Cultivating Creativity | Adaptive Leadership Strategies

Agile: Just The Tip Of The Iceberg

2013-04-25T17:04:00.000-07:00

If you’re familiar with the Agile software development philosophy, you’ll know that it promises a lot (and often delivers). But Agile is also hard to put into practice, especially with complex or interdependent software products. The reason, it seems to me, is that Agile as usually practiced is a production philosophy, and there’s a lot more to product development than production.

All production, whether in software development or not, relies on “external” collaboration (both upstream and in parallel). And that collaboration seems to fall into one of two areas: viability and clarity.

The first of these, viability, comprises all of the thinking (and its articulation) required to establish a suitable framework for production. For example, if you’re in the construction business, it’s a good idea to have an architect draw up plans for a building before anything else happens. There should be no scheduling, no material ordering, no labor hiring, and no cost estimating before there is an architecture. That is the framework for production. The same is true for software product development, and the same term, architecture, is used. In both cases, you can build without an architecture, but the viability of the product will be in serious doubt.

The other area, clarity, comprises all the thinking and articulation around knowing what you want to produce, and why. In business, production has objectives – usually a combination of need fulfillment, strategy, and profit. There are preparatory and ongoing activities involved in sorting those out (and articulating them) and in insuring that that they and the work product remain complementary during production. Without this clarity, the work product’s value is put at risk. In the construction business, clarity may be supplied by the interior designer, the property developer, the principal tenant, the landscape architect, the HVAC specialist, and others. In the software business, clarity is the responsibility of the product management organization.

Having said all that, I can now state my point, which is this:

Agile as commonly practiced is naive in providing clarity for and insuring viability of the finished product.

Agile tends to take care of the production team (software developers) – in an ingenious and elegant way. But Agile leaves that team dependent on substantial unspecified (and often unbudgeted) effort on the part of system architects and product managers. Planning for the effort and availability of those two groups, essential to the viability and clarity of software development, is treated as an externality – and that is a substantial omission!

To make matters worse, when the need for the effort of those folks becomes apparent, that realization usually comes in the form of an emergency. Architects and product managers are then expected to devote unlimited time to the production effort, without regard to their other responsibilities.

This is not a recipe for success, and most Agile shops are struggling with it. As far as how to remedy the situation, I don’t have a proven answer. But I think the key lies in exposing the business value of all the work required for a successful delivery, not just the production work.

That is probably a good practice in any field, and I’m now going to continue on in a way which is specific to software development. So if that’s not your field you may want to take away any nuggets you can, and stop reading now.

Some Agile shops have wisely instituted the practice of assigning a business value to each user story (and when advisable, to epics) in the product backlog. This practice can serve as an instructive model for addressing viability and clarity because it shows how to help the business understand the value being delivered. It also helps the business prioritize work and monitor the pace of value delivery.

Maybe it would be a good idea to (1) maintain additional backlogs (that is, of sized value-packages) for each of those two "external" areas and (2) assign each of their backlog items a business value (a viability value or a clarity value). Doing so would result in three backlogs – production, viability, and clarity. Together, they might help address some of the difficulties I've mentioned.

I’m not exactly sure how this would work in practice, or where it would lead. But it strikes me as fertile enough ground to be tried, and I intend to try it. I will report back if my attempts bear fruit. In the meantime, I’d be interested in hearing about your experiences and observations.

Don’t Get Mad, Get Real

2013-04-09T16:29:00.000-07:00

Ever hear the street advice, “Don’t get mad, get even”? I hope we’ve learned the futility of that. But I’ve recently read advice that we should not get angry in the workplace, and I don’t buy that either. Nor do I believe it’s possible.

There’s a big difference between getting angry and acting out, and apparently the distinction needs some emphasis. Getting angry is something you have no control over. Each of us is different, but we are all wired to react defensively to certain stimuli, in certain situations. Frustration, resentment, fear, and jealousy are just a few of the emotions — which we experience daily — that lead to feelings of anger. Trying not to get angry is like trying to dam a river. It is a major engineering project, and the river always wins in the end.

Fortunately damming the river of anger is not necessary, because anger is not the problem. The problem is acting out. More specifically, the problem is acting out at the direction of your anger rather than at your own direction. What can be done, and what needs to be done, is to cultivate one’s ability to let time pass between your feeling of anger and your resulting action. That ability is what Stephen Covey refers to as the Eighth Habit, in his 2005 book by the same name. It is the habit of declining the invitation to take reflexive action. Simply exercising that ability to delay action disarms the reflex and leaves room for the much more constructive strategies of reflection and intention.

These thoughts are on my mind now because I’m reading Runde and Flanagan’s 2007 book, "Becoming A Conflict Competent Leader". It teaches business leaders what they need to know about conflict and about the constructive and destructive strategies we call upon to react to it. The conflict competent leader learns how to act constructively, and this book gives advice to get you started. There are some vivid case studies that drive the points home. I found the book extremely valuable, especially given the stress-filled business situations I have been finding myself in lately.

Of the book’s 217 pages, I have dog-eared several, but I only red-tabbed one. And the following gem is what I find there:

"When controversy is managed constructively, the conflict partners use collaborative and conflict management skills, for example:

The ability to be critical of ideas, not people
The ability to separate personal worth issues from criticism of one’s ideas
An uncompromising focus on best outcomes, not winning
Listening to others’ ideas
Efforts to understand all sides of issues"

Conflict is challenging, for the participants, their colleagues, and the people who must influence or manage them. It is also a treasure trove of ideas whose synthesis will open new doorways to solve intractable problems. But where there is conflict there is anger.

The book lists the common strategies that people use in the face of anger, and they are largely defensive. You can make peace with conflict (an interesting choice of words), if you know how to handle it. And anger can be your friend too.

In fact, anger had better be your friend, because you will have a lot of it (as we all do). Just remember to watch it instead of obey it. You want anger to become your fuel rather than the other way around.

So when the opportunity arises, don’t get mad, and don’t get even either. Just get real.

Things Take Longer Than You Think

2013-01-22T20:05:00.001-08:00

If a chicken and a half can lay an egg and a half in a day and a half, how many eggs can a chicken lay in a day? Heard that one before? Hint: the correct answer is not 2/3.

As any farmer will tell you, only live (whole) chickens lay eggs, and no chicken can lay half an egg. So the premise is impossible – in the real world, arithmetic gives way to common sense.

Now try this one: If a bank customer arrives on average every five minutes, and on average requires five minutes of a teller’s time, then how many bank customers can a teller serve in an eight-hour day, on average? Hint: the correct answer is not 96.

As any branch manager will tell you, the customer arrival rate fluctuates throughout the day. When there’s a spurt, tellers fall behind. When there’s a lull, if customers are waiting tellers can catch up. But when there’s a lull and no customers are waiting, tellers are left idle – and that idle capacity can’t be recovered. Again, arithmetic gives way to common sense in the real world.

The rule is this, from the mathematical discipline of queuing theory:

In any system where requests arrive and are processed, processors fall behind if average service capacity is equal only to average demand.

Your company, your project, your inbox, your todo list, and the highway you commute on – these are all systems. So whether you’re a project manager, clerk, house painter, traffic planner, or technical writer, you have to provide excess capacity if you hope to avoid falling further and further behind.

The good news is that the excess capacity not only permits you to meet commitments, it accepts the inevitabilily of idle time – so you can use it instead of fighting it. Idle time is useful for administrative tasks or just plain resting, but also for creative experimentation, relationship-building, and channeling frustration into productive strategy.

So...

If you estimate 120 hours of work on that new marketing brochure, at 40 hours a week it will take you longer than 3 weeks. But you may get some great ideas while waiting for reviewers to read your first draft.

If you'll be driving 90 miles to a client at 60 mph, it will take you longer than an hour and a half. But you can listen to an audiobook or think up ways to have the next meeting on the phone.

The pattern can be summarized using just two words: “longer than”. Things always take longer than you think, because time lost can’t be recovered.

So if you want your company, your work, your hobby or your life to be more predictable in its consumption of your precious time, estimate more conservatively.

If you have executive responsibilities, the same advice holds true with those. Your company will only get ahead of its (huge?) backlog of projects if you give it more resources than you think it needs.

It does need them, and it's probably been taking them all along, anyway. Now you know why.

Reinterpreting The Rules

2012-12-26T05:10:00.000-08:00

Almost by definition, a challenging leadership situation requires a breakthrough. The trick, of course, is to make that breakthrough happen. If you have the nerve, here's a way to do it.

I can illustrate best by telling the following story.

When I lived in San Francisco I was invited to a “sunglasses” party, and I was eager to go. The host was one potential new friend, and the party would be an opportunity to meet others. It could also be a whole lot of fun. But I hated sunglasses, because you can’t make eye contact when you wear them. How could I have fun at a party without eye contact?

I decided I couldn't, so I rebelled instead. I cut two yellow "sun" shapes out of construction paper, cut an eye hole in each one, taped them to my regular glasses, and went to the party wearing “sun” glasses.

Boy did I have a good time! Everyone else was starved for eye contact. They only wanted to talk with me, the bright face among all the dark glasses. I was the center of attention all night, never stopped smiling and laughing, and it was truly one for the books.

Did I follow the rules? Yes, but. Were my sunglasses what the host had in mind? No! Did the host take me aside and reprimand me? No! Was it a great party? Yes!

This story illustrates the fact that a rule is nothing more than someone’s attempt to guarantee uniformity of behavior. At the party, the reason was thematic. In the workplace it is more likely to be safety, propriety, comfort, appearance, efficiency, or any number of other legitimate desirable qualities. The thinking behind a rule may be sound, but then again it may not be. What’s important to realize is that a rule’s only purpose in life is to produce a desired result – it is a strategy.

Rules also have life cycles. Once upon a time, a given rule did not exist. Then it was proposed, possibly among competing alternatives. Finally, after due consideration (one hopes) it was imposed. It originated in the past, and its value wears out over time, because:

Conditions that used to exist may no longer exist
Objectives that made sense once may no longer do so
Strategy that was effective once may no longer be so

In other words, things change.

As we all know, social systems (your company culture) and psychological systems (individual beliefs) resist change. So “pushing the river”, as my friend Ernie Hyde used to call it, simply doesn't work. Reinterpreting the rules is a powerful alternative technique for achieving breakthroughs because it doesn't "push" at all – you fly in under the radar.

Wearing “sun” glasses at my host’s party was a bold act. When compared with the party's rules, it was defensible only by a wise-guy. In fact, the only good thing you can say about it is that it worked! Fortunately, it really is true that nothing succeeds like success.

So when you encounter a leadership situation requiring a breakthrough, and you find a rule blocking your path, don’t give up. Imagine the original purpose of the rule, find your inner wise-guy, and reinterpret the rule creatively, keeping its original purpose in mind.

You may ruffle some feathers. But if the party is fun, in the end nobody will really care.

Speaking The Same Language

2012-12-13T00:55:00.000-08:00

Collaboration requires communication, which requires language. So it’s legitimate to ask whether people can truly collaborate when they don’t speak the same language. And if they can, what makes that possible?

The word “language” serves as a convenient metaphor. Engineers and salespeople speak different languages. So do customers and vendors, east coasters and west coasters, teachers and students, executives and staff, men and women, generation X and generation Y, teenagers and their parents, the privileged and the deprived. Your family speaks a different language than mine. Vietnamese is different than French. And at some very personal level, we all speak different languages.

You might find it rewarding at your next meeting to listen to the conversation and count how many different “languages” are represented. Then, if you can, try to notice when one person’s language is being misunderstood by another person. (Extra credit if you are one of them.) And finally, see if you can observe two people bridging their language gap. How do they do that?

Bridging the language gap is a key skill in human interaction, yet most of us don’t pay much attention to it. I have observed many strategies, including forcing one language on everyone (bureaucracy), using a translator (mediation), co-creating a new language (improvisation), and taking turns (empathic listening). We say “speaking the same language”, but apparently it is more complicated than that.

Most of us bridge language gaps in our work lives by doing what comes naturally and hoping for the best. You might call that the school of hard knocks. But if you hope to influence people with your leadership, you will have to get more intentional than that. You will need to school yourself to recognize and expand your repertoire of language-bridging strategies.

I know the promise of more influence is a strong motivation. But I want you to know there is a much bigger payoff than that. If you decide to become a student of language in this way, you will be learning to systematically expand your imagination, not just your repertoire of interpersonal skills. That’s because our beliefs are constrained by our languages. That old chestnut about Eskimos having fifty words for snow is a good illustration (though not strictly true), as is the (truer) observation that an aborigine’s concept of time is circular not linear.

If you’ve never heard those two statements before, they may surprise or even shock you with their novelty. But the same novelty applies to whoever is your partner in conversation, because everyone has some understanding of “reality” that is so foreign to you it would boggle your mind. Every time you stumble across one of those, you are receiving a gift.

You can decline the gift (wish it weren’t so, question their intelligence, question your intelligence). That is the most common reaction and, unfortunately, it leads back into the box that is your own limited imagination. Or you can accept the gift (wonder what the other person’s world feels like, make room in your world for theirs, marvel at the rich variety of beliefs that are possible). That choice leads you outside the box, and may leave you there if you’re lucky.

I hope it does, because that's a fabulous place, and because you will have much more influence from outside the box than you ever had from inside it.

Discretion As A Leadership Strategy

2012-04-22T14:54:00.003-07:00

Now that I have a formal project management role in a consulting company, I have a wider variety of opportunities in which to practice adaptive leadership.

In a recent software development project, for example, I worked with a team of very talented Vietnamese colleagues. At the start of the project, two of them joined me at my client’s site in the US, in order to get immersed in the project.

Part of any project is bringing staff up to speed on the product they’ll be working on, and on the business the product is intended to support. In this case, my client’s product supported collection agencies – whose businesses are complex in ways that can be hard to comprehend for an outsider. So one of our first tasks was going to be giving my foreign friends a briefing on the collection agency business.

That sounded simple, but it proved to be a challenge, because language got in the way. The problem was that the client manager we asked to give the business and product overviews was teaching way too fast for my colleagues to understand. As a result, the briefing turned out to be one-sided. The manager spoke as if every nuance was being understood, and my colleagues struggled to keep up with even the most basic concepts he was describing.

People being people, neither party said anything. The manager didn’t seem to notice that he wasn’t being understood. And my foreign friends, though they asked responsive questions, weren’t willing to say flatly that they needed help. Sounds like people everywhere, doesn’t it?

Talking later with my Vietnamese colleagues, I confirmed that they had grasped very little in the briefing. Since another more detailed briefing was planned, I could see that something had to change. But the options seemed limited, because:

Detailed knowledge was a requirement of the job
Only client staff (and not me!) knew enough to teach it
The client manager did not have the instincts or experience to handle this cross-cultural situation.

I'm sure that this exact set of challenges is typical of cross-cultural collaboration, whether it is in software development, global business planning or non-profit operations in foreign countries. The successful companies find ways to overcome them, and in this project I found my own.

I remembered that my Vietnamese friends were astute programmers, and so was the client manager. In other words they had skills and subject matter in common, so it was likely they also had a common language. After a little more reflection, I realized that their common language was that of diagrams and code, the tools of the software developer.

So I coached the client’s manager before his next training session to:

Keep it simple
Use only diagrams to convey the key concepts
Keep spoken language to a minimum
Confirm understanding frequently, using the diagrams as a reference

To him, this was a throttling-down that seemed frustrating. But he trusted me, agreed to try it, and of course it worked really well!

During his second briefing I saw few signs of disconnection on my co-workers’ faces. The pace seemed to match their rate of comprehension. And my subsequent discussions with them confirmed that they had fully understood what was presented, and grasped its fundamental relationship to mastering their tasks.

What I want to convey to you is this: though we accomplished much less than the manager originally set out to accomplish in his briefings, it turns out that he was overly ambitious. Much of what he set out to accomplish was unnecessary.

His problem – unknowingly unnecessary ambition – is a common problem in business these days. Among engineers it is humorously pathological – “what’s the problem” is usually followed quickly by “sure, I can fix it”. But in one way or another, we’re all pushing ourselves, our colleagues, and our staffs to overachieve without taking the time to remember our real objectives.

I hope my little story will remind you that there is an alternative. Ambition, while it certainly has its place, doesn’t fit everywhere, and discretion is often the more effective path to success.

Discretion that appreciates our differences and our common ground – well that is golden!

The Question Is The Answer

2012-01-02T14:25:00.000-08:00

Wondering how to keep your business thriving and relevant? Simple… ask the right questions.

Samuel J. Palmisano, outgoing chief executive of IBM, explained his leadership strategy in a recent New York Times interview. He described a framework that he said boiled down to just four questions…

“Why would someone spend their money with you — what is so unique about you?”
“Why would somebody work for you?”
“Why would society allow you to operate in their defined geography — their country?”
“And why would somebody invest their money with you?”

In reading these questions, I was struck by how outwardly focused they are. There is nothing in them about efficiency – optimizing processes, cutting costs, reducing delivery times. Nothing about increasing quality – reducing rework or increasing product and service reliability. Nothing about organizational structure, technology, compensation plans, sales targets, project and portfolio management, strategic plans, market penetration or market share.

Palmisano recognized that all of those considerations are simply instrumental by-products of a company’s desire (and need) to serve its four constituencies: customers, employees, community, and owners.

While all companies try to serve their owners, and most try to serve their customers, relatively few work as hard to serve their communities and their employees. That’s an unfortunate reality for those employees and communities, but it exposes a blue ocean of opportunity for your company – you can distinguish yourself from your competitors by minding that often-neglected part of the store.

If you're not persuaded, remember that a constituency you're not adequately serving will eventually undermine your company's success, either through overt resistance or through capture by your competitors. Do you want your community and your employees playing those roles?

It seems to me that the key to Palmisano's framework is the questions. They're not the kind you answer once and then you're done. Answering them is a continuing effort, and there are a million distractions, as any chief executive will tell you. In Palmisano's words…

“The hardest thing is answering those four questions. You’ve got to answer all four, and work at answering all four to really execute with excellence.”

Of course, first you have to believe – in your heart – that these are the right questions for your business. Do you?

Constraints In Organizational Change

2011-12-26T12:38:00.000-08:00

I’ve been thinking about the discussion topics I’ve seen lately in my organizational development LinkedIn groups – what movie would you show the CEO, where’s the best place in the organization for OD to live, is creativity more important than production, etc. They make nice cocktail party conversations, but I have to wonder “where’s the beef?”

To understand what I mean, you have to first ask yourself the three basic questions posed at the end of The Goal, Eli Goldratt’s 1984 masterpiece dramatizing his theory of constraints: what do you want to change, what do you want to change it to, and how will you do it?

What do you want to change?
In OD projects an executive sponsor wants to change “the way things are done around here” as a strategy to respond to a serious persistent problem.

What do you want to change it to?
The sponsor wants the organization to exhibit more of certain qualities (like being responsive or innovative) that are deemed essential to the problem’s resolution.

How do you do it?
The OD discipline supplies a thousand techniques, with pedigrees as fine as Harvard B-school and as crude as “it’s worked for me for forty years”.

You could write a pretty good-looking proposal by picking some tools and fleshing out the above with your project's details, and you could probably get funded. But the project isn’t going to succeed unless you also embrace the key insight of Goldratt’s theory of constraints, which I’ll paraphrase for organizational development:

To be successful, a change initiative must identify and subordinate itself to its fundamental limiting constraint.

To that I would add my observation that:

The limiting constraint in a change initiative is the belief system of the person in the organization who holds the real power.

Surprised? You shouldn’t be. As a change initiative touches more and more of an organization (and it will!), its disruption eventually works its way to the top of the power pyramid (which is not necessarily the top of the organizational hierarchy). The support or opposition of the person occupying that role determines the initiative’s success.

Considering all the failed organizational change initiatives, all the money and time that has been wasted on them, and all the frustration we all have endured as participants, it would seem wise to spend more effort identifying, appreciating, and addressing an initiative’s limiting constraint as the first order of business.

Here is my simplified process for doing that:

Find out who holds the real power in the organization
Assess the limits of their support or opposition to the change initiative
Subordinate the initiative to those limits

What does it mean to subordinate a change initiative to limits? Here’s an example:

The chief operating officer of a local power company wanted to drive decision-making down into the working teams and departments so the company could become more nimble in adapting to changes in power technology, regulations, and market practices. Change management staff and consultants were hired, and millions of dollars were spent, but the initiative has made little real progress after two years.

The reason is that the chairman of the board doesn’t believe important decisions should be left to anyone he doesn’t know personally. This is the limiting constraint. As a result, though authority for tactical decisions has been driven down the organizational hierarchy, strategy and operational control continue to be jealously guarded at the top. And that is where they will stay until the change initiative figures out how to subordinate itself to the constraint of the chairman’s limiting beliefs.

Had this constraint been identified two years ago, a subordination strategy could have been developed then. For example, it might have been productive to initiate a regular luncheon where, each week or each month, the chairman would sit down with a small number of key middle managers and get to know each other. Had that been done, the chairman might have soon become willing to give more authority to them, because he would have come to know each of them personally. His limiting beliefs would have become a support to the initiative rather than an obstacle – that is how Goldratt’s concept of subordination works.

I doubt you’ll find a “luncheon with managers” tool in your OD professional’s toolkit, and you probably won’t see it as a topic in an online discussion group. It is effective because it emerged from sound principles, not from our little black doctor’s bag. I strongly believe that we trust our tools and techniques too much, and our sound principles too little.

And the funny thing about the luncheon strategy is that it does more than support the COO’s change initiative. It also has the potential to set in motion a wider change process that may keep on giving. That’s because there’s a pretty good chance the chairman’s luncheons would increase his trust in the caliber of managers his company produces, thereby shifting his limiting beliefs. Alternatively, he might learn that the company needed a better caliber of managers, and might take steps to begin a process of improvement that expanded the change initiative in a direction it didn’t even know it needed to go.

So next time you contribute to one of those provocative OD discussion topics about clever tools and techniques, please remember that in doing so you are only dancing around the fire pit. There is a fundamental limiting constraint in each of your change projects, and you won’t get the results you want until you engage with it fully.

Dancing around the flames may be fun, but to really have an impact, you’ll have to jump in.

Organizations – The Basics

2011-12-13T15:57:00.000-08:00

Some things about organizations are so basic they tend to escape notice. But that doesn’t change the fact that their neglect is often the root of the most stubborn problems. I call them the ACE.

Accountability is the organization’s answer to the question: “Who decides (what to do)?”

Continuity is its answer to the question: “Who knows (how to do it)?”

Engagement is its answer to the question: “Who cares (whether it is done)?”

In most organizations, those questions have been answered already. The answers may be stale, or they may be routinely ignored (that’s another article!) but at least there are answers, and probably some vestiges of the effective behavioral structures that accompanied them.

But in some organizations, and especially in new ones and in small ones, there may never have been any answers. If that’s the case, the organization will surely suffer when it has to respond to a significant external event. Examples include loss of a funding source, drop-off in sales, loss of key staff or of the founder, adverse changes in the market or in the economy, or emergence of a strong competitor.

Faced with those kinds of challenges, an organization that doesn’t know who decides, who cares, or who knows is like a fancy car without the wheels – it looks good only until you try to use it. And when the time comes to roll, most of your energy will go towards improvising basic functions rather than deciding when and where to go (and with what and whom).

In fact, in those circumstances, the actual response is almost an afterthought. In the language of my three basic questions, somebody decides, but usually by default; somebody cares, but only enough to put out the fire; and nobody knows how to do what’s required, so trial and error rule.

An organization like that lives from crisis to crisis and is always one step away from disaster. Interestingly, that description also applies to the typical client (person) in the world of the social services: somebody decides (but not the individual), somebody cares (but only for one incident at a time), and the individual doesn’t know enough (have enough skills) to sustainably improve his or her situation.

I make this comparison to show you that inattention to the basics is a systems problem not specific to organizations. The leadership challenge is as daunting for the organization as it is for disadvantaged individuals. And the central practical obstacle is the same: Where is an (organization or individual) supposed to find the time, resources, and skills to develop the behavioral structure that would make more effective response possible in the future?

Many organizations and individuals have had their basic questions answered by their first support systems: the founders of the organization or the birth family of the individual. But many have not and, unfortunately, the longer it has been since founding or birth, the harder it is to overcome that deprivation.

There is a lot of simple power in the idea that just three concepts, accountability, engagement, and continuity, are so fundamental to the health of an organization. That power offers some hope. The good news is that with exceptionally good long-term intervention (to address the basics), transformational change is possible. The bad news: it’s really hard.

Change Is An Act Of Faith

2011-10-26T10:54:00.000-07:00

Change is just too darned risky and expensive, isn't it? That's why we avoid it. We pay the bulk of the cost up front, and the benefits don't come until later (if at all). A bird in the hand, and so on. That's why a willingness to change inevitably comes down to faith.

People decide to change because they have faith – in someone's understanding of the current state of affairs, in some vision of a future state, in someone's grasp of the challenges of transition, and in a collective ability to meet them.

No faith, no change. And faith, for all its rational, intellectual, and practical underpinnings, is an emotional thing. So it shouldn't surprise us that emotions determine the adaptability of an organization's work culture. A fearful culture digs in, and a hopeful one aspires to change.

That's why, as leaders, we always have two jobs. The obvious one is to provide a practical framework that permits aspirations to be realized. But the less obvious one is to provide a path for people to follow that moves away from their fears and into their hope. So if your leadership activities are limited to the usual suspects – strategic planning, delegation, business development, and communication – you are missing the boat.

You may think that my analysis is too deep for the business world. And your company's stellar performance may vindicate your style of practical leadership. But I would qualify your success with this phrase: "for current conditions only". By ignoring the emotional side of leadership, you are failing to enlist your company's collective creativity – creativity that makes adaptation possible. And you are dooming your company to fail as soon as conditions change significantly.

Adaptability comes only through the continual building and strengthening of the emotional connections between an organization's stakeholders and its leadership. Since most organizations, and most senior leaders, believe that emotions have no place at work, obviously some fundamental change is called for.

My technique for facilitating that change in your organization is to provide you with a change path that leads away from your fears and into your hope.

Here it is:

Above all, people want to belong, to be heard, and to contribute. If you can find the place in your own heart that yearns for those things, love yourself for it, and come from that place in every action you take at work, you will be amazed at how quickly your business will be transformed.

The magical part of this advice is that the workplace won't really change that much – it is you who will have changed.

The Sorcerer's Apprentice

2011-10-13T13:25:00.000-07:00

So you've found your voice as a change agent – you've gotten your hearing, you've persuaded senior management, and now the organization is ready to roll. My question: are you ready for your first big surprise?

I'm asking that question because an organization's irrational resistance to change can quickly flip into an equally irrational embrace, a big surprise that's does not bode well.

For example, let's say what your company needs is $2 million worth of transformation to reach a new, achievable plateau. Once persuaded, your CEO could easily decide to go "all in" (with the entire company wishlist) and shoot for an unachievable plateau that will cost $6 million. The CEO could trumpet this bold initiative to staff, customers, and even investors. And you could be the one holding the bag.

Are you happy now?

The challenge for you is that the skills you used to gain support (vision and articulate persuasion) are not the skills you need once you have it (expectations management and executive control). The latter are skills of a higher order, and they are not as likely to be part of your repertoire.

As absurd as this scenario may sound, it happens all the time. When executive egos and corporate identity get involved, very powerful forces are unleashed. I have personal experience with this scenario, and the only way to describe it is "out of control".

With these risks in mind, I'm going to offer you a rule to follow before you start persuading in the first place:

When instigating change, never rely on a proxy!

What does this mean? Well, in the scenario I've presented, if you are trying to influence the CEO for major change, I'm suggesting you do not rely on your supervisor. Yes, you will need your supervisor's support. And your supervisor may provide you initial access to the CEO. But you do not want your supervisor (or their supervisors) controlling your access to the CEO.

If you can't develop a good, direct business relationship with the CEO around the change you're thinking of proposing, I suggest you keep your proposal under your hat. Even if you feel you have trusted allies, their aid will not be sufficient when the elephant awakens, and they have other fish to fry. If you are the visionary, it is you who must have the relationship, because only you have both the passion and position to collaborate with the CEO to adapt the vision in a way that manages their expectations and helps them save face.

Successful change depends as much on managing the momentum of the power brokers as it does on disturbing their inertia. Whether you actively aspire to be a change agent, or just find yourself cast in that role (as I did), you'll find that developing a close relationship with power makes the difference between success and failure.

This article has been syndicated in ezinearticles and the Leadership Development Carnival.

The "Can-Do" Attitude

2011-09-25T15:15:00.000-07:00

"No problem… we'll do it!" Isn't that what you want to hear from your colleagues and subordinates? If so, I'm sorry to inform you that you've fallen into a common and pernicious trap.

To quote Peter Senge from his book The Fifth Discipline:

"A person who questions publicly whether the organization can achieve what it has set out to do is quickly labeled as "not on board" and seen as a problem. Yet, this 'can do' optimism is a thin veneer over a fundamentally reactive view [which will] eventually drive out real vision."

"Can do" attitudes may get you through the quarter, but it takes real vision to get you through the decade. Here's a cautionary tale:

Fifteen years ago I was in a senior management role at a software development company where "can do" was the only acceptable response to just about anything. As the new guy on the block, I saw the chorus of "can do's" as a growing problem, so I arranged a one on one meeting with the CEO to alert him. In the meeting, I told him I thought we (the management) were playing a dangerous shell game because the "do" part wasn't happening and couldn't possibly happen with existing resources. I appealed to him to loosen up the constraints he had personally imposed, so his leadership team could adapt to this critical threat.

The result: I and many colleagues were laid off, and the company went out of business within six months. And on the strength of this "experience" in senior management, the CEO and all my senior leadership colleagues went into senior leadership positions in other companies (go figure). I, on the other hand, retreated to lick my wounds.

I have learned since then that reflexive resistance is going to be the typical response of any leader to observations (like mine) that they've led their company into a corner. I'm amazed at how naive I was. Today, when I have to deliver that same message, I call upon fifteen more years' experience, so the scene is less dramatic and the outcome more productive.

The lesson of my story is obvious, but I doubt you are putting it into practice in your company. Because… face it… you don't like admitting your errors, and others don't like admitting theirs. We avoid conversations that seem to be taking us in that direction, and the more profound the error, the more strategic our defenses. This ever-shrinking circle of wagons may protect our egos, but it threatens our companies and our careers (the CEO's story notwithstanding).

Fortunately, it's possible to get that circle expanding again, and the remedy begins with these two simple directives:

Leaders must encourage and reward challenge
Leaders must hire and retain outspoken employees

Though simply stated, for most organizations these directives represent a profound change that will take place over a period of years if it can occur at all. As a change leader, you'll need a guide through the sometimes rough terrain. Of course I hope you'll call me. But if you're not ready for that, I highly recommend Senge's book!

This article has also been syndicated at ezinearticles and the leadership development carnival.

Black Hole In The C-Suite

2011-09-15T12:58:00.000-07:00

In the world of astronomy, black holes are objects so large and dense that they emit no light – only vague background radiation. Perfectly normal in the cosmos, but if that's how your leadership team appears to the rest of your company, you've got problems!

Last night I attended a program describing the Strategy Map, a formal management tool for aligning action to strategy. It claims to address the fact that adults at work need to know "why" in order to respond appropriately to novel situations.

"Why" is a question that demands an answer, and the Strategy Map seems to supply that answer. But it's just a document and, therefore, inherently unresponsive to those day-to-day "why" questions that employees inevitably have and that determine the real direction of a company.

A document can provide guidance, but it can't respond to novelty. That's the job of leadership. Without leadership's active engagement in these "why" conversations, employees will supply their own answers in order to get their jobs done in a timely fashion. Their undirected ingenuity will undermine alignment and eventually lead to corporate drift or worse.

Things get serious when the employee questions start to sound like "remind me why I'm doing this (dumb thing)". When employees are asking those kinds of questions, there's a conflict between strategy and reality that leadership would be well-advised to scrutinize closely.

"No battle plan survives contact with the enemy."

This quotation is German Field Marshall Helmuth von Moltke's famous observation that strategy must continuously adapt to reality. If your company is big on strategy, I wonder whether there's a black hole in your C-suite. You can tell by answering the following questions:

Do you hear your employees?
Your employees are (always!) telling you that they're having trouble applying strategy to their reality. If you don't hear them, you're in a bubble.

Do you respond?
I sure hope so.

What do you say and do?
If you simply recite the strategy but in a louder voice, like an insensitive tourist who doesn't speak their host's native language, you're frustrating your employees.

What do your employees see and hear from you?
Probably not the same as what you say and do.

How do you know?
Let's stop here so you can reflect on this question.

Knowing what your employees see and hear from you is your area of greatest growth and has the greatest potential impact on your company. If you can commit yourself and your company to learning that, you will reconnect the black hole that you're probably in with the rest of your corporate universe.

That's a key secret to effective strategic alignment: pay as much attention to your employees' experience of you as you do to your customers' experience of your company.

The Story Behind The Story

2011-08-11T13:46:00.000-07:00

I used to think only lawyers and doctors needed to read between the lines when listening to their clients. Monday night I was reminded that consultants need to do that too.

Ten colleagues and I met to review non-profit applications for pro bono organizational development consulting. In the application, we ask for details about the organization and its leaders, the problem faced, why is it a problem, how does the applicant imagine us helping, and so on. We had seventeen applications and this was our first review before choosing those to visit for in-person screening interviews.

The most interesting thing to me about this two-hour affair was how drawn I was to making up interesting stories into which an applicant's responses might fit. I made it a game. For example, in one case where the executive director had filled out the form, the problem she described was "board development". Doesn't that pique your interest? It did mine.

So I blurted out something like "mutiny, mutiny, she wants us to help her takeover the ship", and that got a good laugh. Then, to my surprise, some of my colleagues chimed in with their own elaborations of the story behind the story, elaborations that tickled their own fancies. We wound up with a fairly compelling (and professional) picture of the organization's likely state, real needs, and challenges, and one that was a lot more nuanced than the one painted by the application.

In fact, many of the details in that three-page application looked different when we read them with our new back-story in mind. I found that most amazing! A lot of what had seemed vague now made perfect sense, and our playfulness had prepared us with important questions for the first screening interview.

The thing about this "game", and the professional attitude of exploration that goes with it, is that play is a very good way to get out of the box you're in. When someone gives you their perspective on something, they're giving you a box, make no mistake about that. If you can get out of that box, you will see and hear much more of what is really going on.

For organizations and leaders who are stuck in an unproductive or maladaptive pattern, the box is real, entrenched, and very effective in its confinement. Story-telling play may be the only tactic that opens a door to wider thinking.

So I encourage you, in your leadership role, to be more playful in discussing the possibilities for your business. And by all means, encourage others to be more playful too – play is much more fun, and much more effective, when it's a group activity. I will offer a warning, though. You will still be talking about business, and to stakeholders it may be very serious business. So the buoyancy of play must be tempered by the gravity of the situation.

There's a balloon image in there somewhere!

Leaders Must Imagine The Past

2011-07-29T17:39:00.000-07:00

When your coach or mentor encourages you to be more imaginative, you probably think they mean imagining what could be. But as a leader, you may get more mileage by imagining what already was.

Here's a humorous ad from Ameriquest that you may have seen before…

When you hear a disturbing conversation (in a meeting, hallway, restaurant, etc), are you sure you know what it means to the participants?

If not, the most direct way to avoid distress is to ask questions to check out your understanding of what the parties mean. If you're what I might call impressionable, you may feel the need to ask questions even if you're pretty sure you know what the parties mean, just to be sure. These strategies can be tedious, but they work, and it's possible to carry them out with grace and charm.

Here's another one...

When you hear a disturbing conversation, do you know enough about the parties' relationship to understand what the conversation means? Their relationship may contain most of the meaning – just ask any married couple. Again, rather than jumping to conclusions, it might seem better to ask, and you can always do that.

But the thing about asking is that it's not always appropriate and, if overdone, can seem boorish. That's where your imagination can come to the rescue! Imagining what people might really mean keeps your mind open. If you get good at it, you may find (like I have) that your imagination often leaps to the truth – you may have an instinct you're not aware of.

At the very least, your imagination can give your mind something to do while confusing, surprising, or disturbing conversations and events reveal their true meaning. I use my imagination to buy time. I see a lot of things this way, and I credit my imagination for that. Do you credit yours?

Administering The "Injection"

2011-07-19T22:49:00.000-07:00

I've been reading Ronald Heifetz' book The Practice of Adaptive Leadership. Great reading about the highest form of leadership – developing the capacity of the led to meet their own challenges. An admirable goal, and not always popular!

The premise of the book, and of the Adaptive Leadership concept behind it, is that not all challenges are technical in nature, even if most are approached as if they were. Technical challenges are those that respond well to the application of existing know-how. For example, a cavity in your tooth is a technical challenge. The resolution can be carried out by a technician (your dentist) who has been highly trained and has a very high rate of success.

There is another kind of challenge, a much more difficult one, that has no technical resolution. It requires the involved parties to adapt (change) against their will. Heifetz calls it an adaptive challenge. A high cholesterol level is a good medical example of an adaptive challenge because the patient will have to change his/her lifestyle in order to get resolution. Not many people really want to do that, and their doctor can't do it for them. But the doctor can help them do it themselves. Doctors who are successful in helping their patients make that change are practicing what Heifetz calls adaptive leadership.

In his words:

"To practice [adaptive] leadership, you need to accept that you are in the business of generating chaos, confusion, and conflict, for yourself and others around you."

Not what you signed up for? Get over it – your value as a leader (especially today) is that you are willing and able to move people and organizations out of their comfort zones, but not so far out that they shut down or descend into chaos. It's a neat trick.

A key tool for you is being able to confront people with truths they don't want to hear. I'm sure you know the drill: you name the inconvenient truth, they resist, and you, the leader, are marginalized, shunned, attacked, or even dismissed. Only your skill at adaptive leadership (read the book!), the support of your allies, and your other external resources help you weather that immediate storm long enough for he truth to begin to work. Once that shift starts, the adaptation process has begun.

I call this phenomenon "the injection" because it reminds me of the provocative medical immunization treatment of the same name. The "injection" hurts and causes a defensive reaction in the system. But if the dose is correct, that reaction is just sufficient to stimulate the system's defensive energies without driving it into abject rejection. And those energies are what is required to help the system grow its adaptive capacity.

I have given "injections" in the workplace, and it's not for the faint of heart. To get your nerve up, I recommend that you start administering "injections" to your own family.

Have you stopped laughing? I'm serious, and, you know, you probably already do it. For example, I recently said something to my twenty-something son that was completely true, that he needed to hear, and that he didn't like at all – the "injection". The leadership challenge for me was to let myself see his disappointment, risk feeling like a harsh parent, and appreciate the difficulty for him of realizing his incompetence at that moment – all without backsliding into remorse and apology, which I did not do. The result? A few day's later he told me that the conversation had been a turning point in his acceptance of more responsibility in the world. Nice!

So go administer some injections at home. When you've gotten good at it, you can start doing it at work. If you're brave enough you might even volunteer to get one.

P.S. I neglected to tell you that I've also administered "injections" to my wife (and she to me). So everyone is fair game. That's all I'm going to say about that.

Innovative Leadership In The Wild

2011-07-12T13:53:00.000-07:00

I've just finished reading another good article about an innovator's need to open the mind. And as usual, the illustrations come from new product development and business strategy. Articles like these always make me wonder: Doesn't the other 95% of the business need to innovate, too?

Just because innovation is not in someone's job description, that doesn't mean it isn't important to their work. The fact is that most companies spend a surprising amount of effort actually resisting innovation in so-called non-creative functions like operations, finance, customer service, and sales. Those administration and production areas are usually treated as if they were nothing more than machines – designed once (presumably well), and occasionally needing fuel and a little oil.

But as we all know, the real world doesn't work that way. And in response to real change and challenges, the administrative and production areas of most companies have been prepared only to react. Their reactivity drags down whatever innovations do arise, and it's really too bad. One of the most frustrating experiences you can have in business is seeing a great product or strategy die a slow death due simply to operational resistance and unimaginative execution.

More than one marketing powerhouse that I'm acquainted with has internal systems and procedures that would amaze you with their ineptness, diseconomy, and resistance to truly fundamental improvement. If you happen to be a leader responsible for systems or procedures like those, you can make a positive contribution by using the same techniques for innovation that all those product designers and business strategists use.

Go ahead and read the article (link below), and you'll learn about these four techniques:

Immerse yourself
Overcome orthodoxies
Use analogies
Create constraints

In reading, you'll need to use some imagination to see how these techniques might work for you, out in the wild and away from the "creative" areas of your business. But even if you're put off by that challenge, I suggest you just try it. The reward is significant and long-lasting, and applies to all parts of a business – probably including yours. And the techniques themselves can be great fun. If you do try (or you have already), I'd be interested in hearing about how they work for you.

McKinsey Quarterly (free subscription)

This post also appears at LeaderLab

Groupthink and Crowdsourcing In Teams

2011-06-24T09:50:00.000-07:00

There's a great scene in the latest X-Men movie. In a boardroom at the Pentagon, the chairman asks twenty or so generals if the US should bomb Russia. After the obligatory dramatic pause, all hands go up enthusiastically and in unison. It's a laughable moment in a so-so movie, but a very instructive example of groupthink.

In business, we have committee meetings like that all the time. Usually conducted in one physical location, there is frequently an authority figure present. In this environment fraught with social influence, opinions are shared, voting is public, and there can be significant political consequences for expressing one's opinion. As a result, innovative decisions are rare, and bold posturing is as common as meek acquiescence. It's a familiar story, and a main reason why many businesses are not as effective as they could be.

On the other side of the coin we have crowdsourcing, a group collaboration practice which has become very popular lately. In crowdsourcing, the judgement of the members of a large group is solicited individually and anonymously. Usually, the group as a whole proves to be wiser than even its most expert members, a phenomenon known as the crowd effect. There are limitations, of course, but crowdsourcing is a valuable practice that capitalizes on diversity in the best possible way.

Now comes a Swiss study, reported in arstechnica, demonstrating that groupthink and crowdsourcing are two sides of the same coin:

"...even mild social influence can undermine the wisdom of crowd effect in simple estimation tasks."

This finding is profoundly disturbing for business decision-making. Anonymity – the absence of social influence – undermines teamwork and business relationships. But, as the Swiss study shows, it seems necessary to insure the quality of group decisions. What is a leader to do?

I'll leave you to ponder that question and conduct your own experiments. I know there are innovative solutions out there, and I'd love to hear about yours.

arstechnica

Informal Facilitation Techniques

2011-06-10T11:24:00.000-07:00

I spent a pleasant evening recently with 14 delightful board members of a local non-profit. The session lasted several hours and was very productive. It reminded me how informal a facilitation can be and still be effective. In reflecting on the session, I noticed that I used four of my favorite informal techniques – Floundering, The Pearls, The Sophisticate, and The Time Nazi – and I'd like to share them with you.

The Pearls
After the first hour of nitty-gritty content presented by my sponsors, the session was turned over to me, introduced as "the facilitator". The first thing I said was "Does anyone want a break?" All heads nodded, but before we could stand up a fellow said he just had one question. As it turns out, the resulting conversations kept everyone in their seats for another 45 minutes. I didn't say a word, and it was solid, useful discussion. I call this technique The Pearls because I just have to introduce one speck of irritant into the water for the group to start creating value around it. The irritant in this case was seeing an "expert" facilitator apparently introducing further delay. I'm sure it gave rise to fears that nothing useful was going to happen. Those fears prompted someone to speak up with a real question. That's the benefit of The Pearls – it causes people to begin to assert themselves.

Floundering
Floundering often happens at the beginning of the session, just after the objective and ground rules are clear. The 45 minutes I just described were Floundering, so named because the participants don't yet know what's expected of them. They appear to believe that I will direct them, which is not my style. I might ask a leading question and observe them putting toes in the water as they answer. But mostly, I just sit back and watch. To the extent I lead at all, it is to help them avoid stepping on each other as the group warms up and the opinions start to come out. The benefit of Floundering is that is permits people to acclimate to their joint task and content individually and as a group, at their own pace. My deference to their pace also helps make it safe for them to engage each other even though they may be feeling uncertain. I do intervene more assertively as time goes on, but only in due time.

The Sophisticate
Here's where your own life adds a lot of value to the party. When my life and my career have exposed me to possibilities that the group doesn't seem to be aware of, I may offer one of these to them. As a facilitator, your life experiences in business strategy, interpersonal or family relationships, media, or simply your passion will tend to widen the scope of inquiry and increase the humanity of the discussion. Even though a facilitator's value is supposed to be in their mastery of the process, I've found that, as The Sophisticate, one or two nuggets that I provide often prove so valuable to the group that they make their way into the outcome.

The Time Nazi
My least favorite technique, but one I'm very good at, is to make the group aware that time is running out. In this 4 hour session, I started playing The Time Nazi 45 minutes before the scheduled 9PM end. Here's how I announced that role to the group: "You only have 45 minutes left. So would you try to imagine that, after 9PM, you would never, ever get back to any of these issues you've been discussing. And that these remaining 45 minutes are your last chance to come to decisions for action on those issues. Which issue would you want to be sure to resolve in the remaining time?" Boy did things sharpen up in a hurry! We ran over anyway, by only 10 minutes, but it was a very effective use of time. The group made as many sound, informed, engaged decisions in that 55 minute endgame as they had in the previous three hours.

How well do these techniques work? In the words of the board's Treasurer, "We couldn't have done it out you. We wouldn't have done it without you."

Talent Management Makes The Difference

2011-05-31T15:41:00.000-07:00

The folks at McKinsey & Company studied 4,500 researchers in 260 laboratories in academia and research-based industries, including automotive, basic materials, high tech, and pharmaceuticals. Their conclusion?

"The highest-performing labs use the best talent-management practices."

Now, your company may not be a laboratory. But labs live and breathe innovation, and every company can learn a lot about it from them. The study continues…

"Many research institutions don’t understand how well they are doing, because the people who work there wildly overestimate their own performance: in our survey, 12 percent of them suppose that their own lab is in the top 1 percent, and 70 percent think it is at least in the top 25 percent."

In other words, your company is not as innovative as you think it is. It's probably not as innovative as your competitors, and the difference can be a very big one...

"Top-quartile academic labs are five times more productive than bottom-quartile. Similar differences exist among industrial labs."

Can you even imagine what your company would be like if it were five times more productive than it is now? Surprisingly, many leaders of successful companies respond to that question with "we're just fine, thank you". They prefer to continue producing at their current level, and choose to remain unprepared for the next monumental challenge. There will be one, make no mistake about that, and it might be just around the corner.

Companies that neglect innovation and invest primarily in planning and execution are eventually going to fall behind. In contrast, the most successful companies invest in innovation as a matter of strategy. And raising one's game to that level is not that difficult...

"Of the six critical practices that influence a lab’s productivity (talent, strategies and roles, collaboration, problem solving, portfolio and project management, and alignment with the needs of the business and the market) the researchers we surveyed told us that talent is the one most in need of improvement."

Here's how the best of the best find and nurture that talent:

"Great labs … evaluate the potential of researchers by appraising their basic intellectual ability, general problem-solving skills, and enthusiasm."

Unless your company is truly among the best, it probably finds talent this other way:

"Average labs typically look mostly for specific technical proficiencies – say, the ability to use a piece of equipment or to run certain tests."

Think about that next time you write a job description for a new hire. A long and specific list of bullet points makes you less likely to hire the talent your company really needs.

Now, you may be thinking that this is all very interesting but your company isn't a laboratory. In name, it probably isn't. But ask yourself these questions:

Does your company ever conduct experiments?
Does it ever try things before making commitments?
Does it ever use beneficial new ideas?

If the answers are yes, your company is more of a lab than you may think. And if the answers are "no", then I have one more question – "Why not?"

excerpts are from "How The Best Labs Manage Talent", McKinsey Quarterly, May 2011 (subscription)

Killing The Goose

2011-05-10T12:10:00.000-07:00

A colleague of mine has discovered that you can make your work life worse by making it better. Here's how that works…

She consults for a living, and her clients find her work extremely valuable. One finds it so valuable, in fact, that her work frequently finds its way into the client's standard operating procedures. That's what happened with a template she developed for reporting weekly progress.

Over a period of time, she developed and refined this template to where she was able to complete and email her weekly report in a few minutes from her desktop. After a couple of months, the client liked her template so much that they began requiring all their consultants to use it. They started hosting the template online and requiring all the consultants to complete it there. But the hosting tools were not nearly as efficient as desktop tools were, so now the report took a half hour to complete. And any further refinements my colleague might want to make to the template will have to go through "channels" – hardly worth the trouble for such little reward.

My colleague's story llustrates a pervasive weakness of modern business: its drive to standardization often kills the goose that lays the golden eggs. Here's how it happens:

Standardization Discourages Creative Workers
My colleague has seen an insignificant task become a time-consuming annoyance due to her own creative success with it. And the task itself, a living work-in-progress, has now been turned into stone. How creative do you think she will want to be with the next task that comes along?

Standardization Suppresses Adaptation
It's unlikely that the reporting template will change much in the future because it is now too well-protected in its online castle. If it does change, that will be due to an intentional top-down initiative rather than the emergent bottom-up process that gave it its value to begin with. Top-down change is reactive, at best, while emergent change is highly adaptive.

Standardization Often Costs More Than It's Worth
A five minute task now takes a half hour, and an online template (with its associated process) now needs to be maintained. The time these responsibilities take detracts from time available for more productive activity. Though there may be value in standardizing reports, the practice is notorious for seeming important while not actually being so.

Can you see where I'm going with this? I've described one work task, a half-hour's time wasted weekly, and a dose of discouragement – all for just one worker at a small company. A larger company that insists on standardizing everything in sight can expect to multiply that waste and discouragement by hundreds or thousands of workers and all their workday tasks. For that company, there won't be just one goose at stake – there will be hundreds or thousands of them. Think of all those golden eggs!

You may laugh, but the geese are, in reality, disaffected or former employees who leave their talents at home or have taken them to your competitors. Isn't that worthy of your attention?

So if you find yourself making plans to standardize yet another part of your business, think twice before you do. Scrutinize the expected value carefully, and remember that there's a lot of adaptive value in disorder.

Putting Your Butt On The Line

2011-04-25T15:13:00.000-07:00

A software engineering manager asked me the other day how he could keep his professional staff accountable. He didn't like my answer.

This fellow had been using a new approach to software development, adopted by just a few companies so far. It's called Scrum. (Can you tell that an engineer named it?) Scrum is an iterative response to the deficiencies of the straight-line software development process known as waterfall.

In waterfall, a project sponsor describes what to build, and then builders build it. Because there is agreement on the end-product up front, waterfall projects are easy to fund, budget, staff, and manage. There's just one problem – they fail. That's because every software project is inherently unique and uncertain. Sponsors don't really know what they want, and builders don't really know how to build it! So no matter what you call the process, they wind up starting somewhere and learning as they go along.

Scrum (and other "agile" approaches) cleverly accommodate this learning, and deliver dramatic benefits as a result. In fact, they make learning key, by empowering the development team. That team (which includes a representative of the sponsor, by the way) is always learning these three things:

What is needed
How the needs can be satisfied
How to work better as a team

Bi-weekly or monthly delivery events punctuate the development process, at which increments of usable product are publicly demonstrated to the sponsor by the team. These events serve several purposes: they deliver real value, they focus activity, and they provide a reassuring cadence. They also expose the team to the consequences of its actions, a sometimes painful encounter which is an essential part of learning.

So here's what I told that engineering manager. He asked me how he could keep his professional staff accountable, and I said, "they have to feel a little pain." Somewhat agitated, he quickly responded: "no, we don't want any pain."

A world without pain… wouldn't that be nice.

I found that exchange troubling, and reflected on it for several days. I discussed it with colleagues, one of whom asked me what I thought the engineering manager was trying to tell me. I said that he was probably feeling protective towards his staff. Maybe it was a blaming corporate culture, for example. I was trying to be empathetic, and then I realized I knew the real reason – the engineering manager was protecting himself!

Imagine: his empowered team is trying to learn how to deliver useful solutions, and therefore they're making mistakes. These mistakes are resulting in missed deliveries, omitted features, subpar quality. The learning is a sound long-term investment for the company, but the engineering manager has to take the heat in the meantime! In other words, his butt is on the line, and he would rather protect himself then help his team learn.

As you can see, team empowerment is a hot topic in software development today. But its challenges apply to any business management situation. We are, collectively, trying to outgrow outmoded management philosophies that are two hundred years old. It's hard and sometimes painful. Organizations that succeed do so by making mistakes and learning from them. And mistakes have consequences. If you, as a leader, are not willing to support and defend your team's learning curve, you're holding your company back.

Maybe I should have said discomfort?

Learning To Resist

2011-03-16T16:38:00.000-07:00

The words "executive function" sound like management-speak, don't they? Actually, they're a psychological term for a group of strategic behaviors that we begin to master in grade school. Watch this great little video to see how hard it is for children to resist the cookie.

The video re-enacts a famous experiment about childhood development, conducted in the 1960s by Walter Mischel.

To quote from John Medina's blog:

"Our executive function controls planning, foresight, problem solving, and goal setting. We now know that it is actually a better predictor of academic success than I.Q. It's not a small difference, either: Mischel found that children who could delay gratification for 15 minutes scored 210 points higher on their SATs than children who lasted one minute."

"A child's brain can be trained to enhance self-control and other aspects of executive function. But genes are undoubtedly involved. There seems to be an innate schedule of development, which explains why the cookie experiment shows a difference in scores between kindergartners and sixth graders. Some kids display the behaviors earlier, some later. Some struggle with it their entire lives. It's one more way every brain is wired differently. But children who are able to filter out distractions, the data show, do far better in school."

These strategic executive behaviors are such a major advantage to students, you would think they are uniformly well-developed among executives – the successful adults who run companies. Unfortunately, that is not the case. Many business leaders struggle with executive function, and maybe you're one of them. If so, you know that the cost of giving into temptation is a not measured in cookies lost. It is measured in millions of dollars spent, months or years of opportunity missed, and large numbers of staff discouraged.

The object of temptation for business leaders may be: a restructuring, a technology replacement, a client with deep pockets, an acquisition opportunity, a new product line, a strategic planning retreat, or a change initiative. And learning to resist can seem so daunting that it doesn't even look advisable. But it is not only advisable, it is essential. Think of how many wildly expensive initiatives, forays, adventures, and fiascos you've been involved in that proved of questionable value when all was said and done. That's temptation in action. Fortunately, the ability to resist does improve with practice

If you see yourself anywhere in the above picture and would like to raise your game, you can start in a small, safe sandbox until your delayed gratification muscle gains some strength.

In fact, you can start first thing Monday morning! Put a task in your calendar now for next Monday to make a special effort all week to delay your gratification in one of the following ways:

Give a delegate one additional week to work out a solution themselves
Pick a major initiative from your portfolio and decide to suspend all work on it for the week
Ignore an urgent but unimportant issue for the entire week
Leave your business problems behind when you go home at the end of the day, every day

I wouldn't blame you for feeling anxious or skeptical just reading the list. "I can't do that," you may be thinking. Congratulations, the learning has begun! You can snuff it out right now by agreeing with your disempowering fears, or you can reframe them this way: "How might I do that?"

Let the games begin!

The Genius In All Of Us

2011-02-03T08:22:00.000-08:00

I recently read David Shenk's piece at BBC News on the subject of skills development. If you're not familiar with his work, his book The Genius In All Of Us summarizes research indicating that a person's intelligences (and we have many) are more a function of environment and practice than most of us think.

"…everything about us — our personalities, our intelligence, our abilities — are actually determined by the lives we lead. The very notion of 'innate' no longer holds together."

I find this astounding, and I think it challenges the way most companies hire, assign, promote, compensate, and discipline employees. Read the following description of brain research conducted on London taxi drivers:

"…spatial tasks were actively changing cabbies' brains. This was perfectly consistent with studies of violinists, Braille readers, meditation practitioners, and recovering stroke victims. Our brains adapt in response to the demands we put on them."

When we think of an innovative business culture, we usually mean a culture that identifies, encourages, and supports potential innovators. Many of the poster children for innovation — Motorola, Eastman Kodak, General Electric — succeeded with cultures like that.

But this new research implies that we're missing an opportunity to find and use a much larger pool of innovators — people who don't even know they are innovators until they start to live in more challenging work environments.

"It would be folly to suggest that anyone can literally do or become anything. But the new science tells us that it's equally foolish to think that mediocrity is built into most of us."

Lean and other strategies for continuous process improvement are steps in the right direction. But they focus narrowly, in my opinion, on improvement not innovation. Real innovation is not about polishing the apple, it's about finding the pear, the mango, and the tomato.

The key to a truly innovative workplace is setting up the work, itself, as a continuing apprenticeship, with expert and novice hands joining together as a matter of policy to meet all work challenges and get all work done.

We don't do that today. In the typical workplace, you are hired for what you've proven you can do, and assigned the job of continuing to do it. The company relies on your narrow expertise in your area, but makes no use of your perspective, abilities, or potential in any other areas. Though this approach has short-term efficiencies, it shortchanges the future.

In contrast, the enduring path to business success lies in a company culture that recognizes pervasive and continual on-the-job collaborative staff development as its real competitive advantage. The practical demands on workers of such a culture lead them to innovate as surely as a babies navigating their complex world learn to walk and talk (and later, ride motorcycles).

P.S. You'll love the motorcycles!

BBC News Article

This article was selected for syndication by ezinearticles.

The Physics of Corporations

2011-01-14T16:21:00.000-08:00

Geoffrey West is a physicist who has been studying cities. As reported by Jonah Lehrer in the New York Times, he thinks he understands how they grow and why they prosper. He has found that the denser the city, the more adaptable it is and the more wealth it produces per person. But when he turns his eye to the corporation, he finds a different story.

In the bleak corporate reality, summarizes Lehrer, efficiencies of scale are almost always outweighed by the burdens of bureaucracy. To quote West:

"When a company starts out, it’s all about the new idea. And then, if the company gets lucky, the idea takes off. Everybody is happy and rich. But then management starts worrying about the bottom line, and so all these people are hired to keep track of the paper clips. This is the beginning of the end."

West goes on to conclude that large companies are increasingly vulnerable to market volatility. In contrast, cities become stronger and more vibrant as they grow.

"Unlike companies, which are managed in a top-down fashion by a team of highly paid executives, cities are unruly places, largely immune to the desires of politicians and planners. […Cities] can’t be managed, and that’s what keeps them so vibrant. They’re just these insane masses of people, bumping into each other and maybe sharing an idea or two. It’s the freedom of the city that keeps it alive."

If you're the CEO of a large company, what are you supposed to do with this information? It may feel like a dagger to the heart of your livelihood, and that can't be comfortable. May I suggest, as a first step, that you consider these three key ideas:

Economies of scale in theory are often illusory in practice
The short-term benefits of control and management rarely survive the long-term
Freedom, insanity, unruliness, and other undisciplined characteristics of a workplace can be signs of its long-term health

Be warned that, taken seriously, these and similar ideas can lead you and your company towards decentralization and divestiture, empowerment and experimentation, creativity and chaos. I wouldn't blame you for being skeptical.

But I would ask how much of your skepticism comes from a dispassionate evaluation of the outcomes, and how much from a basic lack of confidence that you can be an effective leader in that kind of workplace. I suspect there's more of the latter than you might be willing to admit.

If I'm correct, it might be rewarding for you to learn more about creative leadership, or even to get some experience practicing it. I can reassure you, there is practical wisdom out there for you! I'd be happy to point you to some sources.

New York Times article