We are told that travel broadens the mind. So I traveled this week to a new place: the American Sociological Association’s conference on Reimagining the Future of Work. One of the sessions I attended discussed the realities of human-AI collaboration.

The Promise of Human-AI Collaboration

“Collaboration between humans and artificial intelligence (AI) could unlock up to $15.7 trillion in economic value by 2030,” according to the World Economic Forum’s recent statement on human-AI collaboration in the workplace. That’s a dollar amount that grabs the attention. But how close are we to achieving this dream?

At this week’s conference, Jonathan Winter (European University Institute) reported on work he and his colleagues have done comparing the performance of human teams versus AI (autonomous agent / bot) teams versus hybrid human-AI teams. Which team do you think did best?

Unfortunately for the World Economic Forum, the dream team did the worst.

The Reality of Human-AI Collaboration

The tech optimists have been telling us for years that AI will make everything better. The tech skeptics warn us that AI will put us out of work. So we oscillate between excited curiosity about these powerful new tools on one hand, and existential dread of displacement, on the other hand. In the midst of all this, we’ve been assured that the lucky ones among us will find a way to work harmoniously with AI in hybrid teams that are stronger than their constituent parts.

Unfortunately, that bit of tech optimism has been disproven for the time being. When Jonathan Winter and his colleagues tested the performance of hybrid human-AI teams against teams entirely comprised of humans or autonomous agents, they found that the hybrid human-AI teams underperformed both the entirely human teams and the entirely AI teams.

So much for the dream team that benefits from the best of human and AI capability working together.

But why?

Operational Constraints?

According to Winter, some people explain this underperformance by saying there likely were operational constraints on hybrid teams:

• they might have reduced communication, lacking in both the quantity and quality of communication enjoyed by entirely human teams
• they might have impaired coordination between the humans and autonomous agents in the team
• there might be fundamental mistrust because the humans were not confident that the bot would get the job done properly

Human Team Super Powers

Winter and his colleagues thought there might be a different explanation for why entirely human teams outperformed hybrid teams: human teams have a super power, an extra social motivator in the form of teammate commitment that spurs better performance. This commitment is based on three factors:

• a shared vulnerability to the consequences of poor performance, which meant that everyone had skin in the game
• an expectation of reciprocity, which meant that an offer to help a teammate now would result in future help from that teammate
• the formation of personal bonds, which led to a genuine concern for the welfare of other members of the team

By contrast, AI is not vulnerable to the consequences of poor performance. It won’t get demoted or fired if the project does not meet expectations. Further, AI doesn’t recognize a general obligation of reciprocity so it can neither appreciate help or reciprocate later. Finally, AI doesn’t engage in interpersonal care. So it cannot strengthen teammate commitment. In other words, AI makes a lousy BFF at work.

No BOT BFF – Yet

While you may not be best friends with your human colleagues, you stand a greater chance of developing teammate commitment with them than with a bot. This is your super power.

But this may be a temporary advantage for human teams. Winter suggested that the more anthropomorphic AI becomes, the more it may be able to discern and reflect human emotion.

Will that create a bot BFF with social motivation to improve hybrid team performance? Only time will tell.

[Photo credit: Andy Kelly]

This is the time of year for celebration. In the northern hemisphere, we counteract the lack of sunlight with feasts and festivals that bring candlelight and Christmas tree light into our dark days. If your family is anything like mine, these are days for cozy gatherings with loved ones — often with joyous singing and lots of laughter.

In the midst of this noisy fun comes wise Peter Drucker with helpful advice:

“Follow effective action with quiet reflection.

From the quiet reflection will come even more effective action.”

Performance Reviews – the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

As I wrote at this time last year, a periodic personal review of our own performance can yield helpful insights. Extending that review to cover our personal and professional lives is even better. (See Your Year-End Review for suggestions on how to do this.)

But not every performance review is as helpful. This Drucker quote reminded me that in our striving to do more and do better, we too often focus on our flaws, our missed opportunities, our failures to meet expectations. This is how we have been trained to keep ourselves moving forward into ever-increasing productivity.

There definitely is a time and place for constructive criticism that guides us to better performance. But a single-minded commitment to conquering flaws deprives us of a even more powerful method for living and working at the level of excellence we desire.

Follow Drucker’s Advice

That better method is what Drucker calls “quiet reflection.” This involves switching your focus from the negative to the positive. This change in focus unlocks insight as you analyze your achievements and your many instances of “effective action,” looking for patterns of behavior and other signs that guide you to even more effective action. This change in focus from negative to positive also unlocks your creativity as you discern new ways to build on your proven strengths to achieve greater success in the future.

If you want to put Drucker’s advice into practice, take a little time during this transition from the old year to the new to list your personal and professional successes in 2024. Next, pause a moment to celebrate each of those successes. Celebrate what you achieved, celebrate what you learned through those achievements, and celebrate how you have grown because of them.

But, keeping Drucker in mind, celebrate quietly. Take this opportunity to reflect quietly on the “why” and “how” of your successes. This will give you a head start in 2025 because you will know your strengths and will be able to look for ways to deploy them better.

Keep Celebrating in 2025

Life is too short to spend time in needless negativity. Make a commitment to yourself to celebrate each of your successes in 2025. Take the time to applaud each accomplishment and acknowledge the skills, learning, and personal traits that made it possible. Next, plan how you might extend the impact of those skills, learning, and personal traits. Then watch the magic happen.

Celebrate effective action with quiet reflection. This is a great way to ensure success in 2025.

Happy New Year from Peter Drucker and me!

[Photo Credit: Prophsee Journals]

If you believe law-firm marketing, you would be persuaded that the legal industry is filled with geniuses, and that your firm has more geniuses than most other firms. After all, the lawyers in your firm are star performers, the best in their practice areas who go above and beyond to beat the competition and achieve success for the client. Right?

Right.

While this marketing copy may appeal to the egos of the people in charge, it can also be a red flag pointing to serious problems in your law firm’s organizational cultural. Your Genius Law Firm may in fact be a Fixed-Mindset Law Firm.

Fixed Mindset and Growth Mindset Framework

When Professor Carol Dweck first articulated the differences between a fixed mindset and a growth mindset, we found a useful new way of thinking about success in the workplace and in life. We realized that our earlier emphasis on seeking perfection had created generations that were scared of risk because they were terminally terrified of failure. They believed that either you were born smart and talented or you were not. So early accomplishments were valued.

• Fixed Mindset: a person’s “belief that their intelligence is a fixed, immutable trait.”
• Growth Mindset: a person’s “belief that their intelligence can expand and develop.”

As these concepts penetrated society, educators rushed to encourage growth mindset among their students while employers sought ways to assess current and potential employees for their mindsets. Unfortunately, we misunderstood several things about this framework and, in the process, sanctified growth mindset while demonizing fixed mindset.

To be clear, growth mindset is preferable to fixed mindset but our understanding of these states needs adjustment. In her new book, Cultures of Growth, Professor Mary C. Murphy shines light on some of the key necessary adjustments:

• Fixed mindset and growth mindset are not binary choices. A person is not irrevocably one or the other.
• These mindsets are a continuum and most of us can move along that continuum at different times in our life.
• While we have a default mindset, we can be nudged away from that default by prevailing conditions at any given time.
• Those prevailing conditions often come from our organizations.

Organizational Responsibility

One of the biggest misconceptions is that mindset is purely an individual condition. Murphy’s research shows that organizations or even smaller teams have mindsets too. You can find evidence of group mindset in organizational culture, mission statements, policies, procedures, how policies and procedures are enforced, and leadership statements and behavior.

The other related misconception is that hiring new employees who demonstrate growth mindset will automatically convert your organization from a fixed to growth mindset. Unfortunately, it is more likely that these new employees will tire of being countercultural and will conform their behavior over time to the prevailing fixed mindset behaviors. Or they will simply leave.

Cultures of Genius and Cultures of Growth Framework

If you’re curious about whether your organization has a culture of genius or a culture of growth, assess which of the following statements are most likely in your organization:

• Cultures of Genius
  • We hire only the brightest and the best.
  • We believe you’re either smart or you’re not, you’ve got it or you don’t. It’s a binary world, baby!
  • We have a stable of superstar performers. We poach talent and replace our current team as necessary.
  • We aim for perfection. To achieve this, we quickly point out shortcomings and may arbitrarily fire the lowest performers in a team.
  • We encourage competition among our people — how else do you ensure that they perform at a high level?
  • We experience low levels of trust in and commitment to our organization. Our people will leave anytime to get a better deal elsewhere. Consequently, our recruiting and onboarding expenses are a recurring and growing line item in our budget.
  • Our performance management system focuses on results. How you get there is your business. Consequently, we see low levels of integrity, collaboration, and innovation. It’s an uphill battle to stay ahead of the competition. But that’s life in the arena, right?

• Cultures of Growth
  • We focus on developing our people to be their best.
  • We invest in and reward effective teamwork.
  • We encourage our people to take smart risks.
  • We explicitly support learning from mistakes and sharing that learning.
  • We acknowledge and support the struggle that is the inevitable precursor to growth.
  • We honor the struggle as much as we celebrate the achievement.
  • We do not demand perfection or other unrealistic standards of achievement.
  • Our leaders consistently model behaviors of learning and growth.
  • We reap the rewards of high levels of trust in and commitment to the organization. Consequently, our employees stay with us and we reduce our recruitment and onboarding expenses.
  • Our learning-first environment promotes integrity, collaboration, and innovation. Consequently, we see improvements in the organization’s productivity, finances, and impact.

The Legal Industry’s Special Challenge

The legal industry’s special challenge is the presence of lawyers. (That is NOT a joke!) To become a lawyer, a person must prove themselves to be academically capable, smarter than the average bear. But along with all those smarts come other less helpful attributes common across the profession: the focus on individual achievement and the related need for autonomy and lack of sociability. (To learn more about this, see the work of Dr. Larry Richard linked below.) Given these tendencies, the default position of most lawyers is a fixed mindset. Accordingly, a group of lawyers will tend toward a culture of genius.

The default mindset of lawyers is buttressed by the low tolerance for failure found in law firms: the higher the hourly billable rate, the higher the stakes for the client, the less room there is for error. This makes a culture of genius hard to avoid.

Lawyer attributes aside, the prevailing partnership model in law firms is based on the deeply flawed concept of meritocracy that tends to perpetuate stereotypes and biases. (To learn more about the problems with “meritocracy”, see the work of Professor Michael Sandel linked below.) Professor Dweck views meritocracy as “the legacy of hierarchy”: “…those in power, born into privilege and educated at prestigious schools, tend to look for ways to justify why they are better.” Professor Claude Steele (also at Stanford) takes this a step further: “this type of thinking legitimizes and launders privilege. The reality is that I’ve gotten good because I’ve had some pretty good scaffolding, but with the genius idea, I don’t have to think about my position that way — I can think about it in terms of ‘this is a gift that I have.'”

Conclusion

At the end of the day, law firms demonstrate a strong preference for the simplicity and clarity of the fixed mindset. Partners like their Genius Law Firms.

But, if we believe Mary Murphy and all the other acolytes of Carol Dweck, each firm needs to develop a culture of growth in order to increase its capacity for trust, collaboration, and innovation — the bedrock of continuing success. Executing perfectly an operational strategy that does not enable experiment, failure, and learning is a sure path to perfect irrelevance in a competitive market.

Resources

• Above and Beyond KM – What Makes Lawyers So Challenging
• Mary Murphy: Creating Cultures of Growth (video)
• Larry Richard: Herding Cats
• Michael Sandel: The Tyranny of Merit (video)

[Photo Credit: Arthur Sasse]

“Summertime, and the livin’ is easy….” That may be how the song from Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess goes, but it isn’t how modern life seems to be. There was a time when we could count on clients being on vacation for chunks of the summer. This resulted in an easier pace for us. That’s not as much the case nowadays.

That said, there usually is more of a sense of ease in the summer. This is partly due to the longer stretch of sunlight each day, which makes more leisure activities possible. Plus there may be actual vacation time to look forward to.

If you are able to slow down a bit or even step away from work for a while, how should you use your found time? Here are some ideas to consider:

Rest

If you have school-age children, the academic year can feel like a relentless march through activities and deadlines. Add to that the demands of work and you’ll likely find you’ve shortchanged yourself on sleep. Unfortunately, this has a cascading effect of multiple bad consequences.

My plan this summer is to do a reset on sleep. I know you’ve seen the latest science on the importance of getting a good night’s sleep. It affects everything from your ability to cope with daily life to possibly avoiding a range of diseases. So a sleep reset is worth the effort.

Read

We read all day. But how often do we actually read a book? Summer is a great time to immerse yourself in a long-form read. Why? It’s good for our brains and our spirits to step away from info-snacking and doom-scrolling. By reading in longer rather than shorter stretches we expand our attention span and create space for our brains to do the necessary work of connecting the new information to what we already know. This is how our usable knowledge grows. Better still, creating this space allows the brain to get curious about related new ideas. This curiosity leads to exploration, learning, insight, innovation, and competitive advantage.

Review

Last December I wrote about the value of doing a year-end review. Several of you responded by telling me how helpful the exercise was. Now at the midpoint of the year, it’s a great time to do a mini personal review. How have the first two quarters played out against your plan for the year? Are you on track to achieve what you wanted for yourself? Or have you discovered you’ve been on the wrong track all together? Doing this mid-year review will give you a more realistic sense of what should be possible by December.

Recalibrate

Now that you are in a more rested state and able to view life more objectively, take the results of your mid-year review and any new ideas harvested from your long-form reading to reassess your activities to date and your goals for the year. Do you need to recommit and double down? Do you need to recalibrate? What changes make sense for you now?

Re-engage

Here comes the good part: identify the next best step you can take to put your recalibrated plan into action. Even a small step in the right direction will help you generate some momentum and confidence in yourself to accomplish your plan. This is a great way to re-engage with work life after a summer break.

* * * * *

I hope this is a summer of rest and revitalization for us all. That’s my idea of summer success.

Resources:

• Sleep
  • 8 Health Benefits of Sleep
  • Why Sleep Matters: Benefits of Sleep
  • Sleep: How Much You Need and Its 4 Stages
• Reading
  • Reading Books May Add Years to Your Life (see the next item in this list)
  • A Chapter a Day — Association of Book Reading with Longevity
  • Why is Reading Good for Me?
• Review
  • Your Year-End Review

[Photo Credit: Eirik Uhlen]

In my last post, Failing at Change, I surveyed two decades of reports that claim that as much as 70% of change initiatives fail. By any measure, that is a shocking statistic. Equally problematic are the consequences that flow from so much failure over time. To understand this better, let’s look at some Elephant Tales.

How to Train an Elephant

There is an elephant tale (perhaps apocryphal) that claims that the way to train an elephant not to stray is to tie a baby elephant to a stake early in its life. That elephant will try to escape but will not be able to break the rope or dislodge the stake. After many failed attempts, the elephant will give up. As the elephant grows, all it takes is a similar rope around the leg tied to a similar stake to convince the elephant to stay put even though that full-size elephant is now more than able to break the rope and move the stake. However, early conditioning through repeated failure stops it from trying again.

We humans are not all that different from elephants. We might be able to bounce back from a single failure or even a handful of failures. But after experiencing a seemingly continuous string of failed change initiatives, it is easy to believe that change initiatives are doomed. So why bother trying?

Human brains are energy hogs so they have had to develop efficiencies over time. This means operating in a way that reduces cognitive load such as making decisions efficiently by relying on heuristics (rules of thumb or shortcuts) developed through experience. From a neuroscience perspective, each new action or belief requires creating new neural circuitry while simultaneously disregarding established neural pathways in favor of the new neural road less traveled. All of this takes EFFORT and generally is avoided.

So if you are asking for a change — whether in individual or organizational thinking and behavior — you have to factor in helping your people and organization disregard their standard operating procedures, adopt new practices, and thereby rewire their brains. This does not happen merely because someone in the C-Suite issued a memo mandating change. This happens over time as people are shown the new path, feel supported as they start taking that road, and ultimately experience success.

Saved by the Circus Elephants

When the Brooklyn Bridge opened on May 24, 1883, it was the longest suspension bridge in the world and, therefore, beyond the experience and imagination of most people. At its opening there was widespread doubt that a bridge that large could actually hold the weight of traffic. It was perhaps this fear that led to a disaster on May 30 when people panicked, causing a stampede on a stairway to the bridge. The grim result was 12 dead and 35 injured.

In an effort to shore up public confidence in the bridge, P.T. Barnum marched 21 elephants (and 17 camels) across the bridge on May 17, 1884. To the surprise of the skeptics, the bridge was steady and held up nicely under their combined weight. 140 years later, the Brooklyn Bridge is a jewel of New York City and still holding steady and bearing the weight of more traffic than its engineers could have imagined.

P.T. Barnum knew what many managers fail to realize. People locked in fear or held captive by bad experience cannot allow themselves to believe an alternative is viable until they see it with their own eyes. They need a demonstration of the possible that is so powerful that it can open their minds to better possibilities.

If your people are veterans of repeated change initiative failures, they will find it hard to believe that your new change initiative will be more successful. You may need a demonstration as powerful and as audacious as Barnum’s circus parade to break the cycle of change despair. What will you do?

An Elephant Corollary

Past experiences condition individuals to behave in certain ways. Organizational culture also conditions individuals. At a minimum, organizational change initiatives must specifically address any parts of organizational culture that will need to change. Further, managers must provide long-term support for this effort because organizational culture is more persistent than kudzu and may be stronger than an elephant.

Additional Resources:

• Engaging the Elephant
• The Elephant Encyclopedia and Elephant Database

[Photo Credit: Mylon Ollila]

ILTA’s Catalyst Conference

Last week I had the great pleasure of attending and speaking at ILTA’s Catalyst Conference. The conference gathered women in New York, Austin, Dallas, Houston, and San Francisco for a rich day of conversation and provocation on how to lead change effectively. The structure of the conference enabled conversation across the miles: attendees met in person in the offices of Vinson & Elkins LLP, which were linked by Zoom. So everyone could hear the presentations in New York and Dallas and could participate in the Q&A sessions.

Over my next few posts, I want to unpack some of the nuggets shared at the conference and provide additional resources to my readers who are currently leading through change.

Failing at Change

First, let’s start with a shocking fact: MOST CHANGE INITIATIVES FAIL. And that has been our reality for a long time.

You don’t believe me? Consider the following:

• Harvard Business Review in 2000: “The brutal fact is that about 70% of all change initiatives fail.”
• Gallup in 2013: “The more things change, the more they stay the same — because more than 70% of change initiatives fail.”
• McKinsey in 2015: “70 percent of change programs fail to achieve their goals, largely due to employee resistance and lack of management support.”
• Neuroleadership Institute in 2023: “why do 50% to 70% of organizational change initiatives fail, even when they’re a top priority?”

What’s Really Going On?

Let’s start by saying that I’m slightly suspicious of the fact that everyone seems drawn to the same 70% number. Nonetheless, the fact that recent surveys report comparably depressing results suggests that we have not understood the human experience of change well enough to plan for and achieve it better.

What does this say about our organizations and their leadership that they are so resistant to learning from failure? And what does it say about change management approaches currently in use?

Shortly after the Catalyst conference, I had a thought-provoking conversation with a senior leader in another industry who said out loud the part that several believe but few are willing to say: “Here’s the dirty secret about change management: Often it is simply a way to slow walk a mandate from senior executives.”

Ouch! Is that leader right? What’s your experience?

Related Reading:

• Why People Resist Change
• Are You Ready for Change?
• Change is Good … You Go First

[Photo Credit: Ross Findon]

People have different strategies regarding their tax refunds: some try to avoid them at all costs by keeping their withholding to the lowest possible amount, while others prefer a refund to the anxiety of a surprisingly large tax bill. If you are in the latter camp, how do you decide to spend your tax refund?

I know it isn’t quite tax time, but I found myself thinking about refunds recently because all of us are getting one today. Specifically, we’re getting a TIME refund.

Leap Day is a Time Refund

In three out of every four years, we are cheated out of a quarter day. This happens because the earth takes a solar year of approximately 365.25 days to orbit the sun, but our calendar year rounds that down to 365 days. So in the fourth year, we get a time refund in the form of an extra day to balance the books. And it arrives, without fail, on February 29.

Leap Day Then and Now

This practice of a time refund has been around since ancient times but how and when that refund occurred varied widely. Julius Caesar borrowed from the Egyptian calendar to standardize the Roman calendar. He introduced a Leap Day at the end of February to balance the time books. Then Pope Gregory got involved to adjust the calendar again because a miscalculation in the Julian calendar of approximately 11 minutes per year was moving Easter further away from the day designated by the Catholic church: “the first Sunday after the first full moon following the vernal equinox.”

Over time, a variety of interesting traditions developed in connection with Leap Day: women were “permitted” to propose to men in Ireland; in Greece, it was considered bad luck to marry on February 29. Meanwhile in modern times, Leap Day can be a hassle rather than celebration for CFOs, says The Wall Street Journal. For example, an extra day has an impact on employee payroll and benefits, as well as on interest payments on corporate debt.

How to Spend YOUR Time Refund?

For the individual, the extra day can feel like just another day at the office. But is that the right way to treat your time refund? Michelle Tullier has written about the benefits of found time. Almost all of us breathe a sigh of relief when we suddenly find ourselves free of an obligation. But what to do with that time? She counsels against simply doubling down on the to-do list. Instead, she asks how we can invest that time better. Her plan is to “invest that refund of time in work that brings me joy and grows my business and brand.” Better still, find “something fun and relaxing to do….”

So many options! But the key is to do something worthwhile with your refund, something memorable. At a minimum, use the time to avoid the danger e.e. cummings warned about:

“The most wasted of all days is the one without laughter”

If you’ve already made a plan to make the most of your time refund today, kudos! If not, then make a quick list of the worthwhile things you could do (other than office or home chores) to spend your next time refund in a way that brings you joy and growth. Then pull out that list whenever someone gives you an unexpected time refund.

A gift of time is a terrible thing to waste.

[Photo Credit: Elena Koycheva]

In my last post, Your Year-End Review, I described an upgraded whole-life review that you could do to gain maximum learning from the year past and set yourself up for an even better year in 2024.

The principle behind this comes straight from Knowledge Management 101:

While you now may be ready to take off like a rocket this year, that isn’t enough to guarantee professional success. As work becomes more complex, we increasingly find ourselves dependent on teamwork to complete our projects and meet our professional goals. Even if you personally are firing on all cylinders, you will be hampered if the same cannot be said for each team of which you are a part.

We know this. But what should we do about it?

Review Your Team

Consider a “New Year Refresh” for your team. Now that the last of the holiday season is behind us and everyone is back at work, take a moment as a team to review the year past and plan for the year ahead.

You could start simply with the four questions that began the personal year-end review. Before calling a team meeting, ask each teammate to take 30 minutes (6 minutes per question) to write their own answers to the following questions with respect to the team and how it performed:

• What worked in 2023?
• What didn’t work in 2023?
• What did I learn in 2023?
• What do I want more of in 2024?
• What do I want less of in 2024?

Analyze Your Team’s Foundation

As with your personal review, this is just a starting point. To really assess the strength of your team’s foundation and capabilities, ask your teammates to write down their individual answers to the same five questions written above, but focus on the four following areas of your team’s life:

• Your team’s inner well-being: How supportive are teammates toward each other? To what extent do teammates find it personally rewarding to be part of this team?
• Your team’s physical well-being: How well does your team function? How well does it manage the pace of work?
• Your team’s social well-being: Do you have enough of a relationship with each other to provide the social ease necessary to enjoy working together? Do you know each other well enough to provide context and empathy for each other’s actions?
• Your team’s professional well-being: How well does your team learn and grow together? Compared to the previous year (or previous shared project), how much better is your team performing now? Is it capable of taking on more varied and challenging projects?

Process Matters

It would be so tempting to simply call a team meeting and put these questions on the agenda. Then, one hour later, you could check this team review item off your to-do list. But I can almost guarantee that you will not get results that way that are as insightful and actionable as they need to be.

Here’s a better approach:

• Ask teammates to answer the questions individually in writing.
• Compile the results: what themes and patterns appear?
• Circulate the results so team members have a chance to review and digest them.
• Ask them to read the results and then bring to a team review meeting their suggestions of concrete actions the team can take to improve its results in 2024.
• At the meeting, put the various suggestions on the wall and ask team members to vote for the ones they believe are most effective and are willing to undertake.
• Confirm there is consensus on the top three, as well as a shared commitment to completing those actions within an agreed timeframe.
• Finally, ask team members how the team should measure success. Then, once you have consensus on those measures, track them. (This New Year Refresh will provide a baseline against which to measure performance over the remainder of the year.)

Watch the Replay and then Run a Better Play

Sports teams focused on success take the time to watch replays of their games and analyze what happened. Then they build that learning into their strategy and training. What is true for sports is true for knowledge work. Without this shared exercise of review, analysis, strategizing, and commitment to a new way of working together, teams cannot improve. Instead, they are trapped in a doom cycle of underperformance and increased frustration.

That doom cycle may be what you have come to expect from working in teams but that does not have to be your reality in 2024. Try a New Year Refresh for your team to see how much better your teamwork can be.

[Photo Credit: Matteo Vistocco]

If you are lucky enough not to have had a major year-end deadline, you likely had a few quieter hours or days in which to reflect on the year gone by. What did you discover?

If you haven’t yet carved out this time for reflection, it isn’t too late to do it now.

The Power of Reflection

Why bother? Knowledge Management 101 teaches us that it is only through the act of reflection that you are able to extract from an experience the lessons that can make your life easier and better. Without this reflection, you are forced to rely on imperfect memory and hope that it will deliver to you the necessary prior learning before you make a critical mistake. In this age of distraction, our ability to consolidate and retrieve key memories is less reliable. So why risk it?

Instead, you can can invest a few minutes now to de-risk the new year.

Future You will be grateful.

Questions to Ask Yourself

If you can carve out 30 minutes (6 minutes per question), conduct your own “Year in Review” by writing down your answers to the following questions:

• What worked in 2023?
• What didn’t work in 2023?
• What did I learn in 2023?
• What do I want more of in 2024?
• What do I want less of in 2024?

A Review with a Twist

So far so good. In fact, so far, so traditional. But here’s the catch — all too often, we are told to do a year-end review like this regarding our work lives. But ideally, our lives should encompass more than work. After all, no one ever said on their deathbed: “I wish I spent more time in the office.”

So here’s the upgraded whole-life version of the year-end review that I’d recommend to you. Ask the same five questions written above, but focus on the four following areas of your life:

• Your inner well-being: your sense of being grounded, centered, spiritually fulfilled, able to meet life’s challenges with equanimity.
• Your physical well-being: is your biological age equal to or less than your chronological age?
• Your social well-being: how connected are you to family and friends?
• Your professional well-being: your ability to grow and thrive at work.

Insight + Action = a Better Life

The point of this review is to gain new understanding about your life and then use that understanding to improve your next year. So once you’ve completed the exercise, go back and read your answers. What insights emerge? What changes do they encourage you to make?

To derive the maximum benefit from the review, identify one concrete action you can take in each area of your life to meaningfully improve it. Write down those four actions and commit to working on them this week. Then, as you go through your own quarterly, monthly, weekly, and daily planning process, revisit those commitments. Which actions are complete? What’s left to be done? Where are you ready to move on to the next step?

Reasonable diligence with this process should result in a wonderfully rewarding year-end review in December 2024. That’s my wish for both of us.

Good-bye 2023. Hello 2024!

[Photo Credit: Sixteen Miles Out]

Cooks all over the United States went through turkey trauma last week. I was one of them.

To be fair, if you believed that no one at your table cared about the turkey other than as a mere vehicle for the more flavorful side dishes, then you wouldn’t care about serving a tasteless, desiccated bird. However, I took the position that everything on our Thanksgiving table had to be delicious. So that amped up the pressure and induced a pretty serious case of turkey trauma.

Causes of Turkey Trauma

What causes turkey trauma? As with many problems, it has many parents. To begin with, most of us don’t roast a turkey regularly. So we are out of practice before the big day. It’s not surprising then that when Thanksgiving rolls around, it’s almost as if we are cooking a large bird for the first time. Our memory plays tricks on us, we don’t remember crucial details.

Secondly, unless you have a tried and true recipe, you likely will find yourself drowning in a sea of internet recipes, all of which promise to deliver the “best-ever foolproof” turkey. And then the pain begins as you wade through competing recommendations on whether to brine or not, whether to cook at a low or high temperature, or (in the case of particularly mischievous millennials) whether to cook the bird in the microwave. (Microwave? Please don’t!)

Thirdly, and most frustratingly, as you begin to discern the basic architecture of these competing recipes, you realize the biggest danger of all: nearly each of these recipes leaves out something critical. This isn’t because their writers are malevolent. Rather, there are details so obvious to them that they don’t seem necessary to mention. Unfortunately, these details may not be so obvious to us so their omission creates a gap in the recipe.

In the case of the recipe I decided to use, they gave instructions for a 14lb turkey but didn’t give any guidance for the 16lb bird I had. I was left with the vague instruction to cook it longer. But when we attempted some basic math to figure out how much longer, there was a four-hour difference among the cooking charts we found. That four-hour swing is a LOT when planning to serve a roomful of hungry guests.

Turkey Trauma and KM

So how does turkey trauma relate to knowledge management? It illustrates several workplace challenges that benefit from good KM:

• Infrequent Practice Requires Detailed Guidance. When you regularly repeat routine procedures, you develop a muscle memory that can allow you to operate on autopilot. In the absence of an unforeseen circumstance, you can rely on your muscle memory without overthinking anything and without unnecessary stress. If, however, you do something infrequently, you will need an inversely proportional amount of guidance and support to do it right. In this situation, effective KM can connect you to good documentation coupled with access to friendly experts to help you succeed.
• Abundant Information Can Be a Handicap. Too much information can sometimes be as debilitating as insufficient information. When you have too much, how do you make sense of it all? How do you identify the most reliable? This is where effective KM steps in to find and feature vetted information so that you don’t have to repeat someone else’s research and validation efforts. Curation by trusted experts (or another KM system) is a big help.
• Information Obvious to You May Not Be Obvious To Me. This is the persistent knowledge transfer challenge that arises when we assume a shared basis of understanding and don’t make our tacit knowledge explicit. This is a case where it helps to reality test your recipe (or practice guidance) with a relative beginner. Are they able to follow the guidance and reproduce the results? If not, what missing information needs to be added? (See David Snowden’s seventh KM principle.)

In the case of my turkey dilemma, the issue was that there were glaring holes in the recipes I consulted that could be filled only by making explicit — and then sharing in simple terms — the tacit knowledge the recipe writer had. They might intuitively know how to adjust cooking times for different temperatures and weights but they didn’t share that valuable information with me.

Next-Level Turkey KM

So I struggled through the process and served dinner a bit later than planned. Nonetheless, I’m pleased to report that my new technique* yielded the juiciest turkey ever to grace our Thanksgiving table.

More importantly, like any good KM professional, I conducted an after-action review and made careful notes regarding what worked and what didn’t, as well as any open issues that remained for me to research. Hopefully, when I tackle my next turkey in November 2024, these notes will fill in some crucial gaps in my turkey recipe and significantly reduce (or, better still, eliminate) my turkey trauma.

(*In case you’re interested, I slow-roasted the turkey overnight. It was fabulous. And no one ended up in the emergency room. I’m never going back to the standard method!)

[Photo Credit: Kraken Images]