Cultivating Creativity

Inhabiting The Creative Space

2020-10-09T15:21:00.001-07:00

The simple abstract diagram below depicts the activity space for creating something new.

Every point in the space represents a necessary activity, which is characterized along two axes: REALISM (Blue Sky vs. Down To Earth) and CONCRETENESS (Mind vs. Body).

Activity Space for Creating Something New

In the diagram, I've identified regions for four typical and very common activities, drawn in clouds to indicate the potential fluidity and ambiguity of their boundaries.

In a way this diagram is a Rorschach test. Whatever line of work you're in, it probably has some insights to offer you. So I encourage you to try it on for size – both for you personally and for your organization, team, or department – and see where it takes you.

Here are some interesting questions you might ask, to get the ball rolling...

Is your activity space open-plan (like the diagram) or does it have internal borders? If there are borders, how fortified are they and what do they signify?
How much or how little do actors move around the space? Are they regional inhabitants, nomads, or diplomats? Where do you fit in the space?
Move yourself around the space and see how your feelings change about your "assignment". Does any region of the space feel like "no man's land"?
For any inhabitants you identified, how does their status and power vary depending on the region they occupy?
Is communication between regions in your space more contractual or more collaborative? Sequential or concurrent? Formal or informal?
ask more questions...indulge your curiosity

Now, having asked and answered your questions, ask yourself about the significance of the qualities of your work situation that you have uncovered, inferred, or deduced...

What impact do those qualities have on your own work product?
What impact do those qualities have on the work product of your work group?
What personal impact do those qualities have on you and your colleagues?
How do those qualities help or hinder the creation process?
What new insights or suspicions do you have regarding current pain points? Current success factors? Opportunities?

At this point, there is just one question left: What do you intend to do about it?

In a way that's the most important question of all because if any of your thinking stirred you in any way, you really should do something to trust and honor your interests.

When digging around in fundamental areas like these, you may feel overwhelmed by the scope or gravity of what you uncovered. No worries. It is ok to start small. Very small!!!

So... find something you can do that:

Is effective
Doesn't require too much of your time and energy
You are likely to succeed at
Is going to improve the situation, even if just slightly

You might call that your Minimum Viable Action (tip of my hat to Eric Ries).

And now... go do it – and observe what happens next. Because feedback is where it's at.

The Agile Journey: Creativity Needs Protection

2017-01-27T11:49:00.004-08:00

Creative work flourishes when talented professionals are given clear objectives and empowered to do their best. Enlightened stakeholders sign up for that adventure and agree to indulge any unfamiliar processes and practices that it entails.

The Agile journey is such an adventure – exciting, exhilarating, and profoundly successful. That is, until the sh*t hits the fan...

and stakeholders retreat to perceived safety in old practices whose ineffectiveness they so recently sought to escape: big design up front, over-specification, phase-gates, command-and-control micro-management, time-tracking, and detailed status reporting. These are their go-to strategies in a crisis, and you are more likely to face one the earlier your organization and product are in an Agile transformation.

Sometimes the crisis comes when team progress is blocked by systemic/cultural incompatibilities with Agile practices. But there are other more mundane causes:

Requirements need to change dramatically mid-project
Unanticipated work emerges or technical debt accumulates
Staff turns over
Significant technical problems arise

A crisis disrupt a team's flow, but a truly Agile team will adapt and regain momentum quickly. Unfortunately, even the most effective Agile team will be undermined if a stakeholder-ordered retreat interferes with Agile's ability to self-heal.

Here are some ways you can prevent that from happening:

Establish a track record of frequent successful customer deliveries. Frequent means every two weeks at the most. Force your organization to learn how to do this as soon as possible. When a crisis hits, stakeholders are much less likely to circle the wagons if they've seen you consistently delivering value.
Forecast defensively. Research shows that most technology projects require 2 to 4 times as much effort as anticipated, regardless of how much analysis is done up front or how far into the project you are (!). So don't box yourself in. Endure the pain of justifying and qualifying your forecast up front – it is realistic and it reflects a level of confidence not a certainty. Technology development has no certainties.
Provide a transparent and frictionless progress-tracking artifact that is compatible with Agile principles. When increased scrutiny comes, the first thing stakeholders will start to inspect is your progress. Use of a ranged release burndown chart is good, re-estimating all backlog stories every two weeks is not. Counting hours spent, hours remaining, etc is definitely not. We are not capable of understanding creative work well enough to expect a linear yardstick to accurately measure progress.

These practices can keep your Agile project from going off the rails. But as you can see, they force into stakeholder conversations the fact that you are doing creative work. At some fundamental level, resistance to that fact is the root of most of our difficulties with Agile transformations.

By applying these practices to your projects, you can often keep the flames down long enough for the magic of frequent delivery and market feedback to take hold. And over time (though possibly a longer time than you'd like) you can eventually cure your stakeholders of their dependency on reflexive habits that no longer work.

Patience is definitely a virtue. You can cultivate yours by remembering that, for others, their Agile transformation is a creative project for which you are a stakeholder. Try to resist the temptation to circle your own wagons!

Starting My IoT Journey

2016-02-21T12:18:00.000-08:00

Software people don’t know how easy they’ve got it!

I’ve recently moved from pure software development into integrated technology, aka the Internet of Things. Exciting, challenging, and arguably the next frontier in electronic technology. But as an Agilist, it presents a whole new set of challenges.

The Physical World

Software vendors have no physical product, so they don’t worry at all about manufacturing and worry very little about distribution.

When software is built to the required level of reliability and quality, it is essentially already manufactured. And in a sophisticated shop it can be distributed with the push of a button. (In the most sophisticated Agile shops, that button is pushed within an iteration as part of a user story’s acceptance process.) There is no supply chain, no production tooling, and no concrete product that can interact with the physical world.

With integrated technology, that simplicity is disrupted by the demands of material things and their physical characteristics. For example, electronic devices produce and are subject to electromagnetic and thermal effects that are unavoidably different in a manufactured product than in the bench product. As a result, final acceptance of work must wait until the product has been validated in manufacturing (somewhat like a press check in publishing). Also, hardware and mechanical products require formal specifications in order to be built, and the products must be certified (both in design and after production) by various regulatory bodies.

Time

In the software world, time can compress to essentially zero if enough money and skill are brought to bear. Testing, deployment, and installation can be automated, and with cloud services like AWS and Azure, provisioning can be automated too. As for speed, more horsepower is always available if you can afford it.

So time boxes, the holy grail of Agile (and especially Scrum), are both practical and effective. The time compression that software development permits can fit everything into a time box.

In integrated technology that is not the case. Even if the software components can fit into a two week iteration, hardware and physical engineering (mechanical, metallurgical, etc) usually can not – for the reasons stated above. So you have several collaborating teams, only one of which can cycle fast.

Given these challenges (and there are others), our coordinated IoT teams practicing Agile are finding that:

The risk-reduction work in a product release cycle must be limited to the very front of the timeline, so it can be safely completed before the first hardware production specification goes to a manufacturer. This is a perverse twist on the Agile goal of making decisions as late as possible. As late as possible is not very late at all in IoT, and descending back into full waterfall is a constant danger.
Once the hardware specification has gone to a manufacturer, software teams must restrict their work to capabilities that do not disturb the software-firmware-hardware-material functional interface, which has by then essentially been cast in stone. Rather than tackle improvement opportunities as they come up, those must be batched for later consideration. This introduces more waterfall tendencies.
The short cycles of the software teams must find a way to coordinate with the much longer cycles of the physical teams. And the assumption that every team can deliver fully shippable product at the end of each iteration is simply no longer true. It is a challenge to relax that imperative without abandoning it.

In such an environment, the somewhat religious nature of Agile values is undergoing major, if not radical, change. We are having to abstract them out of the software incubator, into a more complex and more constrained world. It’s a thrilling mandate for those of us working in IoT today, because we are the change agents helping to create a new world where the Agile rubber meets the physical road.

But there are only a few pioneers at this early date. We have a lot to learn from each other, and we need to learn a lot.

So I’d appreciate hearing from you if your shop is involved in IoT.

Scrum: A Race to the Bottom?

2015-08-23T15:46:00.004-07:00

I had an interesting discussion with a colleague a while back. He believes that unless a Scrum team consists of high-performers, its collaborative practices will degrade its performance to the lowest common denominator. Do you agree?

I did, at first. His argument was that high performers keep each other accountable by their nature. They are ambitious perfectionists (for which we are thankful) and hold everyone to high standards including themselves and the organization. In contrast, merely modest performers will not, just by their individual natures, risk team instability in order to hold each other accountable. And so their team’s performance devolves — essentially a race to the bottom.

I found this all persuasive at the time, and left our meeting nodding my head. But after a few weeks I realized I was disturbed by the implication. I mean the implication that, when leading a team of modest performers, I must either settle for poor performance, abandon empowerment for command-and-control, or replace the modest performers with stars.

My problem is that I don’t want to settle, I don’t believe in the effectiveness of command-and-control (or enjoy it), and a team of (very scarce!) high performers tends to fight and otherwise require a lot of attention.

When I probed deeper into my feelings, I realized that the original argument felt like a form of blaming. It blames the people on the teams (people who are capable of pretty good performance, after all) while ignoring the organizational system in which they work.

In an organization that communicates poorly, doesn’t adequately resource leadership or leadership training, or is chaotic for other reasons, the argument does truly hold — because only high performers can overcome the organizational deficiencies. That type of organization is often pegged at the "heroic" level of maturity — fairly low, and all too common.

In contrast, in an organization that masters communication and invests in leadership as a core competency, modest performers have the cultural and operational support they need and can excel as a collaborative team. That type of organization, which I have experienced, is considered more mature. And it is more satisfying to me personally.

So I guess after thinking about all this, I believe in the Scrum framework even more now. And I reject the claim that it's a race to the bottom. On the contrary, it is a proven framework that creates high-performing teams. But it only works that way when properly fed and cared for by the organizational system in which it lives.

Scrum practitioners take note!

Situational Servant Leadership

2015-03-01T11:02:00.000-08:00

Advice to Agile practitioners interested in servant leadership: it is a subtler, more nuanced, and more advanced practice than you’ve been led to believe.

As commonly understood, servant leadership is about empowering teams. The servant leader is supposed to stay out of the way, foster self-organizing behavior, and remove impediments. This is understood to require a non-directive style, a taste for productive struggle, and a willingness to “let the team fail” in order that it may learn and grow.

But that idealized and somewhat passive interpretation of servant leadership works “out of the box” only in the most highly motivated and highly competent teams (and even they have their own challenges… see below). For all other teams (i.e. most teams), you will need a more sophisticated repertoire.

My favorite is the repertoire of situational leadership, developed by Paul Hersey and Ken Blanchard in the 1980s. It refines leadership practice based on a team’s maturity, usually described by the two characteristics of motivation and competence. Here is how I have found servant leadership to fit into the situational framework…

Low Motivation and Low Competence

Servant Leader aims at motivation and competence

For teams that cannot and don’t want to perform, there is nowhere to go but up. So the key to improvement is movement… any movement. As servant leader I overcome low motivation by encouraging the team, often quite bluntly, to consider ways they can improve their competence. I then guide and support them as they attempt to do so.

Low Motivation and High Competence

Servant Leader aims at motivation

For teams that can perform but don’t want to, the performance obstacle must be identified and neutralized. All competent teams were motivated once, before they became discouraged. The discouraging factors are usually in their environment and, as servant leader, I spend most of my time attempting to neutralize those. This often involves challenging the organization, or even championing an organizational change initiative. (How a servant leader pulls that off is another topic for another time.)

High Motivation and Low Competence

Servant Leader aims at competence

Eager teams that don’t have sufficient skills present a unique risk. They are often poorly paid, and they tempt an organization to accept mediocre work because of the cost savings. The organization is often unwilling to trust their ability to learn and perform, and it may fail to provide them with tools and opportunity. I find these teams challenging because their needs (and performance goals!) fly in the face of a disempowering organizational culture. As their servant leader, I focus on gaining organizational support for skill-building and accountability. The resulting performance improvement frequently jump-starts some useful organizational change.

High Motivation and High Competence

Servant Leader aims at harmony

The intense passion and expectations in these “star” teams require both harmony (my job), and clarity of vision (the organization’s job) in order to sustain the team’s performance. Without harmony, this team’s members will fight. And without a clear vision they will quickly (and cleverly) drive the bus off a cliff. Fortunately, harmony can be fostered by a leader skilled in conflict resolution. But harmony is easily undermined by organizational confusion or ambiguity over key roles. And vision in many organizations is often more sizzle than steak, especially where new products are concerned. That’s why, as servant leader for this type of team, I work to help the organization grow and change so that it can fully capitalize on its investment in the team. I also have to be vigilant so the team’s high performance doesn't lead me into complacency.

Empowerment skills (including the ability to influence organizational change) are essential for a good servant leader, and all four kinds of teams require them. But in order to lead most effectively, the servant leader must discern cues from the situation, and must aim empowerment appropriately.

Situational servant leadership is the key.

Keeping Agile Metrics Simple

2014-09-12T11:21:00.000-07:00

Software development leaders who are process-oriented (like project managers and scrum masters) sometimes obscure simple concepts in the interest of packaging. Roboscrum is a good case in point.

If you’re not familiar with Roboscrum, it’s a set of metrics and charts for agile teams. It's based on a simple classification of the scope items “touched” by a team in a sprint. The classification is pure genius, as is Roboscrum’s recognition of two key success factors for product development: focus, and estimation accuracy. But I and many of my colleagues find the presentation somewhat obtuse.

After using Roboscrum for over a year, I’ve stumbled across a simple presentation that seems to be much more readily understood by the average stakeholder. Here it is:

Most people I’ve shown this to don’t need any explanation at all. And the Excel spreadsheet that produces the chart is quite simple. (I would be happy to share it with you.)

In case you’re interested, here is a little more on the Roboscrum terminology as I understand it…

The Classification System
All the user stories in a sprint are sorted into three mutually exclusive buckets, with each bucket’s “size” equaling the total of its stories’ points:

Committed work – what the scrum team originally planned to deliver in a given sprint
Found work – any additional work found to be necessary to meet that commitment
Adopted work – any discretionary work brought into the sprint by the team

Then there is the customary fourth bucket that measures the actual payoff, again in story points:

Velocity – what was delivered to the stakeholder at sprint end (no partial credit!)

The Key Success Factors
The above buckets are used to assess two key success factors:

Focus – inferred from the percentage of Committed + Found + Adopted work that was actually delivered
Estimation Accuracy – inferred from how little or how much work was Found.

Roboscrum is quite a neat little system. I rely on it daily, and I think it gives an extremely valuable perspective on team performance. I hope my little contribution will expand its acceptance in the agile community.

Feeding The Beast

2013-09-08T13:45:00.001-07:00

Fast growth is the goal of ambitious companies everywhere, yet it’s surprising how few know what to do with the opportunity when it finally comes.

Let’s say your company has 100 employees today, and business is going so well that you can legitimately project 500 in five years. If you’re at all typical (and trust me, you probably are), you have no idea what it will really take to pull this off.

You’re probably planning to scale the same organizational growth strategy that took you from 0 to 100 in those first five or ten years: add growth planning to someone’s existing responsibilities, promote some key people, hire some new ones, obtain more office space, and beef up your technology infrastructure.

If that’s you, you’re fighting the last war. Growing four more companies your size (while you’re still feeding the first one) requires a fundamentally different strategy.

Just think about it… the 400 employees at your “four new companies” will all need to learn their jobs. Their creativity will challenge the organization to change and improve. They’ll all need management (and a great many of them will be managers, who will need acculturation). They’ll all need to understand your vision and strategic and tactical roadmaps, which will have become broader and more complex to match your company’s larger size. And, of course, those 400 new contributors will all produce!

You can’t expect to delegate responsibility for this kind of transformation as if it were just another business challenge.

The hard truth is that, like all companies undergoing rapid growth, yours will soon "hit the wall" unless you give growth the respect it demands. Here are your first two steps:

Vest authority and accountability for managing growth in a dedicated full-time C-suite role.
Fully resource growth at all levels of the company. A tight budget will strangle you.

However imprudent or frightening these steps may seem, you have to face the fact that rapid growth is a very ambitious and disruptive undertaking. Don't be caught napping!

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 when it comes to 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 might lie in exposing the effort required for all the work required for a successful delivery, not just the production work.

What if, in addition to the product backlog (which is a list of production items delivering business value) we maintained two additional backlogs of work, the clarity backlog and the viability backlog? They would be the domains of product managers and architects, respectively, and would expose work that is now usually hidden. The aim, of course, is to permit strategic and proactive allocation of resources to get that work done in time to feed the production work that depends on it.

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