Market change, economy change, technology change, workforce change, communication change, today change riddles stress cracks in organization foundations.  Whether 80-year-old companies, Fortune 500 stalwarts, or new-technology dynamos, change is as much an on-going assault on organizations as rust is an on-going assault on metal and your change agents are your organization’s saviors.  You see tomorrow’s relevance through your change agent’s lead.

What is your organization’s relationship with change agents?

How you and your organization treat change agents reveals as much about a dedication to relevance as it does about your organization’s relationship to market reality.

Change agents seed organization with the thought-leadership and options for tomorrow’s relevance.  At even greater impact change agents tend, weed, fertilize, and till the soil that produces market fruits.

Change agents, unfortunately, are also the ones with the figurative bulls-eye on their back.

It’s not the strongest species that survive, or the most intelligent, but the most responsive to change.  Charles Darwin

Today the Internet and globalization constantly assault an organization’s business foundation.  The speed of information demands people and organizations become resilient to change and resilience to bend is the key to buffet a constant wind of change against organization strategy.

The cost of staying the same is the cost your company’s foundation.  Like a buildings foundation limits the height of a building.   What are you assembling to limit the opportunity your change agents bring?  Resistance limits growth.

Let’s start with how to recognize change agents around you?  Change agents are the ones that say:

• “What about … “
• “I have seen … “
• “We could … if … “
• “Do you think … “
• “Talking at a recent event and … “
• “I was doing some research and perhaps … “

Proclamation alone is not the only way to uncover a change agent.  You can spot change agents through their action?  Change agents are the ones that:

• Design the communication strategy
• Envision a new organization structure
• Lead by example while others stand back
• Scope options A, B, C, and D
• Articulate the difference between a process and the promise
• Revisit previous attempts with new insight based on new context
• Find tools that shine a light on new options
• Propose the unheard of
• Stand behind intent when others abandon the challenge
• Believe in the current talent for getting it accomplished
• Ask ever harder questions, while others tap dance, more concerned with keeping up appearances
• Don’t confuse polite with politics

Leader in change

Leaders create a compelling future-state.  A place people can see themselves succeed.  Leaders do not rule through title.  A titled role does not entitle a fiat of organization compliance.  The best lead through inclusion.  The worst through exclusion.  What roadblocks are you constructing against your change agents?

Controlling bosses and micromanagers are your competition’s strongest asset as they drive talent to regress to the mean.  Worse, controlling bosses and micromanagers drive change agents to check out of conversations or to just leave the organization.  Either way and your competition wins. Unfortunately, petty leaders designate change agents as the problem.  These type of leaders shift blame from themselves not wanting to change or type of teams shift their role in not bothering to understand.

Colleague in change

What are you, as a team-mate, as a manager, as a member of a working group, doing to invite more change agents to speak up?  If you are the person who says, ‘now wait a minute, who can add something on how that could work?’, you invite change.

However, if you are one of the first to roll your eyes or quick to offer another reason that it just won’t work than you feed antipathy and the politics over insight.  Do you lead the blame game?

Agent in change

By the time you hit the ‘print’ button strategic plans are barely relevant.  Stress cracks can’t form if the foundation can’t set.  Today change is constant.  People who can flex and remain resilient to what change demands are the real leaders in your organization:

• Change agents are leaders who bring new ways of thinking,
• Change agents are leaders who commit to on-going professional development to remain relevant,
• Change agents are leaders who are active in the quest for business trends across other sectors
• Change agents are leaders who develop insight from all conversation sources

Change agents do not fit the normal distribution of your organization.  And that is a good thing.  As any normal distribution analysis relies:  it is the dispersion, or spread, around the mean that really lends the most insight.

Change agents lead organization thought diversity, they lead this from 1 or more sigma away from the normal or the average.  So, to increase variance increase healthy conversations and an environment for change agents.

Perhaps we need to think of change not simply event by event, but as a constant organization environmental factor; like salt water’s constant corrosion effect on metal.

Change is not an event, but a siege and the strongest defense to the siege of change is your change agent.

Addendum:  While mucking about on this blog, I found a blog post to share:  An open letter to micromanagers

When performance reviews were created the goal was to collect and share observed performance feedback that would sustain good performance or the observed feedback needed to improve performance.  The performance review would then inform merit increase in salary or bonus based on performance feedback.

The goal:  a pay increase or bonus based on merit.  Transparent for all to see.  For all to count on to manage expectation and motivate.  To provide an organization cultural tipping point of expected performance.

Well, that was the goal or intent before new agendas replaced true diligence; otherwise known as due diligence.  True diligence, an effort to back merit with observable and detailed example, has too often turned into an agenda-driven, force fit to prove a political point.

Merit-based performance would focus on the employee’s behavior that exemplifies excellence or the employee’s behavior that needs to improve.  However, a performance review based on merit is often out-numbered and out-gunned in many organization cultures by 3 agendas.  These 3 agendas destroy transparency and sabotage employee motivation to work.  These 3 are rarely identified by a true name, but exist in their behavior for all to see:

1. Partiality to long-standing friends, especially by appointing them to positions of authority, regardless of their qualifications:  Cronyism
2. Policies exists to increase the personal wealth and political power of officials or the ruling class at the expense of the wider population, often without pretense of honest service:   “rule by thieves” affectionately translated to Kleptocracy
3. Group views the world strictly through the lens of its functional goals and judges the relative importance of other activities by the way they affect the group’s objectives:   Parochialism

Engagement becomes a façade when cronyism, kleptocracy, and parochialism exist, but are allowed or advocated within any organization culture:

• Who gets promoted?
• What type of employee gets the biggest raises?
• Who shows up on the high-profile projects and does very little hard work on them?  People see these in culture very quickly.

Politics trumps merit.

All of those should go to those who have shown reliable, merit-based performance.  When given to those with little merit, but through the politics of the above then you’ve sabotaged engagement and have little hope to achieve true engagement.  Every night at 5pm engagement follows motivation out the door while politics are allowed to exist.

In a one-to-one fight cronyism, kleptocracy, and parochialism each trump merit.  When cronyism, kleptocracy, and parochialism gang up meritocracy has no chance.

That is the real cost of culture.  How is your organization spending their time around performance review?  Finding merit or stuffing the ballot box with politics?  I’ve written about no more performance reviews before, why not abandon the whole game and get back to the hard work of delivering to your company strategy and maintaining the bottom line:  people’s motivation?

Jargon, clichés, rhetoric  – talking while saying nothing.   Companies develop their own language or accepted terms.  Professions develop their own lingo.  People use stock phrases or go-to frameworks.  All of these are an attempt to communicate, to create a common understanding, to fit in, to prove what you know, and to make sense of the situation.

The problem arises when these clichés obscure meaning and just fill in dead space.  This leaves people frustrated by lack of progress, lack of clarity, and a host of assumptions, never resolved.

Business jargon has led some to play a game known as bullshit bingo:

• Before a meeting or seminar write out top clichés within your company, team, or profession, as people speak, check off each phrase from your list; keep yourself amused;

• Add to the fun:  before a meeting share your bingo card with others, during the meeting make eye contact to find out who is paying attention to the large amount of rhetoric being slung about;

• Add an element of danger:  agree on a word or catch phrase before a meeting, when a card is complete, be the first to utter something like, “great idea”, your catch phrase, and regale in the glory of your win.  Of course, if “great idea” is your catch phrase to announce to others you won, there is a danger some suck-up, unaware of your game, will steal your thunder.  You might stick with “bingo”, as in “bingo, that’s a great idea boss”.  Ah well, you work it out.

Organization development has a tough enough go of it, as it is.  We organization development folks have a heavy burden:  a business can only develop when its people develop and change is constant.  So, in this challenge where does organization development start and stop?  What is a complete list of what organization development does and does not do?

Organization development needs to be relevant, so for my part I will change the way I talk.  Try to take a little rhetoric out of the world.  Here are 3 business clichés used in strategy, in organization development, in information technology, in project management, or just in conversation around the dinner table.  I now promise to turn from cliché to impact:

1.  Let’s change the framework people, process, and technology to politics, process, and technology

• Seems evident that people are often forgotten in this framework. The benefit of using the work politics is that people drive politics so people are accounted for, but more importantly you begin with the discussion on risk or around stakeholder impact.

2.  Let’s change the entire concept of change management to end-user adoption

• Change management is so often reduced to a process or a task during the project. Seriously, can you get any 3 people to give an accurate description of what change management even is? If we flip our thinking to end use adoption then we build in an expectation and plan throughout for user feedback, for stakeholder design sessions. Ultimately, the switch from change management to end-user adoption means we have not finished until we measure and monitor end-user adoption.
• Take this from a process to a project goal. End-user adoption shifts that focus.

3.  Let’s change seeing is believing to seeing is deceiving

• When someone describes what they saw, they describe what they processed. People communicate through their bias, mood, culture, values, agenda, and a host of other hang-ups we all have in place to make sense of the world.

… monitoring both the information they receive and the way their brains are processing it. But keeping atop the news takes time and effort. And relentless self-questioning, as centuries of philosophers have shown, can be exhausting. Our brains are designed to create cognitive shortcuts — inference, intuition, and so forth — to avoid precisely that sort of discomfort while coping with the rush of information we receive on a daily basis. Without those shortcuts, few things would ever get done.”*

• What you get is what people filter. What you ingest is what you filter. Stop relying on an obvious point you make or a picture you present. Solution: ask more what others see in the data, what others can recap from the assessment, what they think and confirm, confirm, confirm to set, to manage, and to keep on top of expectations.

Join me.  What suggestions do you have to help us move from cliché to impact?

And if you yell, “bingo” in a meeting I facilitate, I appreciate it, you kept me honest.

*The Boston Globe, Ideas Section How facts backfire

Top blog posts from 2011, from number 5 to number 1, a follow-up from Top 10 blog posts for 2011, 10 to 6

5.  The cost of culture, a 50% turnover of the Fortune 500 —

This blog came about to reiterate that change is constant and the things that may have gotten a company to the Fortune 500 are not what guarantees a company can stay in the Fortune 500.  This blog reviews that in a 10-year period 50% of the Fortune 500 companies no longer remain and that perhaps this turnover is the failure of company culture to adapt.

4.  Scope or: how to manage projects for organization success; impact analysis template —

This 1 of a 4-part series on project scope and the impact scope has on project failure.  This blog includes an impact analysis template to identify the project’s impact on the organization.  The impact analysis is a great precursor to the stakeholder analysis as it helps identifies hidden stakeholders and systems before launch.

3.  Change management bottom up or top down —

Another blog originally written in 2010 that flips the worn out, change theory, clichés that change must start at the top or that leaders drive change.  Change driven from the bottom, the base, of the organization has more traction.

2.  Mergers and acquisitions failures are project management failures —

When viewed as a project, a merger or acquisition’s success can have new clarity.  Whether to approve a merger or acquisition means assumptions and promises were made about a merger or acquisition success.  The money or leverage was put at risk on the project success assumption.  This blog looks at a pretty compelling list of sources that reveal a grim success rate.

1.  This social media fad will ruin organization development —

Collaboration, transparency, community, and adding value are elemental to organization development or social media?  Or both?  Some think social media is a fad, most are not aware of organization development, an organization development professional can gain from social media and a social media professional can gain from organization development.

Top 10 postscript:  When I think of the Top 10 blog posts for 2011, I now realize I should have renamed them the Top 10 most viewed blogs in 2011:  only 1 of the 10 blogs was written in 2011.  Of the remaining, 8 of the other 9 were written in 2010 and number 10 on the list was written in 2009.

As I think this through, I am reminded of the power of inertia on the web.  Popular clicks increased exposure on search engine results and, in turn, reinforced the most popular. or most numerous, clicks.

Alternatively, I could think I did not write anything in 2011 the meets the interest of what I wrote in 2010.  That could be.  A way I could refute that thought is to look if my 2011 blogs involved more of community:  more comments, more social media interaction, lower bounce rates, and higher average time on site provides a better view.

2012 may show that 2011 blogs had more clicks.  But more popular?  Only time and fancy analytics may lend some truth.  I really like this medium to interact, learn, and share – thank you.

Closing out 2011 I look back at the year’s most viewed posts as a chance to reflect on differences of what I topics I blog about and what people view most.  Why were some viewed over others:  topic, time-of-year, day-of-week?

In descending order:

10. Competing values drives your organization out of business —

A 2009 blog about organization culture’s impact on change and what happens when organizations who can not identify or manage culture get stuck, become irrelevant, and vanish.  This blog talks about a culture identification tool called the Competing Values Framework and has a follow-up blog The cost of culture, a 50% turnover of the Fortune 500 that appears in 2011′s top 5.

9.  4 Tips to use Twitter for project management —

Written in January, 2010 this blog seems to have hit a note.  This was 1 of 2 blogs eventually highlighted on PM Hut [Project Management Hut], the other Project management is not a process, but a promise.

8.  Crowdsourcing your organization strategy, what’s to appreciate —

What is the cost to strategy adoption that avoids organization involvement:  failure.  This blog ties Appreciative Inquiry with Competing Values [culture] to present a case for expanded involvement.

7.  The key to innovation may be better employee hygiene —

Another blog written in 2010, this is about the demand for innovation while constraining more and more talent confidence:  will I have a job, who else will get laid off, reduction in benefits, to name a few.  This blog looks at hygiene from its organization behavior frame.

6.  Scope or: how to manage projects for organization success:  stakeholder analysis template —

A 3rd blog from 2010.  This 1 of a 4-part series on project scope and the impact scope has on project failure.  This blog includes a template to manage stakeholders for project and organization success.

Next:  Top 10 blog posts for 2011, 5 to 1

The 70-20-10 rule represents, by percentage, how people actually learn and develop:  70% from job experiences, 20% from feedback and collaboration, and only 10% from courses and from reading.

If 70% of learning happens on-the-job, what the employee can take back and use after the actual learning remains the most critical reinforcing loop for both the employee and the organization benefit.  As an employee needs a space to practice, competence equals confidence.

If 20% of learning happens through interaction and feedback then a healthy work environment needs practice as well as both informal and formal feedback.  The space for people to practice within their work demand is critical.  You only know what you know when you socialize what you think you know, so an employee will find this out only through feedback. 

Growth and development builds employee knowledge, skills, and abilities.  Learning provides employees new and necessary resources to do their jobs better.  The investment in learning and an environment to reveal skills is an investment in resources.  With new resources [knowledge, ability, and skills] people feel more confidence they can do the job.  Confidence builds motivation.

Growth and development at the individual and team level in turn builds the collective organization’s knowledge, abilities, and skills as a renewable stock that all within the organization draw on.  When learning is applied, new situations provide the organization gains and returns on training investment through increased motivation, increased job satisfaction, engagement, and a way for people to manage job stress.

An organization can only develop if people develop.  The only way for your organization to develop is through a place of practice.  This is systems theory in reality.

Talent acquisition, recruiting, is useless if the environment retards further growth.  Acquisition without practice is only collecting and unless your company is your hobby if you only collect and store talent without an opportunity growth, you and your company lose.

Here is the source inspiration to this blog:  Learning Fosters Psychologically Healthy Workplaces — Chief Learning Officer magazine

A boss gets things done through others.  An ability to influence others to meet a goal is critical to get things accomplished.  Some call management influence, others call management coercion.  Influence or coercion, controlling bosses cause employees to strive towards goals that are opposite to the boss.

Bosses are managers, bosses manage resources:  time, money, and employee each are finite resources.  Employees value freedom and autonomy and will react to a boss with poor work.  A Duke University study looked at significant others and the impact a significant other, to include boss, has on goals.  As little as a subliminal flash of the name of the controlling ‘other’ was enough to produce poorer work.

There is a psychological mechanism that connects the love of freedom and the behavioral response, this mechanism is called reactance.  Unconscious and unintentional rejection of goals [that status report that you asked for] are associate with overbearing people.  A rejection of a goal [that presentation you need to review] reveals itself by goal in opposition.

I came across the above study through Andrew O’Connell’s Harvard Business Review blog Why Controlling Bosses Have Unproductive Employees.  O’Connell sums it nicely;

“It’s all too easy, once people become managers, for them to forget how deeply their employees value freedom and autonomy, and the extent to which some of them [the employees] … react to any infringement of it, even unconsciously.”

Not getting quality work from your people?

Need to watch your people like a hawk for them to get anything done?

Need to spell out every detail to make sure it is done right?

That bristle of hair on the back of your neck when you think of your overbearing mom or dad may be the reaction employees have at work around overbearing bosses.

Memo to controlling bosses:  the more you control the less quality work your employees provide.

There is a clear difference between getting things done and getting things accomplished.  Similar to the difference between being consistent and reliable.  Better quality may require your goals to synch with their goals.

A .pdf copy of the Duke University study:  Nonconscious relationship reactance: When significant others prime opposing goals

A project introduces something new.  New requires change from what was to a promise of what will.   The project deliverable, or promise, undertaken without process is a leap in the dark.  No sane person will take a leap in the dark without some promise or rational premise of:

• what will be,
• what it will cost to get there, and
• how long it might take to get

Process reduces risk.  Project management process reduces project risk and reduced risk increases a project’s success rate.  The project goal enables the firm goal.  The project promise enables the firm promise.

A project launched to a promise to deliver on time, on budget, and within scope relies on a team of people to manage project process, but does not hold project process above the promise.

Process as hope

Project management is a reliable, repeatable process to deliver on time, on budget, and within scope.  We look at the process, or project life cycle, and try to guide sponsors and stakeholders along a charted path of prior project process standards:

• Initiate – processes performed to define a new project or a new phase of an existing project by obtaining authorization to start the project or phase;
• Plan - processes required to establish the scope of the project, refine the objectives, and define the course of action required to attain the objectives that the project was undertaken to achieve;
• Execute – processes performed to complete the work defined in the project management plan to satisfy the project specifications;
• Monitor and Control - processes required to track, review, and regulate the progress and performance of the project; identify any areas in which changes to the plan are required; and initiate the corresponding changes; and
• Close - processes performed to finalize all activities across all process groups to formally close the project of phase

A perfect project plan includes each of above and their related tools, templates, and procedures.

Variation as promise

A project life cycle rigid to process, process tools, and process templates [templates and formulas have no emotion] without account for variables and unknowns [emotions] is a project short of rationale.  Since people, not machines, run projects expect rational to always get trumped by emotional.

• Project management processes:  rational
• People:  emotional

Process provides skeptics a map.  Unfortunately, processes do not like variables.  Variables are risk and risk threatens projects.  People and time are the absolute variables risks that affect a project.

1. People layer their agenda, their bias, their culture, or their values above any team.  A team does not have a shared value stronger than an individual’s value.  Their individual and collective emotions effect each other.
2. Time obscures variables.  Variables increase as the time horizon increases.  The further the time horizon the higher the variables that assault the process and no process accounts for all variables.

Project management is not about the process, but delivering a promise.  Obedience to process without context of how people and time provide critical variance, is a sure way to miss project deliverables, if not derail project promise entirely.

People need to manage the project process fluidly to deliver the promise; not in spite of the promise, but because of the promise.  Process underpins the promise.  Between process and promise, it is more important that process is flexible and the promise remains set.

Keeping people emotionally involved means looking at what motivates and drives people.  The power of promise is that it creates an emotional connection that people commitment to.  Whether a project is delivered or fails, what is remembered was if the promise was delivered, not that the process was correct.

No process promises 100% success.  A perfect project plan is less important than a project plan perfect for the people involved.

*A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge: (PMBOK Guide)

At work do you ever say, “let me give you some advice”?  If so, do people lean forward with anticipation to hear what you have for advice?

When reviewing a draft ever heard someone tell you, “well, here’s my advice”?  If so, do you take a deep breath so as not to lose your cool?

When you hear someone ask for thoughts have you ever heard a reply start, “here’s what I would have done”?   if so, ever look around the room to catch people roll their eyes?

The point of communication:  action.

However, turning someone off, is rarely a strategic intent of those who hope to influence.  The intended reaction to your communication should not turn someone off, but yet so many turn people off with their communication.

Successful communication creates intended result(s). The performance measure for your communication:  did you get the intended result.  When you gave someone advice was your advice followed?  To the letter or just a little bit?

Do your realize, even as a leader, when you offer advice, you have really only offered weak, wishy-washy communication.  Advice alludes to an option, not a direct expectation.

Why communicate if your intent is missed. Waste of time.

Advice is a waste of time

Giving advice implies your advice is optional.  If your advice is not optional, then why not make it more clear what you expect.

.pdf link from LeadershipIQ website, free white paper, email registration required

A recent brief from LeadershipIQ called, “Why Giving Advice Doesn’t Work”*, lists samples of advice you may have heard or said yourself:

• “Personally, I wouldn’t bother the client before noon.”
• “If it were me, I’d get started on this right away.”
• “Have you tried talking to the client?”
• “You should probably make a few extra just in case.”

This article, one of this year’s most thought-provoking reads I have tried to adopt, lists 5 reasons why advice does not work:

1. Judgmental
2. Directive
3. Gotchas
4. Narcissism
5. Unsolicited

A sample nugget this 4-page, white paper offers:

… [h]owever, when you phrase it as advice, it sounds more like a recommendation than a directive. And as we’ve seen, that [directive] creates a misunderstanding that wastes everyone’s time.

If what you need to tell a subordinate is NOT optional, then be honest with them. Don’t play coy and pretend they have a choice when they actually don’t.

Advice – run that by yourself, first

It seems so logical in corporate America, or socially correct, to couch your expectation in soft-peddled advice or a pleadingly-weak suggestion.  Problem is, if it sounds like an option, people usually take the option of least resistance; resistance being:  they don’t want to redo work.

People will, however do extra work when based on fear, but, of course, fear is not much of a long-term gain for you, as it creates a bottleneck of indecision in your people and retards your people’s development.  And fear usually does not produce quality work as controlling bosses cause poor work.

So, after reading the above article to learn advice does not work doing something about it takes action.  As often as possible, I prepare for a difficult meeting or a difficult conversation by running my intended sentence(s), out loud, to myself.  I try what might say to that person to try to hear how I might react if it someone said the same to me.  Plenty of times this self-reflected sentence/message provides me the realization that what I intend to say would come across poorly.

If I can not get a practice sentence tried out ahead of time and the need is immediate, I at least sit back for 10 seconds and try the sentence I want to say in my head.  A 10-second pause is well worth the investment.

Being able to take that practice run, the subsequent self-reflection, and the modification to properly reassemble my message is always an investment well worth it.  Because, if it is worth communicating, it is worth communicating properly.  Clear communication saves time in both the short- and the long-term.

Source: *Why Giving Advice Doesn’t Work whitepaper — LeadershipIQ [.pdf link, no email registration]

Inspired by a chapter on providing feedback from Mark Murphy’s book:  Hundred Percenters: Challenge Your Employees to Give It Their All, and They’ll Give You Even More.  Mr. Murphy is Chairman and CEO of LeadershipIQ

People, process, and technology.

• Announce a policy, full adoption.
• Map a process, cycle time guaranteed.
• Buy a server, flip the switch.

Seems so simple.

Interconnections, systems, are never simple.

The intent of keeping people, process, and technology in mind is to think through the impact change has on the 3.  Identify that impact and then you should have a good idea of what it will take for a project or effort to succeed.

Thinking strategy, systems, and change-type initiatives the 3 make for good sanity checks.  The reality is that people, process, and technology do not add up to a full picture.  This heuristic trinity leaves a critical hole, in reality you should divide all 3 by the most important factor:  behavior.

Too often within the 3, process and technology take a majority of dialogue and budget.  Why?  Perhaps people, often considered the soft side, represent the heart of change challenges.  Dealing with people is more difficult than plugging a machine.  It is easier, on paper, to map a process or design a system than to build new behaviors.  But, without people, who follows process?  And without people who turns on, utilizes, and maintains the technology?

People, process, and technology.  Planning without deep exploration that the impact change has on all 3 is a project aiming for the scrap heap.  The hardest part, is the softest part:  people.  Usually the soft is ignored so we can get on to the hard work of process maps or vendor selection.

And, admittedly, the people portion might include a review of new skills needed, the new competencies developed, the new reporting relationships, or the new span of control.  But, without a focus on behavior, people, process, and technology does not cover the true impact

• People:  identify the behaviors needed to sustain progress.
• Process:  identify the behaviors that exhibit commitment.
• Technology:  identify the behaviors for target utilization.

People, process, and technology is not a law, it is a rule of thumb; we could quibble that people should not need it’s own category, as both process and technology rely on people.   However, it is clear in most change that people draw the short straw in design.  So, let’s add a policy to include behavior in the design:

• What are the behaviors expected?
• When are they expected?
• How are they expected to change?
• What happens if they do not change?

Recently I felt lucky to get a solid refresh to the oft-quoted S.M.A.R.T. goal design by introducing “Y”, as in WHY are you even doing this, I’d like some more discussion on the behaviors expected for people, process, and technology to succeed.

Behaviors as a denominator keeps end-user adoption in mind from the start.

Industry myopia is business risk.   People who grow in one industry or cycle through only one industry may seem safe to hire, because they may slot in quicker or bring competitive advantage, but industry myopia rarely meets innovation’s need to break things to start over or to view things from a new angle. 

Innovation depends on breaking things.

New organization growth relies on fresh thinking and challenges to comfort.  A long-standing trend, out of step with today’s talent market, are job roles written to prioritize recruiting people with industry-specific experience at the cost of great technical skills.

Organizations stress to managers, who in turn stress to their talent, the need for innovative thinking and entrepreneurial ways of doing things.  When we look to hire industry-only experts, we exclude a whole range of great talent; talent that can provide cross-industry pollination of ideas, styles, and solutions:  innovation.

Innovative people bring innovative ideas far more than innovative processes bring innovative ideas.

Businesses and operations bandy about innovation and entrepreneurial thoughts as the cure-all to compete and to survive today.  However, innovation is risk.  Entrepreneurs are risk takers. 

A Fortune 500 company that calls out the need for innovation and entrepreneurial, but shies from hiring talent from other industries is an organization surviving on rhetoric.

Risk relies on diversity.  Risk relies on failure.  Hierarchy resists risk.  Hierarchies rely on repeatability, not variance.  Risk is variance.  Risk is not a process.

For more than 10 years I’ve consulted on human capital and continue to run against the tide when I advocate hiring outstanding talent no matter the industry.  Someone with great technical skill, but from a different industry has all the ability to ramp up and learn any industry-specific particulars.

Why convert a financial IT expert into the health care IT world?  The upside for your team or department from an experienced financial IT professional in a health care world is the outside perspective, the specific challenge to, “that’s the way health care works”.

Someone can learn an industry far easier than learning a technical skill or bring practiced competence from repeated delivery.  I can learn industry demands of financial services quicker than I can learn and successfully implement organization change.

The by-product of an industry move is refreshed thinking of the way things are done.  When a hiring company looks to fill a role, bringing together a diverse group means cognitive diversity brings new solutions.  This collaborative excellence is diversity and this is what innovation relies on.

When hiring managers or HR directors insist on 5, 10, 20 years of single industry-related experience in their job requisitions this myopia stems from fear.  When hiring requirements are sent through to recruiters it shows hiring managers are not aligned to today’s mobile workforce and today’s need for innovation:  diversity.

An organization surrenders in the war for talent when a company can not strategically hire from other industries.

4 of things I’ve seen, read, or thought might seed results:

1.  Why being wrong is good for you — CNN.com

Most of us go through life assuming we are right, almost all the time, about pretty much everything:  our political, our values, our tastes, our religious beliefs, our view of other people, our memory, our version of facts.

We can not all be right, if someone is right, that implies someone is wrong, and how can so many feel so right when, in reality, so many are so wrong?  Our ability to reach a conclusion is essential for us to know we are right or to prove we are right.

But what do we go through when we are faced with being wrong?  When someone presents their clear-headed alternative to your conviction?  Being wrong is a sign of being a failure.  However, if we better embrace being wrong we better embrace how we learn, change, and develop.  Is it not an admirable trait to continually develop?

2.  On being wrong — Kathryn Schulz TED* Presentation

3.  Three Cheers for the Cheapeners and Cost-Cutters— Wall Street Journal

Innovation without thought for cost can keep great ideas from adoption.  Being cost effective or cheap is as much a driver for innovation adoption.  The greatest impact of a new idea comes when it is cheap enough for many people to use and this economy of scale may take decades.  So, cost cutters, are as important as the original idea and, at times, cheapening provides more innovation than the original innovation.

4.  Patently absurd — The Economist

The U.S. Patent Office, founded in 1790 by Thomas Jefferson, grants patents only to innovations that are useful and genuinely novel.  This system of intellectual property is crucial to generate economic growth, as inventors and entrepreneurs, with patents, become ensured they can make money from their good ideas.

Last year the patent office granted 244,358 patents out of the applications examined, but left 700,000 not even reviewed.  An inventor can wait almost 3 years on a patent decision, 2 years for application consideration and 10 months or more to learn if successful.  If nothing else, we’ve learned that this global economy, connected via the World Wide Web, demands speed.  The U.S. Patent Office remains a bottleneck to economic growth.

*TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design and is a nonprofit devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from three worlds:  Technology, Entertainment, Design. Since then its scope has become ever broader.

Along with two annual conferences — the TED Conference in Long Beach and Palm Springs each spring, and the TEDGlobal conference in Edinburgh UK each summer — TED includes the award-winning TEDTalks video site, the Open Translation Project and TED Conversations, the inspiring TED Fellows and TEDx programs, and the annual TED Prize.

Leaders at the top of the organization are accountable to deliver results.  Some leaders believe results come from questioning others.  Here are 4 questions leaders need to ask themselves, before they begin to ask anything of others:

1. When’s the last time someone disagreed with me in a meeting?
2. What am I teaching?
3. Am I getting 100% from my people?
4. How is my competition eating my lunch?

Leadership is not a title, it is a position.  A leader’s influence positions people and teams for success.  This positioning does not come with a salary range, but is found at any level of an organization.

If you are looking at positions of leadership make sure you constantly ask yourself these questions.

Want to gut-check the quality of the leaders around you?  What do your supervisor or manager or director or VP or SVP or C-level or board member clearly exhibit as answers to each of these 4 questions?

This book provides further grist for building a strong team.

And of course building a strong team is a leader’s ultimate measure of success.

Steve Jobs retired last week.  Steve Jobs had incredible impact as Apple CEO as well as a cultural icon whose products re-shaped and re-defined our relationship with technology.  Steve Jobs’ retirement reminds those in technology that a liberal arts view to their work could serve them better.

It might be a stretch to say Apple is everything Microsoft isn’t.  Well, the 2 companies have had a distinctly different approach to their products and different strategic paths through their existence.  Technology and people.  People and technology.

Since last week’s announcement, of all the articles I read on Jobs, I was most taken by The Genius of Jobs, Marrying Tech and Art from The Wall Street Journal’s, get this, Life & Culture section.

Striking a very sober chord in today’s technology first, reality be damned world, in a 2010 speech, Jobs, suggested Apple’s success had more to do with realizing that technology alone answers little.  His quote: ”[i]t’s in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough.  It’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields the results that make our hearts sing.”

In the presentation, he illustrates that point through an image of the intersection of 2 streets; to your, and to his left.

The article’s author, Steven Johnson, says this intersection’s image is meant … “as a description of the kind of thinking—multidisciplinary, sensitive to human needs and potential—that created [Apple] products …”

This humble blog’s perspective?  Thank you Steve Jobs.  When is the last time you sat with someone from your technology department who made the way Steve Jobs articulated?

Today, most strategy relies on technology.  The disconnect is that too often technology shows too little commitment to the end-user experience.  The enterprise end-user or as the customer end-user.  Let me clarify that last sentence, the enterprise end-user is also a customer.

Imagine your Information Technology (IT) department committed to an end-user experience similar to Apple’s iPad, the iPod, or iTunes end-user experience or your IT department producing products that are an intuitive joy to work with.  Imagine an IT department that creates products and services that make you say, “wow”, not “why bother”?

Well, there’s your challenge IT:  bring a bit more humanity into your function.  There is too much information in information technology and too little liberal arts.  Perhaps increasing the latter will yield results that “make our hearts sing”.

Technology and people.  People and technology.  Microsoft and Apple?  Are the differences as simple as Bill Gates and Steve Jobs?

In their book Putting the Public back in Public Relations authors and technology bloggers Deirdre Breakenridge and Brian Solis wrote, “social media is 10% tool and 90% sociology“.

Let’s start more conversations this way.  Let’s start more designs this way.  Let’s start more requirements this way.

Thank you Deidre Breakenridge

Thank you Brian Solis.

Thank you Steve Jobs.

No doubt I got some things wrong, or left out some important ideas. Please let me know what you think and suggestions you have for me to add value.

“A rose by any other name would smell as sweet … “, iambic pentameter aside, I appreciate Mr. Shakespeare’s point.  However, when I look at a word that is recently trending in a lot of companies and organizations, like the word engagement is, it seems context, perspective, and the value proposition truly defines how sweet the rose might smell.

Without context or the target-audience’s value proposition the use of engagement varies dramatically:

1. Employee Engagement - a heightened level of ownership where each employee wants to do whatever they can for the benefit of their internal and external customers, and for the success of the organization as a whole.^[1]
2. Patient Engagement – the passion, pride, integrity, and confidence of a patient’s care experience with an organization.^[2]
3. Social Media Engagement – developing relationships with active involvement and becoming a part of existing communities or fostering a personal community of your own and the value you add to conversations relevant to you or your brand.^[3]

Rule #1 in communication:  know your audience.  In the case of engagement, move the word beyond jargon or rhetoric and into reality with a level-set awareness before developing, designing, or rolling out a strategy based on engagement.

Words create worlds.  The choice of our words are always interpreted from the other’s view.  Choose wisely and level-set frequently.

No doubt I got some things wrong, or left out some important ideas. Please let me know what you think and suggestions you have for me to add value.

^[1] Wikipedia

^[2] Gallup

^[3] SocialFresh.com

3 of things I’ve seen, read, or thought might seed results:

1.   Bored People Quit — Rands in Response blog

People who quit say:  “I don’t believe in this company.”  Bored people quit.

The author of this post is neither an HR professional nor an organization development/behavior professional, this author simply manages people.  I say simply because a people manager’s primary job is people.  Managers manage people like it their job, not their nuisance.  This rather raw article is written by a manager who realizes bored people are the manager’s fault; his fault.

I think of boredom as a clock. Every second that someone on my team is bored, a second passes on this clock. After some aggregated amount of seconds that varies for every person, they look at the time, throw up their arms, and quit.

Take a read on how an active manager manages, how managing means maximizing resources, and the steps to dole out tough work and parse out the exciting work, as well.

2.  I’m OK, You’re Biased — The New York Times

As the article points out:

Consultants believe they can make objective decisions about the companies that indirectly employ them, just as legislators believe that campaign contributions don’t influence their votes.

Doctors scoff at the notion that gifts from a pharmaceutical company could motivate them to prescribe that company’s drugs, and Supreme Court justices are confident that their legal opinions are not influenced by their financial stake in a defendant’s business, or by their child’s employment at a petitioner’s firm.

What’s the solution to bias?  It looks like a pretty easy fix.

3.  Engaging Employees to Drive Global Success — Mercer

Engagement is a sexy word today.  I guess most organizations got tired of reading survey responses that revealed how little they motivate their employees.  Mercer is a top HR human resource consulting firm with thought leadership in recruiting and talent motivation.

This a Mercer report on engagement.  I take Mercer reports as a serious baseline for most discussions with people to busy to care about people.  Nice to bandy about big consulting firm studies when dealing with folks who need, absolutely are desperate for, data.

As an aside:  If you do not use SlideShare you are missing out on a great social networking site focused on sharing presentations and files.  SlideShare is a great source for research and thought leadership.

This Mercer presentation was posted by Elizabeth L, someone I follow on SlideShare.net.

Here is a link to my telwin SlideShare account presentations.

Share your thoughts on these thoughts…

What is organization development?

Yes organization development is training and leadership development and coaching and performance management and change management and communications and organization design and competency models and strategic planning and really so much, it is almost more confusing than helpful to really say what organization development is.

This challenge spills over when I am to bring organization development with me to look at a performance management plan, but told not to touch incentives, coaching, or talent development.

Or asked to provide change management, but not allowed to meet with the top of the house to identify communication points or told not to touch skills-gap analysis, training, or performance management.

When I look at an organization, a department, a team, or an individual, I see each in a frame of the system they work within.  The general characteristics of a healthy organization are cohesion, interdependence, and stability.

Systems theory relies on all interaction.  You can not divorce the pieces:  just as you can not take the ocean out of the carbon cycle.

What is organization development?  Well, who really cares, unless it helps people identify a need, overcome a challenge, and maximize resource return.

Simply, organization development is diagnosing the root cause and then designing the critical path to commitment.

Without commitment you only have a perspective.  The diagnosis without the critical path to commitment is rhetoric.

No doubt I got some things wrong, or left out some important ideas.   Please let me know what you think and suggestions you have for me to  add value.

In collaboration, there is a notion that we share thoughts and perspectives of what we know to make better decisions.

What we know and share is important for context to any decision and you may have seen some or heard something similar to this:

• What you know you know,
• What you know you don’t know, and
• What you don’t know you don’t know

It is not practical to strive for expertise in all areas; to the 2^nd bullet above.

Clearly, a rational person understands that you can not have seen or will have time to acquire all the knowledge available and you simply may not know; to the 3^rd bullet above.

However, there is a 4th bullet to this:

•  What you think you know, but really don’t know

In a healthy environment, admitting what you don’t know is part of the process to come to a shared understanding.

In an unhealthy environment sticking to a point you think you know, but do not really know drives people to defend positions from a point of weakness that can easily turn into an indefensible point of embarrassment.  Why is this bad?

People who know enough to be dangerous, but do not know enough to realize they are wrong< will not back down or admit their lack of knowledge.  Their position is a position of absolute:  they are absolutely correct.

The challenge comes to gently move awareness of what they thought they knew to a space of owning they really did not know what they were talking about.

Not easy.

Not fun.

And if this is senior person to you AND you do not do this with tact, not always a wise career move.

In a 8 steps to better decision making I made a case for a series of steps we go through to filter, to engage, to improve, and to conclude what is noise and what is needed to get to a decision.

1. Noise – all the 0s and 1s/bytes and bits throughout the web, over the airwaves, across the spectrum
2. Research – the initial question, I wonder if… that sends you to seek answers
3. Information – the all-source return dump from your question or a 1-way flare (information is different from communication: see below)
4. Data – the filter to makes sense of what is valuable and what is garbage
5. Communication – the 2-way relay of what you find and what needs further refinement
6. Interpretation – the unaccountable and unseen layers of values, wants, needs, bias, emotions, and agendas (to name a few) that your communication target has filtered your communicate through to draw their own interpretation of the information or data.
• Note: you have no control on how or what you communicate is interpreted as you intended; caution when proceeding
7. Conversation – the deeper dialogue to clarify responsibility
8. Decision – the shared commitment

A business case usually relies on numbers.  Numbers to justify the investment, numbers to project the return on investment, and numbers to compare against other investment opportunities.  Numbers that matter, matter differently dependent on the view of the person you talk to.  Certainly social media, or social software, numbers rely on us to know our boss and know their need and understand what their need for numbers is to evaluate success.

Recently I went to Google for a social media metrics search and came across a good article to share for 2 reasons.  But, context really, my search was spurred from a discussion with someone who asked what metrics do I need to make a business case for social media success to my C-level?

I had not been asked to make a data-driven business case for social media for more than 2 years, so I just did a quick Google search to see if about the most recent case studies I could update my holster with.

I came to an article Tying Social Software to Business Metrics that Matter.  The 1st reason I like the article was the sober view the authors, John Hagel and John Seely Brown of Chief Executive.net [obviously the target for the article are executives] present about the environment of need we must respond to.  I paraphrase:

In this era of near-constant business disruption where non-routine issues are becoming the norm, your capacity to solve them swiftly, using the unique capabilities of social software makes its measured use important for profitability and growth.

and

Most senior executives are either deeply skeptical of social software because they don’t understand its potential impact on business performance or they have adopted a “check the box” approach — they feel they have to deploy it because other companies are adopting it, but they are not sure what it does or why it matters.

Hagel and Brown understand the world I live in and the expectations I have to deal with.  And that is fair for me, because if I want to impact an executive, I need to think about the executive’s need, not mine.

However a 2nd great point about this article, in truth is not a social media or software issue at, but a great reminder for metrics that matter to the audience:

… tying social software deployment to metrics that matter for your firm and triggering cascades of adoption and sustained usage based on clear and measurable operating impact. Social software can have a significant impact on the performance of the firm but its deployment needs to be guided by a methodology that targets the greatest opportunities for performance impact.

But here’s the problem. The metrics that matter differ at different levels of the organization. Given this, it is vital to focus on a performance funnel that specifically targets metrics that matter at each level of the organization.

Within the 6 pages of this article is a lot of great insight:

• What is the executive level interested in?
• Why is it different, and should be different, to the operational level?
• What is the link between financial, operational, and, what the author’s call, front-line metrics?

I’ll leave with the last article teaser:

Stepping back from all of this, it becomes clear why CEOs are natural and necessary leaders for these software deployment initiatives. Effectively targeting metrics that matter requires a broad overview of the economics of the business and an ability to drill down quickly into whatever part of the operating processes that might be most helpful in driving key financial metrics.

I say, “here, here, next round on me”!

Some other good nuggets leap out when I read this full article, but I do not want to steal the thunder of a timely and relevant read that is important to anyone who cares about staying at the executive table.

Without an understanding of their need for numbers to evaluate success we can get too easily drawn in to people’s personal bias or fear of change.  I am not keen on dealing with a personal agenda that trumps a business need for change.  I can build change management into organization development, but to convince someone in fear of change for their personal reasons, that is a far taller task, and one’s fear does not help the organization.

Chief Executive.net.  It’s a good read.

Enjoy the article and share your thoughts.

The Modern Firm: Organizational Design for Performance and Growth by John Roberts

Brief:  The most fundamental responsibility of a general manager is to craft strategy and design an organization where the strategy can succeed within the economic, political, legal, regulatory, social, and the technological environment the firm operates.  A direct challenge to the design is finding alignment within the environment.

The right strategy or design is an ongoing process of adjustment as the environment changes, as the strategy develops, and as the organization evolves.

Table of Contents:

1. Strategy and Organization
2. Key Concepts for Organization Design
3. The Nature and Purpose of the Firm
4. Organization for Performance
5. Organizing for Growth and Innovation
6. Creating the Modern Firm:  Management and Leadership Challenges

Attraction:  I read this hardcover in 2003.  At the time I was about 4 years into the practice and study of strategy and organization design/development/behavior.  Before this book, most of what I studied was driven by management theorists, their case studies, and experiences they shared observing and influencing firms, people, motivation, and behavior.  Unfortunately, I found too many hard-boiled business and technology people gave little time or patience for those overly academic, management theories around people and motivation.

The way firms organize themselves and exercise authority provides more insight and upside than just a change in processes and routines.  This is a far more analytic, business case for strategy and the critical design elements for effective organizations.  Author John Roberts, an economics professor at Stanford Business School, presents a book that ties economics and environmental factors to strategy and organization.

Some who used to looking at behavior-based change may get turned off by the serious economics rationale for strategy, I found it absolutely needed to allow me to tie people to firm success, strategy to motivation, design to operations.  This was the first in shifting my perspective to make a business case for change and a financial case for motivation.

In 2004 The Economist wrote, “Best business book of the year…deserves to be a classic… Nobody, it can now be said, is fully fit to run a modern firm until they have read The Modern Firm.”

Also take a look at some of my other influences.

If you want an idea of your organization’s culture there is no simpler place for this insight than your organization’s social media strategy.  Companies who view social media only as a marketing vehicle miss far more than an opportunity to engage.  It is as likely these companies have lost their employee’s motivation in similar fashion well before.

Is your organization:

• Theory X?
• Paternal?
• Hierarchical?
• Siloed?

Not sure?  Well, does your social media strategy seem restrictive, bureaucratic, controlled or ghost-written,  blogs, no place available for user comments, no RSS feeds or other calls to action, agencies that write content, or site metrics that are not shared?

Or is your organization:

• Theory Y?
• Flat?
• Open?
• Matrixed?
• Transparent?

Not sure?  Well, does your social media strategy use social media press releases, provide internal access to social media sites, post blogs penned and written by who it says wrote them, have internal departments writing their own web content, and openly share site data and metrics?

I wrote in a prior the similarities between social media and organization development the strength of the best organization cultures rely on a work environment that includes:

• Involvement,
• Communication,
• Listening,
• Collaboration

Your organization can not have an open social media strategy if your current organization does not have faith with involvement, communication, listening, collaboration, or the final trump card:  transparency.

The best social media companies rely on transparency for other’s to easily find and share information about your company’s goods and services.

The best social media companies only edit their site comments for fear of spam not for fear of negative comments.

Good social media companies already leverage transparency and involvement of others to provide feedback and gauge the relevance of the company’s message.

Mature social media company policy shows, documents, and leverages open trust for internal employee access to sites while at work.  Access based on a level of trust, not a level of distrust.  The best company’s know they hired, trained, and communicate with their employees the expectation for web access and company information.

The laggard companies that continue to manage in a pre-World War II management philosophy set social media policies because they are certain if their employees have access they will screw up, so the company protects them from themselves; how very paternalistic of them.

Strong cultures base their policies on trust and the strong management expectation to communicate, educate, and train direct reports on what is expected, not why management knows employees can not be trusted.

If web 1.0 brought about the concept content is king, the maturity to a web 2.0 and social media environment are only achieved when living the concept that community is king.

Without community you can’t have motivation.  How can you develop a community unless you are a transparent part of a community?  How do you seek to understand community without spending time invested in a community?  Well, as these hold true to an individual the same holds true for an organization.

Marketing 2.0, web 2.0, and social media present a revolution many companies continue to barricade their citadel gates against.  Is your company leadership and marketing cowering behind the gates hoping to outlast the pagan horde?  Does social media embody the best your organization culture has to offer?  I will look at this in a second, follow-up, post.

No doubt I got some things wrong, or left out some important ideas.  Please let me know what you think and suggestions you have for me to add value.

Meeting icebreakers can be as painful as a bucket of ice down your shorts.  The icebreaker’s intent?  Loosen things up, meet people, set the stage for effective work.

The challenge, if you are going to use an icebreaker, is to understand the difference between hokey and intentional.

Know your audience is a constant refrain.  But sometimes, as a facilitator, trainer, or consultant,  you may not, always, know your audience preference or style.  Icebreakers run the risk of turning people off before you have even started the heavy lifting on why you are there; that is no good.

Here is an icebreaker, or meeting kickoff, I learned about 10 years ago.  I am fairly certain I saw this at an Appreciative Inquiry training.  Apologies and much appreciation to who introduced me to this.

I particularly like icebreaker as it directly provides context to different perspectives and how people communicate.  I use the icebreaker with groups, I share the concept as an analogy in one-on-one meetings, and I find it not only resonates, but people find the metaphor immediately practical.

Best of all:  it has never been confused with Kumbaya …

I have never written this down, just have it from memory, so here is my first attempt:

Learning Goal: To realize perspectives affect how everyone views things and the impact alternative perspectives has on communication.

Preparation:

Tools: Index cards, flip chart (optional),
Time: as little as 10 – 15 minutes as much as 30 minutes or more – the intent, learning, and takeaway should resonate equally well within most timeframes.

Perspectives Ice-Breaker

1.  Set up:

Ask for volunteers (3 – 5). Tell the volunteers [or the reluctant] they are only volunteering to share their observations with the group. Nothing else is involved, no jumping, no trust fall, nothing but their keen sense of observation.

Tell the group that on each index card a volunteer gets there will be a unique occupation or job title.

The volunteers are handed an index card. They are not to share what is written on the index card. On each index card is an occupation, or job title, for example: race car driver, cook, candle-stick maker.

The volunteers are to take 3 – 5 minutes to look around the room and with the perspective of the occupation on the index card be prepared to describe the room to the rest. Keep in mind to look at the room as this occupation might.

2. Activity:

After 5 minutes, each volunteer, in turn, describes to the others, without telling them, outright, what their occupation is.  The volunteer should share what they see in the room, why it is important to them, and how the room setup impacts them.  Note:  facilitator helps guide the person describing the room with clarifying questions to illicit further insights.

The rest of the room writes down [as individuals or in teams, you decide] what occupation the volunteer is describing:  an electrician, an interior decorator, etc…

All volunteers finish.

Facilitate the room to guess who the first volunteer was, and so on.

Facilitators Note: If guesses are incorrect, work with the volunteer to tease out further details [as time permits] or just ask the volunteer to tell the room or you take the roll over to provide more details until they guess correctly, or you decide to tell them.

Some examples of occupations* and their perspectives may include:

• Secret Service Agent: number of exits, windows, what floor the room is on, how many doors, potential hiding places, drop ceiling, protection …
• Thief: access to sneak in/out, amount of purses laying around, computer bags, jackets, lack of security cameras, lighting (dark), …
• Interior Designer: furniture, décor, color scheme, paintings, light fixtures, carpet, …
• Electrician: the lighting, electric outlets, audio/visual, light switches, etc …
• Fireman: number of exits, fire extinguishers, exit signs, emergency lighting, water, what floor of the building, where the staircases are, emergency exit map on wall, flammable material …

Facilitators Note: Bring the discussions to a close and guide the conversation about some of the learnings in the exercise. Facilitate thoughts and conversation.

Key in on how, despite each of us being in the same room, we each viewed the room through what was important to their own occupation. The perspective of each occupation changed the dynamics of the room.

3.  Key learning opportunities:

1. How this exercise plays out in our professional [and personal] lives, examples you could include as you facilitate the discussion:
   • What is the potential impact of other perspectives to the same issue?
   • Think of a time when this may have played out without you realizing it; was it frustrating for you?
   • Was it frustrating for the other person or the rest of the team?
2. No one perspective is correct, each perspective is correct for each:
   • We all have different perspectives, one is not better than the other.
   • We need to have patience for each other and value other perspectives or viewpoints, as well as realize what we may think is clear for us may not be viewed similarly to another.
3. What should we do differently with this experience in mind?
4. You may think you are explaining your business need very clearly, but not through the other business partner’s filter.
   • Our need to qualify and clarify.
   • Why do you think this is valuable?
   • Try to keep this in mind as we move through the learning or facilitation.
5. On-going learning: After the exercise the facilitator should return to this theme to reinforce the message. For example, if team is terribly bogged-down or stuck, remind them of other perspectives that might help.

*Note:    The possibilities for occupations are up to you.  Do limit the options to only listed only in Section 2; some occupations, obviously work better than others, use your discretion: teacher, movie star, politician; some work better, for obvious reasons.  Alternatively, a police officer and a thief as part of the exercise may describe the same scene, but from different agendas – providing another good learning opportunity.

Also:  

1. This ice breaker can scale up to any size gathering or room
2. This ice breaker can kick off any meeting and any topic.

I look forward to your thoughts, recommendations to clarify, and further insights.

Some people, and some organizations, can confuse very elemental operational concepts.  The confusion is tough to trace to a culture issue or a perception issue between getting it done versus getting it accomplished.

Getting it done means you care more about finishing than about quality.

Very different terms.

Very different concepts.

An alternative way to think about the difference between getting it done versus getting accomplished is like working with someone who continues to advocate the intuitive versus someone who advocates the empirical; to stretch this further:  induction and deduction.

Very different theories.

Just as managing by lists is very different from managing by milestone.

When you manage by list, you only view the blades of grass.  However, when you manage by milestone you have the entire field in perspective.

When you manage by list you only concern yourself with what individuals accomplish.  When you manage by milestone you rely on what a group of stakeholders accomplish together through a series of things to get done that relied on a series of collaborations to happen, before something can get truly accomplished.

Managers, leaders, and organization that care more about getting things done or who manage by list also tend to confuse the tactical with the strategic.

The tactical relates to actions.  An action removed from a reason is never evaluated as a priority in value of the effort required.  If you can not prioritize efforts you can not decide on how to assign resources.  Without a compelling plan for your finite amount of resources.  And a person’s hour is as much a resource as a financial unit.  A person’s hour may be more valuable because you can always make a dollar, but you can never make time.

When you manage resources isolated from the bigger need, you have a very strong likelihood to waste resources.

A group of actions, or options, without strategic reason or alignment also tends to those who have given very little forethought for a return on resources.

Without an understanding of the resources needed to accomplish a strategy, no one can decide what should start, what should stop, and what should continue.

There are distinct times for us to manage strategically and for us to manage tactically.  Critical discussions before embarking on any endeavor should revolve around:

• is this a strategic need?
• does this map direct to a strategic goal?
• are we deconstructing strategy to understand our options?
• is this a tool or is this one of a number of options?
• what will this accomplish?
• who will this impact?

The difference between getting it done and getting it accomplished is the different between looking at your toes and looking at your team.

No doubt I got some things wrong, or left out some important ideas.  Please let me know what you think and suggestions you have for me to add value.

Competitive advantage:  the final frontier.

Today only 2 areas remain for competitive advantage:

1. talent management and
2. project management

Put another way, an organization has 2 ways to beat their competition:

1. their ability to motivate people and
2. their ability to reliably deliver projects.

Talent as a hard asset

Hiring the right talent and keeping that talent motivated and engaged, that is the challenge.  Presumably, all companies hire the best.  So, if you line up all the candidates for one job description across the industry, every company has to assume they would choose the best candidate.

Once that candidate starts, the resume is useless.  Culture takes over.  Politics take over.  Process takes over.  Hierarchy takes over.  Agenda takes over.

That once-eager-go-getter with all the potential and promise?

I am going to make a couple of generalizations:

• people don’t take jobs to do a bad job;
• when a job offer is extended, there is genuine excitement to join;
• people don’t choose to join bad companies

If we work with these generalizations [believe me, economists and sociologists make far weaker generalizations], the way an organization manages talent and motivation becomes a competitive advantage.

The project as competitive advantage

Strategy decomposed becomes a series of projects to implement.

Strategy comes and goes.  If you line up all the 3-ring binder strategic plans within an industry you would find very few that include some huge strategic bet that, if unmet, would bring a company to the brink of ruin.

Strategy design is terribly easy, but the ability to operationalize an enterprise strategy, before the strategy becomes irrelevant, that is where organizations truly succeed.

An organization’s ability to implement a strategy is far more important than an ability to create a strategy.  A company that cannot implement their strategy has far more at risk than the company that implements the wrong strategy.

A strategic plan is only relevant when the goals, objectives, and actions produce a series of projects that move the organization, project-by-project, to achieve the strategy.  When an organization fails to reliably deliver projects on time, on budget, and within scope, they fail to deliver to expectation.

When projects fail, people fail.  When people fail, blame is assigned. When blame is assigned, resentment builds.

A pattern of failed projects seeds doubt.  So, when new projects start, people are less inclined to volunteer to work on any project when failure is the pattern.

Those staffed or charged to lead new projects begin to see that the only people available to work on projects are those not essential to business; if they were important, they would not be available.  What manager would release an important employee to work on a project that will fail and risk the manager’s ability to meet their goals and their performance review at the same time?

Breakthrough or throughput

Deliver on projects, build motivation.  Build motivation, deliver on projects more reliably.  Deliver more reliably, increase margins.  Increase margins, beat your competition.

Breakthrough ideas are nice, but sustainable competitive advantage rarely comes from a breakthrough idea.  What is a breakthrough, though, is the ability to implement a breakthrough idea.

I would prefer an organization that has high project throughput over the breakthrough idea.

Who wins?

If your company and my company recruit the same person and your company can not motivate that person, but my company can keep that person motivated:  I win. 

I’ll take an employee with half the technical skills who is motivated, over an employee with more technical skills who is unmotivated.

If your company and my company need a series of projects to roll out a new strategic plan and your company can not deliver on those projects, but my company can:  I win.

Who’s strategic plan is better is irrelevant.

No doubt I got some things wrong, or left out some important ideas.   Please let me know what you think and suggestions you have for me to  add value.

Does organization culture benefit with bureaucracy?  Bureacracy may, indeed, provide organizations a strong case to manage risk.

Policy, procedure, and bureaucracy tend to creep as an organization grows in size:  revenues, market share, employees.

While a small organization may have flexibility and ad hoc procedures based on 1-on-1 interactions, as an organization adds people the original interactions of smaller teams are stretched beyond 1st-level interaction.  This means the track record of things that may have been consistent is now flexed beyond 1st-level accountability.

You expect an organization grows to meet the demand of added revenue.  However, if your orignal processes and procedures were flexible and not well-documented, you now run a risk to quality when you grow to fast.

If the wheel is wobbly at 5mph it is teeth rattling at 65mph.  The Internet, as a tool, is a good example of the speed element in process:  just because I can do something faster, does not mean I can or should accelerate my output.  If I do not flex to meet acceleration, then acceleration, itself, becomes the stress that cracks quality.

In growing organizations the “way things are done around here”, also known as culture, turns into a secret sauce left to those originally initiated.  With growth becomes new jobs are added.  I’ve seen process and procedure looked at as a burden in organizations that are really only trying to manage and mitigate risk.

The alternative to developing a bit of bureacracy is a shoddy strategy soon left for those who don’t figure the culture out to just flame out.  The people who can not understand the culture needed are too easily relegated to the dustbin comment of “well they just did not fit in the culture”.

To combat risk organizations feel [or actually do] need more process and procedure.  Soon hierarchy is added to a sign off or review of things and to double/triple check decisions or products.  All in the effort to manage and mitigate risk and manage from a smaller shop to a larger, dispersed organization.

In some organizations it seems policy and procedure are intended to make up for active, engaged management or for management by walking around or an organization where management knows each and every employee, their role, their responsibility, their capability, and their limits.

You should not count on culture to snap someone into shape.  Culture is not a management process, culture is a lever for action, not a tool for punishment.  To counter culture [pun intended] policy arises.  Reporting structures become formalized.  Names begin to be replaced by job titles or job codes.

So, in absence of effective management, culture and cultural policy becomes the panacea for active, engaged management.

Business process re-engineering was the intended intervention to poor process.  As a radical review, business process re-engineering is to review an end-to-end process, not pieces or departments within who are part of the process.  If you can not review the process from the input through the final output, you are only adding bureacracy and process.

Organizations should grow and cultivate culture for resiliency, flexibility, rigidity, and flow.  Selective pruning of employees who no longer fit the future-state culture needs of policy and procedure is necessary and on-going strategy to stay healthy.

Here’s a good view to measure your bureaucry:   if you have sign-off authority for something and you can’t-for-the-life-of-you remember the last time you actually reversed a decision to what you were signing and refused to sign-off, then you are within an overly-bureaucratic process.

No doubt I got some things wrong, or left out some important ideas.   Please let me know what you think and suggestions you have for me to  add value.

4 of things I’ve seen, read, or thought might seed results:

1. Think About Diversity of Thought — Diversity Executive Magazine

Organizations have cultural norms that employees are expected to work within.  Ideas presented by employees need become judged on value, not judged on the different perspectives they represent.  Thought diversity introduces not only different viewpoints, but also differences in approach and how individuals look at the world through that lens of experience.

This diversity of thought then becomes both commercially valuable and helpful to the overall organization’s culture.

In 2009 I had some thoughts around qualitative diversity and cognitive diversity when I wrote Diversity facade and Diversity facade, diversity hijacked.  Both originally inspired by a white paper I authored while at Deloitte Consulting.

2. New Efficiencies in Health Care? Not Likely — Wall Street Journal

In this author’s experience of the British health care system all attempts to reduce bureaucracy increase it, and the same goes for cost.  This doctor takes a look at America’s current attempts and options discussed and compares these to what he has lived and worked within under the British system.

On paper, prevention always seems much cheaper than cure. Health-care economists prove it very elegantly and convincingly over and over again.

Unfortunately, the world always proves to be more complex and refractory than the theories of even the best economists.

Though this is an editorial, it is not simply a rant, but well-presented ideas along innovation, policy, and circumstances any change battles with.

A cautionary tale for any change agent.

3. Gone but Not Forgotten — CFO Magazine

in the late 1990s online job boards had an appeal to employers for low-cost executive recruiting compared with using headhunters. But now these job boards are at the point of being very “noisy” — both in the number of resumes and the increased cost of using the boards.

Professionals say rehires and referrals are the 2 least-expensive ways to line up talent, human-resources.  Using an alumni network as a means of hiring former employees, or those referred by them, costs far less than other recruiting methods.  Outside recruiters, for example, charge up to 1/3rd of a new hire’s 1st-year cash compensation.

Hiring ex-employees or referrals is 50% to 60% cheaper than the average for new hires.  Alumni strategies also produces higher-quality candidates because they are also already vetted.

Gartner estimates that no more than 5% of  businesses with at least 1,000 employees use alumni-management software.

• Rehired employees need far less time to acclimate to the company’s environment and culture and allows them to quickly begin contributing;
• Rehired employees tend to stay with the company longer, since they made a conscious decision to join an organization whose culture they were already familiar with; and
• The retention rate for rehired employees is about 2 times as high as for others.

4. Collaboration:  The mother of invention — The Boston Globe, Ideas section

It’s long been thought that proximity fosters fruitful encounters among researchers.  A recent paper showed just how powerful it can be.  An analysis of a decade of Harvard biomedical research collaborations found that the closer the offices of key research partners, the more influential their joint papers were likely to be.

The proximity study was part of an effort to decipher the recipe for innovation, and what makes a city like Boston excel at it while other cities lag:

• Is it a certain density of universities,
• the volume of federal grants or venture capital, or
• a lifestyle that attracts creative people?

Boston researchers, for example, do not author the most papers in scientific journals. But Boston outranks other cities for research published in the most respected journals.

Boston produces an outsized share of scientific breakthroughs. Researchers working side by side is a big reason why.  Good thoughts for not only regional proximity, but inter-office proximity.

Share your thoughts on these thoughts…

4 things I’ve seen, read, or thought might seed results:

1. How Genius Works — The Atlantic

Great art or innovation begins with an idea.  Sometimes the idea is vague or even simply a bad idea.  In this brief, The Atlantic looks into 17 of America’s foremost artists to discuss and find out about how genius comes through in their drafts.

Paul Simon, Tim Burton, Bonnie Fisher, Frank Gehry, J Mays, Kate Mulleavy, and others across a wide berth of inventive disciplines may very well inspire us to realize genius has not short cut.

2. Innovation by HR — Human Resource Executive Online

HR executives may not even be leveraging their HR expertise to really help drive innovation and growth.

Though many in HR say they play a significant role to foster innovation at their organizations, since a large majority also report that performance evaluation for HR leaders wasn’t based, in any way, on the ability to foster innovation how can they tell?

3. The science of science — The Economist

Albert Einstein’s original paper on special relativity had no references at all; even though it drew heavily on previous work.

Despite academia’s pretensions to objectivity, academia is as subject to political considerations as any organizational effort.  Many authors cite colleagues, bosses, and mentors out of courtesy rather than that such citations are strictly required.  Rarely, an author may under cite.

What is the Blei-Gerrish method and how have they found a method that may take science closer to a true ebb and flow of scientific ideas and offer a more scientific approach to science?  Well, a machine may be the answer.  Read on skeptic, read on…

4. Getting Creative to Boost Retention — Talent Management Magazine

To reward and keep top talent means to create internal opportunities for employees to take on high-profile projects that gain them the spotlight.

Creating opportunities for newer or younger employees to work on projects with senior talent facilitates knowledge transfer and boosts retention rates by making younger generations feel invested in the company.

Boy, not only hiring, but creating a boost for your firm’s retention strategies, it is a bottom line opportunity.

Share your thoughts on these thoughts…

3 of things I’ve seen, read, or thought might seed results:

1. Too Big to Succeed? — CFO Magazine

Citigroup, Bank of America, and JPMorgan Chase are the clear winners of the consolidation game.  Each of these, individually, have more than 2 times the assets of 4th-place Wachovia.

These 3 banks have bet cross-selling and their scale give them advantage.  However, some critics wonder if the whole is smaller than the sum of its parts and that scale may not count much in financial services.

2. More Thank Half the Moms Not Satisfied with Their Career — Talent Management Magazine

Many working moms are not satisfied with their career.  Working moms also feel their work is more stressful than being a stay-at-home mom.  What might be the cause or the reason for this:  lack of work and life balance.  In a review of some surveys:

• 70% of respondents don’t have a flexible arrangement worked out with their boss;
• Almost 4 of 10  say motherhood takes a back seat to work responsibilities; and
• Besides pay and advancement, flexible work schedules and flexible arrangements are 2 factors in achieving career happiness for working mothers.

What has positively affect working mother’s workplace perspective:

• 46% of working moms say they are more sympathetic to others’ needs/flexibility,
• 42% try not to sweat the small stuff, and
• 33% have become more patient

3. Girl Scouts censor Facebook criticism of palm oil in cookies — Grist.org

Clearly a cautionary tale in how not to manage an organization’s Facebook page or online community.

From erasing user-generated comments to relying on a public relations department to manage your presence.  Presented here is a view into how palm oil may create a slippery slope of marketing and public relations that could undo The Girl Scouts’ $700 million annual cookie sales.

Share your thoughts on these thoughts…

5 things I’ve seen, read, or thought might seed results:

1. Scrap Learning and Manager Engagement — CLO Magazine

Most organizations overlook an important aspect of development that often makes it many times more effective — manager engagement.

Training tends to lose its power with time.  Employees forget what they’ve learned or let their newly acquired skills go unused. Robert O. Brinkerhoff, Ed.D., professor emeritus at Western Michigan University, said that after training, learners typically fall into one of 3 categories:

1. They do not try to apply training.
2. They attempt to apply it but realize no worthwhile results.
3. They apply training and get some positive results.

Managers have many of the same behavior-shaping tools to support and reinforce learning as parents and teachers do coaching and developing children.

2 actions are critical to develop an application-feedback learning loop, at best only a quarter of managers perform these tasks.

2. Foresight as a Leadership Attribute — Talent Management Magazine

Vision is a coveted leadership qualities.  Vision is a much sought-after trait that allows leaders to guide their organizations and creates meaning and purpose. When vision is applied strategically it translates into practical plans and meaningful work.

Attaining this critical skill often comes through the use of foresight. Foresight does not mean guessing about the future. Foresight is the identification of relevant opportunities emerging and strategizing how to make the most of them today.

3. Distractions to making learning stick — Make Training Stick blog, Barbara Cairns, PhD

What if we all came to agree that multi-tasking is not an ability, but a liability?  That we really can only do one task at a time, ever?

A trainer is in poor position trying to engage and make training stick.  Ms. Cairns, and her consistently good blog, offer some thoughts for managers, for trainers, and for vehicles on how and what to do to help make training stick.

4. Vertical Deals Move Forward — CFO Magazine

Federal agencies are paying more attention to vertical transactions over anticompetitive concerns, it seems.  In particular, antitrust enforcers see red flags when a merger between 2 companies along the same supply chain could possibly affect a competitor’s ability to access a key product.

One way to track this increase is through so-called second requests, when the DoJ and Federal Trade Commission ask for more information about a transaction.  Between October 2009 and September 2010 agencies issued 46 second requests or 4.1% of the 1,166 transactions submitted to the agencies during their 2010 fiscal year (all types of M&A deals, not just vertical ones). Between 2004 and 2008, by contrast, less than 3% of transactions received second requests.

So, what do smart companies do to avoid the 4- to 8-month delays to defend their deals?  One idea:  companies look up and down their supply chain for possible acquisitions as a risk-management tool, not just as a way to expand the business.

5. Charlie Rose talks to Lee Kwan Yew — Bloomberg Businessweek

One of the most important figures of the 4 Asian Tiger economies give his thoughts on China, America and the immediate threat assessments.

When the brilliant Charlie Rose interviews a benevolent dictator it is always an insightful read.

Share your thoughts on these thoughts…

Project management is a profession.

Project management is a discipline.

Project management is a skill.

Project management is a function.

Project management is a knowledge

Project management is useless without scale and project management helps no one if it is not scaleable.

Compare an accounting function of a Fortune 50 company to an accounting function in a 60-person organization.  The goals are the same, the business function is critical, but the processes of a Fortune 50 accounting department would cripple a start-up.  The start-up employee would topple over trying to maintain form and procedure of a Fortune 50 department and never get time to build the company.

Scale is important to the tools, the techniques, and the discipline needed.

The best project management and the mature project management organization realize that yes, a project management plan rolls up and includes the following:

• quality management plans,
• schedule management plans,
• scope management plans,
• risk management plans,
• communication management plans,
• cost management plans,
• change management,
• staffing management plans,
• work breakdown structures, and
• staffing management plans

But to demand the the process and procedures of project plan sign off and closing have all of these as well as the multitude of tools to design these, is a matter of scale as well as a matter of sanity.

Accounting and project management both demand discipline, but both enable business operations, they do not cripple business operations.  The least amount possible to fulfill operational success, without gumming up the works.

The ability to translate project management rigor to the proper level of control within an operating environment is particularly acute for organizations that manage subsidiaries or manage divisions of various size.

Whether an Enterprise Project Management Office, a Project Management Office, or a project manager, know your audience.  Sure, push for standards, but realize the business of business is business, not unwieldy process chart protocols and templates.

Most, if not all, chafe at process and rigor and discipline.  Push-back on accountability may forever be with us, but let’s try to manage risk with project management, not through intimidation.

No one likes the accounting office, if we are not careful, no one will like the project management office let alone the project manager who arrives to join a team.

Let’s work smarter, not harder – together.

No doubt I got some things wrong, or left out some important ideas.   Please let me know what you think and suggestions you have for me to  add value.

4 things I’ve seen, read, or thought might seed results:

1. Managing the Motivation Equation — Chief Learning Officer

Leveraging motivation theory can reduce intention-action gap.  What is the intention-action gap?  Outside work the intention-action gap can be saying you will call you mother every Sunday, but rarely do.  At work the intention-action gap can be saying you intend to show up at work on time, but the majority of times you do not.

Many organizations struggle to make learning stick, with the finances directed toward learning how can you resolve learners who find ways to do anything but learn?  Or to prevent learners from falling back into old habits because they lack motivation?

Whenever an organization identifies a learning need, one of the first questions should be, “How will we motivate our learners to change?” The answers to this question must shape the entire training solution — its design, development, rollout and post-training support strategy.

This article examines 2 distinct questions within the sphere of learning:

1. How can we currently define motivation?
2. How can we manage motivation within the learning function?

Individually, when we understand motivation we can consciously choose to close the intention-action gap.  Organizationally, planning a motivation strategy before training allows trainers to detect motivation gap within individuals or a group.

2. Accounting for the Bailout — Bloomberg Businessweek

If you had a back of the envelope to sketch out the Federal Reserve and Treasury’s potential return on their $2.8 trillion on the line here’s what it would look like.

If you ignore the coffee stain, you see a tidy profit of $24 billion.

3. How to Avoid ‘We Need to Talk’ — Talent Management Magazine

Most supervisors will need to conduct a disciplinary interview with an employee at some point in their careers.  The opportunity for the company to benefit when an employee is corrected improves retention and productivity.

However, no matter how constructively it’s intended, most people don’t like criticism, Employees’ biggest fear is job security.  Supervisors biggest fear is an employee who will become defensive or hostile.

Though never easy to turn these into positive and constructive discussions:

• Set the stage
• Get to the point
• Describe the problem
• Make the course correction

This is the time for specifics, not generalities. Provide examples with dates, times, and details so the employee has a clear picture of how their behavior is falling short.

Listening to the employee’s response is probably the most challenging part of the discussion, but it’s the most critical.

4. AOL Tries for Something New:  Silicon Valley Cred — Bloomberg Businessweek

AOL was a hot stock in the 1990s, only to become half of AOL Time Warner in one of the worst mergers in U.S. history.  The company spun off in 2009 and has a market cap of $2 billion; that’s a fraction of its value on the day the Time Warner merger was announced.

AOL signed a 7-year lease on a 225,000-square-foot building last August and opened the space to a wide assortment of startups.  The new space is part corporate office, part startup incubator, and part college community center.  The hope is some of that entrepreneurial energy rubs off on their 28-year-old company.

If you are an Internet company that conjures images of dial-up modems and out-of-date email addresses can offering space and co-locating startups within proximity of AOL engineers help?  There’s evidence that an exchange of ideas is starting to occur.

Share your thoughts on these thoughts…

3 things I’ve seen, read, or thought might seed results:

1. Learning Fosters Psychologically Healthy Workplaces — CLO Magazine

The American Psychological Association (APA) recently awarded 8 companies with their Psychologically Healthy Workplace Awards (PHWA).

The companies were rated on five different criteria: employee involvement, health and safety, work-life balance, employee recognition, and employee growth and development.

• 74% of working PHWA Americans reported they have participated in workplace training.
• 74% of PHWA respondents said they were satisfied with their employer’s training and development opportunities, while just 44% of overall survey respondents were satisfied
• 32% of overall respondents said they were seeking employment elsewhere, compared to only 6% of employees at PHWA recipients.

Organizations that offer multiple training opportunities help to keep people engaged in their jobs by giving them chances to learn new skills, new information, and new ways to do things.  This both keeps them relevant and keeps them engaged.

The keys include:

• Good assessment
• Tailoring
• Strategic implementation
• Evaluation

2. Just Enough Process — Talent Management Magazine

EBay has grown to a global business, earning $9 billion in revenue in 2010, with more than 16,000 employees and offices in 35 countries. Currently there are 94.5 million active users on eBay and another 94.4 million active registered accounts on PayPal.

In this interview EBay’s Lou Sanchez, vice president of global talent acquisition, management and development at eBay, tells Talent Management what it takes to manage such a fast-growing company and how their talent management strategy provides just the right amount of process to control but not suffocate employees.

3. The 2010 Innovation 1000: How the Top Innovators Keep Winning .pdf download — Booz & Co.

Booz & Company’s annual Global Innovation 1000 study has shown the success of these companies is not a matter of how much these companies spend on research and development, but how they spend research and development money.

Every company among the Innovation 1000 follows 1 of 3 innovation strategies:

1. need seeker,
2. market reader, or
3. technology driver

While no 1 or other of the strategies offers superior results, companies within each strategic category perform at very different levels. Also, it turns out that the top 25% in each category focus on a narrow and consistent set of capabilities across the R&D value chain quite different from those on which their weaker rivals depend.

Share your thoughts on these thoughts…

A reminder:  it’s not the amount of beans, it’s the environment that dictates how each bean can grow…

Change is fun for some:  the energy of the unknown, the passion instilled in people looking forward to a new adventure.  Some embrace the unknown as an opportunity to both learn, grow, and stretch their current perspectives.

Change is pain for some:  the feigned excitement for heading into unknown, the new roles and responsibilities to learn.  And having lived through so many failures that all began with the same patterned enthusiasm many can’t be bothered and opt-out.

Which side of the fence are you on?  Which side of the fence is your team on?  Which side of the fence is your organization on?

The Communication Mission

Regardless of the fun for some, there is a distinctly important group of people who need a bit more assurance that this time things are different, that this time you and your executives are not seemingly shooting from the hip, that this time you and the organization will see it through, that this time what you say will be delivered as expected.

Change requires a whole lot of communicating.  A main cause of change resistance is the resistance to enter, with confidence, into the unknown.  Think about this in your personal life, would you plunge into an effort where you had no idea what the end-game meant or looked like?  Now multiply that feeling horizontally and vertically through your organization.

If you believe you know what the end state is, are you confident your organization is equally confident?

To address this sense of aimless drift comes when you build your mission, vision, and values into your communication DNA.  When communicating change, if you are not completely and absolutely aligning change to your organization mission, your vision, and your core values, you’ve more than likely lost the war, let alone all the battles.

Mapping what you say you will do to these quality criteria for all the organization does takes your mission, vision, and core values from the 2 dimensional to the 3 dimensional.

As much as a strategic plan is improved through the value chain of goals, objectives, and actions.  Your communication, let alone your change portfolio, should undergo a distinct effort to align to the value of your mission, vision, and core values.

Mission Impossible

A lot of missions plainly stink.  Too many organization missions are built by people who believe their position alone shows them to be far smarter than their organization.  These self-appointed organization Mensa members take it upon themselves to design their version of the mission as the only logical option.

These stewards of the future then bring back their mission, vision, and core values and impart it to the organization … magnets anyone?  This misses more than just a few principles needed for successful change and adoption.  Just as you can crowdsource your organization strategy, you can crowdsource your mission, vision, and values, if you really care about organization alignment.

A further benefit of mapping communication to mission, vision, and values is the ability to let you and your organization realize if your mission, vision, and values are worth the ink used to print them.

There is no quicker way to decouple your organization than the revelation of a an organization with a wildly loose herd of change projects that are disjointed, malnourished, or walking dead.

• Couple projects to your mission, vision, and values.
• Link them.
• Cull them.
• Align them.
• Tether them.
• Reposition them or retire them.

Make the case for change alignment through communication’s alignment to mission, vision, and values along the project life cycle.

The Vision for Value

The effort to communicate change aligned to mission will seem hokey at first.  It will seem forced.  Just as starting any exercise always starts with a bit of stretching and a bit of pain, this effort needs a learning curve before it proves its value.  But there is no doubt through a commitment to aligning these the value is realized.  Your mission will move from magnets to common business dialogue.

Communicating is a critical component to differentiate from getting it done to getting it accomplished.

A distinct benefit is the chance to involve more of your organization in developing the mission, vision, and values together.  An organization of people who opt-in is certainly a preferred workplace to one of people who opt-out.

Poor communication is a symptom, not the disease.

The goal of communication, change, and your mission is transparency.

No doubt I got some things wrong, or left out some important ideas. Please let me know what you think and suggestions you have for me to add value.

4 things I’ve seen, read, or thought might seed results:

1. Still too big to fail — CFO Magazine

Too-big-to-fail is defined as the government using taxpayer dollars to rescue “systemically important” banks.

Few debate that the expectation of bailouts provides banks little incentive to guard against excessive risk.  Today the solutions being debated may elevate overall industry risk instead of subduing it.

“If government bailouts were absolutely prohibited, I would be very concerned that [the problems 3 years ago] would play out again and again,” says Ron Box, finance chief at Joe Money Machinery, a construction-equipment dealer.

Many CFOs think irresponsible management should suffer the consequences, but worry that, withough a government safety net, middle-market companies would be more vulnerable.  The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act does limit how far regulators will go in propping up a large bank.

This article highlights the role banking regulators have holding banks accountable without constricting access to credit that so many companies need.

2. Integrating Employees Into The Organization’s Culture — The Lift blog

Can your new hires tell you the vision and values of your company?  Or the strategy and key business priorities?  What if part of the on-boarding of new hires was to map their life mission and core values, yes their personal values, to those of the company’s.

Here is a proposal for a truly integrated on-boarding within 2 meetings.  A rich dialogue to set your most important assets up for success through understanding, commitment, and ownership.

Come to think of it, imagine your current employees sitting down to tell you how their strengths map to the vision and values of the company…

3. Coaching in Context — Talent Management Magazine

While the economic crisis of the past 18 to 24 months has provided a temporary truce in the war for talent, high unemployment, and a belief that employees may just be thankful to have jobs, the post-crisis realities of managing talent are already beginning to shift.

As companies return to profitability, top performers will have external mobility options to meet career goals.  What does coaching provide your organization?

4. Patent reform: The spluttering invention machine — The Economist

Innovation is the key to growth.  Through patents innovation is further spurred.

Patents assure inventors reap rewards of their effort and publicize their discoveries – both important motivators for continued innovation.

Americans make 4 times as many patent applications per head as Europeans.  Are excessive patents having the opposite effect?

March 8th the Senate passed the biggest overhaul to patent law since the 1950s.  The bill would give the patent office the right to set its own fees and keep all proceeds; with an expectation to hire enough examiners to cut its backlog.   This law would also align America with international practice by granting patents to the first person to file them.

Big technology companies complain of “patent trolls”:  companies that buy lots of obscure patents and then bombard alleged infringers with lawsuits.

The “trolls” argue that by making patents valued they are helping to create a market in invention that will encourage inventors.

Some think the new law will make it too easy and potentially lucrative to bring lawsuits for patentent infringement.  Others wanted it easier to challenge patents.

Share your thoughts on these thoughts…

Proposals for organization intervention, from business process reengineering to Lean initiatives, typically focus on problems to be solved.  Many of these organization interventions for change, however, soon look like organization inquisition.  As once a problem is identified, the problem is the focus to diagnos soon both the organization and the people involved pointed out as the problem.

2 issues with this appraoch:

1. An organization’s present is built upon their collected history.  This history is an essential core of their organization’s being.  The past set the present capabilities.  Rattling an organization’s history is rattling the foundation stones of an organization’s culture.
2. Highlighting what people do wrong attracts attention to … what people do wrong.  No one likes to be audited around and in front of others for working within, being part of, or managing broken processes.

Both an organization’s history and people are subjected to uncertainty about the way things need to be done in the future.  Many times, throughout an organization’s life, in absence of process process is created as a work-around.  Soon these processes are adopted as “the way things are done”.

Just as simply, an organization’s process to deliver 100 widgets may not take kindly the stress to deliver 100,000 widgets.  But the stress of delivering 100,000 widgets may then become “the way things are done” because the entire organization has become too busy making 100,000 widgets.

A typical diagnostic approach to problem-solving in an organization intervention is a deficit-based approach.  The issue framed as a problem to be solved and the kickoff centered on what is not working.

This inquisition presents the people in the organization as a series of problems and translates to each as an attack on members of the organization and on the organization itself. This deficit-based view causes an entrenchment environment and natural resistance to change.  No matter what the future promise, when highlighted in this light change, itself, has a problem shelf-life.

Conversely, Appreciative Inquiry (AI) is a process that engages people to build the kinds of organizations that make them proud to work in. AI is not another organization development intervention; but, instead an approach to use to undertake organization development interventions such as:

• strategic planning,
• business process redesign,
• team-building,
• organization restructuring,
• individual and project evaluation,
• coaching, and

Enterprise-wide interventions that AI would affect organization change include:

• mission development,
• culture change,
• new market development,
• diversity and inclusion initiatives,
• continuity of operations, and
• strategic transactions

AI as a perspective for an evaluation process basic belief that an  intervention into any human system is fateful and that systems will move in the direction of the first questions that are asked.

AI also recognizes that an organization is a network of stakeholders from the highest executive down through every employee, and that outside stakeholders are also involved in the organization’s health.

AI looks to the very moments of excellence that people take pride in as the very areas that provide and sustain motivation. Those moments become the roadmap to a positive and generative future.

The words each of us use create a vision in the other’s mind.  Words create the future, as they are used to describe the present.  Therefore, verbalizing and building upon positive experiences from the past engages the organization to develop a shared-vision of a positive future.

Through articulation, you leverage people’s desire to share their hopes and visions.  These then become the organization’s new foundation stones for the place where they want to work and how they want to actively participant within this.

Moving from a frame of what is not working to a frame of what is working is an opportunity to build a space where people are far more likely to opt-in.  The intervention, itself, is a call for change, so why bother to start an intervention any other way?

4 things I’ve seen, read, or thought might seed results:

1. Screening for Resiliency Adaptability and Resilience — Talent Management Magazine

Change is constant, whether we, as individuals, our team, or our organization like this reality, change demands resilience from people, teams, and organization.

Change also causes constant challenges to some more than others. Those who adapt thrive, those who can not jeopardize everyone around them and your organization’s capability to remain relevant.

In this climate of constant change is an adaptable employee now more important to assess than a technical or functional capability?  This article takes a look at how organizations in the public- and private sector go about assessing for adaptability and resilience.

2. The bad mother complex — The Boston Globe Ideas Section

Quality of life means different things to different people.  The balance of personal life to professional life is even more deeply impacted when families begin to have children.

The professional who remains in the work force after having children balances a constant sense of guilt between the maternal instinct and the professional ladder that has both been scaled and that continues to entice.

This Boston Globe correspondent looks at a recent study of 1,800 American workers, both men and women, and her own experiences to draw insight into the study’s findings of increased feelings of guilt.  One key insight:  guilt was only felt among women.

3. Finance Staffs Getting More Engaged — CFO Magazine

Some interesting results from a recent 100,000-person survey by the Corporate Leadership Council:

• Finance now has higher intent-to-stay scores than most functional areas do, however the improvement in discretionary effort still leaves finance employees far behind those in human resources, information technology, manufacturing, and operations/procurement/supply chain;
• U.S. finance and accounting staffers that intend to stay with their current employer spiked in the second half of 2010, as did the number of those willing to go above and beyond the call of duty;
• the highest level of engagement is in the professional-services segment; and
• the lowest is in technology and telecommunications, with technology chronically at the bottom of the list

From an organization behavior perspective it seems finance/accounting areas are rarely aligned to organization engagement.  Your thoughts if you were in charge of corporate culture?a

4. In Mentees’ Own Words — Diversity Executive Magazine

Cultures, technical fields, and personalities all conspire to affect communication styles.  What might come across as rude to one, might be a preferred communication to another.

As we know from Emotional Intelligence, your communication is successful when it garners the results you intended and in our work world communication and performance are vibrantly cross-linked.  This article provides a great view of mentoring from the mentees’ words.

Share your thoughts on these thoughts…

A successful message retains the oomph of intent.  For this to happen communication must travel an obstacle course to reach each person.  Some of the bulwarks against communication’s smooth path to understanding include:  values, bias, mood, culture, agenda, and emotion.  These force communication through filters that affect both the intent and the impact of the message communicated.

Each layer adds a filter to sift, interpret, and frame communication that leans more towards confusion than clarity, and confusion is the biggest enemy to change.  Communication has a rough road to travel to successfully reach your target.

One filter we all may have experience with is the rational/emotional dialogue where we find at the individual level the rational dialogue is many times trumped by the emotional dialogue:

• Waking up at 5 am to go to the gym is the rational payoff to get in shape
• Sleeping in late is the emotional payoff to stay within a comfortable bed

The battle between the rational and the emotional is constant.  This rational/emotional filter where one consistently overrides the other is how habits form.  If we want change to succeed we need new habits to form.

To understand the potential filters involved an organization change effort needs to understand 2 items:

1. The conversations by which people interact and
2. The structures that shape these interactions

These conversations happen at their view, not your view, their frame, not your frame.   These provide a view of the organization’s filter, or culture.  Rule 1 in communication: know your audience.

The more the communicator ignores how filters affect communication, the more the communicator discredits the importance of people.

So, as you view the world through your filter, keep in mind the world views your message through their filter.

No doubt I got some things wrong, or left out some important ideas.  Please let me know what you think and suggestions you have for me to add value.

4 things I’ve seen, read, or thought might seed results:

1. Implementing Planned Change: An Empirical Comparison of Theoretical Perspectives — American Journal of Business

Planned change has been viewed from a variety of conceptual perspectives, but few models of planned change we’ve all been part of have been studied using empirical research designs.  With a study we may find the relative important of various change process factors in successful change.

This study looks at:

• Change variables;
• Variable selection; and
• Variable justification like:  action planning, skill development incentives, monitoring and control

This is a rich, dense article well worth the time investment to read.  Understanding planned change and its components for success is a critical skill for managers involved in the implementation of short and long-term strategic objectives; that speaks to most of the managers I know.

2. The U-bend of life — The Economist

Conventional economics uses money as a proxy for happiness, though economists do not use the term happiness, but the term utility.  Other economists are unconvinced that money has a direct relationship and are looking at happiness itself.  This has a deeper bearing on views of compensation and salary.  As some countries use Gross National Happiness over Gross Domestic Product to shape policy, this shift might do for some interesting conversations in executive board rooms.  Further still, does age have a bigger causal effect on happiness than money?

3. The Tragic Fall of Reserved Parking — Bloomberg Businessweek

The corner office comes with increased stature, pride, and organizational position.  But what of the reserved parking spot with one’s name to announce to the organization whom parks at the most coveted of spots.  What is the emotional, rational, and financial case to remove the hallowed reserve parking lot and why are companies looking at this as an economic or strategic issue.  Change management is never easy, take a peek at organizations this article highlights who have tried to change parking policies.

4. How to Foster Innovation Through Diverse Workgroups — Inc. Magazine

A diverse workforce with a strong culture of individualism has profound effects on internal employee relations, but it can also assist in obtaining new clients.  Large companies, like Coke, have affinity groups made up of cross-organizational teams with members from a similar demographic or social background. Setting up these groups may benefits  your organization for a variety of reasons:

1. 1. Teach new employees about organizational culture;
   2. Gives existing employees a way to develop relationships and connect with people across company groups; and
   3. A resource for your organization’s marketing needs through mini focus groups

One of the biggest challenges to diversity is the organization pull for “sameness”.  IBM was a place where their ads in the 1980s touted “Great minds think alike”.  Eventually, IBM changed the ad to read: “Great minds think unalike.” The point is clear enough:  a diversity of knowledge, talents, and experience helps companies grow.

Share your thoughts on these thoughts…

The success, or failure, of organization change may have more to do with the frame of change you and your leadership view your organization culture through than any other challenge to change.  Adopting and sustaining organization change rarely succeeds if you can not frame communication to emotionally and rationally resonate throughout the organization.

For change to hold, you need to capture both the head and the heart of the organization.  The key to both is to clearly understand the frame to view your organization in.  Does 1,2, or 3 describe the frame you view your organization through?

1. An organization is the rational coordination of the activities of a number of people of the achievement of some common explicit purpose or goal, through division of labor and function, and through a hierarchy of authority and responsibility.  Where the design of the organization is effective to the extent that its information processing capacity matches the level of uncertainty facing the organization.  The organization is viewed as a technical organization.
2. An organization is a coalition with ill-defined and inconsistent preferences with the critical question not how well we are doing? but to whom and for whom are we doing it?  Governance, control and political processes are related to issues of structure developed where coalition s must receive inducements from belonging greater than the contributions they are required to make.  Coalition members, then, are continually calculating whether they might fare better if they altered their participation.  In addition to the allocation of resources, policies, and policy commitments are important, and they are the objectives of bargaining as well.  The organization is viewed as a political organization.
3. An organization is held together by people’s beliefs in a set of norms that make up the organization’s culture.  Organizational and individual effectiveness is enhanced when the organization ensures ‘a maximum probability that in all interactions and in all relationships within the organization, each member, in the light of their background, values, desires, and expectations will view the experience as supportive and one which builds and maintains his/her sense of personal worth and importance’.  Organization development (OD) is concerned with a normative orientation to organizations that lead to prescriptions for change.  The organization is viewed as a cultural organization.*

The challenge of viewing your organization through a frame is that an organization will fit squarely within the frame and you miss those cues or areas outside the frame.  The organization will begin to support only the area within view and important nuances are missed.  More importantly, often termed the Pygmalion effect, the behaviors you see begin to support the frame you view.

Organization change communication often frames either/or views:

• The technical frame of organizations as rational and driven towards efficiency and effectiveness;
• The political frame of organizations as a coalitions bargaining among interests that dominate the allocation of resources; and
• The cultural frame of organizations as internalized rules, structures, and systems that perpetuate and reinforce values and norms

The frame compliments the picture.

The reality:  an organization is never 1 frame, but a mix of all 3 frames.  If you only view the picture with 1 frame than critical nuances outside the border are lost.  To kick change off correctly, you need to take the frame off and realize that your organization exhibits all 3 technical, political, and cultural attributes together, in constant flow.

The frame should not detract from the picture.

Organization are less a technical, political, or cultural organization, because organizations are a combination of all 3.  Ignoring any 1 at the cost of the other(s) means your change misses a host of critical variations.  Isn’t change hard enough to accomplish without the potential to talk over the hearts and minds of the people that within your organization?

The frame you choose uniquely affects and accents the picture; where your real focus should lie.  Be prepared to switch frames readily or better yet to get a better view of the big picture hang remove the frame altogether.

No doubt I got some things wrong, or left out some important ideas.  Please let me know what you think and suggestions you have for me to add value.

*Systems Theory for Organization Development; A Social Network Perspective for Organization Development; Noel Tichy

4 things I’ve seen, read, or thought might seed result

1. Talent Management vs Talent Analytics: The Difference is More than Just Semantics — Talent Analytics blog

In the 1990s talent management emerged as a management practice to shift responsibility of employees an exclusive role for human resource departments to managers throughout the organization.

The past 20 years has seen a proliferation of new talent management software to include attrition information, training and development initiatives, competency tracking skills, resume tracking, skills, the list goes on.

What went wrong?

Enter talent analytics, the evolution of talent technology finally tying business strategy to talent. Instead of measuring contextual data around the talent talent analytics goes to the source – measuring the talent directly.

2. Why You Want Your Organization on This List — The DNA of Human Capital blog

A thoughtful take on why it is important to land on Fortune magazine’s “Best Companies to Work for in America”.  The nature of human capital capabilities on firm performance and stock price is difficult to quantify as a tangible impact on  stock price.

Are the reasons human capital has historically not been considered still excusable?  Is there a correlation between employee satisfaction and stock price?

There is certainly risk assigned to human capital, so there must be a way to assign quantitative human capital risk for stakeholder consideration.

3. Capabilities-Driven Strategy in M&A — Booz & Company podcast
There seems to be a popular concept of mergers driven by the idea of becoming too big to fail. 2 Booz & Company partners discuss M&A from a capabilities-driven strategy.

4. Online herd instinct:  Virtual lemmings — The Economist

We appear to be wired to find fads, no matter their value, psychologically irresistible.  Why?  Humans appreciate company.  Humans also appreciate company who appreciate us.  A way to preserve mutual appreciation is to emulate others and this gives rise to trends or caustically:  the herd mentality.  A nexus with Facebook, lemmings, and acting contrary to our self-interest may spell a true decline of the advertiser’s golden age.

Share your thoughts on these thoughts…

The essence of strategic change is not a new direction, but a series of directives on what to start, what to stop, and what to continue. After all, a strategic plan really acts as a roadmap or charter for change.  A plan not carried out is a project failure.

The difficulty of strategy implementation is a recognized challenge and a Booz Allen* study concluded that 73% of managers believe that the difficulty of implementing strategy far surpasses that of formulating it.

Business strategies that fail are really project management failures and the essence of managing a successful project is as much about managing behavioral change as operational change.  Planned change refers to a premeditated, agent-facilitated intervention intended to modify organizational functioning for a more favorable outcome (Lippit, Watson, and Westley 1958).

While an executive view of strategy may distill itself through changes to the operating model and cost structure only lasting change is achieved with a cultural, change initiative.  Research suggests that between 66% and 75% of organizational culture change efforts fail**.

One of the most challenging and unresolved problems in this area is the ‘apparently high’ percentage of organisational strategies that fail, with some authors estimating a rate of failure between 50 and 90 percent (e.g. Kiechel, 1982, 1984; Gray, 1986; Nutt, 1999; Kaplan and Norton, 2001; Sirkin et al., 2005). By failure we mean either a new strategy was formulated but not implemented, or it was implemented but with poor results.

I began the look at project management in a prior post on mergers and acquisition failures are project management failures.  I don’t think I need to lay a scientific study for business strategy failure as I this blog would devolve.  Your organization experience in business strategy failure provides the most sound case for concern.

For executive strategy to be adopted and to gain organization hold, a series of directives, directly rely on people starting new behaviors, stopping old habits, and continuing the best of what they have done.  An organization can succeed with strategic change only with success at cultural change.

Business strategy needs so much more understanding than the unfreezing-movement-refreezing framework that is conceptually sound, but empirically challenging.  An organization will not succeed implementing a new strategy without success implementing culture change and a culture change relies on understanding the scope, constraints, and risk with organization culture before launching the effort.

3 features of implementation succes, as defined by Miller (1997) include:

1. completion of everything intended to be implemented within the expected time period;
2. achievement of the performance intended; and
3. acceptability of the method of implementation and outcomes within the organization

Like any human undertaking, projects are performed and delivered under certain constraints.  Consistent with project management’s project constraints for success implementation success can overlay nicely:

1. time (completion)
2. budget (achievement)
3. scope (acceptability)

The issue for business strategy failure may be less about strategy and more about the people who develop the strategy.  Traditionally, only top executives make and develop strategy.  However, only those most in touch with organization culture understand the endeavor ahead to take goals, objectives, and actions and change behaviors, minds, and motivations.

Increase the likelihood to successfully implement a business strategy when you:

• Identify and map your organization culture’s competing values;
• Identify what needs to be retained and what needs to change for strategy to succeed
• Crowdsource your strategy
• Use a strategic planning value chain to cascade executive, operational, and technical change
• Identify project scope and project risk

Strategy affects how things will get done.  Culture, is quite simply, how things are done.  After all, it’s not business it’s personnel.

No doubt I got some things wrong, or left out some important ideas. Please let me know what you think and suggestions you have for me to add value.

* referenced in:   Excellence is Born out of Effective Strategic Deployment: The Impact of Hoshin Planning [.pdf]

**Alexander, 1985; Wernham, 1985; Ansoff and McDonnell, 1990

5 things I’ve seen, read, or thought might seed results:

1. Apple, With or Without Steve Jobs — Bloomberg Businessweek

Perhaps there is a coincidence last week’s Fistful of Beans presented an article to divine Google’s possible transformation through their leadership queue, but it looks like Apple is heading into their own multiple-choice risk scenario.  Now that Steve Jobs has taken a second medical leave from Apple, what are Apple’s near- and long-term challenges to sustained growth and to the future of producing game-changing consumer products.

This is a great look into who is in line for leadership and what each might do to impact Apple customers, shareholders, and the 50,000 Apple employees.  Both Apple and Google at a crossroad, talk about succession planning.  Which leads nicely into 2.

2. Taking Talent Inventory — Talent Management Magazine

Losing a key contributor occurs frequently in organizations and a basic challenge many companies have with succession planning. Succession planning efforts focused too narrowly at the top fail to address talent needs for other employees.  But emerging trends — most notably retiring baby boomers being replaced with a younger, less experienced generation that is also smaller in number — require more complete succession planning strategies and processes throughout the organization.

Also, some companies will face a post-recession hiring rebound. Startlingly, a 2009 Academy of Management Journal article, “After a round of ‘involuntary’ layoffs, ‘voluntary’ attrition spikes by as much as 31 percent, and precisely the wrong people — those who have the strongest track records and brightest employment prospects — are most likely to leave.”

3. The Power of Positive Deviance — Diversity Executive Magazine

Taking a practice from one company and making it work in another isn’t easy, cheap or guaranteed to succeed.  Consultants and professionals who import best practices may routinely ignore the importance of the implicit and explicit organizational context that made these practices work in their native environments.

Positive deviance is based on the simple principle that within any group of people with similar resources and constraints facing a challenge, a small percentage of individuals manifest exceptional personal behaviors that enable them to achieve better results. The goal of a positive deviance project is to find these pockets of excellence and make those behaviors available to the entire group, resulting in an overall rise in performance.

4. Scenario Planning the Future — Chief Learning Officer Magazine

Scenario planning is a great way to develop a whole range of strategic possibilities.  Grounded in reality, but stretched past the comfort zone of many, scenarios allow people a range of options not thought previously and a range of risk alternatives with very credible impact.

Scenario planning offers 3 primary learning opportunities. Firstly, naming uncertainty provides a way to confront issues that are unconscious or uncomfortable. Secondly, scenarios provide new context to understand internal and external business dynamics. And finally, scenarios offer a unique way to inform action and a framework for feedback once action has been taken.

5. Why Our Best Officers Are Leaving — The Atlantic

The American military produce the most innovative and entrepreneurial leaders in the country, then wastes that talent in a risk-averse bureaucracy.  That is a rather striking paradox.

The men and women who volunteer as military officers learn to remain calm and think quickly under intense pressure. They are comfortable making command decisions, working in teams, and motivating people. Skills that easily translate to the private sector, particularly business: male military officers are almost 3 times as likely as other American men to become CEOs, according to a 2006 Korn/Ferry International study.

Share your thoughts on these thoughts…

Though coming for a while, there was no sign of bitterness from the advertiser when his consumer finally walks out and abandons the clearly, lopsided relationship:

Which side of the table is your seat?

In a prior blog Marketing 2.0 — You Better Free Your Mind Instead I recapped: Lose control, provide content, make it easy to share content, provide tools for people to congregate, and help them celebrate their passion.

Marketing 1.0: the distribution is the value; command and control.

Marketing 2.0: the content is the value; contribute and collaborate.

A 1-way conversation is not communication.

5 things I’ve seen, read, or thought might seed results:

1. Social-Media Frenzy — CFO

When CFOs talk social media results that matter for top line growth, you know the message is clear.  This looks at some of the tangible results from big companies that CFOs can really wrap their spreadsheets around.

2. Larry Page’s Google 3.0 — Bloomberg Businessweek

The cover story about Google’s rapid growth, rapid acquisition, stiff competition, public failures, the flight of talent, vertical integration.  Just a few challenges to the great Internet-age company.  An in-depth look at the strategic challenges, the strategic dialogues, the executive changes, and the direction Google needs to take their herd of talented, mavericks on.

A look at the graph to the right gives a simple view of the topography.

3. Running Learning Like a Business — Chief Learning Officer Magazine

Corporate learning is a $200 billion dollar business.  To make learning a strategic, valued business partner and maximize the return on learning investment, what if you ran learning like a $200 billion a year business?  Do you rank your learning programs from level 0 through level 6?  Here are 6 steps to run learning like a business that supports business, to include a deeper look at levels 0 through 6 learning and their impact.

4. What We Know About Murdoch’s iPad-Only Newspaper, The Daily — The Atlantic

Rupert Murdoch is infatuated with Apple’s tablet device and reportedly invested between $20 million and $30 million of his own fortune into his new project, The Daily.  About 100 journalists, both up-and-coming and established voices, have been poached from various national news organizations.  What does Murdoch’s News Corps have in mind that makes it different from all the other magazine or newspaper iPad apps?

5. The AI Revolution Is On — Wired Magazine

Today’s artificial intelligence (AI) bears little resemblance to its initial conception.  Today’s AI doesn’t try to re-create the brain. Instead, it uses machine learning, massive data sets, sophisticated sensors, and clever algorithms to master discrete tasks. Examples can be found everywhere: The Google global machine uses AI to interpret cryptic human queries. Credit card companies use it to track fraud. Netflix uses it to recommend movies to subscribers. And the financial system uses it to handle billions of trades.

Share your thoughts on these thoughts…

Crowdsourcing relies on people to participate in a meaningful process as potential partners.  In crowdsourcing people who were formally known as the customer now become the collaborator.  The power of collective collaboration can not only drive product innovation, but has been leveraged for decades to build organization strategy.

Where most organization strategy process finds more analogy to Moses’ descent from the mountain, crowdsourcing, itself, is an open call; and an open call to, an often, undefined group.

Crowdsourcing for a solution is the antithesis of the bureaucratic and often autocratic work performed by chosen few, behind closed doors, and then unleashed onto the masses.   What was once kept closely guarded is now outsourced to a group of  people.

Crowdsourcing has a strong sociological theme and shares this vital link with a vibrant change approach known as Appreciative Inquiry (AI).  AI taps into the impact of collaborative discovery, the wisdom of each as well as the collective wisdom of the crowdsourced insights.

An AI process is where people participate and co-create a future they wish to be part of.  Where people formerly known as an audience of employees or stakeholders now become the collaborators and designers who are approached as partners in modeling and forming organization strategy.

An original presentation of crowdsourcing, found in a 2006 Wired article, highlights the power of tapping into the crowd:

• “The strength of a network … is exactly the diversity of intellectual background”.
• “…the odds of a solver’s success increased in fields in which they had no formal expertise”
• Central tenet of crowdsourcing is network theory,
• sociologist Mark Granovetter describes as “the strength of weak ties.”

Appreciative Inquiry (AI) is usually thought of as a collaborative change approach for organization and community strategy and change.  The AI model relies not on changing people, but, by using a behavioral approach to invite people to engage [that's crowdsourcing] and to build organizations and communities that they, themselves, want to work and live in.

As sociology is the study of the development, structure, and functioning of human society, both AI and crowdsourcing tap into the sociological power of people potentially unfamiliar with each other or with the situation.

Crowdsourcing your organization strategy using AI principles moves the entire change management conversations from “buy in” to “all in”.  There is no stronger way to create organization alignment and commitment than to invite people into a conversation.

Typically, AI is leveraged as an organization development or change process that involves collaborative discovery towards an organization’s peak effectiveness.  More importantly, AI then invites people to contribute new knowledge and shared knowledge towards a future-state organization they want to be part of.  AI is often leveraged to maximize crowdsourcing for:

• Knowledge management,
• Organization innovation,
• Joint ventures,
• Post-merger integration,
• Customer service,
• Business process innovation,
• Strategy and development,
• Evaluation,
• Capability development

Where AI looks at organizations and communities, crowdsourcing looks at a catch-all I identify as opportunities.  Opportunities such as:

• product design,
• innovation,
• marketing, and
• focus group discovery

Crowdsourcing has for 4 basic approaches*:

1. Collective intelligence [direct overlap with AI]
2. Creation [direct overlap with AI]
3. Voting
4. Funding

A look at AI principles with a crowdsourcing cultural lens finds distinct common ground to leverage**:

• Encouraging a broad range of stakeholders, within and outside, to create a shared meaning of answers and responses.
• Sociological research to show things tend to flourish when there is a focus on ideals and achievements, peak experiences, and best practices.
• Organizations [opportunities] are manifestations of human imagination.
• If things are not envisioned, they can not, ultimately, exist.
• Being intentional with the data we focus is unusually effective in improving organizations and communities [opportunities].

Most important, and most difficult, for both AI and for crowdsourcing is crafting the question***:

AI is based on the power of positive inquiry.  But how can a simple question nudge a whole company in a productive new direction?  … [t]he learnings that surface through the AI process begin to shift the collective image that people hold of the organization.  In their daily encounters, members start to create compelling new visions of the company’s future together, grounded in their understanding of past successes.

These visions initiate “ripples” in how employees think about the work they do, their relationships, their roles, and so on.  Over time, these ripples turn into waves; the more positive the questions people ask, the more they incorporate the learnings they glean from those questions into daily behaviors and, ultimately, into the organization’s infrastructure.

Is it dangerous to ask people you think may not know anything about what your’re trying to do?

People with experience outside your particular field can actually be the best at solving certain problems.  Karim Lakhani, an assistant professor at Harvard Business School, studied the crowdsourced problem solving of InnoCentive. “The strength of a network like InnoCentive’s is exactly the diversity of intellectual background,” says Lakhani. “We actually found the odds of a solver’s success increased in fields in which they had no formal expertise,”

The power of your crowdsourced need relies on the power of your question and the power of your social cache.  Like a change management approach that first looks at organization change readiness to reinforce the best methods of prior change, as well as what to avoid, you can not expect a solid crowd response without a genuine, transparent effort to engage.

The most efficient networks are those that link to the broadest range of information, knowledge, and experience.  Where once a crowd was reliant on proximity to engage, technology now enables a crowd to form with little geo-proximity limitation.  When not be bound by proximity, knowledge that was once a scarce commodity now becomes a powerful, abundant catalyst.

To me, crowdsourcing is simply a technology-enabled AI approach:  both views, crowdsourcing and AI, are 2 sides of the same coin, both equaled to the coin’s value.

No doubt I got some things wrong, or left out some important ideas. Please let me know what you think and suggestions you have for me to add value.

Resources:

1. Appreciative Inquiry for Collaborative Solutions: 21 Strength-Based Workshops, by Robyn Stratton-Berkessel
2. Appreciative Inquiry: A Positive Revolution in Change by David L. Cooperrider and Diana Whitney
3. The Power of Appreciative Inquiry: A Practical Guide to Positive Change by Diana Whitney, Amanda Trosten-Bloom, and David Cooperrider
4. *Why the Power of the Crowd is Driving the Future of Business, Jeff Howe
5. **The Essentials of Appreciative Inquiry: A Roadmap for Creating Positive Futures, Bernard Mohr , Jane Watkins
6. ***ibid

January 2011 in review.  A roundup of blogs from the previous month:

Motivation management is resource management —

Leaders, managers, and coworkers are all under intense pressure to manage their motivation to, firstly, show up at work and, secondly, deliver to their expectations and, yes, and to their organization’s expectations.  Juggling our own professional motivation as well as the motivation of others to work with and for you remains a hourly and daily challenge.

The bottom line to your organization really is managing motivation as a finite resource.  And to look at motivation as a resource that is easily expendable, easily stored, easily dissipated, and easily wasted.

Fistful of beans 01/05/2011 —

A fistful of thoughts from a CFO managing 10% unemployment, hiring people with nontraditional backgrounds, the CIO as a change catalyst, developing job hoppers, and big media hypocrisy.

Technical ability does little to mitigate risk —

Recruiting evaluations that focus on someone’s industry experience, work history, and academic education show little positive correlation to someone’s success within a firm or of the impact that a collection of technical wizards towards a firm’s future success.

There are measurable human capital, competency-based assessments that quantify how people manage themselves and others and how teams collaborate.  Getting a quantifiable handle on competencies that people use to manage themselves and teams are critical human capital performance indicators.

Fistful of beans 01/19/2011 —

A fistful of thoughts from the tussle to integrate talent to broader strategic goals, the 15 most hated companies in America, how to tell who’s leaving after an acquisition, confidence, and HP’s CEO strategic reprogram.

The value of information and the link to development —

Enterprise knowledge management is a critical strategic need and how you collect and share information maximizes your organization resources.  However, the value of knowledge comes only when knowledge is aligned to strategic and tactical need.  A look at the disconnect between knowledge and development.

Fistful of beans 01/26/2011 —

A fistful of thoughts from capabilities-driven mergers & acquisitions, an organization culture of engagement, cost reduction resiliency, viral marketing rewards programs, and the strategy behind turning a windows fittings business into an international hand gun manufacturer.

5 things I’ve seen, read, or thought might seed results:

1. Capabilities-Driven Mergers & Acquisitions — Booz & Company

A video conversation on the role that capabilities can have to drive successful, strategic mergers.  This 18-minute, question and answer, interview-style video is broken down in 5 chapters:  The New Meaning of Scale; The Path to Coherence; Capabilities Roadmapping; Integrating Capabilities; and Advantaged Capabilities

2. Creating an Engagement Culture — Chief Learning Officer Magazine

Engagement is a choice only employees can make and the difference between an engaged employee to a disengaged employee impacts your organization’s ability to reliably and effectively deliver goods and services.

More often than not employees do what is expected of them, unfortunately, in absence of clear and consistent communication, standards for those behavioral expectations are little more than hope.

3. Making Cost Reductions Stick — Chief Learning Officer Magazine

On the heels of Creating an Engagement Culture there needs to be a reality check that many employees work in a constant barrage of a cheaper, faster, better operating environment.  The reality is within 18 to 24 months initial cost-cutting efforts fail.

Between these 2 articles you have better insight into managing sustainable, cost-cutting efforts while building for an engaged workforce; contrary to the alternative:  driving organization paralysis.

4. I Love Rewards, But I Love Public, Viral Recognition More — HR Capitalist

What makes someone naturally cynical of big rewards programs?

What is usually missing from rewards formulas?

A view of rewards programs that get it wrong and a recommendation of a rewards vendor’s 5 ingredients in their secret sauce that offer a distinct alternative your entire company can benefit from.

5. Glock:  America’s Gun — Bloomberg Businessweek

This article is not presented to open a gun-control debate, but as a business case of a most unlikely engineer running a radiator plant and window fittings business who turned out to be one of the industry’s biggest innovators.  You expect to be on target by listening closely to market need, but ignoring market culture is rarely recommended.

A fascinating read of a radical product and the surprise oversea, American market built on the rapid reaction to unintended twists regulators and lobbyists had to spur sales and market share.

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