Catching Up

Reconnecting after a period away.

Been traveling an unusual (for me) amount these last two weeks.  First a week in Ghana (Accra and Akosombo), then to NYC for some business development and learning.

In Africa, the focus was on leadership transition and group interaction.  Over three days we worked to successfully prepare an office of sixty for a new way of engaging with each other and with clients.  Because of changing internal and external environments, we chose to spend a significant time defining a common purpose for the group’s work, an important anchor.

Lots of lively conversation that led to a commitment to take a systematic look at the office’s work program and overall portfolio and agree on what it means to create value for clients.

Back in the US, I spent three action-packed days in Manhattan learning about complex adaptive systems and a few practical organizational applications of the concept.

I am particularly excited about this as I have been picking up various ideas about complexity over the years and seeking ways to integrate these into my work.  The smart people at Cognitive Edge seem to have figured a lot of this out.

Many thanks to Michael Cheveldave and Laurie Webster who so generously gave their time and experience to neophytes like me.

As I’m still digesting my drink from the fire hose, I expect to be writing a lot more about what was covered in the program and my own experiments with the material in the coming days and weeks.

The time in NYC also allowed me to reconnect with friends and business associates.  It didn’t take long for me to get back into the pace and rhythms of New York, especially as I was commuting in from the CT suburbs.

While it’s great to be home in DC, it’s also good to be reminded that New York is only a short train ride away.

Context is Everything

Where you come from (in every sense) determines how you see the world.

Listening to a radio broadcast the other day, I was reminded in no uncertain terms how important it is to pay attention to context when trying to gather the meaning of what a person is saying.

This was a call-in show on the topic of the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan following last year’s earthquake and tsunami.

An American calls in.  He’s bright and enthusiastic.  He talks about how remarkably well the plant withstood both the shaking and the surging ocean.  The problem arose, in his view, only when the generators were knocked out by the floodwaters and the fuel could no longer be cooled.

This was a “minor problem” in his estimation, though one with major consequences.  Still, he enthused, this performance gave him every reason to believe the world should be doubling down on nuclear power.  We’re so close to having it figured out.

After I finished scratching my head and tried to put my judgment aside, it occurred to me that this call was a prime example of American optimism and our core belief in human ingenuity.

And, this was a statement made by someone who was 9000 miles away from the events he was talking about.  I wonder if he’d have drawn the same “we can do this” conclusion if the whole thing unfolded near Virginia Beach.

The Japanese response was much more subdued and fatalistic.  The key comment was “We need to be humble and accept what happened.”

Wow.

I can’t imagine a clearer illustration of the importance of context.  How we make meaning based, literally, on where we come from.

This is not about deciding who has The Right Answer, but rather appreciating how we can see the same information and reach entirely different conclusions.  Also how we don’t all have access (i.e. choose to see) the same information, even when it is available to us.

Both have their “right” points, and neither tells the whole story.

And that’s why we have conversations.

What's in a Team?

Recent observations about how we assemble to get work done.

To team or not to team.

Used to be those were our choices when thinking about how to come together to do our work.  And for the last 30 years, everything team has been portrayed as good and virtuous, while not being a team was seen as some kind of deficiency.

It seems we’re getting much more differentiated in the way we think about coming together in groups to do our work.  Some of this may be simply the result of modifications in the language that’s in common use.  The recent emergence of “networks” to describe how we connect to each other is one example.

Still, I think it is more than just semantics.  We are becoming more nuanced observers and designers of what it takes to be effective at our work.

Rob Cross and Jon Katzenbach just published an article that takes a close look at “top teams”.  Senior executives.  That group responsible for running the enterprise with a reputation for not playing nicely together.

Through a lot of interesting network analysis, they make the point that an effective executive team isn’t necessarily all about cohesion and collaboration.  It is rather about figuring out your context, what you are trying to achieve, and then making some intelligent, disciplined choices about how to act and interact.

Dave Snowden has been blogging a bit about what he calls “crews”.  Distinct from teams, crews are characterized by heavy upfront investment in setting people up in their roles.  They also require less effort when put into action.  By contrast, the need for teams to go through formation whenever they are deployed is a “major time waster.”

Think of an airline cockpit crew.  As long as they go through the necessary, pre-established rituals, and have received the required training, it doesn’t matter which pilot is in the seat.

I find all this a really useful development in the field, as it gives us the capacity to be ever more helpful to our clients.

What Makes "Touchy-Feely" a Dirty Word?

Using our emotional lives to maximum effect brings more complete success.

What is it that makes the term "touchy-feely" subject to such scorn and derision?  When uttered by a client, it is invariably accompanied by a sneer, a curled lip, or a look that makes me think he has just stepped in something smelly.

Usually, this means that the person doesn't want to get involved with talking about feelings, or relationships, or how we're interacting with each other.  "Just stick with the facts."  Preferably facts that look like numbers.

After all, there are no emotions in the numbers, are there?

From what I’ve observed, business is all about relationships.  All the numerical data in the world isn't going to alter that basic notion.

A story from my Wall Street past illustrates this:  An entrepreneur approached J.P. Morgan for a loan to fund his fledgling business back in the early part of the 20th century.  Mr Morgan wasn't willing to extend credit to this particular individual, so he did the next best thing.  He took him on a walk down Broad Street, past the NY Stock Exchange and many of the other banks.  Morgan was visibly engaged in an intense conversation with the man, putting his arm around him and laughing at different points during the walk.

After this brief encounter, so the story goes, the young entrepreneur walked into several of the banks he had just passed and secured more than enough funding to get him started.

Whether this story is factual or a myth, it illustrates an important point.  We do business like this all the time.  The "numbers" take us only so far.

Recent work with emotional intelligence has begun to change the way some people think about touchy-feely.  Daniel Goleman has made a convincing case since the 1990s that EI (emotional intelligence) matters more than IQ in predicting workplace success.

Reuven Bar-On has developed a tool that allows for the reliable measurement of EI capabilities.  The instrument defines emotional intelligence as “a set of...skills that influence the way we...use emotional information in an effective and meaningful way.”

Brene Brown from the University of Houston has done some fascinating research into vulnerability.  This is another one of those apparently squishy and uncomfortable ideas that just shouldn't be brought into work, right?  I mean, how can we be successful if we’re running around being vulnerable?  Except that Brown’s research shows how it leads us toward greater connectedness and creativity: exactly the things our organizations keep saying they want more of.

The point about these examples is that no matter how hard we try to have it otherwise, our emotions are always with us.  One of the many paradoxes about feelings is that the harder we try to keep them at bay, the more obvious they become.

Another thing is that the more we learn about the impact of our emotional lives, the clearer it becomes that it is this very aspect of ourselves that contributes most greatly to our success and that of our organizations.

The sooner we stop looking at our emotions as something to check at the door of our offices, the more quickly and easily we can move into this greater success.

Freedom to Choose

If you want me to stay with you, don’t tell me what to do.

Today, I came across this really interesting article on the power of choice.  It explains a phenomenon called psychological reactance, which says that if I am a loyal user of a product or a service and I feel like my loyalty has been won at the expense of being able to freely choose another, similar product or service, I’m very likely to switch out of using the original as soon as an alternative comes along.

Get it?

It’s about how much we dislike monopolies and being told we can’t do something else, even if we don’t want to do something else right this minute.

The research in the article was done using search engines and online shopping sites.  Let’s work with that.  Let’s say you have grown to use Amazon to buy everything, from holiday gifts to appliances for your kitchen.  You love it.  It’s convenient, fast, and easy.  You can’t imagine using another site for purchases, and you don’t, even though there are others out there.

Now, in a slightly different scenario, you still love Amazon, but it started out as the only game in town.  You were, in this sense, forced to start using it for your online purchases.  There simply was no other choice.  The study shows that in this scenario, you’d be 51% more likely to switch to a competing website as soon as one came along.

If, instead, you felt like you had the opportunity to choose Amazon from a selection of similar sites at the beginning, you’d be only 23% more likely to switch to a competitor website.

This has some interesting implications for any change effort.  It confirms the long-held notion that engaging people from the earliest stages of the change is essential for their commitment to the effort.  

And, this study seems to suggest that people need to feel like they have had the chance to freely choose to come along for the change in order to be more fully committed.  This ability to opt-in may the element that can make a big difference in how readily the new idea gets taken up.

This makes a lot of sense.  Treat me like an adult: tell me what my options are and let me choose among them, and I’ll be much more likely to stay around and do what we agree makes sense.