CircaSpecting: People, Tech, and Business

Collaboration and False Friends

My new friend Huguette has been studying up on her English with a book called Vrais Amis et Faux Amis.  In English, that's "true friends and false friends."  Now, this book is not about friendship; it's about words.  Specifically, it's about words that exist in both English and French -- true friends being the situations in which both languages interpret one word the same way, and false friends being those risky situations in which the same letters or sounds have different interpretations by the two cultures.  For instance, "superb" means the same thing in both languages.  But, "car" means this to English-speakers...

...but this to French-speakers.

 

So, it would be easy for me to THINK that I understand Huguette when she uses the word "car," but my mind would be traveling in a different direction from hers…which could create a funny (or not-so-funny) situation later.

This morning, I was thinking about how pervasive this situation is -- even within a single culture.  And, it dawned on me:

DISagreement is not the worst situation in communication.  
MISagreement is.

We are in such a hurry all the time.  A hurry to talk.  A hurry to be heard.  A hurry to move on to the next thing.  A hurry to get something done.  Many times, I REALLY WANT to believe that the other person agrees with me.  So, I am not careful to confirm we have a true agreement, rather than a MISagreement.  It is only later that we must suddenly stop/rewind/redo either one or both partners' resulting work.  

Fortunately, disagreement is also often an illusion.  Yes, fortunately.  You see, I find that most initial appearances of disagreement are such that with a bit of clarification we find that we were simply focused on different parts of the same problem or that we did not have the same information -- and we don't actually disagree in any meaningful way about what needs to be done.

Paradoxically, the fastest way to a truly collaborative outcome is the early appearance of disagreement. 

The early appearance of disagreement usually turns off the automaton-in-a-hurry-to-move-on switch in your brain, slowing you down to focus on what is happening now: this conversation, this partnership, this collaboration needs attention right now to make sure we are in tune -- to avoid MISagreement. 

When you sense one of these situations, I recommend you approach it like the scientific method: test for the alternative hypothesis -- "When you say <insert word>, I interpret that as <insert narrative description or example>.  How are you using the term <insert word>?"  Repeat this until you find the term on which you are disagreeing -- or until you decide that you really, actually disagree.  Either way, it is in your best interest to highlight, isolate, and address misunderstandings and to avoid MISagreements.

While the MISagreement problem certainly happens in spoken communication, I think it is epidemic in written communication like corporate reporting presentations -- especially those that use abbreviated text, bullet points, and illustrations.  In fact, I think we often TRY to make MISagreement happen in our presentations: it requires a great deal of intellectual honesty to use words and images that are intended to avoid MISagreement.  

It is not enough to use words that can mean what you say.  It is essential to use words that cannot mean anything else.

 Even if this means inviting disagreement.  Because I'll take a true disagreement over a false agreement any day of the week.

 

Crabby Leadership

For a few days in March, I lived on a beach in an uninhabited bay on the north shore of Hiva Oa in the Marquesas of French Polynesia.  Talk about a simple life: sleep, eat, watch nature, repeat.

One of those days, my watching nature involved sitting very still on the beach for several hours as the sand crabs came out to forage on the beach.  I was very still, so they went about their business within a few meters of me.  And, they taught me some interesting lessons, one of which I’d like to share.

At first, the crabs appeared to be wandering down the beach in random zigzags, sort of like a stumbling drunk wandering down a city street.  But, upon closer examination, it became clear that the zigzags corresponded precisely with the edge of the previous wave.  The crabs diligently followed the ragged edge of the wave-ends, because that’s where the nutritious bits are.  Any higher on the beach away from the turmoil of the water, there is nothing useful because the water has not carried anything up that high.  Any lower, and the turmoil of the water keeps the nutrition floating and swirling such that the crabs can’t eat it.  The nutrition for growth is at the edge, in between the dead-but-dry higher ground and the too-wet-to-use surf.

I think the analogy is very clear for our organizations.  The edge is messy.  At the edge, there is a lot of trash you cannot use.  So you have to be discriminating. And, the edge is constantly moving.  So, you have to move around a lot to stay in the sweet spot.  The edge I am referring to is what’s happening far from “corporate” -- far from the board room, far from the governance committee, and far from centers-of-excellence and other such policy bureaus.  It’s the world of CSRs and drivers and staff accountants and buyers and sales reps and marketing analysts and the like.  The conversations and ideas and experiments and knowledge of this sea of employees is chock full of valuable nutrients for growing the business.  But, we have to play at the edge...with all the challenges that entails.

• First, we must embrace the messiness.  Resist the impulse toward policies and centralization and standardization, because all that really happens when you try is this: you move yourself away from the action.   You cannot tame the sea.  You may think you are taming the sea, but you are really simply walking up the beach away from the waves where the action is. Your life will feel more organized, but it will also be less rich.  Let people work and talk and act the way that feels natural for them, and they will naturally expose many great ideas you can harvest.
  
  
• Second, we must keep our heads on straight.  Not all ideas are good ones.  But, we don’t want to quash the sharing process.  Generally speaking, this means that you don’t pass judgment on bad ideas, you just ignore them.  And, it means you don’t use big direct financial rewards for good ideas, because employees will then force you to pass judgment on their ideas because they are focused on the reward.  There is a large body of research that corroborates this assertion: employees contribute best when they are treated as if this is part of their normal role....not some extra-special thing we’d really like them to try doing now.
  
  
• Third, we have to be close to the action.  This is where I believe enterprise collaboration (think, Facebook for the enterprise) has such fantastic potential: we can all participate in (or just learn from) many conversations around the business, all the time, with very little effort.  Sure, alot of this stuff (hopefully not as high a percentage as on consumer social media) will be junk; but alot of it will be gold.  Just remember, this is what economists call a free option: bad ideas you can ignore at little cost, while good ideas are there to use for great benefit.

Many policy-wonks in the executive suite and the IT governance team are reluctant to embrace enterprise collaboration because it’s edgy and messy.  I say: that’s sort of the point.

 

Standing on the Shoulders of Giants

These interesting times in banking have reminded me of the old adage: "You can borrow money when you have money."  Ironically, seems the banks are beginning to appreciate the view from the other side of the desk lately.

Now, I think this is a lesson with great application beyond banking.  For instance, to business intelligence.  Recently, Gartner published an article on how NOT to succeed with business intelligence at your company, and the first pitfall was "If we build it, they will come."  I agree that IT going off into a lab and cooking up a system for the business is a recipe for failure, but I see a different root cause lurking behind this mistake.

The people who manage the business are the ones who understand its physical processes -- the making of actual things and the rendering of services to real people.  If they are not already measuring, analyzing, forecasting, and acting on the data, .....then there is no way a slicker tool for measuring, analyzing, forecasting, etc is going to succeed.  It's not going to change the way they work.  Heck, it's probably not even going to be baseline functional, since there would be no business-driven guidance regarding data relevant to the physical business processes.

Fortunately, the reality is that almost all businesses DO have people already measuring, analyzing, forecasting, and acting on the data ... long before there's a formal BI program from IT.  The successful BI programs I have seen were all successful because they viewed the BI program as an extension of existing BI practices across the business -- an evolutionary, participative process involving equal parts business and IT.  So, we need to dispense with the revolutionary/messianic delusions of IT-driven breakthroughs, and embrace the fact that we are all just building on the work of others.

If I have seen farther it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.  Sir Isaac Newton

The #1 secret to successful BI projects is this: Business Intelligence can only succeed in organizations where business intelligence is already in play. 

Waldo Wednesday: Consistency

foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance

Emerson's point in the essay is that a person's true self is immutable and that, if allowed, it will express itself over time in actions which are consistent with that self.  Those actions may not be PERCEIVED by others as consistent at any particular point in time, but a true person cannot allow concern for those perceptions to sway his/her actions away from fidelity to self. 

It is quite Zen: if you care not about the appearance of consistency, you can simply act from the heart .... and this will ultimately result in truly consistent actions.

Reduction is not Simplification

Last week, my oldest son, Hunter, was telling me about an experience in his Physics class.  They were working with an equation for a fairly complex phenomenon in which several forces participate in various ways.  The equation was quite long in its native form -- but each part was intuitive.  Each equation component was visible and was easy (for him, not his Dad) to relate to each of the respective forces at play.  But, then the teacher did something that threw everyone off the train: he reduced the equation to its most compact mathematical form and suggested that this is what the students should (1) memorize and (2) use in their work.  The problem, in Hunter's words, was "the most reduced form might be easy to program into a calculator, but it certainly isn't simpler to use."   Wow.  From the mouths of babes.

In other words, short and compact are not equivalents for simple. Simple is not the mathematically, systematically, linguistically, or technically irreducible approach.  It's the approach that makes the most sense...to people, not machines.  In Hunter's case, he understands each of the forces AND their interplay (genius, yes), and he's completely comfortable solving the problem with the expanded form, because he has mental check-points along the way, where his intuition can warn him if he's going off-track.  The more compact equation loses this charm.

In professional life, we often make the same mistake as Hunter's teacher.  We try to boil down lots of unique moving parts of the Strategy Gameboard into a single pithy Vision Statement -- and then, we're surprised when employees feel no connection with it.  Or, we try to homogenize data and reporting from the variety of functional areas around the business into an non-descript blob of a common-denominator centralized Business Intelligence program -- and then, we're surprised when departmental analysts keep using their own stuff.

My definition of a simple approach is ...

one that creates the minimum cognitive friction for people who want to work with it.

It's not about what design looks amazingly rationalized in the powerpoint presentation to the executive IT funding committee.  It's not about what design is computationally more elegant for the programmers and computers.  It's not about what design minimizes the required amount of data storage.  (By the way, the answer to that one is "don't save any data" - pretty dumb.)  It's not about what can be expressed in the fewest words. 

It's all about best equipping people to engage and predict and channel and shape the phenomena in their worlds.

Innovation as Corporate Lottery Ticket Program

Today, I read a nice little Economist article on Evan Williams, who founded Blogger and Twitter.  In the article, Evan shares his perspective on innovation: 

Great and genuinely new ideas are...

1. Stumbled upon, not the product of determined pursuit
2. Hard to explain to others
3. Obvious in retrospect

First, the caveats
Before going too much further, let's innoculate ourselves against trolls:  All toads are frogs, but not all  frogs are toads.  Just because you are in a situation containing a couple of Williams' principles above does NOT mean that you are onto something like cold fusion -- you could just be confused, or a poor communicator.  In fact, I'd add a 4th principle to Williams' list: great and genuinely new ideas are rare. 

But, man, do they pay off big when you find one.

Second, the takeaways
So, assuming that a genuinely new idea is a zillion dollar lottery ticket, how do we give our organizations the best shot at finding one?  I love the satirical IBM commercial where people lie on the floor in a dark room trying to "ideate" -- because it captures the default corporate behavior of trying to force people to innovate on cue and en masse.  Balderdash.

A leader who wants to invest the organization's resources in Idea Lottery Tickets should manage according to the following principles:

Flexibility and time are key.  I agree with Evan's point that great ideas are accidental.  This means most great ideas are dropped/forgotten because we brush up against them for a moment while we are in the flow of our routines -- and we don't have time to chase the little white rabbit.  If you want your people to find Idea Lottery Tickets, you have to spend the money to let them chase the rabbit when they sense it.  This is a come-to-Jesus moment: most professional managers are efficiency focused, and most are poor at developing capable/trustworthy team members -- which means the White Rabbit management style will drive them crazy.  If you are one of those managers, it's not a great idea to bet on innovation by your folks.

Show, don't tell.  Cultures that communicate through experiential prototyping innovate much more effectively than those who communicate through written descriptions.  Why?  Because language is limited by experience AND because langage limits our perceptions.  But even a crude experience with a thrown-together prototype can light up the human imagination and birth new words and provide productive analogies and reveal potential applications.  Encourage your people to make something real of their new ideas, so others can experience them.

Don't expect a return during your tenure.  How long do you plan to be in your current job?  Your current firm?  If a typical employee finds an Idea Lottery Ticket once in a lifetime, and if you have 10 bright people on your team, and if your team culture insures that no bright ideas are squandered, then you should expect to wait 4-5 years between ground-breaking discoveries.  Since finding such an idea can drive a firm to new heights for another generation, it's worth the effort from the firm's perspective; but, the manager should view innovation cultivation as corporate philanthropy, because it's unlikely to generate success during his/her tenure.

Great Ideas Sound Stupid

Eating sea urchin.
.

Bending time.
.

A TV show about nothing.
.  

Sailing west.
.

Blasting men to the moon.
.

 

.

.

.

.

.

Wouldn’t you love to have been in the room the first time each of those crazy ideas got pitched? 

Since there are lots of bona fide dumb ideas out there, it's important to be able to recognize the actually stupid vs the apparently stupid.  The latter are what breakthrough ideas look like, and you need those things if your organization is to thrive.

The creative process is more like play than like study. The best ideas start with the phrase 'This is a dumb idea, but…'  David Canaan, Research to Fuel the Creative Process, from the collection Design Research, compiled by Brenda Laurel

Strategy Paradox (or Pairs of Docks)

There is an old saying about having one foot on the dock and one foot on the boat.  Ouch.  Sometimes   as I read blogs/books or listen to presentations, I am struck with how confusingly contradictory multiple pieces of very good advice can seem.  One expert says "go with good enough," while another says "it’s the last 5 minutes of effort that make the difference."  Paradoxically, we have to accept both statements as solid places to stand.

So, I thought it might be an interesting (and hopefully entertaining) exercise to juxtapose seemingly contradictory -- but simultaneously true -- pairs of "docks" on which we should all stand:

Listen to the customer.	The customer does not know what she wants.	Watch carefully, ask the right questions, and read between the lines to discover needs and aspirations they cannot articulate clearly.
Be smart.	Don’t be too smart.	A genuine breakthrough is hard work, and the hardest part is simplifying it to the point that mere mortals can use it as effectively and enjoyably as you can.
Dance with the one that brung you.	Get out more often.	Master something, one thing, and don’t take your eyes off that prize; but, find analogies and patterns from odd/unrelated fields to help you solve your tougher problems.
Sweat the details.	Don’t sweat the small stuff.	How does the packaging (boxes, cables, labels, stickers) of Apple toys reflect on the products inside?  On the other hand, do you really need to list every single feature on your website?
Delegate.	Engage.	Your people need your energy and vision, as well as a little bit of idea-DNA every once in a while, but if you expect them to create great things you didn’t ask for, they need to feel some adult independence and ownership.
Be bold.	Be humble.	Play devil’s advocate with yourself.  Change.  Then, stand up straight, look them straight in the eyes, and talk straight about how you want to make their lives better.
Ignore critics.	Heed critiques.	Critics suck.  But, getting early adopters to shoot straight with you is invaluable, and they’ll only do it if they see that you REALLY want to hear it – and change.

If you've got some other favorites, I'd love to hear about them.

If You're Not Falling, You're Not Learning

Growing up, I spent a lot of time at the lake.  Maybe too much time, but that’s another story for another day.  Mom and Dad taught me to ski when I was in kindergarten, and things were never the same.  Though I know a lot of people who enjoy skiing just for fun, for me it has always been a relentless pursuit of ... better.  That pursuit resulted in concussions, stitches, broken ankles, jacked up knees, inverted eyelids, and a host of other injuries from nasty falls.  Fortunately, my Dad just kept repeating the same line over and over again when he came around to clean up after my latest yard sale: "If you’re not falling, you’re not learning."

Dad knew something that we all need to take to heart: getting better is about trying new techniques -- many of which won’t work out so well.  But, then each fall shows you one more way NOT to do it.  The people who let this process break them, who settle for the safety of the status quo, who let the fear of falling prevent them from pushing through to a breakthrough -- they miss the opportunity of becoming something surprising.

Whether success or failure awaits, let us not cower from great attempts.

Design Gods

Kevin Kelly’s oft-quoted comment "Nobody is as smart as everybody" captures today’s post-modern, social-networking-fueled zeitgeist: the power of WE.  There is no debating the truth of this notion in a world of pervasive, immediate communications connectivity.  What is known by Sam can be known by all her friends, and vice versa.  And, the propagation speed of knowledge today is startling.  So, clearly, ignoring the information in your network is, well, ignorant.

But, we must be careful in our definition of the word smart. 

I have children who are freaks of nature.  Not sure what was in the water they were drinking during the early years, but they are quite a bit smarter than their dear old Dad.  At 14 and 16, they clearly have not filled up their cerebral libraries with as many facts and experiences as I have at 40.  But, as I am finding out each time we play Scrabble or Abalone, the REALLY powerful notion of smart is the ability to analyze and synthesize relevant facts accurately and quickly -- the ability to concoct and improve novel strategies.  On this dimension, my kids smoke me.  They may not have the same wealth of information, but they beat me on sheer clockspeed. 

Oddly, however, when we play team style, kids against parents, the kids’ advantage disappears.  What’s going on?

I think the answer is that the two types of smart operate on countervailing dimensions.  For access to information, more nodes are exponentially better than few.  But, for synthesis, analysis, and creativity more nodes impose exponentially higher friction on the decision.  How many times have you found yourself locked in a conference room with a bunch of people, instructed to come up with a creative solution to a problem?  I bet the hair stands up on the back of your neck just thinking about it.  Your subconscious knows it’s a bad idea to expect creativity from a gaggle of people.

Maybe that explains why the solo Design God has come to wield unique power in some leading, innovative firms.  Business Week published a terrific article last week on how Bang & Olufsen achieves extraordinary profitability on less than 1% market share.  Short answer: design by demigod, not by committee. 

I’d also suggest reading David Cohen’s excellent blog post from last week on the topic of Focus.  Also, Malcolm Gladwell’s book Blink provides some great case studies on the surprising reliability of individuals’ snap decisions.  From experience, you’ll probably agree that both focus and intuition are often the first virgins to be sacrificed to the monster of horde-think.

Could it be that higher-order tasks like design and strategy are decidedly un-democratic?