CircaSpecting: People, Tech, and Business

Fear of Flipping the Switch

One of the lessons of life that I’ve been learning lately is that execution does NOT flow naturally from preparation.  Actually, the more you prepare, probably the HARDER it is to move on to DOING.

Here’s what I’m experiencing lately in an interesting little object-lesson called "moving aboard our new sailboat."  The experience is purely personal, but I think it reveals some things about the mind that are 100% applicable to the professional world.

Preparing is sort of a safe little fantasy world.  You tell yourself stories about what is going to happen when you start doing -- the great things that will happen, the ordinary things that will happen, and even the challenging things that will/might happen.  Then you get organized for those things.  You play out those stories in your mind, and you come up with new stories, and you document and buy and stage things to be ready.  But, there is a vast existential chasm between the mental life of these stories and the real life of...well, living.

One of the hooks in preparing that makes it so sticky is similar to the old adage about life: the more you know, the more you realize how little you know.  In planning/preparation, it’s easy to get into the mindset of trying to prepare for everything.  It’s a fool’s errand, but it catches many people in its grasp -- because (1) it seems responsible and (2) it does not actually carry the risk of DOING.

Anyone who has worked in large companies has seen this phenomenon: over-planning, over-preparing -- because you can always justify your preparation as prudent in the face of some bogey-man risk...but REALLy because you are petrified of walking across the threshold from your fantasy world into the real world, because deep down you know that the real world is going to be different from the predictable world of “planning.”

At some point, after you’ve read the manual on switching power sources for the refrigerator
between shore power and generator power, you actually have to ... FLIP SOME SWITCHES AND HOPE YOU DON”T BLOW UP SOMETHING.  You have to crank the generator, which means you have to do a few other things.  You have to route power to places and turn on pumps for heat exchangers and other things.  And, either your plan works and you can have ice cream while at anchor off Saba, or it doesn’t and you are buying lots of expensive new gear.  But, here’s the mindset that matters: 

If I am reasonably smart and reasonably prepared and have a reasonable idea for how to do something, I WANT TO KNOW THAT IT WORKS IN THE REALWORLD...NOW.  You have to reach out and flip some switched -- not stupidly and randomly, but still you have to flip them -- and SEE WHAT HAPPENS. 

Either you will find that you are in fact prepared, or you will find that you were living in Plato’s cave.  From where I sit today, either of these outcomes is superior to admiring shadows on the wall.

 

Of Card Hustlers and Tech Sales

“Let me show you what our product can do with your data.”

Ugh.

Don’t get me wrong, I love data analysis as much as the next guy, and our product has great features for slicing/dicing/ computing/ visualizing data.  But, I cringe when a customer fixates on that sort of demonstration.  Because, as an industry we’ve been doing this computational and spatial and logical manipulation of numbers FOR SEVERAL DECADES.  Let’s just say, as an industry, that we’re 95% of the way “there” -- meaning we’ve achieved a 95% perfect calculator.  Most of what’s new now is nothing more than blinky lights, shiny things....a neat parlor trick.  

So what.

If you want to make a meaningful improvement in your organization’s effectiveness, efficiency, and creativity, you need to look for a 10X improvement in something...or a 100X improvement in something.  

0.05X is just noise.

Whatever is keeping your organization from being more effective, efficient, and creative....IT IS NOT A CALCULATOR PROBLEM.  The solution is not a better tool to allow a user logically, mathematically, or spatially to manipulate her data.

What should we be talking about?  

There is a growing body of recent organizational research demonstrating three of the biggest issues inhibiting knowledge workers:

1. They don't know what data are already available on the subject, or cannot find it, or cannot understand it
2. They don't know who has expertise in the subject, or who is already working on the same subject
3. They don’t know what’s been tried before, what was experienced, and what was learned

Notice a pattern?  Ignorance.  After 50 years of calculator investment -- LITERALLY TRILLIONS OF $ -- most employees are ignorant: they are unaware of the information assets, human assets, and corporate experience THAT ALREADY EXIST IN THE ORGANIZATION.  There’s a good argument being made now that the degree of ignorance on these dimensions is something like 99%, which means that there’s a 100X improvement opportunity here.  Sound high?  Consider this: knowledge workers and managers report spending more than 25% of their time -- every day -- searching for information they need.  Every day.  And, here’s the real killer: that’s just the time they spend looking for things they know to look for, things they believe there’s a chance they’ll find, etc.  There’s a radical step-function opportunity in efficiency, effectiveness, and creativity lurking in the knowledge-sharing problem.

So, please, please, please.....stop asking to see what a product can do with your data.  You’re falling for a card-hustler’s hypnotic tricks.  Keep your eye on the frontier of 100X improvement, something that can actually have a noticeable impact on your team’s results: 

1. Making sure employees can find and understand the data available across the organization
2. Making sure employees can find and engage expert coworkers across the organization 
3. Making sure employees can learn from the community’s experiments and experiences

 Once again: it's all about people.

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.

 

Casting Call

If you are a leader of a growing business, you spend a lot of time recruiting and assimilating new team members.  I hope to share a few ideas in this post to help you get a better return on your efforts.  Most of these ideas fit under this heading: roles, NOT responsibilities.

I hate job descriptions.  Hate.  I am passionate about seeing people flourish to their potential, and IMHO nothing smothers potential like an HR-friendly, legal-approved job description.  The prototypical job description would make Marx chuckle and say "I told you so" -- meaning this description leaves almost nothing to chance, focuses exclusively on the list of specific things for which this person can be judged individually as having done/not, and speaks of the position's manager as one who will tell you what to do, when, and how.  This is not an epic existence.  Far from it.  This is a recipe for total creative shutdown, for dehumanization, for withering, for apathy, for disengagement, for stagnation.  If that's not clear, contrast it with how we learn naturally…as pre-school children, before the institutional machine starts working us over.

Children instinctively live mythically.  "Precision" is sacrificed for a greater degree of suggestion.  Myth is the mode of simultaneous awareness of a complex group of causes and effects. Myth means putting on the audience, putting on one's environment….putting on a whole vesture, a whole time, a Zeit.  People today reject goals.  They want roles -- R-O-L-E-S.  That is, total involvement.  They do not want fragmented, specialized goals or jobs.  Marshall McLuhan

At some risk of inviting critique from the HR and Legal department, here are my 3 simple reasons for ditching "job descriptions" and replacing them with "roles."  

#1: Roles are about BEING, rather than DOING.

The hyper-focus on responsibilities is a canker left over from the Smith-to-Taylor industrial days, breaking down tasks into sub-tasks -- and roles into sets of tasks -- ad infinitum.  Great for pin manufacturing.  Not great for the post-modern, post-industrial information economy in which ideas and creativity cut the path to profit.  I know this is cliche, but that's probably because it's true: we are called human BEINGS, not human DOINGS.  When you think about your team, don't do it with an org chart in front of you.  Don't think about tasks and responsibilities.  Rather, approach it as a director of a theatrical production: how would I describe each role on the cast?  If you have not seen a cast summary in a while, go find one on the internet.  It will DEFINITELY NOT talk about tasks, because it's a ROLE.  And, the beautiful thing about roles is….they give the cast member room to improvise, to interpret, to experiment….to grow.  To BE and BECOME. 

#2: Roles are elastic and relative.

Most job descriptions that focus on responsibility are rigid and isolated.  Given the pace, complexity, and fluidity of the challenges you face each day, can you afford to have your hard-won recruits shackled within rigidly defined individual responsibilities that make the word ME look a lot bigger than the word TEAM?  I think not.  Most of us face challenges that (1) were unanticipated when the job descriptions were written and (2) can only be solved collaboratively -- in relation to other people.  Define and communicate roles in a way that reflects this reality. 

#3: Role performance must be judged holistically.

To satisfy the HR or Legal guidelines, we create job descriptions from bullet points of easily observable accountabilities for each individual on the team.  But, while the king may prance around proud of this clothing, he's naked -- and everyone knows it this time….the recruits especially.  As discussed in the previous paragraph, the nature of work has morphed significantly in the post-industrial era.  We need to stop pretending that the old accountability model works.  The old list of job responsibilities isn't REALLY what we're using to evaluate people.  Nobody's buying that.  So, we should stop pretending that's how we judge people.  A role is judged holistically and subjectively -- sort of like a…human.

Change the way you think about your team, then change the way you communicate about it.  Think of your team as a cast, yourself as a director.  Eschew silly pretense about tasky job descriptions.  And, you'll find yourself building and retaining a much more creative team. 

The Wave

I just finished the excellent book The Wave by Susan Casey, and this morning a seed from the book sprouted in my mind.  Casey interviews several Hawaiians about the sea and the surf, and they all talk about not the waves (plural) at a place but the wave (singular) at a place.  That is, they (even their ancient ancestors) realized that all of the crests breaking in at a particular spot are the product of a single, unique, stationary entity -- which turns out to be (though perhaps the ancients did not quite understand this part) the topology of the ocean floor at that place.  So, each place has a recurring, known and unique set of behaviors under various circumstances, which is to say a way of responding to energy of swells of various intensities and directions.  The Hawaiians characterize the whole of these behaviors as a persona: the wave at a place has a personality and a name and a reputation, and you have a relationship with it.

So, I was thinking this morning that the Hawaiians’ view of the wave also reveals their view of a person.  They projected onto the wave a concept that they already understood from dealing with each other.  They must have already viewed real men and women as being defined by how each refracts, reflects, absorbs, and amplifies the energy in the swells of life to create smooth or rugged, excellent or scary, tubular or foamy, etc waves for the rest of us.  When life hits Sam from thus-and-such direction, he does this-and-that.  Etc.  I think this is a wonderful way to look at yourself, your life, and your relationships -- personal and professional.

Stuff happens, to paraphrase the bumper sticker.  We all encounter thousands of different swells -- energy of challenges and opportunities and mysteries -- in our lives.  These swells hit us from every imaginable angle and height, so they touch every bend and curve and surface of our character -- revealing a rich and true picture, like a sonogram of our soul.  It is a complex picture, and it bears the truth of improvisation: this is not a staged picture; rather, it is a dynamic test in which we see a person “in play in the real world, not posing or reading a script.”  And, I think this is the truest picture.  Here’s why.

Consider the character of someone you admire.  Describe that character with a few words. Now consider those words, and ask yourself: are they manifest in a static environment (no swells) or in a dynamic environment (impacted with swells)?  If you used words like....trustworthy, caring, strong, diligent, etc....you are describing someone’s behavior in dynamic environments in which life gave that person every opportunity to sell out or ignore or rest or play.  But, this person reacted to those swells by channeling them into something smooth for you.  A nice wave.

Life is not stasis, and we are not static models.  And the swells of life are not interruptions or disruptions to some hypothetical snapshot state: they are the dynamic energy that allows us to reveal ourselves by how we reflect and refract and absorb and amplify those swells for the people around us.  The trick is to learn to channel more types of conditions into clean, smooth, rides -- to avoid producing turmoil and turbulence.  We all have good days and bad days, but that’s not what this is about.  It’s about patterns of behavior and illusions of an the unexamined life.  Take a look at your patterns: what is the character of your wave?

(p.s. --  Your team is a wave, too.  How does it respond to dynamic swells to create a great ride?)

 

Fear and Monsters

I’ve been on a sabbatical of sorts for a while.  It’s been eye-opening.  As part of that, I spent 5 weeks solo in Polynesia in 1Q11.  Amazing.  Primitive.  Quiet.  Really quiet.  Like that old Indigo Girls song says, “the lightness has a calm that’s hard to hear.”  I agree. It takes some quiet before you can hear it.  And, when I came back, all I could see and hear was FEAR, FEAR, FEAR.  

Fear is everywhere...politics, advertising, news, family, bosses, employees, customers....everywhere.  The entirety of western civilization seems powered by the fuel of fear.  Fear of failure, of attack, of abandonment, of crowds, of loneliness, of homeliness, of not having enough, of having too much to manage, of too few customers, of too many customers, of not having the right clothes, of getting some dirt on your clothes, of being too fat or to thin or to old or too inexperienced or too liberal or too conservative or too cynical or too naive or too militant or too passive or....you get the picture.  

And, it’s just so damn loud I can barely hear my soul whispering...”it’s ok. you’re good.  you don’t need what they are selling.”

The whole FUD thing (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) is a contrivance designed with one purpose: make you scared so that you will buy (from the person who made you scared!) the thing that promises to keep you safe. What a racket.  Don’t buy it.  Just stop.  So, I’m on a media diet.  No newspapers. No magazines.  No TV.  None.  I’ve been on a media diet since January, and ... nothing.  It’s made no difference.  I’ve not become irrelevant.  I’ve not lost friends.  I’ve not become boring at dinner parties.  (It’s not really all too shocking that people would rather talk about the exotic marine life in Rangiroa than the silly antics of some senator.)  

The bottom line is that we over-consume media because we’ve bought someone’s lie: that we are valuable in virtue of how up-to-date our information is.  BS.  Your value is not transitory like that...fresh one moment, stale the next.  This is not a human being.  The consequence of buying this lie is that we then consume vast amounts of irrelevant drivel, simply so that we can perform regurgitations for other people as a means of validating our value...that we knew XYZ that they had not yet heard, probably didn’t need to know, and would have found out 3.2 minutes later from some other source besides you.  Please tell me there is more to a meaningful life than this!  But, we’ve bought the media's lie that created a fear of irrelevance, which in turn twisted our lives into a contortion, distortion, fun-house image that barely resembles what could be. 

Compared to the peaceful, self-sufficient, proud, grounded existence of which we are capable, our lives sometimes look ghastly.  We make decisions we would never make, attributing it to “but I can’t” or “if I don’t” etc.  But, the reality is...we don’t know what if, and we can do alot more than we think.  We surrender and shrink and outsource our provision/defense/satisfaction to someone who promises they are better at life than we are.  Ug.  Now we are slaves to the monster.  It reminds me of a book we all had to read when we were in middle school: Lord of the Flies.  To me, the moral of the story is that our fears create monsters, not the other way around.  We think that monsters make us scared, but really our fears make us into monstrous contortions of our true selves.  Fear morphs our lives in ways that make us slaves, that cause us to sacrifice our selves and our dreams in exchange for a bowl of crappy stew.  And, the really awful reality is this: the promise is always a lie.  No one can insulate you from risk.  It’s a total bait-and-switch.  Trade the risky world of true life for ... the risky world of slavery.  IQ test.

So, is this just a rant?  No, I think it bears upon many facets of our lives...even if we’re not living in a hut in the South Pacific.  For example, how many times has your boss (or you as the boss) used fear to try to get someone to work harder, faster, longer, etc....”if you don’t X, we’re not going to make payroll!” or similar?  If we don’t get this feature in the release by tomorrow...If you don’t close that deal by the end of the quarter...If you don’t find a way to reduce expenses by 20%....etc, etc, etc.  I’m certainly not saying to be a slacker, but if your passion for the team’s mission is not sufficient to get you to do the job, then maybe (1) you need to get out and/or (2) the company needs to disappear.  Seriously, the use of fear is pervasive.  It’s just such a cheap trick.

Just say no.  Don’t use it.  Don’t let it be used on you.

Fear sucks.  It IS the monster.  Live fearlessly, and you will be able to be true to your self.  And, in the end, that’s the only strategy that’s durable anyway.

thanks to mspuzzles.blogspot.com for the image!

 

This I Believe

A friend asked me this week to write a This I Believe piece.  Seems like fair game for the ol' blog, so here goes...

I believe in improvisation.  Not aimlessness, mind you.  But, a loose hand on the reins and a willingness to create something special from the ingredients life brings into view.  I believe fresh basil that comes up in my backyard is a wonderful opportunity to make pizza for dinner.

When I was younger, there were many plans.  Plans of extraordinary detail and complexity.  When I get to thus-and-such point, I am going to do this-and-that.  The way I’ll deal with something-or-another is A, then B, then C.

I can’t remember the last project that went according to plan, and I’ve never seen a business plan become reality.  Don’t get me wrong: I still create plans.  But, not because I think that writing something down means that’s what’s going to happen.  I create plans because it shows me what to monitor and what levers are likely to be available for improvising. 

But, writing it down does not make it so.

I wanted to go to Wall Street after graduate school, because that’s where all the money was.  But instead I took a job at an airline, because that was the only offer I got.  Improvising, I jumped at every training and development opportunity.  I learned about technology and operations and marketing and corporate finance and a bunch of other things that ultimately prepared me to be a successful entrepreneur.  Not according to plan, I’ve created a great life.

I think there’s something divine about the unexpected. 

A life without unexpected events would mean I was God, and I would not wish that on the world.  The unexpected, the unforeseen, the random, the WTF moments – all these things remind me that I am not God.  But, they also provide a canvas on which to paint the most creative masterpiece – the highest expression of humanity, the greatest distance from ape and nearest reach to God – and that is what happens when I adapt, bend, solve, imagine, and build something just for that wonderfully unique moment in the timeline of the universe.  That is far, far grander a moment than some paint-by-numbers execution of a pre-packaged plan.

Control is an illusion.  I believe in improvisation.

Back to the Future: Self-reliance

It once was noble to be self-reliant. 

Then someone told us we were supposed to be waited on, were supposed to hop on the bandwagon, were supposed to listen to experts, were supposed to ... become dependent.

Take a few minutes to refresh your self with Emerson's essay on self-reliance.  Download The_Essay_on_Self_reliance

Gemini Twins: Style and Substance

"Let's not forget that style is in itself a concept, and made up of a synthesis of concepts. It is a shorthand, a reference to other ideas.  Used carelessly, it becomes meaningless, but if stylistics elements are part of a conceptual solution, then you can feel virtuous. 

The real trick in all this is to ensure that the varied of precise group of viewers that the work is designed for respond to, and understand, the point of the exercise, style or no style.

Style that works is a concept, and a concept that doesn't work has not been styled effectively."

The End of Print, David Carson

The power of "I was wrong"

I don't watch much TV since West Wing went off the air.  But, I love the lead character in House, played by Hugh Laurie.  I mean, aside from the fact that he's got more character flaws than a $10 diamond -- he's completely, brilliantly, insane. 

That's right, I think brilliant insanity can be a good thing. 

William James once wrote that the insane can actually reveal to us some ignored truths about reality, because they don't feel obligated to respect our group-hallucinations.  In other words, I like House because his character shows us how silly many of our supposedly "normal" perspectives are.

To wit, in an episode that aired (rerun?) last week, Dr. House taught a class of newbie residents (the "normal" people), using a difficult but real-life case from his past.  When the students were given insufficient information and asked to choose between two mutually-exclusive treatments, one of which (but they don't know which) would certainly kill the patient, roughly half chose the treatment which turned out to have saved the patient.  House then commented that the other half of the students just killed the patient, at which point one of them objected "but we can't be blamed", on the grounds that there was really no way to know for sure which treatment would work.

To which Dr. House replies with this gem:

I am sure this goes against everything you've been taught, but right and wrong do exist.  Just because you don't know what the right answer is -- even if there's no way you could know what the right answer is -- doesn't make your answer right or even OK.  It's much simpler than that: it's just plain wrong.

Nobody wants to be wrong.  But, nobody's perfect.  We need to get past this obsession with not being wrong.  It's debilitating.  Don't be paralyzed by the possibility of being wrong.  Be informed; use your head and your heart... and make a decision when needed.  Then, when you are wrong ... own it; learn from it; and move on.  Great security, comfort, and confidence derive from honest self-appraisal.