Month: September 2019

Curveballs vs Flips

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Life is going to throw all kinds of stuff our way. From the small to the life changing. I’ll call the small ones curveballs and the life changing ones flips. Here’s how I’m starting to make sense of their distinction.

Curveballs are temporary – events that change the course of a few days or weeks. We all have them. My current curveballs are a termite infestation ( gross but manageable ) and a complete change in week end plans to help a friend in need.

Flips are longer term, more dramatic and longer term changes to life context. An example parents can relate to are the changing perspectives required as your children age. When they’re young, you want to protect and nurture them. As they get older, the approach needs to flip to encouraging independence.

Why do we care about these distinctions? Because it’s important to understand what is temporary and what is permanent. The temporary are things we can let slide and roll with the punches. We deal with them as they come but they don’t have a lasting impact on how we live. The more permanent however, are fundamental changes to how we need to approach the world because the world has literally changed.

Both require a growth mindset, but the mental toughness required to rewire your approach to the world requires 10x the effort. Once you recognize which you’re dealing with, you can allocate proportionate energy.

Why organizations spin

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In my experience, most people have the best of intentions at work. They see problems at work and want to solve them.  They create strategies, work plans and activities to try to fix the problem within their specific context.  While they get an A for effort, the reality is they may do more harm than good. Why?

  • Organizations are systems. The problem is that most issues are connected to other parts of the mothership. When a process breaks down in one area, trying to fix that area on its own could be a short term solve, but it could break or slow things down in other areas. A classic example is optimization of a single task – say call centre. We want to decrease the time on call at help desk. We may try to fix that by passing them off to another group or by speeding up the solve on the phone. But if we try to fix the system, we create resources so the call doesn’t happen in the first place.
  • People want to feel like they’re making a difference. They hear of an issue and set about trying to fix it without communicating or asking if other people are working on it. They forge ahead but often don’t know what they don’t know. This leads to …
  • Many programs, one goal. The number of projects and programs spun up to tackle and organizational priority can be astounding. It’s so rampant in large companies there are often additional projects to gather the activities so they are aligned. If I had to guess, any one organization has a multitude of innovation, onboarding, data projects, new customer etc. underway trying to solve the same or similar problems.

The result is wasted effort and, more importantly, time that could have been spent driving a new product forward, or on other valuable company projects. So how do we get beyond the spin? Organizations need to:

  • Declare – at the top of the house the strategy, workstreams and how is leading
  • Define – the activities for each workstream and who is leading
  • Drive – move with speed so people see results and don’t spin up more work

Purpose. Clarity. Speed. Seems easy, but we all know it’s not. With a leadership team open to exploring, talent that is keen, smart, creative and passionate and a dose of structure, you’re that much closer to solving the things that are important for your organization.

When things are hard

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I’ve been thinking a lot about doing things that are hard things lately.  Over the past decade+, I’ve been on a journey from being an entrepreneur (which was hard but fun), to taking a career sabbatical (which was fun but hard for someone who really likes work) to my current role as a corporate executive (which is mostly hard and a little fun – so far).

While everyone has a set of things they find hard, the following seem to ring true as the causes for things being hard. People may …

  • Lack the capability (don’t have the skills)
  • Lack of experience (don’t have mental model)
  • Lack of practice (haven’t built the muscle)
  • Things are too ambiguous (no goalposts)
  • Lack of drive (no passion or desire)
  • Lack of perspective (no understanding of why)
  • ….

When encountering hard things, I find shifting my mindset works well to reduce the stress (of which there is plenty!). This looks something like:

  • I love hard things – they push me to learn and gather new experiences
  • Learning this new thing will help me prepare for future events
  • The greater purpose of getting through this is _________________
  • ….

My son is going through his own “hard things” phase with the start of a new school year. We talked about mindset, changing the way we look at the world and he had an epiphany. 

We can do anything except if we do nothing.  

It’s hard to argue with that kind of wisdom and clarity.

8 tips to design your next brainstorm

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I spent the majority of my day at a company offsite today. Picture a room with 25-30 well meaning executives at a large organization. The topic of discussion – how do we win more customers in an increasingly competitive environment where we are already a market leader? The day invariably kicks off with context setting and numbers – what did we commit to, where are we today and how far do we need to go – followed by break out sessions to brainstorm ideas. As the day went on, I took on the role of corporate ethnographer (as I often do) and stepped out of body to observe the room. What did I see?

Facilitators of ideation

  • Cross functional – multidisciplinary teams. Creating the setting for openness and multiple perspective is critical. To set this up for success, there needs to be some teaming or common goal setting …see next
  • Setting the stage. People need to know why they are there, the goals of the day and what we want to walk out of the day(s) with. This helps to structure mindset and also develop guardrails and openness to new ideas
  • Ice breakers to get everyone speaking. This is for all teams whether they know each other or not. An important aspect of ideation is trusting the people you’re ideating with so you can feel open to speak. This is very difficult in multi-team environments where people may be worried about post session impacts
  • Feeding and hydrating participants. This is a given. Hungry and thirsty people don’t ideation very well.

Blocks to ideation

  • A lack of insights or stimulus. This is by far the most important ingredient to ideation. In conjunction with prompts and solid activity structure, insights help to provide aha moments and starters to ideation. Stimuli – via examples or new mental models put participants in different frames of mind to open the door to ideation. Without these, there is a natural reliance on falling back to 1/n=1 experiences and 2/ideas that are comfortable and likely already brought up in previous brainstorms.
  • Flat and unfocused facilitators. Choosing who runs these sessions is critical. Part smarts, part energy and the ability to coax teams to action is important. Facilitators also need to have the confidence to guide sr. leaders and push back. The mark of unskilled or inexperienced facilitators is runaway conversations
  • Topics that are too broad or too specific. Developing working sessions is an art. Landing on the right level of specificity on a topic is as important as the topic itself. Too broad and teams will feel like they are boiling the ocean and won’t land in action. Too specific and the ideas end up being narrow.
  • Too many participants. Today was a clear example of many strong voices vying for airtime. The result was a lot of discussion and talking but without much depth. Fewer people run in a series of brainstorms would have yielded richer and more focused ideas

If you’ve experienced a well facilitated session, you exit feeling energized, filled with ambition and a drive to get things done. In a session that isn’t as well done, participants often come out exhausted, unclear and ambivalent.

Working sessions are a great way to achieve ambitious goals. Time is the scarce resource none of us have in abundance Make the most of it with your leaders, peers and teams through thoughtfully designed and delivered offsite and brainstorms.

How to define what’s important to your organization

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In the world of organizational strategy,  brand and employee experience, companies trying to figure out who they are can be an infinite loop. Between strategy, vision, mission, purpose, values, principles, culture, models and many more,  where does a leader even begin? Let’s start with definitions  (Source: adapted from Google).

  • Strategy: a plan of action or policy designed to achieve a major or overall aim
  • Mission: a strongly felt aim, ambition, or calling
  • Vision: the ability to think about or plan the future with imagination or wisdom
  • Purpose: the reason for which something is done, created or for which it exists
  • Principles: a fundamental attribute determining the nature of something; an essence
  • Values: principles or standards of behaviour;  judgment of what is important in life
  • Culture: the customs, arts, social institutions, and achievements of a group
  • Model: a system or thing used as an example to follow or imitate

Looking at this list, a picture of a Venn diagram is beginning to emerge where Purpose overlaps with Mission, Strategy with Vision, Principles with Values (it has the world principles in it for crying out loud). And culture – well culture is just a part of everything so it’s the ultimate container. So – why do organizations feel like they need to check all the boxes and create bodies of work behind each of these? The answer is – they don’t and shouldn’t.

As we define the companies we build and lead, we need focus on what matters – the core and content in how we deliver on how we show up day to day. Let’s get back to the fundamentals of  Why (Purpose / Mission), What (Strategy  / Vision) and How (Culture / Values / Principles). Use whatever label you like,  but keep it to 3 and have each one clearly defined so they can be easily communicated and delivered.

Personally like using Purpose, Strategy and Culture to describe the big O (overall organization) and principles to get to specificity.

Habits make our lives

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The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. While this timeless piece of wisdom from Lao Zi (老子) is uncontested in its truth, the first step is easy. It’s the other 999.99 steps we need to contend with. Research on habit formation and breaking focus on the science of deliberate vs. impulse driven decisions, strength and plasticity of neural relationships and how rewards influence them.

Making and breaking habits is really hard. Our habits form who we are. They become our character and changing them can feel near impossible. Summing up the science in lay terms:

  1. Doing what you know… There’s comfort in the familiar so we gravitate to those things. Can we create comfort in the unfamiliar?
  2. … and knowing what to do. Mastery of a skill begets using that skill. Developing new skills take time and the learning curve can be steep.
  3. What if it _______ (hurts, is boring, sucks, isn’t as much fun… fill in the blank). Fear of the unknown can wreak havoc on the journey to a new habit. How can we replace this narrative?

These apply equally to professional and personal lives. I’m particularly interested in habits at this moment of midlife rebirth. (Habits in progress — writing regularly, moving more, drinking less, sleeping more.) We have the opportunity to do so much at any stage in life— who we are and our journey is created by the things we do every day.

“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” Annie Dillard.

First drafted Sept 5, 2017

Why having fun matters in work

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I’ve just come back from brunch with a good friend who I would characterize as one of the leading thinkers in leadership and organizational design. She does a good job in prioritizing what matters for her and this is something I have been working through of late. While her advice, includes some of the elements of other prioritization frameworks  (top 2-3 important things etc.) she also considers how much “fun” a project is. I’m a big believer in having fun at work. It makes hard work easier. It turns challenges into opportunities.

But you might say, having fun is subjective – I thought you wrote about objectivity. Let’s ground fun in another psychological concept coined by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi – being in flow – when an individual is in a highly focused mental state conducive to productivity. So why does it matter? When you’re having fun, you are also experiencing flow.  It is a self perpetuating positive cycle – when you’re in flow, you are working on things that matter to you, that you have developed (or are developing) skill in and there is purpose and intention – regardless of how long or how much effort it takes – which creates the desire to do more of it. It’s at the intersection of inspiration, ambition, skill and mindset.

So as you’re thinking about how you spend your time and the projects you take on, consider the kind of work you find fun and how to bring those elements into your day to day. The old adage that if you love what you do you’ll never work a day in your life continues to ring true. Have fun and work can be play.