Rowan's Future of Choice

"Optimism is true moral courage"

Sir Ernest Shackleton is my hero. He reminds me that we have so many reasons for optimism, and so many excuses to forget them.

"Bad leaders have an unhappy, unproductive and disloyal staff, making hard work even harder, limiting chances of success, and making it impossible to achieve beyond expectations. It's better, he reasoned, to lighten your burden and the burdens of others with a positive attitude and helpful gestures. 'Optimism is true moral courage.'"

Stephanie Capparell, writing about, and quoting, explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton

Article; photo

Organization change through the decision lens

One of most frustrating issues in operations research and organization leadership is the high failure rate of large, multi-dimensional change programs. These are the types of programs that result generally from mergers and acquisitions, technology replacements, or significant policy or market shifts. They often involve hundreds of people and tens of millions of dollars. Large organizations want to be stable and profitable operations: they are distressed by anything that rocks the boat or introduces risk. Three decision points are critical to increasing the chances of successful change:

Whether to do it. This decision is usually put off until a crisis brews or a deadline looms. Many companies can mobilize only with a looming threat. (This is the famous burning platform.) The key is to mobilize before the crisis hits.

When and how to do it. This decision is usually optimized to disrupt current operations as little as possible, which, if the place is really in flames, is not a wise move. This decision requires lots of data, emotional intelligence, and the courage to tailor the plan.

Correcting the course along the way. This decision is the real opportunity for the inevitable roller coaster of change, for this one big decision should really be dozens of smaller ones.

I have a couple of 'secrets' to managing large-scale change that relate to the second point:

• Spend half of the planning phase on understanding lessons learned from past attempts at both your organization and others, and
• Spend half of the design phase on tailoring these lessons to the near and long-term changes.

What to do with that extra up-front time?

1. Make the people who are the 'targets' of change a part of the decision to change and the program’s design.
2. Individuals don't give up what they have today on the promise of getting something better in the future. Design benefits that are tangible, low-risk, and delivered in pieces.
3. Change leaders and projects managers must give equal attention to organizational or personal losses, as well as corporate gains. The program philosophy and plan must explicitly address "loss management" in addition to communicating benefits.
4. Change program success cannot depend solely on new technologies or what succeeded elsewhere. The technologies and business practices at the heart of most change programs are usually over-sold or just won't work in the conditions at hand. (Think ERP.)
5. Change designs must transcend the personality and short-term agenda of the current executive sponsor. The full benefits of any large change are never achieved on one leader’s watch.

Plan on it.

Under the halo of uncertainty

Interesting short article on the halo effect in decision-making:

Rather than search for simplistic formulas that promise success, managers would do better to adjust their thinking. First, they must recognize the fundamental uncertainty of the business world. Decisions become a matter of probabilities, ways to improve the odds of success, while never imagining that high performance can be engineered. Thinking this way does not come naturally. People want the world to make sense, to be predictable, and to act according to clear rules of cause and effect. Managers want to believe their business world is similarly predictable, that specific actions will lead to certain outcomes. Yet strategic choice is inevitably an exercise in decision making under uncertainty.

By Phil Rosenzweig, Professor at IMD, the International Institute for Management Development, in Lausanne, Switzerland. Link at ChangeThis.

Finding the right question to ask

UPDATE TO AN EARLIER POST

I just spent an enlightening day at a workshop put on by the World Institute for Action Learning. Action learning is an intriguing Socratic approach for helping people and organizations become more effective, especially when faced with complex and difficult problems. Central to Action Learning is coming up with really good questions. I posted this a while back:

We love to build consensus on the top questions to answer:

• How do we beat the competition?
• How do we build a better mouse trap?
• What will it take to become more efficient?

Our shared questions take on a life of their own that is somewhat useful: they help us communicate and make us feel we are part of a team that is working towards something. Unhappily, we usually believe that the answer to a shared question will have more value than it really does.  Peter Drucker reminds us:

"The most common source of mistakes in management decisions is the emphasis on finding the right answer rather than the right question."

Source: The Practice of Management; Peter Drucker; 1993 HarperBusiness

World Institute for Action Learning (WIAL)

A better gift decision

No Baskets, Please. Alternate gifting decisions. Help the world. Click here to learn more.

Courtesy of Andrew Zolli and the folks at Z+ Partners.

Change as a function of choice

Our modern consumer culture is flush with choices nearly every day of the year except election day. Why is that?

I am not saying that politicians are like washers and dryers or toaster ovens. They should not be consumer choices. They are flesh and blood people we choose to make important decisions for us.

But given the wide range of opinions and viewpoints that more than 100 million voters must have on critical issues, why are there only one or two viable candidates for each office on the ballot? Is it because of access, money, the party system, attention span?

It is clear that politicians use elections to listen to the people: "The people have spoken through their choices," they say. It is also clear--today at least, that this occasional form of listening is inadequate in a world that is changing so quickly.

There I go again, equating choice with change. I'll have to think about this some more. What do you think?
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Graphic

Take me to your leaderly one

As part of our ambition to have others decide for us, we defer to so-called 'leaders' in our organizations. We want them to make the big, tough decisions, and will tolerate the higher pay and prestige they often get. We also expect them to take the fall if decisions go bad (though often it does not work out that way).

Leaders come in two basic flavors: 'appointed' ones, who lead by way of authority, and 'earned' ones, who could be anyone who acts in ways that I call 'leaderly.'

McGill business school professor, Henry Mintzberg, "has launched his latest attack on his own profession of management scholars by denouncing the teaching of leadership, the latest business school trend."

Mintzberg:

...decries “managers who sit on “top”, pronouncing their great visions grand strategies, and abstract performance standards.” Good management and leadership, he argues, cannot be separated. “Does anyone want to work for a manager who lacks the qualities of leadership?...Well, how about a leader that doesn’t practice management?”

I believe that leadership is something each of us practices to a varying extent. It should not be the job description of a select few.

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Financial Times article

5 ways to make the PopTech conference even better

I just returned from my second PopTech in Camden, Maine. I listened and talked to many different kinds of people: doctors, designers, business people, communicators, scientists, musicians, teachers, and students. Each in their own way, they mostly described the 500-person conference as mind-bending, incredible, and inspiring. I agree. We flocked to the Camden Opera House to regenerate, fuel-up, get inspired, or 'recover' from our daily routines.

One young woman, an industrial designer from New York City, told me she thinks about the three-day conference throughout the year. The owner of a small software company told me that PopTech is like the legendary village of Brigadoon: an enchanted place that appears too infrequently.

Along with co-founders Bob Metcalfe and John Sculley, current president Tom DeVine, and 'curator' Andrew Zolli, the many volunteers who are responsible for producing PopTech have kept the conference tightly run and somewhat provocative over the past decade. The theme for this year's sold-out event was 'dangerous ideas.'

My ideas for PopTech are not dangerous, but they are worth considering. My readers know that I see decisions and choices everywhere. I believe decisions and choices are the signposts of our lives and societies. (There are some links to earlier posts below.) Here are a few ideas for making new PopTech signposts:

1. Get excited, get with it, and get moving.  PopTech is becoming a significant platform for change. Yeah! The Tanzania Project is one of the few examples of pushing the conference into the real world. PopTech 2007 should begin with an update on platform progress, not end with it. There should be monthly communications between events.
2. Professional production. The PopTech team prides itself on being highly polished and professional. That's fine, but it consumes a lot of resources, and is not always necessary. The event needs less scripting, gloss, and controlled scheduling. Lighten up, loosen up. Get more like the larger world.
3. Moving from 500-to-one to many-to-many. The opera house was built for staged performances, which is not what PopTech is about. As much as I love the ambiance and architecture of the old hall, PopTech needs several, more flexible spaces that foster conversation, spontaneity, and experimentation. These are difficult when the seats are bolted down, facing the stage, and the only ad-hoc spaces are out on the street.
4. People mash. There should be more time for unstructured conversations. Break time is robbed to get back on schedule instead of protected as essential time to talk. Also, a speaker should not disappear after making his presentation or talk: he should stick around and mingle. Brian Eno exemplified this. He participated in every session. He sat in several different seats and met many of us. He asked lots of questions. (I use the pronoun 'he' because there are far too few women at PopTech, both in front and behind the microphone.)
5. Excessive gadget/gizmo/geekiness. Technology is a smokescreen that sometimes hides the real issues and problems. For example, chef-to-the-rich-and-quirky Homaro Cantu handed out copyrighted squares of edible paper, saying this technology could feed the poor. That is fine, but it is my understanding that hunger is a political problem, not a technical one. PopTech should aspire to be the iPod of tech-enabled change; technology so sublime that it disappears and lets the music take over.

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PopTech; Camden, Maine; Brigadoon; Zuckerman on Eno and the Tanzania Project; Jason Kottke blogged it; other PopTech bloggers; my blog posts where I argue that decisions are everywhere,  here and here.

"We lied morning, noon and night"

Once we embrace others' decisions as our own, such as by joining a political party or buying into a product or customer experience, we must keep up with every development or risk a widening gap between expectations and reality. Let me give you an example from European politics.

Hungary's elected Prime Minister, Ferenc Gyurcsany, is in the news for saying in private what he couldn't say in public. His real thoughts are now out in the open, and the people who voted for him are upset with his honesty.

Gyurcsany said:

"We repeated and repeated that you can be richer, fulfil your dreams, and we can give you happiness and fortune as a gift. This is a real lie. For the last 15 years, none of us were brave enough to initiate deep reform. We wanted to avoid painful measures and always found excuses not to act. That's the real lie."  He says now he is the first politician brave enough to admit his mistakes.

BBS News story

UPDATE 9/25: To Americans, it's about the pie.

Thinking small about decisions

In thinking about the speed, quality, and impact of positive changes in decision-making, I came up initially with four scenarios:

1. Big change by many people at the same time never happens voluntarily.
2. Small change by many people takes generations, and lasts as long.
3. Big change coordinated by small numbers of influential people is rare.
4. Small change by a few influential people can have a big, quick impact.