Ron’s Short Review: I’m worried by the loss of face-to-face communication in our digital age. Alvin Toffler wrote nearly 40 years ago in his book “Future Shock” that in order to make this high tech stuff work well, we couldn’t abandon high touch, personal contact.
Earlier this year I reviewed the book Only Humans Nee Apply. The question raised by the book is:
How do we as humans survive in this incredible technology, robotic age that we’re now entering?
One way to look at history is through the “ages” that have been identified.
The Agriculture Age and Industrial Age are well documented and understood. One important thing to remember is the workers at the center of those ages were essentially the upper-middle class of the day.
The landowner or industry owners were the wealthy of that era, but the agricultural and industrial workers were the upper middle class of the day.
The steam engine brought an end to the industrial age when factory workers began making more money. The industrial age ended in September 2007 when the United Auto Workers wages dropped from $60/hour to $20/hour. Industrial workers could no longer make upper-middle class wages.
But when did the information age end? By some measures, it ended 50 years ago. We just haven’t noticed yet.
The next age has gone by different identifies. The Conceptional Age. The Creative Age.
What we know for sure is that we’re entering a new phase where the technology is finally hitting its stride and doing many things that the information or knowledge workers used to do. Several of our major colleges today employ sports writing “robots”. Plug in the stats from the game and the computer writes the sports story.
In his book, Only Humans Need to Apply, Tom Davenport talks about the different ways humans will survive and thrive in this machine age.
Davenport says our best chance is to augment what the machines can do. How do we begin to use that technology and apply our creativeness? The one aspect that machines haven’t mastered is being creative (so far). How do we begin to apply creativity in ways that machines would never think doing? This is how humans will survive in the technology age.
But, I believe our greatest augmentation opportunities lie in teams, not technology. We need to think about our teams in a similar way. How do we augment each other? If we don’t, we’re not gaining the incredible power of teams. We’re just a group of individuals working together. But in the same way, we think about augmenting machines, we can augment what each other do. By doing so we’re creating a team that can go far beyond even what the best individual on the team can do.
This idea of augmenting each other means we’re required to know each other not as human doings, not as what we do or how we do it but as human beings.
This is where growth happens when we’re faced with difficult situations. Teams that learn to augment each other, that function better as a team than as a group of individuals. These are the teams that will be extremely successful in the future. In fact, my belief is that if teams fully augment each other as human beings, the machines won’t have a chance.
Three months ago, she had been excited. This was the opportunity she had been working toward since she joined the company three years ago. Meaningful work is one of the more joyous things you can experience. She didn’t want this job because of its prestige or high pay. She wanted this job because it was meaningful to her, her colleagues and clients.
When I talked with her three months ago she was riding high. She explained that when she joined the company she had been hired for her skill set and outstanding success in her last assignment. But before she even joined the company she explained to the CEO that this was not her dream job. She would certainly do the job and do it well but in the end, she wanted a different assignment that was more meaningful to her.
Over the three years, she did indeed do the job well. She built a great team and was recognized beyond her company as an outstanding contributor to the industry. And while she enjoyed the work and found great satisfaction in building and growing a great team, she continued to remind the CEO on an annual basis that she was still interested in the job that was more meaningful to her. And now she had it.
She was filled with new energy and new excitement and explained all the things she wanted to accomplish in the new role. Many of them had never even been tried by the company. The breadth and depth of her vision were overwhelming when she explained all the things she wanted to build. I was wondering how any superhuman could possibly accomplish that much.
But now! Have you ever seen a large hot air balloon being deflated? The beautiful, magnificent structure stories high into the sky with a buoyancy that leaves it hovering just above the earth defying gravity. But an instant later the entire structure has gone cold, collapsed to the ground with a heavy thud and lies there motionless and useless on the ground. That was what today’s phone call felt like.
She had just come out of a budget meeting where it was clear the company was not going to meet next year’s goals and drastic cuts needed to be made. In an instant, her carefully crafted team and the multiple goals that had been hovering above the ground, ready for takeoff were now lying on the ground with no visible means of support. Deflated!
Times of plenty can destroy one of the greatest assets of leadership teams: good decision making. We’ve discussed this in other blog posts, but the concept is always worth reinforcing. The word decide (de-cide) means figure out what to kill or stop doing. In times of plenty, leaders seldom have the spirit or inclination to say “no”. Good deciding means to be clear about what you’re saying “no” to.
The other concept we began to talk about in her time of deflation was innovation and creativity. It has been well documented that the best innovation takes place when the boundaries are the tightest. Again, in times of plenty, it’s much easier to throw some ideas up on the board, try them all and see if any of them produce fruit. Not innovative! Innovation is about simplicity. Doing the most with the least. It’s those times when budget, time or resources are in extremely short supply when the best innovation happens. This was her time of opportunity. The budget was not just going to be tight, it was going to be slashed. She was going to be forced to say no to save that part that absolutely required a yes. And even the items that received the yes would need to be accomplished in the highest quality and the most elegantly simple way possible. Now was the time for true innovation.
Have you figured out how to say no? Have you absolutely insisted that things get accomplish in the most elegant, simple form possible? At some point, you will likely be forced to accomplish those tasks. You might as well get started now. Learn to say no. Do everything as elegantly as possible.
A few years ago, I became hooked on a TV series. Over time I judged it to be the best written and acted series I had ever seen. Because of the magic of Netflix, Amazon, and others, it’s now easy to go back to previous shows and watch them again as I have been doing lately. I’m not going to say which one it was because everyone has different taste in entertainment and I’m not trying to promote mine. I’m just saying that well-written TV can and does capture my attention.
However, I stopped watching TV news years ago and feel much happier avoiding it. And nothing really changes if I watch it or not.
I’m also a reader. I wasn’t always a reader but have become an avid reader. I read non-fiction material in the morning (related to my work or interests) and fiction at night (for the fun of it).
I’m often asked how I’m able to read so many books in a year. The short answer is less TV, more books.
My favorite blogger is Shane Parrish at Farnam Street Blog. I credit Shane with increasing my interest in reading because I was fascinated by how much he reads and how much he is constantly learning. Shane writes: “Newspapers are focused on things that change. You can’t run fast enough to keep up with this world and yet while you may think it’s valuable, the information you receive is full of noise. Farnam Street focuses on helping you learn things that don’t change over time — It’s an investment. What you learn today becomes the scaffolding to solving tomorrow’s problem.” While his quote is focused on newspapers and not TV, I believe it applies to TV news as well.
My interest has also been sparked by what we’re learning in the field of brain science about the impact of TV versus reading. In general, we’ve come to think of TV as bad and Reading as good. However, sometimes I watch TV in the form of movies or documentaries about the books I’ve also read. One such example is a book titled “Boys in the Boat” about the rowing crew from Washington that competed in the 1936 Olympics. PBS also did a documentary called “The Boys of ‘36”. I enjoyed both but is one form better for me than the other?
Brain research tells us that the more hours of TV watched:
The more reading we do:
Why?
TV is passive, fast-paced and shallow (not enough time for details).
Reading allows for more depth and at the same time forces the use of imaginations!
Read more. Watch less. It’s healthier.
The sun is a powerful source of light as well as energy. Every hour of every day the sun showers the earth with millions, if not billions, of kilowatts of energy. We can, however, actually tame the sun’s power. With sunglasses and sunscreen, the sun’s power is diffused, and we can be out in it with little or no negative effects.
A laser, by contrast, is a weak source of light and energy. A laser takes a few watts of energy and focuses them into a stream of light. This light, however, can cut through steel or perform microsurgery on our eyes. A laser light is a powerful tool when it is correctly focused.
Leaders cease to be powerful tools when they are out of focus and their energy is dispersed rather than targeted.
Rather than resembling a laser, too often we seem like the sun, just going up and down, splashing our energy anywhere and everywhere.
David Allen, one of the world’s most influential thinkers on personal productivity, argues that the challenge is not managing our time, but managing our focus. He believes that with all that is being thrown at leaders, they lose their ability to respond. However, he is quick to add that most leaders create the speed of it all because we allow all that stuff to enter into our lives.
What happens to our energy? Allen says,
If you allow too much dross to accumulate in your “10 acres”—in other words, if you allow too many things that represent undecided, untracked, unmanaged agreements with yourself and with others to gather in your personal space—that will start to weigh on you. It will dull your effectiveness.
Not only will your effectiveness be dulled but so will your power. Instead of being like a steel-cutting laser, you will be like the sun, putting out energy with no focus. There needs to be focus because life is not just about running faster or putting out more energy.
With so much going on around leaders, focus may seem impossible or improbable to achieve. Employees, phones, pagers, e-mail, cell phones, problems, crises, home, family, boards of directors, and other people or things demand so much. We tend to spend our time managing the tyranny of the urgent rather than concentrating our efforts on the relevant and important things that make or break an organization.
So what should we do? Is it possible to better focus your focus?
I have found that two personal qualities combine optimally to create a leader of highly developed focus: passion and achievement. These form the boundaries of focus.
The word therefore has only been used in its current form for around 200 years. It’s a relatively new word in our language.
In the original old English, it meant: for that or by reason of that. Or it could be understood to mean “in consequence of that.”
The question is “What is that?”
We all too often give our reason for something without ever explaining what that reason is based upon.
By reason of that
In consequence of that
One of the practices I find myself talking to corporate teams about is conducting good dialogue. Good dialogue begins with clearly stating the “that” which your argument or conclusions are based upon.
Peter Senge wrote the book The 5th Discipline in 1990. In my experience with corporate clients, it was one of the most impactful books written at the time. Every client I worked with during the late 90’s and early 2000’s was anxious to show me what they were doing with systems thinking (the point of Senge’s book) and re-engineering projects to rethink how they were approaching their work. The book itself was over 400 pages long and my personal notes of highlights were nearly 40 pages. That means I highlighted nearly 10% of all the words written. It was impactful thinking!
One of the basic mental models in the book was Triple Loop Learning. It is most often attributed to Chris Argyris who was a colleague of Senge. In this model, they helped us understand that until we get at the beliefs and assumptions that drive our reasoning we will never actually learn or will always fall short of accomplishing major change efforts. Beliefs and assumptions will always overrule systems, policies, procedures, and processes.
Teams that get good at starting with beliefs and assumptions of each team member find renewed understanding and respect for each other and make great strides accomplishing great things beyond what one individual could accomplish.
In my experience, if you were to watch high performing teams from behind a soundproof glass, you would think they were at each other’s throats. They seem to be aggressively going at each other and getting in each other’s face. But, if you removed the glass and began to hear the discussions, you would be aware that they want to understand each other so deeply that they are aggressively going after the beliefs, assumptions, backgrounds, experiences that support everyone’s starting points when dealing with a difficult issue. By understanding beliefs and assumptions, the team is better at solving problems and reaching a committed solution they all will back and support.
So, what is your therefore there for? If you can’t share what you believe without condemnation, ridicule or repercussions your “therefore” conclusions, suggestions or directions will never be understood or respected. Build great teams that can openly share Beliefs and Assumptions so that “therefore” is understood and respected.
Ron’s Short Review: Ray builds on Life Principles such as: embrace reality, understand that people are different, and effective decision making. He moves into Work Principles with get the culture right, trust in radical truth, and others. Very thought-provoking.
Staying focused is virtually impossible without passion. So how do you identify and capitalize on your passion in the leadership setting?
Passion is a craving deep within us, that yearning for something we feel we just must have. It surfaces in a multitude of ways. For example, consider the story of Patrick (Pádraic) Henry Pearse.
Headmaster at St. Edna’s, a small private college south of Dublin, Pearse’s passion was Ireland’s heritage, something he feared was being destroyed by the domination of the English.
Pearse was by nature a gentle man who could never harm even the smallest creature. He had spent his life helping his students understand and pursue their own big dreams. Pearse certainly was not considered a militant or a revolutionary. Yet he was driven by his passion for Ireland.
No longer able to watch the nation’s language, culture, and history eroding, he felt it was time “to pursue his own great goals that, in his words, ‘were dreamed in the heart and that only the heart could hold.’ ”
He embraced the cause to reclaim Ireland and within a year was a leader of the Easter Rising, the Irish rebellion of 1916. After days of intense fighting, the British army defeated the revolutionaries, and on May 3, 1916, Pearse and others were executed in a jail in Dublin. The British leaders mistakenly thought this would put an end to the rebellion. But they did not understand the power of a person’s passion, as people across Ireland embraced Pearse’s ideas for saving Ireland and dreaming big dreams.
In 1921, Ireland declared freedom from England, and Pearse’s passion and dreams for the Irish culture came to fruition. Pádraic Henry Pearse’s passion ultimately forced a nation to find itself.
Finding our passion includes dreaming big. Ask yourself some questions:
Answers to questions like these will point you to your passion.
This post may have fit well with the recent Balancing Act series. There is an interesting point between fear and excitement. Staying balanced can be healthy. Too much fear is detrimental to your health. Too much excitement with little regard for fear can be fatal. The Darwin Awards are built on this last premise. The Darwin Awards give the highest honor (tong-in-cheek) to those who remove themselves from the gene pool by doing really stupid things.
Fear and excitement produce the same physiological effect. The body can’t distinguish between the two so the brain has to make a judgment. Should I be fearful at this moment or simply excited?
If you haven’t seen anything by Jordon Peterson lately you should look him up. He’s saying things that create a lot of reaction mainly because they are simply the truth that people don’t want to hear. In his book 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, rule number 8 is “Tell the Truth – or, at least, don’t lie”.
The truth about fear is that lies are intended to avoid fear while actually creating it. Jordon says
Taking the easy way out or telling the truth – those are not merely two different choices. They are different pathways through life. They are utterly different ways of existing.
Existing in a world of lies leads to fear.
Someone living a life-lie is attempting to manipulate reality with perception, thought and actions so that only some narrowly desired and pre-defined outcome is allowed to exist.
When you don’t open up to the truth by listening to others (His Rule 9 is: Assume that the person you are listening to might know something you don’t), you begin creating a world as only you see it.
Peterson goes on to say:
If you betray yourself, if you say untrue things, if you act out a lie, you weaken your character. If you have a weak character, that adversity will mow you down when it appears, as it will, inevitably. You will hide, but there will be no place left to hide. And then you will find yourself doing terrible things. Willful blindness is the worst sort of lie.
You can pick up Peterson’s book if you want to see his other 10 rules for avoiding chaos. They are all good and some are surprising.
In my work I’m always trying to help leadership teams behave calmly in the chaos or at least make sense out of is so that fear doesn’t take over. One of the better mental models that I turn to is Aristotle’s Levels of Happiness. The highest level, Level IV, I believe creates great teams. The first element of Level IV is Truth. Speaking it. Discovering it. Acting on it. Teams that seek the truth by listening (with the intent to understand) to each other avoid the fear and chaos of dealing with lies.
One last quote from Peterson’s book:
You can use words to manipulate the world into delivering what you want. This is what it means to “act politically.”
Don’t act politically. It leads to fear. Act truthfully. It leads to happiness.
In one of my recent posts about Balance, I spoke to the human need of balancing certainty and uncertainty.
A really good quote from Warren Buffett is “The five most dangerous words in business are: ‘Everybody else is doing it.”
He’s speaking of the need for Social Proof. When we are uncertain, we observe those around us to figure out how we should behave or how we should think. This need for certainty plus the need for belonging (also addressed in the Balance Blog) can combine for a deadly combination. That’s why Buffett describes them as dangerous.
This combines with another experience I (and likely you) have had when one of my parents discovered that I had done something stupid and asked “Would you jump off a building just because all your friends were doing it? Unfortunately, there are a few examples in history of people doing exactly that.
So how do we turn a moment of Social Proof into a moment of Social Poof? Magicians make things go “poof.” They disappear in a poof of smoke or a flurry of bright handkerchiefs. Why did they go, poof? Because they were illusions. They weren’t real. They were figments of our imaginations. The magician wanted us to “see” them so he could make them disappear.
Our marketing world is full of these Social Proof poofs.
You’re really somebody when you drive one of our cars.
Everybody who’s anybody drinks our beverage.
“Hi, I’m a professional actor and I endorse this product. You should want to buy it.” (Check out the Ted Danson Smirnoff commercials. They’re a great spoof of this concept.)
But, back to the purpose of this post. “The five most dangerous words in business.” Social Proof is a dangerous practice for leadership teams. I’ve seen these environments emerge when
Great teams break down these barriers and attempts at Social Proof by trusting and respecting diverse points of view and honestly dialoguing through them.
Make your Social Proofs go Poof! You and the team will be better off and better balanced.
Ron’s Short Review: Anything less than Radical Candor leaves issues unsaid and unexamined. This builds on the concept of Psychological Saftey which is a key to team success.
My wife and I are in the middle of a renovation project. Not large but it still requires framing, drywall, plumbing, electrical, tile work, finish carpentry and painting. At one point or another, we’ve had the heat, gas, and electrical all shut-off.
I overheard my wife talking to a friend who had asked her how the project was going. “Hard, messy and very disruptive” was the response given. But then she said, “But we know it will turn out nice, so we can put up with the disruption for a while.
While it didn’t make things less hard, messy or disruptive, knowing that the end product was going to be pleasing and meet our needs helped.
That made me think about Team Renovation Projects. I’ve seldom worked with a stable team for a great length of time. There have been a couple and I can tell you that it’s been very helpful in building team strength and cohesion. But most teams are going through nearly constant renovation. Teams are under constant change. The company is growing or shrinking which changes team size. People are coming and going to and from new jobs. Corporate restructuring is happening on a regular basis. Teams are under constant renovation.
But, team renovations are not as clear and obvious as room renovations. Instead of knowing that things will turn out nice, we wonder:
Not knowing the answer to these and other questions and doubts lowers our ability to deal with the disruption. Or in some cases, I’ve had leaders who don’t believe there should be any disruptions and therefore have little tolerance for it.
Team renovations are disruptive. But, just like the home project, if we’ve designed well, selected the right people that fit well, and have a clear picture of how things will look and work with this new team, our ability to cope with the disruptions increases. Our ability to be patient through the disruption increases the odds of a successful renovation.
