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Idiots and Nobodies: Gaining New Perspective

by Ron Potter

“I’ve learned more from idiots and nobodies than from professionals of this or that.”
–Henry Miller from his book, On Turning 80

Photo Credit: Matthew Hoelscher, Creative Commons

Photo Credit: Matthew Hoelscher, Creative Commons

I certainly don’t work with idiots or nobodies. The people who are successful at the top of corporations where I work are energetic, and highly motivated. But I find something very interesting about Millers quote.

The etymology of the word “idiot” says: “From Ancient Greek’s idites, a private citizen, one who has no professional knowledge, layman.”

If we put Miller’s quote together with the etymology, it suggests that we learn more from the non-professional non-expert than we will from the pro.

Now on the surface that’s ridiculous. Our experts and pros spend years and careers understanding aspects of our business world. There are times when I feel like I need every brain cell I can muster just to hang on to a casual conversation between two experts on a given topic.

But here’s the kicker: our world is changing, shifting, and evolving rapidly. The things that I was an “expert” in 20 years ago in the computer industry are essentially worthless and meaningless today. Now, that’s not to say that our experts and pros don’t grow and develop and evolve as well. They do. But by becoming experts we’ve seen it all; We know what to expect; We know how things work. And therein lies the problem.

We may need Innovation more than Experts

When we need innovation or change or we’re facing a disruptive event in our industry, we often have to take new perspectives or think about our business in totally new ways. Experts become victims of their own knowledge. When our brain has an expectation of what we’re going to see, we miss all kinds of interesting things going on around us.

There’s a wonderful experiment where the participants are asked to view a video of two teams in a gym bouncing and passing a basketball. The participants are given the assignment of counting how many passes are made by one of the teams. While watching the video and accomplishing their task, the majority of participants miss the fact (completely don’t see it) that a man in a gorilla suit walks right through the middle of gym. They were too focused to see the bigger picture.

To see things differently and gain new perspective, bring in some idiots (not professional knowledge) and nobodies and listen to them. They’ll see the gorilla in the room when the pros won’t.

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Surviving the Darkest Days

by Ron Potter

In my previous blog on the book “American Icon” by Bryce Hoffman, I commented on the leadership style exhibited by Alan Mulally as he led the Ford Motor Company through some of their darkest days.  He exhibited two key characteristics, Humility and Endurance that are hallmarks of great leadership and may have helped him save Ford.

Photo credit: John Spooner, Creative Commons

Photo credit: John Spooner, Creative Commons

Dedication to Teamwork

But it may have been his dedication to teamwork that was equally important to the survival of Ford.  The auto industry and Ford in particular were not pillars of teamwork at the top.  While I’ve worked with many great teams within the auto companies, the warring chiefdoms of the larger corporation often seemed to be the culture de jour.

Self-Selection

When Mulally first arrived in Detroit, both the existing leadership team and the outside community (mainly the press) assumed there would be a clean sweep as Alan brought in his trusted team members from his years at Boeing.  But, Mulally surprised them all when he answered one of the first reporters that his team was already in place, meaning the previous team members of Bill Ford’s team.  He commented with a very particular statement that I have shared with many of the leaders that I’ve worked with through the years.  Build the right vision and culture and the people who don’t belong there and won’t work out in the end will self-select out.  Once they realize that you, as a new leader, are truly taking the team or company in a new direction and you endure through all of the setbacks, they’ll either get on board (as Mark Fields did in the book and is now the current CEO of Ford) or they’ll realize they don’t belong and figure out how to save face and move on.

The Tyranny of Competence

This may be the more difficult issue to deal with when creating great teams.  The Tyranny of Competence is a title Chapter in Robert Quinn’s book Deep Change.  Quinn states that “It is fairly easy to find an extraordinarily competent person who plays a particularly powerful role in the organization.”  “The person often argues, ‘The only thing that should matter is how well someone does the job.’”  In Mulally’s case, it happened to be the Chief Financial Officer (CFO).  This was not only a powerful role but a critical role. Hoffman writes of the CFO “[He] had devoted his life to Ford and worked as hard or harder than anyone else in the building to save it.  But he was dividing the company at a time when it needed to be united like never before.  He had to go.”

The Darkest Moment

In this darkest moment, when you would think that you need all of the hard working competency you can find, Mulally decided that teamwork was more important than experience and hardworking competency.  And he acted.  Mulally, was not looking for blind loyalty, he had demonstrated time and time again that he preferred to hear contrary opinions and radical ideas.  But the CFO was making decisions on his own that were contrary to the team decisions and enforcing them in spite of where the team and Mulally thought they should be going.  This was not going to work.  Teamwork was more crucial in the darkest of days.

What have you seen or how hard have you worked at really building team?  A lot gets written about teamwork in companies. What are you actually experiencing?  Share some stories with us.

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Quick deciding vs quick learning
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Quick Deciding vs Quick Learning

by Ron Potter
Quick deciding vs quick learning

Photo credit: Anne-Lise Heinrich, Creative Commons

I have observed what I believe to be a very detrimental shift in thinking within our corporate cultures over the last 15 years.

We’ve been inundated with instant communication that is with us everywhere 24/7 (I had one of the first Blackberrys as soon as it hit the market in early 1999). To be clear, I’m not railing against this technology. I love it and I couldn’t imagine running my business or staying in touch with my family and the world without it. But it has interjected a sense of speed and quickness that is altering the way we think and decide as we try to conduct business in a globally connected world.
However, this belief that we must decide quickly changes the dynamics of decision making in a detrimental way. Good decision making (See my post on Prudence) requires good deliberation. However, if we’re in a quick deciding frame of mind we get defensive when:

  • someone raises an issue that feels like it is not in line with the current thinking or
  • will open that proverbial “can of worms” if we entertain the idea, or
  • they simply don’t agree with the current approach.

Teams have developed all kinds of behavior to suppress, shut down or discount the questioning view point. This eliminates good deliberation and will lead to an inferior (or even wrong) decision.
The shift we need to make is back to a quick learning attitude and then use a good process to make good decisions. What’s interesting to me is that teams who have mastered this quick learning leading to good decision approach, consistently make decisions quicker than those with the quick deciding attitude (not to mention better decisions).
Get better at

    • Quick learning with a…
    • Team of diverse points of view and…
    • Practicing good deliberation techniques to…
    • Reach great and lasting decisions.

You and your team will feel more productive, less stressed and will also begin to gain the reputation as high achievers.

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Hard Choices

by Ron Potter

I read Jeffrey Katsenberg’s book, “Hard Things About Hard Things.”

I just listened to Ruth Chan’s TED talk, “Hard Choices.”

So here’s the Hard Thing about Hard Choices:

Ruth explains that any choice that can be quantified is an easy choice because all numeric values can be related to each other based on their comparative amounts but hard choices are based on values.
Values can’t be quantified and compared to each other. Values are based on who we are and who we want to be. Ruth goes on to look at the dilemma from a person’s point of view and concludes that taking the quantitative approach is the safest way out. Making a value based decision forces us to choose who we want to be. I agree. This is a great personal growth philosophy.

But here’s the hard part: I work with corporate leadership teams where I help individuals make their own personal value and growth decisions through my personal coaching. The problem is we also have to make hard team decisions.
I believe most corporate teams fool themselves into believing they only make logical, fact based decisions or believe all decisions can be reduced to a number exercise so that the >=< analysis can be made. But as Ruth explains, hard choices are not quantitative in nature; they’re value based.

So how do you get a bunch of MBA trained financial experts, engineers, marketers, and scientists to make the hard choices based on value?

You need to build team.
Not just a team with defined roles and responsibilities, not just a team with clearly defined interfaces and decision gates. Not just a team of various functions that get together to discuss and coordinate the business. Not a team, but TEAM!
Teams are built on respect and trust. Teams honor and appreciate the diversity of thinking, attitudes, and beliefs that we bring to the table. Teams know who we are and what shapes us and what values we hold dear and what values we won’t violate.

These teams are fully capable of making the hard decisions and are fully capable of making them work.
If you want to build a great company, build a great TEAM.

Have you been fortunate enough to be part of a great team? Share with us how that happened. What made it work? What’s keeping your current team from being a great team?

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Decide: We’ve Got it All Backwards

by Ron Potter

I’ve learned this concept from Chris McGoff. In his book, The Primes: How Any Group Can Solve Any Problem, Chris lays out numerous frameworks on how teams work. One of the most powerful for me and many of my teams is understanding the meaning of the word “Decide.”

I’m not trying to be morbid here, but what do the following words have in common?: pesticide, homicide, suicide, genocide? They all end in “cide.” In Latin, the word means kill, killer, murderer, to cause death. One of my clients who was a Latin student said there was even an indication of public execution—to put to death publicly.

So, if we go back to our word decide, it doesn’t mean to figure out what to do, it means to figure out what to kill.

If leaders and teams would actually start killing off the options or directions they’ve decided not to pursue, a great amount of resources could be saved and redirected toward the chosen path.

When you must decide, figure out what you’re going to kill and publicly execute it.

Image Source: Brandon Doran

Image Source: Brandon Doran

All too often, we decide what we’re going to do and we muster the resources to pursue that option. But no one tells the many people down through the organization what to stop doing. And in fact, there’s lots of momentum in the life of the organization for people to continue doing what they’ve been doing over the last several months or years. If you don’t publicly execute that work, they’ll naturally continue to do it.

As I was working through this concept with one of my clients, one team member said, “But we’re really good at prioritizing our work.” And she was right. The organization was really good at knowing which issues should receive top priority and the most resources. But as we continued to pursue the concept, it became painfully obvious how many resources were being applied to extremely low priority items. In fact, by deciding to kill off those low priority items it was astounding how many resources would be freed up to concentrate on the things that really need to be accomplished.

When faced with a team or leadership decision, decide what to kill and then publicly execute it and you’ll be amazed at how many more resources you have available to pursue the path of success.

Why do we have such a hard time killing off projects, initiative, lines of work or almost anything that people have been dedicating their time to? I can think of several reasons but what’s your experience? Share with us.

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Horns of a Dilemma

by Ron Potter
Image Source: Martin Fisch, Creative Commons

Image Source: Martin Fisch, Creative Commons

 

“Boy do we have a dilemma!”
“This has presented a real dilemma.”
“This decision is so hard to make because it’s a real dilemma.”

I hear these kinds of statements all the time in my corporate world as well as in my civilian life. What are people saying when they talk of having a dilemma? Usually they want to make the “right” decision but it’s difficult to figure out which is the right decision or the best decision or the least damaging decision. Do you notice that there is a sense of right vs wrong or better vs best or least vs most in those words. Well, if that’s the case, you’re not faced with a dilemma, you’re just making a tough decision. The decision will (or should be) made for the right, best or most side of the scale, it’s just hard.

A dilemma is presented when you’re faced with making the right vs right, or the best vs best or the most vs most. Dilemmas are equally right! That’s what makes them a dilemma.

The original definition (without getting too deep into the word construction) meant the horns of a bull; thus, being on the horns of a dilemma. The idea is that you are about to get gored by one or the other horn, but you get to choose. Note that you’re going to be gored either way. Choosing which decision to make will not prevent you from getting gored! Now that’s a dilemma!

In the rapid paced world of today with global implications, I believe we are faced with more and more decisions that become true dilemmas. It’s not the case anymore that we’re faced with five “must do” activities to keep us competitive and all we need to do is prioritize them. No, today we are faced with five must do activities but we only have the resources and time to accomplish three of them. Which ones do we decide to kill (read the earlier blog on “Have We Decided Yet?”)? Now we’re facing a dilemma.

It’s when the goring for our decision happens at a later date when no one remembers (or admits to remembering) that we chose to get gored by one side of the decision. Today we’re getting beat up (gored) by the boss or the market place for lower sales volumes when we knew that would happen based on the price increase we took because of global commodity increases.

When you’re faced with a dilemma it’s important that you decide which alternative to kill, publicly execute the alternative and publicly record the expected consequences of that decision. Don’t look for someone to blame later, look at the consequences of your decisions to see if they were what you expected. Congratulate yourself if they are what you expected. Analyze your decision making process for improvement if they were not what you expected.

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Have We Decided Yet? Probably Not!

by Ron Potter
Image Source: Garrett Coakley, Creative Commons

Image Source: Garrett Coakley, Creative Commons

One of my clients (thanks Mindy) recently introduced me to a book called The Primes: How Any Group Can Solve Any Problem by Chris McGoff. While I’ve found several useful concepts in the book one of the most powerful is the definition of the word “decide.” Notice the make-up of the word: De-Cide.

What do the words pesticide, homicide, fungicide have in common? They (and many others) all end in “cide.” The – cide ending originates from the Latin word caedere meaning to kill. It concerns death, destruction, extermination and deliberate killing. There is even a public execution connotation to the word meaning “to put to death.”

In our corporate world we’ve mistakenly come to believe that when we decide, we’re making a decision about what “to do.” But when we decide what to do, we never decide what to stop. It’s a little bit like the overwhelming morass that our governments have gotten into; every year our legislatures add more and more laws to the books, they just never kill any and so our laws and regulations have become so voluminous we can hardly act freely any more. In our corporate life when we continually decide what to do and seldom decide what to stop doing we spread our precious resources thinner and thinner.

See if you can make this shift with your team. When faced with a decision, spend more time figuring out which alternative you are going to kill. Figure out the consequences of killing that particular option. You’ll notice some deep seated attachment and engagement that you never uncovered when you were decide which alternative to “do.” There will be many people in your organization that may have spent many years honing their skills performing the alternative that you’re about to kill. How do you think they’ll react? They’ll do everything they can to preserve their job and skill set. They’ll do it overtly. They’ll do it covertly. But this is exactly what happens when you decide what to “do” versus what to kill. While the priorities have shifted to the more important task that you decided to “do”, nobody told the people doing the other alternative to stop or shift their resources to the higher priority item or to cut their project to the bare essentials. Thus, we are constantly looking for resources to accomplish all of the high priority items and we create work forces that feel overwhelmed and over extended.

Instead, try deciding. Try deciding what to kill. Try dealing with the fall out and consequences of telling people that we’re no longer doing that activity or project. Help them get reassigned, retrained, more engaged in the activities that you’re not killing.

Maybe you’re very good at prioritizing your work. However, when you prioritize your list of 30 activities rather than deciding which ones to kill, you will still have a huge amount of resources working on priorities 16-30. If you will decide, you’ll notice that you have more than enough resources to accomplish the top 15 priorities.

Start de-ciding! You’ll find yourself and your company suddenly much more productive.

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Getting Past Failure

by Ron Potter
Image Source: Steven Depolo, Creative Commons

Image Source: Steven Depolo, Creative Commons

I recently participated in my first clinical trial. Fortunately I was in the healthy comparison group and not the afflicted group. While the trial was related to a cancer study, it was focused on the cognitive aspect of cancer and the immune system. I know, I know…. having me in the healthy cognitive group is amusing. However, it was a fascinating study.

During one section of the study that was looking at the ability to stay focused and concentrate even while being distracted, I was asked to watch the computer screen for long periods of time and quickly identify the direction of various arrows when they appeared on the screen while other information was also being displayed. The test itself was simple in nature but it was the instructions provided by the facilitator that fascinated me.

In preparing for the test she talked with me about handling failure. Because the arrows will quickly flash on the screen and I must indicate the direction of the arrow as quickly as possible, there will be times when I make a mistake. However, it was important that I put that mistake behind me and keep going. She explained the pattern they see when people make a mistake (which your brain realizes a split second after the arrow disappears) they will often make several mistakes in a row because they’re still upset about the one they missed. Interesting! This was not about life decisions or major corporate decision, it was simply hitting one key or another indicating the direction of an arrow. And yet, they could clearly see a pattern that when we make a mistake the guilt (horror, worry, embarrassment, or whatever) can often linger and result in several mistakes just because we didn’t quickly get past it.

We all make mistakes: individuals, teams, corporations… The trick is to not let failure lead to several others just because we didn’t get it behind us quickly enough.

So what causes these lingering affects? Several possibilities come to mind:

  • Silence – not acknowledging or talking about a mistake (again, either individually or in a team) can cause the additional mistake syndrome
  • Pride – not willing to admit our mistakes will also cause the escalation of further mistakes
  • Lake of Patience – an atmosphere where mistakes are not tolerated will actually exacerbate the environment of continued mistakes
  • Subsequent punishment of mistakes – Often mistakes or even legitimate decisions don’t turn out to be correct in the end. However, when people are punished later for decisions that turn out bad, it creates an atmosphere of low risk and very low accountability. (This is an interesting one that will probably need to be addressed later as its own topic!)

How are you at getting past failure quickly? Talk about this with your team. I believe you will discover that because you’re not putting legitimate mistakes behind you quickly you are creating additional mistakes and a risk averse, low accountability culture that is not serving you in these times of rapid change.

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Patience – Ups and Downs

by Ron Potter
Image Source: Caleb Roenigk, Creative Commons

Image Source: Caleb Roenigk, Creative Commons

Is your arrow headed up or down?

Over the last twenty years of consulting work, I’ve seen many of the ups and downs of the American Corporate landscape. In the nineties the high-tech industry was on an extreme upward climb. And then the dot.com bust. The large Pharma industry was doing great through the nineties and into the “oughts” and then the patents began to expire causing extensive downsizing and mergers. The collapse of the American auto industry and the industrial age has been dramatic. And those are just the major industrial cycles. Every business has its own cycles as well. At any point in time your arrow can be headed up or down as industries and businesses cycle.

It always seems to be easier to exhibit patience when the arrow is headed up. When it’s headed down there seems to be less tolerance, more friction and increased pressure to just do it “my way” that breaks down the fiber and fabric of a team. But, if these cycles of ups and downs seem to be inevitable and a natural part of our business, how do we maintain patience equally well during the up swings and down turns?

Hope! Teams with no hope have no room for patience. Teams with hope seem to maintain patience even in the most difficult of circumstance.

Now hope is one of those words that has lost much of its original intent or has certainly taken on at least two definitions. Most people think of hope as a wished for feeling that all will turn out positive in the end despite current circumstance. But some of the original understandings of the word and concept of hope is a positive assurance that things can and will be accomplished in spite of current circumstance.

One of the experiences that I’ve had through the years is that no matter how difficult or poor circumstances may be for the overall corporation, I have always been able to fine “pockets of excellence.” There is always a team or a division or a unit where the people are positive, energized, respectful and patient as they work toward their desired results even under difficult circumstance.

One of the results that you can work toward and you can maintain, even when the business may be suffering (maybe through no fault of your own) is how the team will actually work together.

  • How will we face the challenges?
  • How will we ration our limited resources?
  • How will we make decisions and what will be the order of our priorities?
  • How can we prepare for multiple scenarios and be prepared to act as each unfolds?
  • What can we learn about the make-up of our team and identify patterns of stress before they manifest?

Teams that commit to positive team interactions, understandings, and support in the face of daunting circumstances survive better than those who let the circumstances dictate. You’ll find that patience can be experienced even in difficult times with a little planning, fore thought and commitment.

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Patience – Project Management

by Ron Potter
Image Source: Amy, Creative Commons

Image Source: Amy, Creative Commons

A while back (June of 2010 actually) I wrote my first blog on Patience. Good patience is one of those elements that can help build great teams or more importantly, lack of good patience can quickly break down a team. In that first blog on patience, I referred to a client who would lose his patience when he didn’t see sufficient progress as critical deadlines approached. I’m convinced there is one key part of that statement that must not be overlooked – “As critical deadlines approached.”

Coming out of engineering school, I spent the first decade of my career immersed in project management for several large projects. That decade left me with a couple of very deeply held beliefs:
1. You can only make up about 10% of a remaining schedule.
2. Projects schedules are lost at the beginning, not at the end of the schedule.

I do not consider these belief’s as hard and fast rules but more solid “rule-of-thumb” concepts. After closely tracking many major projects from engineering to construction to software design and development, I became convinced that you could only make up about 10% of the remainder of any schedule. In other words, if you are tackling a project that will take about four weeks of effort (20 working days) you will run into difficulties if you let the first two days slip by without accomplishing the first stages of the project. It seems so innocent, “The project is not due until next month and it won’t make much difference if I don’t get started until the end of the week or first thing next week.” Wrong! While it’s likely that you will in fact complete the project on time, you’ll not fully appreciate how much those first lost days will add to the stress, overworked, overwhelming feeling of not having enough time to accomplish everything as the weeks move along and all of your other projects get layered on top of these “delayed” projects.

Which leads me to my second belief: projects schedules are lost at the beginning, not at the end of the schedule. It’s not what you accomplish or don’t accomplish during that last week of a four week schedule that makes the difference between success and failure (or stress vs an orderly pace), it’s what you did or didn’t do during that first week of the four week schedule that makes the difference. Unfortunately, we’ve forgotten all about what we put off during that first week and therefore don’t associate with that feeling of being overwhelmed and overworked during the last week of the project.

Patience doesn’t happen by reacting calmly to missed deadlines. Patience is induced by setting aggressive early checkpoints on projects so that they experience an orderly pace as the deadline approaches.

Patience:
• Don’t forget your own learning curve (from the first blog). Leaders must work harder than they expect to help people understand new expectations, learn new processes, and have a vision of the new normal.
• Patience is improved and put to better use when there is more discipline at the beginning of a project instead of trying to handle the pressure better at the end of a project.

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The Fifth Discipline, Paper Planes, and The Beer Game – Part II

by Ron Potter
Image Source: Dmitry Krendelev, Creative Commons

Image Source: Dmitry Krendelev, Creative Commons:

In my last post, we began to talk about the need for viewing our teams and companies as systems, as described in The Fifth Discipline. In Peter Senge’s book by that title, he said that cause and effect are not closely related in time and space and therefore hides from us the fact that our individual actions have systemic effects across our teams and companies. That’s one of the reasons why I like business simulations.

One of the business simulations I run is Paper Planes created by Chris Musselwhite of Discovery Learning.

In this simulation each person is assigned a work station for one element in the making of a paper plane (cutting, folding, gluing, stenciling, etc.). Each person is well trained and fully equipped to perform their job as the plane progresses down the assembly line. We then start up the system to produce as many planes as possible. While each station of one or more people work feverishly to maximize the productivity and through-put of their station, the first run of the exercise always fails to produce the desired outcome. Through successive rounds of debriefing, reengineering and re-running the simulations, teams get better by orders of magnitude. What they all discover in the end is that optimizing their piece of the work does not optimize the whole. We need to look at the entire system as a whole and optimize the system, even if that means sub-optimizing some of the work stations.

Another simulation I enjoy running is The Beer Game. This sounds like a fun (and maybe dangerous) game to run at an executive off-site. The Beer Game was invented at MIT, referred to in Senge’s book and is still given to MBA students at MIT twenty years later. It is similar in nature to Paper Planes except that it’s designed to simulate a logistics system with a brewer (manufacturer), a wholesaler, distributor, retailer and customers. Again, the games helps teams experience in close time and space what plays out in a real logistic system over hundreds of miles and many weeks of time. All of a sudden, it becomes clear to the participants that optimizing the individual pieces of the system does not optimize the whole. The problems need to be figured out at a systemic level.

What’s going on with your team or company? Are you working at maximum effort and efficiency only to see your department or team fail at their overall mission and assignment? Are you working your tail off in your team but some other department must not be carrying their load because you’re not getting the corporate results that you should? Are you looking for blame? Must there be someone else at fault for your corporate failures? Maybe you’re not looking at it systemically to understand how your actions and approach affect the whole. The Fifth Discipline.

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The Fifth Discipline, Paper Planes, and The Beer Game – Part I

by Ron Potter
Milemarker

Image Source: damien_p58, Creative Commons

The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization (No, not the Bruce Willis Film “The Fifth Element”) was first published by Peter Senge (MIT) in 1990. For me it was one of those books that proved to be a “mile marker” in my life.

A mile marker is one of the people, events, experience, or moments of learning that when you look back have influenced, shaped, or directed you along your way. I can identify specific “markers” in my mid to late twenties that clearly lead me to the consulting/coaching business. My wife was putting together a scrap book of our early lives recently and made the comment that I must have had consulting/coaching skills as a young child based of the comments classmates had written. Mile markers are important to identify to understand our own growth, development and direction.

The Fifth Discipline was one of those books for me. I had been educated in the discipline of Project Management at the engineering school of the University of Michigan. Managing and running things was a scientific discipline that could be learned and applied to getting things done. But, right from the start I had always felt that the most productive thing I could do was to help people grow, develop, learn and help the teams function well together. I believed that if we could improve the people side of the business, the business would be successful. Here was a book that “scientifically” presented these principles in an organized form.

What are the five disciplines?

  • Personal Mastery
  • Mental Models
  • Building Shared Vision
  • Team Learning
  • Systems Thinking (Fusing it all together)

For this discussion I want to focus on number five, Systems Thinking.

We tend to be aware of System Structures “out there” in the “real world”. Physical structures like a manufacturing plant are visible to us. We can see the raw materials and parts coming in one end of the plant with the finished product exiting the other end. We can see what happens when parts don’t show up on time. We can identify “bottle necks” in the system and work to alleviate the restriction. We can even see the systems that are not so physical such as cost and demand relationships. The Fed works with a “system” to determine interest rates as they try to manage (manipulate) the economic structure. But what we don’t really see or more importantly don’t believe is that our individual human behavior works in a system across our team and company. Until we can step back and see things in a systemic way, we will fail to change the behavior that is causing the bottle necks and disruptions to our peak performance.

One of the reasons we don’t see “the system” in our teams and companies is what Senge describes as “Cause and effect are not closely related in time and space”. That’s one of the reasons I like business simulations. They allow us to act out and see the system at work in a closely related time and space. That brings me to the rest of my blog title: Paper Planes and The Beer Game. But, that’s all the time and space I have for this post. Tune in to Paper Planes and Beer Games in the next post.

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