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Process

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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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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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BlogLeadership

Knowing the Answer Can Be Very Costly – Part I

by Ron Potter
Image Source: Michael Caven, Creative Commons

Image Source: Michael Caven, Creative Commons

Sometime, in my consulting practice, a company will ask me to fix a flaw that’s preventing a leader from succeeding. One example was a young manager, who was very smart but lacking in humility. His company liked him a lot and saw his potential to do very well, if it weren’t for his arrogance. He stumbled over it constantly in team meetings.

I talked with him about how to listen better and deliberate more effectively. In response he asked a very revealing question: “What am I supposed to do when I already know the answer?”

This particular manager worked in a technical unit, and highly technical people can often feel this way – that they already know the answer although I see it happen in every function and in particular with those who consider themselves the topical “expert.” Consequently, they don’t listen with the intent to understand; they listen with the intent to respond and rebut. Even if the answer they “know” is correct, which happens occasionally, their lack of humility and listening abilities alienates the rest of the team.

More often, poor listeners don’t have the answer. If you don’t listen well, you can’t understand the culture of the organization you’re serving or the needs of your customers. That’s why we often see technical people offering technical solutions that those of us who aren’t technical can’t figure out – and then they get frustrated with us because we’re “idiots” (think Microsoft Vista).

One of the formulas I use when consulting is:

Effectiveness of decision = Quality of decision X Acceptance of decision

It doesn’t matter if your answer is technically correct or even elegant. If nobody understands, accepts and gets behind it, it’s not a good answer.

My reply to the manager’s question was that the answer lies in the truth, and you need to discover the truth through the team process. You need to accept the fact that there might be a different answer that’s just as viable. It may not be the most technically precise answer, but it’s still a much better answer because other people will understand it and accept it.

You can come in with a strong opinion – in fact, we want you to do that – but you also need a collaborative attitude. You need to be thinking, “With my strong opinion and other strong opinions, we’ll discover the answer through good deliberation.” That’s the humble and prudent approach, and it’s much more effective than thinking you already have the answer.

In Part 2, I’ll discuss what happens when the entire company already “knows” the answer.

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BlogLeadership

Seven Deadly Sins

by Ron Potter

PrudenceMost of us know about the seven deadly sins:

Lust
Gluttony
Greed
Sloth
Wrath
Envy
Pride

And I must admit that while I’m not guilty of all of the sins all of the time, I have been guilty of all of the sins some of the time. But, are you familiar with the four Cardinal Virtues?

Prudence
Justice
Restraint
Courage

I’ve been spending some time looking at the four and in particular the first of the virtues, Prudence. One of the intriguing definitions of Prudence is:

“The perfected ability to make right decisions.”

What better descriptor of corporate leadership could be found? The perfected ability to make right decisions!
As I began to explore the concept for prudence further, it presented itself as a process. Prudence breaks down into the functions of:

Deliberate
Decide
Do

These are my words, not the words of the great scholars that describe the process, but what a great process to reach right decisions.

Give it good deliberation
Use a great and well defined decision making process
Go out and execute

Since 2000, one of the “deadly sins” that I’ve seen become more and more prevalent in corporate cultures is the attitude of quick deciding instead of quick learning leading to good decisions. With a quick deciding attitude, teams will ignore, steam roll, belittle or dismiss any behavior that appears to be or feels like it is slowing down the deciding process. In other words, a quick deciding mentality approach is anti-deliberation. It just doesn’t lead to prudent or wise decisions.
What we don’t have time for in our corporations today is non-prudent decisions. We must regain the technique of good deliberation to make great decisions quickly.
Let me know what you think. What is preventing our corporate leadership teams from spending the right amount of time deliberating so that we can then make good decisions? What are the roadblocks?

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