But few of us achieved publishing success early in our career and even fewer aspire to step back into a time before our handy, time-saving gadgets. A friend gave me the most wonderful gadget. Called TV B Gone, it's a key ring-sized little button that turns off televisions. Waiting for a flight, trying to read but distracted into multitasking mindlessness by the murmuring CNN Airport News on the overhead television, one click of my TV B Gone and the screen goes dark, the speakers silent. I only wish they had such a device for the background music so thoughtlessly provided by restaurants, coffeehouses, and bars. One surreptitious click of my Tunes-B-Gone, and I can actually hear and focus on what you're saying instead of what the atmosphere is fogging.
Where was I? Oh yea, multitasking. Seems that this gift that some people claim to have and the rest of us wish we could do better is a myth. Like so many other beliefs: good children, skillful parenting, happy families, predictive planning, multitasking belongs in the museum of capabilities that exist in name only. The effect that makes you a dangerous driver when you yak on your cell phone makes you a dangerous boss when you multitask at work. “Attention Deficit Trait” is now rampant in the workplace, which itself has become as clouded by distracting din as any foundry—less noisy but just as cognitively distracting.
What to do? Wrong question. Perhaps the right question is, "What not to do?" I could prescribe turning off the television, but if you're easily bored, you'll probably turn on the radio or find someone to call. We medicate ourselves with distractions. Our brains feel clever when we shift focus between five simultaneous tasks. Worse, we sense that transcendent tingle of subtle awareness that convinces us that we really, really, really are doing the impossible several things at once. Achieved the juggle. No balls dropped. Someone should put us on stage.
Is this feeling just an illusion? Couldn't the science be wrong? Perhaps others are dumbed down when they walk and chew gum, and I --- probably you and I --- are the odd, reassuring exceptions. For we seem genius to ourselves, wizard to each other, and productive beyond imagination.
Read this and weep, cowboy. The pony bucked us both off again. Link to article
Excessive idealism (encouraging disillusion, frustration, and cynicism),
Speed and oblivion (new endlessly supplants the incompletely implemented),
Carbon copy projects (followed "disgruntingly" as bureaucratic procedure),
Narcissism ("strong actors" become the main driving force, creating a double bind: is this systemic rigor or forceful leadership?),
Technical bias (creativity is evicted by the "concern for the careful management of the means"),
Totalitarian bias (drastic simplification of reality), and
Ideological drift (preaching encapsulates science).
He claims that his research (the most unbiased by ideology I've found, except, perhaps, for my own :-}) concludes that "Painful and slow alignment of people, methods, and systems is the stuff of which actual implementation processes are made."
Of course, no one wants to hear this.
The a priori benefits of standardized work processes seem unapproachably obvious, but Ciborra found them mythical. He found no two companies (in 25 years of continuous study) ever implemented the same method, though most claimed to have implemented one or another standard. Further, he found that the odd eccentricities, the local divergences from standards, often comprised an organization's competitive advantage. He argued that when standard procedures are embraced, they create at best competitive parity. Real advantage was achieved by working in unreproducible, non-standard ways.
Besides, the terms standard and agile (especially if I deign to capitalize the term as Agile) sit together koan-like. A subject, perhaps, for reflection more than action.
Author of best-selling
Fooled By Randomness and Black Swans Nassim Nicholas Taleb was
being a curmudgeon again recently in The Sunday Times. A little of
him goes a long, long way. AND his skepticism about how financial
markets and complex systems are commonly managed seems properly
placed, skepticism being as necessary to clear perception and good
eyesight.
He claims that the US focuses upon managing to models of the world, while the Europeans attend more to adapting to the way the world shifts. And Talib claims that the world shifts unpredictably, under the influence of eventual but unpredictable Black Swan Events-once in a very long while occurances. These, he claims, wipe out the optimistic, who discount their risk because of their low probability of occurring. Wisdom, Talib claims (with considerable credibility), insists that one hedge these unlikely gut shots or risk catastrophy. This is a different mindset than our probability professors insisted we learn, and one quite alien to anyone producing plans, schedules, and "managing risks" in organizations today.
I can't verify his perspective, but I can confirm that the model madness here seems rampant. We do not deal with the world as it is, it seems, but are taught---rewarded even---for dealing with the world as it is supposed to be according to our models of it.
Read Fooled By Randomness if you have a strong stomach for blunt criticism. Read the whole Sunday Times piece if you'd like a gullet-full of his perspective. Watch his recitation of the following "life tips," if you want just a taste of his style. Or just read those tips below.
Taleb's top life tips:
1 Scepticism is effortful and costly. It is better to be sceptical about matters of large consequences, and be imperfect, foolish and human in the small and the aesthetic.
2 Go to parties. You can’t even start to know what you may find on the envelope of serendipity. If you suffer from agoraphobia, send colleagues.
3 It’s not a good idea to take a forecast from someone wearing a tie. If possible, tease people who take themselves and their knowledge too seriously.
4 Wear your best for your execution and stand dignified. Your last recourse against randomness is how you act — if you can’t control outcomes, you can control the elegance of your behaviour. You will always have the last word.
5 Don’t disturb complicated systems that have been around for a very long time. We don’t understand their logic. Don’t pollute the planet. Leave it the way we found it, regardless of scientific ‘evidence’.
6 Learn to fail with pride — and do so fast and cleanly. Maximise trial and error — by mastering the error part.
7 Avoid losers. If you hear someone use the words ‘impossible’, ‘never’, ‘too difficult’ too often, drop him or her from your social network. Never take ‘no’ for an answer (conversely, take most ‘yeses’ as ‘most probably’).
8 Don’t read newspapers for the news (just for the gossip and, of course, profiles of authors). The best filter to know if the news matters is if you hear it in cafes, restaurants... or (again) parties.
9 Hard work will get you a professorship or a BMW. You need both work and luck for a Booker, a Nobel or a private jet.
10 Answer e-mails from junior people before more senior ones. Junior people have further to go and tend to remember who slighted them.
I had no idea that cubicles were a
Utopian statement, but I'm not really surprised that they are. More
surprising is that someone out there is doing their PhD work on the
cubicle as a statement of culture. Had to happen. Just had to
happen.
"Those with moral
aspirations for the cubicle—from countercultural Californians
like Tom Peters to Midwestern Protestants like Max De
Pree—sought to defend some idea of “humanity”
against the inhumanity of bureaucracy. Yet, to say that bureaucracy
is inhuman has not always been an objection to it. As defined by
Max Weber a century ago, bureaucracy makes its great contribution
to the world precisely by ignoring the human spirit. Operating
according to fixed rules, policies, and positions, bureaucracy in
its purest form functions, as Weber wrote, “without regard
for persons.” As bureaucracy “develops more perfectly,
the more the bureaucracy is ‘dehumanized,’ the more
completely it succeeds in eliminating from official business love,
hatred, and all purely personal, irrational, and emotional elements
which escape calculation.” The central impulse of bureaucracy
is to fashion a world in conformity to the impersonal abstraction
and precise relationships of an organizational
chart."
Here's the link
Physicist Freeman Dyson is writing again. This time about global warming and the secular religion of environmentalism.
What I found most interesting about this article, which is actually a review of two books, is the characterization of science and economics, echoing Mark Gray's notion of physics envy—that every social science is jealous of the mathematical precision and replicability of physics.
Yet in all of the prominent arguments of the day, we seem to insist upon either searching for the final word or asserting some perspective as final, this as precondition for finding it useful or acceptable or credible. When the opposite might more reasonably be the case: Anyone asserting that they have found the final word is probably deceiving them self or trying to deceive someone else.
Quoting from the article: "All the books that I have seen about the science and economics of global warming, including the two books under review, miss the main point. The main point is religious rather than scientific. There is a worldwide secular religion which we may call environmentalism, holding that we are stewards of the earth, that despoiling the planet with waste products of our luxurious living is a sin, and that the path of righteousness is to live as frugally as possible. The ethics of environmentalism are being taught to children in kindergartens, schools, and colleges all over the world.
"Environmentalism has replaced socialism as the leading secular religion. And the ethics of environmentalism are fundamentally sound. Scientists and economists can agree with Buddhist monks and Christian activists that ruthless destruction of natural habitats is evil and careful preservation of birds and butterflies is good. The worldwide community of environmentalists—most of whom are not scientists—holds the moral high ground, and is guiding human societies toward a hopeful future. Environmentalism, as a religion of hope and respect for nature, is here to stay. This is a religion that we can all share, whether or not we believe that global warming is harmful.
"Unfortunately, some members of the environmental movement have also adopted as an article of faith the belief that global warming is the greatest threat to the ecology of our planet. That is one reason why the arguments about global warming have become bitter and passionate. Much of the public has come to believe that anyone who is skeptical about the dangers of global warming is an enemy of the environment. The skeptics now have the difficult task of convincing the public that the opposite is true. Many of the skeptics are passionate environmentalists. They are horrified to see the obsession with global warming distracting public attention from what they see as more serious and more immediate dangers to the planet, including problems of nuclear weaponry, environmental degradation, and social injustice. Whether they turn out to be right or wrong, their arguments on these issues deserve to be heard."
The final installment of my Unlearning Project Management series was posted this morning on the Projects@Work Executive Briefing site. The posting also features links to the first five installments.
What did I unlearn in the process of writing this series? Two months ago, when I started writing this series, I was smoking about ten exquisite little cigars every day. Just after I finished the third installment, I stopped smoking. For unlearning, I highly recommend this strategy: First, start smoking. Smoke pretty steadily for five or six years, then decide to stop.
If your experience turns out to be like mine, your first sensation will be of losing your identity, because smoking, whatever the chemical addiction, is a deeply personal, identity-involved activity. The anticipation of identity loss feels sad, and that sadness alone can chase even the most dedicated reformer into the weeds.
Learning usually occurs pre-consciously. Unlearning is not so benign. A level of awareness gets involved in the unlearning that is rarely present when the original knowledge parks its jalopy. And, like not thinking of a rhino, unlearning manifests the presence of what we don't want to acquire what we do want.
Better, perhaps, to focus upon relearning than unlearning. Relearning reframes while unlearning resuscitates into explicit awareness what might have been barely tacit. Ouch!
I'm past four weeks without an exquisite little cigar, and my identity is healing over the scab. I expect some scars will remain. How did I learn about project managing? Cripes, who could remember? How did I unlearn what I'd learned? Painfully aware. Half-filled with promise. Afraid I'd fail. Concerned who I might become should I succeed. Stumbling into interesting territory.
We are unlearning something all the time. Amy's ten-year-old granddaughter has already acquired a raft of unproductive habits and beliefs. Much of her challenge in school is about letting go of what she naively acquired to make space for new, perhaps better, previously unimagined beliefs. Reading entailed letting go of her need to pretend she could already read. Same with math. She lost her composure sometimes, but who wouldn't? Trading mastery for indentured apprenticeship, certainty for no more than the possibility of return. It might be impossible to learn anything without unlearning something previously parked and in the way.
Life, work, heck, even project managing, seems more like Calvin Ball than any of the professional sports featuring a ball. In Calvin Ball, as you might remember from the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes, Calvin made up the rules as he went along, much to the eternal frustration of Calvin's playmate Hobbes. Whatever made Calvin a winner usually dictated the rules of play. Slip that perspective out one notch, replace Calvin's egoism with care for the project's community, and this 'the rule is whatever makes me the winner' doesn't seem so terrible. What game do we play? Perhaps it's whatever game makes us the winner.
Now get out there are Play Ball!
The fifth installment of my Unlearning Project Management series has been posted online. Here's the link.
"In a recent conversation, Howell
remarked, “Current project controls increase risk in projects
... external risk is rarely the killer. Things most often go wrong
because of the wreckage caused by the feedback and control used in
current PM: control for cost, squeeze ‘em down, and the
people will find a way to do just what you ask — reduce the
immediate cost of their work. This reduces the predictability of
workflow in the system, further reducing performance. Hazing
managers in response to further cost increases puts projects into
the death spiral.”
The problem is that we believe we have a problem. Not all Christmases are merry and bright, and only about one in twelve are white in these parts. Dr. Martin E. P. Seligman reported in his Learned Helplessness that one primary cause of depression is the self-help movement, which promises that we can deliver more than anyone can reliably deliver. In business, the romantic notion that success is achievable through "continuous improvement" has doubtless destroyed more companies than it has preserved.
We live in a curiously romantic culture, one which has almost successfully replaced performance with measurement, achievement with intention, and skill with luck. We follow whatever the latest study found, only to learn after years of bliss-filled ignorance that ... whoopsy! ... that study was apparently wrong. Romanticism breeds ignorant bliss in the short run and humiliating moments of enlightenment longer-term.
The following linked article, The Age of Educational Romanticism by Charles Murray got me thinking about how many activities have become romantically entwined and how awful these infatuations turn out to be. Whatever the field, without room for pragmatism and skepticism—let alone realism (I know, no such thing, but still the only place to get a really good steak)—romanticism guarantees its opposite. Mandating that no child be left behind ensures that many will leave on their own volition. Liberating another imprisons anyone who could have liberated himself.
"No one but the most starry-eyed denies in private the reality of differences in intellectual ability that we are powerless to change with K-12 education. People are unwilling to talk about those differences in public, but it is a classic emperor’s-clothes scenario waiting for someone to point out the obvious. Starting that process can be as simple as more articles like this one."Link Here
"Even deeper than
emergence and its challenge to reductionism in this new
scientific worldview is what I call breaking the Galilean
spell. Galileo rolled balls down incline planes and showed that the
distance traveled varied as the square of the time elapsed. From
this he obtained a universal law of motion. Newton followed with
his Principia, setting the stage for all of modern science. With
these triumphs, the Western world came to the view that all that
happens in the universe is governed by natural law. Indeed, this is
the heart of reductionism. Another Nobel laureate physicist, Murray
Gell-Mann, has defined a natural law as a compressed
description, available beforehand, of the regularities of a
phenomenon. The Galilean spell that has driven so much science is
the faith that all aspects of the natural world can be described by
such laws. Perhaps my most radical scientific claim is that
we can and must break the Galilean spell. Evolution of the
biosphere, human economic life, and human history are partially
indescribable by natural law. This claim flies in the face of
our settled convictions since Galileo, Newton, and the
Enlightenment."
from: BREAKING THE GALILEAN SPELL By Stuart A.
Kauffman
Whatever else you're reading, you just gotta read this. It's gorgeous!!
The fourth installment of my Unlearning Project
Management--The Control Dilemma--series has been posted. Here's the link.
Question of the day: What does the following video have to do with unlearning?
Read that posting before you read this one, to get the contiguous story!
... ...
Finally, we invite people to bring themselves to the workshop. Not the role you play or the title you display, but your shoes-off self. To arrive skeptical if you are skeptical. Optimistic if you are optimistic. Curious if you are curious.
We invite you to bring yourself to the workshop because I noticed, after attending many workshops, that I usually didn’t show up. I sent who I was supposed to be in my stead, and this surrogate postured and posed, and stayed in his head where no situated learning could really penetrate. If managing projects is a continuing act of self discovery, then bringing your self to the effort seems necessary, essential.
We cultivate individuals in this workshop.
“What do we mean by individual cultivation? What is the
theoretical background of individual cultivation? More advanced
forms of learning try to go beyond the classical transfer model.
That is to say, the understanding of learning as a process of
transferring more or less stable chunks of knowledge from one brain
to another is replaced by a more dynamic perspective: learning as a
continuous and active process of adaptation and construction in
which knowledge is developed in permanent interaction between the
cognitive system and its environment.”
Markus F. Peschl -
Triple-Loop Learning as Foundation for Profound Change, Individual
Cultivation, and Radical Innovation
We’re interested in discovering what you see, what you prefer, how you respond to difficulties so that you can see yourself in action. This cultivation produces individuals properly situated to resolve the dilemmas they encounter on their project. We consider some of these dilemmas—Should you plan the whole, or just the foreseeable parts? Are you loyal to your manager or your assigned team? Who you discover yourself to be when situated within one of these dilemmas determines the choices available to resolve them. No method involved, other than mindful engagement.
Rather than transfer method-level information, this workshop employs focusing tools—a series of lenses through which to consider your project to help you make better informed choices. We believe that poorly informed choice is the most insidious form of slavery, and that latitude for action comes from becoming better informed about the actions you might take.
One of our focusing tools, for instance, considers your mindset about your project. Mindset, positive or negative, hopeful or hopeless, tends to be causative. We create what we believe we will create at some mysterious level. Considering what your mindset is and deliberately choosing what it will be is one way to gain leverage over even otherwise hopeless-seeming situations.
There is little in this workshop that’s covered in any way in the popular project management trainings. No instructions for calculating a critical path, no directions for controlling change, for this is not a deductive experience but an inductive one. We are conditioning you for the real work your project will bring you, and those deductive, technique-focused models for responding prove poorly situated to provide much real leverage. Besides, you can learn these techniques anywhere. We’re offering something quite different.
This is a difference that makes a real difference. When you return, and your boss asks you what you learned, you’ll probably find yourself unable to crisply respond. There might not be ten bullet items you can explain to anyone who was not there. Those who were there, though, will understand in ways no words could properly express. You’ll feel different as you engage in the same old activities. And you’ll notice choices that never seemed to be there before.
Whether this experience changes anything you do, it’s likely to profoundly change how you relate to your work. Ask your boss to watch. He’ll probably notice, too. And those you work with might ask you about the secret, what happened in that workshop you attended, and think you’ve made some pact of silence when you find yourself unable to explain. But they’ll notice the difference. Invite them to attend. They, too, will experience profound learning, and will find themselves unable to explain, too.
“... profound change does not only happen in the cognitive
domains, but touches a more fundamental necessary to make changes
in this domain than to change one’s intellectual,
philosophical, political, etc. position. Philosophically, one can
refer to this domain as the “person.” It goes beyond
the level of personal skills, competencies, personality, etc.
because it transcends the domain of personality traits, behavioral
and cognitive patterns, solely quantifiable data, etc. It touches
the person on his/her fundamental level of being and, in many
cases, concerns the domain of
wisdom."
Markus F. Peschl -
Triple-Loop Learning as Foundation for Profound Change, Individual
Cultivation, and Radical Innovation
I wish I could claim credit for the snappy title, but that is the work of P@W's fine editor, Aaron Smith.
The picture accompanying this posting comes from the final exercise of our Mastering Projects Workshop, where after two and a half days deeply considering how projects work, participants are assigned a planning exercise where traditional Management By Planning approaches fail. Few groups fail to create meaning with this experience, and none who succeed do so in ways they imagined beforehand. This installment considers alternatives to Management By Planning.
The first two installments generated a lot of comments. This one hasn't. Don't know why, but I'll appreciate any bark-back you might feel moved to post there.
Here's a taste of the content:
"Management By Planning, carried to its naturally recursive root, enlists every member of a project’s community as a planning project manager, which is far from Fayol and Taylor’s original Management By Planning intent. Each interprets the plan they receive, producing a locally situated version. Whether the plan received is wise depends, again, upon the mindfulness of each situated planner. Whether the project manager is wise might depend more upon their ability to listen than their authority to dispatch pre-planned work assignments.
"In the Spanish viceroy system, a bureaucracy that lasted more than 500 years, each viceroy reported directly to the king. Communications being slow in those days, a dispatch from the king, responding to a viceroy’s report, could take more than a year to reach an individual viceroy. So, the viceroys adopted a simple rule for interpreting directions from the king — The King Is Wise. This rule encouraged each local viceroy to interpret the king’s direction in some way that would preserve the apparent wisdom of the king, even if this meant utterly changing his specific instructions."
What do you
see in this picture? And what does this picture have to do with
unlearning project management? See the second installment of my
Unlearning Project Management.
To claim uniqueness, however, does not explain much. This description might elicit many different negative comparisons, such as, “it is almost, but not entirely unlike this other workshop.”
How is this workshop unique? Most project workshops focus attention upon transferring explicit how-to skills: how to plan, how to track progress, how to control execution, and how to build a team. They focus upon the transfer and acquisition of explicit knowledge without ever considering how it is that one goes about acquiring and actually using that knowledge.
This is a different kind of learning, one not encapsulated in any method. Agile, for instance, represents a specific context within which certain techniques are appropriate and others are not. Becoming an Agile practitioner entails exposure to specific techniques, for instance, but practicing agility requires something else, too. It requires a level of awareness about who you are within that context, and not simply the ability to repeat pre-defined practices.
We consider all techniques situationally useful and none universally appropriate. So we focus upon how one might meaningfully pick and choose from among the array of possible approaches to discover, to design the approach best suited to a specific situation. This is at root a design process which includes both knowledge of explicit practices along with a deep awareness of tacit knowledge and personal preference.
To master a project is quite different than to manage a project. Mastery entails both a keen understanding of techniques and methods and a presence of mind while employing them. Mastering Projects focuses upon conditioning that presence of mind which is fundamental to adequately designing any complex undertaking.
How do we accomplish this? First, we ask each participant to bring their own set of learning objectives. Rather than pre-determine the purpose of the workshop for you, we ask you to deeply consider what, in your practice, you want to pursue. This means that the workshop will be pursuing at least as many different objectives as there are participants in the workshop. This context seems to more realistically mirror the context within which real-world projects exist. While a project might have a well-advertised public purpose, every one has imbedded within it innumerable personal purposes: why each individual is engaged. And no project succeeds without attending to these personal purposes as well as the publicly acknowledged ones.
In this way, like on real-world projects, the workshop becomes the medium within which each participant can deeply consider their own objectives and learn to use the workshop to achieve these. Along the way, participants discover clues that inform them about how they form and pursue objectives, and how these pre-conscious patterns of engagement help or hinder achievement.
These learnings take many different forms. Some appear as brilliant a-ha insights, others as less inspiring “oh Shit!” experiences. We employ a simply ethic, “learned if you do and learned if you don’t.” We help you appreciate whatever form your learning might take. We enlist every participant as both a student and a teacher, understanding that your most enduring insight might come from anyone in the room.
We also ask you to bring your own project to use as your own personal case study. Rather than feed you pre-packaged case studies, we help to properly situate your pursuit of your learning objectives by using your own project as the primary case study in the course. We guide you through a series of focusing tools intended to elicit a deeper understanding of yourself, as well as a deeper appreciation of the nature of your project and of the organization sponsoring your project. Not just what to do, but who you, your project, and your organization might be in the context of your specific project.
... More in the
next installment ...
I'm investigating some ways to spread the contents of this blog more widely using Technorati. I might as well start here:
I have been, over the past month, developing a series of articles for Projects@Work entitled Unlearning Project Management. The first in this series was published last week to varied critical reception; mostly, it seems, quite critical. My editor there didn't report any death threats, but he did say that several people recommended that he black ball me from further contribution. He said he'd stick with me through this series, hoping that I might "win over a few of my critics" by the time I've finished the series.
What IS my problem with project management as I see it increasingly practiced? Here's some background from an email exchange with one of the critics of the first installment:
Here's something like a root foundation beneath my assertion. Over the past decade, I have visited dozens of companies struggling to deliver project results. The PMBoK-addicted ones seem to struggle much more. I know this says nothing about the PMBoK, but a lot about how people interpret PMBoK. Perhaps if it was titled, "Some Potentially Useful Project Management Information" this imprinting would be less severe. And, honestly, the problem imprint is rarely at the project manager level, but several levels above that. Executive edict commands that projects will henceforth be managed according to some Hoyle's model, and people within the organization just shut down their natural ability to pick and choose what seems right for their context in favor of pleasing their management. The stories proliferate (most falsely) that if they fail to live up to the promise of PMBoK by choosing differently, they'll be fired (or worse, whatever that might be.) So then their projects are saddled with the obligation to both do their projects "right" AND deliver results. The disconnect is not lost on many, but the disconnect is not easily reconnected.
I have seen many, many, many projects expend more energy failing to fulfill high church expectations that are inappropriate to the scale of their engagements. And lose connection to what works there in the process. So, I'm not on a rail against PMBoK, but, as you'll see in upcoming parts of the series, about how people, in the presence of the """Body Of Knowledge""" respond as if in the presence of something smarter, more knowledgeable, than they already are.
Napoleon claimed that the pursuit of perfection was the greatest evil. I think my moral outrage at the continuous improvement mindset is somehow rooted in this observation.
So, I'm trying to reconnect people to their natural genuis, the one that pre-dates their innocent adoption of an essentially mechanical mindset, which insisted that work is about process and process-improvement, and not about organic human interaction. This is a tough sell, and an even tougher 'think.' Once imprinted on a frame of reference, it's next to impossible to consider any other way; and even more difficult, this experience is teaching me, to explain an alternative in any way that makes sense from within the imprinted frame of reference. I teach about dissolving dilemmas, and I've adopted a dandy one here.
We (Amy and I), in our Mastering Projects Workshop, have found it essential to focus upon some form of relationship mapping BEFORE creating any task plan or even the roles and responsibility exposition, because acknowledging existing relationships can help create a plan that works with what's there. This can also head off some inevitable collisions.
We always find some busted relationship in the mapping, someone in the community who has the power to take another's lunch money without even intending to. Learning how to better cope with these subtly powerful people in our relationships adds a lot of potential to the person and to the project. Creating a task plan without acknowledging these powerful networks seems theoretical; not well grounded in reality.
Of course, these maps are no less notional than any task network, but they seem to carry deeper personal meaning. (Note that everyone, always, already carries an implicit relationship map around inside them. This activity merely moves what might have been only implicit onto more explicit ground.) We guide each participant in creating their personal map of their relationships, and never insist that these be shared or distilled into a single, comprehensive model. These are information, not definition. How I see you is not how you are, but a representation of how I see. How I cope with what I see is more important than agreeing that what I see defines anyone else's reality. Also, announcing that I characterize you as a jerk on my relationship map won't improve our relationship. This is personal information.
We focus upon what we call 'high-cost relationships.' Ones where we aspire for the relationship to be different than it seems to be. Where, for instance, we feel we need a committed relationship, but experience an indifferent one. Or where someone with an invariably different perspective has the power to say, "No!" and make it stick. Then we work through a little safe role-playing, where individuals get the opportunity, with a supportive coach on hand, to engage with their nemesis. The results are usually surprising. Whether the objective of the conversation is met or not, a deeper understanding of how that relationship might work results. Oh, and the one initiating the relationship usually learns how useful it is to have a coach.
I believe that in the future, most project "planning" will incorporate these techniques, and the explicit exposition of social networks will be recognized as an equal, perhaps greater contributor to project success. If the plan doesn't acknowledge informal relationships, focusing only upon formally-assigned roles and responsibilities, looking at formally-declared tasks as the premise for getting stuff done, the project can't work. Can it? When the plan falls apart, these networks kick in to actually get stuff done, whatever the plan might say.
This is a high-level outline of one of the key elements of creating a project community. More in later posts ...
One technique involves creating a portrait of the proposed project from each participant's perspective. Each is given a blank sheet of flip-chart paper and a selection of colored pens. The facilitator starts by asking everyone to, "Place yourself." By which s/he means, create some symbol to represent yourself and place that symbol somewhere on the sheet. Next, people are instructed to place "others," which means those others who seem germane to the context each is representing. The positioning, size, etc. represents relationship, perspective, ... many things.
Next, people are directed to list three adjectives that best describe the scene: i.e., hungry, happy, mystified. Next, people are asked to list three adverbs that best belong in the picture: i.e., extreme, sideways, quickly. Finally, people are invited to list three phrases anyone visiting this scene might expect to hear coming over the tops of the cubicle walls- or in the hallways between meetings - or around the water-cooler.
Finally, everyone is invited to sign their masterwork and post it in the appropriate place on the wall.
This exercise is very introspective until the last step, where we conduct an art gallery. Each artist is invited to explain their masterwork while the rest of the participants watch, listen, ask questions, and absorb.
By the end, whatever notion anyone had about how the project had to proceed has been challenged. A subtle and very powerful internal map of the territory emerges from this experience. Shared yet unspeakable. Understood, yet not physically projectable. We each leave with a deeper sense of knowing each other and the space we all share.
(This topic will be continued in a couple of future posts.)
Hi:
I work
for a large Telco that has a heavy waterfall Technology Development
Process that is used for all software projects. This process is
actively managed by an IT quality control group that has strong
management support and a strict enforcement process.Recently I
argued the benefits of Agile development to this group and asked
for permission to try it on my project.
Their response was:
1. Agile development requires business process changes so is out of
scope of the technology development process;
2. Agile development would require large across the board changes
to the current technology process and is therefore out of
scope;
3. There is no capacity to conduct a trial (even though I offered
to conduct a trial on my project);
4. Most projects are rolling out packages so Agile does not apply
(even though a large number of projects including all those in my
area are developing and enhancing software);
Frankly I'm thinking about giving up and going to work somewhere
more flexible but I would appreciate your advice on how to argue
successfully for the introduction of agile in the
organisation.
Any suggestions?
My
Reply:First, you might be asking the wrong question. "The best way
to argue for agile in a conservative organization" suggests two
questionable
objectives:
1-You might not need to find the best way, but merely a minimally effective way. Do you need the best or just a toe-hold that might well be the worst, but makes some forward progress? Remember, Columbus didn't know that he had to sail South before sailing West to reach the Indies. South seemed so wrong.
2-Arguing positions you 'one down', giving the status quo all the power. They just have to say no to disable your potential. An alternative objective: How might I create just enough space to convincingly demonstrate the benefits of Agile approaches to a conservative organization?" I could further deconstruct your objective, but my point is that you'll be better positioned to succeed if you formulate the problem so that YOU have the power and don't have to ask permission or change anyone's mind for them. (This might require some out-of-the-box imagining.)
Second, innovation doesn't usually ask for permission. I know the mythodology claims that the only way to implement an innovation like Agile is to get executive support to align the organization. Interesting fable. Almost never happens that way. Innovation more often results when some dedicated someone decides it's going to be different and starts building an inspired community around the effort. What I call an Organizational Insurgency. Traditional control methods are fairly powerless against a well-crafted insurgency. (Notice how I'm not mentioning Iraq.)
Your post left me imagining Thomas Paine posting a similar question to a pre-revolutionary war discussion group: What's the best way to argue for no taxation without representation in a conservative empire? Wrong question, Tommy. State your vision, attract some partisans, then act. Might get hung. The alternatives are kinda grim, too.
One
tactic that has worked some places, no guarantees, is to infect the
Quality Control group, which, if they're like all the other quality
control groups in the universe, neither deliver quality nor exert
meaningful control. What's in your initiative that might delight
and attract them? Of course, they'll insist upon compromising your
purest vision, but you might well find a positive
evolutionary
toe hold together, a starting story, that could begin turning the
tanker.
Of course, you could get fired for your benevolence. But then, you're considering going somewhere else, anyway.
My advice: stop looking for the best when a little better (even a little worse) might do. Don't ask someone else for permission only you can provide. There will be plenty of time for the rest of the organization to catch up, once they catch on.
I refer you to the Masters and Slaves chapter in my book, excerpt below, link following.
We have arranged the training-room tables into four rectangles—each with five chairs, two on two sides and one on the end—facing the front of the room. In the back and on the north side, windows overlook the street, where, interspersed with detoured taxis, buses, and cars, a constant stream of trucks carry debris from the remains of the nearby World Trade Center. The background traffic noise leaves us straining to hear each other. A project management workshop started an hour before, and progress has already slowed. The walls are papered with half- completed lists of difficulties, and these glower down like gargoyles over twenty pairs of slackening shoulders as the reality of our project work lives settles over us. A darkening drizzle of rain starts outside, and the room feels uncomfortably warm. Time crawls.
We are considering difficulties, when one student stands, looks at those sitting around a table across the room, and with a gleam in his eye declares, “The problem with you is that you do not properly appreciate the Master-Slave relationship.”
No one shows any sign of surprise, shock, or indignation. A moment of silence introduces a twittering instead, as if he has expressed a universally recognized but unspeakable truth. His comment was a joke, of course. But like all excellent humor, it contained a painfully large portion of truth.
excerpted from The Blind Men and the Elephant- Mastering Project Work © 2003 by David A. Schmaltz - Berrett-Koehler, San Francisco - all rights reserved
Maybe you don't yet properly understand the Master-Slave Relationship. (Hint: The slaves are ALWAYS in charge...)
david
David A. Schmaltz david@projectcommunity.com
Buy my
best-selling book The Blind Men and the Elephant
here:
http://www.powells.com/biblio/61-1576752534-0
David,
While this framework is interesting and may have limited application in some types of work, I do not believe that it corresponds to the world many of us live in on a daily basis.
The foundation of work is OUTPUT. Producing something of value to others. In some cases, it may be useful to work with others to obtain this value but in other cases it is not. While an over emphasis on process over people is never good, work is at its core about producing value. The HOW can and will vary based upon the work environment and relationships may play a part in this how but it is only a part.
I also find you Principles to be questionable at best. Just consider you statement on Ethical Responsibilities v. Enron, Qwest, etc. Or consider the trustworthly statement. Ask anyone who has been laid off after having the boss tell them that the company was in fine shape.
This framework might be interesting way to consider the role of relationships in the workplace but it is far too Utopian.
Tim Davidson | 02.18.08 - 11:36
As long as "biting" is OK, here we go...
Overall: with sincere appreciation for your attempts to re-cast 'work' or 'projects', I've begun to lose count of them all and what they were (somewhere back there is 'we're designers' and a fuzzy distant memory of not-project-management). My appreciation concerns giving a little jolt to my own thinking, but each new epiphany devalues the previous ones.
Concerning this idea of relational work: I've always carried around with me your ideas around the 'project community', this seems similarly rooted, but in your manifesto the dominant feeling is "instead of" where I think "and" might be a better place to start. This criticism may not recognize fully the intent of a manifesto.
You've described a lot of things that I already see in play today, but to put it in practice as the central model...well, I honestly think it might make for a decent exercise in a training class but can't see it working in even the smallest enterprise and not even a whiff of a chance in the types of companies that many of us are part of today.
Allowing myself to provoke a little, you seem to have described a bit of the school playground culture or "Lord of The Flies". And I keep thinking, "Is this who/how you'd get the Hoover Dam built?"
Joel L. Butler | 02.18.08 - 3:43 pm | #
Following is a first attempt at a curious manifesto. I create this manifesto to reframe our interpretation of work.
We live in a time immersed in a culture focused upon processes. I believe this is a fundamental misinterpretation, one which causes many of its own shortcomings.
I warmly appreciate Gregory Howell and his colleagues for pointing out an obvious truth: the metaphor we unselfconsciously use to guide our work is faulty. We see work as a series of disembodied input-process-output processes, though much of the work we engage in these days cannot be effectively characterized in this way. How we think about work influences everything.
How would it be if we characterized work as primarily relational rather than primarily transformational. In this frame, work is the product of interacting relationships, not compliance with disembodied processes. Each is free, within ethical boundaries, to engage in offer-bid-accept trades intended to achieve results. How they engage, when they engage, and to a very large part how they produce results is in the individual trader’s hands, understanding that the future viability of the community depends upon sustaining relationships, not simply fulfilling a current need.
I invite you to join this consideration. I need your help, whether that comes as biting criticsm or encouragement. Consider how this frame of reference might change the work you do and we’ll talk.
Relational Work - A Manifesto
If we want to observe what people are capable of, watch what they do when their well-laid plans fall apart. When guided by their own personal desire to succeed, they become relational. They barter and trade, meet what any process designer might label unrealistic commitments, take charge, and often succeed in spite of what the master plan predicted.
But not all people respond to things falling apart in this way. Some hunker down, waiting for instruction and hold ever more tightly to reins no longer connected to anything. These unfortunate folks struggle to make the shift from compliant worker to skillful trader, and might well blame their overseers for their difficulty. And they might be right to blame.
Humans are naturally relational, but the conditions of our continued employment seem to mitigate against freely relating with others. We fear those who have control over our futures. We reasonably fear those who tell us what to do, expecting us to comply rather than question their directions. The effect of such conditioning is to reduce the judgment guiding a firm to that of its designated management and to rob the firm of its greatest potential competitive advantage.
What if we more deliberately approached work as being relationship-guided rather than process-driven? What would this do to our plans, our management, our control, and our results? If we merely encouraged people to do what they do from the outset? Would this change our experience when our plans fail? Would it eliminate the need for plans as we have known them?
This is no idle Utopian aspiration, but one rooted in solid principles. I have no idea how we’ve managed to evolve into a work paradigm that focuses upon processes and tasks as the primary means of production, but evidence strongly suggests that we’ve been following the wrong star. We engage in unplannable work yet insist upon finely-detailed plans before engaging in it. We control by means of comparing actual to expected and we lose larger purpose. We are not merely assembling a pre-fabricated appliance when we engage in work, but discovering and creating things. Yet we engage as if we really should be able to cognitively pre-fabricate and then simply follow our assembly instructions. In practice, this method usually falls apart, and when it falls apart, we do what we should have done in the first place.
We are wild in our work when the templates fail, but not completely feral. We might be better informed about the relational nature of our work beforehand, but have been sent to process-oriented training instead. An ounce of focus on relationships could replace every pound of process orientation. Yet we seem to invest in the process-oriented training.
And our experience when things fall apart might then reinforce the need for ever greater process control, not because people are not capable of making their own trades, but because they are not yet very practiced at it in their work. They have been trained away from their natural inclinations and are rusty and clumsy engaging in them as a result.
Some Principles Guiding Relational Work
The Trading Floor is theprimary metaphor guiding relational work.
Relational work is characterized not as a network of input-process-output transformations, but as a web of relationships facilitating trades. Trades are offer-bid-accept transactions which both require and reinforce relationships to consummate.
The medium of exchange is whatever is valued within a given community. Traders are free within the constraints of agreed upon ethics to barter to mutual satisfaction to achieve their objectives.
People are inherently trustworthy. They quite naturally work to improve their community and themselves.
People are responsible for their own trades and methods within a community. They choose what their judgment dictates is most workable for any given trade.
People will satisfy their ethical responsibilities if they know what they are.
There is no detail master plan, but rather a set of aspirations and intentions which are expected to be interpreted differently at first and more similarly by the end.
People will be responsible for satisfying their own commitments if they are freely made and just as freely renegotiated. People wisest about the work they perform.
The manager’s primary focus is to provide context, encourage relationships, and maintain transparency on the “trading floor”.
Communication is an essential element governing transparency.
Executive management chooses the strategic field of play and invites individual traders onto the field.
Individuals judge the effectiveness of their own performance, informed by transparency. People write their own performance evaluations drawing from publicly available data. Ultimately, effectiveness is judged by the willingness of others to trade with an individual.
Resource allocation is achieved by market forces informed by intention more than by dictate. It may be dictated within the bounds of ethics and relationships.
Relationships are tenaciously context-sensitive. They are inevitably resonances of the context interacting with individual intentions and beliefs.
The community is key. Who we believe is in and who we insist is out greatly influences performance.
Monoculture, as you say, is the practice of producing or growing one single crop over a wide area, i.e to ‘culture’ or grow one thing. In the Japanese auto industry, we have seen it applied in the setting of the large manufacturing corporation to utilize instruments of social control unique to their production environments. The corporate monoculture in Japan is facilitated by an environment that is very different than those here in the United States. Some factors include the relative absence of ethnic, racial, or religious subcultures. They have historically hired mostly men into permanent positions in their plants, providing corporate dormitory style housing or subsidized mortgage or construction loans under rotating shifts. Housing being scarce and expensive outside the corporate estate, this is a real benefit that instills loyalty. The corporation provides more than work but a work and personal life and livelihood where people socialize with each other and establish a unified identity. Back in Michigan we see a diverse group of people from many backgrounds, race, age, ethnicity, religion and gender living in private homes commuting on fixed shifts, each bringing to the work force their different and rich perspectives that are not as easily compressed into one entity.
We look to the East because of the degree of quality and efficiency we see from the items they produce and want to emulate that here. We want to reduce defects, optimize production, and squeeze everything we can out of each nickel. Out of this desire come concepts of lean manufacturing and Six Sigma. I believe you can be pretty lean if you only produce one item – monoculture, and hopefully quality will fall out of this – though that is not a certainty. But are we trying to “make mono our corporate culture?” And, is that realistic? Will that be the key to success and larger profit margins, more efficiency, more responsiveness to the customer needs and the market?
So far, the jury’s still out. Clearly, in the short run, even a tightly enforced monoculture seems to be capable of producing remarkable increases in effeciency, larger profit margins, and more responsiveness to customer needs and the market. Perhaps even higher quality. Ask any take-over artist.
I say the jury’s still out, because the relevant range of mono-polist tactics is indeperminant. It is certainly shorter than longer, but how long they can remain viable remains indeterminable. What can be known, if only from perusing history, is that such houses of cards are stabile until they are not, collapsing with stunning speed and even greater efficiency. They are not (at least not yet) long term sustainable.
What one might call inefficieny, another might label requisite variety. We know that 80% of the effort to produce most effects in the world cannot be directly related to the observed effect. A trivial example is hanging wallpaper. Less than 20% of the effort to hang wallpaper has anything to do with actually hanging wallpaper. The rest includes absolutely essential, apparently non-value-added effort. The simmering discussions around deciding what wallpaper to hang. The surprises lurking beneath the old wallcovering, not to mention removing the old wallcovering and disposing of the mess.
Compare the efficiency of someone hanging wallpaper on virgin walls with another recovering hundred year old walls, and you’ll find innumerable apparent inefficiencies in the later effort. Some resolve this dilemma by hammering out the lathe and plaster, replacing it with modern sheetrock, then covering that. Others are more respectful of the character of the old place, and work very hard to maintain the original plaster. A superficial glance might not disclose any difference in the finished product, and if you’re judging results solely by cost and time, the decision to create the mono-wall is clearly superior.
It’s a matter of taste. I know, for instance, that Toyota has a world-renowned manufacturing process, but I’ve owned Toyotas and will never buy another one. I spent too many years trying to change the oil in a Toyota that was clearly designed for ease of manufacture, but with no attention to what any owner might have to do to maintain the resulting kludge.
If corporate culture is the unique personality of an organization then, like personality disorders, you can have cultural disorders. As you know recently, I left the National Laboratory environment and went back into private industry for an engineering company that supports the public sector. The history of my current company comes from many backgrounds due to the merger of 5 separate entities into one business unit. For such a long time now, I’ve been confused. I’m trying to socialize into my new culture; really I am, but… I get mixed messages. This is why. My current company has Multiple Personality Disorder – or Multiple Cultural Disorder – and not having the experience and the social network established yet, I never know which ‘personality’ is speaking to me. I came from an organization with Narcissistic Cultural Disorder and it took me years to integrate but looking back I can now see that I, too, slowly developed a small feeling of entitlement that came with that disease.
So, here I am trying to bathe myself clean of that and adopt the new way of ‘thinking’ that I will need to be successful here, only to discover the answer normally given by culture of “this is how we do it here” all depends upon where I'm standing at the time. We are working hard here to create “one” company – a corporate monoculture. We even have a new intranet web site introduced in 2008 that strips us from our past. To make matters worse, we are several companies all blended into one.
What will success look like at the end? What is the goal of this effort? Warren Bennis would say, “managers do things right and leaders do the right thing” so in this frame, managers work on being more efficient while leaders try to be more effective. And, aren’t things more efficient in a monoculture? I guess it depends upon what you want in the end.
The final questions I would ask you are: How do you stay competitive in this one culture? How do you preserve innovation? Where do the new ideas come from?
Ah, these are the questions. The deep paradox of the mono-polist mindset is that it optimizes on the past rather than focusing on the future. While the bubble sustains, the markets rage. Once the bubble bursts, it’s too late to decide how to stay competitive, where innovation might come back from, and where new ideas that were smothered might be resurrected.
Amy makes the distinction between the renter’s and the owner’s mindset. The renter consumes the resource while the owner preserves it. The owner plays a more infinite game, interested, sure, in short-run survival, but compromising that to ensure longer-run sustainability. Because they expect to pass on their legacy to another generation and not simply consume it in the present.
We’re seeing publicly held companies managing like the renters their stockholders have become. In it for the short-term profit, damn the long-run (in the long-run, this mindset insists, we’ll all be dead). But our children and our children’s children will not be dead, unless we leave them incapable of sustaining their life because we insisted upon consuming our legacy ourselves.
Peter Senge insists that the corporate world has ceased becoming the fount of innovation. They’ve optimized on making a lot of money, so much that we now have an unprecidented surplus of financial capital. And a concomitant deficit in both social and environmental capital. Because these three kinds of capital are in opposition, optimizing on one to the exclusion of the others, creates a zero-sum game. If you want efficiency in manufacture, you’ll shortchange society and the environment doing it. You might recognize the economic benefits of monoculture and ignore the social and environmental costs.
In the fifties, urban planners derived a nifty solution for the problem of inner-city poverty. They built huge, subsidized housing projects, which were very cost-effective to build. More cost effective than remodeling thousands of individual neighborhood houses. The resulting wearhouses tore apart the social fabric of the inhabitants, undermining social networks that had sustained even the very poor for generations.
Just a few weeks ago I read an article titled, “Innovative Minds Don’t Think Alike.” The message was that as “our knowledge and expertise increase, our creativity and ability to innovate tend to taper off.” Why? The walls of our boxes thicken with our increased level of experience as we approach our goal of maximum efficiency. Hmmm… So as you specialize in a field, you start seeing things only one way – building and thickening your box. Sounds like, “if all you have is a hammer, everything else looks like a nail. It’s for this reason that my new company tends to engineer itself out of business by designing products ultimately useful only to other engineers. We can’t think of why you wouldn’t want all 52 buttons on your DVD remote control. “It’s why managers have trouble convincing the rank and file to adopt new processes. And it’s why the advertising world struggles to convey commercial messages to consumers.”
The solution to the innovation killer, according to Cynthia Barton Rabe in her book, “Innovation Killer: How What We Know Limits What We Can Imagine — and What Smart Companies Are Doing About It,” is to bring in outsiders that she calls ‘zero-gravity thinkers’. (And so... I was brought in). Now… isn’t that contrary to adopting a corporate monoculture? Who better to tell management that “the emperor has no clothes” than the new person who doesn’t know better? I guess there has to be diversity for healthy 'evolvement' to exist. Those who don’t evolve, dissolve. Now, if we can just stop killing the messengers.
Who told you that you would be revered just because you can escape the bounds of gravity? No, Maysa, it’s a tough job. The monoculture robs even the most well-intended of some of their most human capabilities. You might find otherwise decent people savaging you as if you were an infection rather than a possible source of salvation. This is very hard work, not for ninnies or wimps. Hard, but worthy work. Keep chipping away.
Now, because I know you are a poet, I’ll leave this posting with a poem:
Finding Purpose
When efficiency become the purpose, purpose is gone
When low cost becomes the purpose, purpose is lost.
When conformity, consistency, and sameness become the first measure of goodness,
All goodness is gone.
Mistake the measure for the purpose, the process for the result, the glossy cover for the book,
and you’ll never find meaning in literature again.
Purpose lives beyond tomorrow, over the foreseeable horizon, in a dreamland banned from the bottom line.
Without it, every bottom line is meaningless.
With it, the bottom line today rarely matters.
So what is corporate culture? According to Randall S. Hansen, Ph.D., “Corporate culture is a broad term used to define the unique personality or character of a particular company or organization, and includes such elements as core values and beliefs, corporate ethics, and rules of behavior.” Corporate culture thus guides how we think, act, and feel in our work environments. So understanding corporate culture is important because it affects us in many ways, such as hours worked per day or week, how you dress, whether you polish your nails or not, training and professional development, how people interact and corporate expectations.
Monoculture, as you say, is the practice of producing or growing one single crop over a wide area, i.e to ‘culture’ or grow one thing. In the Japanese auto industry, we have seen it applied in the setting of the large manufacturing corporation to utilize instruments of social control unique to their production environments. The corporate monoculture in Japan is facilitated by an environment that is very different than those here in the United States. Some factors include the relative absence of ethnic, racial, or religious subcultures. They have historically hired mostly men into permanent positions in their plants, providing corporate dormitory style housing or subsidized mortgage or construction loans under rotating shifts. Housing being scarce and expensive outside the corporate estate, this is a real benefit that instills loyalty. The corporation provides more than work but a work and personal life and livelihood where people socialize with each other and establish a unified identity. Back in Michigan we see a diverse group of people from many backgrounds, race, age, ethnicity, religion and gender living in private homes commuting on fixed shifts, each bringing to the work force their different and rich perspectives that are not as easily compressed into one entity.
We look to the East because of the degree of quality and efficiency we see from the items they produce and want to emulate that here. We want to reduce defects, optimize production, and squeeze everything we can out of each nickel. Out of this desire come concepts of lean manufacturing and Six Sigma. I believe you can be pretty lean if you only produce one item – monoculture, and hopefully quality will fall out of this – though that is not a certainty. But are we trying to “make mono our corporate culture?” And, is that realistic? Will that be the key to success and larger profit margins, more efficiency, more responsiveness to the customer needs and the market?
If corporate culture is the unique personality of an organization then, like personality disorders, you can have cultural disorders. As you know recently, I left the National Laboratory environment and went back into private industry for an engineering company that supports the public sector. The history of my current company comes from many backgrounds due to the merger of 5 separate entities into one business unit. For such a long time now, I’ve been confused. I’m trying to socialize into my new culture; really I am, but… I get mixed messages. This is why. My current company has Multiple Personality Disorder – or Multiple Cultural Disorder – and not having the experience and the social network established yet, I never know which ‘personality’ is speaking to me. I came from an organization with Narcissistic Cultural Disorder and it took me years to integrate but looking back I can now see that I, too, slowly developed a small feeling of entitlement that came with that disease.
So, here I am trying to bathe myself clean of that and adopt the new way of ‘thinking’ that I will need to be successful here, only to discover the answer normally given by culture of “this is how we do it here” all depends upon where I'm standing at the time. We are working hard here to create “one” company – a corporate monoculture. We even have a new intranet web site introduced in 2008 that strips us from our past. To make matters worse, we are several companies all blended into one.
What will success look like at the end? What is the goal of this effort? Warren Bennis would say, “managers do things right and leaders do the right thing” so in this frame, managers work on being more efficient while leaders try to be more effective. And, aren’t things more efficient in a monoculture? I guess it depends upon what you want in the end.
The final questions I would ask you are: How do you stay competitive in this one culture? How do you preserve innovation? Where do the new ideas come from?
Just a few weeks ago I read an article titled, “Innovative Minds Don’t Think Alike.” The message was that as “our knowledge and expertise increase, our creativity and ability to innovate tend to taper off.” Why? The walls of our boxes thicken with our increased level of experience as we approach our goal of maximum efficiency. Hmmm… So as you specialize in a field, you start seeing things only one way – building and thickening your box. Sounds like, “if all you have is a hammer, everything else looks like a nail. It’s for this reason that my new company tends to engineer itself out of business by designing products ultimately useful only to other engineers. We can’t think of why you wouldn’t want all 52 buttons on your DVD remote control. “It’s why managers have trouble convincing the rank and file to adopt new processes. And it’s why the advertising world struggles to convey commercial messages to consumers.”
The solution to the innovation killer, according to Cynthia Barton Rabe in her book, “Innovation Killer: How What We Know Limits What We Can Imagine — and What Smart Companies Are Doing About It,” is to bring in outsiders that she calls ‘zero-gravity thinkers’. (And so... I was brought in). Now… isn’t that contrary to adopting a corporate monoculture? Who better to tell management that “the emperor has no clothes” than the new person who doesn’t know better? I guess there has to be diversity for healthy 'evolvement' to exist. Those who don’t evolve, dissolve. Now, if we can just stop killing the messengers.
- “There’s a crack in everything … that’s how the light gets in.” – Leonard Cohen
Maysa-Maria Peterson,Senior Principal Software Engineer
Software Engineering Center Six Sigma Expert,Raytheon Missile Systems
I'll respond to Maysa's questions in my next entry. david "pure" schmaltz
Some have argued that Microsoft has created a virtual monoculture, susceptible to incursion and failure due to viral attacks. I'm seeing organizations increasingly encouraging monoculture solutions to dilemmas arising from the natural diversity of such things as work styles and different kinds of projects and initiatives. The effects of these 'Earth flattening' approaches create another level of dilemma for those working within monoculture-aspiring organizations. Individuals might be expected to perform in ways that are more than simply alien to them, but counter-productive to the organization's overall objectives. As if 'one best way' could actually describe the one best way to accomplish anything.
The following YouTube video describes one of the risks of monoculture.
I'm interested in anyone's personal experiences coping with the increasingly monocultural perspective within organizations. How have you been selected, indoctrinated, incented, and encouraged to adopt 'one best way?' What contradictions have you encountered in coping with these expectations? Comment below or contact me via the Contact tab above.
This issue focuses upon Tidings of Comfort and Joy, under the belief that we've spent plenty of time discussing what doesn't work. Time for a seasonal injection of something sweeter.
Here's the link to the newsletter.
Happy New Year! david
Before the experiment began, the tappers were asked how often they believed that the listeners would name the songs correctly. On average, tappers expected listeners to get it right about half the time. In the end, however, listeners guessed only 3 of 120 songs tapped out, or 2.5 percent.
The tappers were astounded. The song was so clear in their minds; how could the listeners not “hear” it in their taps?"
Today's New York Time presents a remarkable piece which, as many
remarkable pieces seem to do, states the obvious. Innovative minds
don't think alike.
This brings into question the many, exhausting, expensive
efforts to conform knowledge-worker knowledge to a certain defined
standard. As I've commented before, most of the work we do these
days relies upon tacit knowledge, that kind of knowledge we might
not even be aware we have. It's different for you and for me and
for that other guy over there. When we manage to get to thinking on
the same page, we're stuck on that page. This, I claim, is one
reason we see every bank stumbling on the same sub-prime mortgage
crisis (every one had a model that told them exactly when to sell,
but, interestingly, not whom to sell to), and why every company
that hires only PMPed project managers find their projects
compromised in exactly the same old way. (Yawn.)
Here's the link to the article.
Tracing Business Acumen to Dyslexia
By BRENT BOWERS
Published: December 6, 2007 New York Times
It has long been known that dyslexics are drawn to running their own businesses, where they can get around their weaknesses in reading and writing and play on their strengths. But a new study of entrepreneurs in the United States suggests that dyslexia is much more common among small-business owners than even the experts had thought.
The report, compiled by Julie Logan, a professor of entrepreneurship at the Cass Business School in London, found that more than a third of the entrepreneurs she had surveyed — 35 percent — identified themselves as dyslexic. The study also concluded that dyslexics were more likely than nondyslexics to delegate authority, to excel in oral communication and problem solving and were twice as likely to own two or more businesses.
“We found that dyslexics who succeed had overcome an awful lot in their lives by developing compensatory skills,” Professor Logan said in an interview. “If you tell your friends and acquaintances that you plan to start a business, you’ll hear over and over, ‘It won’t work. It can’t be done.’ But dyslexics are extraordinarily creative about maneuvering their way around problems.”
Read the rest of the story here: http://tinyurl.com/yps3tv
I have written here and elsewhere about entrepreneurial energy, about how investigators have tried to identify those skills and teach them to others. What if these skills aren't really skills at all, but rather automatic responses to certain innate disabilities. The logic of collaboration might well get lost in the hustle IF the would-be collaborator really could take care of everything alone. But these dyslexic entrepreneurs have learned, as the founder of Kinkos learned, that anyone can do it better than they can, so sharing the reins becomes more likely under stress.
Can these different abilities be taught? This survey found that a paltry 1% of corporate managers are blessed with the gift of dyslexia, and recruiting strategies seem pretty effective at preventing these special people from ever entering the ranks of corporate management. They do show up in the ranks of those unlikely managers, those who find themselves managing projects, the most entrepreneurial activities in the enterprise.
The current certification craze has further limited entry for those apparently most likely to succeed in these entrepreneurial activities. This might explain why large companies continue to operationalize project work, as if it were just another manufacturing process improved by routinization. It also might explain why large corporations live for, on average, no longer than thirty years. A decade in entrepreneurial engagement, a decade cruising on the start-up's momentum, and a decade extinguishing the initiating spark through selective recruitment and process enforcement.
This is a powerful example of how all those so-called disabilities are situational strengths. If only we could learn to appreciate differences rather than exclude or try to reform them.
I’ve spent most of my current visit in Vienna, where my wife and I were invited to speak at a conference. We spent the first Sunday morning of our visit strolling through the Augarten, a park sited on the grounds of a former palace. (Vienna is lousy with former palaces.) This one, though, is different, because in it stands two flakturms,
There’s little left of the war years’ deprivation. Vienna today is a modern city populating a rebuilt, ancient infrastructure. Our conference was held in another old palace, dating from the fifteenth century, but remodeled into as modern a conference facility as any in the world. Not remodeled cheaply, but re-gilded, with fresh frescoes on the ceilings and finely-carved paneling on the walls. One friend there, who has been expanding his home, showed us his work. He said he built every addition expecting it to last at least two hundred years. Yes, he admitted, it’s expensive, but he feels an obligation to future generations to continue this tradition of building to last. If anything typifies this new Europe, it is this dedication to the long view.
Contrary to anyone believing that investors are only interested in short-term results, business is thriving there, but it’s anticipating the pinch of our sub-prime mortgage crisis. They expect that our financial flu will migrate to infect their economy, and they are not pleased at the prospect of economic sniffles caused by our short-sightedness.
America has lost influence in Europe since 2000. On prior visits, I found our hosts and the attendees at the conferences fluent in English. This time, several commented that their English has grown rusty with disuse. I felt embarrassed that they find little reason to follow the American media or stay current with what used to be considered the trend-setter nation. More than our dollar is falling behind.
The New Europe has resolved many social issues we Americans continue to stiff-arm. High fuel taxes keep cars off the road and encourage choosing public transportation, which is convenient, plentiful, and cheap. When we discovered that a cab ride to the train station would cost us a hundred dollars, we caught a municipal bus half a block away that arrived within ten minutes and cost less than ten bucks—and got us to the train just as quickly. Walking and bicycling are common and delightful in cities purposely designed to be compact. Mornings found legions of bicyclers—many more bicycles than cars—using the bike lanes bordering every road. Sure, there are a lot of regulations limiting choices there, but the European Union has actually made good on commitments to, for instance, leave a smaller ecological footprint while our congress argues over everything but resolves little.
Likewise, universal health care is impossible to argue against. I frustrated myself failing to explain the rationality of our system. They complain about paying half their income in taxes, but are astounded to learn that we pay more than that after adding up the private costs of all our government doesn’t provide. They’ve never had to make the choice between keeping the house and having an operation, and had never heard of anyone having to pay off childbirth expenses over years, like car payments.
And our paranoia over terrorism feels pathological compared to the EU’s responses, even though they’ve been threatened from terrorism for decades. Boarding a flight into an EU country is little different than boarding a domestic flight here. Flying back to the States, I’m caution