How can your team deal with complex challenges ?

Most of the challenges facing leaders today are complex. Dave Snowden’s Cynefin model separates the types of situations leaders are confronted with into simple, complicated, complex and chaos, and indicates how each should be dealt with differently (HBR November 2007). A complex challenge requires leaders to probe, sense and respond. How can this model be applied to a team ?

When teams are invited to solve a problem or find solutions for a challenge, they nearly always intuitively move into solution mode very quickly. Each will mentally assess the situation, categorize or analyze the facts and then share which solution is the best and why this is so. “I think we should do this because I used to …”. Experts often save the day. Brainstorming helps to share as many ideas as possible in a short period of time so the team can respond quickly to the issue. Advocating solutions, expert input, brainstorming or sharing best practices works for simple or complicated problems where the Cynefin model prescribes the steps of sense, categorize, respond, and sense, analyze, respond respectively. Simple and complicated problems are prevalent in an “ordered” world where actions have predictable results. Approaching complex problems in the same way leads to half-optimized solutions at best and a team stuck in disagreement at worst; it is often up to the leader to decide what to do. So much for the team’s contribution !

How can a team work through the steps of probing, sensing and responding and tackle complex problems efficiently ?

That’s exactly what Action Learning does. Action Learning is a problem solving process where a small team works on a real and complex business challenge, takes action and learns as individuals and as a team while doing so. Rather than jumping into solution-mode, the ground rule “statements are only made in response to questions” helps the team focus first on what the real issue or challenge is. Perceptions and assumptions are put aside as the team asks questions about the different aspect of the problem. This corresponds to the probing step in the Cynefin model.

Based on the discussion and exchanges in the Action Learning session, each team member will decide what actions to take after the session. They can take action to test out an idea, confirm an assumption or talk to people to collect more information. This is the sensing step in the Cynefin model.

When the team reconvenes to continue their work on the challenge, each will share the result of their actions and what they learned from them. The team will take in this new information about the challenge, and continue to work on shaping the understanding of the situation through questions. This is the responding step in the model. 

For a leader, the Cynefin model describes how to deal with a complex challenge. When this leader wants to empower the team to learn, develop and come up with new ideas, the Action Learning process provides a clear structure and rules to avoid the pitfall of tackling complex challenges through the ubiquitous brainstorming-like “let’s find the solution” approach.

What questions were not allowed ?

Samsung's debacle with the Note 7 caused a loss in profit of more than 2 billion US$ and the company's image will be dented for a long time to come. Who will rush out to buy the Note 8 ??

The official cause for the batteries catching fire has not yet been communicated and there will undoubtedly be technical explanations about the reasons the phones overheated and started to melt. And maybe a few engineers will be shamed (publicly, undoubtedly) and for sure a good part of the blame will end up in the lap of the suppliers who built the batteries.

But very likely, someone, at some point, at Samsung or at the supplier, had raised questions about the stability or safety of the new generation batteries that were being rushed through production to meet the deadlines. Maybe it was an engineer or technician who thought that some test results were too borderline to allow for the next phase in design and production  ... And they were probably told that the impact on the timely launch would be too important. The Challenger and Titanic disasters are examples where people had raised questions and concerns but been overruled or ignored.

These are dramatic examples. For sure your company will not end up in the headlines to this extent. But just wonder how difficult questions are dealt with in your organization ? Are they written off as disconnected with the business priorities ? As a disturbance ? Or are they looked upon as a way to challenge current practices and do better in the long run ? The impact may not be as dramatic as in Samsung's case, but the way you deal with questions will definitely impact how your organization grows ...

The power of small ...

The former CEO of SAS once said "You cannot improve something by 1000% but you can improve a 1000 things by 1%". 1% doesn't look that exhilarating. Most websites/blogs/consultants or coaches will entice you with breakthrough improvement. They promise to bring you from where you are today straight to best-in-class ... The promises are convincing.

But let's take another look at these small 1% improvements. I came across this visual on Linkedin some time ago. Don't know if this is copyrighted in any way, and if it is, credits go to the author ! 1% a day, for one year. Doesn't sound impossible, but also doesn't sound as much of an improvement at first sight. Until you realize that doing this every single day adds up to a pretty huge difference after one year. Just as huge a difference as 1% decline every day adds up to after 365 days.

And I would add that 1.00(365) = 1 ... The biggest challenge for many is that they are stuck in their current mode.They think/talk or find excuses about the changes and challenges around them ... and as times goes by, nothing gets done.

So a gentle reminder that 1% is not that small after all, if only you can keep it up !

Changing others ...

In the team sessions I run, participants share management challenges and learn from each other through a questioning process. 100% of the challenges are about someone who is not in the room. The difficult colleague. The demanding boss. A team member who is not doing what is asked. Or another who is talking behind your back. The context and specifics are different, but it is always about them. And how to change them.

The presenter explains to the colleagues in the team session all he has tried, all the tricks in his management tool kit that have been tested. And how all these attempts were not successful and how the issue is still there. Once the explanations about the situation are complete, the presenter eagerly listens to what the colleagues will come up with, in the hope they will have a magic trick in the tool box that is brand new and untested and will be the secret to dealing with this management challenge. Alas, after a few minutes, the discussion often turns into "I have tried that too and it doesn't work" or "This solution is not possible in this case because ...".

The exchange quickly grows stale when the focus is solely on what other or innovative tricks exist to change the other person's (peer, boss, team member) behavior. The real insight comes when the presenter realizes that he or she can only change his or her own behavior ... and then see what impact that has on the other person. This seems pretty basic for some but it is only when this awareness has grown that the presenter can come up with real steps of what he can do himself to deal with the challenge.

What insight looks like

One key objective of an Action Learning session is to help a colleague get a better understanding of his or her problem. A better understanding leads to better solutions ! Asking questions helps a leader explore possibilities he or she had not thought of before. This takes time, and simply telling someone what should be done does not work. To come to a genuine insight, our brain requires questions and explorations.

We often ask team members to write out in a full sentence their understanding of the underlying problem. Sometimes, the leader sharing the problem insists that he understands the problem very well, and that there is not really a need to write it out.  Yet the different rounds of asking questions to one another and evaluating different perspectives can sometimes lead to real insights. When the "light bulb is switched on" leaders immediately see their challenge - and the solutions - in a whole different way.

Here are two examples from actual sessions.

The leader's understanding of the problem at the start of the session:
"How can I improve the employee engagement score related to the department's leadership ?"

The leader's insight of the problem at the end of the session:
"How can I develop trust between myself and my leadership team ?"

And the second one ...

At the start:
"How can I improve the relationships between myself and the team ?"

and at the end:
"How can I control my emotional reactions to minimize the impact on the team ?"

Maybe it is time for you to take a fresh look and the challenges you are facing ?

Innovation by deletion

I recently came across an interesting idea in the Dialogue magazine from Duke EC. It is simple yet we often do not think about innovation in this way. Full credit to the author Lisa Bodell.

When we think of innovation or read about it, the focus is nearly always about doing something new, creative, different, something nobody else has thought about. But the authors of this article turn things upside down: very often, innovation can be (indirectly) increased by STOPPING to do stupid things that take up time and energy. They call this the Kill A Stupid Rule tool. I think this is especially true in large organizations.

So here is the approach. Bring your team, department, division together and have them brainstorm or think about "stupid things we do". Stupid rules. Stupid reports, meetings or practices. Stupid processes that were put in place at some point by somebody, but where nobody remembers the purpose or benefit. There are no limits to what can be brought up. Anybody who thinks there is something stupid going on can list this as something the team should consider.

The team will then organize all these "stupid ideas" in the traditional 2x2 matrix, along the axes of "easy versus difficult to implement" and "low or high impact on the organization". The obvious priority is to focus on the quadrant with the easy to remove/high impact topics. The team can vote to pick one stupid rule they all agree to kill right here and now, and evaluate the following weeks that canceling this rule is indeed  feasible.

Asking teams to do something new, something innovative on top of everything else that fills their working days is often a challenge. Change in this direction is hard. But the opposite can be very liberating and invigorating. Removing a "stupid" rule or process or way of doing things can free up time, energy and focus ... and open the possibilities for innovation. It empowers team members to be able to redesign the way they do their current work.

Is Action Learning the secret key to self-management ?

In Reinventing Organizations, Frederic Laloux describes the way Buurtzorg (Netherlands, nursing home care, total 7000 employees) functions on the basis of self-managed teams of 10-12 nurses. On page 70, the author lists the key principles around which teams in Buurtzorg are organized:

- it's okay for tams to struggle: from struggle comes learning, and teams that have gone through difficult moments build resilience and a deep sense of community;

- the coach's role is to let teams make their own choices, even if she believes she knows a better solution;

- the coach supports the team mostly by asking insightful questions and mirroring what she sees;

- the starting point is always to look for enthusiasm, strengths and existing capabilities within the team; the coach projects trust that the team has all it takes to solve the problems it faces.

Anyone who has ever participated in an Action Learning set immediately recognizes these principles: this is exactly what develops when a team embraces Action Learning as a way to collaboratively solve problems. Asking questions to one another creates powerful connections. Team members take actions and share the results and their learning with their peers. The team learns and moves from strength to strength. Engagement and ownership is guaranteed when teams can create and put in place their own solutions.  

Buurtzorg is a fascinating organization: there are no managers, no quality departments, no central structures. Teams of nurses manage everything related to their profession. And the results are extraordinary. 

Leaders often feel the need to thoroughly change their organization's culture (the way things are done), but are not sure about how to get started. You cannot dictate a culture change and we all know the probability of a corporate change initiative being successful ! Getting teams to use Action Learning to solve their own problems is definitely a solid start.

What's your focus ?

Jae Jong (auntie Jong) has been making fried pork for many years. From 6 AM until closing at 4 PM, there is a line in front of the shop. Around noon time, the line is 3 times as long as in the picture taken at 8 AM. 

The food shop next to that of Jae Jong makes "anything you want" (made-to-order). There are plenty of empty seats available at all times.

Jae Jong only does fried pork. Not fried chicken, beef or fish. She sells tens of kilos of it every day. She has a single shop and never opened any branch, although her reputation would undoubtedly make other branches successful. Her shop has no air-conditioning and hasn't changed for ages. She never innovated on her fried pork. There is only one kind of fried pork; no sugar-coated friend pork, no chill-dipped fried pork and no 'design-your-own' fried pork.  There's only Jae Jong's fried pork.

Jae Jong has remained focused on making the best fried pork, believing that people would come and come back for it. And they do, standing in line in the sun and heat every day (the shop does not have a day off). 

I see many entrepreneurs struggling with focus. It is very tempting to add something interesting onto your portfolio, if it brings an immediate opportunity (a new client !). It is hard to say no when you are in need of business. So one client asks something, and they think "Why not, I could do this and I can always refocus later on." And then another client comes up with something else again. Or they see or read something and think that this could be cool as a new product or service. Quickly, they become average at doing many things, rather than excellent in doing one thing. Very hard to get your focus back once you've given it up.

Staying focused works. Yes, it takes time. But people will come back for your product or service if they know yours is the best around.

 

So who is insane ?

I always get chuckles when I show Einstein's definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting different results. Most executives in the room get it immediately and can think of a boss/peer/team member who indeed keeps on doing the same thing and expects or hopes for a different outcome. The executives don't really think about themselves ... and understandably so because to identify yourself as insane does sound a bit extreme.

But then we go into a bit more detail. And we analyse that boss who keeps on doing the same thing that drives us crazy. And of course it is so clear that the boss should stop doing that and do something different. "I don't understand he/she just keeps doing that while it is clear for everybody it does not work !". Substitute boss with peer/team member as you wish. So we declare the boss/peer/team member completely insane based on Einstein's definition !

Once those others have been declared insane, the conversation goes

Me "OK, so the boss (peer/team member) is crazy for doing this or that. And what about you ?"
Them "Me ? What do you mean me ? The problem is not with me, the problem is that he/she (boss/peer/team member) doesn't change !"
Me "OK sure, he needs to change what he is doing ... But what are YOU doing differently when it comes to interacting/challenging/motivating/talking with him ?"
Them "Well, I have told him 100s of times that he needs to stop doing what he is doing, and change what he is doing !"
Me "And does it work ?"
Them "Well no, obviously he doesn't get it !"
Me "So you keeping on telling him the same thing over and over again ..."
Them "Yes, yes I do !!"
Me "... and you expect a different result ?"
Them "Euh ... but ..."

It's easy to pinpoint where others need to change. We can talk about them until the cows come home (most often when they are not around). Think rather what YOU can do relative to that person to help them: whatever you have been doing, or something different ? You might in the end help two people from becoming insane !

Do you measure yourself ?

What gets measured gets done. Not very sure if it was Lord Kelvin or Peter Drucker. And although I have often reminded others about the importance of identifying a target and measuring progress against it, I recently realised I was not applying my own medicine ...

I am working on a PhD dissertation. It will for sure be great and exciting once it will all be finished. But for now, it is tedious, hard and to be honest ... quite boring. I have to listen to and analyze hours and hours of recordings that will allow me to confirm the main assumptions of my dissertation. I got started rather energetically some weeks ago. But that enthousiasm dwindled once I realized how much time all this was taking. Progress just seemed so terribly slow. I quite frankly though about whether I would ever get through all the listening and analyzing. Whenever I got back to work on my tedious never-ending list of tasks, I quickly gave up feeling that it wasn't really making a difference.

 And that's when I reminded myself about what I had applied to any type of performance goal for so many years: visualise and measure. So I created my only-to-myself meaningful visual of all the work ahead of me (and the little that was behind me), which ended up looking like little circles and bigger pizzas. Everytime I finished a new chunk I quickly colored in the corresponding space on the sheet. Doing this didn't make any of the actual work go faster, or even made it less boring ... ! But it created a level of motivation of 'seeing' the progress. And I am now capable of measuring my overall progress towards the goal of completion of all the work. As of this writing, I am at 76%. I am pretty sure measuring 'myself' in this way has helped to keep up the motivation.

We all know that what gets measured gets done. But think about applying this as well to personal goals and projects !

Happy out of your comfort zone

At the end of a recent week-long leadership development program with a group of engineering managers in Singapore, the participants were asked to share one key thought or take-away for the intense week. One of the participants shared ...

"I have come to realize that, if you are pushed often enough out of your comfort zone, you can actually get used to it."

This is a thought that stuck with me. In several leadership development programs, I have seen participants who become very aware about themselves, and get a good understanding of what their own comfort zone is. Awareness is of course the necessary condition towards progress.

But while many understand the concept - and manage to apply it to themselves - pretty well ... the majority still struggle to do anything with this new awareness. As if they now have a good understanding of their own challenges, but remain stuck like a deer staring into the headlights.

So once you are aware of your own comfort zone, what's next ? My personal experience is that it helps to see the situations where you are moving out of your comfort zone, as ... learning opportunities. Not performance opportunities. Not opportunities to show to yourself, or someone else, what you can do (because you can't !). Just learning opportunities. If you can develop your mindset that these situations help you to learn, then the experience becomes far less stressful. And any of these experiences helps to learn more about yourself. Maybe learning that getting out of that comfort zone was easier, or harder, than you thought. It is not about doing it right. It is not about trying to copy what the others (the experts) do. I try to reflect out loud (in my head !) what I am learning, what is going better than thought, or what is not going really well and I would do differently next time. I try to keep myself in the learning mode.

Developing a mindset of learning, when faced with out-of-comfort-zone situations, goes a long way in becoming happy being out of your comfort zone.

No time to learn ?

I often hear that managers (at any level) are so busy they have no time for organizational learning or learning in general. They are loaded with back-to-back meetings. Or visitors they have to take care of. Urgent events keep them busy. And of course emails, and reports, and more emails. When you talk about learning, they refer to the training program  that was fixed during last year's budget period and which is probably very similar to the one the year before. There really is no time left, not at the end of the day, nor the end of the month. There is simply no time. Someone told me recently that it seemed there were fewer and fewer hours in a day (I checked, there aren't).




Reg Revans curve on learning vs change

Learning does not mean studying or going to a training course in a hotel room. Training is about discovering the solutions or best practices for yesterday's problems. Learning is about using the experience that exists in a team, asking questions about the situation and reflecting on how actions should be taken in the new and changed environment. Learning allows your team to develop solutions for tomorrow's problems. Reg Revans said that if an organization can learn faster than the rate of change in its environment, it will prosper. If the organization learns slower than the rate of change, the organization will eventually collapse.

Everybody is aware that changes are happening faster and more intense than ever. Technology, social media or supply chain models change faster than in the past. In the past, when changes happened more slowly, the way teams learned allowed the organization to stay ahead and develop new business opportunities. When changes accelerate exponentially, these ways of learning no longer work.

The way a team learned in the past, can no longer sustain the organization. If we cannot learn faster and therefore grow with these changes, failure is ahead.

If you don't manage to learn, as an individual, or a team, or an organization, it's only a matter of time until you are overtaken by the changes around you. Maybe it is urgent to think about when you will make time to learn.


Whose values are these anyway ?

A manufacturing company has a strict rule about no alcohol on the premises. Makes complete sense if only from a safety point of view. The company handbook clearly states that infringement leads to immediate dismissal, without compensation. Yet the foreign technical expert visiting regularly is known to keep a few bottles of alcohol in his office, for after-hours unwinding (at the factory). This is widely known by everyone but (silently) accepted because "he has always done this and cannot change"
.

Fuji Xerox values

Less critical but in the same vein, a large "no motorcycle parking" in front of the office aims to ensure there is no clutter of bikes parked in an obstructive way. But this is also where the boss' motorcycle is parked every day.

Do you really think your teams need visions, missions or value statements ? They see (literally in the above examples) what the values or priorities are every single day, in what is being done, and more importantly, in what is being tolerated in the organization. Values are concept that is demonstrated by the company's top team, in interactions with people of all levels, including those external to the company. Values are tested in times of stress, conflict or upheaval.

Vision, mission and value statements can be powerful when they synthesize what already exists. It is a confirmation of what the company is and wants to continue to be. If these statements describe what should be, or worse still, are created because it seems they are the "in" thing, they do more harm than good, and it would be better to just do away with them all together. Don't expect people to be inspired by a poster on the wall while issues and conflicts remain unaddressed.

Writing your values statement is not a priority. The priority is to demonstrate your values by the way you lead your organization. Your people will get it.

The team's the limit

Not the sky. Although that may be what consultants will try and make you believe. In the end, the consultant will move on. If you need a consultant forever, then this is no longer a consultant but a fixed part of your organization (and expenses). So the consultant will move on. And leave you and your team behind. So the extent to which the processes, the culture or the knowledge will change following the consultant's intervention, depends on the team.

In my experience, a consultant hardly looks at the team in place. Typically, they will explain you all the great things that other companies out there achieve, the best practices, the state-of-the-art. And you'll be feeling pretty embarrassed that your organization has not yet achieved what everyone else out there has been doing for ages. Obviously all the other teams out there (and their leaders) are way ahead of you.

The consultant does not look at your team, and does not take into account how your team interacts and creates value for the organization. Of course, there will be a "change management" component included with the offer, with a great-looking gap analysis and a few training sessions. This analysis does not focus on the team or its members, their interactions and their experiences; it focuses on the processes, culture or knowledge (whatever the subject of the intervention is).

And that is why so many consultant interventions end up fizzling out or at the most do not deliver the black-and-white gains that were touted at the onset. An organization performs through its teams, not through the consultants that come in. Of course, consultants have their value in helping the organization move to the next level, and in bringing expertise and experience from other missions. But if your team is not the central part around which the change or improvement is built, then the disappointment (including frustration and finger-pointing) is guaranteed.