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 !

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.

Why brainstorming won't get your team out of the box

Brainstorming is a very popular tool to address a problem or challenge with a team. The logic is that the ideas of a handful of people will be more creative or powerful than those of an individual. No issue here. In a brainstorming session, each participant takes turns to come up with an idea, and all are listed on a flipchart, without evaluating, judging or even reacting. The long list of ideas is then reduced, ideas are voted on, or combined.

Brainstorming is very intense. Energy is high. Participants think hard to come up with a brilliant idea waiting their turn ... and hoping that nobody else will have the same idea ! Nothing worse in a brainstorming session than to have your neighbor steal the idea you were about to share !

Neuroscience has demonstrated the limits of brainstorming when it comes to finding real breakthrough ideas. Because of the high level of energy and the dynamics of a brainstorming session, participants come up with those ideas or solutions that require the least thinking effort. The brain is forced to work hard: while others shout their ideas, the brain works overtime to come up with something - anything - by the time it's its turn. After a second of relaxation once the idea has been added to the list, it's back to thinking hard to come up with something - again, anything - before the next turn.

Research by David Rock (Mr. Neuroleadership) has shown that forcing the brain to think under time pressure does not mean great ideas will pop out. It is quite the opposite. Real breakthrough ideas occur when the brain is at rest. When some question or riddle jumps around in our unconscious brain, the weaker connections between neurons are activated: those are the things we know but we don't use them routinely. And that's where new solutions are found. So David Rock recommends the following process. When you are faced with a really complex challenge, spend some time with your team to agree on what the key question is the team should answer in order to solve this challenge. Let the team disperse, and go back to what they regularly do. Then bring them together, one or two days later. The brain has been allowed to rest, and the question has been playing around in team members' brains over this period. Doing a brainstorming at that moment will deliver far superior ideas than the immediate brainstorming.

Need urgent and great new ideas ? Slow down first !

High-performing team anyone ?

There are hundreds of books on how to develop a high-performing team. With matrices, and pyramids, and 5-7-9 steps processes. All guaranteed to lift your team to high performance. Have you ever googled “high-performance teams” ? When you look at the images that appear at the top, you don’t see a new product development team at an engineering firm, or a management team at a famous bank. You see pictures of an F1 team, or a rowing team in action. And some advertising for consultants who will transform your team with their magic formula !

Why is it that it is typically sports teams that get described as high-performance teams, while management teams only seem to aspire to reach that level ? In my experience, a key factor that sports teams apply without hesitation and in a very formal way, is … learning. After each competition, won or lost, the team will get together and analyze in very deep detail what went well, and what didn’t go well. Military teams coined the concept of the AAR, the after action review, often right on the battlefield when everybody’s recollection of the events is fresh. A boxer shared recently that after a win, his team goes right to watch the video to see the moments where the opponent, although beaten, managed to break through the defense. And they would adjust the training program to focus on that particular weakness.

In organizations, we use similar ‘tools’ like PDCA or six sigma control loops. But that seems to be applied most often to the front-line processes. When it comes to management teams, the step of reflecting, learning and planning for improvement is often watered down to a project closure report that is sent around asking to ‘rate’ and fill in comments. Or when all went well, there is a team celebration that is for sure fun but doesn’t really go in any depth, and doesn’t allow the team to learn. Teams are so busy they often consider they don’t have the time to reflect on what is behind them, because a mountain of new challenges lays ahead.

Yet dedicating some time to have an entire team review, in a facilitated setting, the key learnings and needs for improvement will go a long way to enhancing team collaboration – over time. A team might have issues, and sometimes we are stuck with “the deck we were dealt”. But if each time a team completes a project, challenge, customer account or major event, it can learn from this experience and do better the next time, it will develop a growth mindset that moves it up towards the level of high performance, whatever its starting point is. Learning is not something abstract that happens in people’s heads: it is a team activity as much as the actual project work.

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 !

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.

Emergency ! Is there a project manager in the room ?

Project manager is probably one of the least exciting titles to carry on your namecard. Really, what is there to manage about a project ? It's much cooler to identify yourself as being in business development, or at least have "innovation" in your job title. Yet two recent events in the news reminded me of the value of project management.

Apple brought out the iPhone 5 but the improvements of the phone were completely overshadowed by the talk about the disastrous map application that replaced Google maps. Not just some difficult-to-identify bug but real issues that make the application nearly useless.
4GS was awarded the contract to recruit and train security staff for the London 2012 Olympic games. 16 days before the opening ceremony, the company informed the organizers they were still missing more than 1700 guards. PWC made an audit after the fiasco and reported that the company did not realize the scale of the work, and listed numerous errors, including bad management.

These are not small projects. They are immensely important for the companies, their stakeholders, and reputation. These projects were in the works for years, with hundrerds of people involved in each company. Was there any project manager in charge ... ?

Here is a reminder of a few basics of managing projects towards success:

- milestones or deadlines are there to be met: if you do not reach your objective at a certain stage in the project, you need to change something  for the project to get back on track ... action is needed and just continuing and hoping for the best at the next milestone makes no sense;

- a no-go means we don't go; Steve Jobs was notorious for dictating design changes when the curve of a button or the sound of a click was not to his liking. These were critical elements (for him) and compromise was not allowed. If a customer-critical requirement is not met, the project manager needs to make sure the product is not launched hoping customers won't notice.

Project management is not very exciting, and only comes in the news when something goes wrong. Project managers deserve credit for all the projects that we don't talk about: those that deliver on time, budget and quality in a complex world.

Cynefin and the floods

In my previous blog I introduced in a simple way the Cynefin framework. I discovered this last year, right in the middle of the floods that caused so much destruction in Thailand. The framework helped me at that time to do - with the teams - a reasonably good job of steering our organization through this period. Our manufacturing facilities were not impacted at the time, but our employees and our business activity was.

The flood situation, at least as far as my organization at that time was concerned, can be described as a "complex" problem. Characteristics of complex problems are that they are in flux and unpredictable. There are no right answers, and there are many differing ideas of what should be done. The situation was not simple or complicated, obviously, but also not chaotic. In fact, the events dragged out over several weeks. There was no chaos or sudden dramatic event. Day after day, we obtained (often contradicting) updates from the different news sources on the situation, tried to imagine what could happen, and get ready for those eventualities.

So how did viewing this situation as a "complex" problem help me at all ? As explained in my last blog, the Cynefin framework helps leaders to determine how to react to a problem at hand. For a complex problem, the appropriate approach is Probe - Sense - Respond. The following steps are recommended in the Harvard Business Review article of November 2007.

Open discussions and dissenting views In this kind of situation, a command-and-control approach does not work. The leader does not have the answer any more than the next person. Even the experts had differing opinions about what would happen and about what should be done. Within the organization, we created differeent groups to develop ideas of how we could get ready for all possible scenario. Extreme opinions (from "nothing will happen" to "we're all doomed !") were allowed for discussion.

Set barriers We decided not to review or react to every single piece of "news" or information out there. Internet, blogosphere or Youtube all carried hundreds of snippets of information each day. Considering or evaluating this information overload would have taken half a day. Instead, we created our own measures of the rising water level in our surroundings and objectively and frequently reported this to the people in the organization.

Monitor for emergence Many team members were given the freedom to implement their ideas, even though we did not know the appropriateness at the time. This was not a situation where one could turn to the boss for the correct answers. Allowing all ideas to rise and have people implement most of them created a dynamic and motivation that kept the team going for different weeks.

The crisis turned out OK for the organization although several employees were affected personally. As the leader of the organization, viewing the situation as a complex problem and addressing it with the appropriate approach helped me to maintain the team's motivation and commitment. Having said that, I sincerely hope that nobody needs to encounter this kind of dramatic flood, with our without the Cynefin framework !