The Business Sensei

Don’t Let Dracula Decisions Roam Your Business

As published in Corp! Magazine.

As a kid, I liked watching the old Bela Lugosi Dracula movies. The movies were more than a little formulaic, but still fun. Each one would begin roughly the same way: after a series of mysterious murders, disappearances, and other strange happenings, Our Hero would figure out that Count Dracula had somehow returned from the grave. Naturally, everyone else would laugh at him because as they, and the audience, knew perfectly well, Dracula had been thoroughly killed off at the end of the previous movie. Someone might also make the token objection that vampires don’t exist, but no one ever took that objection seriously. Our Hero would persevere, though, and after much debate and argument, eventually convince everyone that the Count was, indeed, once again walking the Earth. Finally, in the very nick of time, Our Hero would successfully drive a stake through Dracula’s heart, or expose him to sunlight, or the Wolfman would tackle him and they would fall together out a window into the raging surf hundreds of feet below, or some other equally melodramatic ending. Afterward, everyone would relax, confident in the knowledge that this time Count Dracula really was dead once and for all. This time, for sure… at least until the next movie.

I frequently hear a variant of this story from my clients. No, they’re not talking about Count Dracula per se; rather, they are talking about making decisions at their companies. No matter how thoroughly a topic is debated to death, and no matter how often teams make decisions on which way to go, the topic reappears in the next meeting. There’s always some purported reason: “We didn’t follow proper procedure,” or “I forgot to include this really important piece of information,” or “It’s not fair that Bob wasn’t here,” or “I didn’t understand what I was voting for,” or, “How about another Dracula flick?”

OK, maybe the last one doesn’t come up all that often. The actual reasons don’t really matter anyway: they’re all about as hokey as the reason why Dracula didn’t really die in the previous movie. Dracula returns because the audiences and the producers want him back; similarly, the decision returns from the grave because people want to bring it back. In this way, even apparently simple decisions can return again and again, sucking up time and energy like Dracula sucking blood. It isn’t long before a mundane meeting turns into an event to be anticipated with mounting horror, or at least a strong sense of dread.

Make decisions that stop returning from the grave
While this problem is particularly prevalent with leaderless, or self-managed, teams, it is hardly unique to them. The real question, of course, is what to do about it. How do you make decisions stop returning to roam the hallways like Dracula returning from the grave?

First off, if the team doesn’t have a leader, it needs one. When you see a team unable to make decisions, that’s a team rushing towards being dysfunctional. Changing course requires putting someone in charge, or at least having someone who can facilitate meetings and hold both individuals and the team accountable.

Next is communications: if no one is asking questions or pushing back on a decision, that’s a bad sign. That’s telling you that the team isn’t engaged in the process, and if they aren’t engaged, they’re also not seriously thinking about the decision. Inviting speculation or asking open-ended questions can get conversation started. If no one is willing to question, then you are also missing out on a valuable opportunity to debug the decision before you make it.

Conversely, once you have debate going, you also need a way to bring it to a halt. Just as it’s important to not end debate too quickly, it’s also important to not let it continue on until people are ready to chew their own legs off. Periodically polling the room to see if everyone can accept any of the alternatives being considered, and, if not, finding out what else they want to say or what else they need to know, can be very effective at helping everyone recognize when debate is ready to end. Once everyone in the room feels that they can support any of the alternatives being considered, you can make your decision. This approach has the added benefit that if there’s someone in the room who is determined to keep arguing until they get their way, that too will become obvious. Should that situation occur, the person in charge can then deal with it appropriately.

Finally, you need to have something substantive to discuss. It’s not enough to just make a decision: you also have to map out how the decision will be implemented, what steps need to be taken, who is responsible for reporting back, and when. In any non-trivial decision, the early steps are always error-prone: those charged with implementing the decisions must feel certain that the feedback they gain on those early steps will not be held against them. If people are afraid of being punished for inevitable learning mistakes, you can count on that decision returning like Dracula until responsibility is sufficiently diffused that no one can be blamed for failure. At that point, you can also be certain that no one will care about the outcome.

As much as the process of effective decision-making may seem to take a long time, it’s far quicker to make a decision once and put it to rest than to have it returning, time and again, like Dracula from the grave.

My Hovercraft is Full of Eels

Originally published in Corp! Magazine.

“Is the product done?” a certain manager asked during a product review meeting.

“It is done,” replied the engineer building the product.

“Are there any problems?”

“There are problems.”

“What is the problem?”

“It does not work.”

“Why doesn’t it work?”

“It is not done.”

I will spare you the transcription of the subsequent half hour of this not particularly funny comedy routine. The manager and the engineer managed to perform this little dance of talking past one another without ever seeming to realize just how ludicrous it sounded to everyone else in the room. It was rather like Monty Python’s classic Hungarian-English phrasebook sketch, in which translations in either direction are random. In other words, the Hungarian phrase, “I would like to buy a ticket,” might be translated to the English phrase, “My hovercraft is full of eels.”

It was extremely funny when Monty Python performed it. As for the manager and the engineer, well, perhaps they just didn’t have the comedic timing of Python’s John Cleese and Graham Chapman.

[SYSTEM-AD-LEFT]As it happens, “my hovercraft is full of eels” moments come about far too often. What was unusual in this situation is that it involved only two people. Usually, considerably more people take part. Thus, instead of a not particularly amusing exchange between two people, there is an extremely frustrating exchange involving several people. The most common failure to communicate is the game of telephone: as the message passes along the line, it becomes increasingly distorted.

What I hear from teams over and over is, “We are communicating! We send email to everyone.” This is where the hovercraft starts to fill with eels. Broadcasting is not really communicating: effective business communications require a certain amount of back and forth, questioning and explaining, before everyone is on the same page.

Who talks to whom? When you send out an email, do questions come back to you? Or do people on the team quietly ask one another to explain what you meant? While it’s comforting to believe that every missive we send out is so carefully crafted as to be completely unambiguous, very few of us write that well. Of that select few, even fewer can do it all the time. Particularly in the early stages of a project, if there are no questions, then there are certainly problems.

When someone else asks a question, either via email or in a meeting, does everyone wait for you to respond? Even worse, does Bob only jump into a thread if Fred jumps in first? Who is Bob responding to at that point, you or Fred? Are you still addressing the main topic or is the hovercraft starting to become eel infested?

It can be extremely frustrating to ask, “Are there any questions?” and receive either dead silence or questions about something trivial. It can easily become tempting to assume that there are no questions and just race full speed ahead. However, until employees figure out how much each person understands about the project and how you will respond to apparently dumb questions, they will be cautious about what they ask. Their curiosity is as much about one another and about you as it is about the project. How that curiosity gets satisfied determines whether you have productive conversations or a hovercraft that is full of eels. In the former case, you get strong employee engagement; in the latter case, you don’t.

If you’ve been working with a team for some months, or longer, and people are still not asking questions then there are really only two possibilities: either your team is composed of professional mind-readers or you are about to find a room full of those pesky eels. No project is ever perfectly defined from the beginning. Questions and debate should be ongoing throughout the development or production cycle. A lack of questions tells you that there is a lack of trust between the team members and between the team members and you. When trust is lacking, so is engagement.

Now some good news: remedying that lack of trust isn’t all that complicated. It does, however, require a certain amount of persistence and patience.

Start by highlighting each person’s role and contribution to the project. Why are they there? What makes them uniquely qualified to fill the role they are in? Be specific and detailed. If you can’t clearly define their roles, you can rest assured that they can’t either.  Questions come when people are clear about their roles. Disengagement comes when people are not clear about their roles.

Prime the pump with questions. Demonstrate that you don’t have all the answers and that you need the help of the team to find them. Give each person a chance to play the expert while you ask the dumb questions. When you set the tone, the others will follow. Communications start with the person in charge.

Separate producing answers from evaluating answers. Collect up the possibilities and take a break before you start examining them and making decisions about them. Brainstorming without evaluating allows ideas to build upon one another and apparently unworkable ideas to spark other ideas. Pausing to examine each potential answer as it comes up kills that process.

Encourage different forms of brainstorming: some people are very analytical, some are intuitive, some generate ideas by cracking jokes, others pace, and so on. Choose a venue where people are comfortable and only step in if the creative juices start to run dry or tempers start to get short. In either case, that means you need to take a break.  Intense discussions are fine, heated discussions not so much.

Initially, you will have to make all the decisions. That’s fine, but don’t get too comfortable with it. As trust and engagement build, the team will want to become more involved in the decision making process. Invite them in: that demonstration of trust will further build engagement and foster effective communications. Effective communications, in turn, builds trust and engagement.

Having a hovercraft full of eels isn’t the real problem. The real problem is what a hovercraft full of eels tells you about the trust, engagement, and communications in your company.

Make Believe Can Really Help Business

I was very pleased to see that Lizzie Stark’s new book, “Leaving Mundania: Inside the World of Grownup Make-Believe” is now available. Lizzie’s book is an excellent explanation of live-action roleplaying (larping) and how it works.

But  wait? Isn’t larping just a game? How can it help my business? I’m glad you asked.

All businesses need to provide leadership to their members, motivate employees, and negotiate with individuals and organizations. The problem is practicing those skills in an environment that doesn’t feel artificial. A well-designed, serious larp provides an engrossing, entertaining training experience. Players are able to get into the game and as a result deal with the problems that come up much as they would in real life. Whether a player gives up in frustration after encountering an obstacle or comes up with a creative out of the box solution, that tells you they’ll likely do the same thing on the job. Conversely, when someone shines in the game, but is a mediocre performer on the job, that alerts employers to untapped potential.

In sports, teams practice their skills over and over to deal with every conceivable scenario. Businesses rarely have that luxury. When I design a serious larp for a business, the experience of playing in the scenario enables employees to practice and hone skills before the critical situation in which they are needed. Employees also have the opportunity to experiment and make mistakes in an environment in which there are no financial consequences to the business. Finally employees who need additional skill training can be identified before they fail on the job.

If you want an academic treatment of larping, click here. Otherwise, I encourage you take a look at “Leaving Mundania,” and think about how you can use the games she describes to help your business (and have a good time!).

Becoming a Loyalty Magnet

Originally published in American Business Magazine.

“I’m looking forward to seeing the results of our work when I return from my two week vacation in Hawaii.”

The coughing and sputtering sounds that broke the silence came from one of the vice presidents who had just choked on his coffee. He had apparently not been briefed on the content of the talk that Fred, the CEO, was giving.

The team was pushing hard to hit an aggressive product launch deadline. The CEO decided they needed a shot of inspiration, a few words of encouragement. He called a meeting in which he exhorted the team to work long hours, work weekends and give up time with their families in order to hit the deadline. Had it not been for his rather dramatic final sentence, his little speech would have been utterly unmemorable. As it was, however, it became the stuff of legend. By the time he returned from Hawaii, two people had quit. Within six months, half the company was gone. After a year, only the CEO’s footsteps echoed hollowly in the empty corridors and offices of what had once been a thriving company.

This, it may be argued, was not the way to build loyalty.

To be fair, it was not this isolated incident that led to the exodus. The Hawaiian vacation was merely the final straw, which, under other circumstances, might have been taken as a joke. While it’s certainly possible, albeit difficult, to lose employee loyalty in a heartbeat, building employee loyalty is a process. Depending on how well you’ve managed that process, your Hawaiian vacation might be the source of some good-natured grumbling or it might be the death knell for your company. Context is everything. As for your customers, well, if you haven’t managed to gain employee loyalty, you can forget about customer loyalty.

So what is this process? In today’s environment of tight budgets and limited raises, what can be done to keep your employees coming back? It’s not as hard as you may think.

To begin with, though, let’s debunk that popular myth that employees had better be loyal because there’s nowhere else for them to go in this economy. If your business is in a profitable niche, then you can bet that other businesses will join you there. Nothing attracts competition like the scent of money. During the last recession, I had a senior manager boast to me that he’d just scoffed at an employee who asked for a raise. “I laughed at him and told him he should be grateful that he has a job!”

A short time later, that employee had a new job with a significantly higher rate of pay. If he’d received a raise, he wouldn’t even have been looking. That manager’s department, meanwhile, was set back six months by the loss of that employee.

Sure, it’s a lousy economy, and sure, it’s hard to find a job. However, those companies that are hiring like nothing better than to lure employees away from their competitors. Indeed, foolish though it may be (see the article, Who Betrays One Master ), a great many companies will only hire those who are already employed somewhere else. Never assume that your employees have nowhere to go.

The first step to building employee loyalty is to give them something to be loyal to. If that’s their paycheck, then all you’ve done is hire a bunch of mercenaries. That’s fine, until someone offers them more money. If you don’t want mercenaries, though, start by getting people excited. What is your company doing? Why does anyone care? Why should they care? Why should your customers care? It doesn’t matter whether you’re a high-tech startup, an accounting firm or a landscaper. If you can’t clearly and succinctly state the value that you are bringing and get people excited about providing that value, you’re in trouble. Recognize that your message doesn’t have to appeal to everyone. Rather, it only needs to appeal to the people you want to hire and, eventually, to those whom you’d like to turn into your clients.

Crafting an exciting message isn’t always easy, but the benefits are worth it. Most of us want to take pride in our work. The more vividly we can see ourselves providing value, the more motivated and loyal we are. Similarly, when clients receive value from a company that isn’t afraid to stand up and say, “This is who we are!” they also become more loyal. People like to support causes they believe in, so make sure your company is the company people want to spend money to support. This is something our friend Fred did well. His product was one his employees were initially extremely excited by and his customers couldn’t wait to get their hands on it. Unfortunately, that’s as far as Fred went.

Now that you’ve established the frame, if you will, the next step is to start filling in the details. Having an exciting message is only the beginning. You have to help your employees see how they fit into your corporate story. Remember, when it comes to stories, no one wants to be the bit part. Maybe everyone doesn’t want to be the hero, but virtually everyone does want to feel competent, important, valuable and useful. Exactly how you make this happen will vary somewhat from person to person, but here are some elements to focus on.

How many hats do employees wear? Some people thrive when given the opportunity to wear multiple hats on the job. Other people like to wear just one hat, but they wear it very, very well. Whether you need employees to do a variety of different things or one thing well, recognize that those alternatives often appeal to different people. When you get a match, you also get increased loyalty. When you give people the opportunity to experiment and potentially expand what they’re doing, you get even more loyalty— provided they don’t think they’ll be fired for failing. But not all experiments are successful. The best way to get employees to do more is to let them develop an area of strength and then try new things. If they succeed, great! If not, they can retreat to their area of strength and try again. Over time, you’ll end up with steadily more competent employees.

The more competent your employees feel, the more loyal they will be. By extension, the more competent and loyal your employees, the more satisfied, and hence more loyal, your customers. Fred got this one wrong on two counts: First, he rarely let anyone experiment to see if they could expand their duties. When he did, he focused on weakness instead of strength and had no tolerance for failure. The net result was that everyone swiftly became afraid to try anything new or volunteer to help out beyond the limits of their job lest it not go well.

Employees also want to feel as though they matter to the company. Can your employees see how their work contributes to the company? When I worked for IBM in the 1980s, I was a very small cog in a very large machine. Even my most successful project was a rounding error on Big Blue’s balance sheet. Fred’s company was considerably smaller and each person could see how their work fit in and mattered. Fred’s biggest mistake was that he didn’t take the time to recognize the work his employees were doing and remind them how much it mattered. Even so, the employees quit in inverse order to the importance of their contribution. Make sure everyone can see their contribution to the company and periodically thank them for it. The more visible and important their work, the more loyal your employees will be.

Part of feeling competent and important is being able to make your own decisions. While any given employee may only be able to make decisions in limited areas, nonetheless, it’s important to provide employees with the opportunity to make as many decisions as possible. Fred needed to be part of every decision, even the most trivial. Not only did this slow down progress, it also left the experts in the company mightily offended. If you’re going to go to the trouble and expense of hiring highly skilled people, make sure you let them make decisions on the best ways to exercise those skills. Create a framework, provide guidelines and structure, but give them some freedom. For example, you might give your customer support people the authority to provide refunds to any customer up to $100 (or $1,000 or $10,000 depending on the nature of your company and product/service). They’ll feel good because they’re getting to exercise their own judgment and help the customers. Then, the customers will be happy because their problem was resolved quickly. Once again, you’ve increased loyalty.

Finally, how will your employees know they’re doing the right thing? Let’s face it, no one wants to have to ask how well they’re doing and you really don’t want people bugging you all the time. That means they need to be able to see the fruits of their labors as part of the job. Developing feedback systems that keep you mostly out of the way is not an easy task, but it is a very worthwhile one. The easier it is for employees to get feedback on their progress, the more they’ll enjoy their work and the greater their loyalty. In addition, taking the time to talk to your employees one-on-one and let them know you see their efforts and appreciate them is very powerful. Back when IBM was a tiny, struggling company, a big part of Tom Watson’s secret to building loyalty was taking the time to meet everyone. Tom Watson, Jr., presiding over a significantly larger IBM, maintained the tradition.

If you take the time to get to know your employees, you also reap an additional benefit: When you know your employees as individuals, you can reward them as individuals. Rewarding someone at random because “I’ve seen your work and I just wanted to say thank you,” is a great way of increasing loyalty. Making that reward something the individual employee really values is even better. Fred could never bring himself to reward people. Instead, he always complained that their work wasn’t good enough and would find excuses not to give rewards he’d promised.

Loyalty is not something that just happens. It’s something that you build over time and put in the bank for the times when you need it. If it’s not there, a single wrong word can cost you your employees or your largest customer. If it’s there, well, you can accomplish almost anything. The choice is yours.

Eye of the Hurricane

I was lying on my back. Standing around me were four people who, only two weeks before, had been teaching a class on appropriate emergency response in jujitsu.

The fact that I was flat on my back on the ground was not, in one sense, unusual. A friend of mine was taking his black belt exam and I had volunteered to let him demonstrate his throws on me. Things went slightly off the rails when he threw me, lost his balance, and ended up kicking me in the head.

The “thwock!” echoed through the gym.

One of the instructors was supposed to take charge. They stared down at me. I stared up at them. Eventually, I said, “Someone get me an ice pack.”

One of the men jumped slightly, turned, and ran out of the room. A moment later, he ran back in with one of those first aid kid chemical cold packs in his right hand.

“It’s not cold,” he yelled.

“You have to squeeze it,” came a voice from somewhere in the room.

In case you were ever curious, yes, it is possible to squeeze one of those cold packs too hard.

For such a small cold pack, the contents covered a remarkably large area.

I looked at my now soaking gi. I got to my feet.

“I’m fine now. Please don’t help me any more.”

Fortunately, in this situation, there was no permanent harm done and the fact that several people froze at the moment of crisis was merely embarrassing. My gi wasn’t even stained.

Unfortunately, many businesses are not so lucky. Even more unfortunately, it’s not the actual disasters that freeze them: handling the rare fire or power failure is barely a blip in the proverbial routine. Rather, the “disasters” that throw everything off balance and freeze decision making in its tracks are those that could have been anticipated or for which management thought that they had prepared.

Despite all their training, when the accident occurred, the four jujitsu instructors metaphorically lost their balance by focusing on the image of how bad it could be. That prevented them from acting immediately to determine how bad it actually was.

At Lacunae Software, the ship date was two days off when QA found a major bug in the software. Rather than stop, investigate the severity, and determine an appropriate course of action, the CEO announced that delaying the ship would clearly doom the company. He castigated QA for disloyalty and ordered the product to ship on schedule. Customers were not happy, costing the company more than the delay would have. Acting out of fear of how bad it could have been made the situation worse.

When things are going well and something suddenly goes wrong, it can be very easy to focus on all the potential negatives. That doesn’t help. Successful companies have the habit of focusing on what can go right. Developing that mindset takes practice:

Take a deep breathe and recognize that you have more time than you think. This is quite probably the hardest step.

• Remind yourself of the vision for your product and company (you do have a vision, right?).
• Review the steps necessary to manifest that vision. It can help to write them down as you go through them.
• List the things that can go right to move you forward from where you are. Be realistic, and also optimistic.
• Any time you find yourself focusing on what can go wrong, stop and shift back to what can go right. Evaluate the problems later.

Far too many companies never define their vision nor do they map out the path to success. The secret to success is staying on balance. The secret to not losing balance is knowing where you’re going, reminding yourself how you’ll get there, and focusing on the positive.

Good leadership traits? Not so fast…

I frequently hear about someone exhibiting good “leadership traits.” Someone who exhibits leadership traits, the argument goes, is more likely to become a successful leader, or at least a leader.

The whole concept of identifying traits and then attempting to identify those traits in other people as a way of meaning, well, anything has a long and venerable history.

In the field of Sport Psychology, a great deal of effort was put into identifying the traits of top athletes and then using those traits to identify potential top athletes from amongst young athletes.

It failed. Miserably. Despite this fact, it’s still popular. In one of my graduate sport psych classes, we were presented with the data on using traits to identify potential top athletes (worse than chance, as I recall). Despite this, about a third of the class insisted that they would still use that method of selecting new athletes for the Olympic Team because, “It just has to work!”

In the field of leadership, a great deal of effort was spent on identifying the traits of top leaders and then using that information to identify potential leaders. It failed as well.

While it seems like a very attractive concept, that if we could just identify the traits of top <X>, then future top <X> would share those traits, it just doesn’t work. Amongst other things that came out of the various studies is that many of these top athletes and leaders did not even exhibit those traits or characteristics when they were young (were they traits that simply hadn’t manifested or learned behaviors? Not clear), and many of those who did never developed into top <X> despite all the attempts to make them so.

A good current example of this flawed reasoning is something someone recently brought to my attention: the concept of Edison Traits. It feels good, but based on the results of similar efforts in other areas, is likely to be meaningless. It appears to be based on the argument that if someone exhibits traits similar to those the history books tell us that Edison exhibited, they’ll grow up to be like Edison or something. It also appears to argue that Edison himself must have had ADHD (I’m not sure why), and that this is beneficial in becoming a brilliant inventor like Edison.

The idea that Thomas Edison had ADHD is, itself, questionable. Intensely inquisitive, challenge seeking, high intelligence does not equal ADHD (so if you think that everyone in your office has ADHD, odds are pretty good you need to take another look…).

At the risk of going off on a tangent, the general concept of trying to argue that ADHD is “Hunter’s Mind” or anything else other than a difficulty in executive functioning is also flawed. That’s not to say that ADHD can’t be used to your advantage: consider Robin Williams.

However, the argument that ADHD is an advantage to a hunter (for example) ignores the reality of survival hunting: long periods of boredom, hours spent practicing skills, etc. To the extent that I’ve read up on this topic, in present day Hunter/Gatherer societies (e.g. in Papua New Guinea), people who cannot regulate attention do not make good hunters.

To some extent, at least some of these beliefs stem from the observation that kids with ADHD do better in martial arts and similar activities. The key is “do better than what?” They do better than they would in more sedentary activities and better than they do in activities with less immediate feedback. Do they do better than kids without ADHD? Once we correct for athleticism, intelligence, etc, the answer is no. Everything that is seen as an advantage for kids with ADHD (e.g. rapid field shifting) is quite easily learnable with sufficient practice by people without ADHD, and those people without ADHD are also much more able to spend the time in routine, boring practice (granted, highly intelligent children and adults often have trouble with routine practice, but that’s not ADHD — that’s normal boredom with routine activities with distant payoffs. The best fix is to make the activity more interesting if at all possible).

Moving back to the question of leadership traits, your odds are better if you train people in effective leadership skills. If you really want to see how someone will be as a leader, put them in scenarios in which they can demonstrate leadership (if you don’t want to risk the farm, predictive scenario serious games are a good tool for leadership identification and development).

In the end, performance, not some mysterious set of traits, is your best method for identifying leaders.

North Korean Rocket Change

I was listening to a news report this morning about North Korea’s latest rocket launch. It was quite the show, with hordes of journalists invited to watch and report on North Korea’s military might. According to one report, North Korea was also showing off for potential buyers of its military equipment.

As anyone who has ever given a software demo might suspect, North Korea’s rocket demo had similar results: it crashed. Unlike software, you don’t get to reboot the rocket and try again.

Although the news report wasn’t entirely clear on what happened, it appears that just before the first stage of the rocket finished its burn and dropped away, stages two and three both tried to ignite.

This did not go well.

Although perhaps less visually spectacular, the results are much the same when a business attempts to implement a “North Korean Rocket” approach to organizational change.

Organizational change is never easy, and on top of that, most companies make it considerably harder than it needs to be.

Change is a process: like launching a rocket, each stage needs to fire in turn. Attempting to fire the stages all at once or out of order only leads to a spectacular boom.

At least with a rocket, you might get some visually stunning fireworks.

The first stage of organizational change is getting your employees comfortable with the idea of making a change in the first place! This is one situation where focusing on what’s wrong is the right thing to do. You want your employees talking about why the status quo isn’t so hot, and how things really could and should be better. After all, if they’re all happy with the status quo, why would they want to change? As many a manager has learned, the more force you apply to make people change, the slower they go and the more likely your change initiate will fail.

Once people are in the mood for change, it’s time for the second stage: building some excitement. Rather than grumbling about how bad things are, it’s time to ask how things could be better. What would the company be like if we did make a change? How would that feel? What would working at that changed company be like? Look at both benefits to the company and benefits to the individual: no one wants a change that will leave them worse off.

In stage three, it’s time to focus on creating the confidence to change successfully. No matter how excited people may be at the idea of change, if they don’t believe they can do it, they won’t really try. It’s time to get them talking about previous successes, especially successful changes they’ve made in the past.

Finally, in stage four, it’s time to get people contributing ideas for change. Getting everyone involved dramatically increases the odds of success. The more confident and excited people are, the better the ideas they’ll come up with. The more involved they are in the idea generation process, the harder they’ll work to make the changes happen.

I worked with one client who would say to me, “Okay, I get it. I should do this, and then this, and then this.”

About then, I’d stop him, and say, “No, just do this one thing.”

He didn’t like that: it was too slow.

Every week, he’d complain that the project wasn’t moving forward. Every week, I’d ask him what he’d done, and he’d list off “this, and this, and this.”

Eventually, he decided to try going through the stages in order and one at a time. Suddenly, he saw progress.

Like the rocket, ignite the stages in the right order, and you make very rapid progress. Try to ignite them all at once or in the wrong order and you have a North Korean rocket launch: straight up in the air and then straight down into the ocean.

If they’re lucky, they might still be able to sell arms to Pottsylvania.

The Speed of Mistrust

Remember the scene in the original Star Wars where Luke, Hans, Chewbacca, and Leia are trapped in the garbage disposal with the walls closing in on them? As the walls inexorably press closer and closer, they engage in increasingly desperate attempts to stop them, a ritual made famous in dozens of adventure movies. No matter how hard they push back against the walls, their efforts are futile. Of course, they are the heroes of the movie, so they do find another way out; after all, if they had not, the movie would have come to an abrupt ending and the fans would have been crushed.

Of course, rather than counting on finding a miraculous escape, it would have been better to have not been in that tight a predicament in the first place.

At Soak Systems, the CEO, whom we’ll refer to as Luke, recently made the comment that, “I guess I should have pushed back harder.”

He was referring to a disastrous product release, one whose eager anticipation by their largest customer was exceeded only by that same customer’s anger and disgust when they finally received it. Their subsequent email was, to say the least, crushing.

In the inevitable post-mortem, it quickly came up that Luke had made at least a couple of attempts to play with the product before it was shipped, but that engineering had “refused to let me see it.”

In retrospect, Luke felt that if he had only insisted more strongly, then clearly engineering would have complied and he would have been able to identify the problems and save the release. Luke is also capable of holding back those moving walls with just the little finger of his left hand. Okay, well maybe not.

While it was gallant of Luke to accept some of the blame for the disaster, he was actually missing the point. In fact, the question is not whether Luke could push back hard enough to convince engineering to cooperate. The question is why he was in that position in the first place. Why, as CEO, does he need to push back that hard just to get basic cooperation? It’s hard to imagine how a release that disastrous could occur without plenty of warning. If nothing else, the stink should have been obvious.

At this point, the traditional thing to do is to nod sagely and observe that if they simply had better communications, the problem could have been avoided. While that observation may be true, it is definitely useless. Of course they weren’t communicating! Why not?

In Star Wars, our heroes at least had the excuse that they landed in the garbage disposal because they were trying to avoid pursuing Storm Troopers. In the resultant rush, they didn’t really have a chance to sit down and calmly discuss their options. At Soak, Luke didn’t have that excuse. There was no rush and no panic, other than the ones that he manufactured.

Effective communications comes from building trust, and trust comes from taking the time to build connections with employees and from, yes, communicating. The problem is that, as CEO, people don’t typically drop by to chat. If you want to get people talking to you, you need to seek them out. Luke didn’t do that. By comparison, IBM’s founder, Tom Watson, was legendary for showing up unannounced at different IBM locations and just dropping in to chat with different people. He was trusted as few CEOs have ever been: employees believed that he cared about them personally.

Luke, on the other hand, talked only to the people he’d worked with in other companies. When he came down to engineering at all, it was mainly to exhort them to do more or complain that they weren’t doing enough. When it became clear that the release had problems, the engineers had mixed feelings about talking to Luke. They couldn’t decide whether he would yell at them and go ahead anyway, threaten them and go ahead anyway, or simply ignore their input completely and go ahead anyway. The VP of Engineering wasn’t able to help them figure out which one it was either, so they decided to simply say nothing.

This is, perhaps, not the best way to establish strong and effective communications with your team.

Now, the fact is, Luke was certainly communicating with the rest of the company. His particularly choice of what to say and how he said it served to build a foundation of mistrust, not a foundation of trust. Sadly, in this environment, the speed of trust has nothing on the speed of mistrust.

Worst of all, Luke’s response, that he “should have pushed back harder,” only confirmed that mistrust. From the perspective of engineering, the release failed due to a number of serious problems that Luke and the rest of senior management were unwilling to address. Acting as if just yelling and demanding more would have changed anything was telling everyone in the company that Luke still didn’t acknowledge the severity of the problems.

The net result: nothing has changed since the release. The metaphorical walls are continuing to close in, Luke is ineffectually pushing back, and one after another the top people at the company are resigning. While Luke may end up with a company full of people he can push around, it’s not at all clear that any of them will be able to push a product out the door.

The situation is not totally irreparable, although it’s getting close. Luke needs to take the time to sit down with his people and actually talk to them and listen to their answers. He needs to take the time to actually get to know more employees than just those with whom he worked in the past. He has a lot of mistrust to overcome and doing that will not be easy. Whether he succeeds or not really depends on whether he is willing to recognize how little trust people have in him, and whether or not he’s willing to work to change that. Until he makes those changes, trust gets the dirt road and mistrust gets the superhighway.

Which is running faster in your company, trust or mistrust?

The Death of Brainstorming?

An article by Susan Cain appearing in the NY Times a few weeks ago argued that brainstorming is counterproductive, a poor way to stimulate creativity.

While the arguments are persuasive, they are also flawed. They appear to proceed from the assumption that brainstorming is a relatively simple process that can be done by any group at any time. In fact, effective brainstorming is surprisingly difficult, and problems with team cohesion, decision making, and leadership can easily turn it into an unpleasant time-waster. Teams that haven’t developed good conflict management and debate skills are also unlikely to brainstorm effectively. Rather than producing good ideas, they are likely to experience exactly the sorts of groupthink that Cain argues is likely to occur.

Fundamentally, though, Cain’s article confounds several problems and concludes, therefore, that brainstorming doesn’t work. So let’s look at how to make it work:

Don’t take on too much in one day. 3-4 topics are about it, probably less. In general, the more important the topic, the more that should be your focus. Spending several days on one large topic is often seen as a “waste” of time, but, done correctly, is actually the most likely way to get useful results.

Give yourself lots of time and take short breaks every 60-90 minutes. Take a long lunch break and get out of the office. Brainstorming is surprisingly draining, so taking regular breaks gives people a chance to refresh their perspective and keep the creative juices flowing. Once people start getting tired, the quality of ideas and effective debate decline rapidly.

Don’t try to cram more work into the day: after 4-6 hours of serious brainstorming, people are drained. If they know they have to go back to work afterward, they’ll hold back during the brainstorming, or do low quality work because they’re tired. Go out to dinner or something afterward and call it a success.

Separate idea generation from idea evaluation. Evaluating ideas as they are presented only invites argument and defensiveness. Instead, spend half your time collecting ideas, no matter how outrageous. Some people brainstorm very effectively by being silly or cracking jokes. Let it flow. I’ve found that the craziest ideas often provide the spark for the best solutions. After you’ve collected enough ideas, then take a break, or even wait until the next day, and then evaluate them. A little distance gives wonderful perspective.

Assign someone to collect ideas; don’t rely on memory. Use multiple whiteboards, an easel with a giant pad of paper, your favorite technology, etc. It can often help to bring in an outside facilitator who has no emotional connection to any outcome. This also helps prevent the appearance of bias or of having someone emotionally connected to a particular outcome attempting to influence the result.

Work in a large, brightly lit space. Institutional gray only dampens creativity. Yes, physical environment matters. A change of venue, away from the office, can work wonders.

If you find your team slipping into a groupthink mentality or unable to agree on a course of action, that’s not a problem with brainstorming. That’s a problem with your debate and decision making process. Bring in someone who can help you fix it, or your brainstorming efforts are going to be a waste of time (in addition, problems with debate and decision making are likely to be reducing your productivity in other areas as well!).

Brainstorming is a powerful tool, if you use it correctly.

Happy Groundhog Day!

In the movie Groundhog Day, Bill Murray finds himself reliving the same day over and over again. Great movie, and solid proof of the old adage that adventure is something really dangerous and exciting happening to someone else. As much as watching Groundhog Day can be lots of fun, actually experiencing it is something else again. Thus, it never fails to amaze me when organizations willingly enter the Groundhog Zone.

No, I don’t mean that they are afraid of their own shadows, although that sometimes happens too! Rather, they are trapped in a cycle that is at best non-productive, at worst, downright destructive to the organization. Worst of all: everyone knows its happening and yet no one does anything about it. Unlike Bill Murray, though, they aren’t actually trapped. They just think they are.

For example, I worked with one two thousand person organization on some serious leadership issues. The first time the organization ran into this particular problem was decades ago, and it nearly destroyed the business. Many of the top people stormed out to found a competing company. The same thing happened again some twenty years later. The third time around, we made some progress: there was no fissioning of the business. Everyone stayed put and the first steps were taken to resolving some of the long-standing structural problems that were causing this cycle to repeat. It wasn’t easy and it wasn’t necessarily pleasant, but it happened.

Okay, that’s an old business. Should we really be concerned with problems that only come up every twenty years? That’s up to you; I suppose it depends on when the next time the cycle rolls around. But Groundhog moments are not limited to older companies. Younger companies can have the same problems.

At one company, the engineering teams are unable to make decisions. The same issues come up week after week: every Monday is Groundhog Day! While there is a lot of talking and a great deal of motion, there is no progress. Running around in circles may feel good, but doesn’t exactly get you anywhere. Management regularly gets involved in various ways, and always with the same results: there’s some yelling, some threats, maybe a few people get fired, and there’s a brief flurry of forward motion. After a few weeks or a couple months, though, they are right back to where they started. Even though many members of the management team know there’s a problem, even though they keep talking about the problem, they take no action despite the cost to the organization: on the order of six figures per month. Groundhog Day indeed!

So what do you do when you realize that you are trapped in Groundhog heaven? Since every company’s Groundhog Day is uniquely theirs, the key is to know how to generate possible solutions, rather than find a one-size fits none approach.

First of all, don’t be afraid of your own shadow. Recognize that something isn’t working the way it should. The longer you pretend the problem doesn’t really exist or the longer you just hope it’ll go away, the worse it will get. As Einstein famously said, doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result is the very definition of insanity. Whatever you’re doing to change things isn’t working. It’s time to try something else.

In Bill Murray’s case, Groundhog Day just happened overnight. In the real world, you didn’t get into Groundhog mode overnight and you won’t break out of it overnight. Stop looking for quick fixes: if they haven’t worked yet, they aren’t likely to in the future. You’ll spend more time and money trying quick solutions that don’t break the cycle than you will in committing to one solution that may take some time to implement. Organizational change, even beneficial change that everyone claims they want, is still difficult. If it wasn’t, Groundhog Day would be over by now.

Look outside the company for ideas. Let’s face it, you’ve got some really smart people working at your company (if that’s not true, you have bigger problems!). If they haven’t managed to change things, it might just be because they either don’t know how or they are too busy doing their jobs to devote the time and energy necessary to driving the changes necessary, or both. Whatever the reason, recognize that if they could, they would. Look at other companies and adapt their solutions to your specific culture and situation and bring in the resources you need to actually break the cycle.

Bill Murray has no choice but to repeat Groundhog Day over and over. Fortunately, you aren’t Bill Murray. What choice will you make?

Stephen Balzac is an expert on leadership and organizational development. A consultant, author, and professional speaker, he is president of 7 Steps Ahead, an organizational development firm focused on helping businesses get unstuck. Steve is the author of “The 36-Hour Course in Organizational Development,” published by McGraw-Hill, and a contributing author to volume one of “Ethics and Game Design: Teaching Values Through Play.” For more information, or to sign up for Steve’s monthly newsletter, visit www.7stepsahead.com. You can also contact Steve at 978-298-5189 or steve@7stepsahead.com.