The Business Sensei

The Four Innovation Musts

This is an excerpt from my new book, Organizational Psychology for Managers.

As for what you have to do to encourage innovation, that’s actually pretty easy. We’ve discussed all of these elements repeatedly throughout this book:

• Continuous learning – As we discussed in chapter 5, continuous learning is key to motivation. It is also key to innovation. Innovation comes from putting together familiar things in new ways. The more you know, the more likely that is to happen. Steve Jobs knew nothing about building computers, but that didn’t stop him from inventing the iPhone.
• Mistakes – At the risk of beating a dead horse, mistakes are feedback. How many light bulbs have you made?
• Take breaks – Another topic we’ve discussed at length. Creativity doesn’t happen when you’re exhausted. The “Eureka!” moment comes when you take a break and see things differently.
• Patience – Innovation is an ongoing process. If you wait until you desperately need a breakthrough before you start, your odds of success will be better in Vegas. Creativity takes time. Innovation is most important when it seems the least necessary.

I hear from many businesses that they’d like to be more innovative. What’s stopping you?

Organizational Psychology for Managers is phenomenal.  Just as his talks at conferences are captivating to his audience, Steve’s book will captivate his readers.  In my opinion, this book should be required reading in MBA programs, military leadership courses, and needs to be on the bookshelf of every Fortune 1000 VP of Human Resources.  Steve Balzac is the 21^st century’s Tom Peters.

Stephen R Guendert, PhD

CMG Director of Publications

Now can I solve the problem?

This is an excerpt from my new book, Organizational Psychology for Managers.

Unfortunately, you still can’t solve the problem. There’s still just a bit more to do before you dive in and implement your solution. Examine the goals you just developed: how will you carry them out? Which steps can you plan and which steps can you not plan in advance? How will you know if you’re successful? This last point may seem silly: after all, if you’re successful, the problem will go away! While that’s true, it helps to identify precisely what you expect to happen and when. Back to goals and feedback: we want to know if we’re succeeding before we get to the end. Conversely, if we are solving the wrong problem or if our solution is flawed, we want to know this as early as possible. As with all goals, we have to define our intermediate steps and identify the factors that will tell us if we’re going off course. At the end, we don’t want to get bogged down arguing about whether or not we’ve succeeded: by defining our criteria ahead of time, before we’re invested in the results, we avoid the danger of getting somewhere random and simply declaring that to be the finish line.

If the implementation of the solution is going to be carried out by other people, it pays to bring them into the process at this point if we haven’t brought them in already. People who have to implement a solution will feel more engaged and committed if they are involved early on in the process of coming up with that solution: respect their competence and build relatedness. On a purely practical level, they are also likely to have expert insights that others may not: I worked once with an architecture firm whose head architect made a point of involving builders in the earliest stages of design. He told me it was because that way he wouldn’t end up giving the client drawings for something that didn’t exist.

At this point, you can go ahead and implement your solution. At the end, do a final check: did it work? Since you’ve already defined the criteria for success, at least in theory this shouldn’t be too hard to determine. In practice, it’s often a bit messier than it sounds on paper, so be prepared for that. If it didn’t work, you have a choice in how to respond:

Option 1: Clearly the failure is someone’s fault. Heads must roll!

Option 2: What have learned that we didn’t know before? Remember our discussion of hindsight in chapter 11. Just because something is obvious now doesn’t mean it was obvious before. Based on what we’ve learned, how can we now solve the problem? What else have we improved along the way?

Cultures that focus on blame typically go with option 1. However, the more optimistic and successful organizations choose option 2. That doesn’t mean not doing a post-mortem and trying to identify mistakes or failing to refine your processes; it simply means that you’re proceeding from the perspective that you have competent, committed people who have no more interest in wasting their time on a wild goose chase than you do. The secret to solving large, difficult problems is accepting that there will be mistakes along the way. The secret to optimistic organizations is that they actually treat those mistakes as feedback and learning opportunities instead of merely giving the concept lip-service.

We’ll return to these concepts when we discuss organizational diagnosis later in this chapter.

Balzac combines stories of jujitsu, wheat, gorillas, and the Lord of the Rings with very practical advice and hands-on exercises aimed at anyone who cares about management, leadership, and culture.

Todd Raphael
Editor-in-Chief
ERE Media

How does the organization shape learning?

This is an excerpt from my new book, Organizational Psychology for Managers

Organizations develop attitudes around learning: when is it necessary? Who gets trained? Why are people trained? How are mistakes viewed? etc. These attitudes shape how learning is viewed and, to a very great extent, how successful learning is.

Many years ago, I was participating in a training exercise. As part of that exercise, I was assigned to play a manager who had been recommended for coaching. Having been a serious competitive fencer for many years, I knew that the only people who were recommended for coaching were the best athletes. One of the other participants in the exercise was stunned at my happy response to the role and said, “How can you be so happy? You’re playing someone who was recommended for coaching!” Her experience with coaching was that it was the last step before you were fired.

Similarly, it matters how the organization views training: is this something done to build people up or “fix those who are broken?” Is it developing strengths or remediating weakness? Is training something fun or something to be endured and forgotten? Will you have the opportunity to exercise your new skills or not? How the culture views training is critical to the success of training. If the organizational narrative is one that teaches us that training is for losers or that Real Experts don’t need training, it’s going to be very hard to make training work. That, in turn, will reduce engagement with the material and, hence, make it difficult for organizational members to grow in their roles. On the other hand, if training is viewed as an opportunity to increase competencies and status in the organization, and those who engage in training are given opportunities to exercise their new skills, training can have dramatically outsized benefits compared to the investment.

All too often, training is viewed as an afterthought, something to do when nothing important is going on. There is frequently a strong attitude of, “Sure, take classes, but don’t let it interfere with the real work.”

If you want training to be effective, it needs to be taken as seriously as any other part of the job. The products you build today are built with the skills you learned yesterday. The products you build tomorrow will be built with the skills you learn today. View training as an afterthought and it will be treated as one. Demand that people already working long hours add more time for training and it will be resented. Either of these factors will dramatically reduce the benefits of even the best classes or training exercises. This may not matter for classes which are done for legal protection more than anything else; it will matter for training that it intended to achieve that goal of a permanent change in behavior.

When training is intended to alter the way people in an organization do their jobs, such as learning new technology or systems, deadlines must be adjusted for that learning to occur. If people are expected to maintain the same levels of productivity during the learning and adoption period as before they started to learn something new, the new technology or systems will not be learned: people will naturally and reasonably opt to meet their deadlines by doing things the old way, rather than invest the time in learning something new. There is almost always a dip in performance in the early stages of adopting new systems and technology: people need time to get used to the new ways of working. This is perhaps the most difficult part of learning as no one likes feeling incompetent. Performance improvements only come once people have become sufficiently comfortable with those new ways of working that they can work faster than they can in the old way: remember, even if the old way is less effective or less efficient, it is very well practiced. That practice enables a great deal of speed and efficiency, which will not initially be present in the new system.
Recall our recent discussion of automatized skills and cueing: the old skills are automatized; the new ones still need to be.

“Author Stephen Balzac has written a terrific book that gets into the realpolitik of organizational psychology – the underlying patterns of behavior that create the all important company culture. He doesn’t stop at the surface level, explaining things we already know like ‘culture beats strategy’ – he gets into the deeper drivers and ties everything back to specific, actionable stories. For example he describes different approaches to apparent “insubordination” by a manager; rather then judging them, he shows how each management response is interpreted, and how it then drives response. Balzac preaches real engagement with one’s own company and a mindful state of operation, especially by executives – who must remember that culture “just happens” unless and until they learn to recognize that their behaviors play a huge part in creating and cementing it. It covers the full spectrum of corporate life, from challenging bad decisions to hiring, training, motivating teams – and the secrets of keeping people engaged and learning – and/or avoiding actions which do the opposite. I highly recommend this book for anyone who wants to participate in creating and steering company culture.”

Sid Probstein

Chief Technology Officer

Attivio – Active Intelligence

What is learning?

This is an excerpt from my new book, Organizational Psychology for Managers

It is very easy to find long and detailed discussions of what learning is and what it means to learn. Most of these definitions, while interesting, are of little practical use. Of considerably more practical use, however, is this:

Learning is the (hopefully!) permanent change in behavior resulting from practice and experience.

Sounds simple. Unfortunately, it’s not quite so easy. We have only to look at the number of failed learning initiatives and the frustration so many people feel around learning to see just how often learning is not handled well. Part of the problem is that learning is treated too often as an event, not as a process: a single class rather than an ongoing practice of skill development. To understand how this works, consider the process of learning a skill.

As I often tell students in my jujitsu class, learning a move is easy. Performing the move when you want to is what’s difficult. For example, it takes only a few seconds to demonstrate how to block a punch. Most people, upon seeing that demonstration, are then capable of moving their hand in the correct manner. They are not, however, blocking the punch yet; they are only moving their hand. In other words, they are repeating an action but they have not yet internalized the action. Under carefully controlled conditions, they can block the punch: it’s slow, it’s clearly telegraphed, their partner doesn’t really want to hit them. If their partner does something unexpected, the student freezes, panics, gets hit, or all of the above. Similarly, a sales trainee might learn a script to use or a set of phrases and actions designed to make the prospect sign on the dotted line. So long as the prospect behaves exactly according to the script, the trainee is fine. Should that prospect deviate in any way, the trainee is lost: their brain is full of the script and there is no room for anything else, such as improvisation.

Eventually, after enough practice, the block improves, right up until there is some pressure: a belt test, a more aggressive partner, or anything else which suddenly raises the stakes of getting it right. At that point, many students instead of blocking with their hands, block with their nose. It takes a great deal more practice before the skill works reliably under pressure. Similarly, a trainee might do well on practice exercises, but fold when tested or put in front of a real client.

This process of continual practice is known as automatizing the skill. Because we are not actually that good at thinking about multiple things at once, if we have to think about how to use the skill, we can’t pay attention to what’s actually going on. We have to learn something so well that we no longer need to think about it. At that point, the skill is becoming reflexive and we only need to recognize the need to use it for it to happen. This frees a tremendous amount of brain power, enabling us to take in more information and respond more effectively to our environment: the beginning basketball player is so busy concentrating on dribbling the ball that an experienced player can walk right up and take the ball away. The beginner will often report that, “I didn’t even see him coming!” As dribbling becomes automatic, the basketball player becomes more able to pay attention to the other players and evade the person trying to steal the ball. The beginning salesman is so focused on her script that she misses the warning signs that the sales call is about to go off the rails. The experienced salesman notices the subtle shifts in the prospect’s behavior, and is able to adjust his strategy accordingly. The rote action is transformed into a framework for activity.

Of course, there is a catch. As I alluded to a moment ago, we have to recognize the need to use a skill in order to use it. It doesn’t matter how much we’ve automatized the skill if we don’t realize that we need it. Thus, part of skill learning is situational: like an actor, we need to know our cues. The more time spent looking for our cues, the slower our response will be. Just like a scene in a movie seems artificial and unbelievable when actors don’t realize it’s time for their lines, so too do behaviors ranging from leadership to engineering to sales seem artificial, and hence unbelievable or not trustable, when we don’t recognize our cues in those settings. The leader who is not aware of the signs, or cues, that indicate a group is entering Storming is thus more likely to respond inappropriately or too slowly to the changing team dynamic. In the worst case, like the jujitsu student who misses the warning signs that it’s time to block, he may be gob smacked.

As a result, proper training includes coupling the behavior and the appropriate cues for the behavior. This pairing must also be automatized, although not necessarily at the same level of reflexivity as the base behavior. Sometimes we want to be able to choose between several trained choices. The important thing is that the appropriate cues bring the appropriate options to mind, and that we have the cognitive resources available to evaluate the situation and choose. Training conducted in an artificial environment which divorces situation from action reduces the value of the training; similarly, management training that does not include the rest of the team lacks appropriate cues from the team, and often teaches the manager behaviors that the team doesn’t know how to respond to. As we discussed in earlier chapters, training the leader and the team separately is not all that effective: this is one of the big reasons why.

Another important point of how learning works is that people have to be able to get it wrong. Learning is not just absorbing, memorizing, and rehearsing behaviors. It is also experimentation and exploration. Making mistakes is a critical part of skill mastery: being able to execute a skill reflexively is great, but you still need to be able to adjust when something unexpected happens. When people learn without the opportunity to make mistakes, the skill is brittle. Failure becomes a catastrophe, and fear of making a mistake can paralyze performance under pressure. That jujitsu student learning to block will get hit many times along the road to mastery: under training conditions, the student might end up with a bloody nose or black eye, but otherwise will be unharmed. Along the way, they learn how to make their own movements more effective. More to the point, they learn that getting hit isn’t the end of the world: it isn’t fun, but you can keep going. This enables them to relax under pressure. Paradoxically, the less afraid you are of getting hit, the less likely you will get hit. The less afraid the salesman is of screwing up, the less likely she is to screw up. The leader who is confident that he and his team can recover from mistakes is more open to trying new and innovative ideas. That confidence and that lack of fear come from making mistakes. Note that there are limits to this: I have been told that the best way to avoid being stung by a bee is to be unafraid of the bee. I can state from personal experience that the bee does not know this.

Unfortunately, too many learning situations are focused around fear of failure, a lesson we all learned in school, when failure meant bad grades and quite possibly Not Getting Into The College of Your Choice. These learned habits often interfere with ongoing learning in organizational settings. Typically, when we learn something new in a class or training exercise, we will only have time to get down the rote memorization piece of it: the process of then mastering the skill, that exploration and experimentation piece, needs to happen on the job. If you can’t handle making mistakes, you just wasted roughly 90% of the training.

Is this all there is to learning? Of course not! If it were, we’d have a lot more experts out there! A key part of making learning successful is understanding what your goals really mean and understanding the context in which learning is occurring.

Organizational Psychology for Managers is phenomenal. Just as his talks at conferences are captivating to his audience, Steve’s book will captivate his readers. In my opinion, this book should be required reading in MBA programs, military leadership courses, and needs to be on the bookshelf of every Fortune 1000 VP of Human Resources. Steve Balzac is the 21st century’s Tom Peters.

Stephen R Guendert, PhD

CMG Director of Publications

Organizational Learning

This is an excerpt from my new book, Organizational Psychology for Managers

Fans of James Bond movies might recall a scene that goes something like this:

We are looking at an unidentified room. Two people we’ve never seen before are standing in front of a desk. We might be able to see the back of the head of the man who sits behind that desk. A voice rings out:

“You have failed SPECTRE. Number 3, why did you not kill 007 as ordered?”

Number 3 stammers out some response and the voice turns its attention on the other person.

“Number 5, you have also failed SPECTRE…”

Eventually, Number 3 is told everything is forgiven and he can leave. Of course, this is SPECTRE. As soon as he walks out of the room he’s dropped into a tank of piranhas, or the bottom of the elevator turns out to be a trap door and Number 3 learns that Maxwell Elevators really are good to the last drop, or he dies in some other Rube Goldbergesque manner.

SPECTRE, as all Bond fans know, is the villainous organization headed by Ernst Stavro Blofeld, the evil genius who spends most of his time trying unsuccessfully to kill 007. Given his track record, as evil geniuses go, he frequently seems more like Wile E. Coyote.

Blofeld’s problem, of course, is that every time one of his agents makes a mistake that agent dies. Those whom James Bond doesn’t kill are terminated by Blofeld himself. This makes it extremely difficult to conduct any form of on-the-job learning. When every mistake is fatal, the lessons tend to come a little too late to do much good. As learning organizations go, SPECTRE has issues.

Although the consequences are generally not so flashy, businesses do face some similar problems. Granted, most business mistakes don’t make for a good action movie, and dropping people in piranha tanks is generally frowned upon. However, there is still the very real problem of figuring out how to enable people to learn from their mistakes without those mistakes harming the business. James Bond, after all, at least gets a script.

Part of the challenge is that even when leaders are well-trained and highly skilled, there is a big difference between what one learns in most management training classes and the actual experience of leading a team, department, division, or company. That doesn’t mean that the training is useless, but it does mean that the training needs to be appropriate.

In sports, for example, athletes drill constantly: they practice the fundamental skills of their sport until they can execute those skills without thought. Doing that, however, is not enough to make an athlete a successful competitor. Such training is necessary, but it’s not sufficient.

As a soccer-playing friend once commented to me, there’s a big difference between the drill and the game. The drill is controlled and predictable; the game is not. The game is confusing and chaotic, and in the moment of truth all those carefully drilled skills simply vanish away. The problem is that chaos is overwhelming: it takes getting used to in order to navigate it. The Japanese term, “randori,” used to describe Judo competition, means “seizing chaos.”

Athletes practice getting used to chaos by moving past drills and practicing in various free play scenarios: mock games, spring training, practice randori, etc. These experiences enable the athlete to experience the chaos in small doses and hence become increasingly comfortable with it. They learn which skills to execute when. The day of the actual tournament, they are ready. When they do make mistakes, they have something to fall back on to help them recover quickly, as opposed to something to fall into and get eaten.

Businesses are in a fundamentally similar position: while there are some obvious differences in the details between learning the skills of a sport and learning sales or management or computer programming, the fundamental process is the same. Since organizational performance is ongoing instead of being organized into discrete chunks such as tournaments, organizational learning needs to be ongoing as well. Optimally, organizational learning should also be an enjoyable experience, not just because that makes people happy but because people learn best when they are enjoying themselves. The methods and approaches to organizational learning should also serve to simplify other issues, such as orientation, accreditation, and organizational change. The lessons of sports and games will serve us well in understanding how to make organizational learning effective.

To begin with, though, we need to understand what learning is and how it works.

Riveting! Yes, I called a leadership book riveting. I couldn’t wait to finish one chapter so I could begin reading the next. The book’s combination of pop culture references, personal stories, and thought providing insights to illustrate world class leadership principles makes it a must read for business professionals at all management levels.

Eric Bloom
President
Manager Mechanics, LLC
Nationally Syndicated Columnist and Author

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.” Steve’s latest book, “Organizational Psychology for Managers,” is due out from Springer in late 2013. 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.

Cut Big Problems Into Solvable Pieces and Get Moving

As published in Corp! Magazine

If a tree falls in the driveway and no one is awake to hear it, does it make a sound?

Where Did The Time Go?

There is nothing quite like that warm feeling you get at the end of the day when you look back and wonder where the time went. There is nothing quite like realizing that an entire day has gone by and nothing got done. Unfortunately, this happens far too often, especially when the day holds meetings.

Meetings have a bad reputation for consuming a great deal of time while producing little of substance. That reputation is well deserved. Despite this, meetings remain extremely popular in many companies. Unfortunately, in addition to potentially wasting a great deal of time, meetings often tend to leave people drained and unable to focus. As a result, they use up even more time getting back on track after the meeting.

Read the rest at FreudTv.com