The Business Sensei

Future Retrospective

Once upon a time there was a staircase. Although it wound its way up from floor to floor in the manner traditionally associated with staircases, this was no ordinary staircase. Although it stood in a courthouse in Franklin, Ohio, in a fashion much like other staircases, yet it was not like the other staircases. With most staircases, those who look down see stairs beneath their feet. With this staircase, however, those who looked down saw the floor below and those people walking up the stairs. They saw those who stood at the bottom of the staircase, for this staircase, you see, was made of clear glass. While we have no information as to whether those climbing the staircase felt a sense of vertigo when they looked down, we do have definitive information about what they said when they looked down: “Hey, those people at the bottom of the stairs are staring up my dress.”

Although the news report was slightly vague on this point, we may safely assume that this comment was made only by those who were, in fact, wearing a dress.

But yes, it seems that people on the staircase made an observation that had eluded the architects who designed the staircase: that if you can look down through the glass, you can look up through it as well.

When questioned on this point, the architects responded by saying that they had naturally assumed that no one would be so inappropriate as to stand at the bottom of a glass staircase in a courthouse and look up women’s dresses.

When this insightful observation was relayed to the judge, he replied that, “If people always exercised good judgment and decorum, we wouldn’t need this building.”

The architects had carefully considered their building material. They had thought about how to make the glass durable and resilient. They had considered the problems involved in building a glass staircase in such a way that it would continue to look good even after having hundreds of people walking up and down it each day. They had, in fact, solved each one of these problems.

What they had not considered was how the customer, to wit, the people in the courthouse, would actually use the product. They were so fixated on the concept that a staircase is for walking on, not staring through, that they failed to consider the ramifications of their architectural decisions. To be fair, architects are hardly unique in making this type of mistake. It can be very easy to let your assumptions about how something should work or how it will be used to blind you to how it will actually work or be used. Consider the example of the business school competition to design a helicopter. The contest was judged on a number of factors, including the weight of the finished product. The winner was the helicopter without an engine. Apparently, no one had included “able to fly” in the criteria for success. The assumption that, of course, a helicopter should fly was so taken for granted that no one thought to see if it was included in the rules.

On the bright side, it had considerably less severe consequences than the situation involving the helicopter that flipped upside down while in flight. Or the data analysis software package that looked like it had crashed the computer, causing users to reboot shortly before the calculations were complete. Or the organizational improvements that led to a massive talent exodus.

In each situation, the people designing the end result honestly believed they were giving the customers, including the employees in the final case, what the customers had requested and that belief prevented them from considering any other possibilities.

“We asked!” the designers protested. “That’s what they said they wanted.”

Were the customers really asking for a helicopter that flipped upside down or an expensive glass staircase that had to be subsequently covered? Of course not. But somehow, that’s what the designers heard.

The problem was that they asked the wrong questions, further leading them into their one, narrow, view of the result. Thus, no one ever stopped to imagine how the end product, be it staircase, contest rules, helicopter, software, or organizational procedures would actually be used.

In each situation, rather than seeking information, the people asking the questions sought validation. They already had an idea in their heads, and any inquiries they made were aimed at confirming that idea, not testing it.

When you say, “This is what you wanted, right?” or “What do you think of this approach?” odds are you aren’t requesting information; you are requesting validation. Indeed, even if you are seriously trying to get information, such questions usually get you validation instead. This is because the client assumes that you, as the expert, know what you’re talking about.

So how do you ask for information? One answer is to change the time frame. Instead of asking them to imagine the future, pretend it’s the future and imagine the past: “If we went with this approach, and six months from now you weren’t happy, what would have gone wrong? If you were happy, what would have gone right?”

This small change causes people to actually imagine using the product or living with the new procedures. Now, instead of validation, you’ll get information. That information may shake up your carefully constructed vision of the future, but that’s fine. Better now than after the sightseers congregate at the bottom of that glass staircase. A future retrospective also forces you to more honest with yourself and address the issues in front of you.

What challenges are you facing? If, six months from now, you had successfully addressed your most persistent problems, what would you have done to make that happen?

Mirror, Mirror

“Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the fairest one of all?”

Magic mirrors have a habit of showing up in fairy tales and legends. The most famous, of course, was the mirror owned by the wicked queen in Snow White. But don’t think that magic mirrors were solely the province of the wicked queen. There were plenty of evil sorcerers, kings, and especially evil grand viziers who had magic mirrors of one sort or another. Given how ubiquitous those mirrors were, one can only imagine that entire fantasy economies must have depended on their manufacture. But that, as they say, is another story.

The interesting thing about magic mirrors is that what they show us is, well, us, with an emphasis on making us feel good about it. That’s the problem with magic mirrors: when we look into them long enough, we might actually start to believe that we really do look that good. If that happens, anything that spoils the illusion becomes a problem to remove rather than feedback that things might not be as they seem.

“Sorry Queen, but it is Snow White who’s better looking by day or night.”

We all know how that worked out.

In a business setting, the magic mirror is the people we work with. When we work as part of a team, we can see everyone on the team: we can see what they do, we react to their work, we hear their words. The one person we cannot see is ourselves. Is our work good or is it poor? Are we behaving intelligently, foolishly, wisely, or carelessly? We can only really tell by how we are reflected in the eyes of our team mates. Without that feedback, we have no point of reference. Sometimes, the mirror doesn’t show us what we want to see.

This mirroring phenomenon is a big part of how a group of people who happen to be wandering in the same direction learn how to come together as a team. We look at others and we see how people act, look, and dress. Because team members always seek some degree of similarity, we try to mimic what we see so that we’ll feel like part of the team. This is especially true when we are new to the team (when everyone on the team is new, each person is doing this. That can make things a bit tricky). Similarity brings the team together, but differences make it effective. The trick is making use of the first without losing the second.

Assuming that each member of the team sees and reflects the appropriate actions, appearances, and behaviors, the team has a much better chance of coalescing and achieving very high levels of performance. On the other hand, if people don’t reflect to one another or, in other words, see too much difference, the team doesn’t come together, members are less loyal, and the team is more likely to dissolve.

Points of similarity can be many things: behavior, clothing, common goals, an outside threat, annoyance at a particular member of the team, skin color, gender, etc. Some of these work better than others. Superficial characteristics such as physical appearance and gender can certainly help bring a team together, although at the risk of creating a more homogenous team. Simply looking at people who look like you might feel good, but it doesn’t do a whole lot to stimulate creative thought; for that, difference helps. As Terry Pratchett observed, we go on vacation so that we can come back to view home through new eyes. Seeing those who don’t look like us helps us consider multiple options and perspectives, an important component of successful products and services.

Bringing a team together against an outside threat has good short-term results, but often only succeeds in suppressing disagreements and preventing the group from learning how to argue effectively and develop consensus. Unifying around annoyance at a particular member of the team creates its own special set of problems. Both of these approaches tend to suppress difference in favor conformity. Common goals, interests, imitating behaviors, and having a common vision work best at building similarity while preserving differences.

How a group unifies then determines who else it lets in. Humans naturally form in- and out-groups, and we are all subject to viewing members of our in-groups more favorably than members of our out-groups. That means that we will tend to favor those who resemble the people around us. Over time, the group will reflect the dominant identifying characteristics: be that skin color, a penchant for puns, gender, style of dress, incisive problem solving capabilities, and so on. The magic mirror is telling us what the group looks like and, by extension, what new members should look like. And, because, we’re human, we are also very good at explaining why our group looks the way it does. In fact, we might decide that there are very good and very serious scientific reasons why it must look that way, and why any other group composition would be wrong. In reality, there may be nothing special about many of the dimensions of group composition other than happenstance.

Indeed, when we recognize the important dimensions of similarity, we can also take advantage of our differences. A key strength of a high performance team is its ability to see a problem from multiple perspectives, to generate diverse ideas, and to explore different and unexpected approaches. Team members must become comfortable along the axes of their similarities and their differences for that strength to manifest.

Just to make things more complicated, not all group members will always recognize which dimensions of similarity are the relevant ones for the group. For example, some people might assume gender or physical appearance is the driver, when, in fact, they are simply coincidental. Part of how a group matures is for members to connect along more significant dimensions than the merely superficial. People who cannot make this adjustment ultimately cannot remain as part of the group. Some will leave after discovering that the group is not what they thought; others will demonstrate their inability to connect along the important dimensions or will demonstrate that they are intolerant of valuable differences and will need to be forced out before they poison the team.

The team is a mirror for each of its members. It’s important to stop and reflect, and then learn to use the feedback correctly. Getting fixated on superficial similarities can break the team and lead to a great deal of bad luck.

When Goals Take Over

“Just give me the numbers!”

Falling firmly into the “I just can’t make this stuff up” category, the preceding statement was made by the head of a certain engineering department. He wanted the performance figures on a series of database lookups so that he could determine if the database code was performing up to specifications. This would be a perfectly reasonable request except for one minor problem: the database code was not producing the correct results in the first place. Performance was sort of irrelevant given that getting the wrong answers quickly is not necessarily all that helpful, although it may be less irritating than having to wait for the wrong answers. It’s rather like driving at 75mph when lost: you may not know where you are or where you are going, but at least you’ll get there quickly. Or something.

In another example, the engineers developing a bioinformatics data analysis package spent all their time arguing about the correct way to set up the GUI elements on each page. The problem was that when they actually ran one of the calculations, the program appeared to hang. In fact, I was assured by everyone, it just “took a long time to run.” How long? The answer was, “maybe a few weeks.”

This may come as a shock to those few people who have never used a PC, but a few weeks is generally longer than most computers will run before crashing (or installing an update without warning). Besides, the complete lack of response from the program regularly convinced users that the program had crashed. The engineers did not want to put in some visual indicator of progress because they felt it wouldn’t look good visually. They refused to remove that calculation from the product because “someone might want to try it.” Eventually, they grudgingly agreed to warn the user that it “might take a very long time to run.”

In both of these cases, the team was solving the wrong problem. Although there were definitely complaints about the speed of the database, speed was very much a secondary issue so long as the database wasn’t producing correct results. And while the user interface decisions were certainly important, designing an elegant interface for a feature that will convince the user that the product is not working is not particularly useful. At least rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic was only a waste of time. It didn’t contribute to the ship sinking.

So why were these teams so insistent upon solving the wrong problems? If you give someone a problem they can solve comfortably, and one that they have no idea how to approach, they will do the former. At that point, once goals are set, they become the focus of everyone’s attention and a lot of work goes into accomplishing them. That is, after all, the best thing about goals; unfortunately, it can also be the worst thing about goals.

While clear, specific goals are certainly good things, goals also have to make sense. You need to have the right goals. It can be a very valuable exercise to look at the goals assigned to each person and each team in the company. Do those goals make sense? What problems or challenges are they addressing? Are the goals complementary, or are there significant gaps? If the engineering team is being evaluated on how many bugs they can fix and the QA team on how many new bugs they can find, what happens to the step where fixed bugs get verified? If no one is responsible for that happening, it won’t get done (and didn’t, in several software companies!). If the team focuses on the wrong problems, they’ll spend their time fighting symptoms or revisiting solved problems, and never deal with the real issues.

Therefore, even before you can set goals, you have to know what the problem is that you are trying to solve. That means first separating the symptoms of the problem from the problem itself. The symptoms are only symptoms; frequently, they can point to many possible problems. It’s important to look at the symptoms and brainstorm which problems they could be indicating. When you start developing possible solutions, you then need to ask what the final product will look like if you go ahead with your solution and you need to know what success looks like. Make sure that your proposed solution will actually solve at least some of the potential problems you’ve identified, and develop some way of testing to make sure you are solving the correct problem. In other words, have some checkpoints along the way so you can make sure that you’re actually improving things. Only then can you start to set goals that will effectively guide you to producing the results you actually need.

Once goals are set, they have a way of taking over. What are you doing to make sure you don’t set goals before you know where you’re going?

The Case of the Blind Airplane Pilot

Recently, on Best of Cartalk, Tom told an interesting tale.

Apparently, a plane was delayed taking off. This isn’t the interesting part; in fact, that’s hardly even news. The plane subsequently made a stop and, big surprise, got delayed again. At this point, the pilot announced that since they were going to be sitting at the gate for some time, passengers might wish to disembark and stretch their legs. Everyone left except for Mr. Jones, a blind man. He had apparently flown this flight before as the pilot knew him by name.

“Mr Jones,” the pilot said, approaching the man, “we’ll be at the gate for at least an hour. Would you like to leave the plane?”

“No thank you,” said Jones, “but perhaps my dog would like a walk.”

A few moments later, passengers at the gate were treated to the sight of the pilot, in full uniform and wearing sunglasses, walking past seemingly led by a Seeing Eye dog.

Sometimes things are not what they appear to be. Of course a blind man with a service dog cannot be an airline pilot. The dogs can’t read the instruments. When it comes to choosing leaders, though, sometimes we’re not much different from a blind airline pilot, with potentially similar results if we get it wrong.

The question of whether someone looks like a leader is a concept that has been in the news a bit lately. I was asked on a radio show once what a leader looks like. I created a stretch of dead air when I responded, “Whatever we think a leader looks like.”

This is the problem with leadership: we can’t necessarily agree on what a leader looks like or even what it means to look like a leader.

Where do we learn what a leader looks like? Fundamentally, from our culture via a variety of sources: growing up, it may be through stories, books, TV, and movies. It may be through activities we take part in, such as sports or playing Dungeons and Dragons. It may be through acting in plays or participating in live roleplaying scenarios. In the workforce, people are seen as leaders sometimes just because they physically resemble other leaders or the company founder. Sometimes, merely acting like a known leader or imitating some key characteristic of theirs or being associated with them psychologically is enough to become recognizable as a leader.

The thing is, those cultural lessons are usually superficial and, at best, tell us only what past leaders looked like. Even worse, when someone matches up to the superficial characteristics of leadership, it is a common human response to assume they have other characteristics as well. Which other characteristics? Whichever characteristics the viewer thinks a leader should have. Conversely, those who do not fit the superficial image of “leader” are then assumed to not have the abilities a leader needs to be successful. Thus, an organization that focuses only on what worked in the past will often blind itself to the vast pool of talented people whom it is not promoting, and who are the right people for the problems the organization has today or will have tomorrow.

Ironically, a common reflex when things don’t work is to become frustrated and metaphorically hit the system with a monkey wrench: while percussive maintenance might sometimes work with a mechanical device, even then it works mainly in fiction. In reality, kicking your computer will rarely yield good results for either the computer or your foot. Hiring someone unskilled for the job just to shake things up may feel very satisfying, but the results are similar to hiring a pastry chef to perform open-heart surgery. He may shake things up, but it’s your funeral.

Thus, it is critical to look seriously at what a leader will be expected to do. What role will they play? What skills will they need? Failing to do this makes it easy to fall into the trap of appointing someone with the wrong skillset, or no skills at all. For example, in the early 2000s, Pfizer had two potential CEO candidates: Hank McKinnell and Karen Caten. McKinnell was an aggressive, abrasive man; Caten a woman who was praised for her ability to build teams. Pfizer chose McKinnell. As Harvard Business Review later observed, he was forced out five years later amid declining share prices, his abrasive manner being less than effective despite the fact that it initially appealed to board members’ mental image of what a leader “looked” like.

The image of an airline pilot with a service dog is comical. Choosing the wrong person to lead an organization is not. Leadership is about more than superficial characteristics: leaders require knowledge, skill, and temperament in order to be successful. Actually taking the time to understand the issues at a more than superficial level is critical to making a successful choice. There’s no reason to fly blind.

Phoning in Culture Change

What is a phone? That seems like a pretty simple question. After all, doesn’t everyone know what a phone is?

Well, yes, in a sense. Pretty much everyone knows what a phone is, but not everyone knows the same thing. For older people, the default image of a phone is a rather bulky object with a handset connected by a cord to a base unit. How far you could walk from the base unit depended on how long your cord was. One of the most striking features of these old phones was that if you positioned the handset correctly, you could make it look like a pair of Mickey Mouse ears.

To many people, however, a phone is a small object that you can put in your pocket and carry with you. You can make calls from anywhere. You don’t need to be in, or even near, your home. These people may not even recognize an old-fashioned phone. Now, you might well be thinking, “Well of course. Young people are used to cell phones and don’t use landlines.” True enough; what’s particularly interesting is that when you ask them why mobile phones are often called “cell phones,” their answers are usually unconnected to anything having to do with reality. One person told me that mobile phones are called cell phones because “they’re small,” like a human cell.

What do we do with a phone? Again, the answer depends. For many people, phones are used to make calls to other people. For my teen-aged daughter, that’s crazy talk. Phones are used to text friends, read email, listen to music, check the weather, and play games. Talking? Why do that?

What is particularly interesting here is that when we talk about phones and using a phone, we might think we’re all talking the same language, but we’re not. In fact, we may be speaking very different languages, even though we’re all using the exact same words. As should be obvious, and ironic though it may be, this effect can make communications just a bit tricky: after all, it’s not just phones that experience this little multi-definitional condition. However, since the point about communications is obvious, we won’t discuss it further. Instead, we’ll look at the more interesting question of why this sort of thing happens.

Fundamentally, what we’re looking at is a cultural shift in process. Over time, the meaning of a “phone” is changing, and that new meaning is moving through the population at different rates. Just because culture is shifting, that doesn’t mean that it’s going to change for everyone at the same time! Cultural propagation takes time. Now, to be completely fair, in a very real sense the exact meaning of a phone probably isn’t going to make that much difference to anyone. However, when the cultural shift is around how work should get done or around the strategic direction a business is taking, this cultural propagation effect can make a very big difference.

One of the problems with any significant organizational change is that major changes typically involve altering the underlying ways in which people work. In fact, we may even be changing the basic principles or reasons beyond why the work is being done in the first place! In other words, what we’re changing is the culture. As we’ve just seen, that’s a lot easier to say than it is to do. One of the big reasons why cultural change is so difficult is that it takes time to propagate; even worse, though, is the fact that those areas of the company where the culture hasn’t changed constantly pull back on the areas where the change is occurring, further slowing down the change. In other words, doing things the way we’ve always done them remains very attractive for a very long time. The old ways are like a comfortable old jacket: no matter how threadbare it may look, we don’t want to get rid of it. Let’s face it, there are people who not only resist smart phones, but don’t even carry mobile phones at all.

Avoiding the cultural propagation problem isn’t easy. It requires doing something that many people seem to find incredibly difficult or at least sort of silly: telling a good story and then living up to it.

That’s right, we start with a good story. Businesses create stories all the time. It’s human nature: we tend to organize information sequentially and we instinctively use a narrative structure to make sense of events. The culture of a business is expressed in the stories the business tells about itself and about key figures in the organization. If you want to change the culture, first you have to change the story. Once you’ve got the story, then you have to live up to it. Senior people need to make the story real: they need to demonstrate the values and message that they are promoting. Then, even as they travel around their business telling the story, they also have to be patient while it propagates. If you can’t live up to your story, few people will believe it and your cultural change will fade out as it propagates. Sure, you may see temporary successes, but the pull of the old, comfortable, believable story will stop your change process. At best, you might have a few small areas temporarily speaking the new language.

It’s only when you tell a believable story and make it real through your actions that everyone ends up speaking the same language. That’s a successful change.

What a Hissing Cat Teaches Us About Teamwork

One of our cats recently needed a course of antibiotics. Now, this particular cat is quite large, but also very sweet and has a purr that would put a motorboat to shame. Giving her pills is really a very simple task: pop the pill in her mouth, give her a treat, and we’re done. She never runs away, never puts up a fight, just gives me a dirty look and then gobbles up the treat. Thus it was that when we realized that we’d be out of town for a few days during the cat’s course of antibiotics, we didn’t think it would be all that big of a deal to have a friend come in and give the cat her pill.

As it turned out, the cat had a different opinion about this. The first night we were gone, we were treated to a series of text messages detailing the ongoing adventures of the friend who had come by to pill the cat. Apparently our sweet lump of a cat had transformed into Demon Kitty. She was loudly expressing her opinion, while ducking under pieces of furniture and also demonstrating her willingness to remove any human limb that happened to come in after her. At the first opportunity, she dodged past our friend and disappeared.

She did not get her pill that night. On the other hand, our friend was intact.

The next morning went somewhat better. Eventually, the cat did agree to eat the pill. The basic problem was that the cat didn’t really know the friend who came over, but once she came by the house a couple of times, the cat began to accept her. At that point, there was a relationship and the cat was willing to submit to being pilled. Cats don’t like people they don’t know sticking things down their throats or doing other unpleasant things to them. They don’t necessarily like it when someone they do know is doing it, but at least they are more likely to tolerate it.

Cats are suspicious of people they don’t know. They approach carefully, if at all. They want to take their time getting to know the person before they will tolerate much, if any, contact. Although we are less likely to hide under chairs hissing and spitting, people are surprisingly similar to cats. We are also suspicious of people we don’t know, although we do a better job of hiding it than a cat might. I’m not sure whether this says something profound about people or cats!

Like cats, we have a variety of social rituals and behaviors that we use when we meet someone new. These behaviors are the moral equivalent of cats sniffing at each other and checking each other out. These behaviors become increasingly important when a team is coming together, when a new leader is assigned to a team, or when a new person joins an existing team. In each of these cases, different members of the group need to build relationships with each other.

At first, those relationships are professional: distant, polite, and, above all, superficial. No one is quite sure of where they stand or what behavior is appropriate. What will offend someone else? What will embarrass us or another person? Which behaviors will help us gain status and acceptance, and which behaviors might get us thrown out of the group? Push people too hard at that point and the reaction can be quite strong. Think about groups you’ve been in: how often did you find yourself agreeing with an idea or a suggestion because you assumed that other people knew better or because you didn’t want to upset anyone? How often did what seemed like a simple suggestion or off-hand comment provoke an unexpectedly angry or intense response? Conversely, think about who has the right to criticize you: people whom you know well, or people whom you don’t? Superficial relationships produce lower quality work.

It takes time for those relationships to move from keeping people at a safe distance to actually engaging with the other person at a deeper, more productive level. It’s easy to say that in the office we need to focus on the issues, not the person, but it’s hard to do. The less we feel we have good relationships with our colleagues, the more we’re likely to feel that they are trying to shove something down our throat. It’s only after we’ve been working with them for a few months that we might really start to develop a sense of trust and comfort. That’s assuming, of course, that the process is handled correctly. Try to rush it, and it only takes longer. That sense of trust and comfort is vital, though, for actually doing high quality work.

As with cats, we have to take it slowly. Everyone involved has to recognize that mistakes will happen. So long as you don’t take anyone’s head off, it is the process of making mistakes and recovering from them that actually builds the relationship. Of course, sometimes it doesn’t work. Sometimes the cat runs and hides. Sometimes the relationship gets destroyed and people flee the team or the company. But the only way to achieve high quality relationships, and do high quality work as a team, is to take the risk of being scratched.

Controlling the Little Things

One of the more painful experiences I had in jujitsu was when my instructor taught finger holds. We assume that because our legs are generally quite strong, it would be difficult for someone to force us to go somewhere we don’t want to go. That assumption lasted as long as it took my instructor to apply a finger hold. All he had to do was take control of the smallest joint of one finger and suddenly my legs would go exactly where he wanted them to go. By manipulating one little thing, he could convince people much larger and stronger than he was to become extremely cooperative. Controlling one small joint gave him control over their entire body, however controlling the body did not produce the same control over the arms and legs: the hands and feet still moved freely, and would regularly engage in what may be politely referred to as “nose seeking behavior.”

Now, you might be thinking, “Well, so what? That’s just leverage!”

Well, yes, it is leverage. And if that was the whole point, the correct reaction would indeed be “so what?”

Leverage, as we all know, enables us to move something large through control of something small. Jujitsu is merely a fairly straight-forward application of this principle. However, the principle is not limited to the physical. Our perception of control is determined not by the big things in life that we control, but by the little things. To put this another way, if we want people to tackle big, challenging projects, we have to convince them that they have at least some control over the outcome; they have to believe that their actions matter and have a reasonably good chance of producing positive results. Conversely, when we don’t have control over little things, we tend to assume that we can’t control the bigger things. Even worse, that feeling of not having control translates into a loss of initiative and creativity. Leverage cuts both ways.

In any organization, those stressors that decrease our sense of control are thus the most damaging. Organizational politics are one obvious example, but at a more direct level, the less control employees have over their immediate environment, the less initiative they take overall. Being able to, within reason, decorate your office or cubicle creates a sense of control. Conversely, when companies have elaborate rules that unduly limit personal expression, control is seriously decreased. Without that sense of control, employees become more like the person whose finger is being twisted rather than like the person doing the twisting: they might be compliant, but they are not enthusiastic or committed.

A recent article in the NY Times discussed how Google addresses exactly this issue. Google doesn’t just allow employees to decorate their work area; employees get to design their work area. Google provides them with the equivalent of high tech tinker toys that employees can use to build the work area they want. Feel like having a treadmill? No problem. Walking desk? Sure. The article pointed out that Google doesn’t even have an official policy about coming in to the office; rather, the assumption is that the employee will work out a reasonable schedule with her team. This is control in action: employees are given control over their environment, even whether to come to the office to work. This control, coupled with making the office an very enjoyable place to work, leads to employees who exercise their control to work longer and harder than anyone could ever force them to work. Indeed, one of the problems Google has is that sometimes they have to chase people out of the office! What would you do to have problems like that?

When we have to force someone to do something, either through threats or through lavish rewards, they don’t get a sense of control or commitment. They are being controlled, but they are not in control. Now, if all we want is compliance, maybe that’s just fine! Indeed, if the task is easy, that may even be sufficient. However, if we want a committed, enthusiastic work force that believes themselves capable of tackling big projects and overcoming apparently overwhelming obstacles, the secret to getting there is to give them control of the little things.

Slush in the Schedule

It’s snowing as I write this. Of course, these days that means I could be writing this article almost anytime. In the last three weeks, we’ve had some 7 feet of snow, or maybe 8, in the Boston area. That makes for a lot of snowmen! It also makes for a lot of slush in people’s schedules. It’s no wonder that the police in one New Hampshire town issued an arrest warrant for Punxsutawney Phil.

In fact, this sort of weather really makes a dramatic point about just how hard it can be to plan and schedule just about anything. A couple of blizzards and it’s amazing how disrupted everything becomes.

Schedules are a funny thing. When I was giving a workshop a few years ago on project management, one of the people in the audience became quite irate when I suggested that the point of a schedule is not to make sure that you optimize every minute, but rather that a schedule exists to prevent us from trying to do everything all at once.

This person insisted that it was possible to precisely calculate the amount of time that each step of the schedule would take and thus there was no need to waste any time. Had this actually worked for him? Well, it turns out that he was (in)famous for missing deadlines and burning out his teams trying to hit arbitrary targets. No matter how precisely he tried to calculate the schedule, something would always derail it: the flu has no respect for precision. Once a tight schedule is disrupted, it can easily become a game of falling dominos.

In the end, the goal is to beat the schedule, not create a schedule that beats you. It’s quite amazing: when we’re ahead of schedule, we are simultaneously more relaxed and more energized. We focus better and come up with more creative solutions to problems. Unexpected obstacles are fun challenges. When we are behind schedule, we feel rushed. Every delay feels like a crisis. We take shortcuts and make more mistakes, which, in turn, only further disrupts the schedule.

The secret, it turns out, to effective schedules is not to try to be extremely precise, but rather to recognize that your schedule will need some slush. Things do not always happen when they are supposed to: some things will go faster than expected, and others will go more slowly. The goal is to be able to adapt to that: when the US military started conducting war games with the Japanese, the hardest thing for the Japanese military was that US forces wouldn’t attack on time. Sometimes they were early, sometimes they were late. This was very frustrating for the Japanese, who were used to extreme precision in their war games. Eventually, they figured out the lesson: warfare doesn’t happen on a clock.

When you’re building your schedule, don’t just estimate how long something will take. Break down each task, think about the different moving pieces involved. Consider which pieces can be disrupted by someone getting the flu or by a freak storm. Where are you implementing a known and tested solution and where are you trying something new and different? Exploration will always take longer if only because you don’t know ahead of time what you’re getting into: Boston’s famous Big Dig certainly had its share of bad planning, but it also had its share of discovering that the problems being solved were much bigger and more difficult than anyone expected.

As I explained to someone very recently, always put breaks in the schedule. As every endurance athlete learns, mostly by ignoring this advice, you need to stop and rest periodically. When you decide to skip a rest or a meal break, you set yourself up for failure. Just as the silence between the notes is what makes the music, it is the breaks in the schedule that enable the team to maintain high productivity over the long term.

Take time in your schedule as well to put in checkpoints to evaluate progress. That doesn’t mean fighting about why something didn’t get done, but rather to understand what is working and what is not. Make adjustments and shift resources as necessary: part of good scheduling is the ongoing process of refining the schedule.

But what about 8 feet of snow? Surely no one can plan for weather conditions like that! Of course not, but that’s not the point. When we are used to the idea that schedules need regular tune-ups and adjustments, when we recognize that unexpected obstacles are just part of the job, then it becomes easier to role with whatever storms arise. The blizzard isn’t a crisis, it’s just a more dramatic version of business as usual.

Are you beating the schedule or is the schedule beating you?

It’s Not a Sprint, It’s a Hike up a Mountain!

Last summer, I had the opportunity to hike Algonquin. For those who are not familiar with Algonquin, which included me up until about two days before I climbed it, Algonquin is the second highest mountain in New York state. This translates to roughly 5100 feet, which may not be much by Sierra Nevada standards, but when actually doing the hike such subtleties swiftly become irrelevant. The trail up Algonquin starts at 2000 feet and climbs 3000 feet in 4 miles. There are a number of words for a trail like that; one of the less emotionally expressive ones is “steep.” The estimated time for the hike was 8 hours.

I have long believed the old adage that building a software project is a marathon, not a sprint. I was wrong. It’s a hike up a mountain. Consider that a marathon may be long, but it is basically predictable. You know how far you are going and exactly what the conditions will be along the way. When you get to the end, you’re done. Maybe it’s a big circle or there are busses waiting to take you home; either way, the finish line is the finish line.

Climbing a peak like Algonquin, however, is a different experience. At the base camp, the weather was sunny and warm, a typical August day. My wife directed my attention to the sign that said that the temperature at the peak was 40 degrees Fahrenheit, just a tad cooler. I hadn’t noticed that as my attention was on the sign that explained that no matter how beautiful the weather, sudden snow storms were still possible. Yes, even in August there are occasionally snow storms at and around the peak.

The trail itself started off very smooth and easy. My brother-in-law set a good pace, since we wanted to be up and down before dark. Assume one mile per hour, was what he told us. I was thinking that the trail wasn’t that hard, so why such a low estimate? Then we reached the steep part. Well, at least the part that seemed steep until we got to the really steep part. Then it got steeper from there. Suddenly, a mile an hour seemed optimistic.

See the connection to a software project yet?

Even a difficult project seems pretty manageable at the start. Sure, everyone talks about the inevitable rough patches, but no one really expects them to seriously derail the schedule. But then it gets steep; or, in other words, something turns out to be much harder or more complex than expected. Lack of planning? Not really; planning is important, but it can only take you so far. Sometimes you have to plan to not know something until you get there. Your plan needs to include how you’ll deal with that discovery.

I didn’t realize how steep the hike up Algonquin would be. But, I had a hiking stick and my wife was using poles. My stick was very useful; on one particularly wet and slippery section of rock, it nobly sacrificed itself to save my ankle. The, now much shorter, hiking stick was still useful in various creative ways on some other impressively inclined sections of the trail.

Preparation can seem pointless until you need it. If you haven’t prepared properly, your will to win won’t matter. That said, sometimes you also have to improvise and be willing to back up and try something different if your first idea doesn’t work.

Algonquin peak was beautiful. Despite the weather reports, it wasn’t nearly as cold up there as expected. No sudden snowstorms came rolling in. Of course, it was also only the halfway mark; we still had to hike back down. That didn’t stop us from having a picnic and enjoying the view; it’s important to celebrate successes along the way, even if you still have more to do. If you never stop and recharge, you’ll never maintain the focus necessary to reach the end. Hiking a wet, steep, trail, that can mean a blown knee or busted ankle; with software, it can mean endless delays, poor design decisions, and a buggy release.

In the end, our 8 hour hike took us closer to 10 hours. Fortunately, we’d started early in the day so we didn’t run out of light; if night had fallen, that would have been a serious problem. Although I did have a flashlight, I had neither a headlamp nor any desire to spend the night on the mountain. Leaving a little more time than you think you need is always a good idea; projects inevitably take longer than expected. Getting stuck on a mountain means a very long, unpleasant, and potentially serious delay; being too aggressive with your schedule can likewise trigger unexpected problems. Putting in some slush time prevents the unexpected from becoming the catastrophic.

As we finished the hike and emerged from the woods into the sunset, we were both exhausted and exhilarated. Algonquin is a tough hike; we celebrated with dinner at a very good restaurant. At the end of your projects, what are you doing to celebrate? No matter how dedicated people are and how much they enjoy the activity, there are sections that are just exhausting. Taking the time to relax and have some fun after the slog helps us appreciate our accomplishments and prepares us to tackle the next big challenge.

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,” sold out at Amazon.com two days after it was released. 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.

The Cardinal and the Sparrow: Effective Organizational Change

You can’t make an omelet without breaking some legs. One of those legs is Cardinal Raymond Burke.

Cardinal Raymond Burke of the Roman Catholic Church was in the news recently, although perhaps not entirely in a way that he would have liked. The good Cardinal recently suffered a significant and dramatic change in status, sort of the equivalent of an admiral being demoted to swimming pool monitor: from Cardinal and head of the ecclesiastic church, he is now the patron of the Knights of Malta. This is not, to put it mildly, an upward career move. Indeed, one might well imagine that the Cardinal and the Bluebird of Happiness are not exactly on speaking terms right now.

The question, of course, is why did this happen? The ostensible cause is that the Cardinal did not agree with Pope Francis. While that may, in fact, be the proximate reason, the real reason is a bit more subtle. It has to do with the often messy and awkward process of organizational change. The world is constantly changing, whether we are looking at the religious landscape of the Church or the business landscape. Businesses rise up and achieve success within the environment in which they are founded. Many of them then go out of business or fade into the background: still important, but no longer dominant. Think Xerox, IBM, Microsoft, to name three, with Google possibly preparing to become a fourth.

Organizational change is never an easy thing. The larger the organization and the more deeply entrenched its culture and behavior, the more difficult it is to change. Few organizations are larger and have a more deeply entrenched culture than the Roman Catholic Church. Change can be a lot like trying to turn the QE II: it’s not something that happens easily or quickly. But Francis is making it happen. How?

To begin with, he is moving slowly. He is not trying to change the church all at once, but rather in small steps. He raises issues and then builds on them; he first suggests different ideas and gets people thinking about them. He then starts to act on those ideas and concepts.

Part of what makes change difficult is that an organization became successful by doing things a certain way. They have learned how to succeed, and everyone knows that nothing succeeds like success… except, of course, when it doesn’t. But trying to change those comforting habits is challenging: like throwing away that old coat that fits just right, the change simply feels wrong.

The first step, therefore, is painting a picture of the future: tell people what change will look like. This can be done through vibrant and dramatic speeches or through quiet questions. What matters is that it happens. Once people know where you are going, they are much more comfortable following you. It’s when they don’t know, or don’t want to know, that people dig in their heels. You have to make it easy for people to follow.

However, no leader can change a large organization on their own. There are simply too many people, too much psychological inertia. It is critical to get other organizational leaders on board. Show them the future and help them become comfortable with it, so that they will then share that vision with their followers. The more people who come on board, the more people will come on board: once change gets large enough, it starts to snowball.

But what about those who hear and refuse to follow? Often, they need to be removed from power: politely, calmly, and firmly. There can be no doubt, no question that the snowball will run over anyone who is refusing to move. Provided that people know which way to start moving, this approach can be remarkably effective at convincing those who have doubts that they should jump on the bandwagon. The catch, of course, is that you can’t get rid of too many or move too fast: scare people too much and they freeze or panic. If people are scared by the change process, they will swiftly become scared of the change itself.

By demoting Cardinal Burke in such a public fashion, Pope Francis is sending a very clear message. By finding a place for him, albeit a minor one, Francis is also recognizing his years of service. It is not always necessary to get rid of those who won’t change; rather, leading change involves moving them to places where they can still help the organization but can no longer impede the change process. Instead of being a focus of attention, they become boring and unimportant.

If you want to lead change effectively, you need to show people the future. Paint the picture that will get them thinking about how the world, or at least the company, can be a better place. Ask the questions that will get people to become unhappy with the status quo and start thinking about how change could be a good thing. Show them the way, recruit followers to spread the message, and strategically replace those who won’t move. Don’t be afraid to turn a few brightly colored cardinals into boring sparrows.

The Leadership Blueprint can help you with organizational change. Find out how.