This one has been on my mind lately:
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous…The major advances in civilization are processes that all but wreck the societies in which they occur." Alfred North Whitehead
Archives For Change
This just in…
"If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original." Sir Ken Robinson
Spoiler Alert: You’ve got to watch the video at the end of this post! (But first, read the post!) The beauty of the blogosphere is that in a few minutes you can connect a lot of dots, you can be influenced by ideas beyond your imagination, you can be exposed to creativity that you’d never even know existed…and it’s really quite an extraordinary thing. It’s free. It’s limited only by your own ability to see relevance or connection. It’s an amazing resource that has the potential to put you right in the audience at the most incredible gatherings of some of the world’s most creative people. Really, really, amazing.
And it’s easy to begin. One of the things you can do is subscribe to a few blogs that are outside of your normal niche. I don’t know what your normal niche is, but the infusion of variety is important for all of us and it’s easy to begin this experiment in the blogosphere. Right now I have 66 feeds (blogs) that I’ve added to Bloglines (which is a free blog-reader). I’ve got what you’d expect (strategists, leaders, business writers, etc.). But I’ve also got blogs by some very different people. One of the most interesting and enjoyable blogs is by Kathy Sierra, who is a writer in the computer field (that such an understatement but you get the idea). Her blog is a constant source for some very thought-provoking content. And you can subscribe to StrategyCentral. It’s easy. (Click here and I’ll tell you how to do it)
As an example of the richness of the blogosphere, in Kathy’s post over the weekend she mentions a great presentation by Sir Ken Robinson at this years TED. What is TED? You can see what it’s about here. Honestly, I’d never heard of it. And I had no idea who Sir Ken Robinson was. But I’ve read enough of Kathy’s posts over the last year to know that it was at least worth a quick look. And what a great 15 minutes! You’ve got to take a look yourself. Whatever you’re doing, stop what you’re doing and check out this presentation from Sir Ken Robinson. You can watch it right here. Let me know what you think!
Isn’t this is a great line?
"Change is the law of life and those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future." John F. Kennedy
If you’re not receiving John Maxwell’s Leadership Wired you’re missing a great resource. It’s a constant source of some great leadership ideas. It’s free! You can subscribe to it here.
What kind of thinking goes into the development of your main events? Are you trying to produce high usability alone? Or are you trying to incorporate fun? Maybe you’re thinking, "fun?" Who said anything about fun? Maybe you think fun cheapens the soundness of your product. On the other hand, you may be really only going for fun…and usability isn’t on the radar!
Kathy Sierra has an interesting post today on usability through fun. This is an important discussion for all of us. If what we’re doing isn’t usable AND fun it really won’t be very effective. One without the other (whichever is missing) really undermines the overall goal.
In her post Kathy includes an interesting list of the five components of usability (as defined by Jakob Neilsen). Here they are:
- Learnability: How easy is it for users to accomplish basic tasks the first time they encounter the design?
- Efficiency: Once users have learned the design, how quickly can they perform tasks?
- Memorability: When users return to the design after a period of not using it, how easily can they reestablish proficiency?
- Errors: How many errors do users make, how severe are these errors, and how easily can they recover from the errors?
- Satisfaction: How pleasant is it to use the design?
Now, if you think about what we do, aren’t these factors right at the heart of our main events? Even everything we’re doing? In a 7 Practices sense they’re really at the core of the design process.
What do you think? Can you see how this becomes a great planning tool?
Be sure and go over to Kathy’s whole post. She goes into some good concept on the idea of play and its role in memorability and satisfaction.
Got an wrinkle in your structure or strategy that just isn’t right? We’re working through 7 Practices of Effective Ministry right now and I’m specifically thinking about practice #2, Think Steps, Not Programs. The idea is to determine that each of your programs or events needs to be designed to move your customer, at least one step, in the direction you want them to go. Once you determine that the next project is to look at each of the programs in your effort and see if they’re actually doing that. You may discover that you’ve got some long established programs that really don’t lead people to where you’d like them to go. They may not be bad in and of themselves. They’re just not productively leading them to where you want them to go. And the question is, "so then what?" What do you do when you discover that you’ve got programs that don’t lead people to where you want them to go?
According to Peter Drucker in July 5th’s reading in The Daily Drucker, we might be able to think about our organization in the same way a doctor thinks about a patient. Once a diagnosis is made, a treatment is prescribed. And when a degenerative disease is diagnosed decisive action is taken. Here’s the line I loved:
"A degenerative disease will not be cured by procrastination. It requires decisive action."
Got any degenerative disease going on? Whatcha gonna do?
All of us have been in discussions that were clearly about the future…but we just couldn’t shake loose from the one person locked in the present. Or even worse, still in the past.
If you haven’t picked up a copy of The Answer to How Is Yes: Acting on What Matters by Peter Block, you are really missing a good thing. I had heard about it. Even checked it out on Amazon. Two weeks ago Mike over at White Rabbit Group mentioned it in a comment…and I finally got to the tipping point. What a great book! There’ve been a handful of these over the last few years. The Contrarian’s Guide to Leadership was one. The Effective Executive was another. Great books that end up with lots of underlining, starred sections, quotes written out on the front flap (and back).
I have to say, I was immediately intrigued by the title: The Answer to How Is Yes. It has a very "take the pebble from my hand, Grasshopper" quality. And the book is full of that kind of wisdom. The first chapter jumps right into a family of how questions that are "always reasonable, but when asked too soon and taken too literally may actually postpone the future and keep us encased in our present way of thinking." This ground is so familiar and yet once you’ve read a few pages you can see where the book is going…and you can’t wait to get there. For instance, if you’ve ever made a presentation to a board you’ve heard the question, "How long will it take?" Seems fair when you look at it. Peter Block takes an interesting tack with it, though. His idea is that the question itself moves us in the direction of answers that meet the criteria of speed…which is the wrong question. Especially since all the evidence suggests "that authentic transformation requires more time than we ever imagined (p. 18)."
Wohh. Take the pebble from my hand…grasshopper.
So you’ve been running your organization a certain way successfully for a long time but you’re wondering whether tweaking a single element might make a difference in your performance. Do you dare test your assumption? Or do you play it safe and leave it alone?
Next month Southwest Airlines will test assigned seating. They’re testing a 35 year old assumption that has been a distinctive element of their boarding strategy. Could you bring yourself to do it?
Picked up a really interesting book the other day: Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths And Total Nonsense: Profiting From Evidence-Based Management. Great insights into the kind of management, evidence-based management, that is willing to test long-held assumptions in order to improve performance. Opening illustration? President George Washington died two days after his doctor drained nearly 5 pints of blood to treat a sore throat. Why in the world would he do that? Common practice in the 1700s. Why are they not doing it today? Today’s medical practice tends to be evidence-based. Amazing the difference between medicine and so many other fields where a gut sense and impression often replaces hard facts.
Thanks to Church of the Customer Blog for the tip on the Southwest story!
Are you settling for the what’s working now? Are you still doing what has always worked before? Is it easier to stay with the tried and true…even though your results are falling off? You may be ready to work at developing the The Prepared Mind skill of challenging, or learning to "question the obvious answers and the path of least resistance in favor of what is the right thing, given the circumstances, and who you are fundamentally, as a person or organization."
If you want to avoid active inertia and irrelevance you’ll need to improve your challenging skills. Where to begin? Here are five key elements:
- Know your values. Often the pieces that need to be challenged are slightly off of what you hold dear. In order to have congruence between values and goals you’ll need clarity.
- Break rules that no longer apply. Many of us are operating in settings where the rules (by-laws, policies, etc.) were established in a very different time. In many cases they’re keeping us from doing what needs to be done.
- Challenge yourself to improve. It begins with you. In order to be effective at challenging you’ve got to changing and open to change yourself.
- Ask great questions. I love this line: "Great questions separate the leaders from the followers (p. 146)." You’re only going to find the answers to the most important questions if they’re being asked.
- List your assumptions, and visit them on a semiannual basis. Underlying every opportunity for challenge are some assumptions that are outdated, invalid, incorrect, and just plain wrong. Here’s another great line: "Just as high blood pressure is the silent killer of the circulatory system, bad assumptions are the silent killer of strategy (p. 146)."
There’s a lot in this idea. Too much to wrestle with in one (or three) posts. I’ll be back with more tomorrow on the topic. In the meantime, you may want to pick up a copy of The Prepared Mind of a Leader.
Home Depot has undergone a massive culture change in the last 5 years. News? No. But there’s a really good Ram Charan (co-author of Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done ) article in this month’s Harvard Business Review, Home Depot’s Blueprint for Culture Change, that describes the tools that HD used to drive a very big change initiative.
The article is very helpful, with a good overview of the four mechanisms that Home Depot employed. working in concert, to change what Ram Charan refers to as "the social architecture… the collective ways in which people work together."
A major innovation was the implementation of a radical new planning process, blending strategy, operations, and human resource planning, requiring resources "to be allocated on the basis of projected future needs rather than, as in most companies, from extrapolation of past events." Imagine the change that this alone would bring most of our organizations. It would be huge.
Question: who could pull off the transition to a radical new direction like that? Only a leader. And not just any leader. Big L. But to get on the new trajectory of resource allocation based on future needs requires a leader who will say, "it’s not going to be based on what we’ve done before. Even what’s worked before."
Good times.
Out.
