The Enlightened Manager

Lessons from Hospice:

Hey there Enlightened Managers.

I've not been the world's best blogger the past few weeks.  Despite the fact that I am thinking of you all often, and itching to write, life has thrown a few curveballs lately.

One of those is the reason why I'm currently tapping away on my computer at the Phoenix airport, on my way home from a weeklong visit with my dying grandmother and her husband.  We knew that her time was short, but we were surprised to find that she was moved to hospice just hours before we arrived.

So many things run through my mind, it is hard to say which ones I'd like to share with you.  Should I talk about how beautiful and sad it was to see my grandfather teasing his wife into eating when she didn't feel like it?  Or how her unstoppable spirit and wit continue to shine through even as the cancer is slowly working into her brain?  These are all important things I think, but I'm not sure I'm ready to write about them yet - or if this is the place to do so.

One thing I did want to write about here is the difference between hospice and a hospital, and the kind of environment they create.  Here are some of the things they do differently:

* No visiting hours - open 24 hours per day.

* No restrictions on food.  They provide meals, or you can bring in food from home.

* No restrictions on visitors.  Pets, friends, family, all welcome.

* Support for the dying, and support for the family.  A social worker is there to talk about options, clergy come by to visit, and volunteers and nurses are always available.

When my mother-in-law passed away several years ago, it was a traumatic experience for everyone.  She was frightened and so were we.  No one knew what to expect.  Being involved with a hospice for my grandmother has been an entirely different experience.  It is still difficult, but there is an environment of caring and support.

I'm not sure what lessons there are to take from this, except that the hospital that served my mother-in-law and the hospice serving my grandmother both had good missions, and they were both filled with good people - yet they produced vastly different experiences.

I think that this hospice's leaders asked "What kind of an environment will best fulfill our mission?"  Not simply pain management, but the bigger picture.  I appreciate that perspective.

Although my work is not like the work of hospice (and yours may not be either) I can appreciate their wholistic view of service. 

Even in the ickiest of times - there is always something to learn, right?

Thinking Outside the Box - Ideas from across the Cultural Divide

I had an interesting chat today with a young woman who recently moved to the U.S from China.  I asked her the question that always burns in mind when I think about that country - did she notice any difference between here and there when it comes to so-called free speech?

Her answer was instructive, but not for the reason I thought it would be.  She said that yes, she has access to more information here, especially online.  You can do the same web search in our two nations and get very different results.  The results in China sounded more polite - no references to the ugly side of world affairs.  Not self protection, but protection from a whole range of bad news.

So I asked her if it bothered her that she had been "protected" from this data back home.  She said no, but that when she does go back, she'll no longer accept the mainstream news as "the truth."  She now knows there is more to the world than what shows up in her home country's media.

So this whole conversation reminded me of how limited we are by our own point of view.  We experience the world being a certain way, and so we assume that our experiences are the truth.  We don't question these assumptions, they just become an accepted part of our inner world, but one that distorts our view, like a mirror of rippled glass.  But we can't see the ripples.

If we wanted to live a life without assumptions, we'd have to completely rewire the human mind so it didn't make assumptions.  And yet our ability to quickly adapt to patterns in our environment is why (I suspect) we are so successful as a species.  Living a life without assumptions probably isn't possible, and a person who could do so might be considered insane.

But like my new friend who sees the world a little differently today, I wonder what I'm missing out on seeing through the eyes of my own little world.  What faulty assumptions do I live by?

I suppose that is the ultimate question when it comes to lifelong learning.  We spend our youth accumulating beliefs, and as adults we gradually shed them with much pain and joy, leading to that old saying "the older I get, the less I know."

When business people talk about this phenomenon, they call it a paradigm shift or learning to think "outside the box."  The neat thing is that "the box" is a construct of our own thinking.  We live in these self imposed walls of beliefs and assumptions.  And yet many of them serve us so well, we wouldn't want to lose them.

So can you engineer a paradigm shift, or radical leaps in personal growth?  I think so.  Here are some of my hunches on how to do it.

1) Be highly skeptical of your assumptions about others and the world - question them.
2) Put yourself in as many foreign environments as you can.  (Not just cultures, but foreign ideas, disciplines, and areas of study.)
3) Get confused.  Get lost in what perplexes you.  
4) Make friends who are unlike you. 

Not terribly scientific, and not a process you can control in detail, I think.  But shifting paradigms is messy work.  Work worth doing though, I think.

This is probably overly heavy stuff for a Friday, eh?  Enough said.  If this is your weekend coming up - enjoy it!

Thoughts on Unsustainable Systems

It's a wet and messy week in the Seattle area.   I was on my way back from the Leadership Tomorrow 25th Anniversary Gala when my sister called, full of news about the impending flood coming to the small town she and my Mother call home.

A year or two ago, flooding in their town was catastrophic, resulting in a rather tense afternoon where I watched my Mom get rescued by boat on our local cable news channel.  This year they are ahead of the game, packing up this evening and planning to drive up to my house tomorrow to wait out the raging river.   When it's over with, they'll go back and clean up, again.

So as I was tidying up the house for guests, I was thinking about this whole concept of unsustainable systems.  We build our homes in flood plains, and rebuild again and again after the water sweeps away our belongings and destroys our homes.

Perhaps we do the same things in our organizations.  We overload our best employees and watch as the raging river of burnout ruins our best talent over and over again.  We rehire and rebuild, because it seems easier to recover from each storm than to focus on the hard work of changing our environment.

I wish my mother and sister would move out of the floodplain, although I'm happy to offer them shelter whenever the water rises.  And I know when my clients are underwater, I'm happy to lend a hand to pull them above the surface.

But as I'm here listening to the wind whistle and the trees sway, I'm reminded that sometimes it's better to avoid the floods of organizational life all together.  Let's build our systems on higher ground.

Looking for Leverage Points

A leverage point is a place where you can provide a small amount of focused energy and get an even bigger and better result in return.  Have you identified the leverage points in your sphere of influence?

I'm delivering a presentation next week on "Coaching Skills" for a local HR association.  The reason for this is that HR coaching managers represents a giant leverage point in organizations.  If one talented HR manager can help make one manager more effective, that HR manager has in fact reached not only the manager but every employee he or she works with.  It's about leverage.

A great tip about leverage points (I believe it comes from Donetta Meadows) is that usually everyone knows where they leverage points are in an organization, except that they are trying to push them very hard in the opposite direction they need to go!   

A good example of this is an overly strong focus on corporate policies and heirarchical control.  I've known CEOs who try to build organizational excellence by clamping down so tightly on rules and regulations that people need three signatures to purchase a box of paper clips.   (OK, a slight exaggeration).  Rather than building excellence, this kind of tight control tends to lead to less accountable workforces, people who say "no" to customers because of "rules" and inflexible approaches.  (Not to mention it also makes managers feel like they're being treated like five year olds - which is never good for retention.)

Where are the leverage points in your work?  Where can you expend focused effort to get a bigger payoff than many might expect?   Food for thought today.

Unintended Concequences

Today I'd like to talk about unintended consequences in organizations.  We all have some familiarity with the notion, we think that changing our supply chain process is going to solve our inventory problem, only to find that it solved that problem but creates three more.  Why does this happen?  Simple.  Because our organizations are complex and interconnected, and when we look at problems in a simple cause and effect way, we can be surprised by how that complexity ends up screwing us over.

Unintended consequences (and how to minimize them) is an aspect of Systems Thinking, which is a competency that I recommend all managers (all human beings!) explore at some point in life.  Systems thinking reminds us that every thing is connected.  Far from being some airy-fairy new age notion, interconnectedness can help us get better business results.

I'm going to share with you a real-life example from an accounting department.  This department was experiencing a high number of invoicing errors, and the department head was ticked off.  This person went to the manager of invoicing, and said "This has gotta stop.  I want you to let your employees know that these kinds of errors *will not be tolerated*"

So here is what happened.

1. The manager checked invoices as they were being entered, and found errors.
2. The manager "wrote up" employees who made errors, telling them if more errors were found, they'd be further punished.
3. Employees previously cross-checked each other's work for accuracy.  Because they were afraid that pointing out errors of their peers would get them fired, they stopped checking each others work.
4. The number of errors increased.
5. The manager increased use of disciplinary action.
6. The employees became even more unwilling to point out errors of others, early in the process when they could be fixed.
7. The number of errors increased.

This example is classic.  I can't tell you how many times that I've seen work quality decrease as a result of a disciplinary push from upper management.  But what the example illustrates is that sometimes when we act, we can generate unintended consequences.  In this case, the manager didn't realize that with employee cross-checks as the predominant fail safe for quality, that the threats of discipline would result in more errors, not less.

Sometimes the connection is even more innocuous.  Perhaps when flattened your management structure by one level, you didn't realize that the eliminated managers actually spent 40% of their time doing ad-hoc training, and now your new hires aren't getting the skills they need. 

At a basic level, unintended consequences can be minimized (but never eliminated) by pushing information down to the lowest levels.  The people directly impacted by the change are the ones most likely to see the consequences nearest to them.

1.  The Accounting Manager could have said "Our error rate is out of control.  I'm being asked to start using disciplinary action to deal with this, but let's talk it out first.  This is serious.  What can we do to get those errors down?"

2.  The re-org team could have asked employees or managers 'what would happen if we didn't have this level of management?"

We often hoard the information about changes like these because we fear the morale impact or the feedback. But this is often just a delaying tactic.  People are going to be pissed if you cut their jobs be it now or later.  You may as well engage them in the discussion, and make the right decision even if it means creating some short term worry.  You can also build some trust that way. 

Just food for thought.

Breaking Paradigms

So, in the last post we talked a bit about what a paradigm is.  Now I'd like to talk about what is known about how to bust out of them.

Have you ever been in a meeting where you were told to "think outside the box"?  Usually what this sentence means (despite its Dilbert-like cheesyness) is that you are being invited to shift outside the group paradigm.  But how can we do this?

Authors in the field (see the end of this post for a brief bibliography) suggest that there are a few ways to accomplish this shift.  The first is what I call the "The Sky is Falling!" method of paradigm shift.  Some people call this a disorienting dilemma or a moment of truth.  In essence what it means is that some people make a paradigm shift when they find that the things they are experiencing make absolutely no sense within the paradigm they currently have.

Examples:

A young woman toils at a job she hates because it pays well, and she believes that the only purpose of working is to make lots of money.  A close friend dies, and she is suddenly shocked by how short life is.  She abruptly quits her job, and accepts less pay in order to lead a more meaningful and joyful life.

A director at a large technology firm is proud of his "no-nonsense" management style and the fact that his employees know exactly where they stand with him.  He credits his direct approach with many of the successes in his career.  Frustrated by the fact that turnover is on the rise in his division, he commissions an employee survey to get to the bottom of things.  To his surprise, his leadership style is listed as a major dis-satisfier in his team.  Recognizing that what he felt were his strengths are actually a weakness, he resolves to become a better leader - no matter how painful or humbling it is.

Sometimes paradigm shifts come from a "shock to the system." 

Now, if you want to consciously shift your paradigm, how do you do it?  It's not like you can orchestrate a jolt to your world, and even if you could it doesn't sound too pleasant.

Never fear, an answer to this puzzle comes to us from systems theorist Jamshid Gharajedaghi.

Gharajedaghi suggests that we can change our paradigm through a conscious process of unlearning and relearning.  In short, this means questioning our assumptions, and then building new ones.

Unlearning our assumptions is not easy, and it can be better (in my mind at least) to think of this process as "checking" our assumptions.  After all, why unlearn something when it's useful?  Equally foolish I think would be to simply let our life assumptions roll under us unchecked.

So how do we question our assumptions?  I find that reframing the questions we ask is one concrete way to do so.  Here are a few examples of reframing to expose our assumptions.

Initial Problem: Sales revenues are declining in the Western division.
Initial Question: Why isn't our salesforce meeting targets in that division?

Reframed Question:  Why do I assume that the salesforce is the problem?  What other factors might be influencing revenues?  If I remove the notion of "targets" from the equation, what is going on?

Initial Problem: I've tightened controls on inventory, but it is getting even tougher to maintain the right levels!

Reframed issue:  Why do I believe that controls on inventory are the answer?  What are the "right levels" for our inventory system?

In summary yes we can wait for the moment of crisis to change our paradigms.  We can let the crisis of a disorienting dilemma tell us that we need to shift our paradigm.  But it's not the only option.  By "questioning our questions" and even "questioning our problems" we can begin to think (forgive me) outside the box and avoid the unnecessary constraints set up by inflexible paradigms.

What questions have you asked your team lately?  What do those questions indicate about your mental models?

Understanding Paradigms

I'll start this post with a disclaimer.  I am a long time hater of the word "paradigm."  That comes from too many meetings in which the word is thrown around like a hot potato with too little understanding of what goes beneath it.  But despite the word's annoying misuse, there is something really important hidden behind it.  So I want to talk about that today.

I'm going to start by delineating between three often confused terms: Mental Models, Worldview, and Paradigm.  While my division between these terms is heavily influenced by my extensive reading on the subject, it is fair to say that the nuances are my own.

Mental Models -  Peter Senge refers to mental models in his book The Fifth Discipline as "our deeply held internal images about how the world works."  These internal images come from many places, our family of origin, culture of origin, religious or secular ethical backgrounds, and the meaning we've made out of our life experiences.  O'Connor & McDermott (in The Art of Systems Thinking) refer to mental models as deeply rooted assumptions.

Worldview -  This is a term that is thrown around pretty casually.  In colloquial English, it seems to indicate a wholistic perspective, or a grouping of mental models.  However the specific nature of "what makes a worldview" is pretty vague.

Paradigm -  O'Connor & McDermott come to the rescue here.  They indicate that a paradigm is a "self-reinforcing" mental model.   So what does it mean to have an internal image that is "self-reinforcing"?

Well, it seems to go something like this:

1. I have beliefs about the world.
2. I unconsciously seek out data that supports those beliefs.
3. I unconsciously ignore/reject data that does not support those beliefs.
4. The data I accept reinforces my beliefs about the world.

I've seen this principle operate in organizations all the time.  I once knew a leader who had a strong underlying belief that one of his peers was lazy. This leader would frequently point out to me all of the ways that this other person was not meeting the work standards.  One day we had a conversation that went something like this.

"Cheri, did you notice how (name) didn't bother to volunteer to participate on one of the project teams?"

"I suppose so."

"This is just one more example of how he doesn't pull his weight around here.... I think... (and so on)"

"Did everyone else volunteer?"

"No, (other person) didn't either.  But that is because he is just overwhelmed!  He is not lazy like (name)...."

When we hold a belief, we tend to look for data that supports that belief.  It's not malice, it's just the way the human brain is wired.  The example above refers to one person's mental model about another manager.  In this case, the leader I was talking to was unconsciously ignoring or "explaining away" any examples of hard work on the case of his peer, and noticing very strongly any evidence that he felt reinforced his view of the "lazy manager." 

Have you ever noticed that when you get a new car you tend to notice cars like yours all over the road?  It's the same principle at work, in a less destructive way of course. 

So far we've discussed paradigms at the micro-level, or reinforcing mental models in a single person.  Paradigms most powerfully come into play when they are held by groups.   Here is a different  example of how a paradigm can take over an organization.

Company X is a non-profit serving homeless families.  They operate off of a deeply held belief that "We help people in crisis."

Company X attracts people who are mission-driven and passionate about helping homeless families.  The organization has a strong history of providing crisis-assistance to families in need.  Over time, the leadership and work teams in the company develop a set of mental models:

"Homeless families are helpless to break the cycle of poverty."
"We need to handle crisis needs (food, emergency medical care, short term housing) first."

Over time, an organization stuck in this paradigm may find themselves facing a set of issues:

- A reluctance to take any action that relies on the strength of homeless families (because the mental model is that they are "helpless")
- A tendency to ignore or reject ideas that go beyond crisis response, even when those ideas serve the mission and have high potential for success.

I could go into more detail, but you can probably see the point.  We all exist within paradigms, and yet they tend to limit our options in the world because our beliefs focus us towards particular actions.

In my next post, I'll talk about how to break paradigms and the benefit of doing so as an organizational competency.

The Power of Appreciation

Did you know that there is a whole set of techniques that consultants use that focus on appreciation?  This is not simply a feel-good thing, retraining your organization to build on strengths rather than focus in on problems can move your organization forward in productivity and growth.

These methods are called "Appreciative Inquiry"

It makes a great deal of sense to focus on strengths, even if it against our cultural wisdom.  American corporate culture is all about "assessing the gaps", finding the errors, and fixing the problems.  While fixing problems can be important, what we sometimes don't appreciate is that because organizations are systemic (interconnected in unpredictable ways) when we act to smash one problem we may inadvertently create more.

There is another option.  By looking at what we most appreciate about our workplaces, our mission, and each other, we can strengthen what is most meaningful about what we do.  We can also connect to our coworkers - whether they be friends, acquaintances, or enemies by relating to them in a new way.

I can't outline all that is Appreciative Inquiry in one brief post, but you can get a taste of  AI by changing the nature of the conversations you are having with others.

With your family, friends, neighbors, and coworkers - try any or all of the following.

1) Without being humble, what is it that you value the most about yourself as a human being?

2) What is is that you appreciate the most about your job?  What brings you to the office each day?

3) Tell me about the high point of your career (or marriage, or family).  Who was there?  What made that moment possible?  Why did it matter to you?

Changing the nature of the conversation is more than about the conversation itself.  It is about changing the quality of your relationship.  Give it a try and let me know how it goes for you!

On Emergence

Why Emergence Consulting?  Emergence is one of the most wonderful and helpful concepts from the systemic thinking tradition.  Joseph O'Connor and Ian McDermott describe it this way:

"Systems have emergent properties that are not found in their parts.  You cannot predict the properties of a complete system by taking it to pieces and analyzing its parts."

Systems theory breaks us away from the limited cause and effect thinking that permeates Western thought.  It reminds us that organizations are not simple machines, but are instead complex living systems.   Here is a scenario that is all too common:

"Ann the manager is frustrated at the poor performance and toxic attitudes in her manufacturing team.  It's clear that two employees are the ringleaders, and after trying unsuccessfully to change their behavior through encouragement and punishment, Ann fires both employees.  One month later, nothing has changed.  Another group of employees has stepped up to become the new problem children, and even Ann's new hires are disgruntled and indifferent.  Ann wonders if firing the whole team is the only answer."

In a simple cause and effect view - Ann removed the problem when she removed the employees behaving badly.  The cause and effect view is also called the mechanistic view because it views the organization as a machine.  In this case, two of the "parts" of the machine were faulty and they were swapped out for new ones.

This approach does not work, and it doesn't work because organizations are not machines.

In looking at the problem from a systems perspective, one would need to look at a bigger picture.  This team is part of a larger system, the entire organization.  The manager, the policies of the organization, the customers, all of it become part of an interdependent web of players.  Somehow this system is creating an emergent property of bad behavior and sub par performance.  These things are considered emergent, because they arise naturally from the system.

Switching out the parts (employees) did not do the job.  Clearly there is something in the system itself which is creating an unwanted effect.  Systems theory encourages us to look at the whole system.  This means examining the inter-dependencies and environment before taking an action.  The most effective action may be elusive, or it may be simple.  In any case, it is rarely as simple as exchanging one employee for another. 

So, that is why I am here and that is what this endeavor is about.  Given your organization, what emergent properties would you like to create?  One of success?   Wealth?  Purpose for you and your employees? 

Let's dive in and get to work on that.  Let's see what emerges.