Shipulski On Design

Archive for the ‘Seeing Things As They Are’ Category

Put together things that contradict yet make a wonderfully mismatched pair.

Say things that contradict common misunderstandings.

See the dark and dirty underside of things.

Be more patient with people.

Stomp on success.

Dissent.

Tell the truth even when it’s bad for your career.

See what wasn’t but should have been.

Violate first principles.

Protect people.

Trust.

See things as they aren’t.

See what’s missing.

See yourself.

See.

“man in park (triangulation)” by Josh (broma) is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Praise happens when you tell someone they did something wonderful.  Praise is virtually free and almost the most powerful force in the universe.

When you tell someone what they did was amazing, they stand three inches taller.  Right in front of you, they get taller.  They grow. They expand. Don’t believe me?  Try it.  And bring a ruler.

To deliver praise, you must pay attention.  You must invest in what’s going on, you must hear what is said, and watch what is done.  Congratulations.  Though you have yet to deliver praise, you’ve already differentiated yourself.  Next, you must compare the behavior against the norms and recognize a difference.  Sure, it’s a simple difference calculation, but it’s a calculation that takes attention and caring, which in today’s rat race are in short supply. Now, you must find words the right words to describe the specialness of the behavior-why it’s different and why it matters.  Then, you’ve got to deliver it in a way that is worthy of the specialness.

Deliver praise in public and be specific.  This person (use their name) did (say what they did) and it’s important because (and say why it is important). And tell people what you think and feel.  They (use their name) did (say what they did) and I feel (e.g., happy, excited, proud) because (tell them why you feel as you do).  Feel free to steal that script, but if you do, stick to it because it’s a good one.

A rule: If you don’t praise people, you don’t know what you’re doing.

But here’s the thing about praise.  If you fake it, you bring about its opposite.  When you fake it, people get smaller and they get angry.  They get smaller because they know they are being patronized.  And they get angry for the same reason.  So, a word of caution.  If you deliver paise that’s fake, you will lose all credibility with the recipient and anyone in earshot.  And it’s such a violation of their dignity, I don’t know a way to resurrect their trust.  In short, if you fake it, it’s over for you.

Another rule: If you have the urge to deliver fake praise, don’t.

Praise is powerful, but in today’s environment is almost extinct.  It’s not that praise-worthy behavior is uncommon, rather, the time and attention required to recognize and formally acknowledge praise-worthy behavior is uncommon.

If you want to elevate the performance of a team, praise their behavior. And do it in public.  Pay attention and praise.  Schedule a meeting, buy the pizza, and praise.  Be specific, be genuine, and praise.

Yes, you will spend a lot of money on pizza, and, yes, that is the best return on investment in the universe.

“Alex and his lion friend” by Tambako the Jaguar is marked with CC BY-ND 2.0.

When you don’t know what to do, what do you do?  This is a difficult question.

Here are some thoughts that may help you figure out what to do when you really don’t know.

Don’t confuse activity with progress.

Gather your two best friends, go off-site, and define the system as it is.

Don’t ask everyone what they think because the Collective’s thoughts will be diffuse, bland, and tired.

Get outside.

Draw a picture of how things work today.

Get a good meal.

Make a graph of goodness over time.  If it’s still increasing, do more of what you did last time.  If it’s flat, do something else.

Get some exercise.

Don’t judge yourself negatively.  This is difficult work.

Get some sleep.

Help someone with their problem.  The distraction will keep you out of the way as your mind works on it for you.

Spend time with friends.

Try a new idea at the smallest scale. It will likely lead to a better one. Repeat.

Use your best judgment.

Image credit – Andrew Gustar

If there’s one superpower to develop, it’s to learn how to assess a project and get a good feel for when it will launch.

When you want to know how long a project will take, ask this simple question: ‘What must the project team learn before the project can launch?”  By starting with this single question, you will start the discussion that will lead you to an understanding of what hasn’t been done before and where the uncertainty is hiding.  And if there’s one thing that can accelerate a project, it’s defining where the uncertainty is hiding. And knowing this doubly powerful, like a pure two-for-one, because if you know where uncertainty is, by definition, you know where it isn’t. Where the uncertainty isn’t, you can do what you did last time, and because you’ve done it before, you know how long it will take.  No new tools, no new methods, no new analyses, no new machines, no new skillsets, no new anything. And for the remaining elements of the project, well, that’s where the uncertainty is hiding and that’s where you will focus on the learning needed to secure the launch.

But it can be difficult to understand the specific learning that must be done for a project to launch.  One trick I like to use is the Same-But-Different method. It goes like this.  Identify a project that launched (Project A) that’s most similar to the one that will launch next (Project B) and perform a subtraction of sorts.  Declare that Project B (the one you want to launch) is the same as Project A (the one you already launched) but different in specific ways and then define those differences as clearly and tightly as possible.  And where it’s different, that’s where the learning energy must be concentrated.

Same-But-Different sounds simplistic and trivial, but it isn’t.  More than anything, it’s powerful.  For the elements that are the same, you do what you did last time, which is freeing.  And for the small subset if things that are different, you dig in!

Same-But-Different drives deep clarity and extreme focus, which result in blistering progress and blinding effectiveness.

And for some reason unknown to me, asking a team to define the novel elements of a project is at least fifty times more difficult than asking them how Project B is different than Project A.  So, it feels good to the team when they can use Same-But-Different to quickly easily define what’s different and then point directly to the uncertainty.  And once the team knows where the uncertainty is hiding, it’s no longer hiding.

And if there’s one thing a project team likes, it’s knowing where the uncertainty is hiding.

“The same, but different by the Paris Photographic Co. (c.1880)” by pellethepoet is marked with CC BY 2.0.

When you have no slack time, you can’t start new projects.

When you have no slack time, you can’t run toward the projects that need your help.

When you have no slack time, you have no time to think.

When you have no slack time, you have no time to learn.

When you have no slack time, there’s no time for concern for others.

When you have no slack time, there’s no time for your best judgment.

When there is no slack time, what used to be personal becomes transactional.

When there is no slack time, any hiccup creates project slip.

When you have no slack time, the critical path will find you.

When no one has slack time, one project’s slip ripples delay into all the others.

When you have no slack time, excitement withers.

When you have no slack time, imagination dies.

When you have no slack time, engagement suffers.

When you have no slack time, burnout will find you.

When you have no slack time, work sucks.

When you have no slack time, people leave.

I have one question for you.  How much slack time do you have?

“Hurry up Leonie, we are late…” by The Preiser Project is licensed under CC BY 2.0

People don’t leave a company because they feel appreciated.

People don’t leave a company because they feel part of something bigger than themselves.

People don’t leave a company because they see a huge financial upside if they stay.

People don’t leave a company because they are treated with kindness and respect.

People don’t leave a company because they can make less money elsewhere.

People don’t leave a company because they see good career growth in their future.

People don’t leave a company because they know all the key players and know how to get things done.

People don’t leave the company so they can abandon their primary care physician.

People don’t leave a company because their career path is paved with gold.

People don’t leave a company because they are highly engaged in their work.

People don’t leave a company because they want to uproot their kids and start them in a new school.

People don’t leave a company because their boss treats them too well.

People don’t leave a company because their work is meaningful.

People don’t leave a company because their coworkers treat them with respect.

People don’t leave a company because they want to pay the commission on a real estate transaction.

People don’t leave a company because they’ve spent a decade building a Trust Network.

People don’t leave a company because they want their kids to learn to trust a new dentist.

People don’t leave a company because they have a flexible work arrangement.

People don’t leave a company because they feel safe on the job.

People don’t leave a company because they are trusted to use their judgment.

People don’t leave the company because they want the joy that comes from rolling over their 401k.

People don’t leave a company when they have the tools and resources to get the work done.

People don’t leave a company when their workload is in line with their capacity to get it done.

People don’t leave a company when they feel valued.

People don’t leave a company so they can learn a whole new medical benefits plan.

People don’t leave a job because they get to do the work the way they think it should be done.

So, I ask you, why are people leaving your company?

“Penguins on Parade” by D-Stanley is licensed under

Creating new ideas is easy.  Sit down, quiet your mind, and create a list of five new ideas.  There.  You’ve done it.  Five new ideas.  It didn’t take you a long time to create them.  But ideas are cheap.

Converting ideas into sellable products and selling them is difficult and expensive. A customer wants to buy the new product when the underlying idea that powers the new product solves an important problem for them.  In that way, ideas whose solutions don’t solve important problems aren’t good ideas.  And in order to convert a good idea into a winning product, dirt, rocks, and sticks (natural resources) must be converted into parts and those parts must be assembled into products.  That is expensive and time-consuming and requires a factory, tools, and people that know how to make things. And then the people that know how to sell things must apply their trade.  This, too, adds to the difficulty and expense of converting ideas into winning products.

The only thing more expensive than converting new ideas into winning products is reusing your tired, old ideas until your offerings run out of sizzle. While you extend and defend, your competitors convert new ideas into new value propositions that bring shame to your offering and your brand.  (To be clear, most extend-and-defend programs are actually defend-and-defend programs.)  And while you reuse/leverage your long-in-the-tooth ideas, start-ups create whole new technologies from scratch (new ideas on a grand scale) and pull the rug out from under you.  The trouble is that the ultra-high cost of extend-and-defend is invisible in the short term. In fact, when coupled with reuse, it’s highly profitable in the moment.  It takes years for the wheels to fall off the extend-and-defend bus, but make no mistake, the wheels fall off.

When you find the urge to create a laundry list of new ideas, don’t.  Instead, solve new problems for your customers.  And when you feel the immense pressure to extend and defend, don’t.  Instead, solve new problems for your customers.

And when all that gets old, repeat as needed.

“Cave paintings” by allspice1 is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0

Next year will be different, but we don’t know how it will be different. All we know is that it will be different.

Some things will be the same and some will be different.  The trouble is that we won’t know which is which until we do.  We can speculate on how it will be different, but the Universe doesn’t care about our speculation.  Sure, it can be helpful to think about how things may go, but as long as we hold on to the may-ness of our speculations.  And we don’t know when we’ll know. We’ll know when we know, but no sooner. Even when the Operating Plan declares the hardest of hard dates, the Universe sets the learning schedule on its own terms, and it doesn’t care about our arbitrary timelines.

What to do?

Step 1. Try three new things. Choose things that are interesting and try them.  Try to try them in parallel as they may interact and inform each other. Before you start, define what success looks like and what you’ll do if they’re successful and if they’re not.  Defining the follow-on actions will help you keep the scope small.  For things that work out, you’ll struggle to allocate resources for the next stages, so start small.  And if things don’t work out, you’ll want to say that the projects consumed little resources and learned a lot.  Keep things small.  And if that doesn’t work, keep them smaller.

Step 2. Rinse and repeat.

I wish you a happy and safe New Year.  And thanks for reading.

Mike

“three” by Travelways.com is licensed under CC BY 2.0

By definition, the approach that made you successful will become less successful over time and, eventually, will run out of gas.  This fundamental is not about you or your approach, rather it’s about the nature of competition and evolution.  There’s an energy that causes everything to change, grow and improve and your success attracts that energy.  The environment changes, the people change, the law changes and companies come into existence that solve problems in better and more efficient ways.  Left unchanged, every successful business endeavor (even yours) has a half-life.

If you want to extend the life of your business endeavor, you’ve got to be novel.

By definition, if you want to grow, you’ve got to raise your game. You’ve got to do something different.  You can’t change everything, because that’s inefficient and takes too long.  So, you’ve got to figure out what you can reuse and what you’ve got to reinvent.

If you want to grow, you’ve got to be novel.

Being novel is necessary, but expensive.  And risky. And scary.  And that’s why you want to add just a pinch of novelty and reuse the rest.  And that’s why you want to try new things in the smallest way possible.  And that’s why you want to try things in a time-limited way. And that’s why you want to define what success looks like before you test your novelty.

Some questions and answers about being novel:

Is it easy to be novel? No.  It’s scary as hell and takes great emotional strength.

Can anyone be novel? Yes. But you need a good reason or you’ll do what you did last time.

How can I tell if I’m being novel? If you’re not scared, you’re not being novel.  If you know how it will turn out, you’re not being novel.  If everyone agrees with you, you’re not being novel.

How do I know if I’m being novel in the right way? You cannot. Because it’s novel, it hasn’t been done before, and because it hasn’t been done before there’s no way to predict how it will go.

So, you’re saying I can’t predict the outcome of being novel?  Yes.

If I can’t predict the outcome of being novel, why should I even try it? Because if you don’t, your business will go away.

Okay.  That last one got my attention.  So, how do I go about being novel? It depends.

That’s not a satisfying answer. Can you do better than that? Well, we could meet and talk for an hour.  We’d start with understanding your situation as it is, how this current situation came to be, and talk through the constraints you see.  Then, we’d talk about why you think things must change.  I’d then go away for a couple of days and think about things.  We’d then get back together and I’d share my perspective on how I see your situation.  Because I’m not a subject matter expert in your field, I would not give you answers, but, rather, I’d share my perspective that you could use to inform your choice on how to be novel.

“Giraffe trying to catch a twig with her tongue” by Tambako the Jaguar is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0

If you are happy with what you have, others have no power over you.

If you don’t want more, you call the shots.

If you have nothing to prove, no one can manipulate you.

If you have enough, the lure of more cannot pull you off the path of what you think is right.

If you don’t need approval from others, you can do what you think is right.

If you know what’s important to you, you can choose the path forward.

If you know who you are, so does everyone else.

If you know who you are, you don’t care what others think of you.

When you don’t care about what others think about you, you can do the right work.

When you can do the right work in the right way, you are impervious to influence.

When you are impervious to influence, the right work happens, despite the displeasure of the Status Quo.

 Anne Ruthmann is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

In these trying times when stress is high, supply chains are empty, and the pandemic is still alive and well, here’s a mantra to hold onto:

Everyone is doing their best, even though it might not look that way.

When restaurants are only open four days a week because they have no one to take the orders and clean the dishes, they are trying their best.  Sure, you can’t go there for dinner on those off-days. And, sure, it cramps your style. And, sure, it looks like they’re doing it just to piss you off.  But they are trying their best.  They want to be open. They want to serve you dinner and take your money.  It may not look like it, but they are doing their best. How might you hold onto that reality? How might you engage your best self and respond accordingly?

The situation at restaurants is one of many where people are trying their best but environmental realities have caused their best to be less than it was. Car dealers want to sell cars, but there are fewer of them to sell. The prices are higher, the choices are fewer, and the lead times are longer.  The salespeople aren’t out to get you; there’s simply more demand than cars.  If you want a car, try to buy one.  But if you can’t or you don’t like the price, what does it say about you if you get angry at the salesperson? It may not look like it, but they are trying their best.  How might you hold onto that? What would it take for you to behave like they are trying their best?

Plumbers and electricians have more work than they can handle. If they don’t answer their phone, or don’t respond quickly, or respond with a quote that’s higher than you think reasonable, don’t take it personally.  They are doing their best.  Plumbers actually like to trade their time for your money and it’s the same with electricians.  But, there are simply more pipes to be worked on than there are plumbers to work them.  And there’s more wiring to do than there are electricians to do work.  Their best isn’t as good as it was, but it’s still their best.  You can get angry, but that won’t get your leaks fixed or your new electrical outlets installed.  How might you hold onto the fact that they are doing their best?  And, how might you engage your best self to respond with kindness and understanding?

And it’s the same situation at work.  Everyone is trying their best, though it may look that way.  Our families or parents are struggling; our kids are having a difficult time; we can’t find plumbers; we can’t hire electricians; we cannot afford new cars prices; there are no cars to buy; and the restaurants are closed. This is crazy enough on its own, but all those outside stressors are sitting on top of a collection of work-related stressors.  There are many vacant positions so there are fewer people to do the work; competitors have upped the pressure; under the banner of doing more with less, more projects have been added, even though there are fewer people; and profitability goals have been turned up to eleven.

How might we hold onto the reality that our personal lives are stressful and, though we are trying harder than ever, our best CANNOT be good as it used to be? And how might we hold onto the reality that with such stress at home, we are giving our all but we have LESS to give.

Let’s help each other hold onto the mantra:

Everyone is doing their best, even though it might not look that way.

“the mask” by wolfgangfoto is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0