Shipulski On Design

Posts Tagged ‘Trust-based approach’

At every meeting you have a chance to move things forward or hold them back.  When a new idea is first introduced it’s bare-naked.  In its prenatal state, it’s wobbly and can’t stand on its own and is vulnerable to attack. But since it’s not yet developed, it’s impressionable and willing to evolve into what it could be.  With the right help it can go either way – die a swift death or sprout into something magical.

Early in gestation, the most worthy ideas don’t look that way.  They’re ugly, ill-formed, angry or threatening.  Or, they’re playful, silly or absurd.  Depending on your outlook, they can be a member of either camp. And as your outlook changes, they can jump from one camp to the other.  Or, they can sit with one leg in each.  But none of that is about the idea, it’s all about you.  The idea isn’t a thing in itself, it’s a reflection of you. The idea is nothing until you attach your feelings to it.  Whether it lives or dies depends on you.

Are you looking for reasons to say yes or reasons to say no?

On the surface, everyone in the organization looks like they’re fully booked with more smart goals than they can digest and have more deliverables than they swallow, but that’s not the case.  Though it looks like there’s no room for new ideas, there’s plenty of capacity to chew on new ideas if the team decides they want to.  Every team can spare and hour or two a week for the right ideas.  The only real question is do they want to?

If someone shows interest and initiative, it’s important to support their idea.  The smallest acceptable investment is a follow-on question that positively reinforces the behavior.  “That’s interesting, tell me more.” sends the right message.  Next, “How do you think we should test the idea?” makes it clear you are willing to take the next step.  If they can’t think of a way to test it, help them come up with a small, resource-lite experiment.  And if they respond with a five year plan and multi-million dollar investment, suggest a small experiment to demonstrate worthiness of the idea.  Sometimes it’s a thought experiment, sometimes it’s a discussion with a customer and sometimes it’s a prototype, but it’s always small.  Regardless of the idea, there’s always room for a small experiment.

Like a staircase, a series of small experiments build on each other to create big learning.  Each step is manageable – each investment is tolerable and each misstep is survivable – and with each experiment the learning objective is the same: Is the new idea worthy of taking the next step?  It’s a step-wise set of decisions to allocate resources on the right work to increase learning.  And after starting in the basement, with step-by-step experimentation and flight-by-flight investment, you find yourself on the fifth floor.

This is about changing behavior and learning.  Behavior doesn’t change overnight, it changes day-by-day, step-by-step.  And it’s the same for learning – it builds on what was learned yesterday.  And as long at the experiment is small, there can be no missteps.  And it doesn’t matter what the first experiment is all about, as long as you take the first step.

Your team will recognize your new behavior because it respectful of their ideas.  And when you respect their ideas, you respect them.  Soon enough you will have a team that stands taller and runs small experiments on their own.  Their experiments will grow bolder and their learning will curve will steepen.  Then, you’ll struggle to keep up with them, and you’ll have them right where you want them.

image credit — Rob Warde

Supply and demand have been joined at the hip since the beginning.  When demand is high, the deck is shuffled so supply seems low.  The fabricated scarcity drives up prices and shareholders are happy.  When demand is low, the competition pushes each other on price.  The abundance creates a commodity, and it’s a race to the bottom.

But this is old thinking.

Scarcity isn’t a lever to jack up prices or manipulate relationships, it’s an opportunity to spend your limited resources on the most important work and to build relationships.  When you tell a potential partner you want work with them and you are willing to spend your finite resources to make it happen, it’s a huge compliment.  Voting with your feet makes a powerful statement that you’re serious about working with them because you think they’re special.  You are telling them that you will say no to others so you can say yes to them.  Both know they’re part of something important and the free-flowing positivity results in something otherwise impossible.

Scarcity is limiting only if your mental framework thinks it is.  If you hoard and hold tightly, scarcity breeds win-lose relationships governed by power dynamics.  But if you choose the anti-framework, scarcity creates trust.

Played differently, abundance does not create commodity, it’s opportunity to show others you have enough to spare.  In personal relationships, when you share some of your work for free your relationships blossom.  When you give it away you are signaling that you have plenty to spare.  It’s clear to everyone you are a geyser of new thinking.  Here – take this.  I’ll make more.  These simple words create a foundation of trust which bolsters your personal brand.  And because all business relationships are personal relationships, it does the same thing for your company’s brand.

Make it a commodity or give it away – how you see abundance is your choice.  The old way breeds bare-knuckled competition.  The new way creates a brand steeped in trust.

If you have scarcity, be thankful for it.  Allocate your precious resources thoughtfully and with love.  Spend your time with the people and causes that matter.  It will feel good to everyone, including you.  And if you have abundance, be thankful.  Choose to develop closer relationships based on trust. Choose to give it away.

Happy Thanksgiving.

image credit — GloriaGarcia

Why are you holding back?  Why aren’t you giving your best?  Why are you blocking yourself?

An open, honest disagreement can be a positive learning experience for both.  If your intensions are good, everything works out well. I’m not sure why, but when your pockets are full of good intensions, the universe is kind to you.

But the universe’s kindness doesn’t manifest in the outcome you want. It’s a better teacher than that.  The universe has been around a long time and has seen it all.  It understands context.  And it has a good memory.  It uses both as input for its outputs. And to keep things lively, it often exercises its dry sense of humor.  But more than anything, the universe is a good judge of character.  And that’s how it decides how things should go.

A situation has no inherent emotional component.  Any emotion attached to the situation is attached by you.  If you feel fear, it’s not the situation.  You’re afraid.  Things aren’t scary, you make them scary.  Situations don’t hold you back, you do.

Fear is a protection mechanism.  But from what?  If you hold back because you’re afraid what others will think, you are protecting yourself from judgement.  At the surface it looks like you are afraid of being judged by others, but that’s not it. You are afraid of being judged by you.  But if your intensions are good, the universe will give you what you deserve.  There’s nothing to fear.  Yet, you block yourself.

You’re not afraid others will judge you as second class.  You want to avoid the discomfort of judging yourself as second class.  You don’t put yourself out there because you don’t want to be reminded that you don’t feel good about yourself.  People and situations can’t knock you down a rung, only you can.  You have control over how much love you give yourself. And it’s time to give yourself more.

This may sound silly, but it’s not – if you make a little time every day to wish yourself kindness, happiness and peace you will have more peace and happiness.  You will attach less fear to situations judge yourself less and block yourself less.

Give it a try.  You’re worth it.

Companies don’t need more ideas, they need ideas that are more meaningful.  Companies have plenty ideas because they measure and track the number of new ideas generated.  Enter your idea on the company’s open innovation web portal, and you’re done. Let the record show that a new idea was added to the hopper.  Increment the counter and update the metrics.  One new idea for the good guys.  It’s a good day to be alive.

For some reason leaders are comforted by a large number of new ideas in the hopper even though there’s no hope of working on them.  Maybe they think there’s value in a backlog of ideas they can fall back on if the existing work doesn’t pan out.  If that’s the case, they probably think the ideas in the hopper have good potential.  But because the ideas are not graded on their potential, that’s simply wishful thinking.

The only thing good about counting the number of new ideas is that the number of new ideas is easy to count.  The good thing about grading ideas on their level of meaningfulness is it causes the most meaningful ideas to rise to the top.  The bad thing about grading ideas is that it requires judgement. And today, judgment is in short supply.  If you use your judgement poorly your career suffers, but if you avoid using your judgement no one notices.  Here’s a rule: If you never you use your judgement, you can never use it poorly.

For a select few, any work that doesn’t require judgment doesn’t rise to the level of work worth doing.  For them, only the most meaningful work will do, and rolling the dice on their career is simply the cost of doing business.  For them, it’s judgement or bust.

If you use your judgement and choose to work on a meaningful idea, be prepared for the loneliness.  Meaningful ideas are, by definition, understood by a few and misunderstood by the rest.  It’s lonely to advance an idea that most don’t understand.  And prepare to be misjudged for your actions because your steadfast pursuit of the idea will also be misunderstood. Your vigor and aliveness will be seen as aggressiveness, anger, negativity, closemindedness, or political incorrectness.  But this misjudgment comes with the territory.  There’s no way around it.  It’s just how it goes.  It’s not personal.

But just as the trivial many will try to tear you down, there are a vital few who will praise you, support you and bolster you.  These are the special people in your organization.  You know who I’m talking about.  You have a personal relationship with them.  You know about their families. You’ve been through tough times together.  They’ve seen you struggle, stumble and tumble, and they’ve seen you get up and move forward.  They’ve seen you run into a brick wall and helped you back to your feet.  Don’t dismiss their praise and don’t feel guilty about accepting help from them. They don’t want credit for helping you, they want you to succeed.

You don’t know this, but those special people want to help you because you’ve already helped them.  Some time ago you unknowingly helped them through a tough time, or were kind to them.  Or, you invested in them or believed in them.  More than likely, though, you inspired them.

Keep moving forward.  Keep pushing.  And take comfort from the special people that believe in you.

Image credit – Ice Man

People have a natural bias toward doing what was done last time.  The behavior is the result of untold generations that evolved to serve a single objective – to survive.  Survival is about holding onto what is – protecting the family, providing food and waking up the next morning.  In survival mode any energy spent on activities even partially unrelated to food, water and shelter is wasted energy.  Any deviation from the worn path creates newness and uncertainty which causes adrenaline to flow and increases caloric burn rate.  In survival mode the opportunity cost of those extra calories is larger than the potential benefit of a new experience.

Today, calories are readily available for most and survival is no longer the objective, yet the bias persists.  Today, the bias is not driven by a culture of survivability.  It’s driven by a culture of accountability.  Accountability forces its own singular focus – make the numbers – and, like survivability, tightly links the consequences of mistakes and shortcomings to the individual.  Spend your calories any way you want just don’t miss the numbers.

In a culture of accountability there is no time to rest and recharge.  Like the predator that never sleeps, metrics continually keep a hungry eye on the human prey.  And like with food and water, any deviation from the worn path of increased throughput and profit is unsafe behavior.

But when the watering hole dries up and the fruit has been picked from the trees, the worn path isn’t the safest path.  Frantic foraging is the only real option, but it’s not much safer and certainly no way to go through life.   Paradoxically, a culture of accountability, with its intent of reducing the risk of missing the numbers can create far more dangerous failure modes.  Where over fishing depletes the fish population and over farming makes for a dust bowl, over reliance on what worked last time can create failure modes that jeopardize survival.

To break the bias and help people do new things, measure new things and talk about new things.  Start the next meeting with a review of what’s different.  The team will feel energized.  And after the discussion, adjourn the meeting because everything else is the same.  At the next status meeting, talk only about the surprising insights.  With the next email, send praise about the new learning.  At team meetings, acknowledge the inherent uncertainty of doing new things and praise it over the potentially catastrophic consequences of over extending the tried-and-true.  And for metrics, stop measuring outcomes.

Image credit — Applied Nomadology

Control strategies don’t work, but trust strategies do.

Nothing goes as planned.  Trying to control things tightly is wasteful.  It takes too much energy to batten down all the hatches and keep them that way every-day-all-day.  Maybe no water gets in, but the crew doesn’t get enough oxygen and their brains wither.

Trust on the other hand, is flexible and far more efficient.  It takes little energy to hire a pro, give them the right task and get out of the way.  And with the best pros it requires even less energy because the three-step becomes a two-step – hire them and get out of the way.

When both hands are continuously busy pulling the levers of contingency plans there are no hands left to point toward the future.  When both arms are clinging onto the artificial schedule of the project plan there are no arms left to conduct the orchestra.  Control strategies make sure even the piccolo plays the right notes at the right time, while trust strategies let the violins adjust based on their ear and intuition and even let the conductors write their own sheet music.

Control is an illusion, but trust is real.  The best statistical analyses are rearward-looking and provide no control in a changing environment. (You can’t drive a car by looking in the rear view mirror.) Yet, that’s the state-of-the-art for control strategies – don’t change the inputs, don’t change the process and we’ll get what we got last time.  That’s not control.  That’s self-limiting.

Trust is real because people and their relationships are real.  Trust is a contract between people where one side expects hard work and good judgment and the other side expects to be challenged and to be given the flexibility to do the work as they see fit.  Trust-based systems are far more adaptable than if-then control strategies.  No control algorithm can effectively handle unanticipated changes in input conditions or unplanned drift in decision criteria, but people and their judgement can.  In fact, that’s what people are good at, and they enjoy doing it.  And that’s a great recipe for an engaged work force.

Control strategies are popular because they help us believe we have control.  And they’re ineffective for the same reason.  Trust strategies are not popular because they acknowledge we have no real control and rely on judgment.  And that’s why they’re effective.

When control strategies fail, trust strategies are implemented to save the day.  When the wheels fall off a project, the best pro in the company is brought in to fix what’s broken.   And the best pro is the most trusted pro.  And their charge – Tell us what’s wrong (Use your judgement.), tell us how you’re going to fix it (Use your best judgement for that.) and tell us what you need to fix it. (And use your best judgement for that, too.)

In the end, trust trumps control. But only after all other possibilities are exhausted.

Image credit – Dobi.

If you’re serious about your work, you’re too serious.  We’re all too bound up in this life-or-death, gotta-meet-the-deadline nonsense that does nothing but get in the way.

If you’re into following recipes, I guess it’s okay to be held accountable to measuring the ingredients accurately and mixing the cake batter with 110% effort.  When your business is serious about making more cakes than anyone else on the planet, it’s fine to take that seriously.  But if you’re into making recipes, serious doesn’t cut it.  Coming up with new recipes demands the freedom of putting together spices that have never been combined.  And if you’re too serious, you’ll never try that magical combination that no one else dared.

Serious is far different than fully committed and “all in.”  With fully committed, you bring everything you have, but you don’t limit yourself by being too serious.  When people are too serious they pucker up and do what they did last time.  With “all in” it’s just that – you put all your emotional chips on the line and you tell the dealer to “hit.”  If the cards turn in your favor you cash in in a big way.  If you bust, you go home, rejuvenate and come back in the morning with that same “all in” vigor you had yesterday and just as many chips.  When you’re too serious, you bet one chip at a time.  You don’t bet many chips, so you don’t lose many.  But you win fewer.

The opposite of serious is not reckless.  The opposite of serious is energetic, extravagant, encouraging, flexible, supportive and generous.  A culture of accountability is serious.  A culture of creativity is not.

I do not advocate behavior that is frivolous.  That’s bad business.  I do advocate behavior that is daring.  That’s good business.  Serious connotes measurable and quantifiable, and that’s why big business and best practices like serious.  But measurable and quantifiable aren’t things in themselves.  If they bring goodness with them, okay.  But there’s a strong undercurrent of measurable for measurable’s sake.  It’s like we’re not sure what to do, so we measure the heck out of everything.  Daring, on the other hand, requires trust is unmeasurable.  Never in the history of Six Sigma has there been a project done on daring and never has one of its control strategies relied on trust.  That’s because Six Sigma is serious business. Serious connotes stifling, limiting and non-trusting, and that’s just what we don’t need.

Let’s face it, Six Sigma and lean are out of gas.  So is tightening-the-screws management.  The low hanging fruit has been picked and Human Resources has outed all the mis-fits and malcontents.  There’s nothing left to cut and no outliers to eliminate.  It’s time to put serious back in its box.

I don’t know what they teach in MBA programs, but I hope it’s trust.  And I don’t know if there’s anything we can do with all our all-too-serious managers, but I hope we put them on a program to eliminate their strengths and build on their weaknesses.  And I hope we rehire the outliers we fired because they scared all the serious people with their energy, passion and heretical ideas.

When you’re doing the same thing every day, serious has a place.  When you’re trying to create the future, it doesn’t.  To create the future you’ve got to hire heretics and trust them.  Yes, it’s a scary proposition to try to create the future on the backs of rabble-rousers and rebels.  But it’s far scarier to try to create it with the leagues of all-too-serious managers that are running your business today.

Image credit — Alan

Work is never perfect, family life is never perfect and neither is the interaction between them.  Regardless of your expectations or control strategies, things go as they go.  That’s just what they do.

We have far less control than we think.  In the pure domain of physics the equations govern predictively – perturb the system with a known input in a controlled way and the output is predictable.  When the process is followed, the experimental results repeat, and that’s the acid test.  From a control standpoint this is as good as it gets. But even this level of control is more limited than it appears.

Physical laws have bounded applicability – change the inputs a little and the equation may not apply in the same way, if at all. Same goes for the environment. What at the surface looks controllable and predictable, may not be.  When the inputs change, all bets are off – the experimental results from one test condition may not be predictive in another, even for the simplest systems, In the cold, unemotional world of physical principles, prediction requires judgement, even in lab conditions.

The domains of business and life are nothing like controlled lab conditions.  And they’re and not governed by physical laws.  These domains are a collection of complex people systems which are governed by emotional laws.  Where physics systems delivers predictable outputs for known inputs, people systems do not.  Scenario 1. Your group’s best performer is overworked, tired, and hasn’t exercised in four weeks.  With no warning you ask them to take on an urgent and important task for the CEO.  Scenario 2. Your group’s best performer has a reasonable workload (and even a little discretionary time), is well rested and maintains a regular exercise schedule, and you ask for the same deliverable in the same way.  The inputs are the same (the urgent request for the CEO), the outputs are far different.

At the level of the individual – the building block level – people systems are complex and adaptive,  The first time you ask a person to do a task, their response is unpredictable.  The next day, when you ask them to do a different task, they adapt their response based on yesterday’s request-response interaction, which results in a thicker layer of unpredictability.  Like pushing on a bag of water, their response is squishy and it’s difficult to capture the nuance of the interaction.  And it’s worse because it takes a while for them to dampen the reactionary waves within them.

One person interacts with another and groups react to other groups.  Push on them and there’s really no telling how things will go.  One cylo competes with another for shared resources and complexity is further confounded.  The culture of a customer smashes against your standard operating procedures and the seismic pressure changes the already unpredictable transfer functions of both companies.  And what about the customer that’s also your competitor?  And what about the big customer you both share?  Can you really predict how things will go? Do you really have control?

What does all this complexity, ambiguity, unpredictability and general lack of control mean when you’re trying to build a culture of accountability?  If people are accountable for executing well, that’s fine.  But if they’re held accountable for the results of those actions, they will fail and your culture of accountability will turn into a culture of avoiding responsibility and finding another place to work.

People know uncertainty is always part of the equation, and they know it results in unpredictability.  And when you demand predictability in a system that’s uncertain by it’s nature, as a  leader you lose credibility and trust.

As we swim together in the storm of complexity, trust is the life boat.  Trust brings people together and makes it easier to row in the same direction.  And after a hard day of mistakenly rowing in the wrong direction, trust helps everyone get back in the boat the next day and pull hard in the new direction you point them.

Image credit – NASA

If on the first day on your new job your stomach is all twisted up with anxiety and you’re second guessing yourself because you think you took a job that is too big for you, congratulations.  You got it right.  The right job is supposed to feel that way.  If on your first day you’re totally comfortable because you’ve done it all before and you know how it will go, you took the job for the money.   And that’s a terrible reason to take a job.

You got the job because someone who knew what it would take to get it done believed you were the right one to do just that.  This wasn’t charity.  There was something in it for them.  They needed the job done and they wanted a pro.  And they chose you.   The fact their stomach isn’t in knots says nothing about their stomach and everything about their belief in you.  And the knots in your stomach?  That ‘s likely a combination of immense desire to do a good job and an on-the-low-side belief in yourself.

If we’re not stretching we’re not learning, and if we’re not learning we’re not living.   So why the nerves?  Why the self doubt?  Why don’t we believe in ourselves?  When we look inside, we see ourselves in the moment  – in the now, as we are.  And sometimes when we look inside there are only re-run stories of our younger selves.  It’s difficult to see our future selves, to see our own growth trajectory from the inside.   It’s far easier to see a growth trajectory from the outside.  And that’s what the hiring team sees – our future selves – and that’s why they hire.

This growth-stretch, anxiety-doubt seesaw is not unique to new jobs.  It’s applicable right down the line – from temporary assignments, big projects and big tasks down to small tasks with tight deliverables.   If you haven’t done it before, it’s natural to question your capability.  But if you trust the person offering the job, it should be natural to trust their belief in you.

When you sit in your new chair for the first time and you feel queasy, that’s not a sign of incompetence it’s a sign of significance.   And it’s a sign you have an opportunity to make a difference.  Believe in the person that hired you, but more importantly, believe in yourself.  And go make a difference.

Image credit – Thomas Angermann

If you want to make a difference, you’ve got to add energy.  And the more you can add the bigger difference you can make.

Doing new is difficult and demands (and deserves) all the energy you can muster.  Often it feels you’re the only one pushing in the right direction while everyone else is vehemently pushing the other way.  But stay true and stand tall.  This is not an indication things are going badly, this is a sign you’re doing meaningful work.  It’s supposed to feel that way.  If you’re exhausted, frustrated and sometimes a bit angry, you’re doing it right.  If you have a healthy disrespect for the status quo, it’s supposed to feel that way.

Meaningful work has a long time constant and you’ve got to run these meaningful projects like marathons, uphill marathons.  Every day you put in your 26 miles at a sustainable pace  – no slower, but no faster.  This is long, difficult work that doesn’t run by itself, you’ve got to push it like a sled.  Every day you’ve got to push.  To push every day like this takes a lot of physical strength, but it takes even more mental strength.  You’ve got to stay focused on the critical path and push that sled every day.  And you need to preserve enough mental energy to effectively ignore the non-critical path sleds.  You’ve got to be able to decide which tasks you must get your whole body behind and which tasks you must discount.  And you’ve got to preserve enough energy to believe in yourself.

Meaningful work cannot be accomplished by sprinting full speed five days a week.  It’s a marathon, and you’ve got to work that way and train that way.  Get your rest, get your exercise, eat right, spend time with friends and family, and put your soul into your work.

Choose work that is meaningful and add energy.  Add it every day.  Add it openly.  Add it purposefully. Add it genuinely.   Add energy like you’re an aircraft carrier and others will get pulled along by your wake.  Add energy like you’re bulldozer and others will get out of your way.  Add energy like you’re contagious and others will be infected.

Image credit – anton borzov

Things don’t happen on their own, people make them happen.

With all the new communication technologies and collaboration platforms it’s easy to forget that what really matters is people.  If people don’t trust each other, even the best collaboration platforms will fall flat, and if they don’t respect each other, they won’t communicate – even with the best technology.

Companies put stock in best practices like they’re the most important things, but they’re not.  Because of this unnatural love affair, we’re blinded to the fact people are what make best practices best.  People create them, people run them, and people improve them. Without people there can be no best practices, but on the flip-side, people can get along just fine without best practices.  (That says something, doesn’t it?) Best practices are fine when processes are transactional, but few processes are 100% transactional to the core, and the most important processes are judgement-based.  In a foot race between best practices and good judgement, I’ll take people and their judgment – every day.

Without a forcing function, there can be no progress, and people are the forcing function.  To be clear, people aren’t the object of the forcing function, they are the forcing function.  When people decide to commit to a cause, the cause becomes a reality.  The new reality is a result – a result of people choosing for themselves to invest their emotional energy.  People cannot be forced to apply their life force, they must choose for themselves.  Even with today’s “accountable to outcomes” culture, the power of personal choice is still carries the day, though sometimes it’s forced underground.  When pushed too hard, under the cover of best practice, people choose to work the rule until the clouds of accountability blow over.

When there’s something new to do, processes don’t do it – people do.  When it’s time for some magical innovation, best practices don’t save the day – people do.  Set the conditions for people to step up and they will; set the conditions for them to make a difference and they will.  Use best practices if you must, but hold onto the fact that whatever business you’re in, you’re in the people business.

Image credit – Vicki & Chuck Rogers