Shipulski On Design

Archive for the ‘Level 5 Courage’ Category

Nothing changes unless there’s a problem.

In fact, without a problem, there can be no solution.

One of the devious ways to solve your problem is to create conditions for others to think it’s their problem.

Shame on you if you try to get me to solve your problem.

And shame on me if I try to solve your problem.

The best way for the problem to find its rightful owner is to leave the problem unsolved.

But leaving the problem unsolved also increases the pressure on all the innocent non-owners that work near the problem.

Leaving the problem unsolved is like a game of chicken, where the person who flinches first loses.

No one can give you their problem without your consent, but that doesn’t mean they won’t try.

So, when someone tries to give you their problem, put your hands in your pockets.

Leaving the problem unsolved isn’t a sign of non-caring, it’s a sign of higher-level caring.

Leaving the problem unsolved is the only way to pressure the company into the higher-level (and unpleasant) organizational learning of who is not solving their own problems.

“Prepare for Squirting” by Wootang01 is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0.

Nothing happens until the pain caused by a problem is greater than the pain of keeping things as they are.

Problems aren’t bad for business.  What’s bad for business is failing to acknowledge them.

The consternation that comes from the newly-acknowledged problem is the seed from which the solution grows.

There can be no solution until there’s a problem.

When the company doesn’t have a big problem, it has a bigger problem – complacency.

If you want to feel anxious about something, feel anxious that everything is going swimmingly.

Successful companies tolerate problems because they can.

Successful companies that tolerate their problems for too long become unsuccessful companies.

What happens to people in your company that talk about big problems?  Are they celebrated, ignored, or ostracized? And what behavior does that reinforce?  And how do you feel about that?

When everyone knows there’s a problem yet it goes unacknowledged, trust erodes.

And without trust, you don’t have much.

If when you write your monthly report no one responds with a question of clarification or constructive comment, this may be a sign your organization places little value on your report and the work it stands for.  If someone sends a thank you email and do not mention something specific in your report, this masked disinterest is a half-step above non-interest and is likely also a sign your organization places little value on your report and the work it stands for.

If you want to know for sure what people think of your work, stop writing your report.  If no one complains, your work is not valuable to the company. If one person complains, it’s likely still not valuable.  And if that single complaint comes from your boss, your report/work is likely not broadly valuable, but you’ll have to keep writing the report.

But don’t blame the organization because they don’t value your work.  Instead, ask yourself how your work must change so it’s broadly valuable.  And if you can’t figure a way to make your work valuable, stop the work so you can start work that is.

If when you receive someone else’s monthly report and you don’t reply with a question of clarification or constructive comment, it’s because you don’t think their work is all that important.  And if this is the case, tell them you want to stop receiving their report and ask them to stop sending them to you.  Hopefully, this will start a discussion about why you want to stop hearing about their work which, hopefully, will lead to a discussion about how their work could be modified to make it more interesting and important.  This dialog will go one of two ways – they will get angry and take you off the distribution list or they will think about your feedback and try to make their work more interesting and important.  In the first case, you’ll receive one fewer report and in the other, there’s a chance their work will blossom into something magical.  Either way, it’s a win.

While reports aren’t the work, they do stand for the work.  And while reports are sometimes considered overhead, they do perform an inform function – to inform the company of the work that’s being worked.  If the work is amazing, the reports will be amazing and you’ll get feedback that’s amazing.  And if the work is spectacular, the reports will be spectacular and you’ll get feedback that matches.

But this post isn’t about work or reports, it’s about the power of stopping.  When something stops, the stopping is undeniable and it forces a discussion about why the stopping started.  With stopping, there can be no illusion that progress is being made because stopping is binary – it’s either stopped or it isn’t.  And when everyone knows progress is stopped, everyone also knows the situation is about to get some much-needed attention from above, wanted or not.

Stopping makes a statement. Stopping gets attention. Stopping is serious business.

And here’s a little-known fact: Starting starts with stopping.

Image credit — joiseyshowaa

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.

Our behavior is a result of causes and conditions. One thing paves the way for the next.  Elements of the first thing create a preferential path for the next thing. If someone gets praised for doing A, more people will do A, even when A is the wrong behavior.  If someone gets chastised for doing B, B won’t happen again, even when B is the right behavior.

The most troubling set of causes and conditions are those that block people from telling their truth. When everyone knows it’s a bad idea, but no one is willing to say it out loud, that’s a big problem.  In fact, it may be the biggest problem.

When people think they won’t be taken seriously, they keep their truth to themselves. When people know they will be dismissed, they keep quiet. When people feel the situation is hopeless because there’s no way they’ll be listened to, they say nothing.

When people see others not taken seriously, that creates conditions for future truths to be withheld.  When people see others being dismissed, that creates conditions for future truths to be kept quiet. When people see others in others from not being listened to, that creates conditions for future truths to remain unsaid.

And causes and conditions are self-strengthening.  The more causes and conditions are reinforced, the more the behaviors become ingrained.  The more people are stifled, the more they will keep quiet.  The more people are dismissed, the more they’ll shut up.  The more people’s truths are ignored, the more they’ll remain unsaid.

Here are three rules for truth-telling that will help you and your company move forward:

1. Without truth-telling, there can be no truth-telling.
2. The longer truth-telling is stifled, the harder it is for truth-telling to reemerge.
3. Truth-telling begets truth-telling.

Image credit — Jinterwas

To: Leaders of the Company,

We’re still out of gas.

Corporate initiatives and reinvention are important, but so are the fundamentals of meeting customer orders and keeping the production lines running.  And so is our emotional well-being.

We cannot do it all.

Our youngest children must go to daycare and elementary school, and that scares us.  And when they get the sniffles, we have a difficult time knowing whether it’s the sniffles or Covid.  And that creates stress for us.  Though we faithfully show up every day, our children’s health is a concern for us.  We still give 100%, but it isn’t as good as a couple of years ago.  But it is our best.

Our children in high school and college are having a difficult time.  In-person, not in-person, masks, no mask, and soon-to-be masks are all additional stressors to the already stressful high school and college dynamics.  This is what we live with every day.  Is college even worth it? Our kids aren’t sure and neither are we.  But that doesn’t stop the expenses.  This is what we have to deal with after a full day of work.  It’s stressful and draining.  And our batteries aren’t fully charged when we wake up in the morning.  Yet, we come to work and give our best.  Though we know our best isn’t as good as it used to be, it IS our best.

We can’t give more.

And there’s a war in Europe.  And while that messes up the company’s financials, it also messes up our emotional state.  People are being killed every day and we see the pictures on the web. This drains and debilitates us.  We need some time to process all this.

Partisan politics are sucking the positivity out of our country, and it drains all of us.

We have less to give.

And climate change is here, and it’s scary.  And we don’t know what to do.  We didn’t travel for business over the last years, and we did okay.  Why not save the cost and the carbon like we did over the last two years?

Respectfully submitted,

Your People

image credit — Nathan

Did you engage today with someone that needed your time and attention, though they didn’t ask? You had a choice to float above it all or recognize that your time and attention were needed.  And then you had a follow-on choice: to keep on truckin’ or engage.  If you recognized they needed your help, what caused you to spend the energy needed to do that?  And if you took the further step to engage, why did you do that? For both questions, I bet the answer is the same – because you care about them and you care about the work. And I bet they know that and I bet you made a difference.

Did you alter your schedule today because something important came up?  What caused you to do that?  Was it about the thing that came up or the person(s) impacted by the thing that came up? I bet it was the latter.  And I bet you made a difference.

Did you spend a lot of energy at work today? If so, why did you do that? Was it because you care about the people you work with? Was it because you care about your customers? Was it because you care enough about yourself to live up to your best expectations? I bet it was all those reasons.  And I bet you made a difference.

Image credit — Dr. Matthias Ripp

When you were wrong, the outcome was different than you thought.

When the outcome was different than you thought, there was uncertainty as the work was new.

When there was uncertainty, you knew there would be learning.

When you were afraid of learning, you were afraid to be wrong.

And when you were afraid to be wrong, you were really afraid about what people would think of you.

Would you rather wall off uncertainty to prevent yourself from being wrong or would you rather try something new?

If there’s a difference between what others think of you and what you think of yourself, whose opinion matters more?

Why does it matter what people think of you?

Why do you let their mattering block you from trying new things?

In the end, hold onto the fact that you matter, especially when you have the courage to be wrong.

“Oh no, what went wrong?” by Bennilover is marked with CC BY-ND 2.0.

If you’re asked to be faster, choose to be more effective.  There’s nothing slower than being fast at something that doesn’t matter.

If you’re given a goal to be more productive, instead, improve effectiveness. There’s nothing less productive than making the wrong thing.

If you’re measured on efficiency, focus on effectiveness. Customers don’t care about your efficiency when you ship them the wrong product.

If you’re asked to improve quality, that’s good because quality is an important element of effectiveness.

If you’re asked to demonstrate more activity, focus on progress, which is activity done in an effective way.

If you’re asked to improve your team, ask them how they can be more effective and do that.

Regardless of the question, the answer is effectiveness.

Image credit pbkwee.

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

When you tell the truth and someone reacts negatively, their negativity is a surrogate for significance.

When you withhold the truth because someone will react negatively, you do everyone a disservice.

When you know what to do, let someone else do it.

When you’re absolutely sure what to do, maybe you’ve been doing it too long.

When you’re in a situation of complete uncertainty, try something. There’s no other way.

When you’re told it’s a bad idea, it’s probably a good one, but for a whole different reason.

When you’re told it’s a good idea, it’s time to come up with a less conventional idea.

When you’re afraid to speak up, your fear is a surrogate for importance.

When you’re afraid to speak up and you don’t, you do your company a disservice.

When you speak up and are met with laughter, congratulations, your idea is novel.

When you get angry, that says nothing about the thing you’re angry about and everything about you.

When someone makes you angry, that someone is always you.

When you’re afraid, be afraid and do it anyway.

When you’re not afraid, try harder.

When you’re understood the first time you bring up a new idea, it’s not new enough.

When you’re misunderstood, you could be onto something.  Double down.

When you’re comfortable, stop what you’re doing and do something that makes you uncomfortable.

It’s time to get comfortable with being uncomfortable.

“mirror-image pickup” by jasoneppink is licensed under CC BY 2.0