How do you predict the unpredictable?

Dec 6, 2019 | Innovation, Leadership

 

Telling the future is a practise best left to  the circus tent, but as strategists we are doing it all  the time.

The question is not how to avoid being wrong, which means you do exactly nothing, but how do you both increase your odds of being right, and be able to pick very early when you are going to be wrong.

The leadership task to be able to play in the future is to decrease the natural discomfort people have with change, to seek ways to  reduce the power of the status quo, look for opposing views that deviate from those that currently drive decision making, and ensure there is diversity of ideas and types in the environment.

Building a resilient marketing and innovation culture is at the core of this challenge. This recent Gartner report covers the challenges well, observing:

‘Innovation is well funded and maturing as a marketing discipline. CMO’s are dedicating head count to innovation and leaning on ecosystems to help accelerate initiatives. despite the progress, obstacles remain, most notably risk-averse corporate cultures’.

None of this is easy. It requires active engagement with the threats you see on the horizon, not just from your immediate environment,  but from the wider field that may influence your enterprise in the future. It is being able to see threats as the opportunities they can be.

As a leader in this sort of change environment you have to be able to make it safe to be wrong, to encourage the pursuit of rabbits down burrows, to learn quickly, and adjust on the run, unlearn the ways that have been successful in the past, and replace them with less proven ideas and processes.

To my mind, curiosity, the absence of fear, and the leveraging of data, are the key ingredients in all  this.

Curiosity is a word that encompasses all sorts of things, from critical thinking to creativity and discovery skills, and so called ‘design thinking’ which is just a fancy term for starting with a clean sheet of paper to design something new from scratch, completely from the end users perspective, while leveraging the best parts of what currently exists. To make  all this happen in an organisation also requires that there is a collegial culture, as nobody can do it on their own, you need teams and networks of collaborators to succeed in todays world.

The second component of predicting the unpredictable is data. Data can reveal patterns, correlations, cause an effect relationships that when seen through a new lens can deliver imaginative insights. It is also true that we have no chance of predicting what an individual might do tomorrow, but assemble a number of similar people together, and we can have a very clear picture of what the majority of them might do tomorrow, and a calculation of the odds of outliers.

The third, which Hugh McLeod nails, again, in the www.gapingvoid.com header cartoon. Innovation is the absence of fear, and only in the absence of fear can we be sufficiently curious and empowered to predict the unpredictable, and bet on it.

 

 

Discover ‘flow’ to build scale 

Nov 28, 2019 | Leadership, Lean, Operations

The notion of ‘flow,’ or as we call it, ‘In the zone,’ is a psychological state first articulated by psychologist Mihaly Csikenmihali, published outside academic circles in his 1990 book ‘Flow: the psychology of optimal experience’.

From time to time, most of us experience ‘flow’ in our lives.

Those rare times when deeply immersed in a task, when energy and concentration are together forming a focus and delivering a rolling output, that makes the time seem to compress and fly. The level and quality of output when in such a state is surprising to us, even  astonishing. 

I wonder if there is a collective noun that describes such a state to a group?. It would apply when a group of individuals are so closely working as one, but using their individual skills simultaneously, and cumulatively, such that the collective output is greater than the sum of its parts.

How does a group go about achieving this state of flow?

It takes engagement, focus, alignment around a common purpose, and preparation. The output when it happens, is amazing.

Einstein must have been in an extended state of flow during his 1905 ‘miracle year,’ when he wrote four papers that together formed much of the foundation of modern physics.

He did  not achieve this by himself, although he was not known outside a small group of friends. He was working full time in the Swiss  patents office in Bern, these seminal papers were his ‘side-gig.’ He was not able to access the supposedly best minds in the fields he was thinking about, as he could not get a job in a university, so he walked and discussed with his few close friends and colleagues, and significantly his first wife, herself a substantial mathematician.

There must have been some degree of collective ‘intellectual flow’ present in that time, the state where collective and collaborative activity delivers compounding outcomes, leading to those seminal papers.  

Every enterprise should strive for ‘Flow’ in their activities. The flow of processes, such that everything happens predictably, smoothly, to a predetermined cadence, building on itself, delivering a compounding outcome.

This applies as much to innovation activity, and strategy development and implementation,  as it does to the mundane processes that we need to have happen every day to keep the doors open.

Can you see any sign of ‘flow’ in your enterprise?

 

Header credit: Lucidpanther via Flikr

The curse of insider knowledge

Nov 22, 2019 | Communication, Leadership, Management

When we know something, the automatic expectation is that those with whom we are communicating understand it equally well.

This automatic, unrecognised assumption can be a barrier, and at its worst, a curse.

Participating in a conversation a while ago where I was the outsider amongst a group of Canberra bureaucrats, their verbal shorthand, particularly around the departmental names and programs was incomprehensible to me. The terminology  was perfectly well understood by all of them, and they were surprised at my ignorance, when I pulled them up and pointed it out.

Try a little experiment.

Tap out a song, like happy birthday, with a pencil on a desk, and have people tell you what it is. We expect most to be able to pick it, the tune is obvious to us, singing it in our minds as we do it, but only a few actually pick it.

Of course, this closed communication loop is used all the time as a badge of membership, and a means of exclusion.

It may be that the group I was talking to were expressing their status as insiders by excluding me, but assuming this is not the intent, it was nevertheless the effect.

Every group has its own set of verbal and behavioral tools. These can be used as an offensive weapon, a means of exclusion, or they can be a tool of inclusion, it just depends on how you use it.

 

Header cartoon credit: Scott Adams and his mate Dilbert.

Pray harder for leadership.

Nov 19, 2019 | Leadership

 

As I look out my window in suburban Sydney, there is a bluish tinge to the air.

The fires around Sydney, and along the Australian east coast have made us all aware that we do live in a very dry continent, and that we do not value the water resources we have, in fact, we literally piss them away.

It is enlightening to watch the and hear the differing conversations going on around us, not just in the pub, but in the media.

People, those who live ordinary lives, pay their taxes  raise their kids, seem to have a different set of perspectives to those who are supposed to be leading us. They seem unable to open their traps without making it a race for political points.

What better time for the pollies to do what the rest of us have done already, and come together, recognising that we are stronger together than we are divided.

News to politicians, who seem to think and act as if the opposite were true.

It is the time for leadership, and leadership is not about how much money has been spent, or how much might be spent at some time in the future, or whether there are more or less park rangers than there were a year ago, it is about the stories of bravery, sacrifice and just old fashioned humanity that will move us.

We humans evolved with stories, it is how we understand, remember and relate to others in our ‘tribe’. We do not remember facts and figures without the context of a story, when listening to a story that engages, our neural activity increases, allowing us to feel, hear and taste the essence of the story.

What an opportunity for politicians of all colours to show leadership, to restore at least a little of the lost trust and faith, that they are there not just for themselves, but for all of us. They wonder about the position of trust they occupy in public sentiment, below lawyers, and just above child molesters. It is a problem of their own making, one that can be reversed with time, honesty, transparency and humility, so I guess that is unlikely.    

The Husband of the mayor of Glen Innes Carol Sparks, Badja Sparks now virtually homeless after fire ripped through the township of Wytaliba, said it best when he said: ‘This climate has changed. Pray for rain: Pray harder for leadership’.

 

9 process management questions from the World Cup finals

Nov 8, 2019 | Leadership, Management

The process drives the outcome, right?

Well, mostly.

So long as the process directs the actions to be taken, the order in which they are taken, and is able to withstand external pressure when it is brought to bear, then yes, it will drive an outcome.

We can look at an outcome and grumble, unexpected, unfair, and so on, but we cannot change it, although we can change the practises that drove it,

Competitively we can also disrupt the processes of others, and have our own disrupted, both internally and externally.

I watched the All blacks demolish the Welsh in the fight for third in the Rugby world cup. Demolition was one description, the All Blacks simply executed their processes with precision, focus and excellence, and the Welsh had no answer. How could anyone beat that?

Well, the previous week England did just that, they beat the All Blacks to go to the final. They beat them by disrupting their processes, not allowing them to execute in the manner in which their processes dictated they should, which would bring the outcome desired, a win.

As a result, England played the Springboks in the final, lucky to be there by beating the Welsh in the 78th minute. While England were the deserved favourites, they were beaten by a team that did to them what they had done to the All Blacks the previous week. The English processes were disrupted, and they were forced to play the game the Springboks preferred. For an hour it was a slug fest, anyone’s game, although the Springboks had the better of the set pieces, by a good margin, and then two pieces of individual brilliance sealed the fate of England.

I cannot let  this go by without reference to the Australian Wannabees. It seems they had no process, or at least not enough to make an impact when it really counted, against good opposition. How can you have a stable repeatable and yet agile process when those whose responsibility it is to execute are never the same people. The trial, mix, and match of team selection is hard to fathom, and makes building a robust, repeatable process next  to impossible, no matter how great the individual players may be.

In addition, processes must be designed with the end in mind.

No good designing a process that gives you an outcome then putting in place people to deliver the outcome who are not instantly aligned to the behaviours necessary to deliver that outcome.

Designing a process, then executing on it consistently while under pressure, are different. Both are challenging, but they are not the same thing.

  • How robust are your processes?
  • Will they be disrupted by competitive pressures?
  • Are they sufficiently agile to accommodate the unexpected?
  • Does each element of the process fit comfortably into those on either side?
  • Does each element of the process compound to build the impact of the whole?
  • Are you measuring the performance of each element?
  • How responsible are the people in ‘hands-on’ control of each element for the performance of their part?
  • Is there alignment between the processes and the desired outcome?
  • Has the overall objective been broken down progressively into its component parts?

Robust, repeatable processes are the foundation of performance, will yours withstand the pressure?

 

The two things we have to achieve for our grandchildren

The two things we have to achieve for our grandchildren

Oct 31, 2019 | Governance, Leadership

Yesterday I listened to a hysterical condemnation of Woolworths, who had come clean to the Employment Ombudsman when they realised they had underpaid staff.

Another example of big business rorting workers, or more evidence of the impact of overwhelming complexity of a system causing self implosion?

Woolworths is the biggest private sector employer in the country, so it is reasonable to assume they have the will and resources to ensure employees are paid properly. On the other hand, with the complexity of the award systems, staggered and differing shifts, varied hours of operation, and the sheer number of people moving from one job classification to another, across locations, the complexity of the payroll must be staggering.  

Over the millennia, as we humans have become more ‘civilised’ and our social and commercial systems more sophisticated and complex, from the early Greeks through to today, there has been an increasingly delicate balance at play.

Varying supply systems and the bureaucracies that control them, deliver the means by which the surplus from our collective endeavours is distributed. While the cost of that complexity is less than the revenue generated, we continue to become more complex. Once we reach a tipping point, where the revenue generated is less than the cost of the management bureaucracies that enable it, we become pointed at shitters ditch.

Look at almost any part of the ‘management’ systems in a democracy. There are always competing priorities, with vocal advocates on all sides. The tax system, NDIS,  defence, social welfare, personal power Vs institutional power, and on, and on, and on. In Woolworths case, the responsibility to get employees pay correctly compliant with various agreements and regulations, while remaining in control of, and extracting maximum return from the biggest expense incurred in operating, is such a balancing act.

It seems to me we have reached if not passed the tipping point.

As Hemingway asks in the Sun Also Rises:

‘How did you go bankrupt?‘

‘Two ways:  Gradually, then suddenly”

Unless we find ways to address just two challenging items, we will continue to slide, as complexity increases, goals become more fluffy,  and accountability diffused .

Those two items:

Priorities.

Focus.

We have to identify and prioritise the few key things upon which the future of our children and grandchildren are based.

We then have to focus resources on their achievement. It will be long term, incremental, and politically difficult, but the alternative is ugly.

The challenge is the same for any enterprise as it is for the country, only the scale is different, along with the accountability. After all, politicians have 3 or 4 years to make a start, depending on the location, while public companies have  to make adjustments quarter by quarter or be castigated by the stock markets.

I wonder if we mere mortals have the grit and foresight to act?

A very rare few do, they are not mere mortals, they are true leaders.

Have you seen any recently?

 

Cartoon credit: Scott Adams and his mate Dilbert.