How far out should strategic plans go?

In an Agile approach to strategic planning, we work from two research supported principles:

  1. The depth of our passion is equal to the length of our vision
  2. Dreams are not locations to reach in an unknowable future but rather lenses through which to better see new possibilities in the present

These principles support going out as far as we want to go in envisioning the future we would love to see possible.

In the Industrial Era where it was common for people in organizations to believe in a more predictable future, planning was based on the assumptive speculations of projections. This practice has lost relevance in the current Information Era when the half-life of expert information is measures in 6-12 months in contrast to the previous era where it was often more 6-12 years.

We're moving away from planning being inspired by the speculative question of what we think will happen in the unknowable future and what we should do about it to the question of what would we love to see possible and what can we do about it.

This radical shift dramatically reduces the risks of taking action in a world of unprecedented complexity, connectivity and uncertainty. It supports our practice of going out at least one generation of 20 years. This practice is also powerful because it causes people to dream and act with more courage and interest in the whole than they do when they keep their vision of the future constrained to the near term of the next couple years.

The power of questions

The model I use in every group collaboration is the Agile Canvas. It starts with questions because it's been my experience that questions are magic. Questions level the playing field. People enter the conversation with various levels of knowledge and skill. Anyone can have questions. The call for questions gives everyone an invitation to engage.

Questions make uncertainty actionable. With an intrinsically unknowable future, questions engages us in discovery that leads to creating the future we want to see.

Questions make us smarter. Curiosity is the highest level of intelligence. Starting off with speculations, reports on the past and debates limits our collective capacity to become smarter together.

Questions create focus. We are most focused when we are most inquisitive about our unknowns and possibilities. Questions  are actually more powerful than goals and intentions in giving us focus.

Questions move us from ambiguity to action. More than all of the fact sharing possible, questions lead to more questions and to action sooner.

Why bigger doesn't always lead to smarter

Those of us who thrive on being inspired by and being dedicated to innovation define smart in today's complex world as innovative. Our finest dreams will require nothing less than innovation. The cynics among us believe that there is a direct positive correlation between the size of businesses and their capacity for innovation. The outliers open the door to more hope.

Of all the things we could hold responsible for a big organization's lack of innovation, I would argue that at the top of the list is not innovating how you innovate. Every organization I see that gets continuously smarter is continuously innovating how they go about innovating. They change and experiment with how skunkworks happens, how they engage external talent in global networks, how approvals happen, how intrapreneurship is supported and they help people learn better ways to collaborate in the innovation space.

New models for civic collaboration

Large scale community and regional attempts at collaboration present a full array of wicked problems. It's often a field of landmines and goldmines. In the old conversations, people believed, or at least hoped, that setting big agendas, infusing big moneys, assembling big groups, commissioning big studies and establishing big leaders could make authentic collaboration for new outcomes possible. What these can be good at is scaling business as usual.

For business not as usual, it takes new models of collaboration. None of the big strategies have the power to substitute for new models. New models are new ways of people doing inclusion, conversation, learning, innovation and entrepreneurship. New models are particularly vital in civic efforts where we lack all the big things and where people need to come together as peers working for each other rather than subordinates working for others in positions of power or authority.

The Agile Canvas we use in these contexts is a new model of collaboration that works with and without big anything. As it turns out, new is the new big.

Getting groups focused

What does it mean for a group to be focused? It's been my experience that focused groups work from questions rather than debates, opinions, assumptions, excuses, complaints, demands. They work from good questions and multiple questions.

Good questions inspire the group to new kinds of learning together, whether their learning is the result of research or experimenting.

When groups get stuck, lost or fragmented, they're working from inadequate questions in quality and/or quantity. Good questions accelerate people from perspiration to inspiration and from talk to action.

Creating space for larger dreams

One of the more striking aspects of my work is seeing people who don't create space for larger dreams. Not doing so constrains their capacity for deep meaning in life. Some have never dreamt large. They believe dreaming is the domain of the divinely inspired. They define success as the prevention of risks that abound with larger dreams. They fear that having larger dreams would make living small lives with other small minded and hearted people intolerable. They think dreams are locations to arrive at in the unknowable future rather than lenses through which to more clearly seeing new present possibilities. They resist larger dreams because they require a kind of collaboration that negates their narcissism.

Dreaming gives us fresh eyes. Dreams infuses our lives and efforts with amazing hope. With larger dreams, we become more alive in the present.

When invited to do so with simple and powerful questions, many people learn how to have and move in the direction of larger dreams. They connect with others to create space that makes the impossible more possible.

Wrong conversations: Why groups struggle

People in every context struggle together because they're simply working from the wrong conversations. This happens even when we believe we have all the right people, agendas, urgencies, accountabilities and resources at the table. People can assume they're having the right conversations for three reasons:

The person leading conversation who is supposedly smarter than others dictates the conversation It's the same conversations that moved us to success in the past We don't know any other conversations to have

Wrong conversations keep groups stuck, fragmented, ineffective or unrealistic. Groups realize their potential only when they have the right conversations. One easy way to stack the deck in favor of right conversations is taking time to reflect whether there might be better conversations for us to be having at this point. It could be that we need to have multiple rather than single conversations happening.

There are also a few core questions we can use to identify better conversations, like:

What matters most to us at this time? What are our most pressing questions right now? The principle is that when we change the conversations, we change our capacity for being smarter and faster together.

 

5 critical indicators of collaboration

When we work from the Agile Canvas, we think about 5 indicators that a group is working at strong levels of collaboration. Collaborative groups are focused, realistic, aligned, inspired and productive. Focus is working from good questions rather than positions, demands and refusals. Realistic is working from facts and data rather than assumptions and speculations. Aligned is working from a common set of operating principles. Inspired is readiness for what we consider amazing rather than afraid of failure. Productive is taking action for the purpose of new learning and results rather than getting bogged down in debates and discussions.

When groups are collaborative, they use the least amount of time, people and resources to get things done. They don't assume more time, people and resources equates necessarily to better outcomes. Their constant commitment to individual and shared learning minimizes risks and optimizes interations of success. They refuse to outsource responsibility for what they do, why and how they do it. They act like they know that they always move in the direction of their conversations.

The magic of adding to-don'ts to your meeting to-dos

Everything in life has a downside, including getting better at meetings. When I teach people how to facilitate better meetings, they typically become much more efficient at moving people from talk to action. One unintended consequence is that, unlike ineffective meetings, people leave with more to-dos than they maintain actually have capacity for. This is complicated by the facts that groups that are realistic know that the actual time any committed task might be unknowable until we actually get into it, given everything else involved.

An interesting and smart practice is to ask people in meetings what, as a result of taking on more tasks, are there any current tasks they can reduce time in, postpone or delete altogether. New tasks can make old tasks less important or urgent. Ultimately, it's getting people to be more intentional about timing.

Predictability and agility

It's one thing to say that we're going to innovate a new product, process or program. Innovation occurs on a continuum from predictability to unpredictability. We can research and model to determine predictability of success. In some cases this is accurate and reliable. In others, things are more unpredictable. Our concern about predictability often emerges from concern about the risks of investment. We only want to invest in success. Unpredictability means risks.

This is where agility makes a difference. An agile innovation is one where we design in adaptability to unpredictability. This supports iterating our unpredictability into success.

When analysis leads to paralysis

One of the classic causes of group stuckness is the paralysis of analysis. This is fueled by an operating assumption that if we better understood the problem, the solution would certainly emerge. Sometimes it does. Every organization, program and community on any scale has stories about how years of trying to better understand problems led to no substantial or sustainable gains. Mountains of data are just that.

No amount of blame, speculation, data or analysis can substitute for vision. Vision is our definitions of success. Only with compelling vision can we build our way to new possibilities. Intractable problems that resist analysis require vision target than analysis conversations.

In some contexts, even solving problems doesn't necessarily bring about the future we want to see. It takes instead the creative collaborations of vision and realizing vision in continuous iterations.

What living in the present has to do with agility

The more dynamic our world, the more vital it is for us to be as agile as possible. As it turns out, being agile has everything to do with living in the present. The more we get stuck in ruminating on the unretreivable past and unknowable future, the less capable of agility we become.

Here are three simple and powerful questions that focus our attention and action in the present in ways that make us more agile.

What's happening in our world right now that's relevant to our efforts? What's the best thing we could do right now? What could we be communicating right now?

What do we do with 2nd generation school failure: A radical proposal

Many US urban schools have arrived at the point where current students labelled "at risk" are second generation in this category. Their parents and grandparents were failures of the public school systems in their day. This stacks the deck against current gen success in public schools, especially in the way they have become more disengaging and parent engagement and competency levels continue to be critical factors in student self-efficacy and success.

I propose that, in every possible case, parents and grandparents go to their children's schools to learn in the morning and teach children in the afternoon. It doesn't have to be every parent every day, but every instance of this dynamic will increase potential for student success.

How much should organizations invest in happiness?

Now that we have compelling evidence that happier people are better at work than their otherwise crabby or apathetic peers, organizations have a new question: How much should organizations invest in sustaining a workplace conducive to meaning and well-being, the key markers of happiness in life and work? Although some workplace leaders will argue it's a space fraught with too many intangibles, the question might be definitively unanswerable. In "The Joy Of Thriving" I talked much about how workplaces could support happier cultures and now we must move onto the nitty-gritty of how organizations could assess a reasonable and effective approach to investing in workplace happiness.

I would suggest two approaches. One is to estimate the sum of compensation the organization invests in people who actively spread ill-will and toxicity that diminishes the happiness of others. The other is to estimate the sum of what it currently costs the organization it maintain the kinds of policies, practices and structures that drive people crazy and make them miserable.

These are calculable numbers and when estimated represent the logical investment the organization should instead make into happiness at work.

5 smart ways to cut back on meetings

As it turns out, there is no evidence that there is a strong relationship between any group’s level of productivity and amount of time spent in meetings. You will have a more productive year and raise the productivity of people in your world by cutting back on meetings. This means having fewer and shorter meetings. The way we think about meetings in the Information Age needs to have little in common with how we had to think about them in the Agrarian and Industrial Ages. Here are 5 ways to reinvent your meetings for unprecedented productivity and efficiency.

Cut meetings in half. Seriously, notice how the same or more amount of deliverables can occur in half the time people are usually given. Don’t let the work expand to the time allotted to it. Try it with a few meetings first so people gain confidence in their own surprising collective efficiency.

Have more conference calls. If a group has face time history, it doesn’t need face meetings every time. Shift more face meetings to conference calls which saves wasted commute times and manages carbon footprints. Use shared screens for any needed visuals.

Defer all work to paired assignments. It’s always a poor use of time whenever people sit in meetings watching other people work on things they should be working on outside meetings. When anything comes up that needs work, get people quickly paired to work on it later. Pairs build in natural accountability.

Leverage the collaborative cloud. Once people are oriented to using collaborative files and documents online, all kinds of communication, collaboration and even decision making can occur. Do anything virtually through shared docs that you can to significantly reduce everyone’s need for more meetings.

Frame all agenda items as questions. End the practice of framing agenda items as nouns and objects. Make sure every meeting agenda item is framed as at least one concise question. Questions are infinitely more powerful in moving groups from talk to action. You will see your meeting productivity scale significantly.

When innovation matters

The seductive nature of success begins when markets send suppliers the message: “As long as you keep doing more of the same, we’ll keep rewarding you for that.” This incentivizes a strategy devoid of innovation. Innovation matters when we’re in declining or new markets where the prime strategy is creating the next new thing that markets are waiting to reward.

The companies that get it right are those that listen best to their markets. It takes deep and creative listening to sort through noise for the greatest actionable opportunities. Then it takes well-designed strategies to balance investments in existing and emerging offerings, based on market voices and performance.

Leadership as improv

Part of skillful leadership involves the ability to be quick, nimble and responsive rather than slow, hesitant and unresponsive. This is especially vital when the pace at which things need to occur requires the right tempo of leadership. Here are three ways to increase your potential as agile improvisational leader.

Address all questions as soon as possible Rather than rely on ponderous analysis, get your questions answered as soon as possible using whatever possible sources you have available. Postpone no questions to another day that emerge today.

Define doneness as "just enough" to do the job Never spend more than 10% of time on a task to complete the last 10% of it. Don't delay the acceptable imperfect for the postponed perfect. As soon as they're "just enough" to get the job done, get things out the door.

Communicate in real time As soon as you know something other people don't, communicate it with whatever media you have available. Refuse to support scheduled meetings that excuse people from real-time communication. Create agreements with people on how fast information needs to flow and how to make that happen.

How politics contributes to group dysfunction

However we slice and dice the dynamics of politics, it's always about the zero-sum win-lose of competition. People work from an agenda of needing to win at the cost of others losing. The less innovative people are, the more competitive they tend to be because instead of creating inventive both-and solutions, they have to have a way that deprives others of the same way.

As it turns out, despite the popular mythologies otherwise, there is no evidence that competition makes groups of any size more innovative, collaborative, cohesive, self-organized or agile. The politics of competition creates fear and greed which constrain the potentials of any group.

Just by radically shifting to the both-and of plus-sum conversations, groups become profoundly more capable of creativity where the group becomes smarter and faster rather than dumber and slower together.

The fundamental flaw of Industrial Era Planning

Planning in the Industrial Era was based on the assumption that planning creates a predictable future. The assumption often worked because the world then didn't have a fraction of the complexity, connectivity and change it has today. In that era, the bottlenecks of hierarchy made information flows so slow and disconnected that predictability was more possible than it is today even when organizations still try to pretend to act like hierarchies.

The unspoken conversation among the guys (who dominated leadership) then was how effectively planning prevented communication. The engineers of the Industrial Era designed work and organizations specifically around the premise that communication was often a root cause of defects and problems. They approached planning similarly. We created plans so everyone could put their heads down and do their own work. Communication was evidence of breakdown and the purpose of more communication was to prevent the need for it.

In the Information Age, the old norms not only have irrelevance, they become the prime basis for failure. In this era, we don't plan to cease communication. We make communication the core of planning because we expect the constants to be complexity, connectivity and change. We define planning as the series of conversations that move any group from ambiguity to action in ways that make a positive difference.

This is a profound divergence in how we view planning. And this new perspective is precisely why approaches like The Agile Canvas is so effective in Information Age organizations.

Can we expect anyone to learn at any age?

The sky's the limit when it comes to ways we disable our capacity for learning. We have personality tests that try to convince us that our identity is destined for a particular set of behavioral and thinking patterns. The mythology that our personalities are fixed in early childhood that lacks empirical evidence continues to proliferate popular psychology. Our penchant for repeating the same stories shadows our lives with assumptions that we are constrained by our narratives.

As the neurosciences demonstrate with more data than most people have, our brains have no permanent structures. All habits of behaving and thinking can be changed, even in weeks, to adapt to whatever styles work for us. We are only limited to our beliefs otherwise. We can learn anything our physical capacities can accommodate.

This liberates us from the excuses we give ourselves and those others impose on us for their own purposes. From a strengths-based understanding of the neuroplastic nature of our brains, we have all the basic skills it takes to develop any kind of personalities we deem significant to our thrivancy.

This is a game changer in how we think about education and training in schools and workplaces. It empowers our potential in ways we imagine possible. And at any age.