Even though people come together with their own agendas, they can still create common principles that inform and form their decisions and actions together. It's not complicated. We ask people what matters to them and why and we connect any dots that can be connected. We mice forward with whatever alignments that we can surface and weave together. Some people will opt out and go somewhere they feel they better belong.
No shortage of opinions
When we come together in any kind of collaboration or meeting, we usually have no shortage of opinions. Some of these are facts and some are assumptions. In the Agile Canvas process, we get every assumption translated into at least one new question. Where untested assumptions create the risk of our getting stuck and lost, new questions keep us focused and realistic.
What we resist letting the group waste time getting bogged down discussing and debating opinions as assumptions, especially where their expression disguises them as facts. Every minute of this postpones learning and action.
Some groups and their leaders allow and even encourage discussing and debating opinions precisely because their unspoken agenda is to avoid learning and action, defining success as the lack of failure.
What To Do With Negativity
Every group encounters in its life some measure of negativity. Groups that flourish are smart enough to see negativity as gifts to be engaged rather than as problems to be fixed. People get negative for any number of reasons.
- It's the only way they have been successful getting attention
- It's their preferred way of bonding
- It effectively gets them out of accountability to action
- It's what sincerely expresses their deep or chronic inconsolable anxiety
The approach is simple. We listen to see if there are important questions embedded in their penchant for pushback. We translate every declaration of negativity into questions we use to make us smarter and move us to intelligent small acts.
This disarms negativity. Only when people feel valued is it possible to find the light in their heart. The group uses the negativity as a window rather than wall. This is what smart groups do.
Making Sense Of Time
Writers know about evolution. We start out with one idea that turns into something else. This is what happened to one of my current book projects, originally titled An Amazing Hope. From countless conversations over the past several months, this has turned instead into a book about rethinking our relationship to time. The title will be Making Sense Of Time. It emerges from my fascination with how our experience of time shapes the character of our personal narratives. I will explore questions about how we shape our sense of time. It's interesting that we can both feel constrained and liberated by time and how this plays into the quality of our lives in all domains and contexts. Life is time. The more sense we make of our time the more we make sense of our life.
Stay tuned.
The Design Logic of the Agile Canvas
When groups invite me to help them in successful new collaborations, I use the model I've evolved over the past 20 years called the Agile Canvas. It's a set of 5 conversations that keep people continuously focused, realistic, aligned, inspired and productive in any kind of collaboration. The Agile Canvas is designed to simply and successfully guide any kind of group through any kind of new collaboration. New collaborations are characterized by a dynamic constellation of common realities.
- From beginning to end, there are more unknowns than knowns
- It is human nature to feel a sense of loyalty to our assumptions
- Everyone comes to the table with their own agendas
- There is no single right way to define success
- The group never has all the resources it desires or demands
Each of the 5 conversations on the Canvas works from each of these factors.
No matter what a group encounters in a new collaboration, the Agile Canvas guides them in a way that engages their strengths and realizes their potential together. Without a model like this, groups unnecessarily struggle, waste time, argue, fracture into factions, get off track, disengage people, make things more complicated than they need be, do more talk than action, create more motion than traction and ultimately define success as bringing in someone who can save them.
None of these things happen because we lack the right people, resources or support. It's because we haven't yet start using the right model to energize and organize our collaboration.
In the Agile Canvas world, whatever people, resources and support we have are always the ones we will succeed with. The Canvas is a simple, portable and powerful model that makes this difference.
The Business Case For Mindfulness
In her recent Harvard Business Review interview mindfulness research pioneer Ellen Langer proposes that mindfulness is the key to personal, professional and organizational flourishing on all levels. Her definition is simple: "Mindfulness is the process of actively noticing new things." This is precisely the definition I proposed in my last book on mindfulness, Abundant Possibilities. My definition emerged from 40 years of mindfulness practice and my global happiness study indicating that the number one source of happiness for the happiest people on the planet is the discovery of newness.
Mindfulness makes us more proactive and flexible, creative and intuitive, energetic and centered. It makes leaders, teachers and parents better leaders, teachers and parents. It accelerates learning. Her work is based on her decades of groundbreaking work in mindfulness.
The contrast is mindlessness. Langer describes mindlessness in terms of assuming that things are the same from one moment, day and month to the next. In this context mindful living, work and interacting expects things to be different and notices those in their subtle and significant manifestations.
This is an incredibly powerful message. We need to start talking more about creating more mindful organizations, schools and communities.
Do We Still Need Strong Leaders?
During the 15 years I taught leadership in one of the top Executive MBA programs in the US, one of the most consistent statements students made was how profoundly their sense of leadership shifted because of the class. They were able to rethink what "strong" means in leadership from the traditional industrial model of super-parent promising provision and protection in exchange for compliance and loyalty. In that world, the strong leader was expected to think, decide, incentivize, punish and arbitrate for the group.
As we now define and measure engagement today, the old model became responsible for the current 70-80% worldwide employee disengagement that we have evidence for today, a number that's been unfortunately consistent over the past decade of research.
In the Information Age of unprecedented change, complexity and connectivity, a strong leader characterizes a whole different set of competences and qualities because they derive their power from engagement not disengagement.
Strongly engaging leaders are skillful in facilitation, connecting, provoking curiosity and experimentation, catalyzing new conversations and creating vibrant cultures of learning and trust. These are the kinds of strong leaders who will take organizations forward in this Age that has little in common with the previous.
Why startups succeed
Every year we see the launch of the next generation of successful startups. My experience has been that each succeeds for its own reasons. As much as popular media and experts relish in generalizations, I urge founders to take responsibility for their own trajectories. It's often a constellation of things that contributes to success. And there is no single point of success. Success is a succession of progress points, each contributing to the whole, each necessary to each next point. There is no "If you only ..." Or the "number one thing."
There is also the reality of the imperfect. I continue to see startups do well with imperfect teams, founders, funding and offerings. Startups don't fail because they have imperfect conditions. They usually fail for the perfect storm of reasons.
Capacity for improvisation turns out to be a more significant factor in startup success than working overtime to emulate formulaic recipes.
Happiness @ Work
When people learn how to take charge of their happiness at work, everything changes. They become more engaged, creative and resilient. In organizations of any size and shape, there are always three demographics related to learning how to take charge of one's own happiness: the already, the ready and the unready. The already are already there, actively practicing happiness as habits in their work. The ready are open and interested in this learning. The unready have no overt interest, often because their narrative doesn't allow for the possibility for happiness unless everyone around them somehow changes.
We energize the organization by helping the already and ready take their happiness to new levels, creating an organically contagious upward spiral.
Cook more
In his talk last night in Cleveland, the celebrated and gifted writer and cook, Michael Ruhlman, wove current research into his own personal experiences to tender a compelling argument that the prime strategy for health care costs, obesity, well-being and community building is more people cooking more. I couldn't agree more. He cited the now amazing research demonstrating that it was actually cooking that allowed the human brain to develop beyond its primate origns and civilized the world into the human societies that continue to flourish.
My work for the past several decades on engagement points to the ontological power of cooking as personal and shared transformation. When we cook more, we deepen our connections to ourselves, each other and the planet. No amount of ideologies can ever have the power of cooking.
Working With Passion
People who work with passion are inspired by their own personal and shared sense of the possibilities they would love to see in their world. Wise leaders who get this do not assume that their leadership passion inflicted on others has the power to inspire authentic passion in their work. They instead continuously help their people to keep growing, refining and acting on their dreams for the success of the enterprise. Passion comes from within. It's an inside-out phenomenon. Passion doesn't come from top down mandates, extrinsic incentives or promises of earned rewards. These create compliance but not passion. Passion is one's own dream and when people connect dreams, the shared passion catalyzes capacity in unpredictable ways.
What To Do When You're Sure You're Right
The more diverse a group or complex the question, the more likely it is that we will hear views and conclusions that we consider incorrect or inadequate. We're sure we're right and might even have the upper hand in data, proof, logic or evidence. The best first move in these contexts is to listen. Listening is giving people space to tell their story and inquiring more deeply into their motivations, experiences and perspectives so we can make sense of their horizon. We cannot influence another's view unless they are convinced that they feel heard and understood. It's that simple and powerful.
The Magic of Early Adoptors
When we want to create any kind of change in any context, there are always people ready to engage in change, the early adoptors. The key is to tell our story and see who emerges as ready. They are connected to the first followers who get involved because their trusted early adoptors get engaged. Growing these two demographics sparks organic growth of change.
Kitchen As Metaphor For Engagement
I've decided this month that my second book this year will be a cookbook. It will be The Agile Kitchen, an idea book on the art of improvisational cooking. It's for people who are intimidated by recipes or want to cook beyond recipes with the power of their own growing culinary intuition. I've had dozens of conversations so far with people who hate cooking to the most celebrated chefs in the planet. One insight emerging so far is the question of whether there is a correlation between how people are engaged in their world and how engaged they are in their own kitchens. Right now, I'm leaning towards the hypothesis of positive correlation. If this pans out (pun pardoned) getting people more engaged in their own kitchen could be one key to getting them more engaged in their world.
Socializing Principles
In the Agile Canvas process that structures my collaboration work, one of the 5 core conversations in the model is the Principles conversation. When a group shares common explicit working principles it moves more easily through decision making and people stay engaged. I've now updated the definition of Principles to include a social component. To the original core of principles, "what matters most to us," we now give consideration to who else we could and should invite into the process who has resources that would mutually benefit them and everyone. This socializes our principles, making them pivots for inclusion and engagement. Very powerful and critical to forming vibrant resource networks.
Energizing civic engagement
One of my current facilitation projects focuses on growing the food system in a rural county with metrics on healthy and local food access for people who regularly depend on food programs. These kinds of projects are always complex and interesting. It's a lot of connecting unconnected dots and aligning fragmented efforts across the whole value network.
In facilitating community engagement in this space, I rely heavily on the facilitation practices of knitting and nudging. We nudge new ways to empower people for healthy food self-reliance and knit new collaborations among food providers, processors, educators, and funders. We engage the willing and hopeful into new habits of collaboration and innovation. It's very interesting and meaningful work. Everyone on our team is passionate and expert, so optimism is high.
Stories That inspire Hope
Behind the first book I will do this year that explores the personal and social nature of hope is an increasingly intense interest in what hope does and what inspires hope. In the early stages of this project, I'm wiling to argue that stories inspire hope. These are stories of overcoming obstacles, reaching new levels of achievement, stories of survival, transformation and breakthrough.
My sense of the significance of hope is that it is what energizes engagement where we work, learn and live. People with hope engage in even what seems unlikely or impossible. Reality is that people who have achieved the alleged impossible did so precisely because of the hope that energized them.
We need to build in time routinely so people inside and outside our group can share their stories and the stories of others that stir hope. It helps to also give people simple recipes for the best story telling possible.
Design & Engagement
Interesting conversation today about how changing physical architecture and organizational structure can be done in a way that has no net positive impact on intangibles like organizational capacity for engagement, specifically in the realms of creativity, collaboration and learning. It can also be done in a way that positively impacts these cardinal capacities. It works when architectural and organizational design considerations follow the mapping and strategizing the optimal qualities of how creativity, collaboration and learning can best work.
Can Things Actually Get Done Through Self-Organization?
Self-organization is how natural systems get things done. From social insects to social movements, people have self-organized into the most amazing new realities. Many of us have witnessed the dance of thousands of birds swarming at high speeds into every variation of patterns possible, each new pattern emerging instantaneously and instantly with nothing but impeccable communication and zero hierarchy of command and control. No one ever gets lost or in accidents with others. It's seamless flow from self-organization.
Self-organization emerges from simple shared rules supporting self-organized learning, working and collaborating. The rules show up along the lines, for example:
- Do something everyone finds interesting and/or important
- Create something everyone contributes to
- Keep communication open, transparent and accurate
In each case, no one assumes or struggles for an imbalance of responsibility or power. People used to telling others what to do do none of that, and instead can help facilitate the process.
The power of self-organization is that it can get done things that could never happen in a leader-dependent group.
Thinking about organizations as communities
Organizations many of us would refer to as enlightened have begun to think of organizations as communities. They have at least the intuition that people thrive in spaces that feel and function more like engaging communities than sterile machines of production. Community building in organizations requires new conversations, strategies and skillsets. It's a radical shift in how people are engaged, empowered and connected. Leadership in community building barely resembles leadership in parentally controlled hierarchies. In strong communities people share responsibility, resources and opportunities. They do not defer responsibility for the many to a few. Decision making is distributed in ways that makes it faster and richer.
I applaud any organization with the vision and courage to embrace the learning curve that community building requires and rewards.