People Support What They Help Create

It's incredibly naive to expect that anyone would support something they didn't help create. This is the call for authentic engagement. It means giving people voice in decisions that shape their world. People want to feel a sense of authorship with their personal and collective stories. We now have all the tech we need to make this possible.

Yes it means less power over, less domination and colonization whether we're talking about where people work, live and learn. The metric is simple. People feel involved in deciding their world, how it looks, feels and works.

It's a call for redefining leadership from hero to host.

The Importance Of Focusing Daily On Success Metrics

Accordion to recent Dale Carnegie training research over 90% of teams in companies do not talk daily about their success metrics. This has a profound impact on how teams stay disengaged and how dysfunction stays normative. This is also a critical factor since according to the Harvard happiness research, people feel best at work when they focus continuously on their progress toward success metrics. In the Agile Canvas process, we do this in four ways:

  • We continuously update the success stories we're working on
  • We plan sprint actions every two weeks to make progress on our top stories
  • We do frequent intra-sprint checks
  • We confirm the doneness of sprint items at the end of each sprint

This positions teams to stay continuously energized and focused.

Happiness @Work

In designing happiness workshops for organizations we have been having conversations about whether to overtly use the term "happiness" in workplaces. One hunch tendered is that the term happiness is inaccessible and curiously unwelcome by many organizational leaders. I've encountered a fair amount of resistance to it based on all manner of concerns about happiness as being potentially irrelevant to distracting from what people refer to as the "bottom line." After all my work and my book on happiness, I'm happy to abandon the term in conversations with people who resist the idea of happiness as a valid organizational performance and metric construct. At the core of this dynamic is that in almost every case, people lack literacy in the happiness research over the last decade.

I'm proposing instead just talking about "how people feel at work" hoping to appeal to leaders who at least intuitively believe that how people feel at work has direct impact on their engagement. We will have to do as much literacy development even about this, drawing from research and practice, on how emotion profoundly shapes core issues like creativity, resilience, collaboration, motivation and performance.

Reality is that it is incredibly naive to think that the externalities of organizational structures and systems could ever have more power than how people feel in shaping how they act and interact at work. The old wisdom that culture trumps strategy and structure reflects the primacy of emotional equity in the workplace. Expect this truth to sustain whatever leadership fashions we endure through the ages.

The Facilitated Learning Advantage

Today I did a workshop on authentic leadership with mid-level corporate leaders. I associated authentic leadership with leading from strengths and modeled this by facilitating their discovery of new ways of being authentic simply by drawing from their own strengths. The last piece of feedback was a poignant testament to the media and message: Of all our 6 workshops so far, yours was the best and you dis far less talking than we did.

This is the power of facilitated learning, whose purpose is not to create confidence in expers but confidence in one's own strengths. These are lessons that will serve these emerging leaders well.

The Power Of Listening In Groups

This week a leadership team of bright scientists I've been working with arrived at alignment around some very contentious and difficult decisions without direction or facilitation. It was a conclusion from our work to, among other things, create a rich culture of speaking to be heard and hearing each other genuinely. It speaks to how critical a culture of listening is.  Teams that don't get this do all kinds of circus tricks to steer people into negotiated and therefore fragile compliances. There is no substitute for everyone doing authentic listening. None.

Do Organizations Need Clear Values?

Many organizations like to wallpaper themselves with lists of generalized value statements, usually top down edicts and usually reflecting more espoused than practiced values. They are always what the leaders give lip service to. To know more clearly what the practiced values are, we look at 3 things: everyone's calendars, decision processes and outcomes and how peers actually treat each other across the spectrum of daily events and dynamics.

In the Agile world, we invite people around any collaboration table to identify specific and actionable principles of what matters and why that get used to shape their immediate and ongoing actions and decisions. They make a difference every time because we pay no attention to anything that lives in the land of lip service.

Weak Leadership

If we start with the premise that relationships are the most significant capital in any organization and community, we would define the strength of leadership in terms of the strengths of relationships there. In this construct, weak leaders create and maintain weak relationships between and among people and groups there. Instead of connecting people in authentic collaborative thinking and doing, weak leaders direct individuals so the only really important relationships are with leaders. Strong leaders build relationships. They facilitate connections. A profound difference.

The End Of "Parking Lots"

I'm not sure of the origin of meeting "parking lots" but they have no rightful place in the Agile Canavs process. The parking lot idea as practiced is simple. The people running a meeting label something they deem unworthy of discussion. They put it on a list that often mothballs the idea into quiet extinction unless the idea originator argues its way back into competitive existence on the list of worthy ideas.

The obvious benefit of parking lots is to create focus, yet at an opportunity cost of potentially losing important considerations and to lose engagement of people whose ideas fated to the parking lot.

In the Agile Canvas process, every single voiced object is listed somewhere. There is literally a place for anything and everything that could come up in the process. And on the questions, stories and sprint lists, they are sequenced according to the order in which we will take action on them. We make sure we lose nothing because change is a constant and what we assumptively declare trash today might become treasure tomorrow.

Google Docs

Shared documents are the easiest and best way for groups without dedicated software otherwise to collaborate on creating and archiving documents of any kind. Google Docs are budget zero ways to achieve this. They work live and virtually, allowing unlimited participation. That said, it's always interesting how unusual many people find the whole option. It's a good example of how making the familiar (docs) different (shared), people can get disoriented. And collaboration with freedom to post and share is radically different from business as usual.

Perhaps the most significant disruption is to power. Power becomes distributed rather than centralized in formal leaders or dominant personalities.

It's more a challenge to sociology than technology. However, I find once people get used to more collaboration than they've ever seen, they don't want to go back to the old ways.

The Power Of Both-And

In cognitive development, one of the hallmarks of the transition from adolescent to adult thinking is the transition from either-or to both-and thinking. This is equally true as organizations move into more mature levels of development. In this transition, we hear fewer either-or conversations that create risky dichotomies. In adult organizations we talk instead about how we can be for profit and planet, younger generations and older, efficiency and generosity, autonomy and alignment, stronger and weaker networks, continuities and innovations.

Organizations grow when they realize that adolescent thinking doesn't have the power to create adult conversations.

Funders & The Collaboration Conundrum

Recent conversations have surfaced a very peculiar dynamic in communities. This dynamic, strongly supported by many funders, calls for "more collaboration" which effectively constrains community engagement and innovation even as funders give lip service to both. The dynamic gets expressed in relatively innocent yet deceptive ways. Someone familiar or new to the community proposes they want to do something in and for the community, like starting up a new school, program, service or business. This is met with sharp and quick rejection with the argument that "We already have ..." one of those, or too many of those. The argument's flaw occurs when the community still has demand that exceeds current capacity to deliver on them.

Funders who get anxious in the face of complexity call for more "collaboration" as an antidote to their confusion over funding competitive efforts.

Granted, communities will benefit in many cases where people collaborate rather than compete. The research has clearly indicated that competition does not guarantee quality, efficiency or innovation. At the same time, communities gain when new enterprises and efforts emerge to take different approaches to similar needs.

This conundrum is a call for a reinvention of how we think of philanthropy in communities. I have been suggesting that funders fund investments in new enterprises and efforts to start or buy new small businesses that can sustainably fund their proposed new efforts. It is no more risky than funding anything that would otherwise disappear the day funding has to be cut because of economic realities beyond anyone's control.

Do Meetings Need Leaders?

Groups can benefit from leaders leading their meetings, particularly when the group is new or dysfunctional and the leader is a capable facilitator. Otherwise groups don't need leaders and in some contexts do worse with leaders who lack facilitation competencies. Groups can develop, even in short periods of time, a natural ability to self-organize without the need for a leader.

It's my experience that as long as a group has what's called a liberating structure, like the Agile Canvas, it can easily self-organize even as a new group, with diverse perspectives and with fairly complex tasks.

Authentic Introductions

When we bring people together who mostly don't know each other, we now have more than enough technology to supply everyone beforehand with pictures and bios, making unnecessary the usual (faux) "introductions" of going around the room with less information. They also preempt the usual introductions as serial monologue data downloads. Either way, I would qualify neither of these as authentic introductions, which I define as people interacting directly in ways that evoke a sense of wanting to spend more time together. I would argue that authentic introductions are dialogues rather than monologues.

So what I do is get people in groups of 2, 3 or 4 and give them contactful questions that have the power to invite authentic introductions. Here are some examples.

  • What would you be doing if you weren't here today?
  • What's something good or interesting most people here don't know about you?
  • What's something you know how to do that most people here don't know about you?
  • What's shifting for you in your life now?
  • What's your dream?
  • Where did your current passion begin for you?

Every time, people used to faux introductions are amazed at how quickly, easily and naturally people spark new narrative connections. I then invite people to continue self-organizing their own introductions with whoever else in the group they want during and beyond on our scheduled time together. The work of host is to remind people that they are in charge of making their own meaningful introductions rather than outsourcing the responsibility to a parent figure leader.

These are authentic introductions.

Deconstructing Entrepreneurship Failure

I continue to see intelligent people pander the fallacious correlation between entrepreneurship and failure. The implication is that new ventures are intrinsically risk magnets and, with exceptions, almost guarantees high levels of failure. Yes, many fail. And many of the many I observe have had flawed planning models that were unrealistic and unproductive by design. I would argue that this is at the root of causes for struggle and failure. 

Without a viable model to work from, founders flounder having only their own native intelligence and the force of personality to guide them. Some are lucky enough to have effective mentors. At the end of the day, more will succeed with good planning models.

Storycrafting

One of the more frequent comments I hear when teaching people how to craft stories that create new levels of connection and influence is that it takes work. This is less a statement about the durability and skills of people but rather about the reality that experience doesn't automatically yield stories. Stories don't exist until we intentionally weave them from the threads of experience. They only have the characters, dynamics and events that we assign to them. They only convey the messages we built into them.

The most amazing reality about storycrafting is the degree of creativity possible. We can begin and end any story in any timeframe, include any character into it and involve whatever events we want. This is pure innovation and always worth the effort.

Good Process Is Good Action

Questions are action and the most influential element in any complex system. This was one of the messages from friend and colleague complexity guru Carole Martin here in a workshop we did this weekend with science fellows in the Bay Area. Good questions have the power of action. They provoke possibilities that lead to new options and differences. Good questions are liberating structures, freeing people from excuses and unnecessary postponements. When we lose our excuses, we do what's possible.

The Art Of Listening

Listening comes in several forms.

  1. Listening for something to agree with
  2. Listening for something to argue with
  3. Listening for something we're not expecting

The third form of listening is the one most likely to reveal new perspectives, learning and discoveries. It comes from a place of curiosity rather than certainty. And it is the only kind of listening that has the power to open us to new levels of understanding and agreement.

Planning As A Practice Of Presence

A plan is a commitment to specific sequences of actions based on specific sets of assumptions. The key word here is assumptions. Reality sometimes aligns with our assumptions but certainly makes no promises, given the fact that change is life's constant. The wise plan accordingly.

Perhaps the most realistic sense of planning is that it is a lens that reveals specific opportunities in the present. In this rather agile view, planning can be a practice of presence rather than prediction or procrastination.