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Founded in 2002, the blog here continues to be a space of daily conversation about the science of mind and its implications and applications
Even though we can talk about the culture of an organization, it is the synergy of each team's culture. As many leaders have discovered, culture change doesn't happen at the organizational level.
Culture is how people interact together at the team level. Culture only shifts when people experiment with interacting differently in how they communicate, coordinate and grow. It is what must be done at the team level, one team at a time.
Why can't we keep doing work as usual?
It's not as much about how work is a problem to be fixed but how it can become a possible way of enriching our lives and transforming our world. Done differently it can help us better enjoy our lives and bring about a world of good for all. It can be a source of joy and meaning.
This vision is not possible in work as we know it, only in work as we can reimagine it.
As much as we talk about a future different from the past, there are always guardians of the status quo. They give lip service to change while doing everything to protect the old language. They argue against change in the form of dreams, success, new questions, habits, strengths and stories.
They argue that we have to talk about what’s wrong. They insist that it’s all about the problems, weaknesses, threats and deficiencies. They talk about how talk about new dreams, success, questions, habits, strengths and stories are denials of problems, weaknesses, threats and deficiencies. and in doing so deny the power of new dreams, questions, habits, strengths and stories.
The guardians of the status quo are enemies of the future. Their passion is the repeated past because it represents the certainty of being right. They prefer being right than better. They know better means uncertainty and want to have nothing to do with it. They have little tolerance for uncertainty.
The champions of change prefer the uncertainty of better. They seek a future different from the past. They want to dream larger dreams, make success their teacher, be inspired by new questions, form new habits, engaging strengths and based on new stories.
What’s vital is their knowing that guardians of the status quo have no power to change things to make things better, no matter how much they pretend better is critical to organizational success. They know the guardians are pretenders and in this knowing, realize their power.
Organizing workflow happens best in the commons. Good tools to consider include Trello, Meister Task, Asana and Planner in Office 365. They are all Kanban boards featuring movable and detailed lists and cards.
Classic boards have four lists: Task Backlog, To Do, Doing and Done. In day to day work, they organize work in 2-week sprints. Backlog is all the known work we gave in front of us. To Do is the work we have dedicated to the current sprint.
We also use the boards as dashboards for the Agile Canvas process, with lists: 20 year dreams, 2 year progess indicators and 2 quarter projects. This feeds the sprint boards.
These keep everyone collaborating, aligned and agile in ways that no amount of emails and meetings could make possible.
In a recent piece, "There's a Scientific Reason Some People are More Motivated," John Rampton describes how highly motivated people have more active dopamine in their brains as they take on everyday tasks and challenges. One way is identifying what they look forward to. This releases the reward chemical dopamine sometimes more strongly than the actual achievement. It's also celebrating progress. Anyone can become more motivated.
Teams are more nimble when anyone can ask for and offer help that is completely unconstrained by the assumptions of fixed roles. Velocity occurs when all work is everyone's work. Freedom to do what needs to be done gets things done without delays, postponements, blame and excuses. Alignment happens when we decide together how and when help best occurs.
From the Blinkest piece on "High Performance Habits":
"Author, Brendon Burchard, has conducted one of the biggest studies on high performance in history, examining people from over 190 countries to understand exactly how they achieve their long-term success.
He concluded that gender, race, age and personality traits have very little to do with high performance. What really matters are certain key habits, like keeping yourself physically fit.
In other words, it’s not who you are, but rather what you do that’s important. The author also discovered that these habits didn’t form by accident. High performers took them on deliberately.
Now, don’t confuse these habits with “life hacks” or some simple, magical changes that take zero effort to implement. High performers outperform their peers because they consciously and consistently practice these habits.
Another common trait is their confidence in being able to master even difficult tasks, like big new projects at work or learning new languages. Again, this isn’t an inherent trait; it’s an earned confidence achieved through diligent practice."
This is the growth mindset that supports our growing together in work. It makes us more nimble as a team.
People on slow teams, without viable known alternatives, continue to hope for a new future in their performance by doing better at business as usual. This is the myth of improvement. Improving the status quo doesn't lead to different outcomes.
People on nimble teams are radically reimagining work without the industrial age sacred cows of meetings and emails, goals and roles, permissions and performance reviews. They are taking a whole different approach and seeing a world of difference.
Whatever the industry or profession, every team can transition from slow to more nimble. Each team has what it takes. Each has the goodness required.
The transition happens in phases and iterations. It's an evolution more than revolution. It's more about experimenting than implementing.
We migrate some kinds of internal emails to the commons. We turn a meeting or two into beautiful converations instead. We create a couple agreements on how people can take more initiative. We create space for people to ask for and offer perspectives on the growth they're working on. In progess, all manner of good becomes possible.
When people on a team are aligned, it's because they decide together on the good they seek and the path they take. Acting in alignment grows trust. Trust accelerates performance and growing together.
When people work from, compliance to permissions, they act out of alignment. They are slower, more fragmented and reactive together. Deadlines are missed, things slip through the cracks, work drains rather than creates energy.
When we guide teams in forming alignment, it takes no special training. People discover by doing. The results are immediate and observable. We don't have to measure for anything. Growth is obvious.
Since August 2002 this blog has always been about the future. Now more than ever, the work that has inspired me over the past 40 years inspires this blog and the latest book that emerged from it.
The future of the world can be transformed by the future of work. We can do work in ways that makes our world better for all, in a future different from the past.
I will be exploring how the conversations are shifting, highlighted by the latest research and practice.
In this latest work, I bring together the more salient and significant themes in my past 10 years of blog and book writing, inspired by my now 40 years of practice. The message is simple. Nimble teams in organizations outperform slow teams because they make growing together the point and path of their work. My wish is that it sparks new conversations that get us completely reimagining how work can be, a beautiful place in which we can become richer human beings.
Since August 17th I've taken my first brief blog sabbatical in this blog that began in August 2002. It was one of the first daily blogs. This time was taken to finish writing for "The Growth Imperative" due next month. The oldest personal daily blog in Cleveland will continue and focus on the future of work.
The most applicable, useful and sustainable learning is question based learning. This is learning that is inspired and organized by the natural evolution of people's questions.
When people learn how to form and act from their learning questions, they are intrinsically motivated to learn. Learning becomes a natural driver of sustainable performance improvement. When people are continuously learning, they work with a growth mindset. Teams and organizations only grow when people work with a growth mindset. Our best people begin their job search on LinkedIn as soon as it's clear they can no longer learn.
Learning questions can focus on new levels of work-related knowledge, skills, abilities or qualities. They can address anything people want to get better at, make easier to do or have more impact in. They can take on many forms:
It takes very little time to teach people how to translate their work experiences, feedback and outcomes into new learning questions.
We make formal learning more relevant and useful by basing on people's learning questions. We make collaborative learning spaces and learning marketplaces more dynamic and useful when people know how to share their learning questions and support these with new insights, supports and resources.
When people work with learning questions, they work with passion. Their potential becomes unlimited.
Given the wide range of tangible and intangible costs of being an unrealistic leader, why would leaders make a habit of this path?
Sometimes they are unaware. They think they're being realistic because their actions align with their beliefs. When their beliefs go unquestioned, they can be unrealistic and not know it. If our beliefs are firmly formed, it becomes less possible to even know when we're actually wrong, or right.
It can be the good fortune of success. Narcissistic leaders believe their expectations are the root cause of whatever success happens in their world. This is incentive to never question how realistic their beliefs are, reinforcing the delusion that if they see success their expectations by definition must be realistic,
When people they have power over passively succumb in compliance to their unrealistic expectations, they can inaccurately conclude that their expectations must be realistic because no one questions them.
Until they find out for themselves what are more realistic expectations, they will be unrealistic leaders. When they become even slightly curious about other perspectives, hope lives.
One of the simplest ways to assess for growth and fixed mindsets is to ask people what about their work they think they could get better at and what they think they can't get better at. The former reveals their growth mindset and the latter reveals their fixed mindset.
What's important is helping them have realistic expectations about each. In some cases they need to discover they in fact can get better at things they feel are outside their control or not adaptable to learning. This discovery empowers them more in their work.
As much lip service leaders give to squeezing the most out of their people, the vast majority of employees worldwide are significantly disengaged and work without passion. People daily fuel their hope for escape to greener pastures on LinkedIn. This cuts across industries and professions, education and salary levels. No amount of management bribes have the power to prevent or turnaround the disloyalty from work that fails to engage joy.
In this world, people don’t do their best. Low engagement and passion mean low levels of creativity, collaboration and learning.
After decades of coaching leaders and teaching graduate level leadership, I’m inclined to take an emphatically compassionate approach to the problem as a leadership problem. Leaders who struggle to be effective do not have bad teams. They are not bad people or bad leaders. They are simply unrealistic. Fortunately, being realistic is a learnable mindset and skillset.
Realistic leaders work from realistic expectations. This creates credibility with everyone they interact with. They work from agreements rather than assumptions, resulting in the kind of trustworthiness that gives them a natural charisma of influence. They don’t struggle or falter in unrealistic plans. Best of all, their wide open eyes and heart see more possibilities than other leaders who are otherwise unrealistic. Realistic leaders understand the power of being so.
Empathy plays a vital part in the impact of products and services. That things work as promised matters. Just as, if not more, importantly is that they solve the real problems of real people. This is where technology meets sociology. Everyone contributes well when emotional intelligence is strong.
As much credit as we ascribe to goals for organizational success, goal achievement is more rare and not definitively related to happiness at work. The failure rate of performance stretch goals in organizations is around 90%. People feeling like they’re failing 90% of the time leads instead to lower performance.
Harvard researchers indicate that recognition of progress not success is most related to meaningful and engaging work. As much as we hope goals inspire us, every day we don’t reach our goals, we are failing. Progress is different. Progress is possible every day.
Ironically, progress doesn’t necessarily require measurable goals. It can be a function of four key questions:
Exceeding what would have been a goal becomes possible with progress that has no end.
A leader recently unloaded her frustration about the millennials on her team she finds suprisingly rigid and resistant to change. Her tone spoke to a sense of being betrayed by their careless disloyalty to her position. Among other things, there are many assumptions and agendas at work here. Her question is the old question of “How can I get them on board?” After all, they’re supposed to be young risk takers. Right?
If I was coaching her, I would offer a different question: What does it mean to engage people as co-authors of meaningful change? And there are others. What would they love to see possible in their work going out as far into the future as they want? How would they critique changes in their areas that have and haven’t worked well? Are there any forms of acceptable failure from experiments possible in their work?
