The possibility of alumni networks

The beauty of networks is the fact of their existence. Many people who leave organizations continue weak and strong ties in networks of organizational alumni. Many people continue to grow in all kinds of wonderful ways.

Organizations have two choices. They can act as if they don't exist, or they can nurture the growth of these networks and tap into the rich resources for its growth. This can be done by any teams. It doesn't have to be a centralized or formal function. It's an incredible gift to engage rather than deny.

Is turnover a valid metric?

Loyalty is a classic value in patriarchy based organizations. It's the parent-child trade of security for compliance. It's no longer a viable deal, given that most people know organizations that demand loyalty feel no reciprocal obligation to its employees. 

In slow organizations, the culture of permission inhibits the growth of people. When people don't grow, they stick around because they don't feel prepared to move onto new challenges. Lack of turnover in these situations is more lack of passion for growth. It's the logic that if we somehow get people to lose passion for growth, they won't grow beyond their job.

Nimble organizations and teams hold growth as a prime metric of success. When people feel free and supported to grow, they can stay around longer because their work is an opportunity space for growth. They can also move onto new opportunities for growth elsewhere. 

The conversation needs to not be about what the turnover and stickiness numbers are, but rather what they represent, and most importantly what problems do we want to have as a nimble organization.

Can we entrust teams with decisions?

As real time information and experience based knowledge is more distributed and accessible, teams are in the position to make good decisions quickly and well. If there is a nimble culture of trust within the team, the team can be smarter than any single decision maker.

Entrusting teams is possible when they gain clarity in how to make realistic decisions together. It doesn't take long, and is simply giving them decision recipes and practice.

The tyrany of team personalities

Before teams grow in alignment and velocity, they are dominated by the tyrany of personalities. If the chemistry of personalities is good, the team can do well, as long as this chemistry continues. If the chemistry is bad, the team will suffer and struggle in slowness. 

One of the classic indicators of slow team cultures is that people blame the personalities of team members and/or leaders for their slowness and all the karmic characteristics of slowness like fragmentation, disengagement and team learning disability.

The more nimble teams become, the less relevant personality differences become as points of blame. The more everyone engages each person's differences in goodness.

The neuroscience basis of the growth imperative

Neuroeconomist Paul Zak in HBR reports that high organizational performance is a function of engagement. Engagement is a function of trust. Trust is a function of freedom in our work, recognition of progress and continous growth. 

Nimble teams know this because we daily live it. In sync with the rest of the team and without permissions, everyone has freedom to do their best in whatever needs to be done. We define together the good we seek in all we do and move towards it in iterations of progress. We are always working from growing questions, expanding clarity in new ways.

Trust builds in this kind of culture. We enjoy high levels of performance.

No bad leaders or teams

Being slow doesn't make people bad. It just makes them slow. The reality is all leaders and teams have exactly what it takes to grow into more nimble leaders and teams. They have all the requisite goodness in qualities and abilities,

All they need is to gain clarity in how to move in iterations toward greater nimbleness. It takes about 12 weeks to gain the basics and another 6 months to create fluency and habits in them. The distance between slow and nimble is clarity. 

Why we need new conversations

This time last year I presented in "The Way Of Questions" the premise that the only way to get to new possibilities is through new questions. Old questions are responsible for the status quo of business as usual and all the defensiveness and excuses that reify them. Slow teams and organizations works from old questions. Nimble teams work from new questions.

It's easy to spot new and old questions. When the questions on the table feel like deja vu, they are old and will yield old results. When we don't have easy or quick answers to a question, it's likely a new question. 

In nimble teams, the possibility of new questions are limitless.

• What is the good we want to seek together?
• How can we engage our own and each other's goodness in this effort?
• What's going well and why?
• What are the problems we want to have?
• How could we make this more beautiful?
• What would be most helpful here?

One reason most mergers and acquisitions fail

Most teams in organizations are slow teams. They go into self-doubt and risk-aversion when uncertainty exceeds their threshold. They become more unaligned and unresponsive to change. Mergers and acquisitons are hotbeds of uncertainty. Slow teams get paralyzed in the process.

Organizations that don't know how to make organic growth possible don't know how to help slow teams become well-performing nimble teams. The only way the merger or acquisiton could work is if the participating organizations help teams move from slow to nimble. This takes a complete rethinking of culture. We now know how to make this rethinking possible. 

Why goals don't work

As much as leaders place superstitious faith in goals, teams are more perspired than inspired by them. Goals provoke self-doubt that brings about risk aversion. Goals require confidence and constant adaptation. Over 80% of goals fail. Every day goals aren't met, self-doubt and risk aversion becomes stronger.

The opposite is defining the good we seek together and translating this into the next step of progress possible. In many stories of this approach, teams exceed would have been goals. Progress provokes confidence and adaptability. We adjust our approach with each new step in progress. 

The magic of a progress approach is how it creates more velocity and alignment. 

3 practices of team kindness

Nimble teams practice kindness. It's an active principle in a culture of trust. Trust matters because it accelerates team alignment and velocity. 

Kindness happens in three ways.

People are present to each other, conscious of what everyone considers helpful. People make and keep promises to be helpful to each other. They work from agreements of mutually crafted and tested ways of working together that is helpful to everyone.

Slow teams become nimble by shifting from the opposites of self-serving interest, fragmented efforts and assumptions. They become more clear on what it means to be present, keep promises and work from agreements. Their velocity and alignment becomes stronger. They exceed expectations. Everyone wins.

What should leadership growth focus on?

In business as usual, slow leaders and leadership development programs focus on fixing weaknesses. They tend to favor leadership assessment tools with this focus in mind. 

In business as unusual, nimble leaders focus on how to know and engage their goodness in helping their teams grow. We assess the growth passion and potentials of their teams and guide leaders to recombine their existing qualities and characteristics in ways that help their teams become more nimble.

Leaders grow in how they help build a culture of kindness and being in sync together. In the process leaders grow. It's a beautiful art form.

The era of empowerment

I did my first unpublished piece on empowered workplaces 40 years ago. It wasn't until 25 years later that I published in "Appreciative Leadership" the technology of making it possible. The essential definition of technology is the science and applications of practical techniques. 

With the current incredible reality that over 80% of leaders still operate from command and control, we finally have the technologies to make empowerment reality, along with the amazing performance benefits possible. 

Now it's just a matter of leadership growth. We know how to guide leaders in the cultivation of empowered, nimble, flourishing teams and organizations. Exciting times indeed.

What high-performing teams have in common

Aligned with the MIT research indicating that communication patterns are by far the most profound predictor of team performance, there is emerging evidence on the power of psychological safety on teams. 

“There’s no team without trust,” says Paul Santagata, Head of Industry at Google. He knows the results of the tech giant’s massive two-year study on team performance, which revealed that the highest-performing teams have one thing in common: psychological safety, the belief that you won’t be punished when you make a mistake. Studies show that psychological safety allows for moderate risk-taking, speaking your mind, creativity, and sticking your neck out without fear of having it cut off — just the types of behavior that lead to market breakthroughs.

This requires shared kindness. Kindness is asking for perspective from others on how helpful we are. It's asking people if they want our perspective before inflicting it on them. It's offering perspective on another's helpfulness and our needs for helpfulness with a future oriention rather than past. It's first saying what we like about an idea and expressing curiosity about it before pointing out downsides. It's talking about what went well first in critiques before talking about what we would like to see differently in the future. It's expressing appreciation for imperfect progress made.

The problems we want to have

Slow teams and organizations are notoriously problem-phobic. They frame work as the elimination of problems. Problems are indicators of failure. It's an approach driven by the old questions of what are our problems today and how can we solve them with maximum speed and minimum costs. The intention is a predictable world of certainty. 

Nimble teams are great reactive solution designers. They are also great proactive problem generators. They are empowered by the new question: What problems do we want to have? This shifts the culture from uncertainty-phobic to uncertainty-inspired. They flourish on problems. Problems are badges of success. They create a future of problems they want to have. Their use of the Agile Canvas makes a proactive relationship to problems possible. 

The diversity illusion

Organizations invest effort into trying to make sure they are diverse. They focus on ethnic, generational and gender diversity. 

What's important is how different ideas, questions and voices are welcomed, how valued people feel for them, and how they help make the good we seek more possible. Simply surrounding meeting tables with dissimilar people is part of the equation. A demographically, even psychographically, diverse group is not enough for people to be smarter and more inventive together. No matter how many hiring and promoting quotas are met, divergent perspectives only count when they are all well engaged.

Knowing how to convene and guide highly engaging converations is a new mindset and skillset for many teams and their leaders. It is business not as usual and very simple and discoverable.

Cobots: team members of the future

MIT is among an emerging field of researchers focused on designing collaborative robots, cobots, to work along their human teammates, doing a variety of physical and mental tasks freeing people up for the more adept and creative sides of work. They're working now on robots that can literally read the minds of their human teammates. 

It doesn't take a wild imagination to consider the implications of work teams composed of people and robots. If we think keeping teams aligned now is a trick, it will become a challenge only nimble teams will be ready for. It's uncertain when this new world will arrive in each profession and industry. Becoming more nimble teams has obvious payoffs in the present, with velocity and alignment, and more to come.

As AI becomes more the norm in work, gaining new skills and habits will be paramount to career mobility and work success. The need for teams to discover how to grow together in a culture of trust and agility will only increase. The future is here.

Stacking the new hire deck: Hiring for culture

Three easy things increase the odds for good hires: agreements alignment, complementary goodness and evidence of growth mindset. This is the power of hiring for culture.

We ask candidates how they feel about the existing posted team agreements. These are the mutually crafted and tested agreements on what matters most  to us as we work together. 

We ask candidates for examples of abilities and qualities they have that are complementary to those on the team. We show them the list of abilities and qualities on the team currently.

We ask candidates what about this work they want to get better at, work on or develop. We show them examples of growing questions on the team.

Our best candidates are aligned, complementary and dedicated to growth. These simple questions separate those who look good on paper and those who will do well with the team.

The primacy of team culture

The future of work is about the culture of teams. As we radically rethink how organizations can flourish in times of unprecedented uncertainty and complexity, it will be the transformation of culture that will distinguish those that will contribute the greatest beauty to our world.

Culture is how people feel as they interact together. In flourishing team cultures, people feel valued, connected and free to grow. Strategy and structure work when we get culture right.

Growing flourishing team cultures is about how we know and engage our goodness in realizing the good we seek, how we define and celebrate progress, how we stay aligned and agile, how we make growing together the point and path of our work, how our work is a craft we practice from the principles of kindness and beauty.

Every team has what it takes to move steadily toward a more flourishing culture. All it takes is doing business as unusual.

Audio podcast: https://anchor.fm/jack46?at=2298962

Is strategy dead?

In a recent piece, "Is the era of management over?" The World Economic Forum raises the vital and timely question of whether strategy is dead.

In a world of unprecedented VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity) how much predictability will we have for significant and viable strategies? Strategies are only as valid as their predictive assumptions are reliable. 

We're seeing Teflon talent refusing to stick around, disruptive technologies and robotics and algorithms replacing any kind of work that is repeatable or needs to be supervised.

The churn of new possibilities is dizzying and unpredictable. Nimble teams replace strategy with dreams. Dreams are agile descriptions of what we would love to see possible. They are lenses revealing new possibilities in the present. The farther out we dream, the larger the lenses. The winners will be those who have better lenses to see emergent possibilities of flourishing.

Nimble leader as convener

The transition from slow to nimble teams is smoother with the transition from slow to nimble leaders.

In a slow culture of permissions, slow leaders make sure everything works by approval. As a team discovers how to work in sync with aligned integrity, inclusion and initiative, they make possible the good they seek through the goodness they have. People work more from freedom to do their best than approvals.

Leaders add value as conveners of beautiful conversations. These are conversiations where people are thinking together, not just talking together. Convening is an art and craft. It involves the nuances of question and story sharing that optimizes people being engaged, smarter, faster and better together. People grow together.

This builds capacity more than dependency. Nimble leaders become more free to help the team be proactive, aligned with other teams and partners, mindful of their markets and continously entrepreneurial. 

Teams become more nimble. People feel and act valued, connected and free to grow together.