The transition from slow teams as victims to nimble teams of empowerment

What is the more salient differences between slow and nimble teams is the fact that slow teams tend to experience a victim of identity. They feel like victims to current circumstances, conditions, strengths, gaps and deficiencies.

What's interesting is that their sense of victimhood occurs precisely to the degree that they lack a shared, compelling sense of the future. Nimble teams have a shared sense of the future that they want to see possible and create together. This keeps them in the space of empowerment and agency rather than victimhood. Slow teams can move from victimhood into empowerment simply by creating and acting upon a shared sense of the future they desired together.

It doesn't matter whether the organization as a whole has an up-to-date or viable strategic plan. It doesn't matter how much certainty the team has relative to its own future. To be empowered is to create the kind of clarity about the future that makes us empowered and proactive in the present.

Question based onboarding

The conventional approach to onboarding is to push as much information as possible on to new people hoping for knowledge retention, skill building, habit development, accelerated performance and employment retention. This sounds good except that people retain up to 20% of information pushed at them. And worse forming new habits for performance requires a uniquely different learning process and the process we use for knowledge and skill development.

What works is question based onboarding.

In this process we teach people how to formulate and iterate their questions as they come into new work and move into new performance. This is a new competency for most people in it results in 80% retention rather than 80% loss of new information. It also helps people get engaged in the culture and form new connections quickly which accelerates their confidence and learning capacity. This is practical work because ultimately need to make learning central to their work as they go forward in this happens only to the degree that they are able to form and follow new learning questions.

 

How to maintain student failure

What school systems are for to a student failure comes in a myriad of forms. They talk about failing grades, dropouts, students at risk and test score failure.

Perhaps the most effective way to maintain these patterns is to continue this conversation about student failure instead of teaching failure. Change occurs when we stop blaming students for their inability to learn and to look instead at how we can transform the way teaching occurs. From this perspective it's not the students failure to learn but the systems failure to innovate in teaching.

The biggest contribution to the old conversation was the irrational belief that putting more pressure on students would somehow make them better at learning. This completely misses the point about teaching as being the effective focus.

The new conversation is about experimentation, trying new things and seeing the results iterating into progress. This is the only hope for moving education forward.

Agile and linear planning

There are two distinctly different kinds of planning.

In linear planning we start with our assumptions usually in the form of predictions and expectations about the future, but they are assumptions nevertheless. Then we form a plan based on these assumptions, not taking into account uncertainties that will certainly occur as we move forward. And then we try to implement the plan meaning trying to follow it based on our assumptions.

And because change is a constant in the universe things change. Unpredictable things happen unplanned. After we admit plan failure we either adjust or abort the plan. We hear people talking about following a plan it is usually code for linear planning.

In agile planning we start with our new unknowns. This is easy because every planning context is abundant with more unknowns than knowns. Out of these we form new questions and through these questions we gain new learning. Learning comes about through decision-making, research or some kind of experimentation.

Out of our new learning we then engage in new action which leads to another cycle of new unknowns, questions, learning and action. Agile planning is a cycle of iterations where questions and learning we take actions that are distinctively realistic because they're not based on assumptions but rather in the ever churning nature of reality.

3 reasons not to manage people

The whole business about managing people is interesting. The less we have to manage people the more space we have for leadership so teams can grow together and flourish. Teams grow together and flourish because they have good leadership not because they're being managed. The point of good leadership is to create a team that can manage its own learning, its decisions and its alignment.

The most vital sustainable level of motivation for teams is when teams work from intrinsic motivation. This means that on a daily basis they feel a sense of authorship over the way work gets done, the way they plan and problem solve, and the way they grow. Slow teams are slow precisely to the degree that they feel they need to be managed and that their leaders believe they need to manage them. Nimble teams are nimble to the degree that they have good leadership which helps them discover how to manage themselves in their work.

Among the many reasons not to manage people and provide leadership instead, here are three.

To engage their goodness

Goodness is the unique constellation of skills, abilities and knowledge each of us has that supports doing well in our work. In every team people have complementary goodness. Each person has a kind of goodness that represents goodness that others want to grow. People have a lot to learn from each other and teach each other. As leaders we do not have to be the ultimate source of all learning. What we know about learning curves is that people actually get better at something when they engage that goodness in helping others learn. So we accelerate a team's capacity for growth when we engage people through their goodness.

To share decisions

When we create an environment where knowledge is transparent and there's a culture of curiosity people can make decisions quickly and well together. As leaders we do not have to be the bottleneck for decision-making. When people are entrusted with decisions, they get better at decision-making, the team becomes more responsive and resilient and they become smarter together. In fact we all become smarter together when the team shares decision-making and we can make that possible as leaders.

To work by agreement

When we help the team learn how to work by agreement they manage their own tensions, disconnects and opportunities for alignment and collaboration. Working by agreement means they share awareness of when each other needs help, how they can help each other in their work, and how they can create and test agreements that they can all support in their work. Agreements create trust, alignment and velocity in the team's performance and growth.

Team trust through agreements

The importance of working by agreement as a team is based on the simple observation that we are either working from the tension of assumptions or from team constructed agreements. Agreements are shared commitments to what will work for all based on the realities that we work within.

Agreements build trust and trust is important because performance and creativity move at the speed of trust.

We can create some agreements as a whole team, as subgroup members of the team, or in one-to-one contexts. It is a good practice to keep these documented somewhere for reference so that we can work from the actual language that we create for our agreement. It's okay that several agreements do not get recorded because they're more on the basis of an understanding between and among us as a team.

The agreements grid demonstrates that there are four kinds of agreements that we can create as teams. There are general and specific agreements as well as immediate and tested. These four categories create a grid of four possibilities.

In this grid we can create general immediate agreements, specific immediate agreements, general tested agreements and specific test agreements.

A general immediate agreement is one in which we can just simply implemented without any testing because we have enough consensus in the team to go ahead with it. An example is that we agreed to use a certain kind of software app to update each other every day but it doesn't specify how we are going to do that, that it's up to each one of us to decide how we will do that, but we will according to agreement update each other in a daily basis.

A specific immediate agreement is one which again we can just simply implement without testing and it's one in which we specifically detail what the agreement is about. So and example would be that we not only agree to use the specific software app but we also agree to update each other first thing in the morning and at the end of business.

The general tested agreement is one which is flexible but is one that we actually go through testing, after which we critiqued the test in which we can or concerns and finally craft a general agreement that the team will implement.

The specific tested agreement is flexible and one in which we implement after testing and critiquing as a team.

The process for creating tested agreements whether general or specific is very simple. We talk about what matters to us as we work together considering things like communication and coordination, points of tension and disconnects, where things can get bogged down or where people can get overwhelmed.

We choose one that we want to start with and we together craft proposal which is a proposed agreement that we can test as a team for specific periods of time. It's important to ask people to voice any concerns, considerations or exceptions as we consider proposals. This makes proposals highly realistic and more engaging and more supported. We then test our proposals and get together for the critique. The critique is simply the questions of what went well and why and what might want to change based on our experience. We then tweak and if necessary retest the new proposal and then as a team implement what works.

The art of prioritization

In the art of prioritization we tend to either end up with a lot of conflict and tension or functional amount of alignment and momentum. This is true whether were talking about prioritization of actions or projects.

When it's a situation of conflict and tension what typically happens is that people prioritize according to the criteria of importance. This is the problem of asking people whose ideas are most important and it runs the risk of having everyone say each one's is the most important and so we have no functional prioritization just conflict and tension.

More functional way to approach this is by having people prioritize by sequencing rather than by importance. In sequencing we put things in the order in which they most logically need to occur. So for cooking a meal together and the main dish takes two hours to prepare and the salad takes 10 minutes to prepare we need to really start the main dish first because we don't have to start the salad until an hour and 50 minutes into the main dish. There's no value in delaying the whole meal by starting a salad first. The first main dish and then salad even though they're both vitally important to the meal. Importance is irrelevant to sequencing because sequencing has to do with the logic and timing of tasks in their interdependencies. Even though both the cake and its ultimate decorations are important we might consider decorations happening after we take the cake out of the oven rather than before we put the cake in the this is the art of sequencing the art of prioritization.

So we can save an amazing amount of time and planning if only go to do prioritization we do it from a position of sequencing rather than importance. Once people get this distinction it makes everything easier.

Two completely different planning approaches.

There are two distinctly different ways to approach planning of any kind. 

One is to move forward from our knowns and our weaknesses. Knowns include our facts and beliefs and weaknesses include deficiencies and gaps. This approach keeps our vision unclear and our momentum slow. 

The other way is to move forward from our questions and goodness. Questions include anything that's unknown, unresolved, undecided and unconfirmed. Our goodness includes our strengths, talents, abilities, qualities and knowledge. Focus on our questions and goodness is an accelerator heightening the velocity of our momentum in the clarity of our vision.

In any planning approach we move the rate of our questions and the quality of our progress is dependent on the engagement of our goodness.

The alternative to debate and discussion

When groups are trying to plan and make decisions together there is a tendency sometimes,and this is especially true for slow groups, to try to make progress from rotten questions. Rotten questions, as we covered in a previous blog post, are those that are old questions have no power to move us into new perspectives and possibilities.

Groups working from rotten questions get bogged down and implode in debate and discussion rather than data. Debating and discussing is the rehashing of knowns that gets us nowhere new.

We bypass the whole debate and discussion implosion by working instead from ripe questions that lead us into action. Action means leaving the room. It means leaving the room of discussion and debate and going out with our right questions to new ways of discovery, research, reflection, learning, exploring and assumption testing with our world as it is. Real data makes decision-making faster and better. It keeps us all on the same page rather than a page divided by debate and discussion which is assumption based. We are divided by assumptions and united by our data.

Nimble teams are mindful teams

It would be easy to argue that for teams to transition from being slow to nimble teams it takes to transition to greater capacity for mindfulness in their work. Everything teams can do to grow mindfulness and mindfulness habits accelerates their capacity for defining good, engaging their goodness, saying aligned and agile, and being creative and innovative. New levels of performance only possible with new levels of mindfulness.

What's important here is to understand the distinction between mindfulness and meditation. Meditation is concentrated focus. When not talking about that here even though that has relevance and importance and usefulness to performance and interaction. Were talking about is mindfulness which has Harvard researcher Ellen Langer suggests noticing differences.

These are differences in time and space. Being curious about what's new but shifting and exchanging. This is mindfulness we could do this in every aspect of our work without extraordinary rituals or taking time away from that we need to get done.

Preparing students for the future of work

If we're serious about preparing students for the workplace in the future we need to begin their connection to work early on in their learning process. This means getting them connected to local businesses and organization so that they could see what goes on in what they need to be prepared for in terms of character qualities and basic skill sets and mindsets. This is especially true when we are driving to grow a new generation of entrepreneurs. They need to be in the workplace volunteering, interning, observing and interacting. Workplaces can be amazing incubators for learning and education in ways that isolated school buildings and classrooms could never afford.

The possibilities of happiness at work

One of the ways we can think about the good we seek in our work together is to think about our definition of happiness and how important happiness is to us in our work.

Happiness is personal each of us has our own definition both in terms of the continuity of our experience across time and also situationally from one day one moment to the next. When will present with one another the present what happiness means at any point in time.

This whole process can begin in the conversation of when we feel at our happiest and what would make us most optimally happy at work. We especially want to pay attention to happiness as engagement, gratitude, resiliency, sense of connection and our capacity passion growth. These are all major drivers of happiness, meaning and well-being and our work.

Simplifying our sense of mission and vision

It's a good idea to think about brand as what our markets think about us. By our markets we mean both those who use the value we provide and those who could use the value we provide.

So certainly we can have brand intention about what we want people to say about us behind our back.

Many organizations look at mission as the business for him which translates basically into brand. This includes both our actual brand as perceived by the market and are intended brand.

One way to look at mission and vision is that mission is our current brand as it exists and vision is our intended brand. This makes for an easy and simple distinction which helps guide us in putting together our Agile Canvas.

 

Tech rollouts

It's easy to have an intention to roll out new technology to teams. In our case we have no hesitation to highly recommending technology apps like Trello, Slack and Google drive.

Like any kind of change and innovation the biggest obstacle we face is the force of habit. People are used to emails and useless meetings and reports. That's their comfort zone. What it takes to move them towards new technologies is going one step at a time aiming for progress rather than for the perfection of goal achievement.

Even when early adoptors are willing and interested in doing more, we can start by moving just one kind of email or conversation or meeting into any of these environments. Even just one transition and migration exposes most people to most of the functions they're going to use the scale into full use of all three.

Parallel to this whole effort of helping people see the benefits and unique advantages of doing so. The last thing we can do is realistically assume that people will understand immediately what the transition is about before we make it clear to them. It is also significant to involve them every step along the way in how the transition occurs.

 

Market listening

The significance of market listening is that it is the opposite of debating and discussing assumptions and predictions about what our markets are up to what they want and need from us. Because change is ubiquitous in our world and uncertainty is a given one thing we know about our markets is that their worlds are continuously shifting and changing.

The shifts and changes happen in ways we know in ways we don't know. It takes deep listening through inquiry and sometimes observation and direct experience with people in our markets to understand what they are experiencing achieving an enduring. This is clearly the opposite of speculation and endless conversation about what we think is happening with people in our markets.

What we need are ripe actionable clear questions about testing our intuitions our expectations and our assumptions. This means leaving our conversation and meeting rooms and getting out and talking to those we serve and those we could potentially serve.

The power of questions

There is a direct relationship between the quality of our experience and the quality of questions we work from.

Questions live on a continuum from unripe to rotten.

Unripe: they are premature, not ready to be useful; they have potential but need to be developed to be useful.

Ripe: they are useful, actionable in the present through research

Rotten: they are old and only capable of old insights; not useful

It only makes sense to work from ripe questions.

Voice engagement

When we're in idea growing, planning and decision making conversations, the quality of supportable outcomes depends on creating space for reflection and expression by all.

Just making sure conversations are new naturally prevents dominating and disappearing. 

The nextgen lens

One way to think about reimagining work Is through the lens of what we would want for the next generations of our children and grandchildren. For many organizations, this would be a new conversation. It means translating the good we want for them into the progress we could make in the present.

Can all leaders grow?

Whatever we believe about the growth potential of leaders or any specific leader, leaders grow when they're ready. That said some leaders will grow with their teams.

Readiness is motivation and optimism for growth in specific ways and contexts. Both are required. Coaching can help leaders connect with these, sparking and nurturing readiness. This is question based coaching. Storytelling helps.