People uninterested in the future

When we invite people and teams to dream out as far as they can into the future some flourish in the invitation and some express disinterest. The disinterest can be because of a lack of familiarity with the process. It can be because they resist consideration of the future because they do not know how to manage complexity and uncertainty intrinsic in it.

The opportunity is to help them learn how, new questions, they can turn the discomfort of complexity and uncertainty into inspiration for the present. Until we help them learn this they will work without the advantage of inspiration from the future they would like to see possible. Until we help them learn this they will work with a sense of things happening to them in their work rather than them making things happen. This is the transition from helplessness to agency.

The value of direct experience

We have become so accustomed to talking about things at work that we take for granted the talking will lead to meaningful new ideas and new action and new outcomes. Talking is often the rehashing of things we already know and therefore have no power to lead to things that are new. New comes from new kinds of direct experience with things like our goodness which includes our strengths, our dreams and alignments.

It is through this kind of direct experience that evokes new possibilities, energizes and inspires us and cultivates our growth together.

Are bosses intrinsically smarter?

Everyone on the team brings to the table a unique configuration of experience, knowledge, abilities, connections, ideas and questions. It is an irrelevant comparison to make about whether one person or another smarter than everyone else when in fact when a team is aligned people are smarter together. This implies smarter than any individual boss might be or strive to be.

This has practical everyday implications. When we rely on the collective intelligence of the group we listen better and collaborate more frequently and effectively. We grow more together.

Knowing our why

What does it mean to bring our whole self to our work in our lives?

It means knowing our why. Our why is the unique sense of contribution we want to make to our world that flows from our personal narrative, our goodness and our dreams. When we know our why we bring all of ourselves in particular our best selves to each moment. We are focused, inspired and connected. We show up with courage, intuition and creativity.

Why deadlines don't (really) matter

In spite of the continued superstitious belief in the power of deadlines most are not met. Whether we set our own or others set them for us they either drive us crazy and cause costs to exceed benefits or we simply experience the remorse or blame in our failure to meet them. It would be nice if deadlines mattered but in truth they often don't.

What does matter is how clear we are in become on the good we seek and the tempo of our momentum toward that good. When we achieve things within satisfying timeframe it's because of the tempo of our momentum not necessarily the timeframe of our motivation. When we get things done on time it's because of this tempo. When we don't get things done on time it's because we're out of tempo we simply lack the momentum necessary for the timing we desire.

So instead of wasting time talking about deadlines we should be talking about how we can create momentum, what that looks like and how we can sustain it with frequent check ins and huddles.

Conscious success

An important distinction regarding success the distinction between conscious and unconscious success in unconscious success we create an achievement or least experience and achievement and do zero reflection on what exactly we did to help bring it about. Included in this zero reflection is the practice of superstitious explanations, credit and blame.

Conscious success occurs when we actually determine using data the real causes of our achievements. This often entails testing and retesting our hypotheses about the conditions of our success through future experiments and experiences. We know we have achieved conscious success when we can intentionally replicate an achievement. Until we arrive at conscious success we manage largely by hope and optimism.

To a large degree when slow teams get stuck in their performance it can have less to do with how often and how they fail or even why they fail in more to do with their lack of creating conscious success from their achievements.

Do teams need a shared future?

The indicators that teams lack a shared sense of the future are many. They appear from the outside to be disorganized, distracted and in disarray. From the inside they feel chaotic, overworked, unfocused, unengaged and uninspired.

Without a shared sense of the future teams lack a sense of direction and at the same time resist imposed direction. They cannot be easily bribed nor threatened into coherence.

When teams have a shared sense of the future they act with strong and flourishing cultures of trust, creativity, optimism, resilience and momentum. It's not a very complicated process. All it takes is dreaming out into the future in the realization of what we would love to make possible in translating this into actionable short-term actions, learning and projects. Perhaps it should be more complicated but it really isn't. And the only reason why teams do this is because they know how and they know the benefits.

Teams have everything they need to grow

The idea that teams have everything they need to grow is both simple and radical. This applies to both slow and nimble teams.

It's a radical suggestion because the norm in many organizations is to be fixated on deficiencies, weaknesses and gaps. This fixation is based on the complete misunderstanding of teams and what growth requires. Growth is not the absence of what's wrong with the team it's the active engagement of the team's goodness.

Every team has the strength in talents and abilities that it needs to be clear on the good it wants to seek and how to make progress towards that good with exactly what the team has to work with.

It is equally important not to get fixated on the teams perceived constraints, threats and obstacles. This fixation only creates a sense of helplessness that slows down and prevents growth. Progress is not a function of overcoming helplessness but instead of embracing and engaging our goodness in the service of good.

The real benefit of planning

The prime value of planning, as the shortest path to what we consider good, is unfolding new unknowns.

The most ubiquitous phenomenon in any kind of planning is the emergence of unknowns, some of which are actionable and others that are not. Each unknown represents at least one question we need to answer in order to move forward. Our momentum is equal to the rate at which we identify and answer these questions.

At the beginning of any process of planning we start with unknowns. Everything we do uncovers and unfolds new unknowns. This is true no matter how much our sense of predictability, certainty and commitment we have to any kind of actions in our planning process.

In planning that involves dreaming envisioning we dream and vision in order to discover new questions. And again this is true regardless of how much confidence we have in the certainty of our assumptions for the commitment to our convictions.

This is a very different way of looking at planning and certainly one which is far more realistic, agile and productive.

Why intuition makes sense

When it comes to decision-making whether simple or complex intuition has distinctive advantage over conscious analysis, debate and deliberation. It pays off to understand and cultivate intuition.

Intuition is that subtle sense or gut feeling that we have in making sense out of uncertainty. Our intuition can sense patterns at least five times faster than our conscious mind can. And they can actually anticipate events 2 to 3 seconds before they occur.

Practicing developing intuition is both useful and possible. Even in heady times of big data, intuition is especially beneficial in situations where our unknowns to a large degree outnumber and outpace our knowns.

Rethinking stress at work

Stress at work is considered to be a symptom of myriad contributing conditions. We associate stress with having things out of our control, having more demands that we have capacity, having problems and uncertainties, feeling undervalued or undervalued or devalued.

An alternative hypothesis is that stress is a logical result of working from the wrong questions. The evidence for this in part is found in the fact that when we feel inspired and engaged in our work it is when we are fact working from good questions.

The power of momentum

The more we come to understand the power of rhythm and tempo in any kind of activity the more we understand that the setting of deadlines that do not have a steady rhythm or tempo lacks power to make traction toward any kind of progress possible.

This is why agile project methodology that uses two weeks sprints has such enormous advantage over the traditional waterfall practice of sporadic deadlines that have no ready tempo.

The vast majority of deadlines in projects and planning are not and it is no coincidence given the fact that they do not represent a steady pattern of rhythm or tempo. Steady pattern of rhythm or tempo is something like deciding what's gonna be done every two days or every two weeks or every six weeks. Even within the micro world of tasks, checklists and subtasks momentum is steady activity where we feel we are in a redemptive flow on our way to starting and finishing each of these.

So the question that really drives momentum is the question of how often should we be working on this task or subtask checklist, rhythm and tempo?

Assessing for a culture of innovation

There is a specific set of questions that can guide us in determining the kind of culture of innovation that an organization has or doesn't have. These include:

Are we talking about how we innovate on a regular basis?

How free people feel to propose ideas, work on ideas and question the status quo?

How much time do leaders invite in meetings to generating ideas on new experiments in the business?

Other venues where people are invited to regularly bring in examples from outside their industry of current innovations?

Are we asking our clients and customers the big questions about their dreams, wishes and ways they want to grow their business?

These are just a few examples of questions that can help spark growing culture of innovation. A culture of innovation does not occur because of speeches and expectations by senior leaders. It does not occur through spending time consternating over strategic weaknesses and threats.

Not pretending we don't all have career futures

It's interesting to observe having so many organizations will go around pretending that no one has career dreams or plan or intention beyond their current job. There are no regular rituals where people talk about each other's sense of career future and so do not have the possibility or opportunity of supporting each other's trajectories.

It would arguably be a significant contributor to anyone's commitment to the organization if they felt committed by others in support of their careers. People have a reason to stay somewhere where they feel supported.

This is not tricky. It starts with not pretending anymore that people are in a job forever. There is some evidence that if people work on personal passions and dreams in any kind of job they bring more passion into their work and are therefore more engaged.

What performance metrics are good for

Establishing and maintaining performance metrics has one primary benefit for teams as they grow. They are good for provoking conversations about why exactly numbers increase, decrease or go flat.

This discovery of why performance patterns exist as they do requires that we work from data rather than assumptions. It takes no effort to get involved with all kinds of interpretations, predictions and explanations that may or may not be accurate and complete. This is why it's helpful to do this in groups rather than as individuals.

If we don't know why a certain pattern has occurred we are more likely to either repeat it or not be able to repeat it again in the case of failure or success patterns. In some cases we have to test a hypothesis before knowing for sure if it is in fact a contributing factor to any specific performance pattern.

The unique power of habits over plans

When our intention is to make progress on the dream we want to realize together it's important to understand that sometimes it's less about the plan that we manufacture for that dream and more about growing the kind of habits that makes momentum and progress possible.

These can be daily habits, situational habits, weekly and less frequent habits. It helps to know the science behind habit building so we can accelerate our growth curve when it comes to growing new habits and strengthening existing habits. Just the process of identifying required habits for our desired dreams empowers us in ways that plans cannot. This is not to say that habits always effectively substitute for good plans. It just means understanding the unique quality and power that habits have over what we call plans.

Our story's Northstar

Jeff Simmermon talks about how every story well told has a Northstar. One of the elements to a story that makes it relatable to others and us relatable to others is the demonstration of our want, need or desire that we have in the context of the story. These are the motivations driving us through the story.

There are two levels of motivation, internal and external. Our external motivation is what we're going after. Our internal motivation is why were going after it. He suggests the simple effective technique of talking about the "so that" for everything we express as an external motivation. We might say we started a trip so that we could explore a new city so that we could find new kinds of food and music so that we could add to our repertoire. Each so that creates a more clear and significant Northstar.

Our narrative Northstar then helps us build a story that engages and works.

Our knowledge learning questions

There are at least three dimensions to knowledge focused learning that we can do during the course of our work. These have to do with knowledge about our industry, markets and organization. The idea is to sustain a live list of learning questions related to each at any point during your work.

We can be curious about what's going on in our industry including new trends and challenges, new stories of success and failures. We can discover more about the experience, needs and dreams of those we impact and serve through what we deliver. We can learn more about what's happening inside of our organization so we better understand the big picture including those who impact us in those we impact.

All of this knowledge shifts and churns on a regular basis so it is important for us to keep our learning questions agile and iterative.

Breaking up with Slack

In Slack, I'm Breaking Up With You, Samuel Hulick pens a personal farewell letter to Slack, citing a string of disappointed expectations, mostly time management focused.

His points are certainly genuine and valid however the most important aspect of his perspective is how we expect technology to completely remove the need for social agreement in how we use these technologies. Our disappointment in the way technologies help or hurt us needs to be understood in the context that what makes them work is not there design but our agreements and how we will use them together.

We need  to agree on simple specific things like how often we're expected to visit and respond within these technologies as a team. We need to agree on when and how we use them and when we don't and instead use other media to accomplish our communication and coordination and knowledge sharing. It's in these agreements that make the technology work for us rather than the frustration of feeling like working for the technology.

Belonging

In his piece, The Beautiful Trap of Belonging, Richard Bartlett talks about how communities form from the experience of belonging. Intrinsic to belonging is the absence of status differences. Peter Block also talks about this when he says that nimble organizations are those where people share power, knowledge and responsibility. This is in contrast to slow organizations where power is divided into two classes of haves and have-nots.

One of the practical ways to get around status differences is rotating positions of what is typically called leadership. This is the rotation of common decisions, interactions outside the team and facilitating team meetings and projects. Empower, knowledge and responsibilities shared people feel sense of belonging and in doing so are able to show up with their best.