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The Value of Experience

March 1, 2011 By 1 Comment

I have a friend who has held several senior level executive positions at very large companies over the past 20 years. She is currently looking for a job and, times being what they are, she finds that unless her experience completely matches up against the new opportunity, she’s not considered as desirable a candidate as someone else whose experience is a more perfect fit. As a strategy and innovation consultant, I’m frequently asked to provide referrals for work that is the same as the work I’m proposing to do. In effect, there is an assumption that my previous success can be replicated if somehow the situation is close enough and if I do exactly the same thing again.

We treat experience as extremely valuable – as if it embodies deep knowledge and insight and is highly predictive of success in the future. We believe that because someone has managed a particular situation in the past successfully, he or she is a better bet to achieve success in the future when placed in a similar situation. But what if experience at best is irrelevant and at worst is misleading? What if how we understand correlation is deeply flawed? What if the truth wears off?

If we define experience as the proven ability to achieve a particular result under certain conditions, it is analogous to the scientific principle of replicability which is a foundation of the scientific method. In a scientific experiment, recreating the conditions under which a particular outcome has been observed is supposed to yield the predicted outcome. But, scientists are finding is that this is not the case. In many scientific experiments, the probability that predicted outcomes will occur actually decreases relative to the number of times the experiment is recreated increases. This is called the decline effect.

Many of the obvious culprits – regression to the mean, publication bias, selective reporting – do not provide a satisfactory explanation for the problem (which is a BIG one for science). After all, if a fact is not a fact – that is, something true that remains true – then what are these things that are being observed? What is the truth?
Regression to the mean is a statistical phenomenon that common wisdom captures in the phrase “the law of averages.” So, any experiment that shows a big effect at first might be expected to show a small effect another time and then bounce around until the effects cluster about an average. However, for many experiments with statistically solid data sets, the data doesn’t regress to a mean, the data thoroughly degrades, for which there is no satisfactory explanation.
Publication bias is the tendency of scientific journals (or almost any publication) to prefer to publish research that supports previously published research. After some period of time, the insight becomes orthodoxy, and then these same journals are more open to disconfirming research. While this explains some of the reasons why certain scientific facts become enshrined and then discredited, it doesn’t explain early positive results.

Selective reporting is the perceptual bias that humans bring to observation. An example of selective reporting can be found in an experiment where scientists look for physical symmetry, which is supposed to be a marker for a preferred mate, in animal subjects. If the scientist knows that the observed subject has successfully mated and is looking for symmetry that is expressed in something as minute as tail feathers or whiskers, there is a predisposition to see it. Experiments that test the efficacy of acupuncture provide another window into the problem of selective reporting. During a 30 year timeframe, experiments were conducted in Asia and the US/Europe. All of the experiments in Asia supported the effectiveness of acupuncture and only about 60% of the US/European experiments reached the same conclusion.
The most disturbing new information that I learned about the scientific method was not that scientists and scientific publications are biased or that judgment based on beliefs turns out to be more important than decisions based on a so-called solid set of facts, but that the notion of a threshold for statistical validity, that a phenomenon’s occurrence is not likely to be caused by chance – the 95% probability level – was originally set because it made “pencil and slide-rule calculations easier.” And much research chases after achieving results that meets this criterion so that they can be treated as facts.

If it turns out that facts are slippery and no more solid than beliefs, how do we understand the value of experience? Our contention that experience matters derives from the scientific model of replicability. But that model is not as firm a foundation as we may have hoped. If we can’t rely on the scientific construct of replicability – find someone whose experience matches up precisely against the current situation to better predict a successful outcome – what can we rely on? Turning to science for answers means a long wait, because science is only now beginning to grudgingly acknowledge that it has a problem. Even though it is much more challenging, I believe that we need to acknowledge that we are not sure what the value of experience actually is and that we might be as wrong about it as much scientific research is turning out to be.

Source: “The Truth Wears Off,” Jonah Lehrer, The New Yorker, December 13, 2010

Filed Under: Decision-making, Leadership, Risk Management Tagged With: , ,

Dessert, Happiness, and Innovation

February 2, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Reading about the dessert revolution that was sparked in Barcelona a decade ago made me think about how limitations and the lack of them combine in subtle ways to unleash innovation.  Around the same time, I had come across the concept of synthetic happiness which also examines the interplay of limitation and freedom.  I began to wonder:  How much freedom and how much limitation create the optimal conditions for innovation?  Are happiness and innovation somehow related?

The dessert revolution was kick-started by the molecular gastronomy movement – the ascendance of chemistry in the professional kitchen.  Molecular gastronomy has been a rule-breaking phenomenon.  Rules like the order of tastes, flavors, and sensations in a meal: the rules that say savory comes before sweet and hot before cold.  Molecular gastronomy has appropriated the tools of industrial food-making and applied them to haute cuisine.  Tools that extract essential oils from fruits and flowers and tools that blow air into liquids to create foams are used to transform food and the experience of eating.  Suddenly, main courses are sweet and cold while desserts are savory and hot (one holy grail – hot ice cream).  Textures and flavors upend expectations and suddenly eating dinner is an adventure.

What is most interesting about the culinary transformation in Barcelona is that it emerged from the realm of the pastry chef in regions of the world where the pastry chef does not dominate the food culture and from individuals who are mostly the younger or youngest sibling in a family business.  As the younger or youngest sibling, these men were forced into the pastry chef role because it has lower prestige; the higher prestige roles went to the older siblings.  In this region of Spain, the culture of dessert had been limited to a few custards and cakes.  It is the antithesis of places such as France or Germany with dessert traditions that span tarts, creams, cakes, cookies, and more.   Stuck in the pastry chef role, but unburdened by a well-developed dessert culture, these young pastry chefs experienced both limitation and freedom and an explosion of wildly innovative desserts have emerged from their kitchens and spilled into the rest of the meal, putting Barcelona on the culinary map.   

What, you might ask, does innovation in Barcelona’s dessert culture have to do with happiness? 

Let’s start with a definition of happiness that comes from Dan Gilbert, author of Stumbling on Happiness. Gilbert differentiates between natural and synthetic happiness.  Natural happiness is how you feel when you get what you want – when you are not forced to face limitations.  Synthetic happiness is how you feel when you change your view of how much it really mattered that you didn’t get what you wanted – when you are face to face with a big solid wall that stands between you and your aspirations and there is no way around it.  In Gilbert’s TED talk (I encourage you to listen to it), one of his main points is that we believe that natural happiness is better than synthetic happiness. But evidence suggests that both kinds of happiness make us equally happy.  That turns out to be a very good thing because most of the happiness we experience is synthetic.  Few of us go through life without experiencing setbacks or bumping into limits. 

Gilbert then moves on to describe the series of non-conscious cognitive processes that allow human beings to revise our view of the meaning of certain experiences.  Gilbert calls this capacity a psychological immune system and it is essential to synthesizing happiness.  We might not need these processes so much if we weren’t also blessed with a capacity to simulate experiences before we have them thanks to our frontal cortex.  This unique aspect of our brain structure allows us to imagine outcomes from situations before we actually experience them and guides us to make certain choices.  For example, presented with a choice between eating mud or a nice warm buttery croissant, we will choose to eat the croissant because we imagine that we will be happier doing so (good choice!).  However, there are many more instances where what we imagine will make us happy and how happy we report feeling after we have had the experience suggest that we really don’t have a clue. 

Gilbert cites several different experiments – most of them share similar characteristics.  Groups that have what most people would call a lousy experience (becoming a paraplegic) and groups that have a terrific experience (winning the lottery) are basically as happy or unhappy as they were before the experience after some time has passed (sometimes as little as 3 months).   People who were generally happy before becoming paraplegics dig something positive out of the experience as awful as it is.  They synthesize happiness (make lemonade out of lemons).   Even in less dire circumstances, we tend to be poor predictors of what will make us happy.  And, as mentioned earlier, we tend to believe that natural happiness – not having to deal with limitations, having ultimate freedom – is better than synthetic happiness.  But, it turns out that this is not the case.

To demonstrate this fact, Gilbert describes another set of experiments in which students are allowed to select a print of a photograph that they can keep.  (I’m going to simplify the experiment design here, go to his TED talk for the more complete description.)  Some students are told that they cannot change their minds – they must keep the photo print they choose.  Other students are allowed to have several days to think it over.  You can probably already guess which group turns out to be happiest with their paintings several weeks later.  Yes, it’s the group that didn’t get to think it over; the group that had to deal with limitations.  Freedom to choose – the ability to make up your mind and change your mind – may be the friend of natural happiness but it is the enemy of synthetic happiness.

When we think about innovation we often imagine that it requires a completely unbounded intellectual space in which we are free to explore anything and everything, a space in which we will find something new and exciting.  Gilbert says that this is the prevailing view of natural happiness – it is something that we must find.  Somehow we believe that this approach – that of seeking in complete freedom – and the happiness and innovations that emerge from it are the best kind.  But what if another equally valid and productive path to innovation is more comparable to synthetic happiness?  The same path that the young pastry chefs in Barcelona experienced – faced with limitations and only afforded certain degrees of freedom.  That would be especially good news since few organizations operate without limitations.  Start-ups lack resources and established organizations have brands to protect.   How we synthesize happiness might provide an alternate way of thinking about how to pursue innovation – without contriving situations that bear little resemblance to the realities that most organizations experience.  If natural innovation requires being out of the box, perhaps synthetic innovation can be produced inside the box as long as the lid is open.  And, it is highly likely that they are both equally good kinds of innovation that will lead to happy results.

Sources:

Filed Under: Change, Innovation

Bye Bye Business Model

December 20, 2010 By Leave a Comment

It seems a fitting way to wrap up 2010 by looking at business models that are on the way out as we head into 2011.

Business models change without warning to those who are invested in them.  Standing outside of an industry looking in, it isn’t hard to see when big changes are in the works or to conclude that the way things are is not going to continue.  In a conversation with a former Chief Investment Officer of a foundation a few weeks ago I heard the phrase “expected surprise” which I think nicely expresses what I’m talking about.  While it may be close to impossible to predict when a change will occur, it’s not at all difficult to predict with certainty that it will occur.  Yet somehow, the argument among those cashing in on an existing business model shifts to knowing when it will occur which has the effect of kicking the can down the road.  If change isn’t imminent, then more important and pressing things take precedence, always.  Which is why when the change inevitably comes, it seems to have been utterly unpredictable and unknowable – a complete (unexpected) surprise. 

Story #1:  The book publishing industry.

The paper-based, time-intensive, highly complex process that brings us books has been convulsing for many years now, but the glue that has bound writers and editors and publishers and publicists and book sellers and even e-sellers of books and e-books is rapidly losing its stickiness.  In August 2010, Seth Godin, a prolific, best-selling author, announced his departure from his longtime publisher, Pearson PLC’s Penguin Group because “…his blog attracts an estimated 438,000 followers…” and that means he knows who reads his books.  “’Publishers provide a huge resource to authors who don’t know who reads their books…”, but that isn’t the case for Mr. Godin.  What are Mr. Godin’s plans for the future?  He’ll hire his own editor and someone who can format his book for electronic distribution and then, it’s up to him to decide how he wants to “package” up the work, how to price it, and how to sell it.  

While Mr. Godin thinks that there still is role for publishers, not everyone agrees.  An e-book publisher, Mark Coker of Smashwords, says that not only will major authors consider this approach, but also those mid-list authors who don’t get much marketing support from publishers.   Those who are not on any list are already in the business of self-publishing, self-promoting and self-distributing.  If top-list, mid-list, and not-on-a-list writers don’t need publishers – who does?

 Story #2:  Knowledge creation.

That’s right – knowledge creation.   When the developers of new knowledge (scholars and researchers) seek to publish their work in career-making academic or professional journals – the ones that christen what is and what is not knowledge – they participate in another time-intensive, complex, opaque process – peer review.  But even in the change-resistant halls of liberal arts academe, a big change has come to the business model of peer-reviewed articles.  A crowd-sourced approach has emerged.   

The Shakespeare Quarterly “posted online four essays not yet accepted for publication, and a core group of experts…were invited to post their signed comments on the Web site MediaCommons, a scholarly digital network.”  This process contrasts with the traditional method in which a hand-selected and small group of academics evaluate submissions anonymously over a period of time which can drag on for years.   And how did what is now regarded as the traditional process come to be?  Like so many traditions which are resistant to change, “[it]…is not so much a gold standard but an effective accommodation to the needs of the field.”   

Yet, the belief persists that democratizing the peer review is not in the best interests of academics.  Many hold fast to the dogma that only experts in the field can truly evaluate whether work makes a significant and unique contribution to the field.  This belief is anchored by the reality that to receive tenure, scholars must be published in peer-reviewed journals.  Only when the authors of the articles that underwent this new process were assured that, if accepted, their pieces would be counted as “peer-reviewed” were they willing to participate.   (Much like the process of ending foot-binding in China, the system (a set of practices) has to change in order to make change stick.   See a previous blog post Formula for Positive Change.)

Story #3:  Manufacturing by printer.

Order of magnitude cost reductions, extreme customization, and just-in-time production – the 3-D printer is bringing all of this to the manufacture of prosthetics, architectural models, furniture, fixtures, cars, and houses.  3-D printers deposit layers of material, often plastic or metal, one on top of the other, controlled by algorithms, to build up an object, layer by layer. 

Bespoke Innovations will use the technology to create customized prosthetics at about one-tenth the cost of traditional prosthetics which are, by comparison, generic templates.  Contour Crafting is using the technology to transform the business of building homes.   A 3-D printer that sits on a tractor trailer does away with most of the manual labor involved in the construction of the structure of the house by not only fabricating walls, but also structural supports and conduits for electrical, plumbing, and heating and cooling systems in one pass.  The Urbee is a completely printed car.  Kor Ecologic, the venture behind the Urbee, is using a volunteer-based, collective approach to bring the car to the market (you can make a donation via PayPal to fund the project).  The president and chief technology officer of Kor Ecologic (Jim Kor) says that the 3D printing technology “lets us eliminate tooling, machining, and handwork, and it brings incredible efficiency when a design change is needed…If you can get to a pilot run without any tooling, you have advantages.”

As the software required to create the design programs plummets in cost and the cost of accessing the printers puts them in reach of more commercial applications, a new business ecosystem is developing in which designers use software to encode their visions and then send these programs to printers whose equipment produces them.  As entire classes of labor costs are removed from the equation, the dynamics of labor cost arbitrage are rebalanced making outsourcing to cheap labor countries which must factor in shipping costs less attractive.  What has seemed inexorable, the United States’ inability to retain its position as a dominant player in the manufacture of goods, might not be as much of a foregone conclusion as it once appeared.

Conclusion

These stories about systems that are in the midst of or on the cusp of radical disruption are all stories about expected surprise.  If you are willing to move outside of the system of which you are a part, and look at it as if you were an outsider, no matter what system you are part of, you would most likely see signs that big changes are coming.  If you subscribe to the idea of the expected surprise, then you know what happens to the rest of a business model when one key element undergoes a transformation. It’s like dominoes that are lined up in such a way that they connect ever so slightly with one another – when one falls, the others must follow.

Sources:

  • “Author to Bypass Publisher for Fans,” Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg, The New York Times, Tuesday, August 24, 2010.
  • “Scholars Test a Web Alternative to the Venerable Peer Review,” Patricia Cohen, The New York Times, Tuesday, August 24, 2010.
  • “3D Printing Spurs a Manufacturing Revolution,” Ashlee Vance, September 13, 2010, sourced on 12/17/10 at: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/14/technology/14print.html
  • “The Urbee Hybrid – the first 3D printed car,” Ariel Schwartz, October 29, 2010, sourced on 12/17/10 at :   http://www.fastcompany.com/1698943/the-urbee-hybrid-the-first-car-to-have-its-body-3-d-printed
Filed Under: Business Model, Change, Innovation

The Collaboration Cure

November 22, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Recently, a series of articles have appeared in which collaboration is offered up as the cure for what ails us – as a species, as a country, and as organizations. 

  • Collaboration (in the form of trade or exchange) is a form of cultural evolution – when practiced, ideas have sex.  
  • Our better than average position as a collaboration hub could be what keeps the US in its top economic position. 
  • Collaboration is the key to long term organizational health.

Matt Ridley, speaking at TED and blogging for Frog Design by way of FAST Company, provocatively states that ideas having sex is the bedrock of innovation.  (I say that ideas having sex = collaboration.)  Ridley argues that human beings in our capacity for trade or exchange beyond our tribe or clan are distinct from every other living creature on the face of the earth.  Other living creatures have cultures and pass on traditions, but these traditions remain within the tribe or clan.  Only human beings trade objects and ideas with those who live outside the boundaries of the tribe or clan.   This capacity to embed ideas in other cultures is analogous to the formation of genomes during sexual reproduction.  During procreation it gives rise to incredible diversity and vitality in the species, during trade or exchange the same occurs in human civilization.

Fast forward thousands of years and we have evolved to the point where everyone works for everyone else because no one knows enough about anything to make it on his or her own.  Ridley cites the pencil and the computer mouse as cases in point – very different technologies, but even in the mid 1800’s when something like the modern pencil came to be, no one person or company possessed sufficient knowledge to make a pencil.  Graphite had to be mined, trees had to be felled, machines had to be fabricated to shape the pencil and insert grooves for the lead.  The computer mouse is infinitely more complicated, involving industries spanning oil & gas, chemicals, electronics, and consumer retail.  As with the pencil, no one person or company knows how to make a computer mouse.   Radical collaboration (many ideas having lots of sex) has pushed innovation beyond the capacity of the human brain by uniting millions of human brains in a complex web of connections that is constantly evolving.  For Ridley, the computing cloud, with its limitless potential to connect all human brains will boost our innovation capacity even further by providing a totally accessible collaboration platform, freed from constraints of time, place, and (almost) cost.

Modulating downward from the computing cloud to the US economy, David Brooks in his New York Times editorial column, The Crossroads Nation, makes essentially the same point as Ridley that innovation will be the economic driver of success in the future.  But Brooks is more focused on the infrastructure of collaboration than on the act of collaboration itself.  For Brooks, America’s economic identity in the future might lie in the very openness and diversity that permeates our culture making us the ideal “hub” nation.  He quotes an essay by Anne-Marie Slaughter – “In a networked world, the issue is no longer relative power, but centrality in an increasingly dense global web.”   Collaboration flourishes in places that are free, but fair, where people can come together with relative ease to connect with ideas and resources.   Brooks wants America to invest in connections to cement our potential position as “the crossroads nation.”   If collaboration is the bedrock of innovation, then to be the “go-to” place/space for innovation means nurturing the United State’s potential to provide the infrastructure and cultural openness that create a vibrant collaboration hub.

Finally, an interview with Martha Samuelson, president and CEO of the Analysis Group, a consulting firm, speaks to what collaboration actually looks like on a day-to-day basis in a company.  Ridley and Brooks get you thinking, but Samuelson addresses the nitty gritty – how do you make it happen?  What encourages people to collaborate once the tools are in place?   To foster cooperation, the Analysis Group operates as one P&L even though they have 10 offices and multiple practice areas.  “We have a trust-based system for setting partner compensation, and it’s based on a belief that we’re in a long game together.”  Samuelson goes on to state that sometimes they get the compensation a little wrong in the short term, but “[t]he people who have stayed and thrived have been people for whom this collaboration issue is so important that they’re willing to leave some money on the table over it.” They are not a precision shop when it comes to getting it exactly right about compensation (which Samuelson notes is ironic since they are economists).   The Analysis Group gets greater accountability from individuals by measuring at the group level than it would if it measured at the level of the individual – current “best practice” in most performance management systems.  For people to pull together, to collaborate, they have to be in it together and being in it together means compromise and getting it approximately right (which means it is slightly wrong).  In practice, getting ideas to have sex is a messy, nearly right sort of thing that relies on goodwill and trust which take time to establish and can be extinguished in an instant. 

Collaboration is essential for innovation – at the level of the species, the country, and the organization.  Ridley believes we have what it takes as a species.  Brooks implores political leaders to embrace the moment and invest in a future in which the US is the collaboration hub par excellence.  Samuelson knows that for her organization, collaboration is so critical to success that even economists are willing to live with imprecise measurement.  Collaboration requires freedom to think and act, incentive to move beyond the boundaries of what is known and safe, an infrastructure to support exchange, a willingness to embrace messiness and uncertainty, and a very long view.   Does your organization have what it takes to innovate? 

Sources:

Filed Under: Collaboration, Innovation

Formula for Positive Change (Creating the New Normal)

November 2, 2010 By 1 Comment

If you’re PieLab, a café in Greensboro, Alabama that is the brain-child of design collective Project M, the formula for creating positive change in the world is simple:

PieLab = a neutral place + a slice of pie = conversation = ideas + design = Positive Change

Initially, what grabbed my attention about PieLab wasn’t the formula for positive change, but the fact that PieLab was envisioned as a kind of pop-up community center.  I had just come back from facilitating a visioning workshop where among the many ideas that were explored, the notion of pop-up facilities (inspired by the increasing prevalence of pop-up retail clothing stores and restaurants that have become possible because of the excess of empty retail space) was bandied about. 

The article suggests that applying the term pop-up “…implies that a concept may be too cutting edge to sustain.”   And, in the case of PieLab, that proved to be true.  PieLab’s story in a nutshell involved a mostly young group of visionaries who aspired to do good, descended on a disadvantaged town, and earnestly set about working their mojo.  They scored some early, modest successes, but failed to grasp the broader context in which they were trying to make change.  As a result, they slipped up and were forced to adjust to the reality that change is a long-haul commitment.  Most of the original team left and PieLab is now known informally as Pie – operating as a traditional cafe that is more integrated into the social and economic fabric of Greensboro.

I think that what the PieLab founders got wrong in their formula for positive change is that it doesn’t capture the element of the long-haul, uncertain process.  The end result of the formula is not positive change, but rather, the potential for positive change.   With that alteration, I think that the formula captures most of the necessary ingredients for change.

I set about applying it to my experience running a successful visioning workshop with a group of people who had never worked together before.  First, I thought about how a workshop devoted to organizational change and a café devoted to social change are similar and came up with these equivalencies:

  • PieLab = Safe, Secure Place/Space
  • Slice of Pie = Something to share/bond over/experience together
  • Conversation = High trust exchange
  • Design = Problem-focused questioning

My revised formula is this:

Workshop = Safe, Secure Place/Space + Something to experience together = High trust exchange + Problem-focused questioning =Potential for Positive Change

If it’s possible to create the potential for positive change (clearly in more environments than a workshop), what has to be in place to realize it? 

A special issue of the The New York Times Magazine devoted to women’s empowerment can be viewed as a series of inquiries into creating positive social change.  The approach that brought about the relatively swift (over the span of one generation) end to the practice of foot-binding in China is one notable example. 

 From my perspective, these are the major factors that led to changing the long-standing practice:

  • Understanding the larger system of which the practice/behavior is a part.
  • Creating institutions that support the changed behavior.
  • Positioning the change as outgrowth of the group’s natural positive progress, rather than a corrective response to failure.
  • Luck (or timing or patience)

Here’s a very condensed version of how the practice of foot-binding ceased in China:  Those advocating against foot-binding at the outset were Christian missionaries.  They invested the time necessary to understand the Chinese culture, learning the language and studying the texts essential to formal Chinese education.  The anti-foot-binding advocates formed relationships with influencers – leaders in the Chinese political and social structure.  China while continuing to believe that it was superior to Western civilizations had suffered military defeats at the hands of Westerners which caused some of its leaders to think about engaging with the West so that China would be better able to deal with global challenges.  

The anti-foot-binding advocates shared information from the West that convinced these leaders that Westerners thought that the practice of foot-binding was a sign of cultural and intellectual backwardness.   These leaders realized that such opinions would create a political disadvantage for the Chinese and they became vocal opponents of the foot-binding.  However, foot-binding was a requirement for marriage in China – so part of changing its practice had to include changing the practices surrounding marriage.  The anti-foot-binding advocates worked tirelessly to form a community of parents who pledged that they would not bind their daughters’ feet and they would not permit their sons to marry women with bound feet.   In this way, the anti-foot-binding advocates created a “new normal” which did not so much disrupt society as hurry it along in a positive direction.  Of course, none of this would have been possible if these factors had not occurred at the same time – which you can view as a matter of luck, brilliant timing, or long-suffering patience.

A formula shorthand that sums up how to realize the potential for positive change:

Realizing the Potential for Positive Change =  PieLab + No More Foot-binding in China = High trust exchange + problem-focused questioning + understand the system + the right change agents + luck = The New Normal

Sources:

  • Project M website
  • Pie + Design / Change, John T. Edge, The New York Times Magazine, October 10, 2010
  • The Art of Social Change, Kwame Anthony Appiah, The New York Times Magazine, October 24, 2010
Filed Under: Change

Do we need to rethink leadership?

October 13, 2010 By 1 Comment

A recent article in The New York Times, “The Boss is Robotic, Rolling Up Behind You,” describes mobile or telepresence robots that are being used in settings as diverse as hospitals and software design companies to get closer to delivering the promise of a hologram – bringing a real-time, interactive version of a person into a place when they are physically located somewhere else, usually hundreds or thousands of miles away.  The robots look nothing like a person – they are all clearly machines and from the photos appear to be about 4-5 feet tall, topped with video monitors that broadcast the operator’s face.  What’s so amazing about these robots is that over time, people begin to interact with them in the same way that they would if the operator were there in person. 

Knowledge and skill gained from building robots for the military to dismantle bombs and complete other dangerous tasks has allowed the companies that design and build them to develop a class of robots that do less complex tasks and are positioned in commercial markets at much lower price points.   It seemed to me as I read the article, that this is the classic disruptive innovation from below that Clayton Christenson described in his book, The Innovator’s Dilemma.  These robots are cheap (relatively speaking), have limited functionality, and it’s not exactly clear “what job they are doing” (it’s tempting to say that they deliver just-in-time expertise at the lowest possible cost, but still, I suspect we can’t yet know).   As a result, it’s not really clear what industries they will disrupt – commercial real estate?   Air travel?  And, it’s not really clear that they themselves will be the disruptive force.   Instead, it’s more likely that they are another point along a technology continuum that has created new organizing principles which change the possibilities for how we work together. 

I remember when the way in which I have worked for the past 20 years began to be possible.  In the late 1980s/early 1990s, low cost overnight delivery (Fed Ex), low cost information storage (floppy disks), and low cost real-time information transmission (the fax machine and the break-up of AT&T) converged to create a different set of possibilities for working.  At that time, I was working for a small (now it would be called a boutique) consultancy with locations in three cities on the east coast.  These technology and industry innovations meant that our work teams no longer had to physically be in one place to get work done, nor did the team members have to physically travel to exchange information rapidly.   And the changes kept coming – from floppy disks to CDs and CD-players to the internet to video chatting on a PC for free on Skype, to replacing the landline with a mobile phone and then with VoIP, from desktops to portable computers (lunchboxes) to laptops to netbooks to Blackberries to iPads.   Suddenly, I could be part of large company with a national position and work primarily from my home.  And now, I can be the hub of a one-woman consulting network working exclusively from my home office and in the future…who knows, have several robot/avatars that are activated at client sites to bring me inside their organizations so that I can work alongside project teams? 

All of the changing possibilities in the way in which work gets done made me wonder why there has been so little change in the way in which many large companies conceive of and implement leadership (which I loosely think of as providing the guiding force from within the organization).  When technology is moving in a direction that allows roles within work teams to be filled with the best talent from anywhere, why are leadership roles still embodied in one person over time instead of whoever is best at filling the role at various times?   Why haven’t dramatic changes in the possibilities for how we work together had a greater impact on the way that our organizations are led?

Most leadership theories examine the individual in the leadership role and the relationship between his/her competencies, skills, style and organizational success.   Very little of the leadership literature questions whether a leader has to be a single individual who is in a role for a fixed period of time or whether a leader can be a rotating cast of characters filling a role whose parameters shift frequently, even though this is what technology suggests is becoming possible.   Even Hersey and Blanchard’s situational leadership which proposed that leadership style needed to be relevant to the task at hand, didn’t propose that the leader him- or herself might need to be relevant to the task at hand.

Back in 1996, James Traub’s article about the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra captured my imagination because it presented a case in which leadership was not vested in a person, but was filled by different people at different times.   Traub asked us to consider in what situations “…the need for final authority is so overwhelming that the model of the benevolent dictator must apply” by challenging us with a case study of the orchestra which “…is a community of people dedicated to achieving a degree of unanimity that is almost unimaginable in a democratic society.”    The conductor-free chamber orchestra was conceived as an antidote to the extreme dissatisfaction most musicians who play in traditional orchestras experience.  “…[W]hile symphony musicians score extremely high on questions designed to measure ‘internal motivation,’ they rank seventh among thirteen occupations – right behind federal-prison guards – on ‘general satisfaction.’”  

Orpheus has developed an approach to playing music called “the core” which is a form of representative democracy.  “…[T]he executive committee chooses a concertmaster, and each instrumental section a representative for every piece; this group works through questions of interpretation and phrasing before the orchestra’s first full rehearsal.”  Those who have studied Orpheus and the Orpheus musicians themselves believe that the intensity and extremely high degree of musicianship that they achieve is because of rather than in spite of their unique approach to leadership.   This brand of temporal fit-for-purpose leadership places responsibility and authority with each musician not only for his or her own contribution to a particular piece of music, but also for the entire piece. 

A high level of commitment not only to the narrow contribution that each individual makes, but also to the outcome achieved by the group as a whole is the holy grail of employee engagement that almost every organization strives to achieve.   Resources are poured into organizational development – performance management systems, competency models, talent management, leadership development, strategic alignment – but rarely, if at all, is the construct of leadership challenged in this thinking.  Could this be one reason why the hoped-for results of these efforts are frequently disappointing and elusive?  Is it time to radically reconsider leadership in an age when technology is transforming the possibilities for working together and when organizations desperately need a highly engaged workforce?

Sources:

  • “The Boss is Robotic, Rolling Up Behind You,” John Markoff, The New York Times, September 5, 2010.
  • “Passing the Baton,” James Traub, The New Yorker, August 26, 1996.
Filed Under: Leadership

Counterinsurgency and Organizational Transformation

September 15, 2010 By Leave a Comment

What can be learned from counterinsurgency efforts in Afghanistan about transformation in large organizations?   After reading “A Civic War” in Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, I’ve concluded that the answer is “a lot.”

Let’s agree that organizational transformation refers to a wide-ranging overhaul of both structure and process and typically strives to embed a new or substantially recharged cultural norm(s) in the transformed organization’s DNA.   As a result, transformations invariably inspire resistance which comes in many different flavors.   There are those who put their heads down and wait for it to blow over; those who agree in public, but share their “concerns” in private; those who find fault with what is proposed and suggest that caution dictates more study.  And these are but a sampling of what might be otherwise called “insurgents.”   

Counterinsurgency doctrine proposes that insurgents emerge in response to transformation because the legitimacy of the current governing structure is questionable.  As a result, “’the primary objective of any counterinsurgent is to foster the development of effective governance by a legitimate government.’”   Most organizational transformations occur under the leadership of a new CEO who typically has installed many new executives (or has sometimes cleaned house completely).   For this reason, the legitimacy of the governing structure is questionable.  After all, it is new and can offer no proof that what is being proposed will succeed.

But, according to counterinsurgency doctrine, the most effective tactics for dealing with insurgents are frequently galling to those with power to command and control because “’the more force used, the less effective it is.’”  While you can give people their marching orders and even compel them to march, the more that these tactics are used, the more likely it is that the transformation will fail.  Successful counterinsurgency seeks to transfer the power to get things done to those who operate at the local level, building legitimacy at the top from the bottom-up.  The transfer of power is a process, carefully monitored and crafted with powerful incentives, but when the goal is a self-sustaining system, power to adapt and adjust must be distributed throughout the system.  

To whom is the power transferred?  In Afghanistan, it is going to people who are viewed as key local leaders, those willing to defy the Taliban (which can be thought of as the existing order).  In my mind, this is a step that most large organizations fail to take.  Much time and effort is spent insuring that key leaders at the top are in place, but much less time and effort is spent at the local level to insure that the same is true.   Key leader engagement at the local level strikes me as a significant contribution to successful transformation.  

Large organizations expend tremendous effort grooming people to lead at the top, but very few focus on how people lead at the bottom which may be why many transformations fail to take hold.  Without strong leadership at the bottom, the local level, that has the power to adapt and adjust, it simply takes too long for guidance to filter down from the top.  In the interim, things fall apart, reverting back to old habits.  Counterinsurgency doctrine seems to suggest that for a governing structure to be legitimate, it must be supported by governance that reinforces the interdependence and ability to act of those at the top, the middle and the bottom.

Source:  “A Civic War,” James Traub, The New York Times Magazine, June 20, 2010

Filed Under: Decision-making, Leadership, Strategy

Frameworks: Evolution’s way of solving problems

August 16, 2010 By Leave a Comment

During one four-year period early in my career, I had the privilege of working with a leader in the then nascent field of family business consulting.  Barbara Hollander was among those pioneering the application of family systems theory (in her case, Bowen Theory) to business dynamics as a way of helping family-owned business leaders better plan for and manage growth – especially transitions from one generation to the next.   Barbara taught me that having a framework is useful because it brings messy and seemingly chaotic situations into focus.  Frameworks provide boundaries and a point-of-view for understanding the gestalt of a situation (what is important, how things fit together or are related, etc.)   

For a much longer stretch of my career, I’ve been surrounded by consultants who are essentially applied mathematicians – people who use mathematical models to approximate the way the world works in an attempt to make recommendations about which actions should be taken today that are most likely to achieve desired outcomes in the future.  These models are also frameworks, but unlike the kind of frameworks that Barbara Hollander applied successfully to family business systems, many of these models have failed.  They have proven themselves to be too narrowly construed and brittle to accommodate extreme events and their unforseen consequences in an increasingly inter-connected world.  As a result, some of these applied mathematicians are expanding their frameworks to blend human judgment with output from mathematical models – a marriage of mathematics and social sciences that to-date has produced behavioral economics and will undoubtedly have more offspring.

At the same time, psychologists, neuroscientists, and artificial intelligence technologists are uncovering astonishing new insights about frameworks.  Human beings appear to be hard-wired with a built-in problem-solving framework that starts as a survival mechanism and blossoms into a highly nuanced point of view as we develop.  “One lesson from the study of artificial intelligence (and from cognitive science more generally) is that an empty head learns nothing: a system that is capable of rapidly absorbing information needs to have some prewired understanding of what to pay attention to and what generalizations to make.  Babies might start off smart, then, because it enables them to get smarter.”(1)   So, frameworks appear to be literally encoded in our DNA and are an essential element in acquiring insights that help us solve problems.     

Frameworks are even more important when a group needs to problem-solve.  When we talk about “getting everyone on the same page,” we are talking about formulating or using a common framework to give us at least a partial understanding of the problem.  A common framework does the same thing for a group that it does for babies – it makes us collectively smart enough to use all of the attributes that  individuals and groups apply to solving really difficult problems.  Andrew McAfee’s latest blog describes these attributes in a post about how individuals and groups have achieved superior results developing solutions to the extremely complex problem of protein folding (a topic beyond the scope of this blog post – see McAfee’s blog to get a reference to the paper in Nature on protein folding that he is discussing).   

Attributes that make human beings good at solving complex problems:

  • Spatial reasoning or seeing solutions (is this the DNA of frameworks?)
  • Intuition or hunches that are the result of experience
  • Adaptivity or the ability to change our approach
  • Language which biases us towards collaboration – an effective way to build and share knowledge
  • Self-organization, a kind of group adaptivity that uses each person’s capabilities to collectively solve problems 
  • Competition, a motivating desire to win or be recognized in some way spurs us on

As the problems we face become increasingly complex, we appear to be well-suited as a species to solving them.  Our DNA-encoded frameworks hard-wire us for ”smartness” and we possess a strong set of complex problem-solving attributes.   In addition, we seem to be evolving our ability to invent frameworks in ways that blend soft judgment  and hard data to achieve closer approximations of the true problems at hand.  With this more “true” picture of the problem, we have a much better chance of zeroing in on a more effective solution.

(1)     “The Moral Life of Babies,” Paul Bloom, The New York Times Magazine, May 9 , 2010

Filed Under: Collaboration, Decision-making

Leadership in the Age of Influence

August 2, 2010 By 1 Comment

Influence.  Control.  The line has been drawn in the sand.  There are some who say that the battle has already been won or lost, depending on your point of view.   However, few would dispute that a battle is underway.  Twitter, Facebook, YouTube:  Are they the three Furies of Social Networking sent to torment those who still believe that what it means to be in charge, in control, has not changed irrevocably?

In an article(1) describing how social networking is changing the face of diplomacy in the State Department,  Hillary Clinton’s position is described as weighing in on the side of the benefits being greater than the risks of engaging in experiments that test the value of “…breaking through..by having people who are doing the work of our government be human beings, be personalized, be relatable.”   The article showcases two relatively young members of the State Department who share not only information about their work, but also about their personal lives via Twitter, and who encourage others to engage with them to share information about the political goings on in their parts of the world.  Compared with the tightly controlled environment in which most State Department communication takes place, this is the Wild West. 

Supposedly, before the explosion of social networking, information and people could be controlled.  Information leaks could be kept to a manageable minimum and if they did occur, broad dissemination could be contained.  Now, the argument goes, that kind of control is gone.  Proof point du jour:  WikiLeaks recently scored a major coup with the publication of tens of thousands of pages of intelligence reports that have been dubbed the Afghan War Diary (http://wardiary.wikileaks.org/) detailing the bleak state of US Army efforts in that beleaguered country from 2004-2010.  While not top secret, the information is secret and its release has prompted investigations and news coverage. The information has generated global debate which has doubled and redoubled the information that is available on the topic, an information spiral that has achieved a self-sustaining momentum, spinning out of control. 

These developments in the public domain are affecting what goes on inside organizations.  It is no longer acceptable, productive, or even possible to rely exclusively on control as a means of eliciting desired behaviors among employees.   As someone who is interested in the confluence of knowledge management, radical collaboration, and innovation within organizational systems, the tension between control and influence seems to be stirring the pot when these three domains intersect (or collide).   As information becomes harder to control, it seems that people are harder to control as well.  Those who are charged with stewardship of an organization’s brand may understand that they are no longer in control when it comes to consumers or customers, but they are now grappling with the challenge of not being securely in control when it comes to employees either.  For this reason, understanding what it means to lead in the age of influence seems acutely important. 

Fast Company is running a project to find “2010’s Most Influential Person Online”    (http://influenceproject.fastcompany.com/).  This is what it says about influence: 

Real influence is about being able to affect the behavior of those you interact with, to get others in your social network to act on a suggestion or recommendation. When you post a link or recommend a site, how many people actually bother to check it out? And what’s the likelihood of those people then forwarding it on? How far does your influence spread?

So, what are ways that people affect the behavior of others through influence rather than control.  What really is the difference? (2)

  • Control – to exercise restraint or direction over; dominate; command.
  • Influence – to move or impel to some action.

Control implies that individuals have no real choice or freedom to act, influence suggests that they do, that there is no negative consequence if individuals choose to act in a way other than what is being suggested.  Perhaps this is why in most organizational systems, reality lies somewhere between control and influence.  In many cases, there are very real, very negative consequences to not acting in the way that is being suggested.   Career development may evaporate, demotion or sidelining may occur – the subtle or not so subtle understanding may develop that it’s time to go elsewhere.   If in organizational systems today, reality is more complicated than being on one side or the other of the control/influence divide, how do leaders determine when it is best to impel rather than compel?  Can both be true at the same time or then is neither true?  How do leaders inspire if they must also control? 

The fact that the answers to these questions are murky is one reason why there is debate about how open and transparent organizations must be to succeed in the marketplace and society.  It makes choices about knowledge management, innovation, and radical collaboration complicated and fraught with uncertainty.   Learning how to lead in the age of influence might well be the next critical leadership skill.

Sources:

  • (1) Digital Diplomacy, Jesse Lichtenstein, The New York Times Magazine, July 18, 2010 
  • (2) Definitions from www.dictionary.com 
Filed Under: Collaboration, Innovation, Knowledge Management, Leadership

Salted Licorice and the Secret of Customer Delight

July 14, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Hibiscus Beet.  Boccalone Prosciutto.  Chocolate Smoked Sea Salt.   These are all ice cream flavors.  They are sold at Humphry Slocombe in San Francisco, an ice cream parlor for people who are bored with traditional ice cream, people who want to be surprised, and I would claim, delighted.  Its founder/owner, Jake Godby, opened the store in 2008.  His goal was to “create a challenging ice cream store.”  In the New York Times Magazine profile that describes Godby and his ice cream parlor, Godby is likened to an artist. 

In the past six months, I have been working with the latest incarnation of a tool that helps organizations understand, serve, and ideally delight their customers – the customer journey map.  A process flow that charts a customer’s experience with purchasing and using a product or service and elicits expectations about that experience; the customer journey map highlights areas where the experience fails to meet expectations.  When it is compared with the organization’s process map, the differences bring into relief another set of disconnects.  The claim is made that by uncovering these failure points and disconnects between expectations and experience, an organization can rethink how and what it delivers to customers so that it can exceed expectations and delight them.

Reading about Jake Godby’s ice cream parlor made me wonder about that.   Can you engineer delight?  Can people tell you what will delight them?  It seems highly unlikely to me that Jake Godby’s customers could have told him that they wanted to be challenged by an ice cream store.  Maybe they were tired of fudge ripple and chocolate chip mint ice cream, but could they have dreamed up Peanut Butter Curry?  Could they have known that they wanted to be surprised and intrigued by wacky dessert options in the form of ice cream that made them think differently about ice cream altogether?

Delight seems to contain an element of surprise, something that is hard to predict, something that changes your perception of an experience.   Mapping the customer experience and hearing what customers expect can tell you how to conform to those expectations, but how do you exceed them?  How do you engineer delight?   You need to understand what your customers expect, of course, but you can’t expect them to tell you what will delight them.  Customer journey maps are one step on the journey to delight.  They are part of the critical understanding of “what is” and hint at “what might be.”  But they only provide hints.  Achieving and maintaining delight demands alertness, adaptability, and artistry from organizations.  You will have to take risks.  You will have to experiment.  Like Jake Godby, you will have to be an artist, a provocateur.  You have to be willing to fail.  If Jake Godby fails, he gets immediate feedback, the costs are manageable, and he lives to innovate another day (apparently porcini ice cream was not a hit).   What would it mean for your organization to offer the equivalent of Strawberry Candied Jalapeno?   Delight or disaster?    Is your organization willing to take the big gamble of innovation to achieve customer delight or does its risk tolerance set a limit at meeting expectations?

Sources: 

Filed Under: Customer capital, Innovation
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