I haven’t done a Post-It doodle for a while so here is one of my favourites that I was reminded of this week. Recently my organisation has mandated that we complete a 360-feedback exercise – which for me generated some anxiety – even fear. Why? What am I scared of? Could it be that I am unconsciously aware that there are things I am not very good – I just don’t know what they are - and by asking for feedback I will become painfully aware of my limitations? What then? Will I able to address those weaknesses or do I have to live with them? And even more painful to consider; what if I believed I was good at something because I have been doing it so long it has become second nature - and I discover that what I was good at is not longer appropriate or needed? Wow! That is not going to feel much fun. I think I’ll avoid the whole process by keeping too busy to complete the online questionnaire. That strategy did not work of course – a head-in-the-sand approach often doesn’t. So I completed it and await my fate with trepidation.
The model of learning that I have sketched is called the Conscious-Competence model or - as I prefer to call it – Capability Awareness. We all start bottom left – not aware of our lack of capablity – let’s call that Blissful Ignorance. Then something happens that challenges our complacency - we become aware of our lack of capability – ouch! That is Painful Awareness. From there we have three choices – retreat (denial), stay where we are (distress) or move forward (discovery). If we choose the path of discovery we must actively invest time and effort to develop our capability to get to the top right position – where we are aware of what we can do - the state of Know How. Then as we practice or new capability and build our experience we gradually become less aware of out new capability – it becomes Second Nature. We can now do it without thinking – it becomes sort of hard-wired. Of course, this is a very useful place to get to: it does conceal a danger though – we start to take our capability for granted as we focus our attention on new challenges. We become complacent – and as the world around us is constantly changing we may be unaware our once-appropriate capability may be growing less useful. Being a wizard with a set of log-tables and a slide-rule became an unnecessary skill when digital calculators appeared – that was fairly obvious. The silent danger is that we slowly slide from Second-Nature to Blissful-Ignorance; usually as we get older, become more senior, acquire more influence, more money and more power. We now have the dramatic context for a nasty shock when, as a once capable and respected leader, we suddenly and painfully become aware of our irrelevance. Many leaders do not survive the shock and many organisations do not survive it either - especially if a once-powerful leader switches to self-justifying denial and the blame-others behaviour.
To protect ourselves from this unhappy fate just requires that we understand the dynamic of this deceptively simple model; it requires actively fostering a curious mindset; it requires a willingness to continuously challenge ourselves; to openly learn from a wide network of others who have more capability in the area we want to develop; and to be open to sharing with others what we have learned. Maybe 360 feedback is not such a scary idea?
What we need is a healthy crisis!
Some years ago I read a book by John Kotter that was about how organisations get themselves into and out of trouble. Recently I read another book by Patrick Lencioni called “Silos and Politics” which carried similar message - some successful organisations become “unfocussed” and “complacent” to the extent that internal silos and petty politics come to occupy more time than improvement – the politics and silos become a self-sustaining name-shame-blame-game. John Kotter showed that the path out of this unhealthy state is to realise that organisational survival is at risk – and this provides a compelling reason to align efforts - usually in a dramatic and desperate exercise in organisational survival. The term Kotter used was “burning platform” which is somewhat prophetic given the ecological, economic and political catastrophe that is currently unfolding in the Gulf of Mexico. Patrick Lencioni takes a different tack on the same problem - and concludes that organisational silos are the result of the attitudes that filter down from the boardroom. He advocates looking for the “symptoms” and if observed in an organisation then it is a good time to engineer a crisis to focus attention on delivering one collective, qualitative, and audacious goal – something that the whole organisation will need to collaborate to achieve and one that provides a “win” for everyone. So, before you get sucked into an unhealthy life-and-death crisis look for the early symptoms that indicate the need to create a healthy crisis: one that will require just as much passion and creativity to resolve and which will lead to a sustainable breakthrough improvement!
Are we SELFish enough?
Improvement is selfish behaviour because if I improve (win) it must be at the detriment (lose) of someone else, surely? Ergo – improvement is not an attractive behaviour because we don’t like to be regarded as selfish by others. What assumptions are driving this conclusion? The obvious one is the zero-sum-game assumption – that if I improve (win) then everyone else must deteriorate (lose). The Laws of Conservation give us this idea - energy is conserved, momentum is conserved, money is conserved (that’s what accountants are for – to balance the accounts). But do the Laws of Conservation also apply to qualitative measures such as happiness, fun, curiosity, sadness, anger, fear? If I am having fun does that imply that someone else must be angry? Our intuition suggests ”no” – if we can both be having fun and we can both be angry then the Laws of Conservation does not apply to qualitative measures siuch as feelings. Therefore, if we focus attention on qualitative improvement then we can be selfish so long as we conciously abandon the Win-Lose constraint and consciously adopt the Win-Win goal. Selfishness is OK if your goal is qualitative improvement for everyone. Win-Win-Win.
Sounds great! The trouble is when we look around us we don’t seem to see the Win-Win-Win principle in action very often. What’s missing? Our quantitative measures obey the Conservation Laws, our qualitative measures do not so maybe we are confusing the two somewhere? What measure can be viewed as both qualitative and quantitative? Time maybe? Time is a definitely a quantitative metric and ”Time is Money” is a familiar phrase that equates these two quantities. When it is MY time we are referring to it feels different and “Quality of Life” is a phrase that springs to mind. So is that where I am confusing quality and quantity? When I am talking about my time and my life – my lifetime. Is it OK for me to be selfish with my life-time so long as the goal is a Win-Win-Win one?
What is so Funny?
One line from the Simpson’s Movie that made me laugh was when Bart says “Dad, this is the worst day of my life!” to which Homer replies “Worst day <dramatic pause> so far!”. If Bart had said “Dad, this is the best day of my life!” and Homer had replied “Best day <dramatic pause> so far!” it would not have been funny – it would have sounded cheesy. Why is that? What does this tell us about how we can sometimes confuse humour and pleasure? If we laugh when we are unexpectedly confronted with someone else’s emotional distress (the basis of slapstick humour); and we also laugh when we see other people laughing; and we also laugh when we have our expectations exceeded (the basis of surprise parties) then by simple association of the feeling (pleasure) with the behaviour (laughter) we have a recipe for collectively laughing at someone else’s distress. More sinister is that we can unconsciously plan to derive laughter (and by association pleasure) by deliberately engineering distress for others. Humour, like any process, can become sick.
Why do we need Two Ears?
What a curious question! You can hear just as well with one ear as two so that’s not the reason. Your glasses would fall off obviously though ears evolved long before glasses so that’s probably not the reason. Just in case you lose one by accident? That sounds reasonable but then why don’t we have a have a spare heart or spare brain too – they are more critical organs? Physiologists will explain that you need two ears to accurately determine the direction that a sound is coming from – and you do that by detecting very slight differences between what one ear hears compared with the other. What a neat bit of biodesign! So what relevance does this have for Improvement Science? Well, to improve a process or system you need to listen to two separate voices – the Voice of the Customer (VoC) and the Voice of the Process (VoP) – and if you compare them the slight difference points you in the direction of improvement. The problem is, when there is a big difference the two sounds interfere with each other and we cannot hear either clearly. In that situation we adopt a policy of selective deafness – most choose the Voice of the Process because it can be measured objectively; a few choose the Voice of the Customer. What results is disagreement because they are hearing different things. Confusion becomes conflict.
With this insight one way out of this impasse might be for everyone to use both ears alternately: everyone listening to the Voice of the Customer for a while and then everyone changing channel and listening to the Voice of the Process for a while, and so on. The direction of improvement would become visible and the steps needed to align the Voices would emerge naturally. The two voices are trying to tell us something and we only need two ears and to learn to use them.
Some fabulous new SPC software, called BaseLine© is now available – it’s designed for organizations and individuals who see the advantages in having people use a standard performance charting tool that’s statistically robust yet straight forward to use even for the uninitiated. As well as being highly accessible, at under £50 it is easily the most inexpensive option now available.
There is even a time-unlimited FREE version.
BaseLine© is obtainable via http://www.valuesystemdesign.com
How might some people be offended by performance charting?
The idea behind BaseLine© is that most every organisation is these days awash with time-series data, usually held in spreadsheet form, yet very little of it is used to diagnose systemic change. Even people who are held accountable for performance are often unaware of the gold that lies beneath their feet – or if they are aware, are for some reason reluctant to make use of it. Because BaseLine© is so accessible – there really is no longer any reason to avoid using SPC, but wait ..
.. observing those who are taking the plunge it’s becoming clearer to me where this reluctance might be coming from. Whilst some of it is due undoubtedly to low organisational expectation, I’m detecting that some of it is also due to low self-perception of capability, and some might even be because BaseLine© somehow confronts the personal value-set of particular managers. Let me refer to these value sets and capabilities as “memes”(1) and allow myself the luxury of speculatively labelling each one – so that I can treat each as a hypothesis that might later be tested – to see if the accumulating evidence either supports or refutes it. So here goes ..
1. The “Accountability-avoidance” meme – Those comfortable and skilled enough to hold a senior position may still however be inhabited by this meme, which can actually apply at any level in an organisational hierarchy. To most people it is an essential underpinning of their self-esteem to be able to feel that they’ve personally made a contribution whilst at work. It’s safer therefore (at least unconsciously) to be able to avoid roles for which any direct or personal performance measurement is attached – and there are plenty of such roles.
2. The “anti-Management” meme – According to this meme there’s something dehumanising about asking anyone to manage a process that delivers an outcome to someone who might appreciate it. Those who embody this value-set may also think that Management sounds altogether too boring when compared to Leadership since not much good happens unless people can feel good about it, and people have to be led to achieve anything meaningful and lasting. If there’s any management to be done it should be done by the followers.
3. The “anti-Control freak” meme – People holding this meme tend to dislike the whole idea of control, unless it’s the empowering of others to be in control – and even this may be considered too dangerous since the power to control anything can so easily be abused.
4. The “anti-Determinism” meme – Inside this meme Albert Einstein is considered as having completely supplanted the Newtonian “predict and control paradigm” as opposed to having merely built upon it. Life is viewed as inherently uncertain, and there’s a preference for believing that little can be reliably predicted, so it’s best to adopt an “act first/ ask questions later” approach. Deepak Chopra fans for example will know that “the past is history, and the future a mystery” and that therefore almost any form of planning is repellent – instead, emergence is the thing most highly valued.
5. The “Numerophobia” meme – so widespread is the tendency to avoid numbers, it may be easier to think of this as a syndrome rather than a meme – indeed, in the extreme it is a medical condition called “dyscalculia.” Whilst few people readily admit to being illiterate, there are many who are relatively happy to announce that they “don’t do numbers” – and some have even learned that it pays to be proud of it. In one recent UK study 11% were designated illiterate, but 40% innumerate.
6. The “iNtuitives rule” meme – People who are inhabited by this meme are those who may well feel comfortable weaving (even spinning) their story without the benefit of data that’s been fully “sensed”. The Myers Briggs Type Indicator – scores around 25% of people as N (iNtuitive), the remaining 75% being Sensors – who prefer to look for and absorb data via their 5 senses, data that to them feels tangibly “real.” On average around 12% people score as having N/T (intuitive thinking) preferences – yet exec teams & boards often score at more than 50%. Is this because they have had to become comfortable feeling disconnected from the customer interface, or because they were always that way inclined and therefore gravitated towards the apex of the hierarchy?
7. The “anti-Science” meme – According to this meme even the fact that I’m labelling these value-sets/ memes at all, will be seen as being antithetical – regardless of whether it might in some way prove to be a useful scientific device for advancing knowledge. People in organisations may behave in a way that’s anti-science in that tasks and projects are typically carried out in a Plan-Do-Review sequence – unaware that Plan-Do-Study-Act represents the scientific method in action, and is an entirely different paradigm.
8. the “protect my group or profession” meme – According to this meme, people are confident that they know what they know – and have spent several years of their life being trained to acquire that knowledge. They less aware of the extent to which this has formed their mental maps and how these in turn direct their opinions. When in doubt, reference is made to the writings and utterances of their personal or professional gurus – and quoted verbatim, frequently out of context. When a new tool arrives, the default position is: if I don’t recognise it, it should be rejected – until one of the gurus authenticates it.
Wow, when I started the list I didn’t think there would be as many as eight.
Individuals and organizations that are already, or can become, comfortable with applying the scientific method in their organisations – and personally – as a system, will see the profundity in a tool like BaseLine©. Others will miss it altogether, and one or more of the memes listed above could be preventing them seeing it. I’ll continue to collect more data, both sensed and intuited, and report on my findings in a future blog.
One source of test data will of course be the comments I solicit from readers of this blog, so having read these labels and descriptions, do you notice any reactive feelings? If so, can you accurately describe what you feel most confronted by? I’d be delighted to hear from you.
(1) Richard Dawkins coined (or adapted) the word “meme” in The Selfish Gene (1976) as a value set, or a postulated unit of cultural ideas, symbols or practices – which can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals or other imitable phenomena. It’s sometimes used synonymously with the phrase “world view.” Clare Graves then made the Value meme (vMeme) a core concept in his Spiral Dynamics model – see Beck D.E & Cowan C.C. : “Spiral Dynamics – Mastering Values, Leadership, and Change” – 1996
Improvement implies change; change implies learning; learning implies asking questions; and asking questions implies both humility and confidence. The humility of knowing that their are many things we do not yet understand; and the confidence of knowing that there are many ways we can grow our understanding. Change is a force – and when you apply a force to a system you meet resistance. The natural response to feeling resistance is to push harder; and when you do that the force of resistance increases. With each escalation the amount of effort required for both sides to maintain the stalemate increases and the outcome of the trial is decided by the strength and stamina of the protagonists. One may break, tire or give up …. eventually. The counter-intuitive reaction to meeting resistance is to push less and to learn more; and it is more cost-effective strategy.
We can observe this principle in the behaviour of a system that is required to deliver a specific performance – such as a delivery time. The required performance is often labelled a “target” and is usually enforced with a carrot-flavoured-stick wrapped in a legal contract. The characteristic sign on the performance chart of pushing against an immovable target is the Horned Gaussian – the natural behaviour of the system painfully distorted by the target. Our natural reaction is to push harder; initially we may be rewarded with some progress and with a Herculean effort we may achtually achieve the target - though at what cost? Our front-line fighters are engaged in a never-ending trial of strength, holding back the Horn that towers over them and that threatens to tip over the target at any moment. The effort, time, and money expended is out of all proportion to the improvement gained and just maintaining the status quo is exhausting. Our unconscious belief is that if we weather the storm and push hard enough we will “break” the resistance, and after that it will be plain sailing. This strategy might work in the affairs of Man – it doesn’t work with Nature. We won’t break the Laws of Nature by pushing harder.
So, consider what might happen if we did the opposite? When we feel resistance we pull back a bit; we ask questions; we seek to see from the opposite perspective and to broaden our own perspective; we seek to expand our knowledge and to deepen our understanding. When we redirect our effort, time and money into understanding the source of the resistance we uncover novel options; we get those goldern “eureka!” moments that lead to synergism rather than to antagonism; to win-win rather than lose-lose outcomes. Those options were there all along – they were just not visible with our push mindset. Change is a force – so May the 4th be with you.
Can you See a Story in the Data?
I often hear the comments ”I cannot see the wood for the trees”, ”I am drowning in an ocean of data” and “I cannot identify the cause of the problem”. We have data, we know there is a problem and we sense there is a soluton; the gap seems to be using the data to find a solution to the problem.
Most quantitative data is presented as tables of columns and rows of numbers; and is indigestable by the majority of people. Numbers are a recent invention on a biological timescale and we have not yet evolved to process data presented in that format. We are visual animals and we are very good at seeing patterns in pictures. Another recent invention is spoken language and, long before writing was invented, accumulated knowledge and wisdom was passed down by word of mouth as legends, myths and stories. Stories suggest solutions. So why do we have such difficulty in extracting the story from the data? Perhaps it is because we our ears to hear stories that are communicated in words and we use our eyes to see patterns in pictures. Presenting raw data as symbols just doesn’t work as well. To see the story in the data we need to present it as a picture and then talk about what we perceive.
Here are some data – a series of numbers recorded over a period of time - what is the story?
47, 55, 40, 52, 55, 70, 60, 43, 51, 41, 73, 73, 79, 89, 83, 86, 78, 85, 71, 70
Here is the same data converted into a picture. You can see the message in the data … something changed between measurement 10 and 11. The chart does not tell us why it changed – it only tells us when it happened and what to look for – anything that is capable of causing the effect we can see. We now have a detective story and our curiosity is aroused. We want an explanation; we do not like to not know. We want to understand, we want to learn, we want to improve. (For source of data and image visit www.valuesystemdesign.com).
