!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
Streamline Training & Documentation
Streamline Training & Documentation
Saturday, March 27, 2010
Timothy Murphy on Jazz Improvisation
Readers of this blog will know that I'm fascinated by the process of improvisation, a subject I discussed most recently here. I'm firmly convinced that one of the prime aspects of expertise is the ability to conjure up promising ideas on the fly. I'm also confident that this is a skill that can be steadily honed through practice.
The Spring 2010 issue of Johns Hopkins Magazine gives its last page over to a summary of how an accomplished jazz pianist in an ensemble undertakes to improvise. The summary is provided by Timothy Murphy, a keyboardist and teacher at Hopkins' Peabody Conservatory and at Towson University.
Murphy's offers these four bits of advice:
First, clear your mind. Get rid al all the words coursing through your head. Sit quietly about 30 seconds before putting your hands on the keyboard.
Improv is a conversation. Watch the facial expressions of the other players, listen to them, try to respond to what they do with the least predictable thing that's still musical.
If you suddenly go blank, just smile and keep pressing the keys until something good happens. Now and then, the best thing to "play" is silence.
A good solo should have a shape. Pay attention to the inner voice that's telling you that you've reached a high point and it's time to wind it down and get out elegantly.
The most direct business application of Murphy's schema is to meetings in which creative thinking is needed, for example, concerning the design of a new product or service or the solution to a problem. An individual's contributions don't have to be "the least predictable thing," but they certainly shouldn't be trite. Everybody should contribute, but no one should overwhelm the conversation. Soliloquies should "have a shape" and, even if the speaker doesn't end elegantly, he or she should not run on.
Generating Business Value from IT III: A Case Study
As a way of bringing together the concepts discussed in my two previousposts on generating business value from IT, I'd suggest reading a December 2007 case study (pdf) by Jeanne Ross, director of the MIT Sloan School's Center for Information Systems Research and Cynthia Beath, a professor emerita at the McCombs School of Business of the University of Texas at Austin.
The case abstract gives this overview of the case:
Pacific Life is a diversified financial services company with a history of autonomous business units. Pacific Life had five independent divisions, including Life Insurance, Annuities and Mutual Funds, and Investments. These divisions served different customers and responded to different regulatory and market requirements. Pacific Life executives embrace decentralization as the best structure for capturing excellence in the individual businesses, so they are willing to sacrifice some potential efficiencies. But while they are usually willing to forego the benefits of a more centralized organization structure, they are not willing to assume any unnecessary risks. This case describes how the company governs shared IT services and enterprise risk management to limit its risk exposure while reaping the benefits of decentralization.
Cameron Cosgrove, the vice president for IT in the Life Insurance Division, explains how Pacific Life decides which IT services will be centralized and which will be located in the business divisions:
Where the divisions have IT requirements that are unique to their core business and they need flexibility to have that independence to just GO, we've put those services into the divisions. Where the need is common and can be shared and the consensus is it's a commodity, and competitive advantage isn't really going to be derived from there, then the focus becomes running that service like a utility with low cost and reliability being the drivers — that's what ITS [the group providing IT shared services] is supposed to do for the divisions.
A key part of the decision-making structure is a set of nine Enterprise Architecture Groups (EAGs), whose role, as spelled out in a Pacific Life internal document, is to "create economies of scale, reduce support, maintenance and training needs, improve quality while reducing complexity, and optimize reusability throughout the company." Ross and Beath explain that "EAGs prioritized and scheduled initiatives to improve, upgrade or harmonize ITS's technology assets or services ... [and] secured funding for ITS-related initiatives."
Providing overall guidance is Pacific Life's Information Technology Council (ITC), which approves "the operating budget for ITS, prioritizing any projects that ITS proposed to improve its services, along with other enterprise-wide initiatives that required ITS to make infrastructure investments or process changes." A key responsibility for the ITC is implementation of "policy decisions flowing from Information Security, BCP [Business Continuity Planning], Compliance and Audit and their respective steering committees that had implications for ITS. These policies often drove the need for strategic ITS initiatives."
In sum, "Together the ITC and EAGs generated some of the benefits of IT centralization without centralizing all of Pacific Life's IT assets."
In 1973 Mark Granovetter, a sociologist now at Stanford, published a paper, "The Strength of Weak Ties" (pdf),1 in which he distinguishes between strong ties between individuals, i.e., relationships in which the individuals are friends, and weak ties, i.e., relationships in which the individuals are mere acquaintances.
Granovetter then goes on to argue, "Weak ties are more likely to link members of different small groups than are strong ones, which tend to be concentrated within particular groups." The significance of this is that weak ties can serve as bridges between social networks, and thereby give individuals in one network access to information beyond what is already known amongst their friends.
For instance, if someone is looking for a job, tapping acquaintances can provide additional leads beyond those that friends may be aware of. Or, if a community is trying to organize for collective action (Granovetter uses the example of threatened destructive urban renewal), it will have more success if weak ties facilitate the uniting of multiple closely knit networks within the community.
In a business setting, weak ties that act as bridges are valuable in any situation in which tapping expertise outside a team will help the team accomplish more, do a better job, and/or achieve results faster.
In the early '80s, Granovetter undertook a review of empirical studies testing the hypotheses in his 1973 paper. The review was published in final form in 1983, and you can read it here.2
__________ 1 Mark Granovetter, "The Strength of Weak Ties," American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 78, No. 6 (May 1973), pp. 1360-1380.
2 Mark Granovetter, "The Strength of Weak Ties: A Network Theory Revisited," Sociological Theory, Vol. 1 (1983), pp. 201-233.
I can't say I'm sold on the broad feasibility of "reality mining," a quantitative technique for tracking people's relationships and behavior developed by Alex (Sandy) Pentland, a professor of media, arts, and sciences at MIT. Reality mining uses electronic sensors to collect the data, which is then analyzed to identify patterns that are influencing performance.
The two videos below provide an overview. The first explains how "honest signals" — defined by Pentland as "unconscious human behaviors that give reliable insight into our relationships and attitudes" — are gathered and analyzed electronically. For more detail, you can turn to Prof. Pentland's 2008 book, Honest Signals: How They Shape Our World .
The second video presents clips of Prof. Pentland responding to questions concerning Honest Signals.
Data collection via sensors that record a person's location, body movements, tone of voice, etc., raises obvious privacy concerns. In an article published in 2007 in Booz Allen's strategy+business magazine, author Mark Buchanan lists Pentland's suggestions for dealing with the privacy issue in a business firm, which include:
... that the technology ought to be used on a voluntary basis, with individuals adopting it because they learn the benefits that it brings for both themselves and the company. An organization could store information on individuals’ own personal computers, rather than in a central location. It might also give people the opportunity, at the end of each day, to review the data that’s been recorded about their activities. They could have the option of deleting anything they’d prefer to keep private. The devices might be fitted with an additional button that would erase, say, the last 10 minutes of data, or data collection might be strictly limited to teams, time frames, and workplace settings where there has been explicit agreement in advance to allow the analysis. Although all these possibilities reduce the amount and quality of data that would be gathered, some steps along such lines will be crucial for giving people confidence that their privacy is being protected.
I leave it to you, after watching Prof. Pentland in the videos, to decide whether or not he oversells his concepts. As I indicated at the beginning, I am not convinced that his "sociometric" techniques have the broad application he claims. For instance, any alert business manager knows, without checking data collected by electronic sensors, that employees often need help in matching their styles to the expectations and preferences of those with whom they work, both internally and externally. On the other hand, I find Prof. Pentland's description of an application like the fuel economy game quite credible.
A couple of days ago, Joe Hodas, senior VP – Brand Communications at a Colorado marketing agency, published a column in Advertising Age that offers a checklist of ten do's and one don't that will help you "advance your career witout selling your soul."
In edited form, Hodas's ten principles are:
Nothing replaces hard work.Effective hard work, that is. You do need to produce valuable results.
We all have a personal toolkit — know yours and how to use it. Identify and apply your strengths. Keep strengthening your strengths.
It's about teamwork, but know who is and isn't on your team. Be an upstanding, savvy participant in the office politics you will inevitably be dealing with.
Don't throw any fits. Outbursts are unprofessional.
Decide how much you can take before you bail. "A career is like a relationship, so make sure you're putting as much effort into trying to fix the problems as you put into feeling bad about them."
Earn your raises and promotions. Hodas is "a firm believer that raises are for the work you've done, and promotions are for the work you can do."
Individuality is to be respected — as long as you're still part of the team. "Don't be afraid to stand out, but do make sure you don't alienate your teammates in the process."
Always try to add something smart to the discussion. And be ready with a rationale for what you are saying. I would argue that "because" (or its equivalent in your own language) is one of the most beautiful words you can use.
Sometimes you have to raise the volume in order to be heard. If you feel strongly about something — and are all set with your "because" statement — speak right up.
Have a perspective on the past, present and future. This is the most agency-oriented of Hodas's points, but it still can readily be applied in other industries: "It's not enough to do well today. Your boss wants and needs to see that you have a broader outlook on where you / the client / the work / etc. has been, is now and will be going."
Always be that ray of light in your boss's/ co-worker's day. This is among my favorite precepts. Remember: What you say and do in a particular situation is a statement of what sort of person you are. So be sure what you say and do reflects the you you want to be.
If Hodas's advice seems commonsensical, there's a reason for that. Principles for handling oneself well generally are a matter of common sense. The challenges are to know what to focus on, and to recruit the strength to be consistent in actually following the principles you swear by.
Elinor Ostrom's Research on Management of Common Resources
You can get an overview of Elinor Ostrom's work on "self-organizing and self-governing forms of collective action" in an interview (pdf) she gave Paul Aligica in 2003.
Elinor Ostrom talking in Stockholm about getting "Beyond the Tragedy of the Commons" (2009) (Stockholm Resilience Centre)
In the interview, Ostrom explains the gist of her thinking:
Academics, aid donors, international nongovernmental organizations, central governments, and local citizens need to learn and relearn that no government can develop the full array of knowledge, institutions and social capital needed to govern development efficiently and sustainably. The sheer variety of cultural and biological adaptations to diverse ecological conditions is so great that I am willing to make the following assertion: Any single, comprehensive set of formal laws intended to govern a large expanse of territory containing diverse ecological niches is bound to fail in many of the areas where it is applied.
Improving the abilities of those directly engaged in the particulars of their local conditions to organize themselves in deeply nested enterprises is potentially a more successful strategy for solving resource problems than attempting to implement idealized, theoretically optimal institutional arrangements. There is plenty that national government officials can do to help a self-governing society. They can provide efficient, fair, and honest court systems, effective property right systems and large-scale infrastructure projects — such as national highways — that cannot be provided locally.
Ostrom emphasizes the importance of viewing self-organized groups as complex adaptive systems and of recognizing the value of polycentric governance.
Complex adaptive systems are composed of a large number of active elements whose rich patterns of interaction produce emergent properties that are not easy to predict by analyzing the separate parts of a system. One can see them as consisting of rules and interacting agents that adapt by changing the rules dynamically on the basis of experience. ... [S]ocial scientists have yet to develop many of the concepts needed to understand the adaptability of systems. ...
Many of the capabilities of complex adaptive systems are retained in a polycentric public enterprise system. By "polycentric" I mean a system where citizens are able to organize not just one but multiple governing authorities, as well as private arrangements, at different scales. Each unit may exercise considerable independence to make and enforce rules within a circumscribed scope of authority for a specified geographical area. ... Self-organized resource governance systems, in such a system, may be special districts, private associations, or parts of a local government.
...
Serious empirical research has now shown that polycentric systems tend to generate higher levels of output at similar or lower costs than monocentric systems governing similar ecological, urban, and social systems.
Another, more recent overview of Ostrom's work is provided in the video below, which records the 8½-minute talk she gave earlier this year at the Stockholm Resilience Centre.
(Background information on Ostrom's Stockholm talk is here.)
Now-retired professor Geert Hofstede of the Netherlands is renowned for his development of a five-dimensional model of culture at the national level. His model is based on research he conducted while employed at IBM (the first four dimensions) and on subsequent research done by Chinese scholars (the fifth dimension).
It is important to note that Hofstede's data are averages across individuals within a particular country. He readily acknowledges that any given individual may depart significantly from the averages for his/her country.
Hofstede's five dimensions are:
Power Distance Index (PDI) — "... the extent to which the less powerful members of organizations and institutions (like the family) accept and expect that power is distributed unequally."
Individualism (IDV) vs. Collectivism — "... the degree to which individuals are integrated into groups. On the individualist side we find societies in which the ties between individuals are loose: everyone is expected to look after him/herself and his/her immediate family. On the collectivist side, we find societies in which people from birth onwards are integrated into strong, cohesive in-groups, often extended families (with uncles, aunts and grandparents) which continue protecting them in exchange for unquestioning loyalty."
Masculinity (MAS) vs. Femininity — "refers to the distribution of roles between the genders ... The IBM studies revealed that ... men's values from one country to another contain a dimension from very assertive and competitive and maximally different from women's values on the one side, to modest and caring and similar to women's values on the other. The assertive pole has been called 'masculine' and the modest, caring pole 'feminine'. The women in feminine countries have the same modest, caring values as the men; in the masculine countries they are somewhat assertive and competitive, but not as much as the men, so that these countries show a gap between men's values and women's values."
Uncertainty Avoidance Index (UAI) — "deals with a society's tolerance for uncertainty and ambiguity ... It indicates to what extent a culture programs its members to feel either uncomfortable or comfortable in unstructured situations. ... Uncertainty avoiding cultures try to minimize the possibility of such situations by strict laws and rules, safety and security measures, and on the philosophical and religious level by a belief in absolute Truth ... The opposite type, uncertainty accepting cultures, are more tolerant of opinions different from what they are used to; they try to have as few rules as possible, and on the philosophical and religious level they are relativist and allow many currents to flow side by side."
Long-Term Orientation (LTO) versus Short-Term Orientation — "Values associated with Long Term Orientation are thrift and perseverance; values associated with Short Term Orientation are respect for tradition, fulfilling social obligations, and protecting one's 'face'."
If you visit www.geert-hofstede.com, you can review graphs of how various countries stack up on Hofstede's dimensions, some assessed using the four-dimensional model, others using the five-dimensional model.
The graph directly below shows the overall average levels, on a scale of 0-100, for the five-dimensional model. Then, as examples of the national readings, I've reproduced the graphs for China and the USA, two countries increasingly involved in bilateral dealings, both commercial and governmental.
It seems that John Baldoni is a man after my own heart. In a June 22 blog post, he argues that
Explanation is a key attribute of leadership communications. Leaders know to inject their communications with verve and enthusiasm as a means of persuasion, but they also need to include an explanation for the excitement. What does it mean and why are we doing it are critical questions that every leader must answer with straightforward explanations.
Not only does Baldoni recommend taking a straightforward tack, the approach I myself consider most appropriate when making an argument or launching an initiative, but he goes on to suggest the Is/Is Not way of clarifying what one is saying, also an approach I endorse for its effectiveness is helping people grasp what they need to understand in order to coordinate their efforts with others.
Finally, Baldoni points out that you, in the role of leader, need to tell people what action you expect them to take so that they are contributing to advancing the new initiative, solving the problem the organization is facing, or otherwise addressing the issue you have been discussing.
In the surprisingly fluffy Summer 2009 issue of the MIT Sloan Management Review — they seem to have been sucked into the camp that swears by abridgement and abbreviation (the curse of Twitter) — an article I found appealingly substantive addresses the question of how to manage virtual teams.
As summarized in their first exhibit, the benefits (somewhat edited) are:
Heterogeneous knowledge resources
Utilization of cost advantages
Access to diverse skills and experience
Knowledge about diverse markets
Ability to have people working more or less around the clock because they are in different time zones
The liabilities (somewhat edited) are:
Language differences
Cultural differences
Difficulties in establishing common ground
Fewer face-to-face interactions
Greater difficulty in achieving good teamwork
The key finding Siebdrat, Hoegl, and Ernst (SHE) report, from their research into the workings of twenty-eight software development teams in Brazil, China, Denmark, France, Germany, India, and the US, is that the balance of benefits vs. liabilities tends to favor dispersed teams under certain important conditions.
These conditions are that a team's task-related ("hard") and socio-emotional ("soft") processes be well-managed. SHE report:
"[T]hose processes that are directly task-related are the most critical for the performance of dispersed teams. Specifically, virtual teams that had processes that increased the levels of mutual support, member effort, work coordination, balance of member contributions and task-related communications consistently outperformed other teams with lower levels. ... Moreover, dispersed teams that had high levels of task-related processes were notably able to outperform colocated teams with similar levels of those same processes despite the physical separation of their members."
On the other hand, "dispersion carries significant risks: Those teams with poor task-related processes suffered heavily with increased dispersion."
With respect to socio-emotional processes, "organizations must ... ensure that team members commit to the overall group goals, identify with the team and actively support a team spirit." The quality of these processes, in and of themselves, does not differentiate performance of dispersed and colocated teams. However, SHE suggest that building robust socio-emotional processes supports achieving high quality of task-related processes. For example, with good team cohesion, it is probably the case that knowledge is transferred more completely, and conflicts within a team are more readily resolved.
SHE describe five dos and don'ts of managing dispersed teams:
Don't underestimate the significance of small distances. E.g., team members located on different floors of the same building actually tend to be less effective and efficient than teams whose members are on the same floor and than teams more widely dispersed. Only teams with members on different continents perform worse on average.
Emphasize teamwork skills. This means recruiting people who are inclined to play well with others, and providing training to help team members strengthen their teamwork skills.
Promote self-leadership across the team. This is necessary because of the difficulty a designated leader is likely to have in intervening effectively when members of a dispersed team are experiencing conflict or other difficulty. "For a virtual team to succeed, members generally need to be aware of the difficulties of dispersed collaboration and find effective ways to overcome those obstacles on their own." Training can help.
Provide for face-to-face meetings. For instance, a project kickoff meeting in which team members are all assembled in one place can make a real difference in how quickly they begin to function effectively.
Foster a global culture, a mindset "in which people see themselves as part of an international network. ... [M]anagers and team members need to recognize and frame their company as such, communicating the international nature of the organization's operations and markets."
SHE cite practices of companies like Nestlé, General Electric, IBM and SAP, such as sending staff on assignments in foreign countries. SHE also suggest providing inter-cultural training. The intended outcome of such measures is "development of diversity-friendly attitudes and the ability to work in different contexts, which in turn help employees cope with the challenges of distance when working on virtual teams."
I'll close by noting that this research, while quite interesting and suggestive, needs replication in order for an organization to draw on its findings and recommendations with full confidence.
__________ 1 WHU stands for "Wissenschaftliche Hochschule für Unternehmensführung” — Scholarly/Scientific University for Business Management.
An earlier post discussed the work of Nobelist Daniel Kahneman, one of the fathers of behavioral economics, a burgeoning area of research.
Behavioral economics departs from certain fundamental assumptions of neoclassical economics, notably the assumptions that
People invariably make rational decisions.
Markets are self-regulating.
In an article in the July-August 2009 issue of the Harvard Business Review, Dan Ariely, a professor of behavioral economics at Duke University, highlights findings from his research of particular significance for business managers.1
In his article, Ariely is looking to help managers "defend against foolishness and waste" that result from irrational behavior. He focuses on two behavior patterns that he has studied experimentally:
Cheating — People on teams tend to engage in mutually reinforced departures from ethical behavior. Managers need to counter this tendency by reminding teams of the organization's ethical requirements, a practice that has been shown to significantly reduce cheating.
Revenge — "If someone who works for you upsets a customer — even in ways unrelated to the job — you will very likely pay the price. Even the smallest transgression on the part of an employee can ignite the instinct for strong revenge against the employer, regardless of who is at fault."
Experiments show that apologizing can significantly dampen the impulse to wreak revenge (assuming the transgression is not repeated to such a degree that the customer decides the apology is insincere). Companies can also monitor sites like Twitter to pick up complaints and respond to them promptly.
Ariely recommends that organizations invest in behavioral experimentation because doing so "can radically improve decision making and lessen risk." He offers several examples, such as running a pricing test for a new product.
Ariely explains that "the goal [of such a test] is not simply to find out the optimal price but also discover how people arrive at a decision to buy at that price." He goes on to caution that a company should "consider also how the introductory price could influence the perception of value for a long time." Think iPhone pricing, which started at $600 and has since come down dramatically. __________ 1 For an extended treatment of Ariely's work, you can see his 2008 book, Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape Our Decisions.
The June 2009 issue of the American Economic Review has a notable article by Gary Charness (University of California - Santa Barbara) and Marie-Claire Villeval (University of Lyon, France) that offers evidence that older workers, on average, are no worse than younger workers in terms of cooperativeness, competitiveness, and acceptance of risk. In fact, Charness's and Villeval's evidence suggests that older workers tend to perform better than younger workers when team cooperation is needed.
Charness and Villeval summarize their findings as follows:
Our results show first that seniors [defined as workers over 50] are more cooperative than juniors [defined as workers under 30], in the sense of making more contributions to team production. Second, we see no evidence at all that seniors are more risk averse in financial decisions. Third, seniors react to incentives and the competitiveness of the environment about as strongly as juniors. These three results are found in both the field and laboratory environments. Finally, we observe beneficial effects in the field from having working groups in which there is a mix of juniors and seniors, since working seniors increase their contribution when they know they are interacting with juniors; this suggests that there are indeed benefits in maintaining a work force with diversity in age. In addition, workers at the two firms in our study reveal a preference for being in age-heterogeneous groups. Overall, the implication is that it may not be wise to exclude seniors from the labor force; instead, defining additional short-term incentives near the end of a worker's career to retain and to motivate older workers may provide great benefits to society.
Of course, this research comes with caveats concerning its generalizability (e.g., only workers at two French companies were involved in the field portion of the research). Nevertheless, the statistical significance Charness and Villeval found suggests organization managers would be well-advised to give open-minded consideration to the potential older workers have to make substantial contributions to meeting organizational goals.
As a follow-on to yesterday's post, I'd like to mention the Miradi software that the Conservation Measures Partnership (CMP) and Benetech have been jointly developing since 2007. ("Miradi" is a Swahili word that means "project" or "goal.")
Miradi is designed to provide project teams with the essential features that they need to design, manage, monitor, and learn from their conservation projects, in other words, to practice good adaptive management. Currently, most conservation practitioners go through the adaptive management process either using pen and paper, or by cobbling together functions from a wide range of programs including flowcharting, mapping, project planning, spreadsheet, accounting, and other software packages. Miradi takes the right functions from each of these different kinds of programs and bundles them together in one easy-to-use integrated package.
To get a project set up in the software, the user works through a step-by-step process that matches the flow of the Open Standards for the Practice of Conservation developed by the CMP. Those steps are:
Once the conservation project is set up in Miradi, the project can be managed and tracked using the various data views the software provides.
The Diagram View shows the conceptual model underlying the project:
In a complete conceptual diagram, the overall project scope is linked to specific conservation targets that are each in turn linked to direct threats and the contributing factors that lead to these threats. The diagram also displays the strategies that the project team is taking to counter these threats, showing the key assumptions that the project team is making about how their actions will lead to their desired outcomes. The diagram also allows users to focus on the specific results chain that they predict will happen as a result of their interventions and to determine what indicators they need to measure to test these assumptions over time. [emphasis added]
Other views include the Threat Rating View, Viability Analysis (showing the status of each conservation target, e.g., "coral reefs"), Strategic Planning View, Monitoring View, Work Plan View, and Budget View.
In the June 2009 issue of the Harvard Business Review, Roderick M. Kramer, a professor of organizational behavior at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, explains a concept that he refers to as "tempered trust." This is an attitude toward trusting people that is prudent, rather than being either unduly credulous or unduly suspicious.
Kramer argues:
We can never be certain of another's motivations, intentions, character, or future actions. ... That said, there is much that you can do to reduce the doubt — in particular, by adjusting your mind-set and behavioral habits.
Kramer offers seven rules for tempering trust:
Know yourself. Ask yourself what your disposition toward trust is.
Someone who tends to trust people too readily must work on improving his/her ability to interpret the cues people send out, bearing in mind that just about "any indicator of trustworthiness can be manipulated or faked."
On the other hand, a person who is good at reading cues, but still hesitates to form trusting relationships, needs to develop more receptive behaviors.
Start small. Take incremental steps, with further steps contingent on reciprocity. This way, you control the risk that the other party will exploit your good will. On an encouraging note, Kramer advises that "Salting your world with lots of small trusting acts sends a signal to others who are themselves interested in building good relationships ..." This leads to more positive interactions.
Write an escape clause. Kramer argues, "With a clearly articulated plan for disengagement, people can trust more fully and with more commitment."
Send strong signals. Kramer emphasizes the importance of sending clear and consistent signals of your interest in dealing with people who will trust you and be trustworthy themselves. He says, "Most of us tend to underinvest in communicating our trustworthiness to others ..."
The signals need to be unambiguous so that you attract other tempered trusters, while deterring predators, who need to recognize that you are not someone to be trifled with. The idea is to develop a reputation for fair dealing with those who reciprocate, and for retaliating strongly, but proportionately, against those who violate your trust.
Recognize the other person's dilemma. Kramer points out that "the people we're dealing with confront their own trust dilemmas and need reassurance about whether (or how much) they should trust us. Good relationship builders are proactive at decreasing the anxiety and allaying the concerns of others."
Look at roles as well as people. Kramer explains, "A person's role or position can provide a guarantee of his expertise and motivation" even when we have not had the opportunity for personal contact with the individual. "Role-based trust is trust in the system that selects and trains the individual."
Remain vigilant and always question. Kramer's admonition is to keep one's due diligence concerning others' bona fides up-to-date. Admittedly, this can feel awkward because it involves regularly checking up on people with whom you have an established relationship of trust.
Do not be deceived by the title given an interview with J. Richard Hackman, a professor of of social and organizational psychology at Harvard, that appears in the May issue of the Harvard Business Review. "Why Teams Don't Work" is really about why some teams don't work, and about the five conditions that must be in place in order to maximize the probability that your teams will work.
According to Hackman, those five conditions are:
"Teams must be real," by which Hackman means that it must be clear who exactly is on the team and who is not.
"Teams need a compelling direction," i.e., their mission and purpose must be clear. Seems obvious, and it is, but that doesn't mean that you can't find plenty of instances in which different team members have different views of what the team is and should be doing. Leadership in getting everybody pointed in the same direction is essential.
"Teams need enabling structures," which means well-designed tasks, an appropriate number and mix of members, and clear behavior norms that are enforced.
"Teams need a supportive organization," which means reward, HR, and information systems that facilitate the teams' work.
"Teams need expert coaching." This is not to be confused with expert individual coaching of team members. The coaching teams require focuses on team processes, "especially at the beginning, midpoint, and end of a team project."
As the concluding question of the interview, Hackman is asked, "Given the difficulty of making teams work, should we be rethinking their importance in organizations?"
His answer is "perhaps." He goes on to talk about an example I don't find convincing, namely the idea that having a group of people working on a house will actually mean a slower job, or even an incomplete job, than if the project were handled by a single person. (Or perhaps by the standard model of a general contractor who deploys individual tradespeople, as needed. It's not clear from the text what alternative to the group approach you are supposed to imagine.) What does make sense to me is Hackman's observation that
There are many cases where collaboration, particularly in truly creative endeavors, is a hindrance rather than a help. The challenge for a leader, then, is to find a balance between individual autonomy and collective action. Either extreme is bad, though we are generally more aware of the downside of individualism in organizations, and we forget that teams can be just as destructive by being so strong and controlling that individual voices and contributions and learning are lost.
Hackman then comments on the problem of the Abilene Paradox, though he doesn't call it by that name, and reiterates another of his key points, namely that fulfilling the essential function of dissent in team discussions can be a serious danger to one's career.
I recommend reading Hackman's astute, research-based comments in their entirety. Just don't be surprised that he is not actually saying in some sweeping fashion that "teams don't work."
Xavier de Souza Briggs on "Getting Things Implemented"
If you want a compact, rich introduction to the issues organizations must manage in order to devise and implement strategies that produce valuable outcomes, you will be well-served by working through the materials Xavier de Souza Briggs put together for a week-long course he delivered this January, just before taking a two-year leave from his MIT faculty appointment in urban studies and planning, to become Associate Director for General Government Programs at the US Office of Management and Budget.
Creating public value, and The craft of political management (negotiation and coalition building)
Basic questions that need to be addressed: "What is worth implementing [What produces value?] and why? How does one go from concept to capacity and then 'production'? ... How to get things done responsibly and ethically when decisions cannot simply be imposed, downward and in a straightforward way, in a hierarchy?" Briggs emphasizes, "We want to be able to distinguish strong ideas, weakly implemented from bad ideas. These distinctions are often not easy to make — but are hugely important for the support we can build for good ideas."
Developing and changing organizational strategy
Here Briggs is talking about devising the means for accomplishing the organization's agreed mission. "The overall [strategic] challenge (and opportunity) is a powerful alignment: Lining up the value-creating idea with what the environment will support and what the organization (or team or alliance) is actually capable of producing." A key lesson: "There's no substitute for organized capacity, beyond any charismatic, smart, or otherwise talented individual."
Strategic collaboration (partnerships and alliances), and Performance management
Some key lessons about collaboration: "Effective collaboration often demands that implementers play a wide variety of roles well (strategic, operational, mobilization-focused, etc.)." "Collaboratives evolve through stages, navigated jointly: agreeing on a problem, developing strategy, implementing ('co-producing' change)." "Collaboratives can have wider ripple effects (political participation, policy reform, etc.)."
The key lesson about performance management: "Systems of performance measures and rules and incentives coupled with them ('management') should align with broader strategies."
Core elements of operating capacity: organizational structure (e.g., by function, by customer segment), operational processes (mapped so as to highlight, e.g., bottlenecks), human resources
Key lessons: Organizational restructuring "invites resistance, requires political capital, proof of concept, supportive coalitions, etc." "Strategic human resource management addresses flows ([employee] entry, development, exit) and targets (motivation, reward, performance)."
Thinking like an implementer, and Leadership (especially, leading change)
A key lesson: An effective implementer recognizes implementation issues (e.g., lack of funding, lack of operating capacity, opportunities for delivering more value, etc.) and develops skill in generating strategic options for addressing the issues.
Some core leadership concepts: exercising leadership vs. exercising authority; technical challenges (well-defined problems with known solutions) vs. adaptive challenges (fuzzy problems, unknown solutions); leadership styles; the need for a repertoire of various elements of emotional intelligence. Exercising leadership "is particularly important for motivating adaptation and risk taking, and thus deep change, in how implementation systems work."
Please note that the above outline greatly condenses and simplifies what Briggs teaches. To get a fuller account of the principles he espouses, you can download pdf files of his lecture notes and study questions here. Briggs's materials are a model of accessibility and practical expertise, structured in a way that requires students to think about the assigned readings (including a number of case studies) in critical fashion.
Each section of the course (generally, two sections per session) ends with a summary of take-away lessons. For example the first lesson from the first session is that "having a goal is not the same as having a clear, actionable value proposition." A related lesson is that "Effective implementers must often help to define ends (value propositions), not just political or operational means."
The course concluded with a take-home exam which, in keeping with the rest of Briggs's materials, places the emphasis squarely on critical thinking and intelligent application of the concepts covered in the class ("value creation, political management, organizational strategy, collaboration, performance management, organizational design and process redesign, human resource management"). Briggs emphasizes quality, not quantity, in students' responses to the seven "word problems" he sets, as you can see by reading through his instructions for the exam and the sample solutions he provides (pdf files).
Donald Sull Makes the Case for Management by Commitment
Donald Sull, who teaches management at the London Business School, has long been a proponent of what he calls management by commitment.
As Sull explains in a brief interview posted at BNET.com on March 4, management by commitment involves looking "at an organization as a network of overlapping, continually evolving promises that people make to each other to get things done."1
Sull contrasts management by commitment to two alternatives:
Use of hierarchical power
"This tends to create silos: the hierarchy is very up and down and doesn't work well for work that requires cooperation across different units or functions. It's pretty slow as well; it takes a long time for information to get up the structure and for orders to find their way down."
Management by standardized processes
"This is hugely helpful — it allows you to squeeze out excess resources and continuously improve on what you do. But here we also have limitations, probably the biggest one being that standardization gets in the way of innovation."
For situations that do not lend themselves to standardization, Sull argues that management by commitment allows needed flexibility. Management by commitment also has a natural place in situations in which you need cooperation from someone over whom you have no authority.
Based on research he and his colleague Charles Spinosa have done, Sull cites five characteristics of effective management by commitment:
The commitments are public and they are tracked publicly.
The commitments are active, as opposed to being casual or pro forma.
The commitments are voluntary. The person from whom a commitment is sought can make a counteroffer, or even say no if what's being requested is something the individual really isn't able to take on.
The commitments are explicit, i.e., it is clear which individuals are committing to what objectives and tasks.
The commitments are motivating. People need to care about what they are being asked to do, so that they are willing to carry on when inevitable obstacles crop up. This requires clarifying the importance of, and the rationale for, the actions people are signing up for.
Note: In a longer interview published in 2007 that is well worth reading, Sull explains in more detail how management by commitment helps with strategy execution.
__________ 1 A brief follow-up BNET.com interview with Sull, citing specific examples of use of management by commitment, is here.
My own experience, as a patient, with electronic health records (EHR) here in Massachusetts has been positive, which inclines me to think that the push to expand use of EHR is, generally speaking, well-advised. However, it is essential to understand that implementing EHR effectively is a multi-faceted proposition.
As Julia Adler-Milstein, a doctoral student at Harvard Business School, explains in a brief article in the April 2009 issue of the Harvard Business Review, introduction of an EHR system at a healthcare organization must be accompanied by organizational changes:
increased individual decision-making authority
comprehensive training
flattened hierarchy
more use of skilled workers
decentralized teams
incentives for team performance
Adler-Milstein argues, "Such changes present a huge challenge in health care, where workers are trained for and expected to fill specific roles." But she also points to the experience of Geisinger Health System in Pennsylvania as evidence that it is possible to meet the challenge. She explains:
After adopting an EHR system, Geisinger ... gave nurses additional authority to respond to medical issues they saw cropping up in the patients' records and made better use of their skills by automating mundane tasks. The organization also created financial incentives for team performance, particularly in areas such as diabetes care, and developed an extensive training curriculum that included close observation of physicians as they used the system.
For a fuller description of Geisinger's innovation strategy, you can look at an article published last year by Geisinger's chief technology and innovation officer, Geisinger's CEO, and the president of the Commonwealth Fund, which provided funding for the study: "Continuous Innovation in Health Care: Implications of the Geisinger Experience" (Health Affairs, Vol. 27, No. 5 (Sept-Oct 2008), pp. 1235-1245).1
__________ 1 If you have trouble accessing the Health Affairs article, you can read a summary at the Commonwealth Fund website.
Strictly speaking, this is a rhetorical query because, at this stage of the game, a wealth of reports has accumulated of companies that have realized valuable results from adding tools like blogs and wikis to their intranets. The real questions Conry-Murray addresses are "Under what circumstances does enterprise social networking pay off?" and "How can you gauge the size of the payoff?"
The whole article, including its sidebars, is worth reading. As an overview, here are the five best practices Conry-Murray recommends for making the most of social networking:
Start with a low-cost pilot to see what tools deliver useful results.
Set modest expectations. "Don't promise executives that enterprise social networking will unleash, ignite, or synergize anything." Instead: "Describe one or two general business improvements you think are achievable. Set reasonable goals for user adoption, and salt your initial deployment with a few teams that are eager for these kinds of tools. And keep an eye out for ways to measure business value. You may not be expected to produce hard numbers from a pilot, but corporate management will want to know the payback down the line."
Let employees use the tools with lightly controlled freedom. If you impose any but the most obvious restrictions (e.g., "No flaming."), you will inhibit participation and constrain dialogue.
Resist exclusivity. When a business unit or team says they want their tools to be accessible only to themselves, press the argument that the full benefit of enterprise social networking comes from openness to broad participation.
Include robust search capabilities. And: "Be sure the search engine allows for user-generated feedback such as tags and content-rating systems, because the point of social networking in business is to let people provide input into the relevancy of content and people."
As a final note, if you find the powers-that-be are leery of the term "social networking," shift to something more business-sounding, like "collaboration tools," until the "social networking" label becomes familiar to the people who have to authorize introduction and roll-out of the tools you believe will contribute to your organization's productivity and growth.
You can get a good introduction to the work being done at MIT's Center for Collective Intelligence (CCI) from a short article by Anne Trafton posted at MIT news on January 13.
For CCI's purposes, collective intelligence is defined as "the harnessing of human kinowledge and intelligence that allows groups of people to act together in ways that seem to be intelligent." Computer and Web technology are key enablers.
The basic research question CCI investigates is:
How can people and computers be connected so that — collectively — they act more intelligently than any individuals, groups, or computers have ever done before?
I was particularly intrigued by the collaborative deliberation tool CCI has developed as part of its Climate Collaboratorium project. The goal of the project is to address the complex issue of global climate change
through the creation of a new class of web-mediated discussion and decision making forum, called the "Collaboratorium". This system, currently under development, will use an innovative combination of internet-mediated interaction, collectively generated idea repositories, computer simulation, and explicit representation of argumentation to help large, diverse, and geographically-dispersed groups systematically explore, evaluate, and come to decisions concerning systemic challenges.
As Mark Klein, Principal Research Scientist at CCI, notes, "it's essentially impossible for any one person or small group to be cognizant of all of the issues, ideas and tradeoffs" that must be taken into consideration in analyzing a complex problem like climate change.
In the video below, Klein explains the web-based collaborative deliberation tool — dubbed the Deliberatorium — mentioned above.
For a brief tutorial on the deliberation map, which serves as the structural framework of CCI's collaborative deliberation tool, you can watch the 3:10 video below.
You can get a sense of the contrast between the CCI tool and a less effective web-based approach to collecting input from a community of users by reading Mark Klein's critique of the Open for Questions page of the change.gov website (which was created during the Obama-Biden transition and is no longer active).
A more detailed (three-page) explanation of the Climate Collaboratorium project is here (pdf, 2006).
As someone who is watching Microsoft's SharePoint software being customized to meet the needs of a particular business, I can't help wondering whether what I'm seeing represents the most effective approach.
ManageSmarter.com recently published a case study of SharePoint implementation at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) which is exemplary in providing quite specific tips not so much for the customization itself, as for designing and developing the accompanying user training, a subject in which I am just as interested.
As Sarah Boehle explains in her brief article, UT-Battelle, the company that manages and operates ORNL, developed its Sharepoint training curriculum "in conjunction with a company-wide initiative to transfer most of the organization's intranet resources to SharePoint servers." The aim of the training "was to teach those new to SharePoint how to use the system, and to show more advanced users how to better capitalize on its many features and functions."1
The tips UT-Battelle offers are:
Begin by analyzing how users really use the system, so you are training on all tasks that are relevant, and only on such tasks.
Use a hands-on format. Admittedly, one would have thought this would go without saying, but UT-Battelle initially used a seminar format, which, not surprisingly, did not meet the training's learning objectives.
Pay attention to the details. I was particularly struck by the decision "to develop a full-color, step-by-step participant manual that details every task in minute detail, complete with illustrating screen shots." The manual guides the users during the training and then serves as a day-to-day reference. For me, the point is that just about every user will regularly consult a well-designed and maintained manual, contrary to the position that some take who argue that manuals sit on the shelf gathering dust.
Keep the training and documentation up-to-date. Among other things, this means keeping tabs on the natural evolution in how users use the software. As Scott Taylor, a UT-Battelle instructional designer explains, "every time I field a new user question, or demo a new feature in class, I always make sure that we add the new task and information to the manual and cover it in the next class."
Once the SharePoint implementation I'm watching is complete, I will use the above tips as a guide for creating accompanying documentation and, as needed, for developing training.
__________ 1 You can get more detail concerning the overhaul of IT at ORNL, which is the larger context in which development of the training described here occurred, from a slide presentation put together last year by Scott Studham, UT-Battelle's CIO.
