!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
Monday, March 08, 2010
A Vivid Preview of US Air Force Basic Training
You can find voluminous information about the US Air Force at www.af.mil, but if you want to check out the really cool stuff, the place to go is www.airforce.com.
Thanks to the March/April issue of Communications Arts magazine, I'm now aware of the immensely engaging and informative section of airforce.com devoted to detailing what happens during Air Force basic training. You can access this section here.
You'll find that the navigation is organized according to the eight full weeks recruits spend in basic training:
Week 1 — Fall In
Week 2 — Basic War Skills
Week 3 — Combat Lifesaving
Week 4 — Countering the Threat
Week 5 — Ready to Fight
Week 6 — The Beast (Basic Expeditionary Airman Skills Training — field exercises and combat scenarios)
Week 7 — Airmanship
Week 8 — Graduation
Each week's material includes a video overview, a short inspirational blurb (accessed by mousing over an image on the screen representing the week's focus), video comments from a Military Training Instructor, still photos, and a summary of the schedule for the week.
The site also provides guidance on how to prepare for basic training (e.g. what to study in advance, what to pack, and what not to pack).
On every screeen a visitor is one click away from launching an online chat with an "advisor" or launching a tool for finding the nearest Air Force recruiter.
Visitors can also:
click on "See What It's Like" to access video on such activities as combat search and rescue, serving on a bomb squad, and special ops.
try various interactive features, such as "Train a Military Working Dog," "Refuel a Plane," "Launch a Rocket into Space," and "Fly with the Thunderbirds."
play simulation games
The basic training section of airforce. com is the handiwork of GSD&M Idea City.
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."
Make it clear how what you do adds value for others — Have a compelling one-sentence explanation at the ready.
Make it hard to be forgotten once you've been introduced at any event, such as a networking event. — Share interesting information about yourself without going into a hard sell.
Practice what you preach. E.g., "If you're in finance make sure your own accounts are in order."
Be ready to share success stories.
Be proud of what you do — When talking about your job, whatever it is, sound a positive note.
Even when you are facing someone who doubts your ability, stay positive. You can be confident that they will be proved wrong.
People buy because you are offering something that will benefit them. This is fundamental to actually adding value, which is always assessed from the customer's point of view.
People make buying decisions emotionally, so tell your success stories in a way that brings out the challenges you faced, the intensity with which you attacked them, and the satisfaction your successful results produced.
Don't stint in explaining what you have to offer. There's a tendency to take one's own expertise for granted because what you do has come to feel very natural. This can lead you to understate what you bring to the table. Be sure you explain fully how necessary your expertise is for creating value in the situations you're discussing with a customer.
Keep building your brand — "Broadcast your personal brand in every possible way. Make it clear and consistent."
I've paraphrased Hood's tips above. They don't take long to read, so I encourage you to have a look at the original list as she wrote it.
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.
Examples of the tools for which the wiki currently has templated pages are blogs, intranets, language translation technologies, mobile phones, Skype, social media, tagging and social bookmarking, video, and, of course, wikis.
Examples of methods (processes) covered are after action review, appreciative inquiry, critical moments of reflection, impact pathways, mediation, mentoring, Samoan circle, storytelling, speed geeking, and the World Cafe.
The designers of the Knowledge Sharing Toolkit offer help to users in identifying tools and methods of particular relevance to their needs by making suggestions for a number of contexts (not mutually exclusive) in which knowledge sharing is important:
Improving impact through knowledge sharing in research
The page devoted to each of these contexts lists the sorts of questions that typically arise, and suggests tools, methods, and tags of likely relevance. (Each tool and method can be tagged by users. The list of tags is here.)
As an example, you might look at the page for people undertaking advocacy. You will see these four questions and the associated lists of tools, methods, and tags suggested as likely to lead to good answers:
How do we get input on our issues from key constituents? Tools and Methods: The World Cafe, Listening Tags: relationship, collaboration, alliances
How do we make our issues visible to the people we want to reach? Internally and externally? Tools and Methods: Storytelling, Knowledge Fairs, Intranets, Blogs, Microblogging, Workplace Knowledge Sharing Tips, Rural Radio, Wikis Tags: content, dissemination, information, offline
How do we use the web to inform our key publics on issues? Tools and Methods: Blogs, Microblogging, Frequently Asked Questions, Language Translation Technologies, Ritual Dissent Tags: content, dissemination, information, offline
How do we make it easy to get people to act on issues and spread the word themselves? Tools and Methods: Blogs, Microblogging, Mobile Phones, Online Surveys, Rural Radio, Social Media, Social Networking Sites, Yellow Pages, Samoan Circle, Wikis, Peer Coaching, Peer Assists, Graphic Facilitation, Good Practices, Community Interactive Theater, Chat or Talk Shows Tags: relationship, collaboration, online, offline
To polish off the guidance on sources of knowledge about how best to pursue advocacy, the page concludes with a list of additional tags with a decent probability of leading to useful pages in the wiki — namely, advocacy, alliances, collaboration, content, dissemination, information, networks, offline, online, relationship, and stakeholders.
For more of an overview of the thinking behind the Knowledge Sharing Toolkit, you can read a June 2008 report written by Gerry Toomey, who has worked as a consultant for CGIAR and the Knowledge Sharing Project.
I'd like to follow up briefly on Sunday's post about research concerning how a message deliverer's expertise and expressed degree of certainty affect persuasiveness.
The research indicates that surprising consumers by having a message containing a subjective judgment be delivered by a somewhat uncertain expert, or by a highly certain non-expert, will engage consumers' interest and make it easier to persuade them that the message is valid (assuming it includes a strong argument in favor of the judgment in question).
This notion of using surprise to gain audience attention, and get them thinking about what you have to say, came back to mind as I was reading a review of William Trevor's latest novel in the November 19 issue of The New York Review of Books (not yet online).
Reviewer David Lodge likes Love and Summer. After several paragraphs explaining Trevor's long career — he is now eighty-one — and introducing the novel, Lodge makes the following comment about Trevor's writing technique: The novel begins:
On a June evening some years after the middle of the last century Mrs Eileen Commulty passed through the town of Rathmoye: from Number 4 The Square to Magennis Street, into Hurley Lane, along Irish Street, across Cloughjordan Road to the Church of the Most Holy Redeemer. Her night was spent there.
In short, it begins with a funeral, though it is not until you get to the last sentence that the penny drops. This is typical of Trevor's technique: enlivening the meticulous realism of the scene-setting not by metaphor and simile, but by little enigmas and surprises in the way information is fed to the reader. He belongs in a tradition classically represented by the fiction writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries like Maupassant, Chekhov, and the Joyce of Dubliners. The narrative voice is impersonal and detached but reliable, in complete possession of the story and its milieu, giving us enough information to be interested, but withholding a good deal to ensure that we read on, and think about what we read ...
Lodge's description of how Trevor presents his story carries a lesson for anyone wanting an engaged audience. A major part of your job in planning the flow of a presentation, especially if the size of your audience limits mid-presentation dialogue, is to decide how to launch your story in a way that gets people to sit up because it is somehow unexpected, and then how to parcel out your information and supporting arguments in a way that continues to inject surprising points that keep listeners' minds in gear.
For related ideas concerning use of stagecraft as a tool for persuasion, see this post from 2006 that talks about David Gergen's views on what effective leaders do that makes them persuasive.
Perceived Expertise, Expressed Certainty, and Persuasiveness
A recent paper by graduate student Uma R. Karmarkar and professor of marketing Zakary L. Tormala of the Stanford Graduate School of Business looks at an aspect of being persuasive to consumers that in all likelihood has broader applicability.1
Karmarkar and Tormala investigate the effect on persuasiveness of whether someone making a subjective recommendation (e.g., concerning a restaurant) expresses certainty or, alternatively, a degree of uncertainty about the recommendation.
The research indicates that the effect of expressing certainty/uncertainty on persuasiveness when subjective judgments are involved and when the argument presented is strong depends on whether the recommendation comes from a perceived expert or a perceived nonexpert. Specifically,
... low[-]expertise sources violate expectancies, simulate involvement, and promote persuasion when they express certainty, whereas high[-]expertise sources violate expectancies, simulate involvement, and promote persuasion when they express uncertainty.
Karmarkar and Tormala reached their conclusion by analyzing the results of three experiments:
An initial test of the incongruity hypothesis, i.e., the hypothesis that an expert who expresses uncertainty, or a non-expert who expresses certainty, will intrigue message receivers and thereby make them more susceptible to persuasion. The results supported this hypothesis.
An investigation of the effect of the message deliverer's certainty on persuasion. Karmarkar and Tormala tested the hypotheses that (1) violation of expectations concerning the relation of expertise and certainty increases the message receiver's involvement (attention to and interest in the message), and (2) increased receiver involvement increases the persuasiveness of the message (assuming it includes strong arguments). The results supported these hypotheses.
An investigation of the impact of varying argument quality. Karmarkar and Tormala tested the hypotheses that (1) increasing receiver involvement by establishing incongruity between the deliver's expertise and certainty has more of an impact on persuasiveness for strong arguments than for weak arguments, and (2) strong arguments produce higher "thought favorability" (e.g., favorable ideas about a restaurant under review), which, in turn, produce more persuasion (in the form of favorable attitudes toward, and interest in, the restaurant). The results supported these hypotheses.
Note that incongruity between expertise and certainty, by increasing receiver involvement, will tend to undermine persuasion if the arguments in the message are weak. At best, there will likely be no effect on the receiver's attitudes and intentions.
Karmarkar and Tormala conclude their paper by pointing out the tactics that their results suggest people should consider when delivering messages involving subjective judgments:
"... individuals lacking in established expertise can augment their persuasive impact when they have strong arguments by strategically incorporating expressions of high certainty into their message."
"... when experts have strong arguments on their side, they will be more influential if they express uncertainty rather than certainty about their opinion or recommendation."
My own thought is that this research has likely applicability for messaging outside the consumer context. For instance, in facilitating classroom training, it is probably advisable not to adopt too strong a tone of certainty when discussing subjective recommendations. Indeed, good facilitators know that leaving space for participants to explore issues about which the facilitator has a point of view (not the same thing as utter certainty) increases participant engagement and promotes learning.
Note: You can read the Stanford business school's summary of Karmarkar and Tormala's research here.
__________ 1 Uma R. Karmarkar and Zakary L. Tormala, "Believe Me, I Have No Idea What I’m Talking About: The Effects of Source Certainty on Consumer Involvement and Persuasion," Journal of Consumer Research, Vol. 36, No. 6 (April 2010); published online October 6, 2009.
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.
As a follow-on to yesterday's post, and to a post from about three years ago, I'd like to mention the suggestions Mario Moussa and Richard Shell offer for handling situations in which you find yourself trying to get a fair hearing from someone who presents a strong "contrary beliefs" barrier.
In a 2007 interview published by the Conference Board, Moussa observes,
Some people are simply not persuadable because their outlook on a topic falls on an extreme end of an ideology. This is the case with things like abortion. So we suggest trying to find a different belief [perhaps deeper] or point of view around which you can come together. Never go head to head against a core belief that someone holds deeply. It's very rare for people to change such beliefs.
In the talk (video) Shell gave at Google in February 2008, he recommends reframing the contentious issue in a way that plays down conflict with the other person's firm core beliefs, a suggestion that corresponds to Moussa's recommendation to look for a different point of view that can serve as common ground.
A further point Shell offers is that you can sometimes actually leverage the other person's beliefs in a way that helps the person see their way clear to cooperating with you.
Schurenberg asks Shell to talk about several central points made in the book, which "is directed specifically at how to be effective at persuading people within a complex organization."
First and foremost is the importance of discerning the other person's point of view and then using that knowledge to shape your approach to persuading the individual that something you're proposing is a good idea. (This principle applies to groups of people as well. You need to be able to determine the general perspective of your audience so that you can design what you say in a way that maximizes the audience's receptiveness.)
A related proposition is that you can't force the other person to change his/her mind. What you can do is remove barriers to the other person's actually hearing what you are trying to get across.
Schurenberg proceeds to step into the other person's shoes and asks about how to resist persuasion. Shell argues,
The best antidote to persuasion is a skeptical attitude. People who get persuaded [to do things they regret] tend to get caught up in ideas that appeal to their self-interest or hold out the promise of a simple solution to a big problem. The best antidote to that is critical thinking.
For a more detailed summary of the The Art of Woo, you can read the article Knowledge@Wharton published at the time the book came out. Key points include the four-step process Shell and Moussa recommend for selling an idea internally:
Polish your idea, and survey the social networks that will get you to decision makers.
Address the barriers to having what you say actually heard. Shell and Moussa call out five barriers as the most common:
Contrary beliefs
Conflicting interests
Negative relationships
Lack of credibility
Use of a persuasion channel that is a poor fit to the audience and situation (see below)
"Pitch the idea in a compelling way." I.e., the person doing the persuading needs "to figure out exactly what problem their idea addresses, how their idea will solve it and why their idea is better than both the status quo and available alternatives."
Secure both individual and organizational commitments — a largely political process.
Shell and Moussa provde a pair of tools in appendices to The Art of Woo that can help you with self-assessment of your persuasion style and of the channels you tend to use in your efforts to persuade — either because the channels are organizationally expected or because of personal inclination.
The five persuasion styles Shell and Moussa measure in the Persuasion Styles Assessment are laid out in the graphic below.
Shell emphasizes, "Whatever your style is, it can be effective. It all depends on the fit with the person across the table and the circumstances."
The Six Channels Survey is intended to help Woo readers "understand both how these six channels work and when they should adjust their pitch ... to appeal to different kinds of audiences."2 The six channels are:
Authority — emphasis on using formal position or rules.
Rationality — emphasis on using reasons.
Vision — emphasis on organizational goals, purposes, and aspirations.
Relationship — emphasis on liking, similarity, and reciprocity.
Interests/Incentives — emphasis on using trades and compromises.
Politics — emphasis on managing perceptions and building consensus.
If you have an hour to spare, you can get the basic Shell presentation on influence, persuasion (influence with a goal or point of view), and negotiation (a special case of persuasion in which at least one party believes there is a conflict of interest) by watching a video of the talk Shell gave to Google employees in February of last year. (The talk begins at 3:09.)
__________ 1 Shell published an earlier book on negotiation— Bargaining for Advantage : Negotiation Strategies for Reasonable People (Penguin, 2006) — that has been quite well-received. The book has gone into a second edition; the first edition, published in 1999, has been translated into 14+ languages.
2 Shell and Moussa have adapted their six persuasion channels from schemas defined by previous researchers, notably, David Kipnis and Stuart Schmidt (see, "Profile of Organizational Influence Strategies," University Associates, San Diego, 1985), and Gary Yukl and Cecilia Falbe (see "Influence Tactics and Objectives in Upward, Downward and Lateral Influence Attempts," Journal of Applied Psychology, Vol. 75, 1990, pp. 132-140).
The MIT OpenCourseWare site recently added materials for a Sloan School of Management course in Communication for Managers, taught by Neal Hartman during the Fall 2008 semester.
Though the materials are not complete — lecture notes for nine of the fourteen class meetings are missing — there are a number of items that anyone interested in this particular skill area will find helpful, even if only as a refresher.
I'd suggest starting with the notes for the course wrap-up (pdf), which provide an overview of the principles Hartman emphasizes in the course:
Four types of leadership:
Visioning.
Relating.
Inventing.
Sensemaking.
How to do a situation analysis as the basis for devising a communication strategy:
Define your purpose.
Analyze your audience.
Assess your credibility.
Analyze the cultural context.
Factors to consider in deciding on your communication strategy:
Managerial style — distinguished in terms of writer/speaker control and the degree of audience involvement.
Structure of the communication — direct statement of your main points or recommendation, followed by rationale vs. indirect approach that begins with subsidiary points or with arguments that set the stage for your recommendation.
Liking — People are inclined to say yes to requests of a person they know and like.
Reciprocity — People repay in kind.
Social proof — People follow the lead of others who are similar to them.
Consistency — In response to personal and interpersonal pressure, people tend to follow through on their clear commitments.
Authority — People defer to experts.
Scarcity — Opportunities seem more valuable when their availability is limited.
The Minto Pyramid (see graphic below, which you can click to enlarge) is a good device for organizing your ideas when you are recommending a change of some sort.
Principles of effective design of visual aids:
Consistency in formatting.
Appropriate titles.
Purposeful use of color and special effects.
Clear and uncluttered layout.
Principles of effective document design:
Use of subheads to show structure.
Use of lists to highlight important and conceptually parallel information.
Use of white space to highlight material and to create transitions through indenting, columns, and lines.
In-text highlighting of key words and phrases.
Use of tables and graphs to make evidence more legible.
Principles of effective cover letters for resumes.
Importance of awareness of values and perceptions that differentiate cultures around the world.
In reading about this effort, first in the Wall Street Journal on Saturday, and then in the June 22 issue of The New Yorker, I was particularly struck by the special type of persuasion the program uses to reduce violent crime and to remove drug markets from community streets.
David Kennedy, director of the Center for Crime Prevention and Control, had the insight some years ago that criminal offenders who had not yet perpetrated violent crimes might be deterred from continuing their illegal activities by being challenged to behave better by people with moral authority, such as family members and community leaders. At the same time, it would be impressed upon the offenders that the police had already accumulated sufficient evidence of their misdeeds to convict them in court if the illegal behavior recurred.
This second-chance approach, with attached sanctions if the second chance does not produce improvement, reminds me of an approach to dealing with recalcitrant employees that has always seemed smart to me. The basic idea is to call in an employee who has persistently failed to meet expectations and deliver this message: "You need to go home for a day and think very seriously about what you want to do. Do you want to bring your performance in your job up to the level that we expect, or do you want to look elsewhere for employment? If you are sincerely ready to do what's necessary to meet expectations, we are ready to help. If not, we have no choice but to let you go."
The process followed with criminal offenders is to ask them to attend a meeting; they are promised that the meeting is not a trap at which they will be arrested.
Those who appear at the meeting are confronted by influential figures, such as family, friends, clergy and ex-offenders, who describe the harm the offenders' activities are causing, earnestly entreat them to stop the bad-acting, and offer help with getting education, jobs, and other assistance for turning their lives around. As the New Yorker article explains, "victims and their family members [are] on hand to deliver the moral component of the message to the offenders: 'What you are doing is wrong, and we know you can do better.'"
The offenders also get a deliberately theatrical talking to from police and representatives of the criminal justice system, who present the dossiers of evidence that are ready to be used to convict them and send them to prison if they fail to take advantage of the offer of a second chance.
You can see portions of such a "call-in" meeting in the video below, which deals with use of the Kennedy approach to deter street drug-dealing in High Point NC.
Jeremy Travis, president of John Jay College, argues:
David [Kennedy] has proved that when you communicate directly with offenders, tell them their actions have consequences — not abstract consequences but direct, immediate ones — and then offer them a way out, that it can have an enormous deterrence value.
It should be noted that, according to John Seabrook, author of the New Yorker article, the social services element of Kennedy's approach has been relatively weak. I am inclined to think that this is because, as experience shows, helping those with employability problems is itself a project that requires concerted, multi-pronged effort. See, for example, this post about the "wrap-around services" the Cincinnati Works program offers to individuals facing various employability issues.
An excellent Wall Street Journal report on the High Point NC experience with using the Kennedy program is here. The maps below show the prevalence of serious crime in High Point prior to the "call-in" of drug dealers, and then about 600 days after. Colors indicate the number of crimes by census block. White indicates the fewest crimes and red the most.
As a follow-on to the post of a few days ago in which I complained about an unilluminating set of "business secrets" purveyed by a spiritually oriented guru, I'd like to call attention to a welcome contrast that appeared at bnet.com today.
As best I can judge from how he presents himself on his website, Sims Wyeth, a consultant specializing in oral communications, is a straightforward type. Straightforward is a style I find particularly effective in an advisor trying to help people with the specifics of skill development.
In "Five Ways to Speak Like Obama," Wyeth does a fine job of explaining practices Barack Obama follows that he (Wyeth) believes are appropriate for all public speaking by businesspeople. The practices are:
Talk about the audience's concerns.
Keep it simple, i.e., make sure you have a clear core message, and support your messsage with a limited number of details selected to resonate with your audience.
Anticipate what your audience is thinking (something I find myself recommending frequently, and not just for speaking, but also for writing).
Learn to pause. (Watch good actors — they generally don't rush through their lines.)
Master the body language of leadership. You should aim to "communicate the right mix of calm and assertiveness." Rehearse in order to project this mix in a natural way.
Clearly, simply stating the recommended practices doesn't accomplish much beyond reminding people of what most have heard before. I highly recommend reading Wyeth's commentary on each practice to get the full benefit of what he has to offer.
(As a side note, I'd mention that Wyeth's article elicited comments that included some responding to the content of his recommendations, and many from people unhappy about commendation of a politician of whom they disapprove. This is an example of the unfortunate difficulty trainers have in citing controversial public figures to illustrate points the trainers are trying to bring to life as clearly and memorably as possible.)
All of these papers are beautifully organized and written. I want to home in on the last of the five because it happens to be the one that I think is of broadest value to people looking to strengthen their professional skills.
In just forty pages, Briggs presents a thorough review of the principles of effective negotiation, with due attention to the complexities associated with such issues of multi-party participation and use of facilitators in the process.
As a sample of the guidance Briggs offers, I'll call out what he has to say about establishing effective working relations, a subject that has especially broad application in the business world.
Briggs describes five traits that generally characterize effective working relationships. Quoting Briggs directly, these traits are:
Forward-looking. Change is expected, even anticipated. The parties involved make room for their relationship to grow. They look ahead to anticipate shocks and opportunities in the environment that might affect the outcomes they care about — and thus the relationship.
Committed and resilient. They withstand pressure, in part through willingness and capacity to “see things through” before resorting to “hardball.” The parties avoid making major assumptions about each others’ intentions. Effective communication is key, and this means more than sending signals clearly. It also includes active listening — listening to understand, summarizing what they say and checking with them to be sure you have understood.
Fair — i.e., perceived as fair by both sides. The relationship reflects a balanced allocation of benefits and rewards, meets the parties’ criteria — whatever defines value — over time, even if short-term costs and benefits are uneven here and there.
Trust-based and forgiving — but provocable. Charles Sabel and other students of cooperation recommend “studied trust” in which the parties make it easy for each other to monitor compliance with commitments made. Beyond having a practical value, supporting such mechanisms signals a willingness to do what you say. And Robert Axelrod says parties can apply a tit-for-tat rule to infractions, being “provocable but forgiving.” Abuses will not be tolerated, but parties will extend each other the benefit of the doubt and will be willing to forgive, at least within certain limits.1
Realistic. Agreed-upon expectations are reasonable and, where possible, adjustable. In a rush to agree, parties will not insist on or agree to things that cannot be delivered, based on best-available information and standards.
A final note: Briggs's "strategy tools" are like chapters in a book — fine for self-study. Just be sure to test yourself for comprehension and retention as you go along.2
__________ 1 Charles Sabel, "Studied Trust: Building New Forms of Cooperation in a Volatile Economy," in Frank Pyke and Werner Sengenberger (eds), Industrial Districts and Local Economic Regeneration (Geneva: International Institute for Labour Studies, 1992), pp. 215-250.
2 For additional self-study materials Briggs has assembled to help people involved in community development, you can visit the Working Smarter in Community Development site based in the MIT Department of Urban Studies + Planning.
Back in January, Geoffrey James, a freelance business writer, put up a post at BNET.com that I've revisited several times and decided deserves a plug for its substance and concision.
The topic is the homework you need to do before making a presentation to a business prospect. Drawing on a conversation with communications guru Dean Brenner, James cites six perspectives that you must be familiar with in order to put together a relevant, persuasive presentation for your particular audience:
The prospect's history as a business and in dealings with you and your organization.
The frames of reference the prospect brings to a meeting with you. For instance, "Do they have a certain way of viewing your offering?"
The prospect's needs and desires.
Likely objections, including how intense and real the objections are.
How much decision-making sway the members of your audience have.
The decision-making style of your audience. Quantitative? Intuitive? Etc.
Of course, even the best-laid plans can go awry, as illustrated by several of the anecdotes recounted here.
In the Fall 2008 issue of the MIT Sloan Management Review, Joseph Grenny and David Maxfield of the consultancy VitalSmarts, and Andrew Shimberg of nGenera Talent, present a straightforward model of influence that can be quite helpful in situations where people need to be willing and able to change their behavior to fit new circumstances.
In "How to Have Influence," Grenny, Maxfield, and Shimberg (GMS) analyze a simple taxonomy of sources of influence in which the willingness (motivational) and ability components of influence each operate at three levels: the personal, the social, and the structural (non-human).
Thus, the GMS taxonomy consists of six sources of influence. GMS list questions to ask (here slightly edited) in assessing whether and how to tap each of these sources in particular situations:
Personal motivation to change — "link to mission and values," i.e., "help people see the broad implications of their actions and choices" and "help them connect the changes to their deeply held values." Ask:
In a room by themselves would people want to engage in the behavior?
Do they hate it or enjoy it?
Do they find meaning in it?
Does it fit into their sense of who they are or want to be?
Example of a successful strategy: Leaders "identified the aspects of the change that were boring, uncomfortable or painful and found ways to either eliminate them or make them more pleasant."
Personal ability to change — "a robust training initiative is at the heart of almost all successful influence strategies." Ask:
Do they have the knowledge, skills and strength to be able to do the right thing?
Can they handle the toughest challenges they will face?
Example of a successful strategy: Leaders "gave guided practice and immediate feedback until people were sure they could engage in the new bahaviors in the toughest of circumstances."
Social motivation to change — "harness peer pressure." Ask:
Are other people encouraging the right behavior or discouraging the wrong behavior?
Do people whom others respect model the right behaviors at the right time?
Do people have good relationships with those who are trying to influence them positively?
Example of a successful strategy: Leaders "identified people who would be most concerned about the changes, and made sure they were involved early."
Ability to exert social influence — "create social support." Ask:
Do others provide the help, information and resources required — particularly at critical times?
Example of a successful strategy: Leaders "created 'safe' ways for people to get help without feeling embarrasssed or being put on the spot."
Structural contributions to motivation to change — "align rewards and ensure accountability." GMS caution that it is generally best "to use incentives third, not first. Otherwise, you might acutally undermine people's intrinsicmotivation." Ask:
Are there rewards — pay, promotions, performance reviews or perks?
Do rewards encourage the right behaviors and costs discourage the wrong ones?
Example of a successful strategy: Leaders "adjusted the formal rewards system to make sure people had incentives to adopt the new behaviors."
Ability to apply structural influence — "change the environment." Ask:
Does the environment — tools, facilities, information, reports, proximity to others, policies, work processes — enable good behavior or bad?
Are there enough cues and reminders to help people stay on course?
Example of a successful strategy: Leaders "reorganized people's workplaces to remove obstacles and to make the change convenient and easy."
(Note that two earlierposts discuss an influence model that addresses situations in which one must exercise influence without authority.)
Positive deviance, discussed in a couple of recentposts, is the brainchild of the husband and wife team, Jerry and Monique Sternin.
In May 2005 Jerry Sternin (who, sadly, passed away on December 11) published an article (pdf) in the Harvard Business Review co-authored with Richard Pascale1 that describes how the principles of positive deviance apply in the business world.
The basic idea is the same as in the context of development economics: When seeking a solution to a problem look for "positive deviants" — people who seem already to have solved the problem despite having access to no more resources than others in the community.
An exhibit in the article summarizes the differences between the traditional approach to change and the positive deviance approach. These differences (here, somewhat edited) are:
Leader as path breaker vs. Leader as facilitator
In the traditional approach, the leader has primary ownership, and the momentum for change comes from above.
In the positive deviance approach, the leader guides the positive deviance process, while the community takes ownership of the quest for change.
Outside in vs. Inside out
In the traditional approach, experts identify and disseminate best practices.
In the positive deviance approach, the community identifies pre-existing solutions and amplifies them.
Deficiency-based vs. Asset-based
In the traditional approach, leaders deconstruct common problems and recommend best practice solutions, with the implicit reproach that the company's or unit's employees aren't as good as their peers.
In the positive deviance approach, the community leverages pre-existing solutions practiced by those who succeed against the odds.
Logic-driven vs. Learning-driven
In the traditional approach, particpants think themselves into a new way of acting.
In the positive deviance approach, participants act themselves into a new way of thinking.
Vulnerable to "transplant rejection" vs. Open to self-replication
In the traditional approach, resistance arises to ideas imported from, or imposed by, outsiders.
In the positive deviance approach, latent wisdom is tapped within the community, which helps forestall rejection. "The trick is to introduce already existing ideas into the mainstream without excessive use of authority."
Moving from problem-solving toward solution identification vs. Moving from solution identification toward problem-solving
In the traditional approach, best practices are applied to problems defined within the bounds of existing parameters.
In the positive deviance approach, the solution space is expanded through the discovery of new parameters.
Focus on the protagonists vs. Focus on enlarging the network
The traditional approach engages stakeholders who would conventionally be associated with the problem.
The positive deviance approach identifies stakeholders beyond those directly involved with the problem.
As a final note, I'd mention the emphasis the positive deviance process places on reframing. Pascale and Sternin outline three steps to reframing a problem:
Identify the conventional presentation of the problem. (E.g., "We don't have enough proper food for our children.")
Find out if there are exceptions to the norm, people in identical circumstances who seem to be coping especially well. (E.g., Yes, Mrs. X and Mrs. Y have healthy, well-fed children.")
Reframe the problem to focus on the exceptions. (E.g., "What are Mrs. X and Mrs. Y doing that's different?")
Reading the whole article will provide you with a range of helpful examples of reframing and of other aspects of the positive deviance process.
__________ 1 Richard Pascale is currently an associate fellow of Oxford University. Previously, he served for twenty years on the faculty of Stanford University's business school.
As a follow-on to yesterday's post concerncing Jay Conger's views on use of persuasion in internal decision-making, a process I suggested he might better have termed "advocacy," I'd mention that David Garvin (Harvard Business School) and Michael Roberto (Bryant University) go a step further in their 2001 Harvard Business Review article, "What You Don't Know About Making Decisions" (pdf).
Garvin and Roberto argue that advocacy — which they define as a more singleminded effort than Conger's notion of persuasion — is the wrong approach for a group working toward a decision. In its place they would have people use a process of "inquiry."
Garvin and Roberto summarize the differences between advocacy and inquiry as follows:
Concept of decision making Advocacy: a contest Inquiry: collaborative problem solving
Purpose of discussion Advocacy: persuasion and lobbying Inquiry: testing and evaluation
Participants' role Advocacy: spokespeople Inquiry: critical thinkers
Patterns of behavior Advocacy: strive to persuade others, defend your position, downplay weaknesses Inquiry: present balanced arguments, remain open to alternatives, accept constructive criticism
Minority views Advocacy: discouraged or dismissed Inquiry: cultivated and valued
Outcome Advocacy: winners and losers Inquiry: collective ownership
I believe the Garvin-Roberto analysis reinforces my own view that Conger uses "persuasion" in an ambiguous way because, the fact is, Conger would probably agree that what Garvin and Roberto call "inquiry" is the way to go.
To some extent, it's a question of who's doing the persuading/advocating/inquiring. Conger's analysis assumes one or two individuals working to build support for a course of action they believe advisable, while Garvin and Roberto are thinking in terms of a group collectively working toward making a decision.
I'm not entirely comfortable with the way in which Jay Conger, now the Henry R. Kravis Research Chair in Leadership Studies at Claremont McKenna College, defines the concept of "persuasion" in a useful 1998 article in the Harvard Business Review. Still, I have no problem agreeing with the process he describes for winning the support of an internal audience for an initiative one is trying to move forward.
I generally use the term "persuasion" in the same way Robert Cialdini does in his book, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion (included in the suggested readings listed at right). Cialdini conceives of persuasion as what a person does in order to induce someone else to comply with a request.
Conger conceives of "persuasion" in the specialized context of getting others in an organization to join in a collaborative effort to achieve a goal, such as proceeding with development of a new product. In Conger's view:
Effective persuasion becomes a negotiating and learning process through which a persuader leads colleagues to a problem's shared solution.... it involves careful preparation, the proper framing of arguments [to show those you are seeking to persuade how they will share in the benefits of what you are advocating], the presentation of vivid supporting evidence, and the effort to find the correct emotional match with your audience.
An important implication of Conger's concept of persuasion is that it involves considerable dialogue and eschewing of any sort of dogmatism:
Before the process begins, effective persuaders use dialogue to learn more about their audience's opinions, concerns, and perspectives. During the process, dialogue continues to be a form of learning, but it is also the beginning of the negotiation stage. You invite people to discuss, even debate, the merits of your position, and then to offer honest feedback and suggest alternative solutions. ... the best persuaders not only listen to others but also incorporate their perspectives into a shared solution.1
Conger wraps up by reiterating that "people must understand persuasion for what it is — not convincing and selling but learning and negotiation." Somehow, I believe Conger would be better off if he called this process "advocacy" or "gaining buy-in" rather than "persuasion," but I nonetheless admire the cogency of his explanation of the best way to mobilize support for a proposal or recommendation.
__________ 1 In retrospect, one of Conger's examples — the push two Microsoft employees made to persuade colleagues to support development of the ill-fated BOB interface — actually illustrates a situation Conger doesn't explicitly address, namely, cases in which dialogue with colleagues should lead persuaders to abandon the idea they're advocating.
