Evolving Web

Don’t Slow Down, Just Get It Done

My colleague and I were four days into a field exercise for an environmental impact statement or EIS. An EIS is a document every public project must complete to show what the short and long-term impacts would be if it were completed. They tend to be large and expensive. This particular project was very large and the impacts many.

Given that the project was underway and had a definite deadline, no one was willing to slow it down or change its scope. This particular task was supposed to take the two of us about a week to complete.

Four days into this particular task, we found the data we had been given was poor, the people to contact with better data were unavailable, and that the massaging of the new data we couldn’t even get would take weeks.

When we presented the managers of the project with this information, we were told Don’t Slow Down, Just Get It Done.

Get it done with what?

The data you already have.

We were then expressly told not to contact anyone else or extend this particular task.

Back then, we were completely confused as to why anyone would be so totally stupid. How could these managers knowingly ignore that we were using faulty information that would result in a useless report? These weren’t Dilbert characters, they were real live human beings.

Over the years I would watch other seemingly smart people drive their high-tech startups into the ground by insisting that an initial plan or idea go forward despite ample evidence that all that lie ahead was ruin.

What cognitive biases kicked-in to destroy these endeavors?

Irrational Escalation – This is in-for-a-penny-in-for-a-pound-ism. Once people start on a project, they find it very hard to stop – even if the project is obviously doomed or the return will not cover future costs. The managers felt that the project was already underway and even using bad data was better than delaying the project and asking for new data. The bad data (not surprisingly) later resulted in obviously flawed analysis – causing even more expensive and stressful work later in the project.

Expectation Bias – This is a world-view bias. If we believe something, we pick data points that support that expectation. Further, we expect that most data will support our expectations. We had an opportunity to create a research regimen that would yield scientific results. The managers assumed this was all a formality and that any data (good or bad) would support the original plan. This was likely underscored by “experience” that showed that most data did indeed support the original plans (which were likely suffering from expectation bias).

Planning Fallacy – A central issue here is simply that we didn’t have enough time to finish our task. The expectation bias inherent in the people who wrote the initial scope gave us only a week. This led to them, and us, falling prey to the Planning Fallacy which shows that human beings have a strong tendency to underestimate task completion times. On the ground, we saw this playing out. From the manager’s desk, the plan was correct, we were at fault.

Status Quo Bias – This bias says that once we start something, we tend to want it to continue. This is why in Collaborative Management we seek to build an explicit Culture of Continuous Improvement for teams and companies. Making change and improvement the center of the culture makes change the status quo. Needless to say, this wasn’t the case with my project back then.

The upshot here is that biases can gang up on us. Our enthusiasm, belief in ourselves, and assumption that things stay pretty much the same can combine to create seemingly logical decisions that can turn deadly. My managers no doubt reasoned that the project plan took over a year to write by well-informed professionals. There was very little cause for concern that a small part of the project might derail the whole thing.

In the end, our re-work was hardly noticed because other parts of the project became late, with much higher costs. One can only guess that the same forces were at work.

Building iKan Without Pain

In record time, the Apple Store has accepted our iKan Personal Kanban app.  This means that Modus Cooperandi’s first iPhone app is up and ready for sale. That link there tells you about the app itself, but this post is going to discuss how it came to be and why it is significant to me.

You see, the way things get built is changing rapidly. It’s exciting – but it’s also not surprising when it fails. But when it works, it is a beautiful thing.

Here’s what happened.

Over the last eight months, people kept asking me “Where is the Personal Kanban iPhone app?” I usually answered something like, “We just came out with Personal Kanban a few months ago, give me a break!” I was expecting other developers to do the iPhone app, but after a time it became clear no one was going to do it.

After a Seattle Lean Coffee, I found myself talking to Jeremy Lightsmith, Gary Bernhardt and Corey Ladas. We discovered a shared vision for what iKan would look like and how it might evolve. We were all keenly interested in the future of work and lean. Things clicked.

We negotiated a quick equity-for-effort model, designed to evolve with the product. As we move forward, equity stakes in the product will change as groups of us (or others) work on the product. No pain, no bickering.

The next day we had our first pre-alpha of the software. Everyone pitched in with the time they had and the expertise they could bring. Jeremy and Gary doing the coding. Corey and I finalizing the feature set and guiding the release plan. And finally Jeremy and myself getting all the rigmarole with getting Apple certification for the developers, Modus Cooperandi and the app itself.

We set up a dropbox folder where Jeremy and Gary fed versions of iKan to Corey, the beta testers (Thanks Ann and Patty!), and myself. We used a development kanban on Zen to track features, progress and tasks. All in all it was about eight weeks to completion.

Why is this beautiful? It was refreshing to have an idea, come up with the first minimal release for that idea, and just build it. No angels, VCs, loans or legalities. Just four people who wanted to get this thing out and working.

Between this, the Personal Kanban book and the work Modus has been doing with the United Nations, I’m feeling pretty good about the state of collaboration in my world right now.

Again, check out the iKan Personal Kanban app and maybe buy a few.

 

Social Media, Lean and the CIA

At the end of March, I spoke at Social Media Breakfast, Seattle (See their recap) at the Waggener Edstrom offices in Bellevue. They were live streaming the talk, but had some technical problems – so the video is in two parts. If you want to see what the audience saw on the screen, there’s also the Prezi I spoke from here.

This talk is covering the challenges that organizations have with collaboration, both internal and external. Social Media and Lean need to be applied together to provide both a set of principles and a collaborative foundation. I also talk about being a punk rocker.  So, if you want to know how punk rock, twitter and the CIA all mean the same thing … take a look!

Part 1 Part 2

Scotch, Apples and Time to Think

What does your company do?

Every company does something different, no matter how slight. Even Burger King and McDonalds have their differentiators.

These differentiators, and ones you've planned to release later, are vital to your survival. They make your products unique. If you pick the right differentiators and can communicate their value, you win! If you pick the wrong ones or can't communicate the value of the right ones, you may well lose.

Companies are filled with people. By and large, these people care about the company. Not only because they like having a job, but also because they are interested in their profession.

At Modus Cooperandi, we try to schedule specific times just to think together. Frankly, it's my favorite part of owning a company. When we were in the Lake Union offices, we had 3pm Scotch. We'd break out the single malt, some nice glasses, and just talk. No agenda was set, but these conversations were deep and engaging opportunities. We developed a lot of new knowledge from our 3pm Scotch.

When I was in DC, we instead took "apple breaks," or went for a walk. Whenever we'd hit a wall in our work, someone broke out the cutting board and knife we knew it was time to talk it out.

Modus' main product is intellectual - we manufacture ideas and knowledge. Whether we are writing a white paper or coaching individuals or teams, we are leveraging tools to help them better manufacture their own ideas and knowledge.

3pm Scotch

3pm Scotch was a time of invention. We'd gather, find a topic, and off we went. Many times there'd be a running theme that carried over from the previous day, but that theme evolved. The ritualized nature of these gatherings became part of the culture. Corey and I would start talking about something in the morning and one of us would suggest writing it on the white board "for Scotch."  We'd record it, and then get back to daily business.

This prevented that conversation from becoming a distraction at at 10am, and instead honored it as a legitimate business act at 3. It also gave us a specific time where we - as a company - took our manufacturing resources (our people) and focused them on new product development or product improvement. We didn't do this by forcing a particular topic, but instead by providing the time in the first place.

On separate occasions, both Thu An and Jeanine expressed how they'd been waiting for these moments all day. This had nothing to do with the Scotch (they often drank tea), and everything to do with something they were itching to talk about.

Software development and other knowledge work teams rarely do this. We get so buried in the day-to-day "work" that we forget what it is that we are building. We miss opportunities to make them better or sell them faster.

Apple Breaks

Apple Breaks often occurred like Andon events on an assembly line. When someone pulls an Andon cord in manufacturing, it is an instant alert that there is a problem, and a team quickly forms to solve it. In some cases, the pull of the Andon cord may actually stop all production.

Apple Breaks caused us to get away from our laptops, regroup in the kitchen, and discuss the problem we were facing. Tonianne and I would get away from our screens and instead focus on the issue, rather than on the words we'd typed. Tonianne likes to say "our nose is too close to the canvas." 
Apple Breaks not only forced us to focus on and solve the issue at hand, they also got our noses away from the proverbial canvas. They gave perspective. They gave us time to work it out.

Most importantly, Apple Breaks gave us permission to stop "working" in order to get work done. Permission is important here. When you are building something for a living, walking away from the production center feels like you are abdicating your responsibility. But this isn't the case.

Watch any construction project. The construction workers take regular breaks, and not just because their work is physically exhausting. It's because they know the more tired they are, the more likely they are to injure themselves. Sometimes walking away from the computer is the best way to use the computer.

Apple Breaks recognize that the source of many issues is often being stuck in the current form of the solution we are working on. The more we stare at that form, the more invested we are in it.  Walking away from it frees us of its tyranny. On more than one occasion, Tonianne and I solved a problem during a 20 minute Apple Break that we fought with for days on the screen.

Why Scotch? Why Apples?

You can eat or drink whatever you want - that's irrelevant. The point here is: Take time out to think expansively. Take time out to solve problems as they happen. Your people need permission to think. Give it to them.

Remember: Knowledge is your company's #1 asset and its #1 product. Knowledge comes from thinking. Did you really hire people to not think?

Celebrate Incremental Victories

Life is short. Crap is plentiful.

Thus defines the human condition.

So we have a few choices. We can focus on either the pleasant, or the unpleasant. I have worked with many people who love to focus on the unpleasant. They call themselves "realists." The thinking here is that you need to plan for and react to bad things as they come up - because bad things are bad.

To adequately plan for bad things, they - the aforementioned realists - envision all the possibly bad things that could happen and then they come up with ways to avoid those bad things, or, they simply fret that they might happen.

They call this "contingency planning."

Then after the project has happened, during which they've fretted about the bad things that might (but usually don't) happen, they go back and talk about all the things that went wrong and how they can be avoided in the future.

They call this a "retrospective."

I call this crap farming.

By focusing on the crap, they cultivate more crap. With their laser sights set on what can go wrong, they over emphasize things that don't go perfectly. Then, during the retrospective, the things that happened that are seen as bad are the only topics discussed.

I am going to go out on a limb here and posit that perhaps this isn't the best way to live or manage our teams.
There are far too many weeds in this garden of negativity. Here's a few:

Rigid Definition of Success - Given that there are limitless ways for a project to go wrong (including meteor strikes and locust plagues), in order for the negative manager to be able to function, they need to have a very precise definition of success. This creates a self-fulfilling prophesy where the definition of success becomes so precise a target as to be practically unhittable - guaranteeing failure in the attempt to avoid failure.

Success Blindness - By focusing on what might go wrong, and building systems guaranteeing the perception of failure, success is discounted as a temporary or even illusionary state. "Yeah, it's nice that success happened but...LOOK AT ALL THE FAILURE!"

Failure Worship - The worship of failure disregards that all projects have variation. Even a successful project has variation in its path from inception to completion. This variation is seen as unplanned events, and therefore failures (because we didn't see them coming). But, in reality, this variation is the measure of actual success. When you look for failure, you will find it. When you worship failure, you will not only find it, you will likewise ignore success.

The way out of this hole:

Don't do it.

Success happens every day, and building on that success is what creates more success. Avoiding failure is proving a negative. Can we learn from our mistakes? Yes. But that, in and of itself, is a success.

Replacing worshiping failure with the celebration of incremental victories means that each retrospect finds ways to do things better (as opposed to stopping doing them wrong). This, in turn, creates teams that are hell-bent of improving - rather than avoiding pain.

Celebrate incremental victories! Take credit for jobs well done, and do them even better next time.

Photo by Bill d’Agostino

Giving versus Co Creation

It’s 9:30 am at Moderate Technologies. Peter Weinberger, the president, walks into the office, and he’s excited.  Earlier that morning while showering, he had an epiphany – one he believes will revolutionize how moderate people do moderate things. 

He bursts into the office and exclaims, “I have this awesome idea! Let’s do it!”

Now most likely, one of two things will occur here:

One: Peter can “give” his employees the project.  He can devise a sure-fire plan and he can deliver it to them with enthusiasm.

The group will gladly execute, and will feel compelled to do so because he's their boss. But all their decisions from this point forward are Peter-focused:

• Is this what Peter wants?
• I would do something I think is better, but technically this is Peter’s baby.
• I wonder what Peter was going for here, because this just doesn’t make sense. But heck, I’ll do it anyway.
• I’m not sure if I should do this, I’ll go ask Peter.

Even if Peter specifically asks his staff for input, it’s human nature to defer to an owner or creator. So, in this case, Peter has inadvertently owned what he wanted to give or share.

A plan is most often (and usually wrongly) seen as an authoritative document or statement. When Peter came up with the plan, he established ownership, subsequently disempowering his staff.

Two: Peter's other option is to separate in his mind the idea - which is viable and can stand on its own - from the implementation. He can then sit down with his staff and brainstorm new ideas, and float his as one of them.  A couple of things could happen: the staff will choose Peter’s idea, or a better one will emerge.  Either way, Peter wins.

If Peter’s idea is sound enough to make it through his team, then the discussion of implementation is the same. The team discusses the implementation. Peter’s plan then becomes one option; it is no longer a dictate.

By the end of the meeting, Peter’s idea becomes the team’s idea.

It’s tough being Peter.  When you have a terrific idea and a great way to implement it, you can’t help but want to run into the room and share it with everyone. You are enthusiastic and feel your plan is a gift. It's awesome, surely everyone will want it. But the more gifts you give, the more the team has a two-fold reaction. On the one hand they start to feel entitlement: Peter gives us gifts. On the other hand they feel resentment: Here comes Peter with something else for us to do, and I never fully agree with his plans. So there’s this mixture of dependence and resentment that is rapid-fire poison for an organization.

Co-creation can diffuse this dynamic.

Blogged in Ocean Shores, WA

Have My People Tweet Your People

“You don’t give your Twitter duties to an intern” – Morgan Johnston from Jet Blue at #140TC

 

Business is lazy.  If business doesn’t understand something, it quickly assigns it, outsources it or otherwise gets it off the to-do list.  At the Twitter Conference #140TC in Mountain View this wee, Morgan Johnston talked about how important it was to have someone in the company with authority interacting on social media.

He had several stories about directly helping customers because Morgan had full penetration into the organization.  To the extent that he held the door open on a plane for two extra minutes so a family running from one delayed flight (on another airline) to that flight could make it.  The family had a member who was tweeting his pain while they ran.

Outsourcing your social media activities to an intern or a consultant means you stand a pretty good chance of working with someone who may well know how to use Twitter, but knows nothing about your business.  Don’t get me wrong, I know some people who are free lance community managers, have more than one client and do a great job.  But these people make it a priority to know their client’s business and ensure that they can quickly get to people capable of acting on a customer request.

If you must outsource your social media interaction, make sure that the person you are hiring cares, that you take the time to train them in whatever they need, and that you give them access to resources.

If you can’t do this, then don’t outsource.  Do it in-house – which you probably should be doing anyway.

Technorati Tags: social media,twitter,social media outsourcing,outsourcing,lazy,jet blue,morgan johnston

Chasing Bucky

“Aren’t you a .Net shop?” he asked me.

“No.” I replied

“But you built this in .Net.”

“I would have built it out of rice crispie squares if it were appropriate.”

At Gray Hill Solutions, we don’t subscribe to one coding platform.  To do so would be to lose any advances in software tools – which come at a wonderfully bewildering pace.  It makes sense, then, to not specialize in the tools – but in the application of tools in general.

Society has finally caught up with Buckminster Fuller.  Fuller was on a life-long quest to make the world a better place.  That’s a big ticket item.  It’s difficult to make the world a better place through myopia. 

In his Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (read, buy), Fuller gave a long and impassioned argument about the dangers of over specialization.  He leads this argument with this passage:

Leonardo da Vinci is the outstanding example of the comprehensively anticipatory design scientist. Operating under the patronage of the Duke of Milan he designed the fortified defenses and weaponry as well as the tools of peaceful production. Many other great military powers had their comprehensive design scientist-artist inventors; Michelangelo was one of them.

Many persons wonder why we do not have such men today. It is a mistake to think we cannot. What happened at the time of Leonardo and Galileo was that mathematics was so improved by the advent of the zero that not only was much more scientific shipbuilding made possible but also much more reliable navigation. Immediately thereafter truly large-scale venturing on the world’s oceans commenced, and the strong sword-leader patrons as admirals put their Leonardos to work, first in designing their new and more powerful world-girdling ships. Next they took their Leonardos to sea with them as their seagoing Merlins to invent ever more powerful tools and strategies on a world-around basis to implement their great campaigns to best all the other great pirates, thereby enabling them to become masters of the world and of all its people and wealth. The required and scientifically designed secrecy of the sea operations thus pulled a curtain that hid the Leonardos from public view, popular ken, and recorded history. – Bucky Fuller, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth

The shifts from Leonardos to Pirates and so on were enabled by advances in knowledge.  Merely introducing the number 0 into the human brain created a massive revolution not only in technology and travel, but in how we relate to the nature of work and to each other.  Fuller here was saying that we can all be geniuses in our own way – we just have to pull back the curtain.

To Fuller, the geniuses were not overly specialized.  They could not be.  In order to truly be creative, you need materials from which to create.  Frans Johannson calls this “the Medici Effect”.  The Medici Effect is, in essence, a mashup of ideas that can only come by stepping outside your field of expertise and learning from something radically different.  Fishermen have something to teach Internists.  Astronauts have something to teach pawn shop owners.  You never know, because the nature of insight is that it creatively links ideas that may not seem linkable.

So we are now in a world where we are understanding the world faster than ever before.  Digital technology so vastly speeds up the conversation that innovation and invention are common place.  “What have you invented for me lately?”

We are now all da Vincis.

In order to be da Vincis, we must now embrace Fuller-style generalism. No one is better to examine than Fuller himself for this.  Being a generalist didn’t mean Fuller was mired in reading random books.  Fuller built housing and cars.  He was an author and and artist.  He was practical and theoretical.

Or we can look at Henry J. Kaiser (right).  Kaiser oversaw shipyards, steel mills, automotive plants, engineering firms and a massive health care company.  Dude was hardly stuck in one mode of thinking.

The fact is that today advances in systemic thinking are requiring more holistic visions.  The human body was at one time a collection of fairly autonomous parts that functioned together.  Now, the body is understood more as a system and medicine is reacting to this realization.  But it doesn’t stop there, because the body reacts to lead in your paint, to particulates in the air, to the sun’s rays, to recycled air, to motor vehicles, to stress …  Suddenly being a doctor is even more complicated than before.

Recently when I was in Hospital for pneumonia, the doctors asked me a lot of questions. An not-insignificant number were about stress.  Did I own my own company?  Was business going well?  How was my life at home?  Had I suffered a loss recently?

At that point, at least at that hospital, I knew medicine had turned a corner and that we were starting to embrace Fuller’s wisdom at last.  Our understanding of the world and life is becoming more systemic and holistic.  The advances of technology and the speed of culture are now so fast that expertise is seen as temporal and contextual.  What is our expertise today will be obsolete technologically very soon – but the experience  of learning and applying the technology is what is really important.  The actions are ethereal, the lessons learned are permanent.

Now it’s up to us to let people know those lessons learned and to grow from them.  That’s the new expertise. We are all experts, we are all generalists.

Technorati Tags: Buckminster Fuller,Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth,Frans Johannson,Medici Effect,da vinci,trevor blake

Blogged at My House in Seattle, WA

Making the Twitter Backbone Usable - CoTweet

People keep talking about making Twitter work for business, but for me it was missing any way to include it into a company’s workflow.  At last, CoTweet allows people to form work groups (centered on a single account) and have permanence for tweets and actions.

Here we see a Tweet where @Sprezzatura has retweeted a question I asked.  I am able to assign that Tweet and annotate it for appropriate action.  This is an instant quantum leap in Twitter usability for business.  Saved Tweets then appear in a personal to-do list.

The personal to-do list, combined with annotation, provides both context for the action and the action itself.  Note that the bottom tweet was a DM, so the app shows regular and direct messages in the same UI – understanding that to me they are both information and the delivery mechanism is simply metadata.

Each tweet-task in the to do list can be DM’ed, replied to, Retweeted, reassigned, e-mailed, or marked done.

My longstanding complaint about using Twitter for any business purpose was simply that Tweets were inherently unmanageable. 

The CoTweet interface is very clean and usable.  Unbelievably so, in fact.  It may be one of the more beautiful interfaces I’ve seen.

The only thing that would make it blast into space and win the X Prize would be an AIR app.  They’re going mobile first which is a shame.  An AIR app gives you access to all users immediately.  Mobile, while necessary, is cumbersome for development and likely only going to benefit iPhone users.  I would have prioritized it differently.

In fact, the lack of an app will mean I will use CoTweet for the time being as a management tool and not as a tool to actually participate in Twitter in real-time.

That being said, I’m looking forward to getting my collaborators on CoTweet and using it to move tasks around and work better with the Modus Cooperandi account.

Technorati Tags: cotweet,twitter,microblogging,management

Blogged in the Alaska Air Board Room, Sea-Tac Airport