Internalising My Inner Game

A response to finishing Miles Downey’s book ‘Effective Coaching’.

This is a book I can see myself returning to again. It falls into a class of books that deliver their value accumulatively. With some books you get all you are every really going to learn on your first reading Other, more useful, books deliver most of their benefit from a staged engagement. You need to read them, put their recommendations and suggestions into practice as best as you can, make mistakes and learn from those errors, then become competent while still not becoming proficient. Eventually you plateau and realise that you will benefit from revisiting the book for a refresher. Second time around certain ideas that seemed opaque initially now slot logically into place and other ideas, that seemed so enlightening the first time around, now seem merely so obvious as to be almost prosaic. Which is a measure of how far your thinking has moved on.

David Allen’s book ‘Getting Things Done’ falls into this category for me, giving some more every time I dip back into it. Likewise with ‘Effective Coaching’, there is a lot to be learned from this book, even if formal coaching is not something I think I shall ever do a huge amount of. Lots of Downey’s suggestions and ideas are useful and worth grappling with. His more advanced material I perceive as only coming into operation after you have successfully internalized the first tranche. Although I do not do much fully-formal coaching within my Design Director role, I am aware of the daily opportunities for informal coaching that benefit everyone. This book provides a great mental toolkit for thinking about optimising those encounters.

Downey writes authoritatively about self-awareness. Expounding on the topic far more than I expected given this volume’s subject material — which just shows what I knew. Obviously, such awareness is a prerequisite trait for becoming an effective coach. But more than that, as is so apparent from other readings and discussions on this MA programme, it is a compelling personal competitive advantage for achieving your goals. Without wanting to get all introspective, spending time getting your head around your own head seems to be time well spent. As a great poet once wrote ‘Know Thyself...’

POSTSCRIPT
As a parting shot (or parting backhand) I cannot let it go unsaid that this book claims the second-highest count of tennis metaphors of any book that I have ever read except for David Foster-Wallace’s ‘Infinite Jest’.

POST-POSTSCRIPT
I realize that the majority of my postscripts are actually technically footnotes, but the unending-scroll format of the blog paradigm is not footnote-friendly. So the cranky Sub-Editor facet of my persona is going to have to live with that. Although who knows, when I get around to the required hard-copy edition of this learning log, I may manage to re-typeset all of these postscripts into proper numbered footnotes.

We Talk Straight So That We Can All Walk Tall

I am going to take a shot at defining or identifying one common thread that connects each of the books and articles I have read during this first module. There are a few weeks to go until I move on from this portion of my MA Programme, but I am getting enough echoes and resonances from the literature that I want to capture this in one place. Let’s dive in.

In so much of our working life, too many of us underachieve (both individually and collectively) because we have an innate bias towards operating in what can be generalised as an overtly considerate manner. There are a number of general patterns that predominate. We avoid conflict. We are not straight with each other. We leave important things unsaid. We tip-toe around uncomfortable issues that we do not want to deal with.

In remaining within our self-constructed frame of politeness and consideration we are, albeit unintentionally, degrading and retarding performance at all levels. To evolve beyond this, our counter-productive interpersonal patterns should be unlearned.

This is not to say that the literature is implying that each of us needs to unleash our inner Michael O’Leary or channel Andy Grove so as to fully achieve our optimum potential. My use of the word ‘polite’ above may mistakenly suggest that being impolite in our career is useful. Obviously that is not the case. Rather it is that there is a lot of interference between what we ought to be achieving and what we actually do. Observing that interference and taking steps to mitigate it is the broad underlying theme.

I think I can further synthesise that theme into a one-line maxim that I could deliver on and that we could adopt in work as well: “We talk straight so that we can all walk tall”. Now that sounds like a plan to me...

Quote Of The Day 30/10

“Take risks and you’ll get the pay-offs. Learn from your mistakes until you succeed. It’s that simple.”
—Bobby Flay. Via Tim Ferris.

My Thought For The Day 29/10

“Realizing what I thought was going to be a learn-by-reading MA has morphed into learn-by-writing, with a side helping of learn-by-doing.”
9:14 PM October 29, 2008 from Twitterrific.

The McCain/Palin Meltdown and Cog’s Bifurcated Anti-Ladder

Mary T. sent through an article yesterday with some additional detail on Cog’s Ladder. It strikes me after reading it that there ought to be an alternate or complimentary ladder metaphor for dysfunctional teams. One which maps teams that get as far up as, say, the Power Stage and then go off the rails. Those sort of teams most definitely do not simply retreat back down the ladder into the Polite Stage. I have an image of a Y-shaped ladder...

Reading today’s paper I can draw a relevant analogy with the seemingly-doomed McCain/Palin team currently striving to claim the US Presidency. Where this team should by now have ascended Cog’s Ladder all of the way up to the Esprit Stage, the evidence is that they are fracturing and splitting off into (not quiet yet openly-antagonistic) factions. The outlines of a Power Stage struggle are becoming clear. With Palin having (privately, allegedly) conceded that this team’s goals are unachievable, she is now, in effect, positioning herself for the leadership role in the Republican 2012 Team.

As a team, the Republican candidates seem to definitely have said goodbye to the Co-operation Stage. (One has to wonder how fences would be mended in the event of an unforeseen victory, to be followed by four years together in the White House. Really, no-one would know where to look.) Once the goals of the top two team leaders divert, then the activities of the whole team must come to naught. (This is heading right back into the territory of The Five Dysfunctions.)

So I wonder how their ladder could be described? I will have to call the fourth phase of my notional anti-ladder the Covertly Antagonistic Stage, with the final act inevitably: Complete Meltdown Stage. You Betcha!

POSTSCRIPT
OK, so I really, really tried to weave in some form of joke about shooting helicopters from the back of wolves. And although I failed, I failed valiantly.

POST-ELECTION POSTSCRIPT 5/11
One week later, and after yesterday’s resounding Obama victory it is hard to get a handle on what is happening with the McCain/Palin team. Once you are the loser is seems that the media treat you as a historical footnote. Although the internet politico sites suggest that a steady stream of negative spin on Palin is already being leaked from the McCain camp now that their campaign is over.

False Consciousness And The Self-Managed Team

Reading some of Bratton’s Work and Organisational Behaviour last night dragged me twenty years back into a major deja-vu of Cultural Studies class in NCAD. It has been that long since I read any reference to Marxist critical theory. Back in NCAD, I always remember believing that the Marxist cultural theorists essentially lost their own argument once they had to introduce the notion of ‘false consciousness’ into the debate. It seemed to me to be their way of both having their cake and eating it. (To summarise briefly, if you felt like a truly oppressed member of society with the weight of capitalism crushing your soul, then you were truly conscious. If not, and you believed yourself to be a happy, well-adjusted member of society, then you had been successfully infected with false-consciousness. As a rhetorical construct this no doubt helped Marxist Theorists always win a lot more arguments down the pub — at least from their perspective.

What brought all of that to mind was the Marxist criticism of Self-Managing Teams outlined on page 314. The thesis discussed was that such teams allow management to still control workers (in perhaps a more covert manner) through an ‘illusion of self-control’. That reads like the same old circular logic to me. One of the other key issues I have with that Marxist approach is that it is ‘in cause’: the choices available to the worker’s must always be limited by management’s schemes. To me this always gives Management (in the broadest and most general sense) a lot more credit than they actually deserve.

My Thought For The Day 19/10 (Addendum)

“And just like that, there is three hours of my Sunday gone forever...”
1:16 PM Oct 19th from my Twitter feed.

My Thought For The Day 19/10

“Thinking through MA assignments at 06:45 on a cold autumn Sunday morning feels just ever-so slightly obsessive.”
11:08 AM Oct 19th from my Twitter feed.

Quote Of The Day 19/10

“Learn from the right people at the right time”
A strong posting on the 37Signals blog about paying attention to whom you are choosing to look to as your business role models at any given stage in your career.

My Thought For The Day 17/10

"Learning Outcome #78: it's nigh-on impossible to write analysis pieces for MA when Starbucks is playing crazy spiralling improv jazz solos."
11:03 AM October 17, 2008 from my Twitter feed.

My MA Cloud Toolkit

When planning my working methodology for tackling this MA programme, I set out to work in the cloud as much as possible. I did not want to be tied to having to work only on one computer in the office or at home. I wanted to build a framework of tools that would support my needs in such a way that I could always work on whatever aspect of the programme suited me, optimised for the time available, the resources I had to hand and my own energy levels.

With that objective in mind, I have chosen to use the following online services and software:

• Gmail for all email communication.
• Google Docs for all writing and document management.
• Blogger for hosting my Learning Log.
• Zenbe Lists on my iPod Touch for to-do lists.
• Notepad on my iPod Touch for first drafts of everything from learning log entries to presentations to essays.
• Evernote for ubiquitous capture.
• Twitter for status updates and self-depreciating humorous asides.
• These next two are infrastructure, but still deserve a place on my list:
• Amazon for books.
• iTunes for audio-books.

Discussing this topic with my classmates and reviewing their chosen methodologies it seems that I am taking a comparatively novel approach to all of this. So I do think it is worth taking a snapshot of how I am working at the beginning of the MA programme and then reviewing that workflow at the end. Whether all of my Cloud Toolkit makes it over the finish line with me is worth finding out.

My Thought For The Day 15/10

“I have surprised myself by not only jettisoning 80%+ of my media input, but sticking with that for four weeks to date.”
01:40 PM October 15, 2008 from my Twitter feed.

DOT Diagram: ‘Ordinary’ Team

I sketched-out these two diagrams on the train this morning. I will find a place for them in our MA presentation on ‘The Discipline Of Teams’.

DOT Diagram: ‘Real’ Team

Teams; ‘Real Teams’ And Curating Your Own Attention

Researched the website of Jon Katzenbach, one of the co-authors of ‘The Discipline of Teams’. I thought it would be interesting to see where his thinking on this topic has evolved to since 1993.

Happily enough, he has a page on Team Discipline. So at least he has not given up on the topic, actually he rather seems to have coined it on this one. The article is now a fully fledged book as well, (although not one that is going to win any cover design awards in this particular universe). One of the statements on his site caught my eye and crystallised something that had been bothering me about the core HBR article.

These kinds of performance units (often called teams) work best with concentrated leadership and individual accountability. They are, however, not ‘real teams’, although their performance results can be significant and appropriate.

There is a bit of a rhetorical sleight of hand going on here. He is saying that there are lots of potential groupings that other people may call ‘teams’ but that only specific defined groupings that follow his analysis are ‘real teams’. In his opinion. This may give us an opening for some critique in that surely you cannot be too prescriptive about these things: he says himself above that a grouping may achieve significant and appropriate results yet not be a ‘real team’. We could argue that if the results are achieved then what does it matter.

Thinking about the creative services and particularly the designer’s role (as with other knowledge workers) you need to discover your own balance point between having to work alone to generate your primary value-added output and the time you spend working within teams. Being successful today means more and more having to steward and protect your attention.

Carving out your ‘Doing-Time’ when you take no email and have your phone off the hook, so that you can get into the flow state is becoming an ever-more important career skill. In our role as designers, time spent in ‘making and doing’ mode has to be at least equal to that spent in ‘discussing and debating’ mode. I am not discounting that success also means having to be a committed team player when it comes to those parts of your job where teamwork is essential. Just that the nuances are different and that a lot of the kind of executive team examples in the MA literature to date have as their sole function going from meeting to meeting and adding their real value through personal interaction.

UPDATE: Paul Graham’s 2009 essay: ‘Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule’ is an insightful analysis of this topic.

Quote Of The Day 14/10

“There ain’t no rules around here. We’re trying to accomplish something.”

Thomas Alva Edison—inventor and businessman

On Countering Group-Think

My train broke down this evening for half an hour. So I got an extra half hour to read the essay ‘What you don’t know about making decisions’ in the HBR teams book. There was one great quote in that article, from Alfred Sloan of GM.

“If we are all in agreement on the decision – then I propose we postpone further discussion of this matter until our next meeting to give ourselves time to develop disagreement and perhaps gain some understanding of what the decision is all about.”

That is all about walking around the problem and trying to see all of the angles. As they say in the world of programming: ‘With enough eyeballs all bugs are shallow.’

The Johari Window And Facebook

I have been thinking further about the relationship model of the ‘Johari Window’ which was outlined in Saturday’s class and it has given me some small insight onto the success of Facebook and other social networking sites.

It takes a lot of effort on our own behalf to maintain the top-left quadrant in the Johari window: our Open information. The status-update features of social networking services such as Facebook and Twitter etc, provides a very low-friction method of letting your friends online know what you are doing. Thus enlarging that top-left quadrant of your Johari window with a far greater circle of people in a very efficient manner.

If I take some of friends in the US as an example of how this works off-line: after not speaking for months it becomes somewhat of a big deal to phone them to have a long catch-up. Equally when they visit Ireland you can spend lots of time informing each other of what has been happening in the last few years: essentially filling in that top-left quadrant.

Now look at the same scenario within a social-network enhanced world. It takes minimal effort for friends to update their status messages. ‘Knitting a sweater for my nephew.’ ‘Preparing for my quarterly evaluation tomorrow.’ ‘Going for my first extended bike ride in many a moon.’ Then on the other side of the window, equally little effort is required to read these. Just spending two minutes over coffee at my desk in the morning and I can have a update on the ‘open’ window quadrants of 30–40 friends and acquaintances.

This can in part explain the phenomenal success of social networking. In that it allows you to have a more open quadrant with your mid-level friends. Those whom are not your dearest friends, but whom you would probably be closer to if you were only more accessible to each other.

How ‘Getting Real’ Relates To Our 'Discipline Of Teams' Presentation

One of the most useful business books that I have yet read is ‘Getting Real’ by 37Signals. Although ostensibly about getting things done in the context of software development, the principles and practices they suggest map to all businesses. Reading through it this afternoon looking for something that would resonate with our topic of ‘The Discipline of Teams’ that I could include in our presentation and that would be contemporary I came across this quote(excerpted).

Less Mass
The leaner you are, the easier it is to change
The more massive an object, the more energy is required to change its direction. It is as true in the business world as it is in the physical world.

Mass is increased by:
—Meetings about other meetings
—Thick process
—The past ruling the future
—Long-term road maps
—Office politics

Mass is reduced by:
—Multi-tasking team members
—Small team size
—An open culture that makes it easy to admit mistakes

Less mass lets you change direction quickly. You can react and evolve. You can focus on the good ideas and drop the bad ones. You can listen and respond to your customers. Nimble, agile, less-mass businesses can quickly change their entire business model, product, feature set, and marketing message. They can make mistakes and fix them quickly. They can change their priorities, product mix, and focus. And, most importantly, they can change their minds.

The complete article is here.

Approaches To Master’s Team Presentations

What is the most informative and engaging style of presentation my MA team can come up with? A few questions spring to mind (and a few answers as well).

Do we use PowerPoint or not?
That is: do we just talk, from memory if we can do it, or with cue-cards, or whatever works for each team member? I have no problem with using PowerPoint, but only as a backdrop to our speaker(s). I have a strong preference for the Presentation Zen approach and that works for me. It is important to avoid the ‘death by PowerPoint’ presentation with too much text on each slide and speakers merely restating their contents.

It is worth having a look at this presentation by Gary Vanynerchuk at the Web2.0 conference. So this is a completely different style of presentation and this guy is a unique character and totally in-your-face. But he is compelling and articulate, and more importantly he uses no slides.

Also, my team needs to take on something achievable within our time frame and commitments. The danger here is for the team that decides to showcase their design and animation skills and cannot get their presentation to work on the night because they can only run it off a Mac and the laptop will not talk to the DIT projector, and so on. Nightmare meltdown time. I do not want to be that team. Also, being mostly designers, it is far easier to spend our time fiddling with the look of the slides than knuckling down and tackling the substantial and difficult part: the content.

Coming up with the content will be challenging enough, so the simpler we can make the actual presentation component the better. Also bearing in mind that we have other reading and course-work to be getting on with in parallel with this activity. My suggestion is that we have our presentation deck locked as early as possible so that whomever has to do the speaking gig has enough time to internalise the material. Again, I do not want to be the team where the presenter ends up apologizing to the audience because the slide sequence was rejigged at 4pm on the day and they get muddled up on-stage.

Who gets to present our work?
There are four of my team, so at its simplest we have four approaches. Obviously there is lots of scope for variation within these outlines but you get the idea. Whatever structure is settled on for our content will influence the choice here as well as personal preferences.
The School Play: four people on stage and each one steps forward to give their 3.25 minutes.
The One-Plus-Trio: one lead presenter handles say 70% of the gig and the other three have a minute or so on their specific contribution.
The Two-Hander: if our presentation breaks down into two logical coherent parts this can work well. This does not imply a 50:50 split of face-time.
The Solo Run: put our best presenter on and let her handle all of the delivery; don’t forget that the team always owns the content.

Based on my experience I would to go with one or two speakers maximum. When you have three or four, the audience tends to get distracted by the inevitable natural changes in tone and speaking style, and the message gets lost within the mechanics of on-stage hand-overs and suchlike.

My Thought For The Day 11/10

“OK, so I really need to mix an Ultimate Studying At Night playlist in iTunes.”
10:06 AM October 11, 2008 from my Twitter feed.

Completed MA Received Prior Learning Report

I finished writing my Received Prior Learning (RPL) report this evening, and it is probably way over the requested one and a half pages. This was a worthwhile exercise, even just to think through how much ad-hoc learning I have done over the years. I am still not fully happy with the goals and objectives section, but I cannot afford to give this report any more of my time. There are a lot of deliverables on this Masters programme, so it is going to be important that I allocate my time strictly and then complete tasks promptly once their allocation is up.

I have also decided to write my Learning Log in a blog format. For a number of reasons. Firstly, it is a format that I am comfortable working with, already having a few blogs under my virtual belt. Secondly, as I am writing the log entries on my iPod Touch, it gives them a permanent digital home if I ever lose that piece of hardware. Thirdly, as this information can be dated and tagged, it is searchable, and therefore far more useful when it comes to the reviewing and reflective learning aspect of getting value out of this blog log.

Quote Of The Day 08/10

"Being smart might be the luck of the draw, but knowing stuff just takes some effort."
--Seth Godin
I read this blog post on the train home this evening and it really resonated with me. I thought that his advice is apt when considering starting out on my journey through this Masters programme.

My Thought For The Day 08/10

“Contemplating my need to change my blog’s name to I Am Always Tired”.
08:48 AM October 08, 2008 from my Twitter feed.