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—Walt Disney
Thoughts on creating disruptive organisational transformations with design thinking.
Showing posts with label review-this. Show all posts
Showing posts with label review-this. Show all posts
Friday, March 27, 2009
Tuesday, December 30, 2008
Sunday, December 07, 2008
Get Persian: Introduce Some Constructive Conflict
I have located this document: ‘Lets Get Persian’ at changethis.com, an idea-propagating website which I been neglecting to visit since diving head-first into my Masters. The (user-generated) content at ChangeThis can be somewhat hit and miss, but the good material there is well worth truffling out. This particular essay has some interesting things to say about executive-level teamwork. I think that it adds some depth to some of the concepts we have been studying recently. Particularly maximising the performance of our teams. Here is one quote with a very useful list.
“In addition to using what might be called a second-chance meeting to review important decisions in an unbiased light, businesses should also take advantage of other means of introducing constructive contention into their decision-making, because disagreement, managed correctly, turns out to be crucial in avoiding errors. Our research found nine additional ways to introduce disagreement and manage that disagreement so it keeps everyone on their toes without harming the camaraderie of a management team:
“In addition to using what might be called a second-chance meeting to review important decisions in an unbiased light, businesses should also take advantage of other means of introducing constructive contention into their decision-making, because disagreement, managed correctly, turns out to be crucial in avoiding errors. Our research found nine additional ways to introduce disagreement and manage that disagreement so it keeps everyone on their toes without harming the camaraderie of a management team:
- Informal devil’s advocacy
- Escalation systems
- Bets
- Staring into the abyss
- Finding history that fits
- Deciding (ahead of time) how to decide
- Smoothing out management ruts
- Constructing alarm systems
- A formal devil’s advocate review
Sunday, November 02, 2008
My Thought ForThe Day 2/11
“Past performance is no indicator of future earnings.”
I cannot assume that whatever I am primarily focussed on doing today is going to earn me the same (or greater) income in five years. I always need to be thinking and looking ahead.
I cannot assume that whatever I am primarily focussed on doing today is going to earn me the same (or greater) income in five years. I always need to be thinking and looking ahead.
Friday, October 31, 2008
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.
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.
Thursday, October 30, 2008
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...
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...
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