Sunday’s Team Workshop

We completed an all-day team workshop to break our Ben & Jerry’s presentation over the weekend. This was probably the most productive session we have had in the MA programme to date. Obviously our team-working skills are advancing with each presentation that we do. I also think that everyone is much more focused after our last effort.

We are approaching our actual presentation on the day in a completely different format. We have ditched the PowerPoint and embraced the ‘School Play’ format. Fundamentally retooling the mechanics in this way frees up our minds — we cannot but break our old habits.



Another key reason why we are being more efficient this time is my decision to bring my laptop to all of our meetings so that we are always working on our actual presentation and making real decisions as we go. In the past we would have long meetings talking around the topics with very reworked notes resulting. Then one person would be left to convert all of that analogue material into the presentation file, often with a looming deadline. This way we are always building.

(The only disappointment today was that none of us managed to score any Ben & Jerry’s ice cream for our workshop.)

Big Hairy Audacious Goals

I just totally love this new phrase ‘Big Hairy Audacious Goal’ (or BHAG) which was proposed by Jim Collins and Jerry Porras in in their book ‘Built to Last’. A BHAG is a form of vision statement “...an audacious ten to thirty-year goal to progress towards an envisioned future.”

It strikes me as a very Tom Peters kind of idea and one that definitely appeals to me. They write about it in the context of teamwork, but to me I can see how this can be such a useful leadership asset as well.

“A true BHAG is clear and compelling, serves as unifying focal point of effort, and acts as a clear catalyst for team spirit. It has a clear finish line, so the organization can know when it has achieved the goal; people like to shoot for finish lines.”

It is an interesting exercise to think about my work and my organisation and ask how we could stretch ourselves be setting the challenge of our own particular Big Hairy Audacious Goal.

My Thought For The Day 15/12

“Finally, module one essay finished, typeset and proofed at 23:55. Triage of my atypical in-box backlog shall have to wait until morning.”
23:57 December 15 from my Twitter feed.

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:

• 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

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...

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.

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.

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.’