Category: business

business

Strategy: Myths, fantasies, and reality

on August 7, 2018

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A defining feature of sustained excellence in any enterprise is a good strategy — a vision and plan linked to the delivery of something of value, consistently. One of the big reasons many organizations fail to thrive is not just that they that have the wrong strategy, but that they don’t have one at all (but think they do). 

Strategy is all about perception.

Whether you think you have one or not is partly perceptive. Whether you are delivering a strategy in practice or not is also a matter of perception. Why? Because strategy is what links what you build your organization for, what you drive it toward, and what you actually achieve. Lots of organizations achieve positive results by happenstance (being at the right place at the right time). That kind of luck can happen to anyone, but it hardly constitutes a strategy.

Also, statements of intent are great for creating the perception of strategy because one can always say they are working toward something in the abstract, but without a clear sense of how intentions are connected to actions and those actions connected to outcomes, there really isn’t a strategy.

Do you have a strategy?

The best example of this is in the entertaining and instructive illustrative book ‘I Have a Strategy (No You Don’t)‘, Howell J. Malham Jr literally illustrates the problems that beset conversations about strategy as it chronicles two characters (Larry and Gary) talking about the subject and busting the myths associated with what strategy is and is not. One exchange between the two goes like this:

Larry: “Hey Gary, I was working a strategy to put a cookie back in a cookie jar but I tripped and fell and the cookie flew into my mouth instead. Good strategy, huh?“

Gary: “That’s not a strategy. That’s a happy accident, Larry“

The entire book is like this. One misconception after another is clarified through one character using the term strategy to mean something other than what it really is. These misconceptions, misuses, and mistakes with the concept of strategy may be why it is so poorly done in practice.

Malham’s work is my favourite on strategy because it encapsulates so many of the real-world conversations I witness (and have been a part of) for years with colleagues and clients alike. Too much conversation on strategy is about things that are not really about strategy at all like wishes, needs, or opportunities.

This isn’t to suggest that all outcomes are planned or connected to a strategy, but the absence of a strategy means you’re operating at the whim of chance, circumstance, and opportunism. This is hardly the stuff of inspiration and isn’t sustainable. Strategy is about connecting purpose, plans, execution, and delivery. Malham defines a strategy as having the following properties:

1. It has an intended purpose;
2. There is a plan;
3. There is a sequence of actions (interdependent events);
4. It leads toward a distinct, measurable goal

When combined with evaluation, organizations build a narrative and understanding of not only whether a strategy leads toward a goal, but what actions make a difference (and to what degree), what aspects of a plan fit and didn’t fit, and what outcomes emerge from the efforts (including those that were unintended).

A look at much of the discourse on strategy finds that many organizations not only don’t have strategic plans, they don’t even have plans.

Words and action

One of the biggest problems with “capital ‘S’ Strategy” (the kind espoused in management science) is that it is filled with jargon and, ironically, contributes greatly to the very lack of strategic thinking that it seeks to inspire. It’s one of the reasons I like Malham’s book: it cuts through the jargon. I used to work with a senior leader who used all the language of strategy in talks, presentations, and writing but was wholly incapable or unwilling to commit to a strategic direction when it came to discussing plans and actions for their organization.

Furthermore, it is only marginally useful if you develop a strategy and then don’t bother to evaluate it to see what happened, how, and to what effect. Without the action tied to strategy, it is no better than a wish list and probably no more useful than a New Years Resolution.

Those plans and linking them to action is why design is such an important — and sadly, highly neglected — part of strategy development. Design is that process of shifting how we see problems, explore possibilities, and create pathways that lead to solutions. Design is not theoretical, it is practical and without design doing design thinking is impotent.

Two A’s of Strategy: Adaptation vs Arbitrary

The mistake for organizations working in zones of high complexity (which is increasingly most of those working with human services) is assuming that strategy needs to be locked in place and executed blindly to be effective. Strategy is developed in and for a context and if that situation changes, the strategy needs to change, too. This isn’t about throwing it out but adapting.

Adaptive strategy is a means of innovating responsibly, but can also be a trap if those adaptations need to be built on data and experience, not spurious conclusions. Arbitrary decisions is what often is at the root of bad (or no) strategy.

Roger Martin is one of the brightest minds on strategy and has called out what he sees as sloppy use of the term adaptive strategy as a stand-in for arbitrary decision-making going so far as to call it a ‘cop-out’. One of the biggest problems is that strategy is often not viewed in systems terms, as part of an interconnected set of plans, actions, and evaluations made simultaneously, not sequentially.

Good strategy is not a set of steps, but a set of cascading choices that influence the operations and outcomes simultaneously. Strategy is also about being active, not passive, about what it means to design and create an organization.

Grasping strategy for what it is, not what we imagine it to be, can be a key factor in shaping not only what you do, but how well you do it. Having the kind of conversations like those in Howell J. Malham’s book is a means to get things moving. Taking action on those things is another.

 

Image credit: Photo by Paul Skorupskas on Unsplash

behaviour changebusinessdesign thinking

How do we sit with time?

on May 16, 2018

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Organizational transformation efforts from culture change to developmental evaluation all depend on one ingredient that is rarely discussed: time. How do we sit with this and avoid the trap of aspiring for greatness while failing to give it the time necessary to make change a reality? 

Toolkits are a big hit with those looking to create change. In my years of work with organizations large and small supporting behaviour change, innovation, and community development there are few terms that light up people’s faces than hearing “toolkit”. Usually, that term is mentioned by someone other than me, but it doesn’t stop the palpable excitement at the prospect of having a set of tools that will solve a complex problem.

Toolkits work with simple problems. A hammer works well with nails. Drills are good at making holes. With enough tools and some expertise, you can build a house. Organizational development or social change is a complex challenge where tools don’t have the same the same linear effect. A tool — a facilitation technique, an assessment instrument, a visualization method — can support change-making, but the application and potential outcome of these tools will always be contextual.

Tools and time

My experience has been that people will go to great extents to acquire tools yet put little comparative effort to use them.  A body of psychological research has shown there are differences between goals, the implementation intentions behind them, and actual achievement of those goals. In other words: desiring change, planning and intending to make a change, and actually doing something are different.

Tools are proxies for this issue in many ways: having tools doesn’t mean they either get used or that they actually produce change. Anyone in the fitness industry knows that the numbers between those who try a workout, those who buy a membership to a club, and those who regularly show up to workout are quite different.

Or consider the Japanese term Tsundoku, which loosely translates into the act of acquiring reading materials and letting them pile up in one’s home without reading them.

But tools are stand-ins for something far more important and powerful: time.

The pursuit of tools and their use is often hampered because organizations do not invest in the time to learn, appropriately apply, refine, and sense-make the products that come through these tools.

A (false) artifact of progress

Bookshelf

Consider the book buying or borrowing example above: we calculate the cost of the book when really we ought to price out the time required to read it. Or, in the case of practical non-fiction, the cost to read it and apply the lessons from it.

Yet, consider a shelf filled with books before you providing the appearance of having the knowledge contained within despite any evidence that its contents have been read. This is the same issue with tools: once acquired it’s easier to assume the work is largely done. I’ve seen this firsthand with people doing what the Buddhist phrase decries:

“Do not confuse the finger pointing to the moon for the moon itself”

It’s the same confusion we see between having data or models and the reality they represent.

These things all represent artifacts of progress and a false equation. More books or data or better models do not equal more knowledge. But showing that you have more of something tangible is a seductive proxy. Time has no proxy; that’s the biggest problem.

Time just disappears, is spent, is used, or whatever metaphor you choose to use to express time. Time is about Kairos or Chronos, the sequence of moments or the moments themselves, but in either case, they bear no clear markers.

Creating time markers

There are some simple tricks to create the same accumulation effect in time-focused work — tools often used to support developmental evaluation and design. Innovation is as much about the process as it is the outcome when it comes to marking effort. The temptation is to focus on the products — the innovations themselves — and lose what was generated to get there. Here are some ways to change that.

  1. Timelines. Creating live (regular) recordings of what key activities are being engaged and connecting them together in a timeline is one way to show the journey from idea to innovation. It also provides a sober reminder of the effort and time required to go through the various design cycles toward generating a viable prototype.
  2. Evolutionary Staging. Document the prototypes created through photographs, video, or even showcasing versions (in the case of a service or policy where the visual element isn’t as prominent). This is akin to the March of Progress image used to show human evolution. By capturing these things and noting the time and timing of what is generated, you create an artifact that shows the time that was invested and what was produced from that investment. It’s a way to honour the effort put toward innovation.
  3. Quotas & Time Targets. I’m usually reluctant to prescribe a specific amount of time one should spend on reflection and innovation-related sensemaking, but it’s evident from the literature that goals, targets, and quotas work as effective motivators for some people. If you generate a realistic set of targets for thoughtful work, this can be something to aspire to and use to drive activity. By tracking the time invested in sensemaking, reflection, and design you better can account for what was done, but also create the marker that you can point to that makes time seem more tangible.

These are three ways to make time visible although it’s important to remember that the purpose isn’t to just accumulate time but to actually sit with it.

All the tricks and tools won’t bring the benefit of what time can offer to an organization willing to invest in it, mindfully. Except, perhaps, a clock.

Try these out with some simple tasks. Another is to treat time like any other resource: budget it. Set aside the time in a calendar by booking key reflective activities in just as you would anything else. To do this, and to keep to it, requires leadership and the organizational supports necessary to ensure that learning can take place. Consider what is keeping you from taking or making the time to learn, share those thoughts with your peers, and then consider how you might re-design what you do and how you do it to support that learning.

Take time for that, and you’re on your way to something better.

 

If you’re interested in learning more about how to do this practically, using data, and designing the conditions to support innovation, contact me. This is the kind of stuff that I do. 

 

 

 

 

 

behaviour changebusinesspublic healthsocial mediasystems science

Genetic engineering for your brand

on April 5, 2018

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DNA doesn’t predetermine our future as biological beings, but it does powerfully influence it. Some have applied the concept of ‘DNA’ to a company or organization, in the same way, it’s applied to biological organisms. Firms like PWC have been at the forefront of this approach, developing organizational DNA assessments and outlining the principles that shape the DNA of an organization. A good brand is an identity that you communicate with yourself and the world around you. A healthy brand is built on healthy DNA.

Tech entrepreneur and writer Om Malik sees DNA as being comprised of those people that form the organization:

DNA contains the genetic instructions used to build out the cells that make up an organism. I have often argued that companies are very much like living organisms, comprised of the people who work there. What companies make, how they sell and how they invent are merely an outcome of the people who work there. They define the company.

The analogy between the DNA of a company as being that of those who make it up is apt because, as he points out, organizations reflect the values, habits, mindsets, and focus of those who run them. For that reason, understanding your organizations’ DNA structure might be critical to shaping the corporate direction, brand and promoting any type of change, as we see from the case of Facebook.

DNA dilemma: The case of Facebook

Facebook is under fire these days. To anyone paying enough attention to the social media giant the issue with Facebook isn’t that it’s happening now, but why it hasn’t happened sooner? Back when the site was first opened up to allow non-university students to have accounts (signaling what would become the global brand it is today) privacy was a big concern. I still recall listening to a Facebook VP interviewed on a popular tech podcast who basically sloughed off any concerns the interviewer had about privacy saying the usual “we take this seriously” stuff but offering no example of how that was true just as the world was about to jump on the platform. I’ve heard that same kind of interview repeated dozens of times since the mid-2000’s, including just nine months before Mark Zuckerberg’s recent ‘mea culpa’ tour.

Facebook has never been one to show much (real) attention to privacy because its business model is all about ensuring that users’ are as open as possible to collect as much data as possible from them to sell as many services to them, through them, about them, and for others to manipulate. The Cambridge Analytica story simply exposed what’s been happening for years to the world.

Anyone who’s tried to change their privacy settings knows that you need more than a Ph.D. to navigate them* and, even then, you’re unlikely to be successful. Just look at the case of Bobbi Duncan and Katie McCormick who were outed as gay to their families through Facebook even though they had locked down their own individual privacy settings. This is all part of what CEO Mark Zuckerberg and the folks at Facebook refer to as “connecting the social graph.”

The corporate biology of addiction

In a prescient post, Om Malik wrote about Facebook’s addiction to its business model based on sharing, openness, and exploitation of its users’ information mere weeks before the Cambridge Analytica story came out.

Facebook’s DNA is that of a social platform addicted to growth and engagement. At its very core, every policy, every decision, every strategy is based on growth (at any cost) and engagement (at any cost). More growth and more engagement means more data — which means the company can make more advertising dollars, which gives it a nosebleed valuation on the stock market, which in turn allows it to remain competitive and stay ahead of its rivals.

Whether he knew it or not, Malik was describing an epigenetic model of addiction. Much emerging research on addiction has pointed to a relationship between genes and addictive behaviour. This is a two-way street where genes influence behaviour and behaviour influences a person’s genes (something called epigenetics). The more Facebook seeks to connect through its model, the more it reinforces the behaviour, the more it feels a ‘need’ to do it and therefore repeats it.

In systems terms, this is called a reinforcing loop and is part of a larger field of systems science called systems dynamics. Systems dynamics have been applied to public health and show how we can get caught in traps and the means we use to get out of them.  By applying an addiction model and system dynamics to the organization, we might better understand how some organizations change and how some don’t.

Innovation therapy

The first step toward any behaviour change for an addiction is to recognize the addiction in the first place. Without acknowledgment of a problem, there can’t be much in the way of self-support. This acknowledgment has to be authentic, which is why there is still reason to question whether Facebook will change.

There are many paths to addiction treatment, but the lessons from treating some of the most pernicious behaviours like cigarette smoking and alcohol suggest that it is likely to succeed when a series of small, continuous, persistent changes are made and done so in a supportive environment. One needs to learn from each step taken (i.e., evaluate progress and outcomes from each step), to integrate that learning, and continue through the inevitable cycling through stages (non-linear change) that sometimes involves moving backward or not knowing where along the change journey you are.

Having regulations or external pressures to change can help, but too much can paralyze action and stymie creativity. And while being motivated to change is important, sometimes it helps to just take action and let the motivation follow.

If this sounds a lot like the process of innovation, you’re right.

Principled for change

Inspiring change in an organization, particularly one where there is a clear addiction to a business model (a way of doing things, seeing things, and acting) requires the kind of therapy that we might see in addiction support programs. Like those programs, there isn’t one way to do it, but there are principles that are common. These include:

  1. Recognize the emotional triggers involved. Most people suffering from addictions can rationalize the reasons to change, but the emotional reasons are a lot harder. Fear, attraction, and the risk of doing things differently can bubble up when you least expect it. You need to understand these triggers, deal with the emotional aspects of them — the baggage we all bring.
  2. Change your mindset. Successful innovation involves a change of practice and a change of mindset. The innovator’s mindset goes from a linear focus on problems, success, and failure to a non-linear focus on opportunities, learning, and developmental design.  This allows you to spot the reinforcing looping behaviour and addiction pathways as well as what other pathways are open to you.
  3. Create better systems, not just different behaviour. Complex systems have path-dependencies — those ruts that shape our actions, often unconsciously and out of habit. Consider ways you organize yourself, your organization’s jobs and roles, the income streams, the system of rewards and recognitions, the feedback and learning you engage with, and composition of your team.  This rethinking and reorganization are what changes DNA, otherwise, it will continue to express itself through your organization in the same way.
  4. Make change visible. Use evaluation as a means to document what you do and what it produces and continue to structure your work to serve the learning from this. Inertia comes from having no direction and nothing to work toward. We are beings geared towards constant motion and making things — it’s what makes us human. Make a change, by design. Make it visible through evaluation and visual thinking – including the ups, downs, sideways. A journey involves knowing where you are — even if that’s lost — and where you’re going (even if that changes).

Change is far more difficult than people often think. Change initiatives that are rooted solely in motivation are unlikely to produce anything sustainable. You need to get to the root, the DNA, of your organization and build the infrastructure around it to enable it to do the work with you, not against you. That, in Facebook terms, is something your brand and its champions will truly ‘Like’.

 

* Seriously. I have a Ph.D. and am reasonably tech literate and have sat down with others with similar educational backgrounds — Ph.D.’s, masters degrees, tech startup founders — and we collectively still couldn’t figure out the privacy settings as a group.

References: For those interested in system dynamics or causal loop modeling, check out this great primer from Nate Osgood at the University of Saskatchewan. His work is top-notch. Daniel Kim has also written some excellent, useful, and practical stuff on applying system dynamics to a variety of issues.

Image credit: Shutterstock used under license.

businessinnovationpsychologyscience & technologysocial systems

The logic of a $1000 iPhone

on September 12, 2017

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Today Apple is expected to release a new series of iPhone handsets with the base price for one set at more than $1000. While many commentators are focusing on the price, the bigger issue is less about what these new handsets cost, but what value they’ll hold. 

The idea that a handset — once called a phone — that is the size of a piece of bread could cost upward of $1000 seems mind-boggling to anyone who grew up with a conventional telephone. The new handsets coming to market have more computing power built into them than was required for the entire Apollo space missions and dwarf even the most powerful personal computers from just a few years ago. And to think that this computing power all fits into your pocket or purse.

The iPhone pictured above was ‘state of the art’ when it was purchased a few years ago and has now been retired to make way for the latest (until today) version required not because the handset broke, but because it could no longer handle the demands placed on it from the software that powered it and the storage space required to house it all. This was never an issue when people used a conventional telephone because it always worked and it did just one thing really well: allowed people to talk to each other at a distance.

Changing form, transforming functions

The iPhone is as much about technology as it is a vector of change in social life that is a product of and contributor to new ways of interacting. The iPhone (and its handset competitors) did not create the habits of text messaging, photo sharing, tagging, social chat, augmented reality, but it also wasn’t just responding to humans desire to communicate, either. Adam Alter’s recent book Irresistible outlines how technology has been a contributor to behaviours that we would now call addictive. This includes a persistent ‘need’ to look at one’s phone while doing other things, constant social media checking, and an inability to be fully present in many social situations without touching their handset.

Alter presents the evidence from a variety of studies and clinical reports that shows how tools like the iPhone and the many apps that run on it are engineered to encourage the kind of addictive behaviour we see permeating through society. Everything from the design of the interface, to the type of information an app offers a user (and when it provides it), to the architecture of social tools that encourage a type of reliance and engagement that draws people back to their phone, all create the conditions for a device that no longer sits as a mere tool, but has the potential to play a central role in many aspects of life.

These roles may be considered good or bad for social welfare, but in labelling such behaviours or outcomes in this way we risk losing the bigger picture of what is happening in our praise or condemnation. Dismissing something as ‘bad’ can mean we ignore social trends and the deeper meaning behind why people do things. By labelling things as ‘good’ we risk missing the harm that our tools and technology are doing and how they can be mitigated or prevented outright.

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Changing functions, transforming forms

Since the iPhone was first launched, it’s moved from being a phone with a built in calendar and music player to something that now can power a business, serve as a home theatre system, and function as a tour guide. As apps and software evolve to accommodate mobile technology, the ‘clunkiness’ of doing many things on the go like accounting, take high-quality photos, or manage data files has been removed. Now, laptops seem bulky and even tablets, which have evolved in their power and performance to mimic desktops, are feeling big.

The handset is now serving as the tether to each other and creates a connected world. Who wants to lug cables and peripherals with them to and from the office when you can do much of the work in your hand? It is now possible to run a business without a computer. It’s still awkward, but it’s genuinely possible. Financial tools like Freshbooks or Quickbooks allow entrepreneurs to do their books from anywhere and tools like Shopify can transform a blog into a full-fledged e-commerce site.

Tools like Apple Pay have turned your phone into a wallet. Paying with your handset is now a viable option in an increasing number of places.

This wasn’t practical before and now it is. With today’s release from Apple, new tools like 3-D imaging, greatly-improved augmented reality support and enhanced image capture will all be added to the users’ toolkit.

Combine all of this with the social functions of text, chat, and media sharing and the handset has now transformed from a device to a social connector, business driver and entertainment device. There is little that can be done digitally that can’t be done on a handset.

Why does this matter?

It’s easy to get wrapped up in all of this as technological hype, but to do so is to miss some important trends. We may have concern over the addictive behaviours these tools engender, the changes in social decorum the phone instigates, and the fact that it becomes harder to escape the social world when the handset is also serving as your navigation tool, emergency response system, and as an e-reader. But these demands to have everything in your pocket and not strapped to your back, sitting on your desk (and your kitchen table) and scattered all over different tools and devices comes from a desire for simplicity and convenience.

In the midst of the discussion about whether these tools are good or bad, we often forget to ask what they are useful for and not useful for. Socially, they are useful for maintaining connections, but they have shown to be not so useful for building lasting, human connections at depth. They are useful for providing us with near-time and real-time data, but not as useful at allowing us to focus on the present moment. These handsets free us from our desk, but also keep us ‘tied’ to our work.

At the same time, losing your handset has enormous social, economic and (potentially) security consequences. It’s no longer about missing your music or not being able to text someone, when most of one’s communications, business, and social navigation functions are routed through a singular device the implications for losing that device becomes enormous.

Useful and not useful/good and bad

By asking how a technology is useful and not useful we can escape the dichotomy of good and bad, which gets us to miss the bigger picture of the trends we see. Our technologies are principally useful for connecting people to each other (even if it might be highly superficial), enabling quick action on simple tasks (e.g., shopping, making a reservation), finding simple information (e.g., Google search), and navigating unknown territory with known features (e.g., navigation systems). This is based on a desire for connection a need for data and information, and alleviating fear.

Those underlying qualities are what makes the iPhone and other devices worth paying attention to. What other means have we to enhance connection, provide information and help people to be secure? Asking these questions is one way in which we shape the future and provide either an alternative to technologies like the iPhone or better amplify these tools’ offerings. The choice is ours.

There may be other ways we can address these issues, but thus far haven’t found any that are as compelling. Until we do, a $1000 for a piece of technology that does this might be a bargain.

Seeing trends and developing a strategy to meet them is what foresight is all about. To learn more about how better data and strategy through foresight can help you contact Cense. 

Image credits: Author

 

businesscomplexityevaluation

A mindset for developmental evaluation

on September 7, 2017

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Developmental evaluation requires different ways of thinking about programs, people, contexts and the data that comes from all three. Without a change in how we think about these things, no method, tool, or approach will make an evaluation developmental or its results helpful to organizations seeking to innovate, adapt, grow, and sustain themselves. 

There is nothing particularly challenging about developmental evaluation (DE) from a technical standpoint: for the most part, a DE can be performed using the same methods for data collection as other evaluations. What stands DE apart from those other evaluations is less the methods and tools, but the thinking that goes into how those methods and tools are used. This includes the need to ensure that sensemaking is a part of the data analysis plan because it is almost certain that some if not the majority of the data collected will not have an obvious meaning or interpretation.

Without developmental thinking and sensemaking, a DE is just an evaluation with a different name

This is not a moot point, yet the failure of organizations to adopt a developmental mindset toward its programs and operations is (likely) the single-most reason for why DE often fails to live up to its promise in practice.

No child’s play

If you were to ask a five-year old what they want to be when they grow up you might hear answers like a firefighter, princess, train engineer, chef, zookeeper, or astronaut. Some kids will grow up and become such things (or marry accordingly for those few seeking to become princesses or they’ll work for Disney), but most will not. They will become things like sales account managers, marketing directors, restaurant servers, software programmers, accountants, groundskeepers and more. While this is partly about having the opportunity to pursue a career in a certain field, it’s also about changing interests.

A five-year old that wants to be a train engineer might seem pretty normal, but one that wants to be an accountant specializing in risk management in the environmental sector would be considered odd. Yet, it’s perfectly reasonable to speak to a 35-year-old and find them excited about being in such a role.

Did the 35-year-old that wanted to be a firefighter when they were five but became an accountant, fail? Are they a failed firefighter? Is the degree to which they fight fires in their present day occupation a reasonable indicator of career success?

It’s perfectly reasonable to plan to be a princess when you’re five, but not if you’re 35 or 45 or 55 years old unless you’re currently dating a prince or in reasonable proximity to one. What is developmentally appropriate for a five-year-old is not for someone seven times that age.

Further, is a 35-year-old a seven-times better five-year-old? When you’re ten are you twice the person you were when you were five? Why is it OK to praise a toddler for sharing, not biting or slapping their peers, and eating all their vegetables and weird to do it with someone in good mental health in their forties or fifties? It has to do with developmental thinking.

It has to do with a developmental mindset.

Charting evolutionary pathways

We know that as people develop through stages, ages and situations the knowledge, interests, and capacities that a person has will change. We might be the same person and also a different person than the one we were ten years ago. The reason is that we evolve and develop as a person based on a set of experiences, genetics, interests, and opportunities that we encounter. While there are forces that constrain these adaptations (e.g., economics, education, social mobility, availability of and access to local resources), we still evolve over time.

DE is about creating the data structures and processes to understand this evolution as it pertains to programs and services and help to guide meaningful designs for evolution. DE is a tool for charting evolutionary pathways and for documenting the changes over time. Just as putting marks on the wall to chart a child’s growth, taking pictures at school, or writing in a journal, a DE does much of the same thing (even with similar tools).

As anyone with kids will tell you, there are a handful of decisions that a parent can make that will have sure-fire, predictable outcomes when implemented. Many of them are created through trial-and-error and some that work when a child is four won’t work when the child is four and five months. Some decisions will yield outcomes that approximate an expected outcome and some will generate entirely unexpected outcomes (positive and negative). A good parent is one who pays attention to the rhythms, flows, and contexts that surround their child and themselves with the effort to be mindful, caring and compassionate along the way.

This results in no clear, specific prototype for a good parent that can reliably be matched to any kid, nor any highly specific, predictable means of determining who is going to be a successful, healthy person. Still, many of us manage to have kids we can proud of, careers we like, friendships we cherish and intimate relationships that bring joy despite no means of predicting how any of those will go with consistency. We do this all the time because we approach our lives and those of our kids with a developmental mindset.

Programs as living systems

DE is at its best a tool for designing for living systems. It is about discerning what is evolving (and at what rate/s) and what is static within a system and recognizing that the two conditions can co-exist. It’s the reason why many conventional evaluation methods still work within a DE context. It’s also the reason why conventional thinking about those methods often fails to support DE.

Living systems, particularly human systems, are often complex in their nature. They have multiple, overlapping streams of information that interact at different levels, time scales and to different effects inconsistently or at least to a pattern that is only partly ever knowable. This complexity may include simple relationships and more complicated ones, too. Just as a conservation biologist might see a landscape that changes, they can understand what changes are happening quickly, what isn’t, what certain relationships are made and what ones are less discernible.

As evaluators and innovators, we need to consider how our programs and services are living systems. Even something as straightforward as the restaurant industry where food is sought and ordered, prepared, delivered and consumed, then finished has elements of complexity to it. The dynamics of real-time ordering and tracking, delivery, shifting consumer demand, the presence of mobile competitors (e.g., food trucks), changing regulatory environment, novelty concepts (e.g., pop-ups!), and seasonality of food demand and supply has changed how the food preparation business is run.

A restaurant might not just be a bricks-and-mortar operation now, but a multi-faceted, dynamic food creation environment. The reason could be that even if they are good at what they did if everything around them is changing they could still deliver consistently great food and service and fail. They may need to change to stay the same.

This only can happen if we view our programs as living systems and create evaluation mechanisms and strategies that view them in that manner. That means adopting a developmental mindset within an organization because DE can’t exist without it.

If a developmental evaluation is what you need or you want to learn more about how it can serve your needs, contact Cense and inquire about how they can help you. 

Image Credit: Thinkstock used under license.

businessinnovationpsychologysocial systemssystems thinking

Fail Fast, Succeed Sooner(?)

on October 4, 2016

 

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Our series on paradox continues today by taking a look at the curious case of failure and how it’s popularity as a means to success represents more than just a paradox, but a series of contradictions that might just thwart the very innovation it seeks to support by embracing it. 

Failure is everywhere. Today I noticed a major research university share a post on LinkedIn celebrating failure in the workplace. This follows a recent conversation with a colleague who was thrilled that she’d received funding to study failure, having secured peer-reviewed funding to do it. If it hadn’t done so before, failure has finally jumped the shark. With all due respect to my colleague, the university and everyone who’s embraced failure, it’s use in common discourse has now reached a level where it was never intended to go and has perhaps done more to mask real solutions to problems than solve them.

The more we celebrate failure, the more likely we are to get it.

I’ve written about the failure fetishism that is sweeping over the world of business, innovation and now education. You know failure and innovation has reached its peak when scholars are getting peer-reviewed funding to study it. This in itself represents a paradox on many levels when you consider that research is intended to support innovation, yet the very process that funders typically use to support funding innovative ideas is based on the evidence of how those ideas have been used before as judged by peer review. Thus, you need to show that an innovative idea is worthy by means of evidence to support the research to generate the evidence of the innovative idea.

If you are doing peer review appropriately one could argue that you should never approve projects that are highly innovative as there simply isn’t evidence to support it. Given that the university and science have the goal of advancing new knowledge it’s hard to imagine a more perfect example of paradox.

Anxiety & failure

It’s interesting to review that post from 2011 — 5 years ago — in that much of the material seems as relevant and fresh today as it was back then. Citing a column in HBR by Daniel Isenberg, I highlighted a passage that resonated with me and what I was seeing in the discourse and use of failure in scholarship and innovation development:

Well-intentioned though they may be, these attempts to celebrate failure are misguided. Fear should not be confused with anxiety—and celebrating failure seems aimed at reducing anxiety.

Anxiety is defined as an extreme un-ease and a discomfort and stress about a situation, scenario or circumstance. While the rates of clinical anxiety and mood disorders appear to be quiet prevalent at over 11% of the adult population in Canada, the general mood of the public as expressed in the media, social media, and coffee pub conversations suggests this might be the tip of an iceberg of yet indeterminable size. Some have branded this the Age of Anxiety, drawing on the mid-19th century poem (pdf) of the same name  by W.H. Auden (suggesting our worry about worry isn’t new).

However, as digital marketing strategist and author Mitch Joel writes, digital technologies lend themselves to their own anxiety among citizens, business owners, marketers and communications professionals alike. As Joel and many others have advocated: we might need to unplug to better connect.

IBM has conducted its global C-Suite studies for years and has found that terms like collaboration, partnership, and social all emerged from the interviews and surveys across the world as priorities for business moving forward. All of these involve non-specific measures of success. Unlike profit (which is still a top-line item, even if not always spoken), the metrics of success in any of those areas are not clear and success is poorly defined. Ambiguity in the measures of your success and the uncertainty surrounding pathways to success is a recipe for anxiety.

If you don’t know what your criteria for success is, or what is expected of you, the ability to fail is low. But what often happens is that we see metrics almost arbitrarily introduced to program evaluations and research because we are using what worked before in one context into a new context. All of a sudden we have inappropriate measures and metrics meeting uncertainty meeting anxiety and all of a sudden failure becomes a big deal. Of course people are failing, but that doesn’t necessarily help the bigger picture.

The innovation problem

Innovation is something that can be enabled, but often not well-managed and the distinction is important. The former is more organic, complex and unpredictable while the latter notion implies a degree of control. The less control we have, the more anxiety we are likely to feel. But innovation is not just some word that’s sexy, it’s also about critically adapting to new conditions and new circumstances.

This Thursday in London, my friend and colleague John Wenger is leading a workshop on how to deal with Brexit for those feeling confused, upset, angry, or isolated because of the decision made by referendum this year. Through the use of sociodrama, dialogue and discussion, John helps people connect with their feelings and thoughts in novel settings and contexts to help them to ground what they don’t know in what they do. That is innovation lived out in real-time. This workshop’s not technological, it might not be easily commercialized, nor will it ‘scale’ enough to secure massive investments of venture capital, but it is a process that is at its heart about innovation: new thinking realized in practice through design to produce value.

If those participants go off and have more compassionate conversations with each other, their neighbours and with themselves as a result of this we will truly see social innovation.

Participants in processes like this are designing their life, their way of thinking and relating to each other that is new, even if the process, memories and material might be quite old and established. The confusion about the need for innovation to somehow be this (high) technological or world-reaching ‘thing’ is what limits our sense of what’s really possible and produces considerable failure. Failure would be a failure to learn and attend to what is happening, not a failure to experience hurt, shame, joy, confusion, or community.

Yet, if one were to adopt the rhetoric of failure in this case we might actually produce the very kind of failure that we, ironically are trying to avoid. Anchoring our metrics and focus on what constitutes ‘failure‘ — which is a concept that is rooted to some definition of success — leads us away from the complicated, tricky questions about what it means to innovate and adapt. It also draws us away from looking at problems of systems to problems of individuals.

Failed systems, not failed individuals

When individuals fail at not reaching an inappropriate target, it’s not a problem of them as individuals, but the system itself. Celebrating that failure might reduce some of the stigma associated with this ‘failure’, but it doesn’t address a larger set of problems.

While it may be that our interventions are aimed at individuals, it is the problem of the system in which individuals, groups and organizations are rooted that contribute to a great deal of the issues we individuals face. It’s why innovation requires platforms to be successful at a larger scale because they create new systems and ecosystems for innovations to anchor to other changes, which strengthens their power for change. If we were to look solely at individuals, divorced from context and the community/socitey in which they arise, concepts like Brexit cannot make any sense no matter how you look at them (whether voting for or against it).

Platforms and ecosystems do not fail as much as they succeed, but they do support the necessary change far more that idolizing the fact that we’ve not succeeded in achieving the wrong thing, which is more and more what failure is all about.

To borrow the phrase from design thinking: We may fail fast, but will not succeed sooner or ever if we continue to fail at the wrong thing.

Photo credit: Fail by Denise Krebs used under Creative Commons License. Thanks for sharing your art Denise!

 

 

behaviour changebusinessinnovationknowledge translation

The hidden cost of learning & innovation

on February 8, 2016

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The costs of books, materials, tuition, or conference fees often distort the perception of how much learning costs, creating larger distortions in how we perceive knowledge to benefit us. By looking at what price we pay for integrating knowledge and experience we might re-valuate what we need, what we have and what we pay attention to in our learning and innovation quest. 

A quote paraphrased and attributed to German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer points to one of the fundamental problems facing books:

Buying books would be a good thing if one could also buy the time to read them in: but as a rule the purchase of books is mistaken for the appropriation of their contents.

Schopenhauer passed away in 1860 when the book was the dominant media form of codified knowledge and the availability of books was limited. This was before radio, television, the Internet and the confluence of it all in today’s modern mediascape from Amazon to the iPhone and beyond.

Schopenhauer exposes the fallacy of thought that links having access to information to knowledge. This fallacy underpins the major challenges facing our learning culture today: quantity of information vs quality of integration.

Learning time

Consider something like a conference or seminar. How often have you attended a talk or workshop and been moved by what you heard and saw, took furious notes, and walked out of the room vowing to make a big change based on what you just experienced? And then what happened? My guess is that the world outside that workshop or conference looked a lot different than it appeared in it. You had emails piled up, phone messages to return, colleagues to convince, resources to marshall, patterns to break and so on.

Among the simple reasons is that we do not protect the time and resources required to actually learn and to integrate that knowledge into what we do. As a result, we mistakenly look at the volume of ‘things’ we expose ourselves to for learning outcomes.

One solution is to embrace what consultant, writer and blogger Sarah Van Bargen calls “intentional ignorance“. This approach involves turning away from the ongoing stream of data and accepting that there are things we won’t know and that we’ll just miss. Van Bargen isn’t calling for a complete shutting of the door, rather something akin to an information sabbatical or what some might call digital sabbath. Sabbath and sabbatical share the Latin root sabbatum, which means “to rest”.

Rebecca Rosen who writes on work and business for The Atlantic argues we don’t need a digital sabbath, we need more time. Rosen’s piece points to a number of trends that are suggesting the way we work is that we’re producing more, more often and doing it more throughout the day. The problem is not about more, it’s about less. It’s also about different.

Time, by design

One of the challenges is our relationship to time in the first place and the forward orientation we have to our work. We humans are designed to look forward so it is not a surprise that we engineer our lives and organizations to do the same. Sensemaking is a process that orients our gaze to the future by looking at both the past and the present, but also by taking time to look at what we have before we consider what else we need. It helps reduce or at least manage complex information to enable actionable understanding of what data is telling us by putting it into proper context. This can’t be done by automation.

It takes time.

It means….

….setting aside time to look at the data and discuss it with those who are affected by it, who helped generate it, and are close to the action;

….taking time to gather the right kind of information, that is context-rich, measures things that have meaning and does so with appropriate scope and precision;

….understanding your enterprises’ purpose(s) and designing programs to meet such purposes, perhaps dynamically through things like developmental evaluation models and developmental design;

….create organizational incentives and protections for people to integrate what they know into their jobs and roles and to create organizations that are adaptive enough to absorb, integrate and transform based on this learning — becoming a true learning organization.

By changing the practices within an organization we can start shifting the way we learn and increase the likelihood of learning taking place.

Buying time

Imagine buying both the book and the time to read the book and think about it. Imagine sending people on courses and then giving them the tools and opportunity to try the lessons (the good ones at least) in practice within the context of the organization. If learning is really a priority, what kind of time is given to people to share what they know, listen to others, and collectively make sense of what it means and how it influences strategy?

What we might find is that we do less. We buy less. We attend less. We subscribe to less. Yet, we absorb more and share more and do more as a result.

The cost of learning then shifts — maybe even to less than we spend now — but what it means is that we factor in time not just product in our learning and knowledge production activities.

This can happen and it happens through design.

CreateYourFuture

Photo credit by Tim Sackton used under Creative Commons License via Flickr.

Abraham Lincoln quote image from TheQuotepedia.

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