Category: systems thinking

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.

complexityeducation & learningpsychologysystems thinking

Complex problems and social learning

on September 14, 2017

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Adaptation, evolution, innovation, and growth all require that we gain new knowledge and apply it to our circumstances, or learn. While much focus in education is on how individuals attend, process and integrate information to create knowledge, it is the social part of learning that may best determine whether we simply add information to our brains or truly learn. 

Organizations are scrambling to convert what they do and what they are exposed to into tangible value. In other words: learn. A 2016 report from the Association for Talent Development (ATD) found that “organizations spent an average of $1,252 per employee on training and development initiatives in 2015”, which works out to an average cost per learning hour of $82 based on an average of 33 hours spent in training programs per year. Learning and innovation are expensive.

The massive marketplace for seminars, keynote addresses, TED talks, conferences, and workshops points to a deep pool of opportunities for exposure to content, yet when we look past these events to where and how such learning is converted into changes at the organizational level we see far fewer examples.

Instead of building more educational offerings like seminars, webinars, retreats, and courses, what might happen if they devoted resources to creating cultures for learning to take place? Consider how often you may have been sent off to some learning event, perhaps taken in some workshops or seen an engaging keynote speaker, been momentarily inspired and then returned home to find that yourself no better off in the long run. The reason is that you have no system — time, resources, organizational support, social opportunities in which to discuss and process the new information — and thus, turn a potential learning opportunity into neural ephemera.

Or consider how you may have read an article on something interesting, relevant and important to what you do, only to find that you have no avenue to apply or explore it further. Where do the ideas go? Do they get logged in your head with all the other content that you’re exposed to every day from various sources, lost?

Technical vs. Social

My colleague and friend John Wenger recently wrote about what we need to learn, stating that our quest for technical knowledge to serve as learning might be missing a bigger point: what we need at this moment. Wenger suggests shifting our focus from mere knowledge to capability and states:

What is the #1 capability we should be learning?  Answer: the one (or ones) that WE most need; right now in our lives, taking account of what we already know and know how to do and our current situations in life.

Wenger argues that, while technical knowledge is necessary to improve our work, it’s our personal capabilities that require attention to be sufficient for learning to take hold. These capabilities are always contingent as we humans exist in situated lives and thus our learning must further be applied to what we, in our situation, require. It’s not about what the best practice is in the abstract, but what is best for us, now, at this moment. The usual ‘stuff’ we are exposed to is decontextualized and presented to us without that sense of what our situation is.

The usual ‘stuff’ we are exposed to under the guise of learning is so often decontextualized and presented to us without that sense of how, whether, or why it matters to us in our present situation.

To illustrate, I teach a course on program evaluation for public health students. No matter how many examples, references, anecdotes, or colourful illustrations I provide them, most of my students struggle to integrate what they are exposed to into anything substantive from a practical standpoint. At least, not at first. Without the ability to apply what they are learning, expose the method to the realities of a client, colleague, or context’s situation, they are left abstracting from the classroom to a hypothetical situation.

But, as Mike Tyson said so truthfully and brutally: “Every fighter has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”

In a reflection on that quote years later, Tyson elaborated saying:

“Everybody has a plan until they get hit. Then, like a rat, they stop in fear and freeze.”

Tyson’s quote applies to much more than boxing and complements Wenger’s assertions around learning for capability. If you develop a plan knowing that it will fail the moment you get hit (and you know you’re going to get hit), then you learn for the capability to adapt. You build on another quote attributed to Dwight D. Eisenhower, who said:

“I have always found that plans are useless but planning is indispensable.”

Better social, better learning

Plans don’t exist in a vacuum, which is why they don’t always turn out. While sometimes a failed plan is due to poor planning, it is more likely due to complexity when dealing with human systems. Complexity requires learning strategies that are different than those typically employed in so many educational settings: social connection.

When information is technical, it may be simple or complicated, but it has a degree of linearity to it where one can connect different pieces together through logic and persistence to arrive a particular set of knowledge outcomes. Thus, didactic classroom learning or many online course modules that require reading, viewing or listening to a lesson work well to this effect. However, human systems require attention to changing conditions that are created largely in social situations. Thus, learning itself requires some form of ‘social’ to fully integrate information and to know what information is worth attending to in the first place. This is the kind of capabilities that Wenger was talking about.

My capabilities within my context may look very much like that of my colleagues, but the kind of relationships I have with others, the experiences I bring and the way I scaffold what I’ve learned in the past with what I require in the present is going to be completely different. The better organizations can create the social contexts for people to explore this, learn together, verify what they learn and apply it the more likely they can reap far greater benefits from the investment of time and money they spend on education.

Design for learning, not just education

We need a means to support learning and support the intentional integration of what we learn into what we do: it fails in bad systems.

It also means getting serious about learning, meaning we need to invest in it from a social, leadership and financial standpoint. Most importantly, we need to emotionally invest in it. Emotional investment is the kind of attractor that motivates people to act. It’s why we often attend to the small, yet insignificant, ‘goals’ of every day like responding to email or attending meetings at the expense of larger, substantial, yet long-term goals.

As an organization, you need to set yourself up to support learning. This means creating and encouraging social connections, time to dialogue and explore ideas, the organizational space to integrate, share and test out lessons learned from things like conferences or workshops (even if they may not be as useful as first thought), and to structurally build moments of reflection and attention to ongoing data to serve as developmental lessons and feedback.

If learning is meant to take place at retreats, conferences or discrete events, you’re not learning for human systems. By designing systems that foster real learning focused on the needs and capabilities of those in that system, you’re more likely to reap the true benefit of education and grow accordingly. That is an enormous return on investment.

Learning requires a plan and one that recognizes you’re going to get punched in the mouth (and do just fine).

Can this be done for real? Yes, it can. For more information on how to create a true learning culture in your organization and what kind of data and strategy can support that, contact Cense and they’ll show you what’s possible. 

Image credit: Social by JD Hancock used under Creative Commons license.

behaviour changeeducation & learningsystems thinking

Learning fails in bad systems

on August 28, 2017

2348137226_2d6536745e_o_Edits.jpgEnormous energy is spent on developing strategies to accomplish things with comparatively little paid to the systems that they are being deployed in. A good strategy works by design and that means designing systems that improve the likelihood of their success rather than fight against them and this is no truer than in the effort to learn on the job.

 

A simple search of the literature — gray or academic — will find an enormous volume of resources on how to design, implement and support learning for action in organizations. At an individual level, there are countless* articles on personal change, self-improvement, and performance ‘hacks’ that individuals can do to better themselves and supposedly achieve more in what they do.

Psychology and related behavioural sciences have spent inordinate time learning how individuals and organizations change by emphasizing specific behaviours, decision processes, and data that can support action. A close inspection will find that relatively few strategies produce consistent results and this has to do less with execution, skill or topic and more with the system in which these strategies are introduced.

To illustrate this, consider the role of learning in the organization and how our strategies to promote it ultimately fail when our systems are not designed to support it.

Knowledge integration: A case study

Consider the example of attending a conference as a means of learning and integrating knowledge into practice.

Surajit Bhattacharya published a primer for how to get value from conferences in medicine, pointing to tips and strategies that a medical practitioner can take such as arriving a day early (so you’re not groggy), planning out your day, and be social. These are all practical, logical suggestions, yet they are premised upon a number of things that we might call system variables. These include:

  • The amount of control you have over your schedule week-to-week.
  • The availability of transportation and accommodation options that suit your schedule, budget, and preferences.
  • The nature and type of work you do, including the amount of hours and intensity of the work you perform in a typical week. This will determine the amount of energy you have and the readiness to be attentive.
  • The volume of email and other digital communications (e.g., messages and updates via social media, chat, project management platforms) you receive on a daily basis and the nature of those kinds of messages (e.g.urgency and importance).
  • The amount and nature of travel required to both attend the event and the amount you had prior to attending the event.
  • The level of rest you’ve had. Sleep amount, timing, and quality all factor into how much rest you get. Add in the opportunity to engage in an activity like walking, exercise or stretching that one might do and we see a number of factors that could influence learning performance.
  • The setting. The lighting, air quality and air flow, seat arrangement, room acoustics, and access to some natural light are all factors in our ability to attend to and engage with a learning event.
  • The quality and format of the content and its delivery. Speaker quality, preparation, content and overall performance will all contribute to the ability to convey information and engage the audience.
  • Food and drink. Are you eating the kinds of foods and beverages that enable your body’s performance? Do you have access to these foods and drinks? Are they served at times that suit your body?
  • Your level of comfort and skill at engaging strangers. This matters if you’re more introverted, dislike small talk, or are not energized by others.

These are all platform issues: those in which motivation and energy can be channeled to focus on and engage with learning content. The fewer of these factors present the greater the energy expenditure needed on the part of the learner.

Learning within systems

W. Edwards Deming noted that most of the issues of performance in any organization were due to processes and systems (estimated to be up to 85% or more) rather than individual employees. While Deming was referring largely to manufacturing contexts, the same might be said for learning.

Consider our example from earlier about the conference. We’ve already outlined the factors that could contribute to learning at the conference itself, but let’s extend the case further to what happens after the conference. After all, a surgeon, engineer, computer programmer, law clerk, or carpenter isn’t going to practice her or his craft at the conference; they’ll do it when they return to regular work.

Now consider what our attendee encounters after they have made the trip home to apply this newfound learning:

  • A backlog of emails, phone messages and other correspondence that has either been left untouched, scantly attended to, or fully managed. In the first case, the backlog might be high and requires a considerable amount of time and energy to ‘catch up’ on upon return, however at least the learner was fully present to perform the many activities suggested byBhattacharya in the earlier article. In the second case, there is a higher than usual amount to attend to and the learner might have been selectively disengaged from the learning event. In the third, the learner returns to usual life without a backlog but may have sacrificed considerable attention toward the usual correspondence than actually learning.
  • A backlog of meetings. Scheduled meetings, calls or other events that require a co-presence (virtual or physical) that were put off due to travel are now picked up.
  • A backlog of administrative tasks. Submitting receipts and conference expenses, regular accounting or administrative tasks are all things that either was left untouched or, in the case of submitting expenses, unlikely or impossible to do until the trip has returned.
  • Fatigue. Sitting in a conference can be exhausting, particularly because of the conditions of the rooms, the volume of content and the break in the routine of every day (which can be energizing, too). Add in any travel issues that might arise and there is a reasonable chance that a person is not in an optimal state to take what they have been exposed to and apply it.
  • The usual organization processes and structures. Are there are opportunities to reflect upon, discuss, and process what has been learned with others and spaces to apply those lessons directly with appropriate feedback? How often have we been exposed to inspiring or practical content only to find few opportunities to apply it in practice upon our return in enough time before the details of the lessons fade?

It’s not reasonable to expect to have optimal conditions in our work much of the time, if ever. However, as you can see there are a lot of factors that contribute to our capacity to learn and the required energy needed to take what we’ve been exposed to and integrate it into our work. The fewer of these situations in place, the greater the likelihood that the investment in the learning experience will be lost.

An organization or individual requires a platform for learning that includes systems that allow for learners to be at their best and to provide a means for them to take what they learn and apply it — if it’s valuable. Otherwise, why invest in it?

This isn’t to say that no good can come from a conference, but if the main focus is on actual learning and the application of knowledge to the betterment of an organization and individual why would we not invest in the platform to make use of that rather than discarding it.

Rethinking our systems

When I was doing evaluation work in continuing medical education I was amazed to see how often learning events were held at 7 or 8 am. The rationale was that this was often tied to shift changes at hospitals and were the one time of day when most physicians were least likely to have other appointments. This was also the time when physicians were either highly fatigued from a night shift or having battled traffic on their commute to work or were planning the rest of their day ahead — all circumstances when they might be least focused on actually learning.

This choice of time was done for scheduling purposes, not for learning purposes. Yet, the stated purpose of continuing education was to promote learning and its various outcomes. Here, the strategy was to expose medical professionals to necessary, quality content to keep them informed and skilled and doing it at a time that appeared most convenient for all is an example of an idea that had logic to it, but ultimately failed in most regards.

How? If one looked at the evaluation data, typically the results suggested this strategy wasn’t so bad. Most often post-event surveys suggested that the overall ratings were consistently high. Yet a closer look at the data yields some questions.

For example, the questions asked to assess impact were things like: did the presenter speak clearly? or did the presenter provide the content they said they would? In most cases, participants were asked if the speaker arrived on time, presented what they said they would, were intelligible and whether there was a chance the learner might find useful what was presented. It had little to no bearing on whether the content was appropriate, impactful or applied in practice. This is because the system for evaluation was based on a model of knowledge transmission: content is delivered to a person and, assuming the content is good, the lesson is learned.

We know this to be among the weakest forms of moving knowledge to action and certainly not something suited to more complex situations or conditions, particularly in health systems. This is still what prevails.

Design for learning

If you’re seeking to promote learning and create a culture where individuals across an organization can adapt, develop, and grow learning requires much more than simply sending people to conferences, hosting seminars, providing books and other materials or watching some instructional videos. Without a means to integrate and promote that new knowledge as part of a praxis, organizations and individuals alike will continue to get frustrated, lag in their efforts to anticipate and respond to changing conditions and will ultimately fail to achieve anything close to their potential.

Designing for learning is as much about a curriculum as the context for how that curriculum is delivered and how learners are set up to engage with it all in their organizations and everyday lives.

*This is literally the case because the volume of new articles being published daily is so high.

If you’re looking to create learning systems in your organization, visit Cense to explore what it can do for you in shaping your strategy and evaluation to support sustainable, impactful learning for complex conditions. 

Image credit: “Platform” by Martin L is licensed under CC BY 2.0

 

behaviour changecomplexitysystems thinking

Reframing change

on August 10, 2017

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Change is one of the few universal constants as things — people, planet, galaxy — are always in some state of movement, even if it’s imperceptible. Change is also widely discussed and desired, but often never realized in part because we’ve treated something nuanced as over-simplified; it’s time to change. 

For something so omnipresent in our universe, change is remarkably mysterious.

Despite the enormous amount of attention paid to the concept of change, innovation, creation, creativity, and such we have relatively little knowledge of change itself. A look at the academic literature on change would suggest that most of human change is premeditated, planned and rational. Much of this body of literature is focused on health behaviours and individual-level change and draws on a narrow band of ‘issues’ and an over-reliance on linear thinking. At the organization level, evidence on the initiation, success, and management of change is scattered, contradictory and generally bereft of clear, specific recommendations on how to deal with change. Social and systems change are even more elusive, with much written on concepts like complexity and system dynamics without much evidence to guide how those concepts are to be practically applied.

Arguments can be made that some of the traditional research designs don’t work for understanding complex change and the need to match the appropriate research and intervention design to the type of system in order to be effective.  These are fair, useful points. However, anyone engaged in change work at the level where the work is being done, managed and led might also argue that the fit between change interest, even intention, and delivery is far lower than many would care to admit.

The issue is that without the language to describe what it is we are doing, seeing and seeking to influence (change) it’s easy to do nothing — and that’s not an option when everything around us is changing.

Taking the plunge

“The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.” – Alan Watts

Dogs, unlike humans, never take swim lessons. Yet, a dog can jump into a lake for the first time and start swimming by instinct. Humans don’t fare as well and it is perhaps a good reason why we tend to pause when a massive change (like hopping in a pool or a lake) presents itself and rely both on contemplation and action — praxis — to do many things for the first time. Still, spend any time up near a cottage or pool in the summer and you’ll see people swimming in droves.

The threat of water, change of fear of the unknown doesn’t prevent humans from swimming or riding a bike or playing a sport or starting a new relationship despite the real threats (emotional, physical, and otherwise) that come with all of them.

Funny that we have such a hard time drawing praxis, patience, and sensemaking into our everyday work in a manner that supports positive change, rather than just reactive change. The more we can learn about what really supports intentional change and create the conditions that support that, the more likely we’ll be swimming and not just stuck on the shore.

Whatever it takes

“If you don’t like change, you’re going to like irrelevance even less.”—General Eric
Shinseki, retired Chief of Staff, U. S. Army

“It’s just not a good time right now”

“We’re really busy”

“I’m just waiting on (one thing)”

“We need more information”

These are some of the excuses that individuals and organizations give for not taking action that supports positive change, whatever that might be. Consultants have a litany of stories about clients who hired them to support change, develop plans, even set out things like SMART goals, only to see little concrete action take place; horses are led to water, but nothing is consumed.

One of the problems with change is that it is lumped into one large category and treated as if it is all the same thing: to make or become different (verb) or the act or instance of making or becoming different (noun). It’s not. Just as so many things like waves, moods, or decision-making strategies are different, so too is change. Perhaps it is because we continue to view change as a monolithic ‘thing’ without the nuance that we afford other similarly important topics that we have such trouble with it. It’s why surfers have a language for waves and the conditions around the wave: they want to be better at riding them, living with them and knowing when to fear and embrace them.

What is similar to the various forms that change might take is the threat of not taking it seriously. As the above quote articulates, the threat of not changing is real even if won’t be realized right away. Irrelevance might be because you are no longer doing what’s needed, offering value, or you’re simply not effective. Unfortunately, by the time most realize they are becoming irrelevant they already are.

Whatever it takes requires knowing whatever it takes and that involves a better sense of what the ‘it’ (change) is.

Surfing waves of change

To most of us, waves on the beach are classified as largely ‘big’ or ‘small’ or something simple like that. To a surfer, the conversation about a wave is far more delicate, nuanced and far less simplistic. A surfer looks at things like wind speed, water temperature, the location of the ‘break’ and the length of the break, the vertical and horizontal position of the wave and the things like the length of time it takes to form. Surfers might have different names for these waves or even no words at all, just feelings, but they can discern differences and make adjustments based on these distinctions.

When change is discussed in our strategic planning or organizational change initiatives, it’s often described in terms of what it does, rather than what it is. Change is described as ‘catastrophic‘ or ‘disruptive‘ or simply hard, but rarely much more and that is a problem for something so pervasive, important, and influential on our collective lives. It is time to articulate a taxonomy of change as a place to give change agents, planners, and everyone a better vocabulary for articulating what it is they are doing, what they are experiencing and what they perceive.

By creating language better suited to the actual problem we are one step further toward being better at addressing change-related problems, adapting, and preventing them than simply avoiding them as we do now.

Time to take the plunge, get into the surf and swim around.

 

 

Image credit: June 17, 2017 by Mike Sutherland used under Creative Commons License via Flickr. Thanks for sharing Mike!

psychologysystems thinking

Smart goals or better systems?

on July 19, 2017

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If you’re working toward some sort of collective goals — as an organization, network or even as an individual — you’ve most likely been asked to use SMART goal setting to frame your task. While SMART is a popular tool for management consultants and scholars, does it make sense when you’re looking to make inroads on complex, unique or highly volatile problems or is the answer in the systems we create to advance goals in the first place?  

Goal setting is nearly everywhere.

Globally we had the UN-backed Millennium Development Goals and now have the Sustainable Development Goals and a look at the missions and visions of most corporations, non-profits, government departments and universities and you will see language that is framed in terms of goals, either explicitly or implicitly.

A goal for this purposes is:

goal |ɡōl| noun:  the object of a person’s ambition or effort; an aim or desired result • the destination of a journey

Goal setting is the process of determining what it is that you seek to achieve and usually combined with mapping some form of strategy to achieve the goal. Goals can be challenging on their own when a single person is determining what it is that they want, need or feel compelled to do, even more so when aggregated to the level of the organization or a network.

How do you keep people focused on the same thing?

A look at the literature finds a visible presence of one approach: setting SMART goals. SMART goals reflect an acronym that stands for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Time-bound (or Timely in some examples). The origin of SMART has been traced back to an article in the 1981 issue of the AMA’s journal Management Review by George Doran (PDF). In that piece, Doran comments how unpleasant it is to set objectives and that this is one of the reasons organizations resist it. Yet, in an age where accountability is held in high regard the role of the goal is not only strategic, but operationally critical to attracting and maintaining resources.

SMART goals are part of a larger process called performance management, which is a means by enhancing collective focus and alignment of individuals within an organization . Dartmouth College has a clearly articulated explanation of how goals are framed within the context of performance management:

” Performance goals enable employees to plan and organize their work in accordance with achieving predetermined results or outcomes. By setting and completing effective performance goals, employees are better able to:

  • Develop job knowledge and skills that help them thrive in their work, take on additional responsibilities, or pursue their career aspirations;
  • Support or advance the organization’s vision, mission, values, principles, strategies, and goals;
  • Collaborate with their colleagues with greater transparency and mutual understanding;
  • Plan and implement successful projects and initiatives; and
  • Remain resilient when roadblocks arise and learn from these setbacks.”

Heading somewhere, destination unknown

Evaluation professionals and managers alike love SMART goals and performance measurement. What’s not to like about something that specifically outlines what is to be done in detail, the date its required by, and in a manner that is achievable? It’s like checking off all the boxes in your management performance chart all at once! Alas, the problems with this approach are many.

Specific is pretty safe, so we won’t touch that. It’s good to know what you’re trying to achieve.

But what about measurable? This is what evaluators love, but what does it mean in practice? Metrics and measures reflect a certain type of evaluative approach and require the kind of questions, data collection tools and data to work effectively. If the problem being addressed isn’t something that lends itself to quantification using measures or data that can easily define a part of an issue, then measurement becomes inconclusive at best, useless at worst.

What if you don’t know what is achievable? This might be because you’ve never tried something before or maybe the problem set has never existed before now.

How do you know what realistic is? This is tricky because, as George Bernard Shaw wrote in Man and Superman:

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”

This issue of reasonableness is an important one because innovation, adaptation and discovery are not able reason, but aspiration and hope. Were it for reasonableness, we might have never achieved much of what we’ve set out to accomplish in terms of being innovative, adaptive or creative.

Reasonableness is also the most dangerous for those seeking to make real change and do true innovation. Innovation is not often reasonable, nor are the asks ‘reasonable.’ Most social transformations were not because of reasonable. Women’s rights to vote  or The rights of African Americans to be recognized and treated as human beings in the United States are but two examples from the 20th century that are able lack of ‘reasonableness’.

Lastly, what if you have no idea what the timeline for success is? If you’ve not tackled this before, are working on a dynamic problem, or have uncertain or unstable resources it might be impossible to say how long something will take to solve.

Rethinking goals and their evaluation

One of the better discussions on goals, goal setting and the hard truths associated with what it means to pursue a goal is from James Clear, who draws on some of the research on strategy and decision making to build his list of recommendations. Clear’s summary pulls together a variety of findings that show how individuals construct goals and seek to achieve them and the results suggest that the problem is less about the strategy used to reach a goal, but more on the goals themselves.

What is most relevant for organizations is the concept of ‘rudders and oars‘, which is about creating systems and processes for action and less on the goal itself. In complex systems, our ability to exercise control is highly variable and constrained and goals provide an illusory sense that we have control. So either we fail to achieve our goals or we set goals that we can achieve, which may not be the most important thing we aim for. We essentially rig our system to achieve something that might be achievable, but utterly not important.

Drawing on this work, we are left to re-think goals and commit to the following:

  1. Commit to a process, not a goal
  2. Release the need for immediate results
  3. Build feedback loops
  4. Build better systems, not better goals

To realize this requires an adaptive approach to strategy and evaluation where the two go hand-in-hand and are used systemically. It means pushing aside and rejecting more traditional performance measurement models for individuals and organizations and developing more fine-tuned, custom evaluative approaches that link data to decisions and decisions to actions in an ongoing manner.

It means thinking in systems, about systems and designing for ways to do both on an ongoing, not episodic manner.

The irony is, by minimizing or rejecting the use of goals, you might better achieve a goal of a more impactful, innovative, responsive and creative organization with a real mission for positive change.

 

 

Image credit: Author

 

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Decoupling creators from their creations

on June 1, 2017

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The world is transformed by creators — the artists, the innovators, the leaders — and their creations are what propel change and stand in the way of it. Change can be hard and its made all the more so when we fail to decouple the creator from the created, inviting resistance rather than enticing better creations. 

If you want to find the hotspot for action or inaction in a human system, look at what is made in that system. Human beings defend, promote and attend to what they made more than anything. Just watch.

Children will rush to show you what they made: a sandcastle, a picture, a sculpture, a…whatever it is they are handing you. Adults don’t grow out of that: we are just big kids. Adults are just more subtle in how we promote and share what we do, but we still place an enormous amount of psychological energy on our creations. Sometimes its our kids, our spouses (which is a relationship we created), our ideas, our way of life, our programs, policies or businesses. Even something like a consumer purchase is, in some ways, a reflection of us in that we are making an identity or statement with it.

Social media can feel like one big echo-chamber sometimes, but it’s that way because we often are so busy sharing our opinions that we’re not listening — focusing on what we made, not what others made. Social media can be so harsh because when we attack ideas — our 140 character creations sometimes — we feel as if we are being attacked. This is one of the reasons we are having such traumatized, distorted discourse in the public domain.

Creations vs creators

The problem with any type of change is that we often end up challenging both the creator and the creation at the same time. It’s saying that the creation needs to change and that can hurt the creator, even if done unintentionally.

The interest in failure in recent years is something I’ve been critical of, but a positive feature of it is that people are now talking more openly about what it means to not succeed and that is healthy. There are lots of flaws in the failure talk out there, mostly notably because it fails (no pun — even a bad one, intended… but let’s go with it) to decouple the creator from the creation.  In many respects, creators and their creations are intimately tied together as one is the raw material and vehicle for the other.

But when we need to apologize for, make amends because, or defend our creations constantly we are using a lot of energy. In organizational environments there is an inordinate amount of time strategizing, evaluating and re-visiting innovation initiatives, but the simple truth is that — as we will see below — it doesn’t make a lick of difference because we are confusing the creators with the creations and the systems in which they are creating.

Sometimes we need to view the creator and creation separately and that is all a matter of trust – and reality.

 

A matter of trust, a matter of reality

If you are part of a team that has been tasked with addressing an issue and given a mandate to find and possibly create a solution, why should it matter what you produce? That seems like an odd question or statement.

At first it seems obvious: for accountability, right?

But consider this a little further.

If a team has been given a charge, it presumably is the best group that is available given the time and resources available. Maybe there are others more suited or talented to the job, perhaps there is a world expert out there who could help, but because of time, money, logistics or some combination of reasons in a given situation that isn’t possible. We are now dealing with what is, not what we wish to be. This is sometimes called the real world. 

If that team does not have the skills or talent to do it, why is it tasked with the problem? If those talents and skills are unknown and there is no time, energy or commitment  — or means — to assess that in practice then you are in a truly innovative space: let’s see what happens.

In this case, accountability is simply a means of exploring how something is made, what is learned along the way, and assessing what kind of products are produced from that, knowing that there is no real way to determine it’s comparative merit, significance or worth — the hallmark tenets of evaluation. It’s experimental and there is no way to fail, except to fail to attend and learn from it.

This is a matter of trust. It’s about trusting that you’re going to do something useful with what you have and that’s all. The right / wrong debate makes no sense because, if you’re dealing with reality as we discussed above there are no other options aside from not doing something. So why does failure have to come into it?

This is about trusting creators to create. It has nothing to do with what they create because, if you’ve selected a group to do something that only they are able to do, for reasons mentioned above, it has nothing to do with their creation.

Failing at innovation

The real failure we speak of might be failing to grasp reality, failing to support creative engagement in the workplace, and failing to truly innovate. These are products of what happens when we task individuals, groups, units or some other entity within our organizations, match them with systems that have no known means forward and provide them with no preparation, tools, or intelligence about the problem to support doing what they are tasked with. The not knowing part of the problem is not uncommon, particularly in innovative spaces. It’s nothing to sneer at, rather something that is a true learning opportunity. But we need to call it as it is, not what we want it or pretend it to be.

My colleague Hallie Preskill from FSG is big on learning and is not averse to rolling her eyes when people speak of it, because it’s often used so flippantly and without thought. True learning means paying attention, giving time and focus to what material — experience, data, reflections, goals and contexts — is available, and in . Learning has a cost and it has many myths attached to it. It’s difficulty is why many simply don’t do it. In truth, many are not as serious about really learning, but talking about learning. This is what Hallie sees a lot.

The material for learning is what these innovators, these creators, are producing so if we are valuing creation and innovation we need to pay attention to this and entice creators to continue to generate more quality ‘content’ for us to learn from and worry less about what these creators produce when we task them with innovation missions that have no chance to ‘succeed’ just as they have no chance to ‘fail’

A poor question leads us to poor answers.

Consider what we ask of our innovators and innovation and you’ll see that, if we want more and better creators and if we want more and better creations we need to see them in a new light and create the culture that sees them both for what they are, not what we want them to be.

Image credit: Author

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What’s in your baggage?

on April 19, 2017

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Social and emotional baggage is what we bring with us and, like the real thing, it’s all in what we pack, how we pack it and how aware we are of what we’re packing it for. And like the real thing, individuals and organizations can’t go on much of a journey without carrying some of it with us.

Social and emotional baggage is a concept that has been drawn from psychology to metaphorically represent the things — memories, expectations, experiences — that we bring from our past into our present context, usually in a negative, debilitating or otherwise limiting way. It’s something that is attributed to individuals, but may also fit organizations, too. But baggage is a part of any trip and looking at it as part of the journey might provide us better ways to use it, rather than ignore it.

Metaphors are useful ways to take what we cannot see or touch, but nonetheless are experienced as real and makes the concept more tangible. The metaphor of baggage is useful because we can look at it in many different ways.

Baggage is what we bring with us on our journey and, like real baggage, it matters what we bring, how much of it, and how amenable it is to being moved.

What’s in your carry-on?

Let’s consider what we might bring with us this journey of ours and consider what roles these items play in our lives and organizations. What’s going in our bag?

Clothing: Different outfits allow us to transform our appearance, to stand out or blend in, or express ourselves in creative ways (along with keeping us comfortable while avoiding the whole “naked in public” thing that’s a bit problematic in most cultures). Spare clothes provide us with the ability to envision ourselves in different forms. They represent our ability to adapt and to dream new futures. There’s a difference between having the latitude to transform and having so much stuff that either it’s not all that different or is so different, we lose our sense of who we are. When we’ve packed too much of anything, we get lost in choice and focus. If we don’t pack the right stuff, we lose our ability to adapt to changing conditions.

Toiletries: A basic toiletry set allows us to care for ourselves, maybe even make ourselves up a little. These are the things that repair the damage from day-to-day wear and tear on the body, heal, and protect ourselves from the wear to come and prevent future damage (hello, sunscreen!). We might also wish to make ourselves up a little sometimes, too (hello, lipstick or cologne!). If we pack too much of these things we can get vaingloriously trapped in what others might think of us and present a face that’s less authentic than our true selves. We might also be so focused on repair and prevention that we fail to recognize what’s in front of us in the present moment (the only moment when we can do anything to change the game).

Gifts: These are things we bring to others based on our experience and are shared best through acts of service, kindness, generosity and love. They may be souvenirs, stories, photos and keepsakes – things given and transported with care for others and might include sharing our knowledge (tacit and explicit) and experience with others through storytelling. Our fellow travellers benefit from our gifts, and so do we as they often bring joy to the giver through the giving. However, if we pack our bags with too many we may wind up looking more after others than ourselves. Our focus is on giving to others at the expense of caring for ourselves. Our bags only have so much room and gifts take up some of that room.

Memories & Experience: This is our past. This is the part that accumulates over time as we get older and experience the world. It builds on and continually adds to our carriage, meaning we need to consider how we pack it, what we choose to hold on to from this vast collection, and what we might want to discard. This is where wisdom resides. It’s also a seat of some of our biggest problems. If real healing — that integration of experience with understanding, reflection and growth through our social life — doesn’t take place, we might find ourselves with things in our bag that we’d thought we’d discarded, but didn’t. It’s like finding the scorpion that might have hid in your luggage from your tropical vacation as you go home. If we’re not careful and mindful about what we pack, we might let in things we thought we’d left behind.

Cargo: This last element is cartage from one space to another. This is the stuff we bring from one place to another that may or may not have any purpose. It’s ‘stuff’. It’s trivia, the news, pop culture, or the flotsam and jetsam of everyday life. It seems like this would be the easiest thing to disregard, but it’s not. It can take up a lot of room. Consider where you put your attention and what you consume in a day — your social media feeds, gossip at the office or the dog park, advertisements, broadcast media — and what you hang on to. This is the stuff that can make us lose sight of what we think is important, so it’s critical that we are mindful about what cartage we add to our baggage.

As my colleague Alex Jadad says:

Nothing really matters apart from what matters to us. Therefore, we must be very careful about what we choose to matter to us.

Packing what matters most

Our baggage represents a system. We create the boundaries by the shape and size of the bag (or bags) we choose to bring with us and all of what goes in the bag interacts (it all has to work together to fit). What happens when we pack piecemeal, we throw all of the stuff above into a bag and try and organize it. Sometimes we seek to bring more bags or getting a bigger suitcase; maybe that will work. But things don’t fit, it doesn’t go together. Or we find ourselves laden with luggage, slow to move, strained in the back and joints from carting it around…but at least we have our stuff, right? (if we can find it).

The problem with that ‘add more’ strategy is that, the more we have, the slower we are, the more encumbered, and the more confused. We add to complexity, rather than create simplicity. We need to design better.

The best packers are those who create extra space for things they’ll pick up along the way, put in things that go together (e.g., outfits that mix and match), and they determine their essentials ahead of time. They spend the time considering what is most important, most used, most necessary and organize around those things: they employ strategy (and they adapt their strategy along their journey). They know what they need, what they like, and what makes them comfortable, safe and happy on their journey. Why? They’ve paid attention and collected data to support that decision (e.g. through ongoing evaluation, reflective practice, mindfulness, personal therapy).

This is all about being mindful about our work and life. For organizations, there are things you can do to create mindfulness in the way you work to help understand the choices you make and their consequences. For individuals, it’s about doing self-development work and engaging in reflective practice — in work and life.

If we don’t know what’s in our bags, we might be surprised what comes out. The subconscious works that way: it will pop things out at times of its choosing when we are often not expecting it or desiring it. Subconscious processes work at the individual and collective levels — it’s not just a personal thing.

Mindful packing

We are contributors to the story of our lives, but not the sole authors (despite what many seem to think). What has happened to us because of others matters as much as what we create for ourselves. It’s not about labeling those experiences as ‘good’ things and ‘bad’ things, rather dealing with the consequences that those experiences bring to our life in the here and now and asking if they are helpful or unhelpful to living the life we want.

Were you under appreciated by your colleagues or family? Bullied? Neglected? Think it’s all in the past? Replicate that situation in the present and see how you feel — it might not be all in the past. Abuse and neglect are common experiences at home and work and how we integrate that into our lives — or whether we do at all — can be a key factor in determining how we relate to the experiences in the present.

What about that project at work that got everyone excited and failed to deliver the value that everyone expected or felt promised? Is that going to temper the willingness to try again, to innovate or risk something new again? Organizations and teams might be tempted to ‘lower the bar’ to avoid disappointment, despite suggestions that an organizations’ settling for ‘mediocrity’ drives quality people away from work. 

What about that romantic relationship that was perfect, but ended because it was too perfect? How is too perfect even possible, you ask? If you’re not accustomed to being loved and cared for you might find it very uncomfortable to get exactly what you want (and need) and find (invent?) reasons why the relationship won’t work and end it (or sabotage it so you don’t have to end it). The issue isn’t that you don’t aspire for this ‘perfect love’, it’s that you’re not used to it; maybe the only way you were loved before was through neglect, abuse, or simple disinterest and partner disengagement. When that changes, so does our narrative about what real love is all about and if we don’t ‘flip the script’ we’ll write the new story into the old one and that just won’t work. (And if you’ve not experienced this in romance, how about a job? A friendship? An opportunity at work? — self sabotage is very real and underexamined).

None of this is crazy-making: it’s just how some people deal with the intense sadness of not knowing how to be loved or to achieve real success.

Like anything in life: change challenges us and these experiences (fears, hopes, unrequited dreams, and victories) go into our luggage and often not by choice — or awareness. But knowing this can happen will help us understand our baggage and how our past and hopes for the future affect the present.

The temptation is to make some sort of judgement about baggage and assume its a problem. We bring what we need with us and that means that we each will have and will need baggage differently. What we wish is for it to serve us, not debilitate us or keep us from growing. Being mindful, reflective and careful about what we have already packed is another critical step.

The next is realizing that, like real baggage, we can re-pack. We can discard things, re-organize, re-prioritize what goes inside. It’s never too late, but it does require work. The best thing of all is that, when we reorganize our baggage we create more of what we want — what matters to us — and less of what we don’t want or others want for us. Our baggage is our asset if we allow it to be.

Reflective practice, healing (to be covered in a future post in more depth), compassion (because we all have things we wish weren’t packed for us in our bags – be good to ourselves), systems thinking (and design thinking — creatively considering how we pack, not just what we pack) and healthy social engagement are all ways to improve our relationship with baggage.

And that’s something to hang our hats on.

Happy, healthy travels.

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Image credits: Author

 

 

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