Learning Leader

The great project planning sinkhole

Following on from my last post, I seem to be coming across a number of writers who are flying in the face of convention as questioning our obsession with project planning. Here's a quote from Seth Kahan in Getting Change Right: How Leaders Transform Organizations from the Inside Out:

Inappropriate emphasis on project planning can kill a good idea. Don't fall into this resource sinkhole early on. Instead, get out and talk to people.

It reminds me of the time, early on in my career, when I got my hands on my first project planning tool - MacProject(!) - running on a stand-alone Mac Classic. I remember getting totally absorbed in this tool, rather like a computer games addict ... until I became dimly aware of my team banging on my door pleading to see me. My first response was, "Don't interrupt me. Can't you see I'm planning here!" Shame on me. These good people needed leading and I needed their conversations to help me shape the project in the real world.

On reflection there was another great piece of software on my Mac that was rather more useful to me in the long term: MacDraw. With this I was able to build soft systems diagrams that key clients found so useful that one of them kept a copy pinned on their wall to track progress toward the target capability. Now, that was a tool that helped purposeful conversations around the project.

The point is, that whilst a measure of planning may be necessary, talking with people intentionally always trumps planning.

Next step or project goal?

Readers of this blog will know I'm quite a fan of David Allen, the productivity/organisation guru, and his 'Getting Things Done' (GTD) process. See Getting Things Done: How to Achieve Stress-free Productivity. Following on from yesterday's post, I wrote about the tension between the strategic and the tactical, a tension required to be held by operational managers leading their teams through change.

Well, in his GTD system Allen strongly advocates gaining clarity on two things:

  1. the project outcome you want; and
  2. the next step - the next practical action you can take which should be less than 20 minutes to do.

In between? No project plan. For personal projects, just being clear on the next step gives you the momentum you need to move you closer to realising that outcome. You can intuit the plan as you proceed.

In a recent work(Making it All Work: Winning at the Game of Work and the Business of Life), David Allen discussed which, if one had to chose, would be more important in personal effectiveness, the desired project outcome or the next step. His advice surprised me: the next step ... every time.

I've reflected much on this since. Clearly it is better to do both. But most coaching in change through programmes and projects - including my own - has been guilty of stressing the the planning and neglecting the execution. Ultimately its all in the execution. The graveyard of projects is full of fabulously sophisticated plans where everything fell short in the doing of it.

More and more I am compelled to help clients in the focus on, and the practice of, execution. In our training, for example, more and more now we are challenging delegates to define and commit their 'next steps' following training. And when we follow up, the results are encouraging.

Lazy delegation

Lazy delegation is where work is given, but the reason for it is not. Lazy delegation is common and it is damaging.

I was briefing some fellow trainers recently to deliver a tailored Change Management course to one of our clients. In this course we had included some material on Viktor Frankl. I was not surprised at all that most of the trainers had not heard of Frankl; he had the misfortune to die in the same week as Mother Teresa and Diana Princess of Wales, so his passing and his life's work did not gain the attention it deserved at the time.

As a young man, Frankl was interned into a Death Camp during World War II. When he arrived, he asked himself the question: "What sort of people will survive this?"  [I remember Jim Collins saying at a leadership conference I attended a few years ago that all good research starts with a great question.]

In short he discovered, that among those who were given the chance - that is, those who were not just taken away and executed -  the survivors were all people who had something to live for beyond the camp, whereas those who gave up the will to go on in that dreadful place usually grounded their hope and their meaning within the circumstances of the camp.

In fact, the guards seem to know this. They devised a special form of torture whereby they took a random detail of prisoners and made them move a pile of rubbish from one end of the camp to the other. It was back-breaking work. The next day the guards would select the same group and get them to move that mound of rubbish back to exactly the same spot it was before. By taking any rational meaning out of the prisoners' work, the guards sought to take away their will to live, to grind them down.

After the War, Frankl went on to found a branch of psychotherapy called Logotherapy (from the Greek word 'logos' meaning 'Word' or 'Meaning'). He devised a cognitive therapy strategy whereby he helped patients to mental health by helping them to connect with what was most important in their lives, to connect with meaning. He set out his discovery and some of his experiences in an amazing book called Man's Search For Meaning.

I tell delegates this story sometimes on our change management courses and I ask: how often do we do the equivalent of getting people to move around the rubbish? By decanting work of any meaning for people, we do just that; and we lose health and motivation from our organisations in the process.

And we do that in projects that start without clear business cases.

And we do that in inflicting change on people without explaining the benefits.

And we can do that with lazy delegation: not taking the care to explain 'why' when we ask somebody to do a piece of work for us.

Learning in the Cloud Pt.2

This week finds me leading a P3O Practitioner course. (The delegates have all taken their Foundation Paper - and passed with good marks (!) - and now they are preparing for their Practitioner paper later this afternoon.)

Again I've been experimenting with a shared Evernote notebook with the class. See my previous post on this.

What is beginning to emerge for me is that this is a very helpful way of gathering topic-based resources gathered through Evernote. I've brought together here for the class references to items touched upon in the class discussion but not adequately defined in the set materials. P3O, as with most of the OGC Best Management Practice Guides, pulls in concepts, techniques and tools from a diverse range of management areas.

For example, this week the question of 'What is a Requirement Planning Tool?' came up, and I was able to insert into the notebook a definition from Wikipaedia, which in turn has illustrative references to Requirement Management tools.

As with the Change Management Practitioner notebook, I included my topic-specific reading list.

I suppose I'm wondering now if I should do this for every course event, or whether simply to maintain a growing and enriched shared notebook for all future delegates.

 

Learning in the Cloud

Last week I was leading our Change Management Practitioner course (which I love to do). We had a great group of people and I made a little experiment: I created for the delegates a shared notebook on Evernote, one of the free storage systems. Delegates were able to set up a free account, if they didn't already have one, and access notes that I posted there during the week.

Evernote's mission is to store the world's memory, and I must say it does a pretty good job.

Delegates were invited by me before the course to access the free notebook (pictured). As we went through the week, I captured photos from the course of flipcharts, table and floor layouts, and added notes on relevant resources, including an updated Change Management further reading list.

It was easy to set up and operate. Now we are considering creating streams for our graduates by topic on our Facebook page.

I suppose this is what people mean in part by 'Learning 2.0': use Web 2.0 technologies, cloud services like Evernote, to gather and share learning materials.

Right now, I'm enthusiastic, but I'm not sure we've yet landed on the best tool and process. I'd be interested in any views or advice on this, particular from people in management training.

A Leader's View of Change

Today I was interviewed by Penny Pullan for www.basummit.com a Virtual Summit for the business analysis community. My interview topic was "A Leader's View of Change".

Penny is a great host and we covered quite a few subjects from "How do you convince board level people that they also need to change?" to "How do you deal with cultures that are resistant to change?" I found it stimulating.

The recording will be available at the Summit on 25th November. You can register now to hear our interview and others througout that week.

Switching Mindsets

 As early as last August I heard Dan and Chip Heath, authors of the excellent Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Take Hold and Others Come Unstuck , speak at a leadership conference in Chicago about their forthcoming book, Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard . Their first book was about effective communication, and this next work would be about influencing people, organisations and societies to make a switch in their behaviours. I was eagerly looking forward to this book.

I was not disappointed. As a leader of an organisation and also as someone who leads change management courses and workshops, I greatly appreciated the insights and stories. There are a range of established change management models out there, but what the Heath brothers present us with is a simple, accessible model, a model leaders and change agents can get to grips with quickly, not matter what their level or experience.

I particularly enjoyed the story of the aid worker from Save the Children challenged with making a national change in post-war Vietnam with virtually no budget and pulling it off, of how abusive parents were coached to a different pattern with their children, of the Brazilian rail company ALL that was able to achieve a dramatic turnaround with a simple operational script, of the woman physician who achieved the realisation of a breast care centre with a shift from weeks of waiting for results to results being given before the patient leaves the building on her first visit. All these vivid stories are interleaved with helpful 'clinics' where the reader is invited to work through a real change challenge using the model.

Most helpfully the authors make the case that apparent resistance to a change is often not out of stakeholders' negative attitudes, but rather because the means to effect the change are often unclear or badly shaped by the leaders themselves.

We have already begun to use this model in our consulting assignments with our clients and within our own company, and we will include it on some of our courses.

Switch is certainly the best business book I have read so far this year and a valuable addition to the canon of change management books.

Confessions of a Public Speaker

Wandering through Blackwells in Oxford (as I do) the other day, I saw a copy of this book that I'd been meaning to buy. I know Scott Berkun from some of his writings around project management and his blog.

Well, as a frequent public speaker I very much enjoyed this book. I think the enjoyment came from the empathy I felt for Scott Berkun as well as his humour - he has a nice turn of ironic simile, almost on a par with that of Douglas Adams or of Raymond Chandler.

Empathy came from the approach he has taken, which is an unapologetic personal take on his journey to become a competent presenter. I found this quite refreshing. In fact, in his notes towards the end of the book, he comes clean about the power of storytelling, even though he didn’t include a specific chapter or section on it.

So this is no dry, systematic treatise on the obvious mechanics of presenting - eye contact, posture, and so on - although most of the main elements are touched on at some point. No, here the reader finds lived experiences written with the visceral relevance of someone who has found himself speaking in all kinds of unpredictable contexts, written sometimes in a self-deprecating and irreverent style.

I will be recommending this to my colleagues in pearcemayfield.

Change or Die

Five years ago Alan Deutschman published a cover article in Fast Company magazine by this title. At the time it caused quite a stir and much discussion on the web. Mr Deutschman later published a fuller analysis in a book two years later.

I have noticed since I began tracking blogs and so on that one of the tendencies of web-based discussions ('memes') is that some subjects aren't given the shelf-life they deserve. I believe this to be the case with Alan Deutschman's work here. It addresses the perrenial questions of human nature: why do we find it so hard to change? and how can we change in a prevailing successful way?

So I am delighted to be talking about this today to a group of scientists at the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy, here in the Science Vale of Oxfordshire, UK.

Here again are the graphics of my presentation:

Change or Die! on Prezi

Again, apologies for the pagination problem on this blog (I will sort it out!). Here is a simple link.

I'm being followed by a Web Shadow

Dear Reader, Please note that what you are about to read has been written by a father (me) about the first book of his eldest son (Antony Mayfield). I've tried my best to discount any family pride and bias, but you, dear reader, will need to be the judge of that.

Published last Monday, Me and My Web Shadow: How to Manage Your Reputation Online is an excellent book! I've been very conscious over the last few years of my attempts to define my own online privacy boundaries and etiquette in blogging, Twitter, Squidoo and the like. We all stumble over discussions of this on blogs throughout the web, I'm sure. But what Antony has done has been to pull a coherent argument together from the perspective of positively managing one's online (professional) reputation.

I like the accessible voice that Antony has written it in, with lots of useful asides and opinions from the author's personal experience. As well as being an easy read, it is a valuable one on two counts:

1. This is a central issue of the online world that has crept up on us all. To describe this as timely is an understatement. This book defines the problem of what follows us as a trail of activity on the web, and provides practical advice on how we can shape it to our advantage.

1. It is a useful reference. The later sections are deliberately intended as such. Although qualified with several qualifications about how rapidly it will date, nevertheless is an excellent practical guide on using the web with personal information and social networks in 2010. For example, Antony's arguments about SlideShare, Scribd, Delicious and LinkedIn in particular have prompted me to reappraise these and how I use the latter two. For example, I had not given much thought to using Delicious as a research tool; but  of course it is.

Rightly Antony makes the point that having and managing an online presence demands time. We must each make our own judgement on how much time online work deserves. He gives some useful checklist for an online management strategy as well as managing things like passwords. I liked the fact that he wasn't dogmatic about tools, although he is clearly a Mac, iPhone, GMail, Google and Wordpress fan. Tools are likely to be more ephemeral after all. It will be the basic principles of online publishing that will endure.

The book is nicely presented, too. It is is a slightly smaller size than the average paperback, which is something I like, and the typography/layout is clean and easy on the eye. The bibliophile in me was not once irritated.

You will allow a father, though, a couple of smallish criticisms, though:
   * I'm not sure I agree at all times about the 'thick skin' approach to exchange of views. I prefer a more appreciative, sensitive approach. But then Antony's intention was to raise an objective discussion and he has achieved this for me.
   * So continuing in my sensitive, appreciative style, not once does my son acknowledge that I blogged some time before he did! In fact, I taught him all I know (but then he went on from that paragraph of wisdom to develop his expertise into at least this volume).

Seriously though, for me this book will survive its first cover-to-cover reading and be an important reference source of mine for the foreseeable future.

All I need now is for my son to sign my damn copy!