Learning Leader

The power of napkin notation

This picture was drawn by me in my day book. [A Moleskine A5 plain drawn with a cheap Lamy fountain pen ... for all the stationery geeks reading this.]

I composed it over a coffee Starbucks before a client meeting.

Spurred on by my graphics course last week I decided to illustrate the process of the C4CM-accredited modules in our Leading Change Summer School from a 1-day training module (top left) where delegates leave with an open exam paper, to receiving their Award (bottom centre).

It brought me back to Dan Roam's intriguing book:The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures; the idea that there is real power in the simplicity of of hand-drawn diagrams, rather than sophisticated PowerPoint pitches.

My client got it immediately.

What makes us tick: more lessons from the dark side

This week I've posted articles on Viktor Frankl, Elisabeth Kubler-Ross and Virginia Satir, all of whom have brought us valuable insights into how we deal with change from observing people in very bad situations - in a Death Camp and when told they are dying.

Forgive this rather morbid streak of posts this week, but it reminded me of what I wrote a while back about observations of patients who had critical cardiovascular disease. This was pulled together in Alan Deutschman's book Change or Die: The Three Keys to Change at Work and in Life . In this instance these patients could do something about it. By lifestyle changes - more exercise, eating more healthily, giving up smoking, etc - they could either avoid costly invasive heart surgery or prevent the same thing happening again.

The remarkable evidence is that so few of them seemed to have the will power to sustain these life-giving habits longer than about six weeks! One in nine, in fact. And the same seems to be true of all of us.

However, Dr Dean Ornish, in remarkable research with a group of patients with acute heart disease, was able to buck this trend with a combination of:

  1. making the change radical. It seems we can engage with more radical change than keep with minor changes of habit. Others have pointed out that people are rallied to BHAGs (Big Hairy Audacious Goals) or WIGs (Wildly Important Goals) that connect with emotions;
  2. repeat: positive visualization through meditation, etc., help establish new habits drawn by a positive vision rather than a negative threat; and
  3. relate: working in small support groups and communities where there is mutual accountability and encouragement.

Put these three things in place and it seems that 80% stuck with the changes some two years after, thus avoiding heart bypass surgery. Quite a reversal from the statistic of 9 to 1 against prevailing with a change, wouldn't you say?

There are vital lessons here for embedded transformational change in our organisations. Are these three things in place to help people form new habits and stick with them?

In extremis: learning how people change in the dark places

I wrote yesterday about Viktor Frankl and the profound insights he gained whilst experiencing and surviving a Death Camp. It's interesting that his is not the only instance where learning how people behave comes out of the darkest places.

Take, for example, the work of Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, a psychiatrist who studied the emotional pathology - the journey of emotions - of people who were told that they were terminally ill. Grim stuff, but very revealing. Kubler-Ross observed that people inevitably go through the same sequence of emotions following the worst of news, but end the emotional roller-coaster with a much more positive frame - IF they are told the truth early enough.

Her model of emotions was later developed by Virginia Satir and others, such that now this model has not just passed into general management training but also into popular entertainment. (I have even seen illustrations of this in episodes of 'The Simpsons' and 'House'.)

Why? Because it seems that whenever we are given unpleasant surprises, bad news that we cannot avoid, we are emotionally wired to go through these emotional stages very predictably. If I am told I am going to lose my job, then this emotional sequence will kick in, no matter how informed or sophisticated I may be.

[The diagram is from our Change Management course, and we are running a one-day accredited version this summer.]

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.

The art of changing effectively: It's all in the timing

We had a wonderfully stimulating series of workshops on Friday at the Best Practice Showcase.

We focused on the question of how we get better and smoother take-up of project deliverables by client operations, an area where there is so much waste, of project products not being properly or fully used, the cause of so many unrealised benefits.

The sessions seems to build on each other and amplify as the day went on. Richard and I, with our freshly-honed graphical skills, developed a series of flip charts that we agreed to send copies of on to all participants along with our analysis of the emergent themes.
(If you would like a set please contact our office.)

One theme that emerged fairly strongly was around certain ideas that were apparently contradictory. For example, the need for quick wins was raised several times, but also the need to pause at the initiation of a project - to wait - until the key stakeholders were all properly engaged. This contradiction illustrated for me quite vividly that with change management we are dealing as much with an art as a science.

Delegates hinted at experience through the day of charging ahead to a strategic timetable without a clear consensus by key stakeholders at a senior level. Powerful people were not on board when the train left the station; so they never did get on board, with disappointing consequences.

But this picture of holding our nerve at initiation until all the key stakeholders are engaged, despite pressures to scamper on and deliver, reminded me of that classic movie, "Henry V" with Laurence Olivier as the King, where the archers have all drawn their bows as the French cavalry advance on the field of Agincourt, and they wait, and wait, and wait... The king has his gauntlet raised, but he waits.... The tension becomes almost unbearable, but he waits for the moment when the initial volley from the archers will have maximum effect.

In recent years I've been won over to the concept of Agile, of 'failing fast', of getting delivery out quickly. However, I do accept that when it comes to issues of engagement, I could quote another Shakespeare play, Julius Caesar: "There is a tide in the affairs of men, when taken at the ebb leads on to fortune."

Ultimately it's all in the timing.

May I be very graphic?

Y esterday my colleague, Richard Rose, and I attended the Graphics Made Easy 'Starter' Workshop  led by Penny Pullan and Vanessa Randle. (Here is a picture of Richard at the end of the day with his summary of the workshop, surprised at how useful he found it.)

We have associated with Penny for some time now, and she did some graphics facilitation at one of our trainers' days. I'm a great fan of Penny's work, and as a one-time Buzan accredited Mind Mapping Instructor, I did not take much convincing of the power of graphics. As a trainer I have seen as well how a well-drawn flip chart illustration drawn in front of a class is far more engaging than a PowerPoint slide.

Even over a few hours I grew in confidence. Penny and Vanessa are excellent coaches.

We were all encouraged to practice simple symbols and techniques through the day and at the end allowed to practice on a topic of our choice. I chose tomorrow's 'Birds of a Feather' workshop on 'The Age of Change Management' that I wrote about on Monday. You can see me building up a wall chart we will use at this event in this series of photos. If you are in London tomorrow and can spare an hour, do come along and join in. It should be both stimulating and fun.

  [Photos courtesy of Penny - thanks!]

 

Fixing the broken training cycle - putting it into practice and getting results

"Now we are finding a new way that is already yielding significant benefits."

There is a challenge for those of in the training world: how do we bridge learnings from a formal learning experience into practice? How do we move it on from being a purely theoretical experience?

Let me explain with reference to a classroom training approach.

A delegate comes on a course, and no matter how engaging the material, how relevant it seems, as soon as the delegate returns to their routine, they seem to be swept up by other, more urgent matters. It may be several weeks in the life of a busy manager before they think to reference the class materials they have brought back with them. By then, the course is a distant memory. The classroom experience is dissociated from the real demands of their job.

Some articulate this sense of dissociation from the classroom such words: "I enjoyed the course, but a lot of it was too theoretical for my everyday work."

And so the real return on their investment in that training event is significantly reduced.

As trainers, we have wrestled with this in pearcemayfield quite a bit:

• We make sure we introduce a challenge and self-accountability to immediate application at the end of some of our courses: "What one thing will you do at work tomorrow that will take you no more than 20 minutes?" (We feel 20 minutes is about do-able as a practical commitment in most people's working day.)
• We offer consultancy, sometimes in clients' own centres of excellence, to reinforce and embed these learnings back on projects.
• We provide action learning sets and one-on-one coaching.

All these are oriented towards gaining real, measurable improvements in a manager's behaviour and performance.

Now we are finding a new way that is already yielding significant benefits. Instead of the conventional accredited model of a 3-to-5-day course with professional exams at the end - some exams have the so-called 'Practitioner' title but in truth that are still rather too theoretical - we are launching a series of one-day modules this summer where delegates leave with an open exam paper. They complete this paper over the next month against their own work, and in doing so bridge the classroom to their workaday experience. It is returned for independent assessment and, if successful, gains an award that builds up to a Change Management Certificate. We are launching this as the Leading Change Summer School at Eynsham Hall near Oxford.

The results for delegates and their organisations are astonishing. We are seeing so much more learning over a shorter period of time and positive application that is of immediate value to their organisation.

I'll write more on this exciting new approach.

The Age of Change Management

In our firm, pearcemayfield, we very rarely show at exhibitions. The exception to this has always been the Best Practice Showcase. We have valued this as a way to re-connect with old clients and meet with new ones. At the same time it gives us some space to show clients what we can do. One of the main ways of doing this has been through 'Birds of a Feather' sessions.

Last year was less than successful, in my view, because we had our table in an open area where we had to compete with the noise of other vendors' to make ourselves heard, and we drew a large number - sometimes fifty to a session designed for twelve. In fact, in one session I lost my voice and one of my colleagues had to take over!

Well, this Friday (17th) will be different. This time we have our own room.  And we plan something special.

We will be running a session called 'The Age of Change Management' and exploring the startling reality of poor take-up of the outputs from otherwise-successful projects and programmes, and exploring possible solutions to this deplorable waste.

We will also be offering some amazing deals on the day for our  Leading Change Summer School as well as our other public training, such as the Change Management Practitioner.

Plus we will be using an exciting and visually-appealing method in these workshops. There will be no pre-booking, so, dear reader, get on down to the event and say 'hello'.

See you there.

A meeting of agendas

I was with a client on Friday talking about some change management training and my client described effective stakeholder engagement - really engaging with people - as answering the question: 'How do we share agendas?' This is what he wanted his colleagues to be able to demonstrate.

It made me reflect on how our assumption is that 'Agenda' something unilateral, dictated by the person who calls the meeting, and ephemeral, lasting only for a meeting.

Agendas in this sense last longer than meetings. These are the objectives and desires of different individuals and groups. In his classic 7 Habits of Highly Performing People, Stephen Covey identified the habit of 'Seek Win-Win' as a trait of all High-Performers. This habit exercises the emotional competence of empathy. We incline ourselves into thinking into the other person's shoes. How do matters look from their perspective?

So perhaps we could think of a meeting of minds as a meeting of agendas.

Transparent Change Leadership uses the Rumour Mill

One the delegates on our recent Change Management Practitioner course shared with us a remarkable initiative within her organisation, Cambridgeshire Constabulary, the regional police force for that part of England. 

What follows is with the kind permission of the Constabulary. 

Rumour Mill is, in essence, very simple. It is an intranet discussion board, where anyone can post any question or comment about current happenings within the force ... anonymously.

Let the radical transparency of this sink in for a moment ... anyone ... anonymously ... on anything! 

Could your organisation cope with that? Would your leaders be courageous enough to provide and promote such a forum?

So, if someone, anyone, posts a comment such as, "This initiative will mean the loss of twenty jobs at HQ", within a couple of hours at most a response is posted by the change team, correcting any wrong assumptions or clarifying any confusion where appropriate.

People following the thread can see the openness of leadership here and the abiding trust grows that everyone is being heard.

I must say, that after reading the emphasis on radical transparency in Stephen Denning's latest book, I can see how courageous and powerful this is. Well done, Cambridgeshire!