Learning Leader

Navigating through Complexity: the MSP Flow Navigator

First, I wish everyone who reads this a Happy New Year!

At pearcemayfield we are continually innovating, mostly in small, but rapid improvements.

Recently we launched an online navigator for people who book on our transformational change MSP courses. This works as a sort of digital wall chart that you can pan, zoom and inspect how the transformational flow (process model) in MSP interrelates with key themes and documents, something that the traditional book format cannot convey.

The Navigator shows clearly, for example, how and where transition planning happens in the MSP scheme of things.

One of our talented associate trainers, Nathalie Collister, said:

 I just went through this in detail and I think it is an outstanding document. I like the fact that you go from overall picture to details. The explanations are clear and it's really easy to move around. It looks very snazzy. It is brilliant... Great work, very impressive.

And a customer who was re-sitting on one of our recent MSP Practitioner courses responded:

Thank you Patrick, this is great. Exactly what I need to help with my revision! See you next week.

(She passed, BTW!)

Here's a short instructional video I've uploaded for our MSP customers.

 

 

If you would like to access the chart, then book yourself on one of our courses, and we'll be pleased to give you access free of charge.

 

Related articles

Transition Planning and Leadership: the Cinderella of #Change?

Execution: the hard part of strategy

Via the Seth Kahan blog, I came across this interesting video from Franklin Covey:

I once consulted to a programme that delivered some excellent innovation to the UK health sector. I'm not sure it was exploited. It got lost, I think, in the noise of too many objectives - typically a Chief Executive of a hospital trust had about 120 (!) objectives at that time; it's probably worse now - What a waste!

I found the idea of limiting quite radically the number of Wildly Important Goals (WIGs) compelling, as was the idea of creating a compelling scoreboard and making people accountable on a weekly basis around it.

 

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.

High praise for our 'Birds of a Feather' session at Best Practice Showcase

Wow! I've just received a forwarded comment by one of the participants the other Friday at the Best Practice Showcase:

"Your session was best of the day by a mile in my view in terms of facilitation, content and dynamic discussion."

Thank you for that (you know who you are!).

We are analysing the contributions from over all five sessions and I'll present our analysis of it here shortly.

But that comment has just made my Friday! :)

From rapid learning to recognition

With our Leading Change Summer School we are building on the experience with clients where we have delivered short 1-day modules that are separately accredited to demonstrable applied performance in the workplace, leading to an external qualification. I have put this into a Prezi presentation

 

and added a voice-over explanation here:

 

Let me know what you think.

Traditional Management Training: What's Wrong with this Picture?

On Friday I posted a 'Napkin' picture that I had drawn for a client. It began with an image something like this first picture, designed to show the 1-day workshops that make up our Leading Change Summer School.

Later I asked one of my colleagues, "What's wrong with this picture?"

He got it immediately. It's a lecture, not the kind of learning that we advocate and practice. (I find it interesting how many people in our business have 'Lecturer' or even 'Senior Lecturer' as their job title!)

So I drew this second one. What I have attempted to show is the delegates learning by discovery, where the trainer is more a guide on the side. [The trainer is top left in the picture.] 

Reflecting on what I had drawn, I realise I had drawn the trainer smaller and in the background. It made me wonder how much the ego of a trainer comes into this. I recognise in myself that I would rather be 'the sage on the stage' than 'the guide on the side'. There is something ego-centric in me that I want others to recognise my learning, knowledge and insight. I think this, more than anything else, has allowed the traditional model of training to persist for so long, when the alternative is so much more effective.

What's your experience?

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.

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!]

 

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.

pearcemayfield first to gain ISO9001 through APM Group

News finally came through yesterday that we had gained the ISO9001 Quality Certification ('ISO') through APM Group: a first for us and a first for APMG. So we are all quietly quite proud here.

The journey over the last few months has been an interesting one. My concern has been that the ISO process did not become self-serving but actually did add value.

My colleague, Andrew Rock, is our Quality Manager and he did a superb job. Unlike me, Andrew is a completer-finisher, and is strong on consistency. I am more of a maverick, valuing innovation, ideas and agility. Andrew urged me first to grapple with a thing called Quality Policy, which he said needed to be owned by senior management. (That would be me.)

As I studied what was meant by 'Quality Policy' I began to appreciate that this was where we could set out our stall as to how we, as a company would apply ISO. We could not, as many other organisations have done, take a passive approach to applying the international standard; we hear that many that have done this have found, as a consequence, that ISO then took them places they did not want to go. In some cases, writing it became like boiling the ocean and observing it became excessively bureaucratic.

So, in little over a page, I set out our stance:

• Values-based. Our Values would continue to be paramount and non-negotiable. We've learned what our customer love about us has actually emerged out of our being consistent in living our values.
• Simplicity. 'Keep things as simple as possible, but no simpler.' (Einstein) This became our design approach.
• Outcomes-oriented. Process always needs to serve the outcomes it intends to achieve.
• Value-adding. Only change where there is clear added value in doing so.
• Document on exception. Evidence is not required where the system is being followed, only where deviances have been found. We cannot become a paper-factory documenting the 'normal' to the nth degree.
• Always use best judgement. I borrowed this from Nordstoms in the USA. We live in an emergent business reality. We need to be humble enough to realise that what we codify today as our practice may be ill-suited for the demands of tomorrow. So if we encounter a novel challenge or opportunity, and the procedures are inadequate, guess what? We permit ourselves to decide as best we know how.

What I realised was that without doing this, external advisors and assessors might well bring in a culture of ISO that would be mechanistic and legalistic. In turn this could lead to some unintended consequences that would compete against what we needed to be and achieve, and potentially be disastrous.

Richard Rose, our internal auditor, and Andy Taylor, our external consultant, also deserve special mentions here for helping me bridge my intent into the strange language and constructs of ISO.

Now I am certainly not a quality expert. We are working out our salvation as we go along. If you, dear reader, feel this approach of ours is flawed I'd really appreciate hearing from you.

Meanwhile we are popping the champagne to celebrate being the first to gain this through APM Group.