Learning Leader

A passion for the subject

Earlier this week I had the opportunity to lead a three-day Principles of Change Management Foundation course. I very much enjoyed it.

Afterward my lead client sent me a very complimentary email including this comment:

    " I appreciated very much that there's a lot to put over and engage the group with and that 3 days is a long trek for a sole trainer..."

I appreciate the email. I am 57 (soon to turn 58), so I'm no spring chicken. However, there were four things that helped me call on sufficient energy to serve this excellent group: 

1. I'm keenly aware that my colleagues do this week in, week out, and to a very high and consistent standard. I am always mindful that I must not let the side down.
2. I do work out. That's important. I've learned I can't keep up high levels of energy unless I've built up reserves through physical exercise. By God's grace I'll continue to exercise; it improves the quality of my life, not just of my work, significantly.
3. I cared about the delegates this week. They are fine people, trying to forge good out of sometimes chaotic and brutalising forces of change. This change leadership stuff really matters, and can help them.
4. I love the subject. I believe in leaders shaping change. Best practice change leadership resonates with me ... and sometimes convicts me. It convicts me whenever I am teaching something and I realise that I haven't been living it in leading pearcemayfield; it make me want to go back and make amends, to lead better.

I thrilled that this course will shortly be upgraded to practitioner level. John Edmonds and Andrew Rock are working on taking this programme to a new level. If you are interested in being kept informed of this, let us know.

How the Mighty have fallen: stories, research and the power of questions

I've begun reading Jim Collins' latest book, How the Mighty Fall: and Why Some Companies Never Give In, bought on my recent trip to Chicago. He begins the book with a story about leading a seminar at West Point to a group that included not just leaders from the military but also from commerce and the third sector. He uses this story to set the scene for his book.

This is one of the two reasons I like Collins' writing. He is a story-teller. He contextualises the points he makes and the stats he presents as part of stories.

The second reason is that he is an excellent researcher. I once heard him say at a previous Leadership Summit that. 'all great research starts with a great question.'

The question that spawned this book is, "Why did great companies decline and what are the warning signs of decline?" (I suppose that's two questions...)

As a top-flight professor he is is used to posing great questions among seminars of students. In places like Harvard, Stanford, Oxford and Cambridge asking probing questions is a primary mode of teaching.

It seems to me that every great trainer and coach comes armed with .... no, not PowerPoint slides :) ... but great questions, questions that challenge and stretch students, to look a little deeper, to look for patterns in the data, to grow their own hypotheses, before being given some prefabricated model.Asking good questions, questions that provoke reflection and pertinent enquiry, helps a student bridge from their own experience and constructs of that experience to breakthrough insights.

    Ask an impertinent question and you are on the way to a pertinent answer. (Jacob Bronowski)

Conference Mapping

How do you make sure that a group of 11 leaders mobilise their learning from an intense two-day conference in two hours and also commit to action? Well, here's how I tried...

I was with a group of leaders, mostly from the Bristol area, at the Leadership Summit this year. The Summit included some great speakers and memorable sessions including Andrew Rugasaria from Uganda speaking on Trade not Aid, Jessica Jackley, founder of the excellent Kiva, and Gary Hamel to name but a few.

After the Conference I was asked to facilitate this two hour session in a small room in the Marriott, Schaumburg. These are the steps I took them through:

1. Clarified and agreed the objectives.
2. Asked for the first three sessions that were most memorable for them.
3. Arranging them into three groups I showed them a Mind Map template I had drawn on a flip sheet. It had the central theme (one of the sessions) and four branches radiating out:
4. 1. Key points
   2. Key quotes
   3. Interesting thoughts provoked (strong or logical association not necessary)
   4. Actions or responses we might take
5. Then I gave each group a different session a different coloured flip chart pen and they each did a mini-group Mind Map.
6. After a few minutes I got them to circulate the maps so that each group was working on a new  session.
7. One more iteration of this allowed all to contribute to all three Maps
8. Then I hung their handiwork up around the room and asked them for any emergent themes that come out for them across all the sessions. (I always find it amazing how different speakers even when not briefed can build on certain emergent themes in a good conference.) I listed these on a flip chart.
9. I moved every other delegate around the room so that people were now working in new groups. And we repeated steps 5-8.
10. There was time for one final round of Mind Mapping and delegates 'voted' for the last three sessions - and no, Tony Blair's session didn't make the cut! (Brits will understand, Americans will be bemused.)
11. Towards the end of the two hours, I allowed everyone to walk around all nine of the group Mind Maps, in a sort of gallery, just taking the time to review all their collective thoughts.
12. At the end, I closed by giving them a few moments to reflect and write down actions they would commit to, and the name of someone they would be accountable to and share with their committed actions. One of these actions, in true David Allen style, should be done day 1 back in the UK and should take no more than 20 minutes. And, as you can see, I documented all this work by camera for later distribution to the group as a permanent record.

All in all, this process worked well, given the richness of our experience, lack of IT in the room and the severe time constraint. I would do this again, but only for a group of about this size.

Repeating History

A theme developing in this blog recently has been the matter of learning lessons, particularly around the new edition of PRINCE2 project management and its principle of Learning from Experience.

A genre of reading that has been badly neglected by me has been history. Recently, in rapid succession I read two major histories: The Great Game by Peter Hopkirk, and D-Day by Antony Beevor (the latter a father's day gift from my older son). Both of these gripped me, although in quite different ways.

In The Great Game Hopkirk unfolds the epic 19th century struggle between the two super powers of the day, Russia and Great Britain, for control of High Asia, a geographically romantic but inhospitable region. There was the drama of human folly and great heroism on both sides. But also as I read this in the early 21st century, there dawms upon me the appalling reality that imperialists have learned very little from this, particularly in executing a military campaign in Afghanistan; or, for example, from the fickleness of the British politics over this era, depending on whether the Tories or the Liberals were in power at the time.

Then I picked up Antony Beevor's Book. As a teenager I had read Cornelius Ryan's account of the D-Day landings, The Longest Day ,and more recently, like many people, had seen the movie Saving Private Ryan, so I was aware of the near disaster on Omaha Beach. Oh, but the shambles of the Normandy campaign in the following three months was a revelation. 

For example, I'm no military historian, but I do know that nearly a hundred years before in the American Civil War the Confederates at Gettysburg were better integrated into units of calvary, infantry and artillery, and so had the edge in the early part of the battle, but that they failed to press home their early advantage. Amazingly, this lesson appears to been learned again the hard way in Normandy in the summer of 1944. It took some while for the Americans to 'get it' that they would be more effective if they coordinated armour, infantry units, artillery and air strikes closely. The British never did seem to learn this, despite taking on the lion's share of the panzer divisions during the campaign.

So what are the lessons here for project managers? 

I believe we humans are less likely to learn and adapt from the experiences of others than we like to think. We are apt to dismiss the experiences of our predecessors as irrelevant and so we learn the expensive way. We really do need to take this into account in valuing and living the PRINCE2 principle of Learning from experience.

Learning Lessons at the PRINCE2 Briefing at the British Council

At our second PRINCE2 Refresh Breakfast Briefing this morning, we found ourselves, thanks to our hosts in the British Council, in a beautiful conference room overlooking Admiralty Arch just off Trafalgar Square in Central London. There was a good turnout of knowledgeable people from a number of our client organisations. (One delegate even confessed to being a reader of this blog!)

One topic that prompted an interesting question from the floor was the principle of Learn from Experience. Where was the evidence that this was happening rather than just capturing 'lessons' and then moving on? John Edmonds confirmed that the new edition now calls the repository the 'Lessons Log' because until these are put into practice they are not learned. (It's obvious when you reflect on that for a moment.)

So imagine a situation in future where assurance people and auditors were to start with the PRINCE2 Principles. Might such folk look for evidence that the principles are being practised? How often has project assurance gone into spurious comparison with the detail of a method or standard when such details might not be relevant to the project in hand?

So in this case assurance would be looking for examples of where lessons earlier from the project or previous projects are informing and adjusting the management of this particular project. Wouldn't that be a better more mature way to confirm best practice?

Seduction of the Short Term

One of the most damaging features of this recession is not so obvious. It is the drift to short term horizons. Because confidence has taken a knocking, because we are no longer as certain as we were about what the future will look like, then we take comfort in short-term decisions.

I think this can become a form of denial. We take comfort in the month-to-month perspective, because looking longer term can be too scary. The result is often short-term and short-sighted decision-making.

Recently a client told me,

"We are not going to make the mistake we made seven years ago. Then we hit hard times and stopped all investment in training. We regretted it three years later."

This is visionary thinking. It transcends a recessionary period.

The ability of this organisation to learn lessons such as this from the past is rare. This organisation, partly because of this ability to reflect and learn from its history, has become a market leader.

So how short term is your thinking? Are you willing to plan for, invest in, the future beyond recession? If not, what will you have in place when the tide turns?

Excellence in Exeter

Recently I and a colleague paid a business visit to the Met Office, which is headquartered in Exeter, Devon. It was the first time I had visited the new premises. (Previously the Met Office HQ was based in Bracknell, Berkshire.) I found an impressive new building, light and airy, with good facilities for a professional community, some of whom you would find at work all hours of the day.

After our meeting we were given a VIP tour of the machine rooms that now house some of the most advanced super computers and storage in the world. At one point I asked our guide, "Is there another machine room like this in the UK?" to which he replied, "Yes, it's just across the corridor," which is their back-up system.

I was told how the current system runs a global model of weather systems, to a level of detail of 40 square kilometres across the entire surface of the earth and to some 50 levels in the atmosphere above it. The new capability will increase this level of detail to 25 kilometre squares at 70 levels(!). The numbers I was given made my head spin. I'd heard of terabytes, but now I had been introduced to petabytes - a 1,000 terabytes - apparently the only sufficient unit now to measure the required processing capacity of the Met Office systems.

All kinds of organisations now buy forecasting services from the Met Office, from the NHS to the farming industry. No plane in the northern hemisphere takes off without a forecast from the Met Office. This saves untold amounts of fuel as aircraft can reduce loads to the optimal levels.

Then we were taken into the operations centre. The picture here doesn't do justice to the the impressive banks of screens we saw and the quiet buzz of Meteorologists going about their business.

My colleague and I came away feeling deeply impressed and proud of a British capability like this that is having a profound global impact for the good.

Communications, project management

Collaborative Cardiff

What is a 'community of practice' when it comes to programme and project management?

I was invited to be part of an encouraging initiative yesterday in Cardiff - the launch of the Wales Community of Practice for Project & Programme Management - led by Cardiff City Council's PPM Centre for Excellence. Around 150 practitioners met for the day at City Hall to share and discuss various ideas and challenges, particularly in the public sector.

I spoke on the MSP 2007 Update and this seemed to generate one of the several buzzes going around the event. As well as briefings from suppliers, several practitioner case studies were presented including the St David's 2 Project.

One delegate from one of the welsh colleges asked me whether I thought programme and project management practice lagged behind the rest of the UK. I replied that I could only speak from what I had seen and heard, but that my impression was Wales did not lag, but was actually relatively progressive. I think there are two reasons for this:

1. Over the last twenty or thirty years there has been significant public investment in regeneration programmes, particularly in Cardiff. Early on there were some high profile embarrassments but in recent years there have been some resounding successes, such that Wales can hold its head up high. Witness the Millennium Stadium, the Welsh Assembly Building and, in fact, the whole Cardiff Bay Area development.
2. As a visitor from across the Severn River I notice a culture among the Welsh of positive collaboration. Lessons from one programme or project seem to travel more easily. Yesterday was a case in point.

So, well done Wales!

Communications, programme management

Reflective Project Management

Whilst at the BPUG Members' Conference last week in Crewe I saw even more vividly the connection between the work we are doing on the Crib Sheet research and this whole idea of better projects being ones that demonstrate a regular cycle of reflection on experience and learning. One of the emerging principles in the work to refresh the PRINCE2 project management method is 'Learn from Experience'. This is more than just logging or reporting on lessons, but demonstrating an adaptation to these lessons during the life of the project, where possible. This would be evidenced by conscious adaptation in the light of that learning.

Of course, this has implications for the organisations within which projects happen. Most projects assemble temporary teams. Once the project ends, the team breaks up - and usually so does the opportunity to exploit the collective learning which that team has gained.

It is one thing to understand knowledge management; it is quite another to mobile that knowledge for future benefit.

Enter P3O (R). One of the three main functional strands of this kind of office is as a 'Centre of Excellence'. Knowledge mobilisation is very much central to this. I see members of a good P3O being rather like worker bees, cross-pollinating valuable learnings from one project to another.

But at the individual level, at the level of the professional project manager, our research shows that those regarded as higher performers seems to have greater emotional intelligence, in particular a self awareness, a concern over learning and adaptation of their own working patterns.

Now there's a lesson for us all.

"Lest I missed anything in my youth"

A friend of mine, in her mid 50's (I would say) has recently taken early retirement on health grounds from a fairly high-powered financial job. She would move millions each day across money markets.

Learn Direct

Now she tells me she is has taken up a couple of self-directed learning courses through learn direct. And these courses include .... basic mathematics. My friend is enjoying learning to manipulate fractions(!), something she did not have to have mastery of before now.

I think this is admirable. The strap line for this blog has been a quotation from Alexander von Humboldt, who was often found, as an old man, listening to lectures on physical geography with young students at Berlin University. The lecturer would often quote the works of the great man himself. So when challenged about why he was there, he would reply,

"Lest I missed anything in my youth."

iTunes U

Now we old fogies can even be saved the physical embarrassment of attending lectures with young people. Apple are promoting iTunes U , which endorses an emergent trend by Higher Education Institutes - publication of standard lectures onto the net.

Maybe my friend is a model of emerging learners - people who return to education to make sure they have not missed anything.