Learning Leader

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.

Speaking at Best Practice Showcase in India next week

I've been invited to speak at APMG-India's launch conference across three cities next week. The organisers have asked me to speak on P3O (Portfolio, Programme and Project Offices) which I delighted to do. I'm agreat fan of this management guidance. It has helped me an others make sense of an otherwise confusing management landscape - how to control and make agile timely decisions at a senior level across a complex mix of projects and programmes.

I'll be using the metaphor of a backbone (hence the diagram). We have found clients can exploit a P3O framework to support the frame of the 'change investment' - all the projects and programmes that are happening - as well as using it as a conduit vital and immediate central nervous system supporting timely decision-making.

If there is anybody reading this that will be there, please come and say, "Hello'" to me.

The Conference runs  from Tuesday evening in Bangalore, then Mumbai, finishing on Friday evening in Delhi. Will I get a Tour T-shirt at the end with the dates and cities printed on the back, I wonder? :)

Inside the Minds of Star Project Managers

I'm presenting the current state of our research at the Oxford Branch of APM tonight at 6:30. Here's a copy of my presentation:

As you will see the presentation above does not fit this blog's page layout, so instead, click here: Mental Crib Sheet of Project & Programme Managers on Prezi

Refreshing PRINCE2 Audio Series - Unscripted

One of the approaches we took in recording the podcast series at
www.pearcemayfield.com/audio was to record them more-or-less unscripted as conversations between John and me. We follow the content of PRINCE2, rather than try to paraphrase chunks of the manual we explore the design approach behind each feature.

So here was the scenario: as someone who had a role in delivering the original edition in 1996, I pumped John, as one of the authors, about the new look 2009 edition. 

What happened was that, very naturally, illustrations and experiences came to mind for both of us. What emerged was a series of informed conversations on an abstract Method related to the real world. This is produced something we feel is more engaging and memorable for people learning the new edition of PRINCE2 than if we were to have produced a slick, but anodyne, audio narration of the Method. 

Besides, enough people tell us that they find the book is boring enough already!

So I'm really pleased the natural spontaneity we achieved. (Someday we may publish the outtakes.)

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?