Learning Leader

The Bookmark Test of Vision

I'm often asked for examples of good Vision Statements. Usually this is when talking to clients about the MSP approach to delivering such a profound change that the 'world' looks quite different once the change has been made; so called 'transformational change'. Bad vision statements abound. One client of ours has a document that sets out the vision over about eight pages of text(!!), mostly in abstract corporate language that leaves many in that organisation none the wiser, and if anything even more confused and skeptical.

Well I came across this example from a surprising source the other day. The image shown here is a bookmark, given to me by an associate who is working on a project to revitalise the museum in Abingdon, a town near where I live in Oxfordshire, UK. It contains several of the features of a good Vision Statement.

As you will see, it's short. Vision should be short. But this one has to be laid out on a bookmark. It's laid out in a series of bullet points, some clearly stating what in the 'old world' will be preserved, but describing the new from the client perspective.

Also, I find it quite appealing. I'd quite to visit this museum when this vision is realised.

And that's another characteristic of a good vision: it is verifiable, we will know when we are now living in the vision.

We often talk in business about the 'elevator pitch', getting your proposition across in the time it takes to travel in the elevator with the decision-maker. Maybe we should apply, in like manner, the 'bookmark test' to our vision statements.

Stress makes you stupid: why this matters to public agency decisions

A few years ago I co-presented with Helen Whitten of positiveworks to the title 'Stress Makes You Stupid'. We used a piece of technology called 'biodots', little circular stickers which we gave out to delegates. If you stick a biodot onto the back of your wrist you can watch it change colour according to your skin temperature; and skin temperature, I was told, is a good indicator of your stress level. When you are stressed, your body diverts oxygen from the brain to your muscle groups to aid the 'fight or flight' response. However, the depletion of oxygen levels in your brain impairs your ability to think deeply, reflectively and wisely - not that you need to do in a moment of threat!

However,the point it that chronic stress reduces our analytical and conceptual abilities to almost habitual thinking patterns. We miss opportunities because we are always living in stress, and lack of oxygen doesn't allow us to see possibilities.

Right now executives teams of public bodies all across the UK are under great stress. They will have to live with unprecedented budgetary challenges for the foreseeable future,and the future they foresee is not very far ahead at all. Just getting through the next financial year seems like a huge achievement. These decision-makers are asking themselves, "How can we maintain services whilst making 25% cuts in budget?"

My concern is that stress is shaping their approach with, shall we say, less-than-smart thinking. This quality of thinking will not allow them to conceive that this is an opportunity for positive transformational change, and that maintaining service levels is even a possibility.

Stressed public executives will miss opportunities for transformational change - radical changes to the way services are delivered, such as rationalising and sharing delivery with other local agencies. They will slash services, because their thinking abilities in this climate of stress will funnel them into limited EITHER-OR thinking.

Jim Collins and Jerry Porras found in their research that all organisations of outstanding performance reject this 'Tyranny of the OR', and instead adopt the 'Genius of the AND', insisted on more creative BOTH-AND thinking. Where are our public leaders who can do this now, who can achieve necessary budget cuts AND maintain service levels?

Today there is an opportunity to transform positively the delivery of public services in the UK. But will the stress that these chief executives live under allow them to believe this is even possible?

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.

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.

Where should we start to chart change?

We were looking organisational-level change in the Change Management course I led this week when one of the delegates asked me a great question: "Where is the best place to start?" It was such a good question that I feel I need to record it in this blog.


The context was this: we were reviewing an exercise where the delegates had worked on two client-based changes using the McKinsey 7-S Model (see diagram). The delegates had worked through the seven S's to describe both the current and desired future states of their organisation. There's a lot to consider. But that's the point of the model: it is forcing you to consider a more fully-orbed view of the present and the future organisation; it helps you stop going down some blinkered tunnel of change ignoring important associated aspects of the life of an organisation.

So the question came out of a sense of relevance for this approach. Where is the best place to start (meaning which one of the 7 S's)?

My response was in three places:

Values
One of the S's is 'Shared Values'. If the values are truly values - that is that they are truly the way individuals behave in the organisation and hold dear - they we should consider carefully why they should need to change them at all. Jim Collins and Jerry Porras presented some convincing research in their acclaimed Built to Last that all high-preforming organisations do not change their values. Instead they had a clear sense of their operating values, never confused them with practices, never changed their values, but were constantly reinventing their practices.

Values are the one constant through change. Perhaps they are more than that. They are, perhaps, a kind of fulcrum upon which large-scale change can be levered elsewhere: "One thing that will not change around here," says the leader, "are our values."

The second is equally rational:

Vision

With a rational, top-down approach to change, we start with Vision.

Those familiar with MSP (Managing Successful Programmes) will recognise elements of the Blueprint in the McKinsey Model, a description of an organisational architecture, either current or future. The MSP top-down approach has it that Vision is the non-technical description of a beneficial future and the Blueprint fleshes this out into a description of the kind of organisation that will support that Vision and help make it an actuality.

I don't happen to agree with Cameron and Green that Visionary Leadership has had its day, that things are different now in the 21st Century.

When did that happen? It's not that Vision has been tried and found wanting; rather it's that Vision has been found to be too hard by too many senior management teams, and not tried at all.

But Vision First is the rational, top-down, ideal approach.

But we don't appear to live in a rational, top-down world. So my third response is:

Anywhere
Start anywhere on the 7-S model and let the interrelationships and consequences evolve. We cannot risk paralysis by analysis when we seek to lead change so we must not let the 'hard bits' stall our efforts. My experience is that as I start with a team to map out the familiar and the known aspects of change, the less familiar, more complex issues begin to unravel themselves and yield themselves to a description. Usually these descriptions prove to be 'good enough' for identifying the change: broadly right, but precisely wrong.

So where do we begin to chart our change plans? Vision or Values or .... anywhere.

Good Change: Relentless or Rhythmical?

As a continue to read (and value) John Kotter's latest book, A Sense of Urgency, there is a growing dis-ease that I must set out here. As I noted in an earlier post, Kotter makes a distinction between a true sense of urgency with a false sense of urgency and with complacency. But he goes on to describe this desired state a permanent dynamic:

    'It is often believed that people cannot maintain a high sense of urgency over a prolonged period of time, without burnout. Yet with all the alertness, initiative and speed, true urgency doesn't produce dangerous levels of stress, at lest partially because it motivates people to relentlessly look for ways to rid themselves of chores that add little value to their organizations but clog their calendars and slow down needed action. People who are determined to move and win, now, simply do not waste time or add stress by engaging in irrelevant or business-as-usual activities.' (p.9)'

Professor Kotter, you anticipate my objection. It reminds me of another quote, this time from Tom Watson, Founder of IBM:

    "IBM is what it is today for three special reasons.  The first reason is that, at the very beginning, I had a very clear picture of what the company would like when it was finally done. You might say that I had a model in my mind of what it would look like when the dream - my vision  - was in place. 

    “The second reason was that once I had that picture, I then asked myself how a company that looked like that would have to act. I then created a picture of how IBM would act when it was finally done. The third reason that IBM has been so successful was that once I had a picture in place of how IBM would look when the dream was in place, and how such a company would have to act, I then realised that unless we began to act that way from the very beginning, we would never get there. In other words, I realised that for IBM to become a great company it would have to act like a great company long before it ever became one.  From the very outset, IBM was fashioned after the template of my vision. And each and every day, we attempted to model the company after that template.  At the end of each day, we asked ourselves how well we did, discovered the disparity between where we were and where we had committed ourselves to be,  and at the start of the following day, we set out to make up the difference. Every day at IBM was a day devoted to business development, not doing business.  We didn't do business at IBM, we built one." 

But I am still sceptical about living this level of urgency as a business lifestyle. Jim Loehr & Tony Schwartz in The Power of Full Engagement: Managing Energy, Not Time, Is the Key to High Performance and Personal Renewal , and Dr Jack Groppel in The Corporate Athlete: How to Achieve Maximal Performance in Business and Life , have brought research on improving athletic performance to the business arena. All human systems operate on a stress and recovery cycle. What Loehr, Groppel, et al.
 have shown is that by introducing proper, regular disciplines ('rituals') that slightly stress more but allow a rhythm of recovery, individual performance can improve in measurable terms by as much as 20%.

Now, if this is true for individuals, could this also hold true for teams and organisations? I think there may be some carry-through into project or organisational performance. Indeed, I have come across organisations where there have been deliberate practices of planning shorter, high-stress project life cycle bursts, but then following that with a step-down into useful, but restorative recovery patterns of work.

As a Christian I draw on the Jewish tradition of Shabbat ('Sabbath') as one of my spiritual disciplines (rituals), and I can testify to the restorative nature of this practice. Among other things, it breaks the 'Tyranny of the Urgent', as Charles Hummel called it, and helps me to get my head above the weeds and remember what is truly important. It's more than a mere cliche to say that life is a marathon and not a sprint.

So, yes, working on truly urgent/important work as a tempo is energising, but I suspect it is even more productive when it is not chronic, but mixed with cycles of recovery.

A Taxing Vision

Why do most organisations find writing and communicating a clear Vision so hard? I have my theories, but I am always on the look-out for good ones, as I believe that good models help improve practice.

David Gurteen, in his stimulating blog, quotes an interesting example from the UK Government's tax authority, HMRC (Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs). And the Vision?:

    "We will close the tax gap, our customers will feel that the tax system is simple for them and even-handed, and we will be seen as a highly professional and efficient organisation."

This, as a Vision Statement, ticks a number of boxes (according to MSP):

• it is short
• it is written for a future state
• it can be easily understood by a wide variety of stakeholders ... (although I'm struggling to be sure what the 'tax gap' means)
• it is written with the broadest audience as the target
• Avoids spurious target dates
• Describes a desirable future
• It is verifiable

All we need are the politicians not to make it impossible for HMRC to realise this Vision.

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?

From Decluttering to Imagining the Positive Space

Why do we focus so much on the task, its enormity and complexity, and give so little attention to the end state we are aiming for? If we spent more time focusing on the 'end in mind', then we would get the task done more effectively.

I experienced this truth in a surprising way a couple of months ago, when my wife and I were about to take a week's holiday. Rather than go away, we decided to stay at home and get rid of some junk. The results are as shown here:

A full skip after clearing out a double garage that has not known a vehicle inside it larger than a bicycle for several years now, plus a shuffle through our loft meant we filled the skip, and it all felt very cathartic.

Now, the point about the end in mind was because at the same time I picked up a book about decluttering one's living environment-

"It's All Too Much: Living a Richer Life with Less Stuff" (Peter Walsh). In it the author explains that he advises people to pause before the purge by just imagining the room or living space in its ideal, decluttered stage. This visualisation process, this envisioning process then helps people to qualify whether an item 'belongs' in that space much more easily.

This is so true.

Product-based planning in PRINCE2 is so powerful because it gets planners to focus first not on the plan but on the end product, its features and so on. The Vision Statement in MSP is the keystone in supporting the principle of Envisioning and communicating a better future.

Maybe if we spent more time just imagining and sharing the end result we'd find the journey a lot more positive and effective.

Vision Leaks

I’m at the ever-stimulating Leadership Summit at Willow Creek, Chicago. Bill Hybels opened with a powerful session on Leadership and Decision Making.

At one point Bill talked about one of his self-coined leadership proverbs or axioms:

        Vision Leaks

By this he meant that he had learned after much painful experience that communicating a vision once is insufficient. People .... well, just forget, and need to be reminded of the vision. The leader may live with the Vision day on day, but the people who the leader seeks to lead do not.

The new edition of MSP stresses this. Crafting and writing a Vision Statement is one thing, but where many leaders fall down is in under-communicating. It sometimes requires frequent representation and reframing.