conversation matters

Can Democracy Survive in America Without Organizations Becoming Democratic?

“Democracy is a tough way to live. With all its flaws, I think it beats the alternatives. I do not wish to have someone else, no matter how educated, well intentioned, wealthy, or wise, decide unilaterally what is best for me. Unless we are deeply involved in our work, we cannot feel good about ourselves. Unless we work with others toward valued goals, we cannot infuse hope and aspiration into our lives. Unless we treat one another as equals, we cannot find dignity, meaning, and community in work. Unless we make our own mistakes, and learn to forgive ourselves, we cannot learn at all. Unless we cooperate we cannot survive.” Marvin Weisbord, 1996                                           

 

Each time I read Weisbord’s quote, it brings to mind a question, “How can we have a democratic society, when most of our working lives are spent within organizations that are far from being democratic?” Even within western cultures, which have overturned monarchies and reduced the impact of class, organizations remain places where hierarchy and privilege closely resemble the monarchies or class-based societies of the past. Consider that most organizations are places where:

• organizational policy and strategy decisions are made by CEOs, whose actions have too often revealed that their primary interest is in lining their own pockets and that of their shareholders, with little concern for the environment, the well being of employees or the communities in which those organizations function. (Buybacks of  company stock rather than increasing employee salary from the tax cuts; inappropriate use of Covid 19 emergency fund)
• the disparity of income between those at the top of organizations and workers is excessive and unconscionable. (The average S&P 500 CEO earned $14 million in 2017, 361 times the average worker’s salary; compared to a ratio of only 42 in 1980.  From 1979 to 2018, net productivity rose 69.6 percent, while the hourly pay of typical workers increased only 11.6 during that same 39 year period.)
• employees frequently find themselves in an adult/child relationship with their managers, reducing their ability to make use of the knowledge and insight they have gained to address the work problems they face. Rather they are told what to focus on, how to do it, and how long it should take.
• employees suffer from a competitive culture that too often results in depression, heart attack and disengagement. (The health website WebMD reported that work was the number one source of stress. The American Psychological Association’s 2015 report Stress in America noted that the top two sources of stress were money and work, with almost one-quarter of all adults reporting extreme levels of stress. Sixty-one percent said that workplace stress had made them physically sick, and 7 percent said they had been hospitalized because of workplace stress and its physiological effects. The prevalence of heart attacks on Monday morning has caused hospitals to staff emergency rooms to correspond to the increased risk.)
• those at the top control information. The resulting secrecy leads to damaging and even illegal organizational behavior, which if employees had full awareness, they would not support, indeed would feel ashamed. (VW emission control scandal, the Wells Fargo Bank customer deceptions.) 

No citizens of a democracy would allow their government such control over their lives in the way organizations exert control over their employees. Mary Parker Follett* once said, she could not understand how people could complain about small freedoms taken away, like helmet laws or seat belts, yet were willing to function as surfs within the walls of an organization. I echo that sentiment. In answer to my own question, “How can we have a democratic society, when most of our working lives are spent within organizations that are far from being democratic?” I believe we cannot have a democratic society unless we rethink the governance of our organizations.  

Writing as early as 1989, in “Reassessing the Divine Rights of Managers,” Edgar Schein said, “soon we will need to develop a new picture of what a manager should be. Hierarchical authority will probably play a much small role in that picture, while coordination skills will play a much larger role.” But he cautioned “Our thinking about these matters is hampered by one major, deeply embedded cultural assumption so taken for granted that it is difficult even to articulate. This is the assumption that all organizations are fundamentally hierarchical in nature, and that the management process is fundamentally hierarchical.” He said, “We need models, but we may have difficulty inventing them because of the automatic tendency to think hierarchically.”

The first step, in bringing about this much needed change is the recognition, as Schein reminds us, that the items in the above list are not “givens.” We now have the models that Schein said we were in needed of. There are now numerous organizations that have developed new approaches to organizational governance, although few would use the term democracy. Instead they are called, Deliberately Developmental Organizations (Kegan), Self Designed, Learning Organizations (Dixon), Holocracy (Robertson), Teal Organizations (Laloux), Conversational Firms (Turco) as well as a host of other terms. Whatever the label, they are organizations with little, if any hierarchy, in which employees make the decisions about what work they do and how they do that work, and in which employees influence the overall strategic direction. And there are many more organizations that are moving in that direction, as seen by the increase in self-directed teams and Agile teams.

I have many ideas about what is propelling this change, as well as, specific examples of how governance is being implemented in different organizations because indeed, these examples differ by size and context. But those topics are for other posts. In this post, I only wanted to lay out my concerns about the problems that result from our current model of governance and acknowledge the growing movement toward a revisioning of how organizations might governing themselves in a way that acknowledges respect for employees, community and the environment. I would be very appreciative to hear from you either in the comment section or through email,([email protected]) about what thoughts this post as sparked in you?

 

*Mary Parker Follett, was denied a Doctorate  at Harvard on the grounds that she was woman. She was one of the first women ever invited to address the London school of economics, where she was invited to address the London school of economics, she distinguished herself in the field of management by being sought by Pres. Theodore Roosevelt as his personal consultant, on managing not-for-profit, non-governmental and voluntary organizations. Peter Drucker identified her as his guru.

Police and Black Men Minneapolis- an Innovation

As many of you know, for several years I have been a volunteer facilitator for Better Angels, a citizen's organization uniting red and blue Americans in a working alliance to depolarize America.

Better Angels meetings were designed by Bill Doherty, a professor in the Dept of Family and Social Science at the University of Minnesota.  He has been doing another project, in his home town of Minneapolis, since 2017. You can read about it here. But here is a brief overview.  

The project's goal is to forge connections between police officers and African American men that can lead to better partnerships for community safety and law enforcement. It grew out of concern following the high-profile police shootings of Black men in 2015-16. Initially the meetings involved five Minneapolis police officers (three White and two Black) and six Black men from the community,  and was facilitated by Bill Doherty.

"The Minneapolis Police Department approved the project. All group members come as individuals speaking for themselves and not as representatives of an organization. Beginning in January 2017, they agreed to meet every other week for a year or more to build relationships based on honest communication, and then decide on action steps. Meeting places alternate between a community setting and a police setting.

The first set of meetings focused on relationship building: storytelling to understand one another’s backgrounds and experiences.  Over time the group got into more and more difficult conversation including negative personal experiences, the history of policing in Black communities, sources of current mistrust, and different perspectives on recent police-involved shootings.  The group kept returning to the table, forming close personal bonds, coming to understand each other’s perspectives, and evolving a common vision for change.

Clearly this project's work did not prevent the death of George Floyd, even after almost two years of meetings. Yet, I believe police and citizens talking together, as they do in this project, is vital. Of course, talk has to lead to changes in policy and laws, but laws and policy alone will not change people's hearts and minds - that only happens person through person to person conversation.

I have learned through the many Better Angels meetings that I have led, that when people come together in facilitated and well designed conversations, they leave with greater respect for each other and a willingness to "seek to understand" each other. I support the Black Lives Matter protests. I support the much needed legislative changes. I support changes to the role of police in communities. But most wholeheartedly, I support bringing together the police and the black community to hear each other's stories, fears and hopes.  How else do we change hearts and minds on both sides? 

An Organization That Is Serious About Lessons Learned:The Wildland Fire Lessons Learned Center

The Wildland Fire lessons learned are posted weekly by email to over 7000 readers. They are the way the Wildland Fire Lessons Learned Center (LLC) does rapid lesson sharing. They are also a place for users to submit their own stories about fire-related accidents, close calls, successes, or a way of doing things more efficiently or safely.

Click on the images to read short lessons and learn why they are so impactful. You might be able to use the one about cell phones yourself!

                                     
Research on the transfer of knowledge (Szulanski and Lee 2020) describe common barriers to transfer, which the Wildland Fire Lessons Learned Center has found a way to overcome. Here are some of those barriers (in bold) and my take on how the LLC has addressed them (in italics):

Common Barriers

• The effort required of the source to share lessons – a firefighter can click on the button at the end of each lesson and fill out a quick electronic form to share their story with the Lessons Learned Center who then does the formatting, write up, and adds the pictures of the lessons for publication and distribution.
• Lack of motivation of the source to provide enough detail for the recipient to implement the lesson – firefighters are willing to provide enough detail to keep their colleagues out of life-threatening  situations and the recognition from having their name and often their picture as well is an added incentive.
• Causal ambiguity – the lack of understanding about how a suggested lesson will change the outcome – the lesson writers make the benefit clear, often through the images, as well as restating the benefit again at the end as a recommendation or caution
• Lack of absorptive capacity of the recipient to understand the what the source is talking about- the use of common firefighter jargon (e.g. “faller,” “sawyer,” “geysering”) in the lessons aids in the understanding of other firefighters. Colleagues are doing the same work and have many of the same experiences as the source.

Likewise, Szulanksi and Lee suggest what encourages the production and improves the receptivity of lessons learned.

Encourage Lessons Learned

• Gatekeepers that can absorb knowledge from a source and interpret it for the recipient – the Lessons Learned Center writers, who are firefighters themselves, know what to ask the firefighters to get all the necessary details for their stories.
• A shared superordinate social identity between the source and the recipient - firefighters have a shared identity born out of their commitment to the mission and the genuine threat of danger with which they live on a daily basis.
• The credibility of the source   – that the lessons come from other firefighters, not from an unnamed source or HR lends credibility.
• Observability – the vivid pictures in the Lessons help the receiver both see and remember the lessons.
• Provenness of knowledge – real firefighters telling their stories about their own accidents and recovery, is verification that the lessons work.

The Wildland Lessons Learned Center was created after the 1994 South Canyon Fire that killed 14 wildland firefighters. This tragedy triggered the interagency TriData Firefighter Safety Awareness Study that recommended a permanent “lessons learned” program be established for wildland firefighters. Karl Weick, one of my heroes, from my faculty days at the University of Texas, worked with Wildland Fire to figure out how it could learn as an organization. That is what Lessons Learned should be – a way for organizations to learn.   

In 2002 the interagency Wildland Fire Lessons Learned Center (LLC) was created to focus on  improving safe work performance and organizational learning for all Wildland firefighters. The website declares, “The Wildland Fire Lessons Learned Center is the single most important step forward for wildland fire agencies in becoming “learning organizations.” The LLC facilitates the documentation of lessons in a variety of formats to make them accessible. In addition to the weekly emails, the LLC produces a compellation of incidents that have occurred over the past year, for example, trees falling on firefighters, chainsaws accidents, or heavily loaded vehicles that have rolled. Check out one the annual reports - you will be amazed at what firefighters deal with daily. 

The LLC also provides  a  1) quarterly magazine called Two More Chains; 2) a popular website for wildland firefighters, 3) a YouTube channel as well as 4) training, meetings, conferences, workshops, seminars, and wildfire academies throughout the United States.

The website notes, “The LLC is particularly important at this time when a large cohort of senior wildland fire managers are retiring within the next 4-5 years. The LLC offers an opportunity for those highly experienced firefighters to provide the next generation with well-learned lessons in fire behavior, safe practices, wildfire management, prescribed fire, and all other aspects of wildland fire management.”    

That is taking Lessons Learned seriously.  It takes a lot of effort and focus for an organization to become a learning organization!

 

 

 

Collective Sensemaking -The Democratization of Organizations

There is an encouraging shift happening - organizations are becoming flatter and more self-governing. Over the last ten years, I have had the opportunity to work with and write about a number of such organizations¹. Fredrick Laloux’s book, Reinventing Organizations², describes over fifteen self-governing organizations across the world (Gore, FAVI, Buurtzorg, Sun Hydraulics) where employees make the decisions about what work they do and how they do that work. And numerous books have been written about individual companies that are self-governing³. This change is driven by the increasing complexity of issues organizations face, for which there are no known answers and the recognition that those who are impacted by an issue, often the frontline workers, are also the people who have the knowledge and perception to develop an in-depth understanding of that issue. The shift is also influenced by the desire of workers to be associated with organizations where they can co-create what the enterprise stands for. To be flatter and self-governing requires organization leaders to turn to and believe in the knowledge and wisdom that is embedded in the workforce.

Such organizations establish new norms, not only about who makes the decisions but, equally about who is called upon to make sense of what is happening; and the practices of bringing groups together to enable collective sensemaking.  Taylor & Emery explain, “Sensemaking is a way station on the road to a consensually constructed, coordinated system of action.” Thus, sensemaking is the necessary step before coordinated action can take place. In organizations made up of specialized domains, sensemaking requires bringing those domains together in conversation to develop as complete an understanding as possible of the current situation the organization is facing. Thus, collective sensemaking is a conversational event where people intentionally come together for the purpose of using their varied perspectives and cognitive abilities to make sense of an issue or problem they are mutually facing, that will allow them to act collectively.

Weick, in describing a high-performing crews on carrier decks says, “when they interrelated their separate activities, they did so heedfully, taking special care to enact their actions as contributions to a system rather than as simply a task in their autonomous individual jobs. Their heedful interrelating also was reflected in the care they directed toward accurate representation of other players and their contributions. And heedful interrelating was evident in the care they directed toward subordinating their idiosyncratic intentions to the effective functioning of the system.”

An organization cannot follow Weick advice to “enact their actions as contributions to a system” unless members are able to hold a mental representation of that system in their minds. Sensemaking conversations provide the opportunity to build such representations.

Following is an example of collective sensemaking in a hospital setting that I had the privilege to work with. This Patient Safety Learning Pilot (PSLP) was conducted with microsystems in six hospitals and involved using MERS-TH (an error reporting system) and the development of causal trees based on the Eindhoven classification system for errors. The following description is of a sensemaking conversation that was convened by the Director of Patient Safety, at St Anthony’s in Crown Point, Indiana. In the Director’s words:

“We held a sensemaking session on a medication error that originated in the pharmacy. A patient was given a blood pressure medication that the physician had put on hold. The patient had come from the regular floor to our rehab unit. No harm occurred as a result of this error; however, we were interested in this particular error because we were in the process of implementing barcoding throughout the hospital. The unit where the error occurred was trialling the barcoding system so both the pharmacy and the rehab unit had put in new processes for these orders.

Before the sensemaking session occurred, I, as the Director of Patient Safety, and the Director of Pharmacy conducted a root cause analysis on the error and based on that developed a causal tree using the MERS framework. The causal tree had the consequent event as: “Norvasc 10mg administered to patient when order was written to hold – no harm to patient” followed by eleven antecedent events.

The sensemaking meeting brought together ten people, including the Director of Pharmacy, two pharmacy technicians and two pharmacists, one of whom had been involved in the error. We also had the nursing unit director from the floor where the error occurred, the VP of administration, the management engineer and the nursing informaticist who had expertise in barcoding. In addition, two nurses from the floor had agreed to come, but at the last minute were not able to do so. The meeting lasted about an hour and a half and was held toward the end of the shift to allow some people to come in early and others to stay after their shift.

I facilitated the sensemaking session, having participated in the earlier training given by Dr. Dixon. At the beginning of the meeting, I attempted to set a tone of openness. I explained that the intent of the sensemaking session was to educate ourselves on how we do things and more specifically how this error had occurred and I acknowledged that we all make errors including myself. I recalled an error I had made and asked if the others, whom we had arranged in a circle, would be willing to share a personal experience they had with an error and to say something about what it meant to them. Nearly everyone in the circle did so and this beginning proved valuable in demonstrating to everyone present that we were all on equal footing. The beginning also served to introduce those present to each other, which was important because one of our barriers to fixing medication errors has been that people from the floor don’t know many of the people from pharmacy.

I had printed the antecedent events from the causal tree on individual sheets of paper and these were placed one at a time on a wall chart. I explained to the group that this was just our rendition of what had occurred and that what I was looking for was input from them as to the correctness of the items or the sequence. As I placed each component on the tree, the group talked about that item, providing feedback, correcting, and adding new items. I used post-it notes to write additional information or steps. Having the items on individual sheets to be posted and changed proved much less threatening than using PowerPoint. It emphasized the tentativeness of what we had already produced illustrating that it was changeable.

The discussion evolved slowly as the group began to open up. As the meeting continued it became clear to me that the members were really trying to make sense of each other’s reasoning and contributions. Rather than all the questions coming from me, they began to ask questions of each other. For example, one pharmacist asked, “How do you know what medication you’ve put in?” The other pharmacist responded, “I check them off.” The first pharmacist was surprised because he had not been checking them off. Moreover, one of the techs explained that he thought the check meant that the pharmacist had already done a double check, so had not been re-checking those items.

As another example of the openness of the discussion, when I put up the antecedent event that read, “Must first reactivate transfer meds to rehab in computer,” which I had developed from my discussion with one of the pharmacist, the other pharmacist said, “I don’t just reactivate the screen, somebody else enters them all in manually.” So even the pharmacists were discovering differences in how they did things and that often lead to a discussion about which practice was safer.

One of the ways this meeting seemed different from a typical Root Cause Analysis that I have conducted was that the sensemaking meeting had a tone of curiosity, rather than the urgency to get the form completed and the meeting over with. I found myself exploring more in this meeting, trying to get at the staff’s understanding rather than just get the facts. I found myself honestly curious about what happened and did not feel compelled to make judgments. In this meeting, we primarily tried to understand what had happened and to reflect those changes on the causal tree. In the end, I felt great satisfaction knowing that the discussion did indeed go beyond the surface of the event. The casual tree we ended up with added several items including the recovery and in addition, added the causal codes that were useful when we were ready to create our action plans.

In two subsequent meetings, we created an action plan to address the issues we had uncovered in the sensemaking meeting and based on the same incident we conducted four subsequent FMEA meetings. So the sensemaking meeting proved a rich source of understanding for our continuing improvement work. The safety culture re-survey conducted in the pharmacy showed a positive change which, in part, was as a result of the conversation we had in the sensemaking meeting.”

This healthcare example illustrates only one of numerous possible formats for collective sensemaking, but it is illustrative of the role of the convener, how trust is built, the use of drawings or objects, the difference between a sensemaking conversation and a decision making conversation, and of the positive outcomes that can occur.  I describe other examples from organizations focused on technology, finance, oil and NASA in other blog posts:

• Using Collective Sensemaking to Put Caring Back in Healthcare https://www.nancydixonblog.com/2015/05/using-collective-sensemaking-to-put-caring-back-in-health-care.html
• Leveraging Collective Knowledge: NASA’s Constellation Program https://www.nancydixonblog.com/2010/07/leveraging-collective-knowledge-nasas-constellation-program.html
• How to Make Use of Your Organization’s Collective Knowledge – Part 1 https://www.nancydixonblog.com/2011/01/how-to-make-use-of-your-organizations-collective-knowledge-accessing-the-knowledge-of-the-whole-orga.html
• A Book That Will Blow Your Mind About How to Make Use of The Knowledge In Organizations: A Review of An Everyone Culture: Becoming a Deliberately Developmental Organization
• https://www.nancydixonblog.com/2017/08/a-book-that-will-blow-your-mind-about-how-to-make-use-of-the-knowledge-in-organizations-a-review-of-.html

References

1. Dixon, N. M. Glimpses of Organizations in the Act of Learning. In The Oxford Handbook of the Learning Organization.
2. Laloux, F. (2014). Reinventing organizations: A guide to creating organizations inspired by the next stage in human consciousness. Nelson Parker.
3. Robertson, B. J. (2015). Holacracy: The new management system for a rapidly changing world. Henry Holt and Company.; Sheridan, R. (2015). Joy, Inc.: How we built a workplace people love. Portfolio; Kegan, R., & Lahey, L. L. (2016). An everyone culture: Becoming a deliberately developmental organization. Harvard Business Review Press.; Turco, C. J. (2016). The conversational firm: Rethinking bureaucracy in the age of social media. Columbia University Press.
4. Weick, K. E. (1995). Sensemaking in organizations (Vol. 3). Sage.

Collective Sensemaking -The Democratization of Organizations

There is an encouraging shift happening - organizations are becoming flatter and more self-governing. Over the last ten years, I have had the opportunity to work with and write about a number of such organizations¹. Fredrick Laloux’s book, Reinventing Organizations², describes over fifteen self-governing organizations across the world (Gore, FAVI, Buurtzorg, Sun Hydraulics) where employees make the decisions about what work they do and how they do that work. And numerous books have been written about individual companies that are self-governing³. This change is driven by the increasing complexity of issues organizations face, for which there are no known answers and the recognition that those who are impacted by an issue, often the frontline workers, are also the people who have the knowledge and perception to develop an in-depth understanding of that issue. The shift is also influenced by the desire of workers to be associated with organizations where they can co-create what the enterprise stands for. To be flatter and self-governing requires organization leaders to turn to and believe in the knowledge and wisdom that is embedded in the workforce.

Such organizations establish new norms, not only about who makes the decisions but, equally about who is called upon to make sense of what is happening; and the practices of bringing groups together to enable collective sensemaking.  Taylor & Emery explain, “Sensemaking is a way station on the road to a consensually constructed, coordinated system of action.” Thus, sensemaking is the necessary step before coordinated action can take place. In organizations made up of specialized domains, sensemaking requires bringing those domains together in conversation to develop as complete an understanding as possible of the current situation the organization is facing. Thus, collective sensemaking is a conversational event where people intentionally come together for the purpose of using their varied perspectives and cognitive abilities to make sense of an issue or problem they are mutually facing, that will allow them to act collectively.

Weick, in describing a high-performing crews on carrier decks says, “when they interrelated their separate activities, they did so heedfully, taking special care to enact their actions as contributions to a system rather than as simply a task in their autonomous individual jobs. Their heedful interrelating also was reflected in the care they directed toward accurate representation of other players and their contributions. And heedful interrelating was evident in the care they directed toward subordinating their idiosyncratic intentions to the effective functioning of the system.”

An organization cannot follow Weick advice to “enact their actions as contributions to a system” unless members are able to hold a mental representation of that system in their minds. Sensemaking conversations provide the opportunity to build such representations.

Following is an example of collective sensemaking in a hospital setting that I had the privilege to work with. This Patient Safety Learning Pilot (PSLP) was conducted with microsystems in six hospitals and involved using MERS-TH (an error reporting system) and the development of causal trees based on the Eindhoven classification system for errors. The following description is of a sensemaking conversation that was convened by the Director of Patient Safety, at St Anthony’s in Crown Point, Indiana. In the Director’s words:

“We held a sensemaking session on a medication error that originated in the pharmacy. A patient was given a blood pressure medication that the physician had put on hold. The patient had come from the regular floor to our rehab unit. No harm occurred as a result of this error; however, we were interested in this particular error because we were in the process of implementing barcoding throughout the hospital. The unit where the error occurred was trialling the barcoding system so both the pharmacy and the rehab unit had put in new processes for these orders.

Before the sensemaking session occurred, I, as the Director of Patient Safety, and the Director of Pharmacy conducted a root cause analysis on the error and based on that developed a causal tree using the MERS framework. The causal tree had the consequent event as: “Norvasc 10mg administered to patient when order was written to hold – no harm to patient” followed by eleven antecedent events.

The sensemaking meeting brought together ten people, including the Director of Pharmacy, two pharmacy technicians and two pharmacists, one of whom had been involved in the error. We also had the nursing unit director from the floor where the error occurred, the VP of administration, the management engineer and the nursing informaticist who had expertise in barcoding. In addition, two nurses from the floor had agreed to come, but at the last minute were not able to do so. The meeting lasted about an hour and a half and was held toward the end of the shift to allow some people to come in early and others to stay after their shift.

I facilitated the sensemaking session, having participated in the earlier training given by Dr. Dixon. At the beginning of the meeting, I attempted to set a tone of openness. I explained that the intent of the sensemaking session was to educate ourselves on how we do things and more specifically how this error had occurred and I acknowledged that we all make errors including myself. I recalled an error I had made and asked if the others, whom we had arranged in a circle, would be willing to share a personal experience they had with an error and to say something about what it meant to them. Nearly everyone in the circle did so and this beginning proved valuable in demonstrating to everyone present that we were all on equal footing. The beginning also served to introduce those present to each other, which was important because one of our barriers to fixing medication errors has been that people from the floor don’t know many of the people from pharmacy.

I had printed the antecedent events from the causal tree on individual sheets of paper and these were placed one at a time on a wall chart. I explained to the group that this was just our rendition of what had occurred and that what I was looking for was input from them as to the correctness of the items or the sequence. As I placed each component on the tree, the group talked about that item, providing feedback, correcting, and adding new items. I used post-it notes to write additional information or steps. Having the items on individual sheets to be posted and changed proved much less threatening than using PowerPoint. It emphasized the tentativeness of what we had already produced illustrating that it was changeable.

The discussion evolved slowly as the group began to open up. As the meeting continued it became clear to me that the members were really trying to make sense of each other’s reasoning and contributions. Rather than all the questions coming from me, they began to ask questions of each other. For example, one pharmacist asked, “How do you know what medication you’ve put in?” The other pharmacist responded, “I check them off.” The first pharmacist was surprised because he had not been checking them off. Moreover, one of the techs explained that he thought the check meant that the pharmacist had already done a double check, so had not been re-checking those items.

As another example of the openness of the discussion, when I put up the antecedent event that read, “Must first reactivate transfer meds to rehab in computer,” which I had developed from my discussion with one of the pharmacist, the other pharmacist said, “I don’t just reactivate the screen, somebody else enters them all in manually.” So even the pharmacists were discovering differences in how they did things and that often lead to a discussion about which practice was safer.

One of the ways this meeting seemed different from a typical Root Cause Analysis that I have conducted was that the sensemaking meeting had a tone of curiosity, rather than the urgency to get the form completed and the meeting over with. I found myself exploring more in this meeting, trying to get at the staff’s understanding rather than just get the facts. I found myself honestly curious about what happened and did not feel compelled to make judgments. In this meeting, we primarily tried to understand what had happened and to reflect those changes on the causal tree. In the end, I felt great satisfaction knowing that the discussion did indeed go beyond the surface of the event. The casual tree we ended up with added several items including the recovery and in addition, added the causal codes that were useful when we were ready to create our action plans.

In two subsequent meetings, we created an action plan to address the issues we had uncovered in the sensemaking meeting and based on the same incident we conducted four subsequent FMEA meetings. So the sensemaking meeting proved a rich source of understanding for our continuing improvement work. The safety culture re-survey conducted in the pharmacy showed a positive change which, in part, was as a result of the conversation we had in the sensemaking meeting.”

This healthcare example illustrates only one of numerous possible formats for collective sensemaking, but it is illustrative of the role of the convener, how trust is built, the use of drawings or objects, the difference between a sensemaking conversation and a decision making conversation, and of the positive outcomes that can occur.  I describe other examples from organizations focused on technology, finance, oil and NASA in other blog posts:

• Using Collective Sensemaking to Put Caring Back in Healthcare https://www.nancydixonblog.com/2015/05/using-collective-sensemaking-to-put-caring-back-in-health-care.html
• Leveraging Collective Knowledge: NASA’s Constellation Program https://www.nancydixonblog.com/2010/07/leveraging-collective-knowledge-nasas-constellation-program.html
• How to Make Use of Your Organization’s Collective Knowledge – Part 1 https://www.nancydixonblog.com/2011/01/how-to-make-use-of-your-organizations-collective-knowledge-accessing-the-knowledge-of-the-whole-orga.html
• A Book That Will Blow Your Mind About How to Make Use of The Knowledge In Organizations: A Review of An Everyone Culture: Becoming a Deliberately Developmental Organization
• https://www.nancydixonblog.com/2017/08/a-book-that-will-blow-your-mind-about-how-to-make-use-of-the-knowledge-in-organizations-a-review-of-.html

References

1. Dixon, N. M. Glimpses of Organizations in the Act of Learning. In The Oxford Handbook of the Learning Organization.
2. Laloux, F. (2014). Reinventing organizations: A guide to creating organizations inspired by the next stage in human consciousness. Nelson Parker.
3. Robertson, B. J. (2015). Holacracy: The new management system for a rapidly changing world. Henry Holt and Company.; Sheridan, R. (2015). Joy, Inc.: How we built a workplace people love. Portfolio; Kegan, R., & Lahey, L. L. (2016). An everyone culture: Becoming a deliberately developmental organization. Harvard Business Review Press.; Turco, C. J. (2016). The conversational firm: Rethinking bureaucracy in the age of social media. Columbia University Press.
4. Weick, K. E. (1995). Sensemaking in organizations (Vol. 3). Sage.

Combining Virtual and Face-to-Face Work

The following is a blog post I wrote that was published in HBR July 01, 2015. As we are trying to emerge from being totally remote, it seemed appropriate to revisit it.

"Many companies feel they face a conundrum when it comes to determining remote work policies. Perhaps the most common misconception about adopting virtual work is that it is an all-or-nothing proposition, such that once we have networking tools in place, there is no need to come together — or conversely that we have to be in the office all the time. But this paradigm often forces knowledge workers to choose between two strong drives: the need for autonomy and the need for a purpose that inspires and unites them.

It is neither wise nor effective to turn our backs on the benefits of having a virtual work force. But it is also true that in this increasingly digital age, we stand to lose something integral to what makes organizations both humane and productive places to work: the relationships and sense of purpose that can only be built by having in-depth, face-to-face conversations about important issues—what I call collective sensemaking (based largely on the work of Karl Weick).

The way to satisfy both needs is to blend sophisticated virtual tools with periodic face-to-face meetings. This involves what I call the “oscillation principle,” which allows you to tap the best attributes of both virtual work and face-to-face convening.

Virtual work allows for:

• Drawing on the global talent pool
• Reducing costs from office space
• Providing greater autonomy to workers by giving them room to experiment and control their workflows
• Being able to respond quickly to local customers
• More satisfying integration of work and family life

Convening fosters:

• Strong commitment to jointly made decisions
• Shared understanding of goals and a larger purpose
• The ability for components, developed independently, to smoothly come together into a meaningful whole
• Diverse and innovative solutions to complex issues
• A sense of community, cohesion, and belonging

One example demonstrates how. Proquest, an information company, has a Research Solutions Division comprised of three remote teams, with members scattered from Amsterdam to San Diego. They are in daily communication with each other using multiple forms of media, but everyone comes together for a three-day Summit every four months to plan the work they will be carrying out virtually. Taco Ekkel, the division manager told me, “We would need four scheduled calls to accomplish what we get solved around a white board in an hour. Without the Summits it would definitely slow things down.”

During the Summit, he creates a culture to foster collective sensemaking. This means: 1) actively seeking members’ input into the agenda, 2) abandoning hierarchy and giving decision-making power to the group, 3) whiteboarding to jointly design features and build group ownership of ideas, and 4) preserving social time to help team members build important relationships. (He makes sure work sessions end promptly at 5PM so they can socialize at 5:30PM.)

Outside of the Summit, he maintains this collaborative culture by holding (almost) daily virtual meetings so everyone is aware of what everyone else is doing. And they’ve learned which virtual media is appropriate for certain tasks. For example, email works best for requesting or passing on factual information, while a teleconference is typically necessary for a problem solving task, such as deciding who should represent the company a client meeting. A face-to-face meeting might be needed for a brainstorming discussion about ways to alter a product’s design. Proquest usually saves larger conversations about new features for their Summits. “We’d never really effectively get them conceptualized without the richness of face-to-face contact coupled with sketching,” Ekkel said.

In this example, workers are both virtual and remote. But the oscillation principle is equally applicable to organizations where workers spend some of their time working remotely—in a client office, at home, or even at temporary “hot desks” when they’re in the office. If these workers aren’t periodically connecting, in person, around issues that matter, they’ll find themselves disconnected from their colleagues and the driving mission of their unit.

And how frequently your employees come together depends on task interdependence — or the extent to which one person’s work affects what other team members do — and complexity. The greater the interdependence and complexity, the more frequently collective sensemaking meetings need to occur.

The more virtual organizations become, the greater the need for oscillating between being remote and coming together on a regularly scheduled basis. I can conceive of a time when employees will conduct their individual work where it is most convenient to do so. They will come together to innovate, share new experiences, understand issues they are all are facing, solve problems, and develop strategy. There will be an understanding that when they convene it is to make use of all the knowledge and analytical ability that is in the room.

Everything else will be effectively conveyed virtually. The normal way of working will be: isolate to concentrate, convene to collaborate."

 

A Rant on “That’s an Excellent Question”

“That’s an Excellent question” has become the ubiquitous first words out of the mouth of any speaker in answer to a question. But I ask you, can every question possibly be an excellent question?

What qualifies for being an excellent question? One that the speaker finds easy to answer? One that the speaker can’t figure out how to answer, so is stalling for time? One that the speaker and you planned ahead of time? 

Have you ever heard a speaker say, “That’s not a very good question”? Well other than Trump! What if you don’t receive the obligatory, “That’s an excellent question”? Does that mean your question was lousy?  Should we be grading questions?  What if your question was only worth a C+ or heaven forbid, a D?

I’ve been noticing this strange repetition for about the last year. Before that, it seems like speakers just, well, answered the question. But it’s like someone yawned and then everyone else started to yawn.

I’ve been thinking about alternatives:

• My top choice is to revert to the historical precedent and just answer the question.
• If you need to stall for time, how about, “Let me think about that for a moment.”
• If it’s a question you get every time you speak, don’t sigh, just say, “I find a lot of people share your concern”

Whatever way you handle the situation, please stop saying, “That’s an excellent question.” It’s driving me nuts!

Quick Clinic for Remote Work

I have developed an easy way to provide some help to managers who are having to deal with remote workers during the virus. Let me know if this is of interest.

 

Staying Together While Working Apart

There is a great deal that newly remote teams can learn from teams that have worked remotely for several years. Here are some tips about how those experienced teams stay connected:

• Manager 1:1s with team members
• Online social hours
• Online team development
• Paired team conversations
• Building a digital team home  
• Oscillating between virtual and in-person meetings
• Effective online staff meetings

Manager 1:1s with team members

When working remotely, team members can become concerned that their manager may not know what they have been working on and what they have successfully achieved. They may fear that if they are out of sight they’ll be out of mind, because there is no way for them to casually mention an accomplishment during a hallway conversation or for a colleague to brag to the manager about what another team member has done.    

Managers can feel equally in the dark, unaware that a team member might need information for a report, is being overwhelmed with requests, or that a project is falling behind schedule. 

Here is how TechnipFMC deals with both of those issues. TechnipFMC’s Knowledge Management team of 12 members, is remote. The team is divided into three sub-teams, each with a  program manager who is in a supervisory role. Program managers hold a weekly 1:1 with each person reporting to them. Luis, one of the program managers, explains, I always make sure we have cameras on. Taras in Russia smiles a lot, and it's nice to see that. I smile back, and it helps with the human interaction. In the 1:1s, I typically ask questions to better understand the projects they're working on and who the client is. I'm always trying to make connections with others doing something similar so I can connect them with that person. Luis sees his role as support rather than monitoring or assigning tasks, so he typically asks questions like, What can I do to make your job easier? or even What do I need to stop doing. In this time of the coronavirus, you could imagine him asking “How’s the family dealing with sheltering-in-place? or Have you got the equipment you need? He views the 1:1s as the time for team members to raise issues that are important to them. So team members often join the video meeting with a list of topics they want to discuss, everything from training they hope to take, to how they see their career path moving in the future.  

Online Social hours

Many remote teams meet by video conferencing once a week, in an hour dedicated to connecting socially. The social hour mimics an on-site team’s having an office birthday cake, gathering for TGIF at a bar, or going to a football game together. 

Social hours are one of a number of the rituals Atlassian, a software development company, has instituted to keep their remote team members connected. Take De Coninck as an example. She is an experienced designer who works remotely out of her home office in Melbourne, more than 500 miles away from Atlassian’s home office in Sydney. The office in Sidney has a life-size cutout of De and other remote workers that office staff occasionally move around to make it look like a remote worker is peeking from behind the office ferns or is at the watercooler. The whole team dials in for Friday evening social time where they can hang out, play video games or simply have a drink over a video call and bond. De notes, It just mimics that real office vibe. You can tell that they really wanted to make it work.

Social connections are a strong element in building collaboration within a team because collaboration depends on the relationships between team members. And relationships are built on trust, which is borne out of knowing each other beyond just the work team members do. Lita Kernery, who works on a ProQuest product development virtual team, says of her teammates, I like to know them personally. Do they have kids? Do we have something in common? It’s easier for me to talk with them about a work issue if I know something about them personally.

Online Team development

Every team benefits from having team development sessions to help the team collaborate more effectively, align around a shared purpose and improve the quality of work life. Although we typically think of team development as being an in-person retreat, it can be accomplished very successfully online. But if provided online, it is critical that the workshop follow some basic online principles for learning:

• meetings are conducted in small groups of 4-6 team members, so there is airtime for everyone to talk. If a larger team is involved, it is divided into sub-groups for the development meetings.
• meetings are spaced over time, for example, 90 minutes one day a week, or every two weeks. Being online all day just doesn’t work for anyone!
• keeping the same small group together for each session to give them the time needed to build relationships.
• applying the 80-20 rule to content, that is, 20% content and 80% group discussion that facilitates team members using the content in their own work.

The best virtual team development I’ve come across is CoachingOurselves. (Full disclosure: I am a CoachingOurselves Associate) I use these modules in my teaching at Columbia University’s Information and Knowledge Strategy (IKNS) program to build collaboration before a group of students begins working together on a team project.  

Paired team conversations

Paired calls between team members open the space to share their personal stories, for example, work history, schooling, hobbies, family. This foundation sets the stage for knowing each other beyond the surface-level and feeling more connected. However, team member participation should always be optional for paired calls, not mandatory.

Buffer is a fully distributed organization of 90 people living and working in 15 countries around the world. They create social media products for customers to build their brands. Buffer has been very intentional about studying how to build a culture that supports remote work. When Buffer discovered that team members were feeling a hunger for deeper connections, they began experimenting with a number of ways do to paired calls. After several tries, they settled on structured one-hour sessions held every other week. The calls are with a peer who works in another part of the organization. The peers keep the same partner for each call. Buffer workers say, I think it’s been really helpful to have a designated space to share and grow with another Bufferoo who isn’t my manager or someone on my team, and A great opportunity to connect with teammates and dive deeper into conversations that might not happen in a typical pair call.

There are lots of ways to do paired calls, the American Red Cross sets up “Randomized Coffee Trials.” Interested team members sign up, and each month are randomly assigned someone to have a short coffee break chat with. Then the next month they are assigned someone new. The idea is to give people a space to talk, and then to just see what happens. One Red Cross volunteer who participated said, Thank you for providing the opportunity to share and forge links with other volunteers worldwide. I had my first virtual coffee trial today and it was an awesome experience. Discussing our work and sharing our experiences just added the right flavor to what we do regardless of the distance. We are not alone. We have a voice. Thank you. Looking forward to the Second Round.   When I introduced the idea to Huawei in China, they opted for Randomized Tea Trials, so the idea is easily modified to fit different teams and cultures.  

Building a digital team home

We all know the downsides of using email to communicate between team members – someone gets left out, misunderstandings occur, a team member learns about a change before others, responses have the wrong subject heading, on and on. Team collaboration apps like Slack, Twist, MS Teams or Yammer are one of the easiest ways for teams to stay together.

Team apps provide a space for everything that is going on in a team to be in one place. That includes project documents, requests for specific information, private messages between team members, messages directed to everyone, separate channels for different teams or projects, announcements, recordings of team meetings, and more.  Team apps serve as a digital team home for a team, including social sections where team members can post family pictures and announcements. Doist is a fully remote team that produces productivity and communication apps.  On Twist, Doist’s teamwork app,  team members routinely post photos of their weekends and vacations, share news about weddings and babies, and chat about favorite books, films, and music. Parents at Doist even have a dedicated channel to discuss everything related to child rearing.

In team collaboration apps, team members can create robust profiles that include their skills, experience and current projects. Those profiles allow other team members to know who to turn to for answers to specific questions. There are useful add-ons to most collaboration apps, for example, Buffer uses an add-on to Slack, called HeyTaco. It lets teammates recognize the accomplishment of someone by giving them a taco. Each team member gets five tacos a day to distribute, and the accumulated tacos can be redeemed for rewards.

If a team app is new to team members or has only been used by a few team members in the past, new users will need some help. The organization's technology group may have online training available or the team might identify power users on the team who are willing to provide quick help if they receive a message like, How do I set up a new channel?  or How do I send a private message?

Team apps are a great benefit to remote work, but only if everyone on the team uses the app, including the team manager. One way to ensure that everyone starts using the app is for the manager to let team members know, “I only respond to messages through the team app. If you send me an email I won’t see it.” That will do the trick!  In some organizations, all internal communication takes place on the apps.  Email is used only for exchanges with external clients and suppliers.

Effective online staff meetings

There is a lot to know about holding virtual meetings. I wrote a blog about it here. The guidelines are 1) use video conferencing with cameras on,  2) no PowerPoint or long presentations (nothing more than 5 min), meetings should be for discussion and connection among team members, 3) have frequent short meetings (30 to 90 min max) rather than long meetings, 4) elicit topics from the team about what they need to talk about before the meeting and put those topics on the agenda, 5) use breakout groups, polls, and chat functions to keep the meeting active and interesting, 6) start and end with a check in.

Oscillate between virtual and in-person meetings

My hope is that when things return to normal, many managers will have come to recognize the value of remote work so that many more organizations will offer employees the option of working one or more days a week remotely.  If that happens, it is essential to remember that working remotely is not an all or nothing proposition. What works for teams that have been working remotely for a long while, is to oscillate between working remotely and coming together physically. That is the way the teams I have described in this blog,  Buffer, Atlassian, Proquest, TechnipFMC and Doist work. I write more about that idea here.  And I explain how frequently a team needs to meet here.  

Peter Block notes that an in-person group meeting has a symbolic significance, which he likens to a family at the dinner table. He explains It is when all of us are at the dinner table together that we get a sense of the whole. It is the moment we are physically reminded that we are part of something larger. The awareness of “being part of something larger” is critical to a group’s being willing to do the hard work of collective sensemaking.  It is easy for organizational members to lose the sense of what others do and how what others do relates to what each member does - particularly in remote work. Without this understanding, it is difficult to take into account the needs of others.

 

 

The Essentials for Leading a Newly Remote Team

I recently held a webinar targeting managers who suddenly have to lead a remote team
because everyone has been told to work at home.  I cover what a manager can do to support newly remote workers and how to keep the team connected under such difficult
circumstances. 

 

 If this is an issue you for you please find the webinar at https://vimeo.com/cpiworld/review/400344400/cb5c1b61ed.

 

 

Has the Coronavirus Imposed Virtual Team Meetings? The Problem and the Solution

The Problem: No matter how carefully leaders plan their online meetings, team members too often end up disengaging while on the call. According to a recent study, 82% of people admit to multi-tasking. The study shows they do everything from surfing the web to answering emails to using the bathroom during team calls! (Ferrazzi, HBR, 2014)

The Solution: Six design elements that make virtual team meetings both engaging and productive

1. Visual Conferencing. Use a visual conferencing app (Zoom, Skype, Go to Meeting) rather than relying on audio. Unless bandwidth or security issues prohibit it, don’t let team members cop out of turning on their cameras. Research shows that 73% of visual meetings end faster and with better results than do audio only meetings https://zkresearch.com/. In those situations where cameras are prohibited, put pictures of members on the screen during the audio meeting. It’s a poor substitute for video but at least pictures of team members keep everyone on the call in the front of participants’ mind.   

2. The 80-20 rule. Make meetings 80% active and only 20% passive. Passive means just watching or listening, for example, PowerPoint presentations, listening to speeches or reviewing documents. Active means participants are engaged in a multi-directional activity, that is, they are engaging with each other. Multi-directional activities include things like polls, thumbs up/down, small breakout group discussions, large group discussion, go-arounds to check where everyone is on an issue, writing responses in the chat, and raising hands. These activities are useful to periodically check the temperature of the group or to check if the group is close to an agreement. Change the activity every 7-12 minutes!

3. No PP or Speeches When it is important for team members to have new information, send it out several days before the meeting and with it send 3-5 questions about the topic that is to be discussed at the meeting. Discussion questions need to reference genuine issues that require team member input, not just checking to see if they understood or compliance issues. Sending a short video out ahead is probably even better than a PowerPoint or documents. An update on what each team member is doing can also be sent ahead with time on the agenda for questions or discussion relative to what others are doing. A useful rule of thumb is that a team member who has not read/viewed ahead does not get a voice in the discussion or decision!

4. Elicit Team Members’ Questions and Concerns Canvass team members at least 4-5 days before the virtual meeting to identify issues they think need to be discussed on the team call. Then talk with each respondent to frame the question for discussion. Issues raised by team members are the most useful part of an online meeting. They can prompt needed process improvements and spur re-alignment around disagreements.  

5. Short Frequent Meetings - It is better to have several short meeting than one long virtual meeting. Virtual meetings should never exceed 90 min and 45 minutes is optimal. Almost no one can maintain focus on a video meeting longer than 60 minutes and when it is audio-only it’s more like 30 minutes. If team members read/view before the meeting there is no need for lengthy meetings.

6. Have 2-3 facilitators For a video meeting there needs to be one person to facilitate the discussion. It is best if this is someone who does not have a stake in the game. The facilitator needs to stay aware of the pace and quality of the discussion. They intervene when an activity is needed like a poll or a go-around. They listen for when the group is nearing agreement when one person appears to be dominating, and for who may have dropped out of the discussion. A second facilitator is a technology person who helps team members initially get connected or brings them back when they have lost connection. This person listens for background noise that is disturbing the discussion and mutes that connection. They set up polls or divide the group for breakout sessions.  The third facilitator watches the chat for questions that come up or themes that appear to be emerging and lets the person who is facilitating the discussion know.  

Opinion | You Are Now Remotely Controlled - The New York Times

In the absence of new declarations of epistemic rights and legislation, surveillance capitalism threatens to remake society as it unmakes democracy. From below, it undermines human agency, usurping privacy, diminishing autonomy and depriving individuals of the right to combat. From above, epistemic inequality and injustice are fundamentally incompatible with the aspirations of a democratic people.

via www.nytimes.com

This is important for our democracy. I long article but read it all, it's critical

Working Virtually: Re-designing Work for Human Flourishing

I welcome the growing movement toward virtual work because I believe it is allowing work to be re-designed for greater human flourishing. Several years ago, Peter Drucker said, "The knowledge worker cannot be supervised closely or in detail. He can only be helped. But he must direct himself, and he must direct himself towards performance and contribution, that is, toward effectiveness." Virtual workers are primarily made up of knowledge workers, and by virtue of their distance from managers, they are self-directed.

The most frequent reason knowledge workers give for choosing remote work is because they want flexibility. Virtual work offers two kinds of flexibility, both of which increases human flourishing.

Autonomy
The first way virtual work is flexible is worker autonomy; "direct himself" as Drucker put it. 77% of millennials say they would quit their job for greater flexibility over where and when they work. Among workers of all ages, 74% say they would make that same decision. (Softchoice.com)

Virtual workers have a greater opportunity to do their work in a way that makes sense to them and their teammates because the close supervision that occurs is the office is not possible when workers are out of sight by virtue of distance. Also, virtual workers have less supervision because their managers lack the knowledge of customers and conditions that the remote workers acquire locally. A virtual team has the freedom to puzzle over how their task is going and to change course when something is not working as well as it should, so experimentation as well as the resultant learning, is significantly increased. Finally, if an organization functions in a way that goes against virtual workers' ethical or moral standards, they are more able to speak out about their concern or to leave. They are a part of the growing gig economy that is not tied to location or organization.

In my studies of virtual teams, one of the managers I interviewed, Kim Glover, the Global Manager of Knowledge Management at TechnipFMC, exemplified worker autonomy, as this quote from one of her team members illustrates. I feel like I've got my boss's support for anything, and that makes me just take a deep breath and get creative. Having the freedom to focus my energies on tasks that I feel are important is important to me, as is having teammates that will support me and vice versa. Such a sense of empowerment and commitment is consistently shown to be one of the highest contributors to employee job satisfaction.

Work-Life Balance
The second way virtual workers experience flexibility is through work-life balance. Working remotely allows employees the opportunity to balance family and work. It gives them a choice to live where they choose and thereby be more available to aging parents or the social and physical environment that fits their lifestyle. Research indicates that a lack of work-life balance and commute-related stress are two of the top factors that make people prefer a job with flexible options (FlexJobs Survey, 2018).

• 86% of people feel that working remotely reduces stress.
• 77% of people believe remote work improves general health because it allows for a better diet, more exercise, and a generally healthier lifestyle.
• 28% of people would even accept a 10-20% pay cut if it allowed them to work remotely. (FlexJobs Survey, 2018)

Pfeffer, in his book, Dying for a Paycheck, describes the stress that office-based workers too often experience. "The health website WebMD reported that work was the number one source of stress. The American Psychological Association's 2015 report Stress in America noted that the top two sources of stress were money and work, with almost one-quarter of all adults reporting extreme levels of stress. Sixty-one per cent said that workplace stress had made them physically sick, and 7 per cent said they had been hospitalized because of workplace stress and its physiological effects. There is the so-called Black Monday Syndrome, the fact that more people have heart attacks on Monday morning than at other times during the week, maybe because they are back at work after the weekend. The prevalence of heart attacks on Monday morning has caused hospitals to staff emergency rooms to correspond to the increased risk." It is this unhealthy level of stress that virtual workers reduce by working remotely.

Despite these alarming, but these well-documented facts, about office-based work, no workplace change effort in the last 40 years, has had much impact on the work culture, which produces such stress. This toxic culture has persisted even given numerous management theorists including Peter Drucker, Charles Handy, Warren Bennis, Henry Mintzberg, Mary Follett and more recently Daniel Pink, all of whom have spoken about the need and benefits of worker autonomy. These theorists have explained that employees do their best work when they have the freedom to make choices about what they work on and how they do that work. They have advocated that employees need to bring their whole selves to work, rather than suppressing or playing down who they are outside of their work function, that is, that they are parents, caregivers of aging parents, homosexual, transgender, compassionate women, believers of less dominant religions, and on and on. But their voices have brought about only minimal change, perhaps because it is difficult to tie autonomy to productivity increases.

The productivity of knowledge workers is challenging to measure, even among those that are office-based. However, the few companies that have been able to track the productivity of remote workers have reported substantial increases in productivity.

• Best Buy's average productivity increased 35% through its flexible work program.
• British Telecom estimates productivity increased 20% through telecommuting.
• Dow Chemical estimates a 32.5% increase in productivity among its teleworkers
• Surveys and pilots conducted by IBM suggest that telework employees can be up to 50% more productive.
• Alpine Access, one of the nation's largest all-virtual employers, attributes a 30% increase in sales and a 90% reduction in customer complaints to its home-based agents.
• American Express telecommuters handled 26% more calls and produced 43% more business than their office-based counterparts
• Compaq Computer Corporation documented increased teleworker productivity ranging from 15 to 45% (TeleworkResearchNetwork.com, Kate Lister, April 2010)

Reports on other productivity indicators show:

• Companies allowing remote work have 25% lower employee turnover than those that don't. (Ultimate List of Remote Work Stats, 2019)
• Employers save an average of $11,000 per year, per remote employee. The savings accrue from not having to provide working space, hardware, electricity and internet bills. (State of Telecommuting, 2015)
• In 2017 companies that support remote work lost 9% of their employees, compared to 12% in companies that don't. (Owl Labs' 2017 State of Remote Work)

The remote movement is precipitating a much needed change in human flourishing in the world of work. As companies come to realize the economic benefits of remote work and as more and more workers choose to work for companies who provide this choice, it seems safe to predict that the future of work will bring greater human flourishing.

Five Misconceptions About Virtual teams

 

1. The bigger the virtual team, the more it can get done

Wrong! To get things done, team members have to talk to each other. So do the math!  With a team of 5, it takes ten conversations for team members to connect with everyone about a critical issue – very doable. Guess what happens with 13 team members – it requires 78 conversations – not happening. It’s the number of links between people that creates the collaboration problem. A team of five members is ideal!  It's large enough to have a diversity of ideas. It’s small enough for one person to build on another’s ideas. If you go much beyond five, you have lots of people offering their views, but they come out as serial monologues, with little ability to make collective sense. If you want your team to move fast – break a large team into smaller pods. And re-design the work so that a small team can accomplish a given task. Then ensure collaboration between the pods by selecting leads for each pod that frequently meet for coordination. These leads are not bosses but coordinators – regular members of the teams who are willing to take on extra duty.

2. Virtual teams do not need to meet F2F

Not so. It is almost impossible for team members to maintain the deep relationships required for a truly cohesive team without periodic face-to-face interaction. The research is undeniable on that topic. When people come together in person, they have the opportunity to exchange knowledge and ideas, as well as convey feelings in a way that’s tough to do virtually. Having the whole team together can ensure that everyone is interpreting objectives, goals, roles and other vital content the same way. Disagreements can be aired more easily and quickly, and mistaken assumptions can be identified and dispelled. And, very importantly, face-to-face meetings help people create the bonds that are needed for team members to collaborate virtually down the road.

3. It’s helpful to have the co-located team members sitting all together in the office while remote members join through Skype or Zoom.

Mixed-mode causes real problems! Having some participants sitting together, maybe even in the same room as the boss, while others are online, unduly privileges those who are collocated. Those in the room can make eye contact with the person speaking and can even notice who is getting ready to talk. While those online have no eye contact and can only view the whole group. Even if the group is careful about ensuring that that online team members “get in,” those that are remote remain 2^nd class citizens.  Build a level playing field across time and distance by having every team member be on their office computer for team meetings. Just remember - No Mixed Mode. We are all together or all apart.

 4. Virtual teams don’t need to worry about team building

All teams need to think about how they’re working together periodically. It’s even more critical for virtual teams because they have fewer opportunities to run into someone in the hall to repair a misunderstanding or to casually check out how others might be thinking about an issue. Team building can be accomplished virtually if spaced over time.  Rather than gathering for a two-day F2F event, effective team building can occur in 2-hour virtual segments, spaced over six weeks. A virtual team building workshop increases trust, builds appreciation for others’ strengths and weakness, re-builds alignment around goals, and improves communication. 

5. A good way to get everyone on the same page is to use virtual team meetings to show PowerPoint slides and have everyone do individual status updates.

That one is a no brainer! According to a recent study, 82% of people admit to doing other things while in
a virtual meeting—anything from surfing the web to playing solitaire. They do so because the meeting, or substantial parts of it, are of little interest. So follow the 80/20 rule. Make meetings 80% active and 20% passive. Don't bore meeting participants by showing slides or reviewing documents that can be sent and read before the meeting. Use virtual meetings to solve problems, exchange ideas, offer suggestions, or seek guidance. Do that in small breakout groups of 3-4 people and invite team members to suggest items that need to be discussed in the meeting.

How Often Do Virtual Teams Need to Meet Face-to-Face?

In a previous post, I wrote about how successful virtual teams benefit by functioning as #Hybrid teams. I defined Hybrid teams as teams that  1) meet face to face periodically, 2) meet in pairs when appropriate, and 3) are intentional about engaging in interpersonal as well as transactional interactions during online meetings.

This post answers the question, what should the frequency of face-to-face meetings be? The answer depends on three factors 1) the type of tasks of the virtual hybrid team, 2) the degree of a shared view among team members, and 3) the strength of relationship among team members (Maznevski).  The most critical of those factors is the type of work the team does and it is this factor that I address in this post.

There are three levels of team interdependence, pooled, sequential and reciprocal,  each requiring different levels of interaction and thus the frequency of meeting face-to-face.

With Pooled interdependence virtual hybrid team members work independently of each other. Examples would include insurance claim reviewers, call center responders, appliance repair mechanics, and some sales teams. In such jobs, the outcome of all the workers is combined to reach the team’s target. As there are no handoffs between team members, there is no need for the team to come together to ensure that handoffs go smoothly or to resolve joint issues. Coordination is achieved by standardizing the task. However, like other virtual team members who function without the presence of colleagues, they can suffer loneliness and feel disengaged, which reduces the team’s total productivity. Hybrid virtual teams, that are doing tasks that require pooled interdependence, bring those members together at least yearly to celebrate the success of outstanding performers and to build relationships and team commitment. Some organizations combine such meetings with the introduction of new products or training. Limited face-to-face meetings are supported by asynchronous exchanges such as Communities of Practices where team members can ask questions of each other and share best practices as well as synchronous exchanges such as webinars when those are designed for interaction rather than presentation.  

With Sequential interdependence, the team carries out a series of tasks, each performed by a different team member, like a virtual assembly line. Each team member’s success depends on the person who does the previous task completing that task on time and at a high level of quality.  Therefore, a virtual hybrid team’s performance can be improved by each team member fully understanding the needs and requirements of the person who will receive their handoff. Because needs change over time, a virtual hybrid team holds weekly, online, synchronous conversations by Skype or Zoom to stay updated on problems and concerns. Teams use online project management apps like Trello or Zoho for planning and to track task completion. They use asynchronous team apps such as Microsoft Teams or Slack for messaging, social interaction and document storage. Many hold daily, virtual, standup meetings, often lasting no more than 15 minutes to check in with who needs help and to head off problems. 

Virtual hybrid teams with sequential interdependence meet face to face initially to build strategic alignment, to do the necessary upfront planning for coordination and to establish trust relationships that are critical to sequential interdependence.  Although the team’s ongoing tasks are sequential, the initial meeting requires reciprocal interdependence.  Without the conversations that establish trust relationships, team members lose awareness and concern about those they depend upon. Team members need to meet face to face at least twice a year to renew that trust and to put into place changes learned from their ongoing experience.

Reciprocal interdependence requires continual interaction between co-workers. Team members must diagnose, problem solve, and collaborate to accomplish their task. They must continually adjust to each other’s actions as the situation changes. Examples of reciprocal interdependence are product design teams and strategy development teams. Reciprocal tasks require in-depth discussion that involves input from diverse perspectives. A virtual sales team may involve technical experts, developers and marketing people who must interact to craft a proposal for a client. As the client gives feedback on the proposal or later adds new requirements, the team will need to convene to make modifications. Coordination is achieved by mutual adjustment anytime a new factor is introduced. Moreover, mutual adjustment entails synchronous conversation that is best achieved face-to-face. Attempt to make such changes asynchronously whether by email or team apps results in mis-interpretation of others meaning and often the false assumption that agreement has been reached.

Virtual, hybrid teams that are reciprocal meet at least quarterly face-to-face. In between meetings, they primarily rely on visual communication tools such as Skype, Zoom or Google Hangout. They may also use team apps such as  Slack or Teams, to maintain documentation.  As Weick notes, “The same event means different things to different people and more information will not help them. What will help them is a setting where they can argue, using rich data pulled from a variety of media, to construct fresh frameworks of action-outcome linkages that include their multiple interpretations. The variety of data need to pull off this difficult task are most available in variants of the face to face meeting.”   

Task interdependence varies depending upon the task in which a virtual team is engaged. It is not uncommon for teams to have some tasks that are reciprocal and others that are sequential. For example, the initial design of a software project would be reciprocal, while the ongoing development tasks might be sequential and the retrospect at the end that looks for ways to improve the process, to again be reciprocal.

Go Virtual Or Bring Them Back to the Office? The Answer: Hybrid Teams

There is a mistaken perception that a team is either virtual or co-located. The assumption is that once networking tools are in place, there is no need for a virtual team to come together or conversely, team members need to be co-located.

Neither is adequate to meet current workplace needs! Clearly, virtual teams offer great benefits; for example, they reduce overhead and relocation cost. They provide greater team autonomy and enable an organization to maximize their functional expertise by utilizing professionals that are geographically dispersed. Great advantages! On the downside, virtual team members collaborate less fully and experience lower levels of engagement.  40% of virtual team members experience loneliness and are concerned that they are “out of sight, out of mind.” Not so good!

Being co-located takes care of some of those negatives. For example, team members have greater visibility to management, so fewer worries about being forgotten. They have opportunities to observe each other’s skills and integrity, both of which are prerequisites for trust and collaboration. They also experience the third ingredient necessary for trust, opportunities to learn about each other on a personal level, e.g. families, health, hobbies, and concerns. In Humble Leadership, Schein & Schein describe this as Level 2 relationship which is particularly critical for millennials.  Google’s Project Aristotle found personalized relationships were the most salient characteristic of its highest performing teams.  Co-location makes all this possible, although not inevitable!  However, co-located teams have their share of negatives. The most obvious is the cost of building space, not to mention the environmental cost of commuting and the related reduction in family time workers have. And of course, managers are unable to make use of their most experienced and skilled employees that are in other locations.

Thankfully there is an alternative, Hybrid teams.   Hybrid teams are a skillful blend of the best of face-to-face and remote work. 

A Hybrid team is one in which team members work virtually and come together periodically for in-person meetings. But that’s only part of the story, #Hybrid teams are also intentional about engaging in interpersonal as well as transactional interactions during the periods in which they are apart. Let’s explore both of those issues.

Hybrid teams meet face-to-face periodically to deal with tasks that require collective sensemaking, for example, strategic alignment, reviewing what the team is learning from their on-going experience and addressing complex problems. Those meetings, often lasting from three to seven days, ensure time for relationships to develop during breaks, over dinner, late-night drinks and hallway chats.  Meeting periodically can mean once a year or quarterly, as some teams do. But full group meetings are not the only way for team members to meet in person. It is also possible, and less costly, for pairs or trios of team members to meet for a few days to work on joint projects or to problem solve. These smaller meetings may last from a few days to a couple of weeks with no expensive meeting spaces required. Such meetings develop close personal connections that can increase collaboration for months after the meetings. It is well known that dyads are the most fundamental unit of interpersonal interaction and as such, are the basis for group cohesion.

Dyads allow team members to learn in-depth about the others’ expertise and to build the trust that promotes open and honest communication. When small pairings are made, in different configurations, over time, the full group becomes more connected.  Although these paired meetings cannot replace full group meetings, which are necessary for strategic alignment, they are a highly effective way to increase collaboration and engagement.

The second way #Hybrid teams reduce the relationship deficit is to increase interpersonal interaction during online meetings. Hybrid online team meetings, which are also visual, start and end with time set aside to “catch up” on family, hobbies and concerns. The more transactional parts of Hybrid meetings are also interactive - no PowerPoint or lengthy lectures. Information necessary for the meeting is sent ahead in a short video or memo. That allows online time to be spent in small group conversation addressing the issue of the meeting and in full group discussion to come to agreement for moving forward.  Highly interactive, online Hybrid meetings curtail the bane of virtual meetings, multi-tasking.  Rather than holding a long two-hour meeting, Hybrid teams have shorter and more frequent online meetings. Borrowing tactics from Agile, teams might check in daily for 15 minutes to hear what each member is working on or meet weekly at a set time for 30 minutes to update each other on an on-going problem.

Hybrid teams which 1) meet face to face periodically, 2) meet in dyads when appropriate, and 3) are intentional about engaging in interpersonal as well as transactional interactions during online meetings, eliminate many of the deficits of virtual teams. They build the relationships and trust necessary to increase collaboration, engagement and knowledge sharing.    

A Skill Set That Makes Open and Honest Conversation Possible

Conversation is critical to learning in an organization. Of course, it is not the only way employees learn, they also learn through reading and their own experience, but without open, honest, conversation, learning, and therefore the ability for an organization to change, is severely reduced.  But employees often refrain from speaking up and voicing new ideas to avoid contradicting a superior or embarrassing a colleague. Sometimes they remain silent because they don’t want to risk looking ignorant or coming across as a know-it-all. But while keeping quiet can work for self-protection, it does little for group problem solving and helping an organization avoid serious mistakes.

I wrote about this problem and about and a solution in Speaking Up 101, an article I published in the Ivy Business Journal.  In that article, I describe the most well researched, and internationally recognized conversation skill set that was developed by Chris Argyris at Harvard. It is the skill set I taught analysts at the Defense Intelligence Agency and is the subject of this article where I describe the learning process and the outcomes that we were able to achieve.  

I hope you will have time to read the whole article, but as a sneak preview, here are charts of before and after analytic teams learned the Argyris skills of Speaking Up

1. Analysts’ Actions Before Learning the Skill Set
2. After Analysts Learned the Skill Set

The first column of the second chart mirrors the situations in the first chart because such conditions are a normal part of group life. What is different in the second chart is the intent of the speaker (second column). In the first chart, the intent is to win or to save embarrassment, while in the second chart the intent is to learn. The actions in the third column follow from that intent, in that team members seek to understand others’ points of view as well as actively advocating for their own. They also stay open to the idea that they may not yet have all the information about the issue. The last column illustrates the way the revised actions increased the knowledge gained by the team.

If these ideas are of interest please join us at the Conversational Leadership Workshop September 20-22 at the Elvetham Hotel in Fleet, near London, where participants will have an opportunity to learn the skill set and practice it over the three days.#conversation matters,#KMers, KM

 

 

Conversation Elements

In preparing for the Conversational Leadership workshop, that @David Gurteen, @John Hovell and I are doing near London on Sept 20-22, I have been giving a lot of thought to what makes conversations work and have ended up creating this chart as a way to organize my thinking.  It is still a work in progress, but I thought I would put it out there for comment and additions.  Where possible, I have attributed the concepts in the chart to their source. As I did so, I was amazed at how many wise thinkers have influenced the work I do in organizations to make meeting and retreat conversations more productive - Argyris, Edmondson, Block, Heifetz, Isaacs, Bushe, Johnson & Johnson, Hackman, Revans,

#KM  3kmers #knowledgemanagement

How to Learn From Experience

There is a growing recognition of the value of employees learning from experience. In this post, I outline what needs to be in place to make learning from experience work. I also highlight some examples of learning from experience that are currently improving productivity and increasing collaboration within organizations.

What Needs to Be in Place to Learn From Experience

Learning from experience requires setting aside time to learn, but equally important, it requires being in conversation with peers with whom learners can reflect on their own experience and contrast that with the experience of others. It is not the advice of others that is so helpful; instead it is 1) assimilating 
the experiences of peers that inspires thinking about one’s own experience from a new perspective and 2) it is the questions that peers ask. Here I am not talking about questions that come immediately to mind such as questions for clarification or even questions to better understand the parameters of a situation. Rather I am thinking of generative questions that take a while to form, and that having been asked cause the learner to reflect more deeply. Generative questions are the gold standard of learning from experience becasue they surprise us, engage both heart and spirit, build relationships, and reframe reality (Bushe 2007).

Learning from experience with peers benefits from being-spaced over time, rather than occurring in a single conversation.  Whether it is overnight at a workshop or a week later at a regularly scheduled meeting, spaced conversations provide time for generative questions to develop and for learners to ponder the experiences of others. Think of it as gestation time. Any new idea, particularly those ideas that apply to self-development, for example, competence, image, attitude, or mindset, require time to assimilate.

Spaced conversations also allow time for trust to build among peers. Using Argyris’ language, “single loop learning” is an effort to identify solutions to a specific problem. However, there is often a deeper layer of understanding that is missed when the focus is solely on solutions. Argyris calls it “double loop learning.” It brings to light underlying norms, habits or attitudes as the source of a problem; insights that are apparent to peers, but which we are often blind to ourselves. However that awareness only develops when the group of peers has had enough time together to know each other and to build a sense of psychological safety that is necessary to offer new perspectives or indeed to take them in. Psychological safety grows over time and with repeated contact.

Finally learning from experience benefits from having a designed structure. Structured conversation guides participants by allocating  time to listen to others, to speak, to reflect, and to ask questions, as well as, limiting certain kinds of exchanges, for example, cross talk,    judging others, or speaking with undue conviction, rather than speaking from one’s own experience.   

Five Methods for Learning From Experience 

1. Coaching Ourselves®

The most productive conversations I’ve been involved with is Coaching Ourselves®, which brings together small groups of 4-6 employees in ninety-minute sessions that occur over several weeks, either online or in-person. Modules developed by leading management thinkers guide these meetings. The modules provide carefully crafted discussion questions that spur participants to reflect together on their own work issues. The structure is relatively consistent across all modules with times specified for each activity so that the modules can be self-facilitated by the group:

• Sessions start with each participant sharing a story about something that happened at work over the last couple of weeks or following-up on items left over from the previous meeting.
• Then each participant reflects on a situation related to that week’s module topic, which might be accountability, decision making, conflict, or any one of several dozen modules.
• There is a 10-15 min lesson offered by the management expert on the topic.  
• Followed by a lengthy period where the members of the group apply the expert’s concepts to their own work. The application might entail a series of questions for each participant to respond to, a survey to complete and discuss, or a role play.
• The 90 min sessions end with a final reflection by each participant.

By the time a group has met for six sessions, participants have come to know and trust each other. They have helped each other solve problems, laughed with each other, commiserated together, watched each other improve, and most importantly, discover that they had learned an enormous amount by collaborating. When multiple groups across an organization engage in Coaching Ourselves®, it significantly increases the level of collaboration within the organization.

2. Action Learning

Action learning is both a process and a powerful program that involves small groups of peers coming together to solve their own real work problems while at the same time benefiting each group member and the organization as a whole.  Revan’s, the father of Action Learning, says that learning and action require each other.  “There is no learning without action and no thoughtful action without learning”.  Action Learning brings together small groups of 4-6 peers for an all-day meeting. Peers meet regularly, over several months, with a facilitator. Sometimes action learning groups are made up of peers from different parts of the organization to broaden participant’s understanding of the whole organization. During the meeting each person has their own “airspace” of 45-60 minutes to describe an issue they are facing, reflect with others about how to address it and at the next meeting report back to the group on what happened. The help that others provide is primarily by asking questions rather than giving advice. These are genuine questions of curiosity that help the members think through the “why” behind their actions and consider their own assumptions. Because the meetings are spaced, usually every two weeks, participants have time to try out what they learned and see the results. Over time participants began to care about the other members of the group and for that reason are increasingly open to helping others and to receiving the help of others.  Members of an action learning team often form relationships that last for years after the meetings have ended and thus remain a source of learning and support.

3. KM Clinics

Knowledge Management  Clinics are hour-long, free, online meetings where a KM professional can get help from peers about a KM issue they are facing in their organization. Each session  has one client, the person with the issue, and up to 11 peers who have some knowledge or interest in that same issue. The issue could be, for example, how to transfer knowledge from someone retiring, how to get more participation in an online community, or how to convince higher management that KM is important. The clinic starts with the  client explaining their issue, the context in which they are working in, and what they have tried already to solve the issue. There is then is a period of silence while their peers individually construct and post questions that have the potential to broaden the thinking of the client about the issue. The client selects one or two of the questions to focus on – questions they believe would help the problem owner to think differently about the issue. Then there is a lengthy period of general discussion about the topic among all the peers. The hour ends with the client identifying one or two new actions they will try. Before leaving the call, the client commits to letting their peers know the outcome of their actions.  KM Clinics are a way for peers to think in more depth about issues than can be achieved by posting their questions on a community forum.

I would be remiss if I ended this post without referencing learning from experience when there are highly divisive or sensitive issues at stake. These are conversations designed so that the structure does not permit peers to say “you’re wrong”  or “that’s not correct.”  Also where peers are asked to talk only out of their own experience. In such meetings, although it is possible to disagree with another’s facts, it is not possible to disagree with another’s experience.  Following are two examples where the structure of the conversation makes peer learning possible even in difficult situations. 

4.  Alcoholics Anonymous

The most well-known example of learning from experience with peers is Alcoholics Anonymous. The guidelines for AA are few but powerful:

• Keep confidentiality: “What you hear stays here.”
• Make “I” statements: Avoid using “you” or “we.” For example: “I am Stephan. I am an alcoholic.”
• Stay in the “Here and Now”: Share what you are dealing with today or this week.
• Share feelings about your experiences, strengths, and hopes.
• No fixing or advice giving to or by other members.
• No crosstalk or asking of questions. Just listen.

With such a simple structure, the accompanying “12 steps,” and the availability of a sponsor, AA has helped millions of alcoholics maintain their sobriety. Although studies vary about the success rate of AA, one eight-year follow-up showed that 49% of individuals who attended AA were abstinent.

5. Better Angels

Finally, I have been moderating meetings of Better Angels workshops for about a year and a half. Better Angels is a non-profit organization devoted to de-polarizing America. The workshops are attended by an equal number of Red (conservative) and Blue (liberal) participants. In each workshop, participants on both sides of the political divide have opportunities to talk about their views and why those ideas are important to them. The guidelines are simple:

• We’re here to understand others and to explain our views, not to convince anyone to change their mind.
• Let’s each speak for ourselves and not try to speak for or represent any outside group.

During the several exercises of the workshops, e.g. fishbowl, stereotype, Q&A, each side initially talks separately with like-minded colleagues to decide what they want to say about their ideas to the other side. When the two groups come back together, each side just listens to understand the other’s views. As the moderator, the question I ask the whole group, after each exercise is, “What did you learn about how the other side thinks about these issues and what did you hear in common.” It is through this reflective question that learning and respect grows. There is no cross talk and no attempt to persuade the other side to their view.  I have been amazed at what happens when people put down the intent to persuade and just agree to listen and try to understand. Participants walk away seeing the “others” not as a stereotype but as fellow human beings who share some of their values, if not the way to achieve them. After the workshops many of the participants, choose to join a Better Angel’s Local Alliance where they work together toward common goals for their community.

In these five very different examples of learning from experience (and there are many more), it is possible to see the reasons why learning from experience in conversation with peers works. It works because:

• it is peers in conversation with peers
• they are in conversation, not listening to presentations
• the conversation occurs in small groups, which is the size most conducive to learning
• there is time to reflect on each person’s own experience and the experience of their peers
• the structure of the conversation provides a sense of safety and over time builds trust
• they employ spaced learning, that is, learning happening over time
• no one tries to persuade/convince others, whether that is a peer, leader, consultant, or a trainer.

#KM, #KMers #knowledgemanagement

KM Metaphors that Could Expand Our Practice

Lately, I’ve been reading Schön (1979) about the power of generative metaphors. He views metaphors “as the basis for how we make sense of the world. In his view, metaphors serve our understanding of the world by drawing out similarities, and assigning meanings to a situation by making connections.”

The seminal work on metaphor is Lakoff and Johnson’s Metaphors We Live By. I remember reading it in college, and its impactful ideas have stuck with me ever since. Lakoff and Johnson explain that metaphors guide much of our thinking in ways of which we are often totally unaware.  “The essence of a metaphor is understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another.” They use the example of the common metaphor, argument is war. We are all very aware that an argument and a war are different things.  Nevertheless, we structure, understand and talk about argument in terms of war:  

• He attacked every point in my argument.
• I’ve never won an argument with him.
• His criticisms were right on target.
• You disagree? Okay shoot.
• If you use that strategy, he will wipe you out.

Applying the terms of war to argument influences how we think about arguing and even how we act when in an argument. For example, we attempt to win, rather than focusing on understanding the other’s perspective. Thus the metaphor argument as war influences how we engage with one another. Lakoff and Johnson argue that a metaphor is not just a choice of words; it is how we think. Metaphors are useful to us to construct and explain our ideas, but at the same time, they limit us. For example, using the metaphor, argument as war, blinds us to the possibility that there is another way to engage those with whom we disagree. (see the Public Conversation Project on how to talk with someone on the other side of an issue or Better Angels on how Reds and Blues can interact with each other.)

Schön provides this organizational example, “if we say that an organization is fragmented then it follows that what is needed is more integration. But a fragmented organization might be seen, alternatively, as composed of ‘semi-autonomous units.’” By employing the metaphor of fragmentation, a tacit image arises of the organization as something broken, something that once was whole and needs to be made whole again. Schön argues that by becoming aware of the metaphors we use, “we can do a better job of problem setting, which can make people in organizations perform creative leaps into seeing old problems in new ways.” 

Re-reading the literature on metaphor led me to think about the metaphors we use for knowledge management. KM professionals primarily use the metaphor knowledge is an object. Regarding knowledge as an object implies that those objects, much like books in a library, can be collected and stored where others can find them and can take what they need when they need it. The knowledge as an object metaphor has resulted in KM setting up repositories, lessons learned sites and wikis – the modern forms of libraries.

One of the most prominent KM practices is the idea of sharing those important objects across the organization. Knowledge sharing is often depicted in graphic form as an object in one person’s head with lines drawn to the head of another. Sharing itself is a metaphor and a positive one. It seems like something we all ought to do. After all, we were taught as children to share our objects, such as toys, treats, pets. And indeed, the sharing metaphor has been useful to KM in that it prompted us to set up CoPs, where participants could easily learn what practices others employ as well as what tools they use.

Although undoubtedly helpful, the metaphor of knowledge as an object has also limited how we implement KM. It has resulted in KM primarily focusing on existing knowledge that can be collected and shared, but it has made us blind to the critical knowledge that Leonard calls “deep smarts” or Polanyi called tacit knowledge; knowledge that cannot be transmitted through a quick response to a CoP question or in an online document. It also results in us not taking into account the fluidity of knowledge, that is, that what we “know” is continually growing and changing within our minds, as well as within our teams and organizations. (see my post on Transferring Expertise)  

We could add to the metaphors we use to think about knowledge; seeing knowledge not as an object, but as construction, something that is continually assembled and reassembled within the mind of individuals based on input from their own experience, what they read and what they hear and see from others. If one of our metaphors were knowledge as construction, then we would encourage greater focus on individual reflection and on teams coming together to learn from their actions jointly. We would increase the interaction of employees across internal boundaries. We  would emphasize ways to bring people together to assemble new knowledge collectively – not just brainstorm (another metaphor) but to build further understanding of a situation or a problem, perhaps to jointly reframe an issue. The metaphor of knowledge as construction would give us a whole new vocabulary we would think about building, producing, assembling, reassembling, creating and  reframing knowledge rather than just collecting and sharing existing knowledge.

As KM professionals, we have inherited the KM metaphor of knowledge as an object from the past. If we now want to grow KM to be more relevant to the complexity that organizations face, we need to both become aware of the metaphors that we are currently using, and think clearly about the metaphors we could use to expand the role of knowledge management. 

 

Fundamental Change to Oranization Structure and Governance

For the first time since the industrial revolution, organizations are changing at a fundamental level. The change is very much a work in progress in most organizations. But we now have many examples of organizations that are fully functioning in an entirely new way –  that is, new ideas about how the organization is designed, about how work gets done, how people relate to each other

The elements of this fundamental change are:

1. Networked structure. The structure of organizations is changing from being hierarchical to being flatter, networked organizations. One of the recognized problems in hierarchical organizations is that information travels too slowly, making adaptation difficult. Networked organizations are growing because social enterprise software has made the more immediate and broader exchange of knowledge possible, thereby facilitating the coordination between parts of the organization. The labor-intensive task of information traveling up the chain of command, across departments, and down another chain of command in order to coordinate, is greatly reduced by social enterprise software.

 

2. Teams as the unit of work. Within networked organizations teams are now the unit of work. Tasks are assigned to teams rather than to individuals. It is teams that create new products, interact with customers and resolve the organization’s problems. This change has been necessitated by the increased complexity of the issues facing organizations, which require a diversity of expertise as well as greater manpower to accomplish. Increasingly, no one individual is capable of addressing these complex issues/problems by themselves.

 

3. Self-governed teams. Given that there are no known answers to the complex issues teams face, the teams themselves invent the answer. To do that they continually try new ideas and learn from their actions, including their successes, and failures, and from their interactions, including other parts of the organization, customer requirements, customer satisfaction, and competitors. In order to learn, team members hold frequent conversations to reflect on their actions jointly. And based on that reflective sensemaking, arrive at decisions about what to do next, rather than relying on a manager to tell them what they should do next. They self-select the most appropriate tools and work practices to carry out their decisions. Each team develops work practices unique to their situation, and those practices change over time. Self-governing requires team members to have frequent and authentic conversations where they learn with and from each other.   

 

4. Focus on human relationships. To have authentic conversations team members give greater attention to developing more human and personal relationships among team members than would be found in traditional teams. Such relationships are based on 1) shared purpose, 2) respect for others’ expertise, and 3) greater knowledge of each other as human beings (Schein). Psychological safety, based on these three attributes develops only when these three conditions exist. Psychological Safety makes it possible for team members to enact learning behaviors such as, sharing mistakes, seeking feedback on their own actions, and discussing differences among team members openly rather than privately. Such behaviors are essential for team learning (Edmondson).

 

5. Changed role of leaders. In self-governed teams the manager/lead is a coach or servant leader, rather than the decision maker. The traditional role of a manager in hierarchical organizations is framed as “power over” as in master-servant, parent-child, or teacher-student.  Such relationships block team members from cooperating and collaborating internally by putting too much power in the hands of one individual (Jarche). Edmonson’s research found that “teams with minimal power differentials were better able to reflect effectively.” In many self-governed teams a lead is selected by the team or the role is rotated among team members (Laloux). This change in the role of managers/leaders also serves to increase the authenticity of team conversations because without the “power over” of a manager, the fear of speaking out is greatly reduced.   

 

6. Deployment of virtual teams. Whether a team is spread across the globe or co-located with members periodically work from home, social enterprise software has made effective virtual teams possible. The need to leverage in-house competencies, resources and capabilities have made virtual teams a necessity. Virtual teams are a new form of teaming, but like co-located teams they hold frequent conversations to 1) reflect, build and maintain close relationships, learn from their actions, and make decisions related to work practices. The more remote team members are, the greater the number of practices and tools are needed to establish and maintain close relationships. Virtual teams are most effective when they oscillate between face-to-face exchanges (in a variety of forms) and online communication (Dixon).

 

7. Decentralized Governance. In a networked organization, governance is decentralized. How that decentralization is implemented depends on the organization’s size and the interdependency between its parts. In organizations with extensive interdependences, such as the US Army, the governing body is a team of teams, that is, a representative from each team meets together as a unit for coordination (McCrystal).  Others hold frequent town halls both in-person and online (Turco). And still others, convene task forces composed of volunteers that manage issues like budgets, new projects, or changes to current policies. However, most networked organizations have merely developed, at the local level, a set of agreed upon practices to address issues such as conflict resolution, hiring, decision making, performance management, etc. (Laloux).

 

All of these changes require a higher level of collaboration among team members, as well as, between teams.  And they require teams to have autonomy in how they accomplish their tasks, to hold more productive conversations, and to build deeper and more personal relationships.  

 

TWO QUESTIONS ABOUT GOVERNANCE

 

1. To achieve peace and prosperity must a nation be governed by a monarch?

2. For sustainability and prosperity must an organization have a hierarchy in place?

 

The first question

Three hundred years ago most people would have answered the first question “yes,” because in their lived experience, without a monarch there was continual warring among factions. However, the great experiment that is the United States proved that
answer wrong. We have demonstrated that a democracy, governed by the people, is viable. Having shown it was possible, hundreds of countries around the world have followed our example putting into place some form of democracy.     

The second question

Today most people would answer the second question “yes,” because in their lived experience all organizations are hierarchical.  They assume that’s just the way organizations are because without hierarchy you would have chaos and no accountability. However, there are now many examples of organizations, large and small, that function effectively without hierarchy. Many of them have been around for some time, for example, Patagonia, Morning Star, W.L.Gore, and Zappos. Even so they tend to be viewed as abnormalities - the exception that proves the rule. However, the number of such organizations is growing. In Reinventing Organizations, Fredric Laloux provides in-depth descriptions of twelve organizations that are non-hierarchical. In the new Oxford Handbook of the Learning Organization, I describe a study I conducted of two organizations that function without hierarchy, one of which, Kessels & Smit has done so for over twenty years.

Eliminating hierarchy does not mean such organizations are without structure. Most are organized in self-managed teams and those teams have jointly thought through a structure that includes processes and practices for how decisions are made, salaries are set, people are recruited and dismissed, conflicts resolved, etc. All these organizations are based on peer relationships that are undergirded by a very simple assumption, that employees have both the intelligence and the will to act for the good of the whole.

We should not be surprised that organizations are moving away from hierarchy. A number of thoughtful theorist have predicted the need for more democratic organizations that preclude hierarchy.

In 2004 Weisbord said, “Democracy is a tough way to live. With all its flaws, I think it beats the alternatives. I do not wish to have someone else, no matter how educated, well intentioned, wealthy, or wise, decide unilaterally what is best for me. Unless we are deeply involved in our work, we cannot feel good about ourselves. Unless we work with others toward valued goals, we cannot infuse hope and aspiration into our lives. Unless we treat one another as equals, we cannot find dignity, meaning, and community in work. Unless we make our own mistakes, and learn to forgive ourselves, we cannot learn at all. Unless we cooperate, we cannot survive.”     

In 1964, Warren Bennis and Phil Slater said  Democracy Is Inevitable, "In both the workplace and the world this is the only system which can successfully cope with the changing demands of contemporary civilization.”

Much earlier, Mary Parker Follett said she could not understand how people could complain about small freedoms being taken away, like helmet laws or seat belts, yet were willing to function as surfs within the walls of an organization. 

In 1989, Edgar Schein said that given the computer revolution, “soon we will need to develop a new picture of what a manager should be. Hierarchical authority will probably play a much small role in that picture, while coordination skills will play a much larger role.” But he cautioned that, “Our thinking about these matters is hampered by one major, deeply embedded cultural assumption so taken for granted that it is difficult even to articulate. This is the assumption that all organizations are fundamentally hierarchical in nature, and that the management process is fundamentally hierarchical.” He said “We need models, but we may have difficulty inventing them because of the automatic tendency to think hierarchically.” 

The good news is that we now have those much needed models in manufacturing, government, retail, health, schools, consulting, and more. The structures they invent vary with the industry, but they are all self-managed, with no managers and no hierarchy. Its time to change.

 

 

Getting Virtual Teams Right

It’s easy to set up a virtual team, but hard to get it right. Happily, there have now been enough studies of virtual teams, including my own studies, that we know a great deal about how to “get it right.” Here are some examples of what we've learned:

• Have an initial face-to-face kick-off meeting. There is strong evidence* to show that a team that initially meets in-person functions more effectively.

o    At that first meeting, take time for the team members to get to know each other in terms of their work experience and their areas of expertise. That crucial understanding will 1) allow team members to make the best use of each other's knowledge when dividing up responsibilities, and 2) to agree upon the team’s goal. Typically, the team lead or manager assigns the team their task and goal, but that doesn’t mean they all understand it in the same way – in fact, Hackman’s research suggests that most of the time they don’t.**  Hackman designed a three-part activity for an initial meeting to meet both goals.***

♣    Task 1 Getting Goal Agreement- Team members pair up with someone they don't know well. Each person jots down their own understanding of the main purpose of their team and the consequence of accomplishing or failing to accomplish that purpose (4 minutes).  They then compare the descriptions and resolve any differences (10 minutes).


♣    Task 2  Exploring Experience - In pairs, Member A interviews Member B for about 12 minutes to learn what knowledge, skills, and experience Member B is bringing to the team that would be especially valuable in accomplishing the team’s purposes. Then they switch roles and repeat the process.  

♣    Task 3 Making Introductions – The team is reconvened to have each team member introduce his or her partner, emphasizing the unique resource the partner brings to the team’s work (assuming 5 members to a team and 3 minutes each -15min).

• Keep teams small. The ideal size for a team is five. If a team needs to be larger to achieve the task, then divide the task and assign the parts to smaller sub-teams. Studies show that the larger the team, the more likely social loafing will occur. Also in large teams, members lose track of what others are doing and how what they are doing interacts with their own work.

 

• Build a rhythm of regular online meetings, rather than meeting ad hoc. Regular online meetings improve coordination and prevent issues from festering. Meetings need to occur at least weekly, and for some teams even more often.  However, meetings need not be lengthy. Some Agile teams meet each morning for just 15 minutes. If there are no issues to resolve, each team member simply says what they are planning to work on that day and what they accomplished on the previous day. That reporting keeps team member be accountable to each other.

  

• Establish peer coaching meetings to help the team problem solve and improve their skills. Every two weeks is a good interval. Bring together sub-teams or create coaching teams drawn from all the sub-teams. See previous post.

 

• As a team, establish and commit to a communication charter that describes communication norms. Norms might include, how quickly team members should respond to emails or notices on the team site, attendance at team meetings, disrespectful remarks to other team members, willingness to help others, what documents to place in a depository. Have team members be responsible for overseeing infractions; a quarter in the cookie jar when norms are broken?

 

• Bring the whole team together face-to-face at least once a year and more frequently if the group’s task has strong interdependencies. (see the oscillation principle) Such meetings allow the team to address issues that are too complex**** to addressed virtually, as well as to renew relationships and commitments.

 

• Take advantage of team members’ travel, to visit another member. Tack an extra day on to a business trip in order to spend that day with a member at another site. This develops more robust relationships but also explores the issues each member is working on and the environment in which that work takes place.

 

I’m currently conducting a study of a great virtual team at TechnipFMC -  so more ideas to come.

 

*Josiane Kroll, Juho Mäkiö and Manal Assaad, 2016, Challenges and Practices for Effective Knowledge Transfer in Globally Distributed Teams; 
A Systematic Literature Review

** Interview by Diane Coutu, 2009, W, Why teams don't work, R.Hackman, Harvard Business Review-  ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

*** Richard Hackman, 2011, Collaborative Intelligence

**** Martha Maznevski and Katherine Chudoba, 2000, Bridging Space Over Time. Organization Science.

A Surefire Way to Build Widespread Collaboration Across Your Organization

Organizations have discovered the power of collaboration to increase knowledge sharing, speed up problem solving, create new knowledge, and spur innovation. But even having implement great technology, too many organizations are finding collaboration is not as robust as it needs to be.

The good news is that we know how to increase collaboration.  The research* is clear -  trust improves collaboration, whether it is across a network or within a team. Building trust requires on-going interaction that allows employees to experience others’ capability, reliability, and to witness their integrity in a work situation.**  So the real question is how to create situations in which employees can learn those things about each other.

I have found Peer-Coaching to be the most effective answer. It increases collaboration by bringing together small groups of 4-6 employees, in ninety-minute coaching sessions that occur over several weeks. Trust is built as participants talk together about issues they encounter in their own work.  These self-directed meetings, called CoachingOurselves®, are guided by modules developed by leading management thinkers. However, primarily, they provide carefully crafted discussion questions that spur participants to reflect together on their own work issues. By the time they have met for six  sessions, participants have come to know and trust each other. During a ninety-minute coaching session, they have helped each other solve problems, laughed with each other, commiserated together, watched each other improve, and most importantly, discovered that they have learned an enormous amount from collaborating with each other.

Fujitsu group in Japan is a good example.  It began peer coaching in 2008. Fujitsu is a large global conglomerate with 159,000 employees. This chart illustrates the relationship Fujitsu found between participating in peer coaching and the increase in the ratio sales to profit. Pretty impressive!

 

 

 

I love doing demos, so let me know if you want to get a small group of people together to try a CoachingOurselves module over Zoom. I'm at [email protected]

*Al- Ani, Marczak, Prikladnicki, & Redmiles, 2013; Henttonen & Blomqvist, 2005; Jimenez et al., 2017

** Nilsson and Mattes,2015

The Newly Recognized Power of Knowledge Workers

As human beings, we have a need to be employed in organizations that are humanizing – where people can do meaningful work on projects and issues that interest them, along with others that they like and respect. To have such work, people must be able to influence decisions about the work they do.

I don’t think we can expect the management of organizations to create the humanizing places we need to work within. To expect those in power to give up their decision-making power willingly is unlikely. It was as long ago as 1967 when Douglas McGregor, in The Human Side of Enterprise, explained Theory X and Y. He showed that dealing with employees as resources, rather than as human beings was counterproductive. Since then hundreds of social science researchers and management theorist have offered their version of the same principle. The principle has been researched, verified and reported in book after book, even up to the latest book by Edgar Schein, Humble Leadership, in 2018. However, that wealth of proof has had minimal influence on how organizations function. Those in positions of power too quickly come to think they alone deserve the right to make decisions because they are in some way better than others, that is, smarter, better educated, better able to see the big picture. It is just too hard for CEOs, department heads or even mid-level managers to let go of the idea that they are the ones best able to make decisions, especially, when they have worked so hard to achieve that power.

If a change toward more humanizing organizations is going to happen, it will come from knowledge workers. For the first time in history, those who do knowledge work have power. Their power comes from the knowledge they hold in the growing number of organizations where, what Dorothy Leonard called “deep smarts,” is essential to the organization’s success. Organizations have, of course, been saying that “knowledge is our most important asset” for the last 20 years, but they are just now coming
to realize what that shift portends. What we have seen happening at Microsoft, Google, PWC, and a good many others over the last couple of years, is that when a large group of knowledge workers say their organization needs to end a contract on some project they don’t want to be associated with, or they see that the organization is mistreating some segment of the workforce, the leaders listen and make the change. (see previous post) They do that because they cannot afford to say, “You’re all fired” like Reagan did with the air traffic controllers.

The problem for organizations in 2019 is that knowledge workers are not easily replaced.  The government fired air traffic controllers and then trained a new group of employees because the work of air traffic controllers consisted of applying well-known algorithms - a set of established rules. For those new hires to function effectively took 2-3 years of practice, but did not take creativity or innovation.  By contrast, the tasks of most knowledge workers are not algorithmic; instead, they are heuristic, that is, there are no known rules to follow. Most knowledge workers are paid for their capability to innovate new products and services. That capability is gained through a familiarity with the tools and products of the organization, coupled with their ability to do “out of the box” thinking.  That capability gives them job security. Sure, management could fire one or two “gang leaders”, but they can’t fire thousands and hope to stay competitive. It is groups of knowledge workers, not just individuals, that are using their power to gain a voice 1) in the kind of work they do and 2) in the decisions their organizations make. Over the next ten years, we will see a long overdue shift in knowledge worker autonomy and, as McGregor foresaw, a concomitant increase in productivity.

Knowledge Workers Take Charge

In 2002, Kessels and Keursten wrote, “When in the 21st-century knowledge productivity becomes the driving force, and as this knowledge production will be found at every level of economic activity, the knowledge workers will take charge.”  

I see that prediction coming true in numerous organizations where workers are actively impacting the policies and strategy of organizations, as the following 2018 headlines attest:

• Google to Drop Pentagon AI Contract After Employee Objections to the “Business of War,” The Washington Post, June 1, 2018
• Microsoft Employees Protest Work with ICE, as Tech Industry Mobilizes Over Immigration, New York Times, June 19, 2018
• Nike CEO Apologizes for Corporate Culture That Excluded Some Staff, Wall Stree Journal Dec 19, 2018,Bloomberg, May 4, 2018; New York Times, May 5 2018
• Employees Call on Deloitte to Stop Working with ICE, New York Times, July 12, 2018
• PWC’s Millennial Employees Led a Rebellion – and Their Demands Are Being Met, Quartz at Work, March 20, 2018
• Google Employees Protest Secret Work on Censored Search Engine for China, New York Times, Aug 16, 2018
• Employee Uprisings Sweep Many Tech Companies. Not Twitter, New York Times, July 4, 2018

In each of these companies, employees disagreed with management policies, by written letters, meetings with management or walkouts. What is so different from past employee uprisings is that these protests are not about demanding something like better wages or shorter working hours; instead they are challenging the ethics of the organizations they work for. These employees feel they have the right to influence their organization's policies, ethics and mission.

It is not coincidental that these organizations are primarily composed of knowledge workers.  Knowledge workers frequently have much greater insight into their products and services than those at the top of the organization, thus they are not easily replaced. Far from being just human resources, they constitute the intellectual capital of these organizations. With that awareness, knowledge workers view themselves more as associates or even partners, than as employees.

A letter, signed by thousands of Google employees, addressed to Google’s chief
executive Sundar Pichai, illustrates this shift in how knowledge workers view their role. The letter said, “Here, we address an underlying structural problem: currently we do not have the information required to make ethically-informed decisions about our work, our projects, and our employment…. We urgently need more transparency, a seat at the table, and a commitment to clear and open processes: Google employees need to know what we’re building.” Among the five items of oversight employees asked for in that letter was, “A clear plan for transparency sufficient to enable Googlers an individual ethical choice about what they work on.”

These Google employees, as well as employees in many other organizations, now assume their right to work on products and services that meet their ethical standards, and when those standards are not met, rather than leave the organization, as employees in the past might have done, they expect the organization to change, because they are the organization.

What If It Was Okay To Be Friends With Your Employees?

Some years ago, Jerry Harvey developed a survey about organization practices. Responders were asked to mark each item on the survey as true or false.  One item said, “Occasionally, it is necessary for a manager to lie to or deceive others in his/her organization in order to achieve organizational objectives.” Being realistic, most people responded “true.”  After all, managers have to stay in role and not get too friendly with employees. Managers are taught, “Keep a professional distance.  If you know a layoff is scheduled, act like you don’t know. If a merger is in the offing, pretend ignorance.  Don’t think of employees as people or get too involved with their concerns. Think of them as resources you have to manage - human resources.”

The next item on the survey said, “I work most effectively with those who occasionally lie to me.” Trying to respond to that item often produced an internal conundrum in the responders because they could not mark it as “true” to match the first item. They knew what we all know, that if we don’t trust our managers we are less effective because we find ourselves doing things like withholding problems and not admitting mistakes, resulting in us and our organization being much less competent. However, we also know that “keep your distance and stay in role” is well-accepted management theory. It is what the gurus tell us we are supposed to do – a conundrum.

Interestingly, one of those management gurus, a very famous one, Ed Schein, is now saying, it is time managers created stronger relationships with employees. Rather than staying in role, managers and employees need to see each other as whole persons, and he advises that managers should develop more personal relationships around shared goals and experiences. Quite a shift!

In his new book, Humble Leadership, Schein explains this shift by describing leadership in terms of relationships. He identifies four levels of relationship a leader could have with employees:

Level Minus 1: This relationship is total impersonal it depends on domination and coercion. It is like the relationship between prison guards and prisoners, or managers of sweatshops and their workers or between leaders and immigrants who, though they are often mistreated, say nothing out of fear of being deported.

Level 1: This relationship is transactional, role and rule-based leadership. The manager described in the above survey item has a Level 1 relationship with employees. The manager stays in role, keeping his/her distance, even lying and withholding information when the role requires it. It is the relationship surgeons have with nurses and in most organizations it is the relationship that managers have with employees.

Level 2: This relationship is personal, cooperative, and trusting. It is the way friends relate to each other. It involves knowing each other as whole persons, knowing about each other’s families, ambitions and disappointments. Level 2 leadership achieves a kind of collaboration that is built on deeper trust and openness. It acknowledges joint responsibility and honoring commitments. Both parties trust that neither will undermine or harm the other. Nor will they lie or withhold information from each other.      

Level 3: This relationship is emotionally intimate, with total mutual commitments
. These are the relationships we hear about among military platoons or  Navy seal teams or like the relationship the Apollo 13 astronauts had with their ground crew.   

Schein says that managers need to move from Level 1 relationships to Level 2 to achieve the kind of collaboration and trust necessary in the current work environment.  He says the complex and multi-disciplinary tasks that much of the workforce is now trying to accomplish requires Level 2 relationships. Level 2 relationships provide psychological safety, that is, members of a team, including the team manager, are willing to acknowledge mistakes, are candid about needing help, and are willing to discuss differences of opinion openly rather than privately. Those types of actions don’t happen with Level 1 relationships because everyone is  protecting themselves.

I find Schein’s description of leadership types, based on the nature of the relationship, a very useful way to think about leadership and about what needs to change. It is a change at a more significant level, than most leadership gurus talk about. I agree with Schein that most current leaders need to move from Level 1 to Level 2. And he may be right that groups are more effective when facing complexity, if they have Level 2 relationships. However, I see a more fundamental need for the shift. I believe Level 1 relationships have made our organizations toxic. They allow neither managers nor team members to be fully human at work. We all spend too much of our work lives in places where indifference, manipulation, or worse, lying and concealing are the norm. We cannot grow and develop as human beings in that kind of environment.  We need managers to move to Level 2 relationships because it supports human flourishing.  

Six Ways Leaders Kill Conversation

 

A conversation among team members can yield critical new ideas as well as strengthen the relationships among team members. As one member builds on, supports, or challenges the ideas of others, new understandings and solutions can emerge. However, often leaders, quite unintentionally, act in ways that kill or significantly limit the conversation among their team members. Here are a few of those inadvertent killers:

1. Standing in the front of the room while everyone else is sitting  
2. Making a comment or response after each team member speaks
3. Wearing a jacket when everyone else is in shirtsleeves  
4. Pretending you don’t have a position on the topic under discussion (when you really do)
5. Holding a conversation in the boardroom
6. Asking a question without giving team members time to think about a response

1. Standing in the front of the room while everyone else is sitting. If you stand while team members are sitting, they will address their comments to you rather than to each other. If you’ve been standing to make announcements and are now ready to have a group conversation, then draw a chair up to where everyone else is seated.  Sitting behind a desk has the same deleterious effect as standing; all comments will be addressed to you. When you are ready for the group to have a conversation move your chair out from behind your desk and join the group as a member of the conversation.
2. Making a comment or response after each team member speaks. Even innocuous responses you make, for example, “ok” or “I see,” will keep returning the focus of the group to you. With each response, you affirm that you are the person whose opinion matters most. If you want conversation to flow between team members, those team members will have to look at the others when they talk, not at you.
3. Wearing a jacket when everyone else is in shirtsleeves. The difference in clothes is like a signpost that says, “I am of higher rank than you.” Conversation is most effective when it is egalitarian, that is, opinions are not judged not by rank, rather by the value they bring to the discussion. Wearing your “rank” makes it more difficult for team members to judge your view on the basis of its value rather than your position.  
4. Pretending you don’t have a position on the topic under discussion (when you really do). When you raise a topic for your team to discuss, it is more effective to state your position; then adding to it an indication that you are open to other ideas, for example, “This is just my first thinking on the topic”, or “I’m interested in hearing what I might be missing.” If you don’t state your own position team members will spend their time surreptitiously trying to detect what you really think. Of course, you can only offer such assurance if it is true.  If you do hold a view that you are unlikely to change, then don’t call for a conversation about it, just inform team members of what you've decided.  
5. Holding a conversation in the boardroom. Space matters. If you regularly use the boardroom for staff meetings during which you are primarily asking for reports and making announcements, then choose a different room to hold conversations.  We are all creatures of habit, and our bodies and minds associate certain spaces with specific behaviors, like returning to the same spot for every team meeting. If team members are accustomed to just listening in the boardroom, and you want to have an active conversation, change the room the team meets in, then team members won’t be cued to behave the same way they do in the boardroom.  
6. Asking a question without giving team members time to think about a response. Silence always feels awkward; your tendency is probably to start talking again when you don’t hear an immediate response to your question. Realistically, team members need time to think about their answers. After you ask your question, let them know they have time to think about what they want to say, for example, simply saying, “I’ll give you a few minutes to think” and then staying quiet for a minute or two.  Alternatively, saying, “Take a couple of minutes to write a note or two about your thoughts before we start.”  Everyone making their own notes before anyone responds has the proven advantage of producing a greater variety of responses – which is very much to the good! Use your watch to check that at least two minutes have lapsed. Without checking your watch 30 seconds of silence can seem like two minutes.

SharePoint Can’t Learn

I am just back from KM World and was amazed that so many of the presentations were about how some organization has implemented SharePoint.  SharePoint has become so ubiquitous that, at KM World, Knowledge Management seems to have become equated with implementing SharePoint repositories and communities!

I want to push back a little on that. Learning in an organization happens when teams or workgroups take the time to think together about what is occurring within their purview and then to consider what needs to be changed or strengthened – when they have human-to-human conversations aimed at improving their own work. Only after they have reflected together and figured out what they need to do next, is it useful to seek out the ideas of others. A document in a SharePoint repository or a question/response on a community forum can certainly spur the imaginations of team members about what might be possible. But help is most useful when a team has identified a problem. Without the first step of reflecting on what is needed, documents are just “nice to know.” A document in a repository is not knowledge any more than a book on a shelf is knowledge. Knowledge is created and resides in the minds of human beings.

Even when a document in a repository is a good match for a team’s need, a second kind of human-to-human conversation is required for learning to take place. A team does not learn from reading a document about what some other team has done. The successes of others have to be translated to fit the tasks and culture of the receiver’s environment. Copy and replace never works!  When the receivers of new ideas function within a context that is different from the one the document was written about, translation is required.

Although the receiving team can do some translation on its own, they lack the knowledge of the reasoning behind the actions of the other team, for example, what they tried that did not work, what they thought about but did not execute on and why. There is so much more a team knows than they can put in a written in a document or an online response to a question. (We know more than we can write!) Translation is most effective when it is a conversation between those that wrote the document and those that want to use that knowledge. Through conversation the receiving team can learn what conditions made the other's success possible, for example, the level of team experience, size of the team, management support, time frame, and culture. Human-to-human dialogue is invaluable in figuring out how to modify what the originating team did so that it could work in a different environment. Joint translation is a learning process that significantly benefits the receiving team. But, as often, it is also learning for the originating team because in explaining what they did, they come to a more complete understanding of their own work.

At the next KM World, it would be great to hear presentations on how teams figured out what they learned from a project and how they thought through what changes they needed to make on the next project, based on that learning; how often they reflected on what they were learning and who they involved in those discussions; in what ways those reflections changed the way that they worked.  It would be great if KMer’s focused on innovations in learning from experience, rather than just getting reports into SharePoint. It would be great to find out how a team talked through what they hope to learn on the next project, as well as the outcome they wanted to achieve. That way they could continually improve their work processes and get better at what they were doing.  It seems like we have become so focused on “sharing” that we have forgotten that KM is primarily about learning.   SharePoint Can’t Learn, only humans can.

The World Needs Dialogue

What a great title for a conference! Last week 80 of us, from across the world, gathered at Roffey Park in England to talk about the many ways organizations are using dialogue to address problems.

One of the most interesting was the prison system in Virginia, which is holding dialogue meetings that bring together prisoners, guards, probation officers, family, police, administrators and many others to improve the prison system. Jane Ball talked about it as the “Offenders Resettlement Journey” that helped everyone in the dialogue see how their role in that journey impacted other parts of an offender’s experience- a powerful dialogue.

Peter Hill explained how he brings the indigenous people of Canada together in dialogue with The Canada Border Services Agency to find ways to fulfill the Canadian government’s commitment to engage, respect, co-operate and partner with Indigenous Peoples.

Jonathan Drury told about an on-going dialogue among people who are autistic, that also includes family, and researchers. He called it “a safe, civilized, and mutually respectful way to engage with the subject and each other.”

Beth Macy talked about her work in nursing homes that brought together administrators, temporary workers and full-time employees to find ways to give better employment to low paid workers who must provide 24-hour care for patients.

Per Hilding explained how a municipality in Sweden used dialogue to help work teams become aware of their responsibility for setting goals in the organization. 

The definitions of dialogue varied among the twenty examples, but all involved the four basic practices of:

• Voice (participants use their genuine and authentic voice)
• Listening (following what is meant and being able to paraphrase what was heard)
• Respect (for the person, their history and their situation; attending even when you disagree)
• Suspension (revealing your thinking so that the assumptions that you bring to the dialogue can be confirmed or corrected)

All were face-to-face dialogues, many meeting numerous times to achieve their goal.

This group of 80 practitioners, including myself, were convinced by these twenty examples, that when people come together in dialogue, even long-standing problems can be successfully addressed. Dialogue is not the answer but is a critical way to explore and co-create answers.

I’m always interested in how conferences are designed.  How can we meet and learn from each other without endless PowerPoint presentations? The Academy of Professional Dialogue that sponsored this conference used many interesting design elements that made that possible:

• Leading up to the conference, a select group of 20 participants wrote papers about their dialogue work in organizations. The papers went through a thorough editing process and were made available to all the participants two weeks before the conference.
• Participants were asked to read the articles before coming to the conference so we could discuss them, rather than listening to presentations.
• The conference was limited to 80 people. That enabled us to get improve the discussions by getting to know each other. Over the three days, everyone was in more than one discussion with everyone else.  
• We had time to reflect on what we were learning in “home teams” that met periodically and were comprised of six participants each.
• Four sessions (papers) were held concurrently with members of the home team attending different sessions. We had some choice of which sessions we attended, while still keeping participation relatively evenly divided among the four papers.
• The conference rotated between the paper discussions with 20 participants, full group meetings of the 80 participants sitting in concentric circles, and reflections in our home team of six.

For me, both because of the design and the topic, it was one of the best conferences I have participated in.  I left renewed in my belief that The World Needs Dialogue.

Speaking Up 101

I have a new article out in the Ivey Business Journal, Speaking Up 101

Here is a brief description:

The necessity for organizations to embrace “speaking up” is broader than “speaking truth to power,” although that is one manifestation. Speaking up is about improving group performance by engaging in open dialogue—across all levels of rank, position, and tenure—to ensure that organizations have all available knowledge when addressing challenging issues.

Unfortunately, open dialogue doesn’t always come naturally. People often refrain from speaking up and voicing new ideas to avoid contradicting a superior or embarrassing a colleague. Sometimes they remain silent because they don’t want to risk looking ignorant or coming across as a know-it-all. But while keeping quiet can work for self-protection, it does little for group problem solving and helping organizations avoid serious mistakes.

The good news is it is possible for members of your organizations to embrace speaking up. This article explains how to achieve this by developing dialogue skills and increasing psychological safety while implementing teaming routines that provide the opportunity to speak up. It then highlights my work with the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) to illustrate the benefits of speaking up in a real-life setting.

  Download Speaking Up 101 -Dixon

If you'd like to like to talk about how to accomplish Speaking Up in your organization send me an email [email protected]

 

A Reflective Conversation

Last evening I heard a beautiful reflective conversation between two violins, a viola and a cello.  The conversation spoke of the greatest joy and the most profound sorrow, both almost indistinguishable from each other.

The conversation was among the members of the world renown Emerson Quartet. Throughout the concert, my mind kept returning to the artistry of a great conversation, because that’s what a string quartet is, a conversation among the instruments. The program was two of Beethoven’s late quartets that are enormously difficult to play with sounds ranging from the softest, most delicate in some movements, to rough and strident chords in others. There were passages so fast and frantic you could almost not see their fingers moving on the strings and other passages so soft and slow you were not sure there was still a sound in the auditorium.

I heard their playing as a conversation because when one instrument introduced a phrase or theme, another voice reflected back a more in-depth statement of that theme, perhaps in a different register or with embellishment, but still recognizable as the same theme.  It was as though the viola might be saying to the first violin, “This is the meaning I took from what you just said.” In other passages, the voices of the instruments blended, seeming to have reached a common understanding.

As the music intensified the players leaned toward each other, just as we lean in when we're concentrating on what a friend is telling us. They watched each other, checking to see the right moment to enter the conversation. They even breathed together. At the beginning of a movement, you could see the first violin breathe in before his bow struck the string; the others breathing in concert with him, so that first note from all four instruments was simultaneous.

One of the most beautiful moments was at the end of a piece when all four bows quit moving, but the sound was still in the room. The musicians did not move, and the audience did not even breathe, wanting that last chord to stay in the air as long as possible.

The music did not originate from their instruments. As beautiful as they are, they were only the carrier. The music came from meaning deep inside each player, in much the same way that the meaning in an authentic conversation arises from deep within each individual speaker. Whether we agree or not, we know that the other is speaking his or her truth. 

Even when the voices of the instruments were frantic and gruff, as they are in places in the Beethoven quartets, the players maintained eye contact and continued to listen to each other carefully. We should all listen to a Beethoven string quartet before we start a conversation so that we can hold that ideal conversation in our minds as we to talk together. If we could only engage in our too often rancorous public discussions with the intent to listen and reflect back what we heard. If that happened, then each speaker, feeling listened to, might have less need to raise the volume or increase the hostility. We might even find moments in which our voices could blend.     

The poet, John O’Donohue, said, “Music is what language would love to be if it could.”

A Conversation to Reduce the Discord in Our Country: Better Angels

Like many others, I have been sorely troubled by the level of disrespect in our public conversations. For that reason, I’ve become associated with an organization that is trying to do something about it, Better Angels.

I feel positive about Better Angels because it is not trying to convince anyone to change their mind about their political position, rather the goal is for both sides to listen and try to understand what the other side is saying – just that!  You might think that’s not enough. But I think the goal of returning to civil discourse is the most constructive goal we could have. We don’t need everyone to agree about the direction of our country. We will always need people who bring different perspectives to the national conversation. We need those that disagree to correct our mistakes, which are inevitable. Disagreement is what makes democracy so powerful, but we need that conversation to be respectful.  We can’t hear each other when we are shouting vitriolic statements.   

The name of the group, “Better Angels” is taken from Lincoln’s Gettysburg address:

We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory…will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.   Abraham Lincoln, March 4, 1861

As difficult as it is to think that way, I believe we are not enemies, that those on the other side have reasons for thinking as they do; reasons we need to understand and respect, even when we do not agree.  

Better Angels offers two kinds of workshops, the Red/Blue workshop and the Skills Workshop, both of which are free.  The terms Red and Blue refer, roughly to the two sides of the political divide.  Red is the label Better Angels uses for those of us that are conservative, (pro-life, 2^nd amendment advocates, Republicans, etc.); Blue is the label for those of us who are liberal (pro-choice, Democrats, pro-immigration, etc.).      

The goals of the Red/Blue workshop, which brings together equal numbers of each side, are:

• To better understand the experiences and beliefs of those on the other side of the political divide.
• To see if there are areas of commonality, as well as differences.
• To learn something that might be helpful to others in our community and the nation.

The goals of the Skills workshop (which does not have to have equal numbers) are:

• Knowledge of what it takes to have constructive, non­polarizing conversations between people who disagree politically. 

• Skills in having these conversations. 


For a long while now, my professional work has been guided by the words of Margaret Mead, Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.  As participants leave a Red/Blue workshop, I hear them acknowledging the humanness of the other side. I hear people reciting those things that they have in common with the other side, e.g. a desire for fairness, help for those that cannot help themselves, a positive future for our children. I hear people laughing together, promising to get together for coffee, and smiling and waving at their counterparts. I hear change, one small group at a time.

Believing strongly, as I do, that conversation is the most powerful tool we have to bring about change, whether in an organization or in the public discourse, I am committed to helping bring about this change in our country by serving as a moderator for the workshops. The online moderator training is in-depth with step-by-step directions on how to lead the workshops. Even with the excellent moderator training provided, it still takes skilled facilitators to lead the workshops.  Many of you who read my blog are, like me, long time facilitators. To heal the divide, Better Angels needs a host of skilled facilitators to take the moderator training and lead workshops across the country.  Better Angels is a volunteer effort. Facilitators don’t get paid, and there is no cost for the training. Give it some thought and if you find yourself interested here is where you can read more about the work of Better Angels, and here is where you will find the moderator application form.    

Some time ago I wrote this poem which expresses my thoughts about the value of conversation far better than my prose ever does.

The Paradox of Dialogue

Amid complexity and strife

With no clear path at hand

When trusted answers won't suffice

How then to understand?

 

Complexity to discourse turns.

We've naught but this poor tool

Of fervent words in counterpoint

Uncertainty to school.

 

Then heed the voices of dissent,

Yet honor sanctioned thought

And strain to hear what's left unsaid

And challenge what is not

 

There's knowing at the heart of this

Cacophony of sound.

Through insight borne of dissonance

Rare clarity is found

 

The paradox of dialogue;

That simple talk can yield

An understanding so profound

Shared wisdom is revealed

 

Changing Organizations One Conversation At a Time

 

Organizations are all looking to transition from being hierarchal, with a focus on accountability and control, to being agile, high engagement, participatory, and innovative. That change can’t happen top down, because it is too much of a paradox.  It begs the question; shouldn’t we be able to participate in the decision about whether to be participative? 

The City Government of Utrecht found a way around that conundrum – involve the people that are supposed to change in designing the change. In 2014 it was clear that the internal departments of the city government were too siloed to serve the citizens of Utrecht effectively. Internal problems were taking too long to solve, and the same problems kept reoccurring year after year. A transformation was in order.  The newly hired City Manager, Maarten Schurink, spoke of the transition as “via B.”  But, he refrained from identifying what “B” was, saying employees themselves would invent the new organization. And he noted that “B” would probably continue to move as employees in conversation discovered new ways to improve their effectiveness. To support these efforts, he made available coaches and facilitators, as well as providing opportunities for employees to come together to participate in organizational issues, but with no requirement to do so. The following story, about one of many such conversations, illustrates the approach.

The city employees who operate the street cleaning machines – the ones that have those large scrub brushes – came together to talk about how they might be more effective and efficient in their work. Traditionally, each employee had been assigned a weekly route, for example, on Monday Peter would clean streets A through F, on Tuesday clean G through K, and so on.  But when the street cleaners got into a conversation about their work, they said, “Well, some streets need to be cleaned every 2-3 days because there are of lots of leaves or kids dropping trash in the streets. But other streets really don’t need to be cleaned very often, so driving the machines over those streets every week is a waste of time and energy.” Out of that conversation, the street cleaners created a plan that made each employee responsible for keeping a specific area clean but leaving it to that employee to establish the schedule of when and how often each street was cleaned. They took pictures of clean streets so everyone would understand what the standard was for “clean.” The employees are now able to use their knowledge of what is happening and changing within their area to establish their schedule. It worked because the street cleaners had local knowledge that the city planners, who developed the original schedule, lacked. 

Research* overwhelmingly shows that employees are more willing to support a change when they have a voice in deciding about that change. That is true, not just for a system-wide change, but for change at the division, department and team level as well. It is not only research that supports employee involvement, it is also the deep-seated human desire to be responsible for our own actions - self-efficacy as it is called in psychological terms. As Weisbord wrote:

Democracy is a tough way to live. With all its flaws, I think it beats the alternatives. I do not wish to have someone else, no matter how educated, well intentioned, wealthy, or wise, decide unilaterally what is best for me. Unless we are deeply involved in our work, we cannot feel good about ourselves. Unless we work with others toward valued goals, we cannot infuse hope and aspiration into our lives. Unless we treat one another as equals, we cannot find dignity, meaning, and community in work. Unless we make our own mistakes, and learn to forgive ourselves, we cannot learn at all. Unless we cooperate we cannot survive.                                                 

From my work with the City of Utrecht as well as with many other organizations, I have found that the way to bring about change is to create conversations within an organization about what needs to change and how to do it.   And in this time of rapid technological advances and increased complexity, where change is continuous, those conversations need to be on-going to course correct and respond to new demands. But not all organizational issues require conversation.  A useful rule of thumb is that employees need to be involved in the conversations about issues that impact them directly.

To change an organization you have to change the conversation, that is,  what is talked about, who is invited into those conversations, how frequently those conversations occur and even the space in where those conversations take place.

In studying organizations that have made such a change I have identified a core set of propositions that guide the change. They include:   

1. Employees come to work wanting to do a good job.
2. Employees possess the collective knowledge to solve the difficult problems they face in their work.
3. Problems/issues get solved through conversations. It is where we discover what we know, share it with our colleagues, and in the process, create new answers and insights.  
4. Employees are more committed to change when they have a voice in planning that change.
5. The deepest and most generative conversations occur in groups where members feel psychologically safe. To feel psychologically safe members need to have a strong enough relationship with each other to learn each other’s strengths, weaknesses, expertise and abilities.
6. A scaffold is needed to support organizational conversation, but it requires a light scaffold, not one that is completely filled in. Whether that scaffold is based on Agile, Appreciative Inquiry, Theory U, the Toyota Production System, or Via B, it must be flexible enough to adjust and improve as the organization learns.

The City Government of Utrecht started with this set of propositions and over the next four years changed the organization one conversation at a time. 

 

* Anderson & Adams, 2016; Turco, 2016; Pentland, 2014; Argyris 2012; Block, 1993; Ackoff, 1981;

Turning Lessons Learned Upside Down

                                                                                                                                      

Many organizations have diligently collected lessons learned from projects and programs that, unfortunately, no one pays much attention to after having been categorized and stored.

The reality is that documented lessons learned are useful only under very limited conditions, what I refer to in Common Knowledge as “near transfer.” In that book, I explain that for documented lessons learned to be useful, the conditions and the context of the receiver of the lessons must be the same as the originator.  Ford Motor Company is an example of where those conditions are the same. Ford Motor plants across the world build the same vehicle using the exact same parts and process. If a Ford truck plant in Kansas City discovers a process improvement, it can be replicated at a sister plant in Cologne, Germany.  Documented lessons learned are also useful when an organization has developed a standardized operating procedure (SOP) to accomplish a task.  Then, when an improvement in the procedure is developed, the standard can be updated and notices sent out to employees to inform them of the change in the SOP.  In summary, documented lessons learned are effective when a team does a regularly occurring, routine task, that can be made available to other teams that are doing the same task in the same context at a different location.  “Near” refers to the similarity of context and conditions, rather than to the geographical distance.    

“Far transfer,” implies dissimilar context and conditions. Far transfer is needed when a team that is doing a non-routine task wants to learn lessons from another team, that does a similar non-routine
task in a different context. For example, an HR team planning a reduction in force, having never done one before, or a hospital unit that has been trying unsuccessfully to reduce the spread of hospital-acquired infection.  To transfer lessons of non-routine tasks you have to turn lessons learned upside down, meaning you start with the problem, not the solution.

The first step is for the team in need of certain knowledge to locate other groups that have had a similar experience or solved a similar problem. Maybe you find several such groups. Now here is the place where many organizations go wrong. The wrong way is to ask those groups to tell you how they solved their problem or to ask them for a presentation or an article about how they did it. That won’t be useful unless their conditions and context are the same as yours; and for non-routine tasks that is, by definition, not possible, because every time your own team does the non-routine task it will be done differently. Add to that, other teams are sure to be a different size, in a different part of the country, have higher levels of expertise, less sophisticated clients, more or less capital, and on and on. The team that needs the knowledge cannot copy what others did because they have a situation that is “far transfer, not “near transfer.” 

Having identified other groups, you invite them to a meet with your group. Maybe you invite 4-5 members from one other group, or maybe you invite one member from each group you’ve found. When your visitor team is assembled, you turn lessons learned upside down! You tell them about your problem, your context, your conditions, what you’ve tried, etc. The visitors will want to ask questions to get a full view of your situation, that’s all to the good. When you have explained the problem as thoroughly as you can, you set out your objectives – exactly what help you want. You tell them that you want them to apply their knowledge and experience to your problem. You are asking them to translate their experience into your context. That is a harder job than just telling you how they succeeded in their own environment. You are asking for their tacit knowledge – all that stuff they learned from the innumerable experiences they have had but didn’t write down because that kind of knowledge only comes together in response to a new problem or puzzle.

Now the learning begins, and perhaps surprisingly it feels like a conversation among colleagues. It is not your visitors teaching you, but you and your visitors thinking together, testing ideas with each other, wondering out loud about possibilities. Now you are gaining the lessons they have learned but targeted at your problem. This is the real deal! You are making full use of each other’s tacit knowledge.  It works because you’ve started upside down with the problem rather than the solution.

Working with organizations, I’ve facilitated many ways to turn lessons learned upside down. I’ve explained one way here. But other possibilities are, going to the other team’s site, having a virtual meeting, setting the transfer up at a conference, holding a clinic.  In whatever way it is formatted, the process has to start with the problem, not with someone else’s solution. And it has to end in a conversation among equals, who are together using their tacit knowledge to invent possible solutions.

Knowledge Management As a Way to Bring Civility and Caring to Organizations

 

Could you envision KM as a way to bring civility and caring to organizations?  After all, KM is essentially about employees sharing what they know with other employees. Sharing is about giving and kindness. And we seem to have a desperate need for both of those qualities in our present culture.

I think it's possible for KM to help make organizations places where people look out for each other – where they go out of their way to help others succeed.  I remember that at Fluor when John McQuary was responsible for KM. There were large posters up on the walls in every facility that told stories of how someone had received help from a colleague and how the receiver benefited. There was one story about a young engineer who left Fluor to work for another company and after a year came back because she so valued the support of her colleagues at Fluor. I always found it interesting that the stories were about the receivers not the originators of knowledge. It celebrated giving rather than achieving. What if we focused on those kinds of stories in our organizations instead of the number of downloads or the dollars saved?

We would all like to work in an organization that puts people first, rather than in one where employees are always striving to beat each other out of a job. I have been a part of a few organizations like that and have written about them, CompanyCommand in the U.S. Army, and Kessels and Smit, a consulting company in the Netherlands. And I have read about many more.  

We hear that employees are disengaged.  Gallup found that having strong social connections at work makes employees more likely to be engaged with their jobs and produce higher-quality work, and they were less likely to fall sick or be injured. In HBR we read that workers, at all levels,  are lonely. Vivek H. Murthy, who served as Surgeon General of the U.S. from 2014-2017 has written, “Companies in particular have the power to drive change at a societal level not only by strengthening connections among employees, partners, and clients but also by serving as an innovation hub that can inspire other organizations to address loneliness.” Although it may seem counterintuitive, the act of helping others reduces loneliness and increases engagement!

Maybe we’ve been putting the wrong focus on KM. Maybe KM is not about increasing production or saving dollars. Maybe it is about creating the kind of culture where we would all like to work.

 

 

 

The Metaphor That Leads Organizations Astray

The metaphors we use when we talk about work have an impact on how work is designed in organizations. The predominant metaphor is “labor as a resource” as in Human Resources. That metaphor results in those who design how organizations function limiting their conception of workers as a means to an end. There is no question that workers in an organization are the means through which an organization accomplishes its goals. But the metaphor ignores the reality that workers are also an end in themselves, not just a means to an end.

The use of any metaphor is not a conscious intent to explain or to justify actions. Rather the metaphors that guide much of our thinking are so well embedded in our cognition that they no longer even seem to be metaphor, rather they appear to us as just the ways things are. For example, the common metaphor “argument is war” results in us approaching any argument in terms of defending our position and of winning the argument. When a problem arises between two people the “argument as war” metaphor precludes our consideration of collaboration or of considering the other’s perspective.

Similarly, the metaphor of “labor as a resource” results in organizations viewing jobs as a cost that, like the cost of raw materials and tools, should be kept down. With this mindset, cheap labor is viewed as a good thing, much like cheap oil. If human beings are viewed as a resource to organizations they can be treated in the same way as supplies and tools, that is, obtain labor at the least cost and replace or eliminate workers when profit is threatened, with no need to consider the mental health consequences of lay-offs. The metaphor also leads organizations to make no distinction between meaningful work and dehumanizing labor, no need to think about job design to make work more interesting.

When an organizational problem arises that demands change, the typical organizational response is to ask smart people (a consultant or a high-level committee) to think through the problem and the solution; have the people in authority approve the plan; then those in authority instruct their subordinates to execute the plan. The organization sees no need to engage the workers, who will be impacted by the change, in either designing or determining how to implement the change because the workers are viewed as “the means” not the thinkers.

Human beings work to provide sustenance for themselves and their families. They also work because work gives meaning to their lives. Weisbord has written, “Democracy is a tough way to live. With all its flaws, I think it beats the alternatives. I do not wish to have someone else, no matter how educated, well intentioned, wealthy, or wise, decide unilaterally what is best for me. Unless we are deeply involved in our work, we cannot feel good about ourselves. Unless we work with others toward valued goals, we cannot infuse hope and aspiration into our lives. Unless we treat one another as equals, we cannot find dignity, meaning, and community in work. Unless we make our own mistakes, and learn to forgive ourselves, we cannot learn at all. Unless we cooperate we cannot survive.”

Twenty-first century organizations want and need engaged workers, and bemoan the lack of engagement that current surveys report. Organizations ask employees to put their energy, time, and best thinking into the time they spend at work. The metaphor of “labor as a resource” is inconsistent with the push for engagement. If organizations want workers who engage rather than just accept the status quo, then they will have to view workers as humans who have the ability and right to help shape the organization’s actions, goals and direction. As Weisbord’s words explain, engaged workers have a voice in “the end” as in, what that organization does, what it stands for, its culture, and its values.

The two views of “labor as a resource” and “engaged workers” are incompatible. Finding a new metaphor for “labor as a resource” would be a start. Even the current slogan of “our people are our most important asset,” is not much of an improvement. It is not much better to be thought of the same category as capital, buildings, and patents. Until the metaphor that guides our cognition validates workers as “an end” as well as “a means,” engagement is unlikely.

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The Central Challenge of Collaboration

 

The following is from a review of Adam Kahane's new book "Collaborating with the Enemy: How to work with people you don't agree with or like or trust." The review is on the Berrett-Koehler website. 

Kahane explains that collaborating is increasingly difficult and increasingly necessary. It is difficult because of our inclination to view those we disagree with as the enemy. 

"The enemyfying syndrome that I have observed and enacted is at the heart of the challenge of collaboration.

In politics and at work and at home, collaboration is both necessary and difficult. We want to get something done that is important to us, but to do so, we need to work with people who view things differently than us. And the more important the issue and different the views, the more necessary and difficult the collaboration.

The central challenge of collaboration is crystallized in the tension between its two dictionary definitions. It means simply “to work jointly with,” but also “to cooperate traitorously with the enemy.” ⁴ The word therefore evokes both a story of generous and inclusive progress, such as an energetic and creative work team (“We must all collaborate!”), and a story of degenerative and amoral villainy, as in France during World War II (“Death to collaborators!”).

The challenge of collaboration is that in order to make our way forward, we must work with others, including people we don’t agree with or like or trust, while in order to avoid treachery, we must not work with them.

This challenge is becoming more acute. People are more free and individualistic and so more diverse, with more voice and less deference. Their identities and affiliations are more fluid. Enabled by new technologies, established political, organizational, social, and familial hierarchies are breaking down. Volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity are growing.

Increasingly often, we are therefore unable to get things done unilaterally or only with our colleagues and friends. More and more, we need to work with others, including our opponents and enemies—and we find it more and more difficult to do so.

This collaborative challenge is wonderful in that it grows out of the weakening of authoritarianism and subservience. And it is terrible in that, if we fail to meet it, we will produce ever-increasing fragmentation, polarization, and violence.

We must find a way to collaborate more effectively.

We are face-to-face with the challenge of collaboration when we say, “I could never work with those people!” What do we mean by this common exclamation? Maybe we mean that we don’t want to work with those people, or that we are not able to, or that we don’t need to. In such situations, when we think it is not desirable or possible or necessary to work with certain others, then obviously we will try to work without them or against them: to avoid them or defeat them.

But what do we do when we think it is necessary to work with these others? This might be because we worry that we can’t avoid or defeat them, or they have some skill or resource that we need, or we believe it would be wrong to exclude them.

Such situations present us with the central challenge of collaboration. We see these other people’s values and behaviors as different from ours; we believe they are wrong or bad; we feel frustrated or angry. Although we know that we have to work with them, we wish we didn’t. We worry that we will have to compromise or betray what we believe is right and matters most to us. In these situations, although we see that we need to collaborate with those people, we don’t see how we can do so successfully.

How can we succeed, then, in working with people we don’t agree with or like or trust?"

It is worth thinking about this question as we work with organizations. 

Appreciation Is the Magic Glue that Connects

Have you had the experience of helping another person with a problem and then never hearing whether what you offered was useful? It leaves you a bit empty, doesn’t it?  And worse it reduces your inclination to help a second time. What we all want, in return for our help, is just to know that the help was appreciated. 

There may be nothing more precious to us in our work life, than the feeling that we matter - that we contribute a unique value and that others recognize that value. I certainly experience that phenomenon each time someone tells me that a blog post I wrote was really helpful. It sends me scurrying back to the computer to write another post. Appreciation is energizing and motivating!

Yet many of us are not fluent in the language of appreciation. There is a nurturing quality to expressing appreciation that we sometimes feel awkward about exhibiting in a work context. If you are willing to try being more appreciative of others, here are some tips that might help you get started.

• Noticing – The first step in being more appreciative is noticing what others are doing; focusing on the ways others are contributing. That contribution might be a way of thinking that offers a different perspective, a story that illustrates an important concept, or an idea that you had not considered before. Appreciation is about the whole person, not just about an achievement or reaching a performance goal. So, noticing a personal characteristic is an important part of appreciation, for example, another’s kindness, consistently meeting commitments, generosity, empathy. People want to feel valued for who they are not just what they do.
• Describing - Having observed another’s contribution, the second step is to describe what you have noticed. The more specific the appreciative comment is, the more positive the impact on the other person. “Thanks” is much less appreciative than describing the way the person was helpful, for example, “Thanks so much for your explanation, I’m much clearer on next steps now.” Or “I really appreciated the trouble you went to by providing not only the names but the contact information for those two experts.” Or “The way you explained customer service in our meeting today really struck a chord with me.”
• Make Space – Neither noticing or describing is doable unless you put away the assumption that you are the only one in the room (or online) with valuable knowledge or understanding about a topic. Even if you are the designated teacher or the online speaker, you are rarely the only one with knowledge that would be useful to others. Everyone listening to you has garnered insights from his or her own experience, whether that experience was successful or not. So, make space for others to offer their thinking. You can’t express appreciation for others unless they have an opportunity to offer their contribution!

• Be authentic – we have all experienced someone saying something positive as a precursor to being critical – the infamous sandwich technique. Or someone who praises us just before asking for a favor. People know when they are being played. Appreciation has to be authentic to be useful. While I was writing this blog, I was tempted to quote research evidence that demonstrated how appreciation could increase productivity. Then I thought again; if I explain being appreciative as transactional, it won’t work. Appreciation only works when it is from the heart.

A Few Ways to Express Appreciation

• If someone in your community posts something you found useful, you can “like” it, but even better you can comment on why that idea was meaningful to you.
• If you have asked a question in a community, you can post what you did as a result of the feedback you received.
• If you are leading a workshop, at the end, you can ask people to form a circle and go around the circle asking each person to say something they learned from another participant. But request that they not say your name as the teacher or presenter, instead to name another participant.  
• You can model appreciation in a lecture or presentation, by noting what you liked about a response from a participant or an insightful question.
• John Kellden, Founder of the Conversation Community, says, “add considered, considerate comments on other people’s post.” 
• You might create a kudos board displayed in a prominent place in your workplace.
• For birthdays, providing cake and coffee is great, but you could add to it a big poster where colleagues have written appreciative messages about the birthday person.
• Create a kudos page on your organization’s website where people can post comments about someone that has been particularly helpful.

Many years ago, I spent a sabbatical year at the Center for Creative Leadership, as a Research Fellow. When the year was over, the research staff gave me a beautiful, small, silver bowl. It was inscribed with my name and the Center’s logo. What was so thoughtful about the gift was that the bowl was filled with small folded pieces of paper on which each member of the research staff had written a note to me. It was a long time ago, but each time I notice the bowl sitting on my shelf, it brings back the pleasure I felt in being with a group of people who so unreservedly valued me as a colleague. I have treasured the bowl all these years for the generous words written on those small scraps of paper.

Resistant to Change

In my work with organizations, I often hear someone say that “so and so” is resistant to change. When I hear that, what pops into my mind is, “Well a different hypothesis is that “so and so” is sometimes resistant or even frequently resistant to change.”  That’s a slight change in language, but a big difference in meaning. The first makes being resistant a characteristic of the individual. The second is a behavior that the individual exhibits in some situations.

I’m using “resistant” here for whatever label is being attributed. It could be, “not being a team player,” “being uncooperative,” “being closed,” or “egotistical.” So every time I write “resistant,” substitute the word that’s heard most frequently in your organization.

I would suggest that in some situations each of us has found ourselves resisting. But, if we heard someone label us “resistant,” we would probably respond that we had good reasons for resisting! After all, maybe no one bothered to provide us the information we would have needed to understand. Or maybe we could see that the idea had a lot of problems. Or maybe putting that idea into place would have really messed up something we were working on. It is certainly never a label we would put on ourselves because we fully understand the reasons for our resistance.

However, there is an advantage to viewing resistance as a personal characteristic. The advantage is that it allows us to give up on the person.  We can just write him off mentally. We don’t have to struggle with our own incompetence in interacting with him because we have decided there is something wrong with him that makes him not worth our while.  

Of course, there is also a great danger in viewing resistance as a personal characteristic. The risk is that our view will hold the person in that place.  We know this from all the studies conducted on the Pygmalion or Rosenthal effect -  the phenomenon whereby our higher expectations of a person leads to an increase in her performance, likewise when we have lower expectations of a person it results in poorer performance. How we view a person becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. We prevent ourselves from ever learning that the person has or could change. And most dangerous, if the person is really not resisting on this particular issue but instead has a legitimate point, we’ll never hear it. Oops!

The idea that someone resists because the decision will cost him or harm him in some way seems altogether logical to me. It is reasonable to resist a change that will harm us. It is not reasonable to roll over and play dead.

So how can we find out if a person has reasons that make sense to her? The answer is to ask her. If we can discover her reasoning, we may see that it is based on a concern that we can fix or satisfy in some way, or we may find that our idea has a flaw that we needed to know about. But how to ask takes some thought.  We certainly don’t want to say, “Why do you always resist the changes I propose?” That clearly won’t get us anywhere.

To make asking work we have to firmly hold in our minds that the person has a reason that makes sense to him. We don’t have to assume he is right, just that the reason makes sense to him. And we have to leave open a little doubt in our mind about our own rightness.  If we can’t hold on to that, then we shouldn’t ask, because it won’t work. I’m going to call asking with that mindset, an inquiry, to differentiate it from our typical way of asking. The success of an inquiry is totally dependent on phrasing the inquiry in a way that reflects that mindset. Here are a couple of examples of inquiry.

• “I noticed when I introduced xxxx today, you didn’t say much. I recognize that you work with xxx every day, so I wanted to ask what problems you see that I may not be aware of.” (By not saying if he sees problems, rather what problems, I acknowledge that it is legitimate for him to see something that concerns him.)   

• “As I’ve talked with others about xxxx, I’ve heard a range of views; I was wondering how you see xxxx benefiting or causing the team problems.” (I’m acknowledging that there may be unintended consequences I may not be aware of)

Here is the inquiry formula to use if you make the assumption the other has a reason that makes sense to him.

Explain why I’m asking --> indicate that I’m open to learning that I don’t know everything --> legitimize her having a different view --> ask to hear her thinking --> 1) fix her situation or 2) improve my original idea or 3) say I can’t do anything about it and ensure that she knows she has to do it.

Here’s the formula to use if you assume the other is just a resistant person.

This person is resistant --> no need to ask --> just ensure that he knows he has to do it.

Using either formula you might end up in the same place.  But using inquiry offers the possibility of change, in you or the other person, while asking ensures no change.   

 

Organizations That Breathe In and Breathe Out

The more virtual an organization becomes, the more it needs to put into place periodic opportunities for workers to come together to renew relationships and cement their commitments to each other and to their joint goals. Think of it as breathing out and breathing in. Organizations breathe out by spreading across the globe, they breathe in when teams come back together to have human interaction. Oscillating between the two provides the best of both worlds.

But many organizations have decided they need to do one or the other. Some think that after spending all that money on software, team members should have no need to come together. Others like IBM, Bank of America, and Yahoo, having tried being virtual, have called workers back to the office to strengthen collaboration. Both have an “all or nothing” way of thinking - when the answer is really both!

Virtual (breathing out) contributes:

• The ability to draw on the global talent pool
• Reduction in the cost of office space
• Autonomy that provides workers greater opportunity to experiment and try out new ideas
• Being able to respond quickly to local customers
• More satisfying integration of work and family life.

In-Person (breathing in) contributes:

• Commitment to jointly made decisions
• Shared understanding of goals/purpose
• Parts smoothly come together into a meaningful whole, despite having been developed independently
• Innovative solutions to complex issues that are arrived at through collective sensemaking
• A sense of community, cohesion, and belongingness

I envision a future in which organizations that breathe out and breathe in are the new normal. A future in which organizations make full use of the unique attributes of both virtual and in-person.

“Office buildings” will have become “convening centers.” No longer will they be they places where individuals enter one by one, each heading to his or her assigned cubicle, instead whole teams will arrive together, greeting colleagues they have not seen over the past few months. Convening centers will be conducive to renewing relationships but also to addressing difficulties that have arisen related to the joint task a team is engaged. There will be spaces of all sizes, which are easily re-configurable with moveable furniture to accommodate groups of five or fifty and lots of open space for putting chairs in multiple small circles or one large circle. There will be rolling whiteboards and wall space for making joint work visible. There will be large windows with no need to worry about having too much light to see the screen because convening will be about conversations, not PowerPoint presentations. There will be lots of comfortable, informal space, ideal for chatting over coffee and snacks.  

When breathing out, I see organizations using advanced virtual tools to collaborate and stay connected. Tools that, with just a click of a button, a team member can be virtually in another member’s office, or all ten team members can be developing a plan in a virtual space. There will be effortless ways to view what others are working on and to contribute to each other’s work. There will be visualization tools that allow everyone on the team to see each member’s progress toward getting the group’s task accomplished, so team members can reach out to help where and when they are needed, and so that accountability is visible. Team members will have learned to be proficient in their use of virtual tools; able to make sound judgments about when to use what form of media to address different types of issues, e.g., decision making, brainstorming, requesting information. And they will recognize when an issue is too complex to try to solve virtually, so will schedule that issue on the agenda for the next in-person meeting.  

Look around! It’s already happening at the edges!

We Learn When We Talk

At face value that doesn’t make much sense, after all, we must know what we think about an issue; how else are we able to talk about it? But the reality is that what we don’t necessarily know what we know!  For example, has this happened to you? You begin to describe a complex issue to another person whose help you want to understand it. But while you are in the midst of explaining it, the answer pops into your mind even before you finish the question. And you end up saying, somewhat sheepishly, “Never mind, I think I’ve just realized what the answer is.”  What happened is that in trying to explain the issue, your mind has put the bits and pieces that you know about the topic together in a new way and provided you greater clarity. 

Johnson and Johnson, researchers at the University of Michigan, who have conducted studies of conversations, explain it this way. “In these meetings (of expert and asker) individuals exchange their data, conclusions, reasoning,
and questions with others. Although the cognitive benefits to the receiver of such an exchange are apparent, there is evidence that it is the speaker who makes the greatest cognitive gains from the exchange.  Individuals organize information differently if they are going to present it to others than if they are trying to understand it solely for their own use. It is in the act of speaking that people tend to organize cognitively what they know.”  They learned when they talked!

What an incredible phenomenon - we learn when we talk!  It has all kinds of implications for knowledge sharing:

• If I deliver a lecture or a presentation, it would be helpful to make time for those listening to have a conversation with each other – a way for them to put what I've said in their own words and to make mental connections that otherwise might never be made.
• If I want another team to learn from the lessons my team or project has garnered, the transfer will work better if I arrange a conversation between the two groups rather than having one team write and post lessons learned. The conversation would provide the opportunity for the recipients to think out loud about how the lessons relate to their own work.
• When I’ve read a great article, I will incorporate the ideas more fully into my cognitive map, if I tell a colleague what I have just read (or write a blog about it.)
• In the debrief of that great project my team just accomplished, the team is more likely to be able to understand how they achieved that success if I gather the team members to talk to about what they learned. They will figure out what they learned as they talk with each other.
• If I am stating an argument to convince someone else of the reasonableness of my position, I would be wise to pause periodically to give the other person an opportunity to articulate his or her thinking about what I’ve said. Even if the other’s response is only to offer a counter-argument that person will learn something new about their own position by “the way they have organized information differently…. to present it.”
• Perhaps most profoundly, it means that if we want people to learn from each other, we need to put them together, face to face if at all possible. If not, by a medium conducive to conversation, for example, Skype, Google Hangout, or Zoom. But they need to be together in small groups of no more than five or six, to give an opportunity for each person to talk.

On the negative side, it means webinars, where one person does all the talking, aren’t very good learning mechanisms.  Nor are presentations where one person is talking or making a PowerPoint presentation, and the only opportunity for others to talk is at the when the speaker says, “Are there any questions?” in the last five minutes.  Questions after a presentation, really just ask the presenter for more information. They don’t help the listeners put the learning into their own words. How many times have you sat through a day of presentations at a conference and can remember very little of what you heard?  Without the time to articulate the ideas in your own words, all that knowledge quickly evaporates.

A simple rule of thumb, we learn when we talk. 

Industry Leaders Conversation: Change, Culture, and Learning #KMWorld

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mary Abraham took these notes on a panel discussion I was on at KM World 

Session Description:

Former head of KM with the BBC, Semple believes in conversations and leads our panel on a far-ranging discussion of change, culture and learning as we all aspire to an outbreak of common sense on our journey for knowledge sharing and creating sustainable, high-functioning organizations and communities.

Speakers:

• Euan Semple, Director, Euan Semple Ltd
• Jean-Claude Monney, Former Chief Knowledge Officer, Microsoft, Columbia University and Digital Transformation Coach
• Kim Glover, Global Manager of Knowledge Management, TechnipFMC
• Nancy Dixon, Principal Researcher, Common Knowledge Associates

NOTES:

• Why are you connected to knowledge management?
• at Microsoft Services, Jean-Claude Monney was given responsibility to get 100% of Microsoft knowledge to 100% of Microsoft’s customers, 100% of the time.
• Best of the knowledge = relevant (in the context of the work) and trustworthy
• For Nancy Dixon, knowledge management helps the organization learn better and faster.
• What is the pedigree of knowledge?
• if the knowledge comes from a person, is that person reliable/trustworthy?
• if the knowledge comes from a document, is the source of the document reliable?
• Knowledge management should focus on the issues that matter.
• Nancy Dixon worries that KM focuses too much on the tactical (how to be more efficient) but misses the issues that can really bring down the organization, such as ethical issues.
• General Motors once had a terrific KM group. However, they were unable to help the company prevent bankruptcy. What if there were a KM group at Volkswagon that could shed light on ethical issues? Would that have prevented the emissions control disaster? Would there have been a different outcome at Wells Fargo if there were a KM-organized forum for employees to express their concerns about business practices that did not align with the company’s mission statement?
• Conversation is Consequential. 
• Conversation is something you enter with the realization that you might be changed.
• Conversation in an organization creates a culture — it is important to notice what is talked about AND what is not talked about.
• An organization that wants the benefit of consequential conversation must first create an environment of psychological safety.
• We Make Culture.
• Culture is not just something that is something that is done to us. We make culture by everything we do (or do not do).
• We learn culture in the first instance from our experiences with our direct managers.
• How to Start a KM Program.
• If you are lucky, the CEO comes in one day and says we need a KM program.
• More likely, find business problems that KM can help solve.
• When you are asked to “show them the money,” don’t assume the responsibility for the numbers. Instead, partner with the business first, find out what KPIs are important to them, and then figure out the value KM adds to achieve those KPIs.
• Before you mention KM to anyone, collect stories of instances when one unit helped another unit (and how much money was solved). Then suggest to management that you create an organizational strategy out of this collaboration.
• What’s Next for KM?
• Monney:
• We are experiencing a massive change due to digital augmented knowledge. The reality of AI and augmented reality is extraordinary. The key is to use AI to improve a human’s ability to make better decisions.
• We need to figure out to digitally transform our business — or someone else will.
• We need to develop empathy
• We need to harness the source of knowledge — but what if the knowledge is the heads of contractors or people who do not want to be handcuffed to the organization.
• Glover: As technology gets better and easier to use, KM professionals can go back to being “people people” rather than reluctant technologists.
• Dixon: There is an erosion of cognitive authority. We have stopped trusting CEOs and other people in positions of authority. KM’s role is to make things more transparent so that we can operate without omniscient authority figures.
• Recommended Reading:
• The Conversational Firm by Catherine Turco
• An Everyone Culture by Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey

 

 

 

 

  

 

Building a “Speaking Up” Culture in Teams

Following is the description of a workshop I originally designed for the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). I delivered the workshop over ten times to DIA top management teams as well as to teams of analysts. I am now making the workshop available to other organizations. If you are interested in reading a case study based on the work at DIA I will send it upon request or you can find it at "Truth to Power, The SOL Journal, Vol10, No.4  

The Need

Organizations depend on the knowledge, ideas and observations of their employees for current and future performance. Yet there is evidence that employees too often choose silence over speaking up, leaving managers to face the difficult repercussions of a culture in which staff are reluctant to offer their ideas and thinking. Studies of work situations show that the reluctance to speak up is not a function of a person’s personality, courage, or professional discipline. It is also not a function of organizational level - the concern about speaking up is as prevalent for senior managers as it is for front line workers.  Rather, the reluctance to speak up is related to the culture of the unit and to the dialogue skills of team members.   

In this workshop, we teach team members how to speak up for the good of the team by focusing on their skills and concerns and we teach team leaders how to design and convene conversations that create the psychological safety, powerful focus, and openness that allow teams to tackle even the most difficult and sensitive issues.

Who Should Attend:

The workshop is designed for team members along with their team leader. Multiple teams can attend a given workshop.

• Teams who have recently been convened – as a way to start off right 
• Teams who want to collaborate more effectively to accomplish their tasks
• Teams who function remotely and need to improve their joint effectiveness

Teams Will Learn To:

• Engage in productive conversations on tough issues
• Participate in team meetings in a way that creates psychological safety
• Deepen learning and strengthen relationships through a more authentic exchange of viewpoints
• Challenge ideas while preserving face for yourself and others and maintaining collaborative relationships
• Reframe a situation so that it opens creative options for action
• Provide feedback to other team members in a respectful and compelling manner.

Workshop Design:

This workshop is highly interactive. Team members become deeply immersed in the material through interactive simulations with one or two other people, providing a way for participants to test and validate concepts in an engaging, refreshing and sophisticated manner. The workshop also includes written exercises that apply key concepts to the participants’ own situations. Videotaping (on participants’ phones) in small groups is used to self-analyze the actual dialogue they produce. Brief lectures are used to present key concepts. Participants are asked to bring with them a short critical incident, unrelated to their current team, so they have authentic situations for practice, rather than role play. 

Workshop Agenda - Building a Speaking Up Culture - 1

Day 1 –  Learning and practicing the dialogue skills of Speaking Up

• Effectively supporting your view in team meetings
• Avoiding jumping to conclusions, your own and others’
• Asking questions about others’ positions based on genuine curiosity
• Reducing abstract language, that is easily misunderstood, by focusing on concrete examples

Day 2 – Practices for leading the culture of Speaking Up

• Building connections among members before turning to content
• Using a very different, and more effective, set of ground rules for meetings
• Designing a physical space that serves conversation
• Enabling all voices to be heard
• Encouraging differences preceding finding common ground
• Reflecting together on team effectiveness – conducting retrospects

Building a Speaking Up Culture - 2 (a follow-up workshop focused on current team issues)

• Two-day intensive workshop held 2-4 weeks after the first workshop to:
  • Deepen individual skills based on critical incidences that have occurred within the team
  • Practice dialogue skills and ground rules in group discussion focused on a work-based topic identified by the team      
• Each participant is assigned a specific skill to practice between sessions, based on a need identified in the first workshop.  
• Individual participant coaching between workshops, one hour per participant by phone. Plus 3 hours of team leader coaching and planning for the follow-up workshop by phone.

Please contact me at [email protected] to see if this workshop is a good fit for your team. 

A Book That Will Blow Your Mind About How to Make Use of The Knowledge in Organizations: A Review of An Everyone Culture: Becoming a Deliberately Developmental Organization

•  If you think you’re already doing a pretty good job of making use of the critical knowledge in your organization;
• If you find yourself thinking about ways to fix the problems that hierarchy causes in organizations; or
• If you are still hoping management will be re-invented;  

- then you should read An Everyone Culture: Becoming a Deliberately Developmental Organization by Kegan and Lahey.  A remarkable book!   

Kegan and Lahey are adult development professionals at Harvard. Kegan’s theory of adult development identifies three stages of adult development:

• Socialized-mind
• Self-authoring mind
• Self-transforming mind

The authors explain that in the past organizations functioned very effectively if they had employees who were at the stage of the socialized minded.  They were “good team players, pulled their weight, were loyal to the organization and could be counted on to follow conscientiously the directions and signals of their boss.”  However, in the knowledge economy to be effective employees need a greater capacity for innovation, self-management, personal responsibility and self-direction.” In other words, to be self-authoring, which means understanding themselves and their world at a qualitative higher level of mental complexity.” And managers of self-authoring employees, must necessarily be self-transforming, that is, be able to step outside their own ideology or framework, to observe the framework’s limitations or defects, and author a more comprehensive view. In short, today’s organizations need a quantum shift in individual mental complexity across the board. 

If you want to know more about the three stages of adult development read Immunity to Change, where Kegan and Lahey provide detailed explanations and tools to help readers understand the different stages. But in An Everyone Culture, they are focused on how the stages of adult development play out in the workplace.   

The authors find that the norms  of most organizations as well as the hierarchy, are designed to support the socialized-mind. People cannot continue to develop past this initial stage of adult development while working in an organization that is trying to keep any threats to certainty, predictability, routine, control, and connection to a minimum. Noting that we spend most of our waking hours at work, they say that if employees are to continue to develop, they need to do it at work in what they call a Deliberately Developmental Organization.    

And as farfetched as it sounds, they have found three organizations, Next Jump, Decurion and Bridgewater that are as focused on the development of their members as they are on making a profit. Indeed, they say the two are intertwined, that is, that they are profitable because they are focused on development. And what is most remarkable is that these are not organizations coached by the authors, rather each organization has independently come to the idea of the need to continuously develop their people.

But this is not your father’s kind of development!  It is not a workshop or a training course - this development is on-the-job. It is about all employees, including the CEO, management, and frontline employees, daily working on overcoming their own internal barriers to change and using their errors and vulnerabilities as prime opportunities for personal and company growth. Each of the three companies showcased in this book have deliberate practices in place that are focused on development, and in each, those practices are quite different – clearly growing out of the context of the organization, not out of academic theory.  Let me introduce you to just a few of the developmental practices at each of the companies discussed in the book.   

Bridgewater

A lot of organizations talk about the need to learn from failure, but at Bridgewater learning from one’s mistakes is a job requirement. “The company’s culture supports treating errors as opportunities for growth through a variety of tools and practices.”  One such practice is the Issues Log. “Every employee is required to record problems and failures in a companywide “issues log,” one that requires detailing one’s own and others’ contributions to business mistakes. The logging of errors and problems is applauded and rewarded, but failure to record a mistake in the issues log is viewed as a serious breach of duty.” The data collected in these Issues Logs is treated as a resource for collective diagnosis of root causes of failure – both individual and organizational. The Issues Log is open to everyone in the company and, in fact, everyone is expected to review it and to be aware of problems that might be systemic. One employee noted that, the Issues Log “is like our evolution machine” for “watching the progress on any problem that’s ever been raised in the company.” “People’s limitations are seen as their growing edge—a company resource, an asset—that should be continuously and publicly engaged.” 

Here is an example of an issue that Rohit, a junior staffer in the research department, entered in the Issues Log. In his entry he is questioning how
Alex, his department head, is overseeing work. He writes, “We’ve been struggling to keep up with all of our needs, and it’s gotten to the point where Alex now has consultants managing consultants. For a place so synced in its culture, how could this be? How could we have all these outside people managing these other people without having gone through all the necessary things to become a Bridgewater citizen? . . . How is Alex ensuring the consultants acting as managers are managing in a principled fashion and holding the bar high enough?” In the days following Rohit’s entry there are responses both by Alex and others, exploring this issue in an extended online conversation.

At Bridgewater every employee, including senior leaders, has a Baseball card, which is electronically accessible to everyone else. The Baseball Card integrates all kinds of data about what a person is like, for example, testimonials, personality inventories, “relys-on” (what the employee is reliably good at doing) and “watch-out-for” (areas of weakness).  

The Daily Case is a multimedia case study of a teachable moment that every employee reviews for fifteen minutes each day and then responds to a series of questions about what they would do in that situation. Another daily practice at Bridgewater is the Daily Update, a way to stay in sync with each employee’s manager. Updates are a way to give employees an opportunity to reflect on what they are learning about themselves, any pain they’re experiencing, and ways they’re grappling to improve their application of the principles. And Updates are, again, public.

As these practices illustrate, one of the central principles of Bridgewater is Pain + Reflection = Progress.

Next Jump

 Next Jump also has a formula for its principle, “Better Me + Better You = Better Us”.  Everyone in the organization, from the CEO to new hires, has a Talking Partner that they meet with every day. Each person takes a turn, and a turn begins with venting – no topic is out of bounds. Then the talk turns to the day ahead. “What will be most challenging, rewarding, significant or meaningful?” What opportunities will there be to practice my Backhand (practice overcoming a habit that typically gets me into trouble)?  An example of practicing a Backhand is, if I typically tend to dominate conversations, then waiting until two others have spoken before I speak again is practicing my Backhand.

Everyone participates in a Personal Leadership Boot Camp where they learn to identify their character weakness (backhands). They leave Boot Camp with a practice plan for working on their Backhand. Everyone is given a Peer Mentor who coaches them, holds them accountable and helps them stick to the practice plan. Again, everyone, including top management, participates in Boot Camps and has a Peer Mentor.

At Next Jump, people bring challenging situations into a Weekly Situational Workshop, a one hour meeting of five people who talk in two different pairs of talking partners, along with a more experienced colleague acting as a mentor and coach. Partners talk about situations encountered in the work life of an individual. But rather than spending a long time on any one situation, the focus in on becoming aware of patterns they would not otherwise see.

Employees devote two Saturdays per year for Super Saturday where they interview, test, and choose new employees for Next Jump.  They are looking at the potential employees for, Are they takers? Are they in it only for themselves, or do they have the ability to be givers (helping others grow)?

In the Salary Review Process at Next Jump, contributions to revenue are weighed at 50 percent and contributions to culture at 50 percent. You can be a revenue hero and still be penalized in compensation if you’re not working on personal growth. The highest bonus and salary increases go to those who improve the culture.  And at Next Jump there is a No Fire policy, an explicit commitment to stand by employees through thick and thin.

Decurion

Decurion’s principles are that 1) work is meaningful; 2) that people are not only means but also ends in themselves; 3) that individuals and communities naturally develop; and 4) that pursuing human development and pursuing profitability are one thing. The developmental practices at  Decurion include a Check-In at the start of every meeting – a deep form of Check-In that openly welcomes the whole person into work every day.  There is a Check-Out as well. Check-Ins and Check-Outs are a part of creating and maintaining a sense of strong community. Working life at Decurion is organized around this idea of community. Decurion believes that when authentic community forms in groups, learning happens: a collective intelligence.

One segment of Decurion’s business is managing theatres that primarily employ young people who are often in their first job, to do tasks like taking tickets or working the concession stand.  In the theaters, Pulse-Check Huddles occur throughout the evening, where groups of crew members and managers give and receive feedback on how the floor operations are going and how they can be improved.

Every job at Decurion has a list of competencies and every person has a Competency Board listing the competencies he or she is working on and that is publically displayed. When the employee has achieved a competency, a blue pin is placed by that competency. As with the two other companies, such information is publically displayed and the practice is engaged in at all levels of the organization.

Once every three to four months, depending on the need, the entire business leadership—every manager—attends a daylong Decurion business leadership meeting (DBL). The DBL is a slower, more deeply reflective version of a huddle. A DBL usually begins with individuals Checking In, sharing the worries and excitement that have a hold on their attention, so that they can acknowledge these concerns and ideas and allow others to better understand what’s going on interiorly.

When problems occur at Decurion, rather than jump into solving the problem, group members will try to let the problem solve them, exposing issues and patterns of thinking that go much deeper than the immediate circumstances. To do this they use a Fishbowl, another developmental practice, that puts those who are involved in the issues in a tight circle within a circle, to talk through the issues. Those in the outside circle listen to the conversation. Two of the ground rules for the Fishbowl include 1) speaking from your own experience and 2) not leaping to inferences about what others believe.    

Looking across all three organizations, Kegan and Lahey identify five qualities of the practices in the DDOs:

• Practices help externalize struggles that are interior
• Practices connect the work of the business to working on ourselves
• Practices move us from focusing on outcomes to the processes that generate outcomes
• Language is a practice and it creates new tools for a new paradigm
• Systemic stretch involves everyone, every day, across the organization

My big take away from reading the book is that the employees at the three organizations really want to be learning and growing.  But for that to happen requires being able to make mistakes and learn from them, which is only possible if you don’t have to hide those mistakes, and when people at all levels are open and supportive. The employaees at these organization are willing to undergo the pain involved in both uncovering and in acknowledging mistakes, because they value the personal growth they achieve.  Having experienced both the discomfort and the benefit, they agree with Bridgewater’s claim Pain + Reflection = Progress.

A CEO letter to the Board...long overdue | Henry Mintzberg

29 July 2017

via www.mintzberg.org

Henry lays out sound reasoning why CEOs should not be paid so much!

The CKO of Microsoft Services Has a Surprising Perspective on Knowledge Management

I recently had the opportunity to interview Jean-Claude Monney, for a project I was working on for USAID.  He is the CKO of Microsoft Services, the largest Division of Microsoft with over 22,000 people. One of the questions I asked him was, “Do you know of research completed or any underway that demonstrates the value or effectiveness of KM to the larger entity – the society, the organization or the project?” 

His surprising answer was, “Everyone talks about effectiveness as if it’s thae holy grail.  It’s the wrong question! KM is key to providing insights, for example, on how to improve sales and marketing, but KM is not the one to define benefit. You can’t measure the ROI of knowledge.  Like his unique position on effectiveness, Jean-Claude has atypical views on the familiar KM maxim of People, Process and Technology.

In terms of People he says KM should be focused on the changing context of work. Where we used to talk about blue collar and white collar, we now need to add “no collar.”  “These no collars are those contributing knowledge on platforms like Stack Overflow, they are software programmers that work freelance and get engaged as contractors. There is a movement happening between full employment and contractors. Contractors/freelancers want quality of life, they want to go on vacation when they want and to do the kind of work they like. The social context is changing. We need more research to understand the social context of the worker, for example, what are the legal aspects of who owns the knowledge? “Taking a job for 30 years is gone – it is the past”. He notes that most customers that Microsoft works with, have a 2020 project to think about how the Digital Workplace will be changing the way they work.

A second People issue that concerns Jean-Claude is that KM should focus on how individuals can rapidly grow knowledge and skills to move into a new task. He notes that the world is embarking on an effort to drive in apprenticeship, so people can be employable in two years.  He sees on-going learning as the new normal and uses himself as an example. He explains that although he just hit retirement age, he can talk machine learning with any 30-year-old engineer because he is continually learning. People should not be so busy at their jobs that they do not make time to continue learning by reading, talking to colleagues, and reflecting on actions their team has taken. He is grateful that Microsoft has embraced a growth mindset culture that leads to a desire to learn and see failures as essential to mastery, find lessons and inspiration in the success of others and embrace challenges with agility.

In terms of Process Jean-Claude thinks that most of the current KM processes are shallow. He explains that at Microsoft they have engineered the three processes of 1) creating knowledge, 2) reusing knowledge (embedding it in daily work processes), and 3) harvesting, curating and growing knowledge. But under those three are 18 sub-processes, each of which is measurable. He says process must get to that level of detail to be effective. The KM principle he supports, is not only about sharing, it is also about the programmatic application of shared knowledge where the processes define the trust level of that knowledge. 

In terms of Technology, Jean-Claude says we need new research on how AI based technology mixed with cognitive science and neuro science, are impacting knowledge work. He points to law firms that are increasingly replacing paralegals with AI, what he calls “knowledge augmentation.” For example, AI is a better way to update expertise finder systems, because the rate of technology change is so fast that individuals won’t go back and update their profile with “I learned this yesterday.”  He explains that new expertise finders will capture the employees' digital footprints, for example, if an employee has written a white paper or acquired certain expertise during a project, the employee’s profile will be dynamically updated.

Another example of the use of AI, coupled with the knowledge of cognitive science and neuro science, is in healthcare. He explains AI-based cognitive services can detect emotions in the faces of people to learn about how they are feeling. There are translation services and speech recognition that could be used if the patient and healthcare worker do not speak the same language. Today, the free Skype translator version offers simultaneous voice translation in 8 languages, and the text translator is available in more than 50 languages for instant messaging, you can experience it in this video. And he notes that audio, text and video could be used to mine a knowledge base of healthcare conversations between doctor and patient using the new Video Indexer Cognitive Service from Microsoft.  As an aside, Jean-Claude said he was horrified at with how the Ebola crisis was managed – another place where AI and KM could have been helpful.  “Given that humans are the most important part of KM, we need to translate the academic principles of cognitive science and neuro science into real life knowledge management.” 

He believes we need more education on KM at all levels and has joined the Columbia University faculty where he will be teaching Digital Transformation, the Digital Workplace and KM at the Information and Knowledge Strategy (IKNS) Masters in Science Program.

Finally, on an encouraging note he explains that he has been invited to share Microsoft Services' KM initiative at industry events like a Keynote at the World Bank's bi-annual Knowledge Sharing Conference and with more than 100 companies in the last 2 years.  He believes that the interest in KM is springing up in all industries. And with the accelerating advances in AI and Cognitive systems, KM will become an expected managerial capability, like finance, operations or HR.

The Hidden Knowledge Problem in Organizations

Having had the opportunity to observe many conversations in organizations, I have come to understand that the greatest knowledge deficit in organizations is not the lack of sharing nor is it poorly designed repositories. Rather it is the inability to hold authentic conversations. What I have too often observed is teams and units where members do not offer their best thinking out of fear; fear of not being viewed as a team player, fear of being seen as incompetent, fear of embarrassing themselves or someone else, fear of acknowledging that they do not understand something. I find team members unwilling to say they disagree with the boss or saying they agree when they do not.  

When I say fear, I don’t mean shake in your boots fear or fear of being immediately fired. I mean the everyday reluctance of individuals to say what they know or believe, because of the threat of embarrassment or a negative response from others.  I see it both at the highest organizational levels and with front line employees. When fear exists, critical knowledge is lost and serious problems remain hidden. The time waste is both enormous and expensive. Rather than speaking honestly to one another, people invent costly workarounds, delay, procrastinate, or make agreements they don’t intend to keep. This problem is so long standing in organizations that people have become resigned to it as, “just the way things are.” We hear that resignation in the familiar phrases people use to explain not speaking out, “You have to choose your battles,” “You just don’t tell the boss that he’s wrong,” or, “Saying that would be career limiting.”  

But at a time when “critical shifts have taken place in the wider culture away from hierarchy towards networks, from top-down to widespread engagement with greater emphasis on innovation and creativity” (Gilmore) the need for making use of the knowledge of all employees has become a major imperative.

Fortunately, along with the knowledge demands made by these critical shifts, has come a richer understanding of how to access this hidden knowledge (Edmondson, Kegan, Turco).  These new perspectives demonstrate that it is possible for authentic conversations to be the norm in organizations or even within a team that is embedded in a larger organization. But they also illustrate that such a deeply embedded deficit does not succumb to quick fixes such as a simple workshop or admonitions for authenticity from the C suite.  Rather to address the problem requires a sustained focus on three elements 1) developing a culture of psychological safety, 2) members’ gaining awareness of their own blind spots, and 3) building learning routines in everyday work.   

It is possible to find case studies of organizations that have accomplished this. They include some that I have written about and some that others have detailed, Kessels & Smit, Bridgewater, Next Jump, Decurion, TechCo (pseudonym in The Conversational organization),  Lake Nona Project, The Defense Intelligence Agency.

Learning Together and Working Apart

I have a new article published in a series on The Future of Workplace Learning by Emerald Publishing. My article, Learning Together and Working Apart: Routines for organizational learning in virtual teams, is here.  

 

Abstract:

Research suggests that teaming routines facilitate learning in teams. This paper identifies and details how specific teaming routines, implemented in a virtual team, support its continual learning. The study’s focus was to generate authentic and descriptive accounts of the interviewees’ experiences with virtual teaming routines.

All six of the articles in this journal can be downloaded free until July 27. They are here and include:

Building Better Learning and Learning Better Building, with learners rather than for learners

Interactive Technology and Smart Education: Augmented reality, the future of contextual mobile learning 

Learning Opportunities for Group Learning: An empirical assessment from the learning organization perspective

Workplace Spirituality, Perceived Organizational Support and Innovative Work Behavior: The mediating effect of person-organization fit

The Future of Learning and Teaching in Next  Generation Learning Spaces

So please take advantage of these free downloads. If you miss the deadline contact me and I'll be glad to send a pdf of the one you are interested in. 

 

 

Three Books Every KM Professional Should Read

Much of the very helpful research and theory that under lies our field of KM is produced in the related disciplines of Organization Behavior, Organization Learning, Group Dynamics, Computer Science, and Organizational Psychology.  Following are summaries of three such, highly acclaimed, books that have recently been published.  They are:

• Teaming: How Organizations Learn, Innovate, and Compete in the Knowledge Economy, 2012, by Amy Edmondson, a Harvard Professor of Organizational Learning.

• Critical Knowledge Transfer: Tools for Managing Your Company’s Deep Smarts, 2015, by Dorothy Leonard, Walter Swat, and Gavin Barton. Dorothy Leonard is Professor Emeritus at Harvard Business School.

• Social Physics: How Good Ideas Spread: The Lessons From A New Science, 2014, by Alex Pentland, Director of MIT’s Human Dynamics Laboratory and the MIT Media Lab Entrepreneurship Program.

Teaming

Edmondson’s book, Teaming is one of the best knowledge management books I’ve read, although I don’t think she ever mentions the term knowledge management in the book. The book is not limited to teams, rather she uses the term “teaming” as a verb, to talk about a way of organizational functioning. The major take-away from the book is that an organization needs to move from focusing on “organizing to execute” to “execution as learning”. To do this employees must make use of learning behaviors, such as, asking for help from other members, discussing differences of opinion openly rather than privately or outside the group, revealing their own errors to the group, and several more.  The organization must provide the routines (opportunities) during which employees can use those behaviors.  Those routines vary with each organization described in the book, but examples included retrospects, planning meetings, soliciting feedback from customers, strategic conversations, and surgical team meetings that occur before an operation.  Edmondson clarifies that team members will only exhibit learning behaviors when they feel psychologically safe and explains in detail how psychologically safety comes about. The book is rich with examples of teaming, including the Beijing Olympics, Children’s Hospital and Clinics in Minneapolis, NASA’s space shuttle program, Intermountain Health Care, and many others. The book also includes findings from Edmondson’s own research much of which has been conducted in health care venues. It is a must read for anyone serious about helping an organization learn. 

Critical Knowledge Transfer

In her book, Leonard is not addressing the transfer of all knowledge in an organization, rather she is focused on “critical knowledge,” expertise that is largely undocumented and is in the heads of employees, particularly employees considered experts who have vital knowledge that is likely to leak out of the organization during transitions. Leonard categorizes knowledge into three levels, explicit, implicit and tacit, explaining that each must be transferred differently. This book is primarily about the last two.

Explicit knowledge can be transferred through written documents and community Q&A.

Implicit knowledge is that knowledge which an expert can articulate, but only with the help of skillful elicitation techniques. Those techniques require training and experience to develop.

Tacit knowledge, that which even an expert may not be aware of, is transferred through the learner’s observation of an expert, followed by supervised practice and coaching. Leonard calls this process OPPTY (for Observation, Practice, Partnering and joint problem solving, and Taking responsibility). She explains that OPPTY works best when knowledge is transferred, not to novices, but to “near experts”.

The book has advice for managers in terms of how to determine what knowledge is critical to transfer. Leonard says, “First you have to be confident that you understand what know-how, skills, and other capabilities underlie your company’s success.”  She devotes three chapters to the various techniques to elicit and capture knowledge, make sense of it, and then massage it into a form that can be transferred, with lists of knowledge elicitation questions for each. This is an in-depth look at knowledge transfer from one the great experts on the topic.

Social Physics

Pentland describes social physics as “a quantitative social science that describes reliable, mathematical connections between information and ideas on the one hand, and people’s behavior on the other.’ He builds on Bandura’s theory of social learning, “the fundamental assumption that learning from examples of other people’s behavior (and the relevant contextual feature) is a major and likely dominant mechanism of behavior change in humans.”

Pentland found that he can study patterns of information exchange in a social network without any knowledge of the actual content being exchanged, and using that data, can predict how effective a network is, whether a small team or a large organization. The data is gathered by means of mobile sensors, embedded in badges that employees wear. The sensors can track where employees go, how long they are there, even the tone of the conversation – but not the conversation itself. In one such study Pentland found that 50% of the variation in performance across groups and tasks can be explained by:

• The large number of ideas: many very short contributions rather than a few long ones.
• Dense interactions: continuous, overlapping cycling between making contributions and very short (less than one second) responsive comments (such as, “good,” “that’s right,” “what?” etc.) that serve to validate or invalidate the ideas and build consensus.
• Diversity of ideas: everyone within a group contributing ideas and reactions, with similar levels of turn taking among participants.”

And 35% of the variation in a team’s performance can be accounted for by the number of face-to-face exchanges among team members. From Pentland’s research, he concludes: 

• It is not simply the brightest who have the best ideas; it is those who are best at harvesting ideas from others.
• It is not only the most determined who drive change; it is those who most fully engage with like-minded people.
• It is not wealth or prestige that best motivates people; it is respect and help from peers.

He concludes that leaders need to focus on changing the connections between people rather than focusing on getting individual people to change their behavior.  His findings are ideas that KM has been saying all along, but Pentland has the data to prove it. This book provides evidence that being in relationship with others in a team or organization improves the flow of knowledge.