Digital Digressions

The Lessons of Great Leadership

There used to be a time when I was suspecting that I had a problem with authority. I didn't have much respect for my boss at the time, and in general I was feeling very disillusioned. This is not a nice frame of mind to be in so one invariably begins wondering why things are the way they are - is it because of me? Is it because of the other person? Is it a combination of both?

I've come to the conclusion that I'm just not very good at putting up with what I call the 'Mushroom Management Method' or M3 for short... What's that you may wonder and it is a joke which someone once mentioned, but it stuck with me, because it summarised so well all things I felt really sucked with the situation this person was putting me in. The Mushroom method plain and simple is to be kept in the dark and covered with Sh*t. Your leader likes to keep you in the dark (never telling you the bigger picture or the reasons why decisions are made the way they are - so invariably you are faced with two options: a) there is no bigger picture, because no one has a clue or b) people aren't actually making these decisions for the greater good of the company, but to serve their own ends and thus one cannot state this openly) and cover you with Sh*t (i.e if you do ask questions you get a random combination of Bull Shiitake in reply such as, 'you are a great, talented blah blah and don't you worry about these things.. or.. we've got it under control.. or this a decision by higher management, and doesn't have to be justified to people like you..(what so now you are saying they don't have a clue?) and so on and so forth).

Anyway - you get my drift. All this is incredibly corrosive to a team and very demotivating to individuals, because yes, you do stop respecting your leader pretty much instantly when you get treated like this and secondly: you never learn to get better either, which results in the same mistakes being repeated over and over again. Again very discouraging and nothing makes you feel more stuck in a job than not having any opportunities to learn.

There is hope though - for every bad leader there are many good ones out there. I am blessed with one at the moment and I have realised that no, I have absolutely no problem with authority as long as it is vested in someone I have a lot of respect for. In fact: I welcome it!  Trying to pick apart what makes a great leader, someone stuck this list under my nose the other day, but sadly it is devoid of the credits of the original author! Thus my request to all of you - if you recognise this list, please let me know who to credit, because credit needs to be given where credit is due and this: my friends is a pretty exhaustive list, which defines in my opinion so well what makes a great leader. Here we go:

1. Clear Strategic Intent
The ability of the leadership to set and continually reinforce the vision for the Organisation. Having the courage to outline what is possible to achieve and getting the people to understand the exciting future. Getting motivation through continually reminding people of the importance of taking the Organisation forward and giving inspiration on achieving extraordinary results.

2. Assembling the Team

• Get to know each other: Understanding how important it is to know what the team members are like. Knowing what their attitudes, opinions and objectives are as well as their style of working. Realising it is important to devote time to 'the team' as opposed to 'the task'.
• Job allocation: Having clear roles and responsibilities and encouraging each team member to become an expert in their field. Having the trust that each team member knows what they are doing and ensuring that their contribution is valued.
• Information: High performing teams rely on plenty of information. They want to know what is happening and how their contributions affect the performance of the team as a whole.
• Goal Setting: Having a clear process for setting and monitoring short-term and long-term goals. Ensuring that these goals are reviewed and adjusted dependant on the performance of the team, and making sure they are challenging without being impossible.
• Boldness and Decisiveness: Having the inspiration to make decisions even though there may not be complete information available. Not playing it safe, which is usually too late. Having the courage to admit to a poor decision, and adapting quickly without huge recriminations and postmortems
• Follower or Pioneer? Being  prepared to take a risk and being a pioneer. There are times when good 'Followship' is essential. However, most winning teams have to take a chance and pioneer at times.

3. Running the Team

• Clear Briefing: Spending time briefing the team clearly on a specific task, or project, before it is started. Not relying on 'seat of the pants' management. Ensuring that most actions are worked out before the task is attempted rather than playing it by the ear as it goes along.
• Performance Review: Reviewing performance regularly to see where improvements should be made. Having an ethos that the team themselves review performance as a matter of discipline, and not relying on the leadership to suggest this happens.
• Avoid 'Blame Culture': The attitude of learning from mistakes, but not having a witch hunt. 'Leaving it on the wave behind' rather than indulging in personal witch hunts to find out not whether it was right or wrong, but rather whose fault it was.
• Empathy: Having an ethos of genuine caring for the well-being of others. Helping the less experienced or skilled in the team so that they feel they have people who they are able to look to for help.
• Scuttlebutt: Making sure there is no malicious gossip. Having the culture that says clearly that gossip is unacceptable and if the person has a gripe with another team member then their duty is to sort it out face to face, or keep quiet.

4. Maintaining the team

• Not all are heroes: Understand that not all team members are in the limelight. Finding people who support the performance of the team and realise that some of the less noticeable actions contribute hugely to the overall performance. Finding these unsung heroes and giving them the recognition they deserve.
• Continuous improvement: Making sure there is an ethos of looking for ways to improve performance and that these ideas are encouraged and recognised.
• Coaching: Making sure that team members realise that they are expected to learn new skills and are relied upon to keep themselves up-to-date. Also to realise that teaching and coaching others is the responsibility of all, and that they must spend time helping others to improve their skill levels.
• Quiet word: Spending time giving words of encouragement and congratulation to team members. The ability to notice the little things that people contribute and acknowledging this contribution by having a quiet word.
• Formal Briefings: Giving time to organise formal briefings which run efficiently with a proper agenda and clear starting and finishing times. Making sure that these times are kept to and no waffle is allowed.

Here we go. Next on the agenda is what are the Lessons of Great Followership... stay tuned!

The 7 Must-Do's of Innovators

Having spent the last five years in front-end innovation and now moving into a new role managing an innovation process I have come across a few must-do's when it comes to enabling innovation in companies. Innovation is one of those hip words that is back on the agenda after everyone has cost-cut their way out of trouble and Total Quality Managed themselves until even the morning coffee making adheres to a strict Six Sigma process. There is a lot of expectation on Innovation to deliver prosperity for all. The trouble with innovation is that it is a delicate thing and there are more ways of doing it wrong that there are for doing it right. To keep things simple I have tried to gather some fundamentals into this post, the must-do's if you like - so the thinking is that if you manage to do these you are already halfway there to being a successful innovator.

1) None of us are as smart as all of us
Many companies leave the 'innovating' to a group of select few, thinking that only this way there will be someone dedicated to the pursuit of innovation. There is nothing inherently wrong with this thinking, it is more the attitude and role people play in this situation. Innovators are at best facilitators, great listeners and connectors who bring together people from many parts of the company to distill the best thinking from around and turn it into bankable opportunities. This is the best case scenario, however more often than not these experts are easily be tempted to withdraw from the greater hustle and bustle of the organisation to concentrate on 'innovating' in peace.

For innovation to happen and make it to the market you need everyone and even more importantly, you need everyone's support and insights, because you cannot afford to alienate people from the process of innovation by creating two classes of citizens: those who get to have fun and think of ideas all day long and those, whose job it remains to get on with the daily grind and put food on the table for everyone else. If this is the case you will find that magically, most ideas will get killed before they ever get to market. Why? Because the rest of the organisation became bent on ensuring the ideas from this select crew would never make it further than the Ivory tower. Why? Because by not involving anyone else, there is no reason for anyone else to champion the ideas in the absence of this 'special' group. And ideas get killed. Over and over again.

2) Let a thousand flowers bloom
Unfortunately this rather useful title was first mentioned by Chairman Mao and with very unfortunate consequences. Here appropriated to explaining that not every idea has to be a blockbuster. Sufficient numbers of small or incremental innovations can lead to big profits. And many apparently blockbusting innovations are in fact several clever smaller ideas combined together in an unbeatable package. So you never know where that tiny idea might lead, so let it out!

3) Innovation is everywhere
Don't just stare yourself blind at the next product innovation, innovation can come from anywhere: marketing, production, finance, supply chain, distribution or even the famous janitor who no one ever thinks of asking except in films. And I'm not kidding. It was in fact a janitor who thought of the way to fix a textile company's problem with thread snapping and made the company fortunes. The only reason his idea was heard was because a new executive joined who was committed to hearing out any idea regardless of where it came and his openness and affability encouraged the janitor to speak up. When asked how long the janitor had had the idea he replied '30 years', which goes some way to explaining how much hackneyed focus on a select few 'problem-solvers' alone can cost a business in the long run.

4) Don't strangle the baby before it's born
The random serendipitous nature of innovation is what usually freaks out anyone whose job it is to stare at a spreadsheet and far too often the rigid controls applied to established product lines and businesses are hurriedly applied to things that are only half-baked and with devastating consequences. The planning, budgeting and reviews just end up strangling the life out of any innovation efforts. Here different approaches need to be put into place and rather than focusing on how much the idea will make when launched, focus efforts on understanding who will want it, why, for what, how often etc. A detailed understanding of the insights to consumers or customers not only benefit the development process, but also highlight mismatches early on.

5) It takes effort to develop an idea, but it takes courage to change it once it has been defined.
It's hard to get things right the first time, particularly if you are truly trailblazing in a new field. Rather than let this get you down, plan to test things often and with real users - why not involve your potential users in developing the idea, this way you are making sure things don't get lost in Chinese whispers, but stay customer-focused at all times. Moreover, on another level, companies need to encourage employees to challenge the status quo, if people are rewarded simply for doing what they committed to do, rather than acting as circumstances would suggest, you end up creating a band of yes-men rather than budding entrepreneurs.

6) Lay off the financials, lay on the love instead
Interpersonal skills, connections, sharing the love - whatever you call it, it is what makes companies go around. Albeit loosening the financial measures on innovation, companies should absolutely demand that interpersonal connections between innovation and the rest of the business are there. No more navel-gazing, innovation is a shared responsibility!

7) Communicate don't procrastinate
The temptation is always to stick the boffins together and assume that as long as they knock their heads together something bankable will emerge. The trouble is that experts and specialists in narrow fields aren't always the natural connectors and communicators, patient and willing to explain in lay-man's terms what the latest great invention is all about. Collaboration is a great lever and connectors are great at unleashing this, so never set up innovation without someone like this on-board. They are worth their gold in building support, connections for the team, bringing people on-board, mobilising help, input and ensuring that there is broad buy-in for the innovation. Moreover, they are great at keeping the team together, it is hard to innovate if no one's in for the long haul, building trust and team spirit takes time and communication.

3 Secrets of Successful Management

Last week the CEO of the LEGO Group, Jorgen Vig Knudstorp, was elected Danish Manager of the Year 2006 by Ledernes Hovedorganisation, a Danish management organisation. The prize is awarded to a corporate leader whose performance has been outstanding during the past year. Albeit fairly unheard of outside the toy industry, Knudstorp has caught the attention of both employees and LEGO fans alike in addition to competitors by pulling off the phenomenal turnaround of the much-loved toy company from the doldrums it faced particularly in 2003.

Someone asked me recently why I thought that LEGO had hurtled into trouble in the first place and also what it is about Knudstorp that has enabled such a phenomenal change to take place and in effect save the company from being sold off altogether. For me there are many reasons for both - but one stark contrast exists today in comparison to those dark days at the turn of the century: the attitude and style of top management at LEGO. Let me explain:

I joined the company in 2001 and at this time the damage was already being done and perpetrated by an individual at the top of the company who had very little understanding for what LEGO stood for and a vicious management style, which seemed driven by politics, personal vendettas and basically a principle which seemed to suggest: if I don't like the look of you and what you are doing and particularly if you challenge me: you are out! You can of course argue on the merits of such a style, but what it achieved more than anything was spreading fear across the company - into every level, nook and cranny. This fear is was a kind of stifling fog, which meant everyone suddenly stopped speaking their minds for fear of retribution. This meant that suddenly the crucial information was no longer getting up to the top, the dashboard of dials top management were looking at went blank. Reckless driving is what ensued.

By contrast, when Knudstorp took over as CEO in 2004, things began changing dramatically. His humble style and openness, coupled with a desire to communicate face-to-face and via his blog with all layers of the company, began working miracles in gradually dissolving the fog of fear that made it so difficult for top management to see the status of the company, hear whether the engine was creaking or indeed pull up to the petrol station and fill the tank. In my mind, Knudstorp's management style closely resembles the principles of airman-ship that all pilots are taught: Aviate, Navigate and Communicate. These principles need to all be handled simultaneously and you cannot focus on one at the expense of the others, or you risk crashing the plane, yet in business circles many leaders adopt as their hobby horse one of these principles and neglect the rest. This means organisations limp along, struggle for survival and are gradually abandoned by disillusioned employees who can see the wall coming up sooner than top management. Let's elaborate:

1) Aviate
Let's face it, whether you are flying a plane or running a company - it's tricky stuff. You need to be able to fly the plane in an orderly fashion, keeping tabs at all the information your dials and indicators are telling you, resist sudden movements and above all: keep the plane in the air. Running companies is often similar - business climate can suddenly change, there is a lot of information to keep track of and in financial terms you have to keep the company solvent in terms of working capital and cash flow. Equally, you need to make sure the dials are indeed registering all the information on key financial measures, because without them: flying is nigh on impossible.

2) Navigate
Just keeping the plane in the air is not enough, you need to know your direction and altitude. You have to actively and continuously navigate to work out where you are going and if you are lost, you need to work out what to do to get back on track. Timing is also important: you can't afford to run out of fuel. For the financial controller, this means having a 'navigate' dashboard with the appropriate financial measures that enable the organisation to check that it is implementing its planned strategy - the equivalent of making a safe landing.

3) Communicate
Even if you are flying in an orderly fashion and succeeding with navigating as well, you need to keep both crew, passengers and the watchtower informed what is happening in order to make it to your destination. You need to keep your passengers calm and up-to-date as well as set their expectations, the crew have a set of tasks to perform, which are dependent on what the airline offers in terms of service, but also influenced by timing and flying conditions so they need to anticipate your actions in order to be able to orchestrate their own activities accordingly and lastly, the watchtower needs to know what you are up to so as to be able to give you the benefit of their experience in keeping everyone else from crashing into you.

In the same way, business leaders and financial controllers need reliable lines of communication, so that the organisation has complete situational awareness and what is planned corresponds with what is done and what is measured. Therefore you, as a pilot (CEO) need to be able to do all three things concurrently to be able to keep your company functioning and flying safely, with everyone on-board and on the ground comfortable with what is happening. Knudstorp makes this seem effortless in a way that begs the question: surely this should be a more widespread practise across the board? Moreover, how come it is so easy for rogue pilots (CEOs) to take over and try to fly some crazy stunts and get away with it, leaving companies when the damage is done only to join another one and wreak havoc all over again?

On Empowerment: 3 Key Principles

Many years ago, fresh out of school I joined a children's charity, working alternatively on youth empowerment, indicators for sustainable development, designing books written by and for kids on topics like human rights, the environment and in between all of that, doing fund-raising. It was great fun, running teams of volunteers from all over the world, burning the midnight oil, trying to send faxes to Sierra Leone in the 2 hour window when they had electricity, trying to decipher letters from kids in Africa wanting to start their own youth groups or persuading governments at the UN to give young people a voice and a say in running their future.

Those were the days. I suppose what makes it all the more surprising is that I was only 18 at the time. In retrospect this experience was something that really formed my belief in the importance of empowerment - what a difference it makes to motivation, to a sense of purpose, achievement, learning and understanding the deeper meaning to why you are doing something and how you are unique in the value you can add to something. Empowerment is not something you turn on or off like a light switch, it requires profound commitment and consistency to take root. Moreover, it requires an organisation to not just stand for some virtuous goals, but also be transparent, open and trusting in  sharing information and lastly, to have structures in place that allow for empowerment to happen, supported and coached by managers rather than suppressed by them.
So here are my three steps to 'be the change you want to see in the world' (Mahatma Gandhi):

1) GOALS and VALUES
Business people have struggled for years to try to work out the magic formula to taking their company to the next level and really breathing fire into the hearts of their employees, yet too often managers can't help meddling in everything and creating a command-and-control structure, where even the most ridiculous questions need to be referred to superiors. There is no greater sure-fire way to kill any potential empowerment in an organisation, than command-and-control management.

When managers begin to realise command-and-control doesn't work, it is time for the incentives approach, introducing competition between teams and before long, inadvertently creating a cut-throat atmosphere inside companies where everyone's busy running after the carrots, trying to subvert the system to qualify for bonuses and having lost sight completely of the bigger picture or indeed the fact that none of us are as smart as all of us. The incentives, although designed to encourage intrinsic motivation, end up subverting it.

So how to create intrinsic motivation? It's about making people identify with the goals. This requires some serious interpersonal skills and also some values or goals worth fighting for - profit isn't enough. Profit is what allows us to be here, but ultimately money is simply a means to an end - not an end in itself, so what does the company really stand for? It helps if the organizational goals are virtuous, or perceived as virtuous, in some way. Apple creates almost fanatic identification, almost entirely through a narrative that started with a single Superbowl ad in 1984: we are against totalitarianism. To achieve the goals it is about creating a cohesive, jelled team that feels like a family, so that people have a sense of loyalty and commitment to their coworkers. For this, they need to be able to unite behind some values people want to fight for - this is essential as to why people want to be empowered. If the goals are clear and the values are something people want to fight for, empowerment is simply a way to fight more efficiently!

2) INFORMATION
Lots of books keep dissecting the ins and outs of empowerment, what works, what doesn't, how much or how little is enough - but they miss the point that without information empowerment can become a destructive force rather than a positive one. Empowerment relies on having the accurate view out of the window, it feeds on trust and transparency in a company and if some are 'more worthy' than others to information, then people start hoarding it, because it is valuable and start communicating on a 'need-to-know' basis. When this happens forget empowerment. People want empowerment to better do what they perceive is right, if the information on what is right is actively deprived of them, people are very unlikely to expend energy to first fight for the information they need to do something and then have any energy left to carry on once they have the information. Chances are their motivation is gone and however lofty the values of the company, hypocrisy is what rules at the end of the day.

3) EMPOWERMENT
For empowerment to work you need both goals, values and information as mentioned before. This is assuming you have a talented and skilled work force. The freedom associated with empowerment can also mask the presence of people who aren't pulling their weight (see post on spotting corporate freeloaders)- their effect on the rest of the team being detrimental and should be dealt with swiftly and decisively. The longer people hang around who don't pull their weight, the longer it will take people around them to have their faith in management restored. It's hard to believe in the goals and values of the company if you don't believe in its management. The two go hand in hand and leaders need to be able to be the change they want to see in the world, leading by example.

So how do you empower people:

1. Give people clear roles and responsibilities and the support/coaching they need to deliver things
2. Give people the authority they need to as many decisions as possible on their own
3. Have clear purpose, tasks, deliverables and time-lines
4. Have clear structure for performance review, based on achievements, not subjective judgement
5. Respect people for their know-how, give them a platform regardless of rank and recognise their achievements
6. Information should be free so communicate fully
7. Listen to people, expedite for them when necessary
8. Treat people as you would your friends, if you wouldn't behave like this to your friend, don't do it to your employee, team mate or boss either.

Some years ago my boss at the time was a real text-book case on how to prevent even the tiniest inkling of empowerment in his team. For me, it's probably one of the hardest thing I've ever had to go through - to be continuously reminded of the fact that the stuff you know you can do you can't and aren't allowed to do because you have a manager who thinks that by giving you space and room to get on with things, they are jeopardising their own role and rank. Many years of this treatment and continuous brainwashing I think anybody eventually starts believing what they are being told - ' no it is true, I cannot do anything without referring to my manager, he is the brains, I execute, simple as that'. I mean, this is hard for me to confess but I notice the effect on me only now when I'm no longer working for him. To be fair on the guy, he did improve, albeit slowly. Some things are just hard to forget and you never know whether they are genuinely a thing of the past, or whether they will crop up again later in another context.

Hidden Talents: Are You a Connector?

Somebody came to me the other day and told me they had been told to speak to me, because of my uncanny talent of connecting people and forging links between people with problems and people with solutions. This has me dumbstruck for a few seconds as I had never thought of myself as such. Nor is this a skill people often quote in either job adverts, or even on their CVs, but I have come to realise it is an essential skill particularly when working in big organisations.

Surely enough, after listening for a moment to this person's account of their skills, abilities and interests I could recommend about 5 people to speak to, whose problems would either be solved by speaking to this person in front of me, or who could advice on steps going forward. I did this without even thinking about it, because again, it is not something I'm conscious of. Someone listening in pointed this out to me later on and I've tried to think more deeply about this to try and explain what is happening.

1. Are you curious and interested in people?
Are you fascinated by people, how they tackle the challenges ahead of them, the problems they come across, how people relate to one another and so on? Someone told me recently I do a lot of active listening, again something I wasn't aware of, but this is an essential skill in being able to get to the heart of the matter as people invariably, often even subconsciously, tell you more openly about what's on their mind if they feel you are truly listening and interested in what they have to say, rather than having that look on your face, which suggests that you are actually right now only thinking about what you will say to this person as soon as they have stopped talking. This is essential in getting people to open up, but also to trust you and the truth is: you can't fake it. If you really couldn't care less, no amount of acting will convince the person in front of you otherwise and you will never get to the bottom of things.

2. Are you open-minded?
This goes hand in hand with the previous point. I'm not saying you have to be entirely happy-go-lucky without a care in the world of what's happening or where life is taking you, but that you are able to put those ambitions and single-minded drive to one side and not let them cloud your judgement or prevent you from seeing opportunities in front of you or even other people. Many problems or indeed situations can only be solved by a very lateral view of the context where the problem exists and only if you are open minded are you able to see those links and connections. It is an interesting phenomenon and essentially it is about a fluidity of being able to switch from your point of view to another person's point of view, look at things from their perspective and maybe even a few more people's perspectives, but essentially being comfortable doing it without a fear of loss of self. I suppose a pre-requisite is self-confidence and an intrinsic understanding of yourself, so you can do it without feeling threatened or even worry that you will lose your own perspective by looking at things from another person's. But being open-minded enough to be able to do it, means you will also see things you probably hadn't seen when just looking at things from your own view and those are the opportunities, which are golden.

3. Are you generous with your time, thoughts and ideas?
I often see people holding back on compliments, connections or even ideas - not wanting to share them with friends, colleagues or even relative strangers, because of..well, I can only call it jealousy or a fear that giving away too much means they will get ahead of you in some way. This is a very small-minded approach, because people often forget that being generous with advice, ideas, contacts whatever is about sharing good karma, that is something you will be remembered for and the word will travel in the most unusual of ways to come back to support you later, whereas small-minded pettiness will only do one thing: make sure your time was completely wasted.

Also many conflicts exist because people focus in on one thing which really annoys them about another person, and soon cannot see the forest for the trees in the sense that all the other skills or abilities or good sides of people go unnoticed, because that one irritating thing. In the past I have spent a lot of time listening to people complain about one another, but again from very single-minded points of view and myself in turn, having spent time explaining the sides of the person that are not so bad or indeed have even gone unnoticed. A lot of conflicts can simply be solved by encouraging people to identify good qualities in the people they have difficulties with and doing the same with the person causing the conflict and subsequently watching a change in behaviour as both parties suddenly snap out of a locked situation, because they become aware of the mutual respect created by both recognising each others' qualities. Not rocket science but again, easily forgotten. And by the way - there is no such thing as a perfect human being so no point trying to pretend you are one. Instead approach the world with appreciation and respect and you yourself will experience the same towards you.

4. Do you like surprises?
I'm frequently delighted by the connections I'm able to think up and the ideas that come from that and by sharing them, the true surprise comes from what happens thereafter. Helping people by listening to them, giving some unbiased advice, introducing them to other people, you name it - those are good things to be doing, because you yourself feel good having done them, but equally positive surprises come your way, things that you never planned or even predicted, but things that could only have happened as a result of you initial kind effort. I love surprises.

5. Does solving problems give you a buzz?
Problems can exist on many levels: practical, social, psychological or a combination of all three. Some people can only deal with practical problems and shy away from problems that people have, others like to listen to people and their troubles, but don't want to their hands dirty in anything practical and again others like to think of all the answers themselves. Problem-solving is a combination of being practical, understanding that you can't possibly have all the answers yourself, being creative and lateral in your approach of who you need to speak to and also being creative in thinking of alternatives. You either view solving problems as a delightful challenge or you are daunted by them. Many problems can indeed be daunting, but do they paralyse you or do you just stare at them for a while and then start chipping away determinedly until you get to the heart of the matter? That is also the test of your effectiveness as a connector, because your creativity in approaching a problem will take you to talk to a lot of people, investigate different options and ultimately the buzz of solving the problem will make you want to solve another one soon.

6. Are you humble?
Humility is a great thing - humility means you can talk to anyone, regardless of rank and connect with them. Humility means you respect the person in front of you, not because they might be someone very important, but because they are human. We are all human, and being respectful to one another means we eliminate so many of the friction points that cause connections to be lost, and the reasons people often hesitate to help, because they worry their kindness will be abused. If you are humble, those concerns don't even enter people's minds, regardless of your rank.

What a Difference a CEO Makes..

I don't often praise people unreservedly on this blog, in fact I often do the very opposite and take veiled punches at business practises or culture that really winds me up and that I believe does nothing to encourage productivity or even happiness in a company for that matter. A while ago I wrote about How to be a CEO and remain human, this I confess was a deliberate attempt to pick apart what our CEO at LEGO, Jørgen Vig Knudstorp, does so well in the company and what a profound effect it is having on all who meet him, regardless of rank or role or even whether they are an employee or a fan.

In many ways this shouldn't really be rocket science, but what is sad is that this behaviour is so very rare - the opposite is in fact far more common: a command-and-control approach where a CEO surrounds him/herself with people who echo the views he/she wants to hear. Or circulating in the upper echelons of the company without ever communicating directly with staff lower down. Or caring at all for that matter. I believe staff smell this a mile away and CEOs and managers alike struggle to get the credibility they need to really achieve change. Credibility isn't something you can apply as an after thought. It is either with you from the start because you avidly believe in values higher than self-interest and how those values can benefit the company, or you will never get it.

There is a wonderful quote by Colin Powell, the former US secretary of defence, which goes something like this ' the day soldiers stop bringing you their problems is the day you stop being their leader. They stop because either they have lost their faith in your ability to solve these problems or they think you just don't care. '  This quote summarises so well what the problem seems to be in so many companies: the further company bosses are from the real consumers or people executing the company strategy on a day-to-day basis, the further they are from reality and the easier it is to entertain completely flawed views of reality. When asked recently what the values are that our CEO lives by, he replied in his blog simply:

• integrity (sticking to what you say, being truthful, honest and reliable; putting your money where you mouth is,walking the talk; acting rather than talking, most important self identity, knowing who you are and what you stand for)
• execution (delivering on promises, getting things done, with urgency/speed, doing first things first)
• innovation (creativity; creating new "meaning" out of previously uncombined well known things)
• inspiration (fun, surprising, uplifting, broadening perspective, urging to action)
• collaboration (demonstrating that winning in business is a team sport, not an individual sport, knowing how to get different people, with different qualities, to work together to create synergies between people, teams and organisations (partners)).

I couldn't agree more. He further says "The five leadership values first and foremost stress the importance of vigor, determination and strong resolve in leading a business - rather than a thinking that knowing what to do, and how to do it, is all that you need. A lot of managers believe that as long as you know where to go and how to get there, the rest will take of itself. Anyone who has ever lead a large team or organization should know otherwise. It is like suggesting that just because people know that it is healthy to be fit and that they can get fit by exercising, then they will automatically start being fit."

What a difference a CEO makes. Really.

The Irony of Perception

Last week I attended the annual Marketing Forum, which is a 3-day event out on a cruise ship -  a match-making exercise of sorts where clients and suppliers meet for a good shindig and hopefully come away with tons of lucrative business and plenty of useful contacts. This was a first for me so I didn't know quite what to expect - part of me was quite wary at the prospect of people pitching at me for three solid days with no obvious escape in sight - you are pretty trapped in a cruise ship. Equally the three days were peppered with seminars and various key-note speeches, some more interesting than others.

The worst seminar I attended was by a lady who calls herself an image consultant. This I regretted almost immediately after walking into the room, but being a good citizen and a representative of my company I had to be polite and sat down. Why did I choose this subject? Good question. The blurb explaining the seminar talked a lot about the people being the real brand of an organisation, the advocates, if you like and this I agree with. A lot of business is conducted primarily by people with people so how your staff is perceived has a big impact on how your company is perceived. In my opinion a lot of this has to do with motivation and people genuinely believing they are doing something worth while - so mistakenly I assumed this is what the seminar would be about. How to breathe fire into your colleagues and co-workers to stop the fait accompli and get people passionate about companies and the strategy ahead.

How wrong was I. Unfortunately the seminar was all about telling people how to dress, classifying people into 'clowns', 'hermit crabs' and 'wet lettuces' and promoting your own 'personal brand'. Ok there are things to be said about dressing well and dealing with issues of personal hygiene, but once you have polished the surface you are still stuck with the person within. Shallow personality make-overs won't fix the fact that if you aren't happy, productive and feeling empowered and fulfilled - your company won't exactly reach to the stars either. What was particularly grating to sit through was her way of skimming through issues of personality: you should APPEAR to have honesty, integrity and knowledge - what's wrong with BEING honest and knowledgeable I wonder. Talking about people, personalities and perception in terms of personal branding makes it sound like you apply a veneer of polish on top of a dysfunctional product where what you see is actually not what you get at all - the inflated 'advertising campaign' is nothing but hot air. I can see how this is popular with companies though - send your people on a course like this to polish off the rough edges and avoid dealing with the bigger issues of motivation, silo-like structures that promote herd-like behaviour and antique command-and-control culture. Organisational transformation is infinitely more difficult (but ultimately more rewarding both for people and for profit margins) than simply telling people what type of collar best compliments their face.

Perception can in fact work against you completely as I learnt today accidentally reading the news. The BBC reports of a study carried out by Dr. Ian Walker of Bath University, which proves that people who wear a bicycle helmet are in fact more accident prone than those who don't. Sounds completely contrary doesn't it? The explanation seems to lie in perception - if you wear a helmet, motorists feel more confident passing you closer than they would when you don't wear one. And better still, if you wear a wig and look like a woman, they give you the biggest space of all on the road. Why? Because female cyclists are rarer on the roads and are perceived as more 'erratic' riders than lycra-clad road warriors. How ironic. So forget my racing kit and cycle shorts, next time I'm going out in a skirt and wig with a wicker basket on the front.

Joking aside, I have actually found that once I invested in a racing bike I get more 'respect' on the road from motorists who are less inclined to cut me up because they reckon I'm going faster than your average Sunday cyclist. This is good, and also they give me way rather than squeezing me to the side of the road. On a race bike I have no problems whatsoever keeping up with traffic and often being a  lot faster than it because of all the traffic jams, but I must say that this finding about helmets does make me laugh. Dr. Watson does point out though that for low-speed impacts, helmets are very useful and thus kids should definitely be wearing them - but then I think any motorist or even pedestrian is paranoid about hurting anybody's children.

Using the Factors Affecting Change to End Procrastination

Recently I wrote a post on the Getting Things Done-methodology by David Allen, a surefire way of ending procrastination. Someone commented to me since that they would have preferred reading more about procrastination itself than how to get things done - which, in itself is an interesting spin on the subject and reminded me of this most excellent article by Alan Deutschman of the FastCompany. His article delves into details on recent neuroscience studies, highlighting how people change and what makes people change. Interestingly, he also indirectly points to things that lead to people failing to change, which in other words could be seen as procrastination. Let me give you and example:

Dr. Edward Miller, the dean of the medical school and CEO of the hospital at Johns Hopkins University, delivered a speech at IBM's Global Innovation Outlook Conference last November - where he turned the discussion to patients whose heart disease is so severe that they undergo bypass surgery, a traumatic and expensive procedure that can cost more than $100,000 if complications arise. About 600,000 people have bypasses every year in the United States, and 1.3 million heart patients have angioplasties -- all at a total cost of around $30 billion. The procedures temporarily relieve chest pains but rarely prevent heart attacks or prolong lives. Around half of the time, the bypass grafts clog up in a few years; the angioplasties, in a few months. The causes of this so-called restenosis are complex. It's sometimes a reaction to the trauma of the surgery itself. But many patients could avoid the return of pain and the need to repeat the surgery -- not to mention arrest the course of their disease before it kills them -- by switching to healthier lifestyles. Yet very few do. "If you look at people after coronary-artery bypass grafting two years later, 90% of them have not changed their lifestyle," Miller said. "And that's been studied over and over and over again. And so we're missing some link in there. Even though they know they have a very bad disease and they know they should change their lifestyle, for whatever reason, they can't."

Why could that be? My argument is that they procrastinate about changing - they know they should, but for some reason they just don't get around to it. Why could it be - or is it that in the absence of certain key factors, we all fail to change our behaviour or do certain things, even when we know we should? Let's recap on the points Deutschman mentions as being key to change:

1. Emotion
2. Framing
3. Radical change
4. Support
5. Practise

1. Appeal to people's emotions, not just logic
The conventional wisdom says that crisis is a powerful motivator for change. But severe heart disease is among the most serious of personal crises, and it doesn't motivate -- at least not nearly enough. Nor does giving people accurate analyses and factual information about their situations. What works? Why, in general, is change so incredibly difficult for people? What is it about how our brains are wired that resists change so tenaciously? Why do we fight even what we know to be in our own vital interests?

John Kotter, a Harvard Business School professor who has studied dozens of organizations in the midst of upheaval, has hit on a crucial insight. "Behavior change happens mostly by speaking to people's feelings," he says. "This is true even in organizations that are very focused on analysis and quantitative measurement, even among people who think of themselves as smart in an MBA sense. In highly successful change efforts, people find ways to help others see the problems or solutions in ways that influence emotions, not just thought."

Look again at the case of heart patients. Dr. Dean Ornish, a professor of medicine at the University of California at San Francisco and founder of the Preventative Medicine Research Institute, realised the importance of going beyond the facts. "Providing health information is important but not always sufficient," he says. "We also need to bring in the psychological, emotional, and spiritual dimensions that are so often ignored." Ornish published studies in leading peer-reviewed scientific journals, showing that his holistic program, focused around a vegetarian diet with less than 10% of the calories from fat, can actually reverse heart disease without surgery or drugs. Still, the medical establishment remained skeptical that people could sustain the lifestyle changes. In 1993, Ornish persuaded Mutual of Omaha to pay for a trial. Researchers took 333 patients with severely clogged arteries. They helped them quit smoking and go on Ornish's diet. The patients attended twice-weekly group support sessions led by a psychologist and took instruction in meditation, relaxation, yoga, and aerobic exercise. The program lasted for only a year. But after three years, the study found, 77% of the patients had stuck with their lifestyle changes -- and safely avoided the bypass or angioplasty surgeries that they were eligible for under their insurance coverage. And Mutual of Omaha saved around $30,000 per patient.

2. Framing the Change
Why does the Ornish program succeed while the conventional approach has failed? For starters, Ornish recasts the reasons for change. Doctors had been trying to motivate patients mainly with the fear of death, he says, and that simply wasn't working. For a few weeks after a heart attack, patients were scared enough to do whatever their doctors said. But death was just too frightening to think about, so their denial would return, and they'd go back to their old ways.

So instead of trying to motivate them with the "fear of dying," Ornish reframes the issue. He inspires a new vision of the "joy of living" -- convincing them they can feel better, not just live longer. That means enjoying the things that make daily life pleasurable, like making love or even taking long walks without the pain caused by their disease. "Joy is a more powerful motivator than fear," he says.

Pioneering research in cognitive science and linguistics has pointed to the paramount importance of framing. George Lakoff, a professor of those two disciplines at the University of California at Berkeley, defines frames as the "mental structures that shape the way we see the world." The big challenge in trying to change how people think is that their minds rely on frames, not facts.

"Neuroscience tells us that each of the concepts we have -- the long-term concepts that structure how we think -- is instantiated in the synapses of the brain," Lakoff says. "Concepts are not things that can be changed just by someone telling us a fact. We may be presented with facts, but for us to make sense of them, they have to fit what is already in the synapses of the brain. Otherwise, facts go in and then they go right back out. They are not heard, or they are not accepted as facts, or they mystify us: Why would anyone have said that? Then we label the fact as irrational, crazy, or stupid." Lakoff says that's one reason why political conservatives and liberals each think that the other side is nuts. They don't understand each other because their brains are working within different frames.

3. Radical Change is Better Than Incremental Change
Reframing alone isn't enough, of course. That's where Dr. Ornish's other astonishing insight comes in. Paradoxically, he found that radical, sweeping, comprehensive changes are often easier for people than small, incremental ones. For example, he says that people who make moderate changes in their diets get the worst of both worlds: They feel deprived and hungry because they aren't eating everything they want, but they aren't making big enough changes to quickly see an improvement in how they feel, or in measurements such as weight, blood pressure, and cholesterol. But the heart patients who went on Ornish's tough, radical program saw quick, dramatic results, reporting a 91% decrease in frequency of chest pain in the first month. "These rapid improvements are a powerful motivator," he says. "When people who have had so much chest pain that they can't work, or make love, or even walk across the street without intense suffering find that they are able to do all of those things without pain in only a few weeks, then they often say, 'These are choices worth making.' "

While it's astonishing that most patients in Ornish's demanding program stick with it, studies show that two-thirds of patients who are prescribed statin drugs (which are highly effective at cutting cholesterol) stop taking them within one year. What could possibly be a smaller or easier lifestyle change than popping a pill every day? But Ornish says patients stop taking the drug because it doesn't actually make them feel any better. It doesn't deal with causes of high cholesterol, such as obesity, that make people feel unhealthy. The paradox holds that big changes are easier than small ones.

4. Support Makes All the Difference
Even when leaders have reframed the issues brilliantly, it's still vital to give people the multifaceted support they need. That's a big reason why 90% of heart patients can't change their lifestyles but 77% of Ornish's patients could -- because he buttressed them with weekly support groups with other patients, as well as attention from dieticians, psychologists, nurses, and yoga and meditation instructors.

5. Practise Makes Perfect
Neuroscience, a field that has exploded with insight, has a lot more to say about changing people's behavior -- and its findings are guardedly optimistic. Scientists used to believe that the brain became "hardwired" early in life and couldn't change later on. Now researchers such as Dr. Michael Merzenich, a professor at the University of California at San Francisco, say that the brain's ability to change -- its "plasticity" -- is lifelong. If we can change, then why don't we?

Merzenich starts by talking about rats. You can train a rat to have a new skill. The rat solves a puzzle, and you give it a food reward. After 100 times, the rat can solve the puzzle flawlessly. After 200 times, it can remember how to solve it for nearly its lifetime. The rat has developed a habit. It can perform the task automatically because its brain has changed. Similarly, a person has thousands of habits -- such as how to use a pen -- that drive lasting changes in the brain. For highly trained specialists, such as professional musicians, the changes actually show up on MRI scans. Flute players, for instance, have especially large representations in their brains in the areas that control the fingers, tongue, and lips, Merzenich says. "They've distorted their brains."

How, then, to overcome these factors? Merzenich says the key is keeping up the brain's machinery for learning. "When you're young, almost everything you do is behavior-based learning -- it's an incredibly powerful, plastic period," he says. "What happens that becomes stultifying is you stop learning and you stop the machinery, so it starts dying." Unless you work on it, brain fitness often begins declining at around age 30 for men, a bit later for women. "People mistake being active for continuous learning," Merzenich says. "The machinery is only activated by learning. People think they're leading an interesting life when they haven't learned anything in 20 or 30 years. My suggestion is learn Spanish or the oboe."

A Procrastinator's Guide to Getting Things Done

So there we are, a week into a new job and my head is buzzing with trying to get a hang of all the things that have been done, will need doing (probably by me) and may be nice to do once I get that far into the job. If you wonder what I'm doing - that is a fair question and this post may hopefully illuminate a few things or then not, as the case may be. More on that later as I get around to updating my profile page on this blog and all that jazz. Back to this post - I thought that starting afresh with a new job would be a brilliant opportunity to start a crash course into the 'Getting Things Done' methodology avidly debated and evangelised the web over and originally devised by David Allen in a book bearing the same name. Doubtless this guy's made it big and it amuses me that he's done it simply by devising a system that supposedly is the enemy of all procrastinators: a tool to get stuff done.

My musings aside, new job - plenty to get my head around so plenty of potential opportunities to feel anxious and stressed about all the things that need doing - I feel like a textbook candidate for the methodology so I shall take you on a journey of my findings so far.

Apparently the great enemy to our peace of mind is collectively defined as 'stuff' -  anything you have allowed into your psychological or physical world that doesn’t belong where it is, but for which you haven’t yet determined the desired outcome and the next action step. [pg. 17]. Sounds fair enough and if you are anything like me your mind is a zoo of ideas that like to wander up and down the pathways of your mind, collide with each other, create strange new connections and generally think about anything and everything all at the same time. The difference is of course that over the years I have got quite used to this and certainly, as things became more predictable in my old job - I also learned the ebb and flow of demand, tasks, deliverables and that sort of thing. My coping mechanisms weren't very elaborate, merely a diary with a page devoted for each day, so I could keep a running to-do list - things I would get done I would cross out and things pending would get moved to the next day. Not too complicated and more over, quite beautiful in its simplicity.

However, a new situation prompted potentially changing this simplicity, because I have been inundated with project outlines, time-lines, facts, figures, contacts, FYIs and all that sort of thing and because I'm still new to it all, I struggle to decipher which of the information is pivotal to me right now and what is more 'nice to know' and something I can refer to later. So how does Getting Things Done work then? Quite simply:

1. identify all the stuff in your life that isn’t in the right place (close all open loops)
2. get rid of the stuff that isn’t yours or you don’t need right now
3. create a right place that you trust and that supports your working style and values
4. put your stuff in the right place, consistently
5. do your stuff in a way that honours your time, your energy, and the context of any given moment
6. iterate and re-factor mercilessly

Sounds straight forward enough, but then there is an awful lot of talk about folders and in-boxes and categorising stuff - something which the geeky side of me didn't quite warm to. Instead, there are a number of solutions to this same dilemma available in program-form on the web, so as to allow for the same recording and categorising of information, but devoid of all the papers. I'll get back to those in a moment. To recap on how the system works MineZone Wiki have created an excellent set of notes from the book, summarising the methodology in beautiful simplicity:

1. collect things that command our attention (anything personal or professional, big or little, that you think should be different than it currently is and that you have any level of internal commitment to changing)
   1. get it all out of your head
   2. minimize your collection buckets
      • physical in-basket
      • writing paper and pads
      • electronic note taking
      • auditory capture (answering machines, voicemail, dictating equipment)
      • email
   3. empty the buckets regularly
2. process what they mean and what to do about them
   1. what is it?
   2. is it actionable?  YES or NO
      • No
        1. trash
        2. incubate
           1. someday/maybe list
           2. tickler file (suspended or follow-on file; a 3D calendar)
              • 43 folders:
                • 31 Daily Files
                • 12 Monthly Files
                • Tomorrow's Date at the front
        3. reference (reference should be information that can be easily referred to when needed)
      • Yes
        1. What is the next action?
           • do it
           • delegate it
           • defer it
           • Project (anything requiring more than one step to accomplish the desired outcome)
        2. actionable tracking
           1. list of projects
           2. storage or files for project plans and materials
           3. calendar (time specific actions [appointments], day specific actions, day specific information)
           4. list of reminders of next actions
           5. a list of reminders of things you're waiting for (only review as often as they have to be in order to stop wondering about them)
3. organise the results
4. review the options
5. do
   1. choosing actions in the moment
      1. context
      2. time available
      3. energy available
      4. priority

Work is Play and Lasting Value Can Only be Co-created

As some of you know I've recently started a new job with Community development and specifically experience design - a fairly 'new' area on corporate radars, but rapidly gaining momentum all over the world as companies realise the limited growth opportunities associated with competition on price and features alone. Interestingly, delivering experiences to consumers is more than simply scripting or staging events around the company's various offerings. It is also more than merely outsourcing activities to customers and moreover, it is significantly more than marginal customisation of products.

Alas, things are close to boiling point in many industries and product categories - companies generate more goods and services than at any point in history, delivered through an ever-growing number of channels. Ironically, the large product variety has not necessarily resulted in better consumer experiences. For senior management, the situation is no better - ubiquitous connectivity, globalisation, industry deregulation and technology convergence means industry boundaries are blurring and so are product definitions. These discontinuities are releasing worldwide flows of information, capital, products and ideas, allowing nontraditional competitors to upset the status quo. Managers have to focus on more than solely costs, product and process quality, speed and efficiency - for profitable growth, we also need new sources of innovation and creativity. Paradoxically consumers have more choice that yield less satisfaction and management now has more strategic options that yield less value. We, in fact, need a need frame for value creation - co-creation of value.

Traditional business thinking starts with the premise that a company creates value. A company autonomously determines the value that it will provide through its choice of products and services and consumers represent the demand for the offerings. We are talking about an exchange process - value is extracted from exchanging ownership and thus companies have developed multiple approaches to extracting this value - increased variety of products, efficient delivery, customising them for individual consumers or wrapping contexts around them and staging the value creation process, as themed restaurants do. Ultimately we are talking about a linear build-up of cost and thus decisions on what to make, what to buy from suppliers, where to assemble and service products and a whole host of other logistics issues derive from this perspective. Employees focus on the quality of products and processes and innovation invariable entails technology, products and processes.

What if you turn this concept on its head and start with the premise that the consumer and the company co-create value and the value-creation process centres around individuals and their co-creation experiences. Thus it is no longer the exchange of products which is the locus of value creation, but instead it is the interaction between consumers and company. Context and consumer involvement contribute to the meaning of a given experience to the individual and to the uniqueness of the value co-created. So we are no longer talking about merely the quality of products and processes, but the quality of co-creation experiences. This quality depends on the infrastructure in place for the interactions between company and consumer, oriented around the capacity to create a variety of experiences. So what we are talking about is a need to build 'experience environments', places, contexts, situations, opportunities where experiences can take place and also 'experience networks' that allow individuals to co-construct and personalise their experiences.

Pine and Gilmore famously stated that 'Work is theatre & every business is a stage' - but I believe we can go much further than that. Through enabling active participation in the co-creation of value, through numerous interactions - not just with the company, but with an entire network of individuals and thematic communities, through events bringing everyone together, a multitude of different contexts that cater for the heterogeneity of individuals and their preferences and ultimately through a variety of experiences we are talking about far more than theatre. Theatre implies scripts and rigid production - improvisation on the other hand is much like play - it happens according to rules agreed on by the players and therefore I would like to postulate that 'Work is play and lasting value can only be co-created'.

For consumers the benefits of co-creation are numerous: greater level of knowledge and expertise about the product and with it greater self-esteem. This leads to emotional bonding with product and company and enhances customers' readiness to trust the company and believe in the quality of its products and not to mention the access to a community, which greatly increases a consumer's enjoyment of the product. Ultimately the experience of co-creation is markedly different from traditional product purchase and the value shifts from the price of the physical product to the value of co-designing it and the interactions between consumers, company and community.

For companies the benefits are equally dramatic and in addition to new business opportunities, co-creation offers greater consumer insight as well as ideas for design, engineering, manufacturing. Employees gain greater understanding of consumer aspirations, desires, motivations, behaviours and agreeable trade-offs regarding features and functions. Ultimately this means reduced insecurity in capital commitments. Of course there are issues that also need to be solved, such as how to interact intensively with consumers and maintain operational efficiency, how to maintain high standards and cede some control over design, how much access to give consumers, what the legal responsibilities are and how to forecast accurately - but the benefits are potentially huge if these can be solved in a satisfactory manner. Just look at Harley-Davidson.

Running Creative Brainstorms: A Collection of 'Non-method' Methods

Recently I was yet again faced with the prospect of running a series of brainstorms to generate new product concepts. This time, with a team of people I had never met before. Aside from being a slightly daunting prospect, it got me thinking about the role of the catalyst in such situations - what is it that brings out the best in us and stimulates parts of our accumulated knowledge and insights and turns it into great ideas we felt we had all along, but struggled to articulate.

At the start of the day I was asked what methods I was intending to use and must say I struggled to name specific methods. Having worked in the same concept team for about 5 years and occasionally also with other teams, I've come to the conclusion that one needs to pick the good bits from a range of different methods and use them where appropriate. Sometimes it is about combining them to create a totally new method. Ultimately the discussion about methods can be very distracting though, because methods can be restrictive - they can disrupt the flow of a conversation, because it doesn't quite follow 'the method' one is intending to use. Methods can also be coercive in terms of making a team feel insecure about contributing, particularly if some team members are more familiar with the method being used and others less so - and the best brainstorms in my experience are sessions where discussions flow freely, one sticks loosely to the topic, but there is laughter, the atmosphere is relaxed and ultimately it feels more like play than work.

Find a Safe Haven
Brainstorms are seldom productive in stuffy office environments. I must say I have very seldom come across an office environment where all the chairs, tables and computers don't mount up to creating an oppressive atmosphere - even if you are blessed with beautiful interiors, designer chairs and a goldfish in a bowl. Ultimately I don't blame office environments, but more what offices do to us psychologically. Offices remind us of work, which reminds us of our positions and internal hierarchies and also sometimes about competitiveness within teams and departments. None of these are conducive to creativity and being open, wacky and wild. Brainstorming is very much like playing and kids are picky about the places they like to play. We are the same, even if we are grown up.

Awaken the Child Within
Creativity goes hand in hand with the ability to feel comfortable playing and listening to our inner child. As we grow up, we often lose touch with our inner children because of the pressures at work, responsibilities, hierarchies, mortgages, you name it - but if you have a passion whether it is steam trains, cars, motor bikes, cycling, flying remote controlled planes or whatever - whenever faced with something that reminds you of this passion your eyes light up, a big smile stretches over your face and your heart races just a little bit - this is the kid inside waking up. This kid is also the one who will be the most helpful in a brainstorm, but he needs to feel comfortable and accepted.

Play, according to Arthur Koestler, is about an ability to bisociate - which means you are able to perceive a situation or idea in two self-consistent, but habitually incompatible frames of reference. For a kid it means he can be in his bedroom and simultaneously be Batman hiding in his Batcave. These are two (to adult minds) incompatible frames of reference, but to the child - it is just play as normal. When kids play they collectively engage in this activity and negotiate among themselves what the rules are to the imaginary world and props they have invented - trust is at the heart of it all and everyone plays their part, much like in improvisational theatre.

Brainstorms, when successful are much the same - to engage our imagination it is important to sometimes part with reality, the politics and hindrances that are in our way and simply boldly dare to imagine, express thoughts and ideas - however wild, to in turn awaken new ideas in our colleagues. Many people feel awkward about saying crazy things, but it's often less about the crazy ideas than the effect they have on loosening up our imagination, and the thoughts they spur in others, when listening openly and without judgement. When brainstorming we need to create an atmosphere where saying even the craziest thought will be accepted, so our inner kids gradually can get coaxed out of hiding.

Think of the Ingredients before cooking the big dish
Often great ideas don't simply appear in a puff of smoke, but are in fact made up of an ideal balance and mix of the right ingredients. Brainstorms can easily grind to a halt if the topic picked is simply too enormous. For instance, we have frequently found it difficult to think of the greatest new toy concept in one sitting, ideas often don't work like that - instead it is about thinking about the ingredients to what make something great. Trying to pick apart things we like, why we like them, what was fun about them, what made them work really well.. you end up with ingredients, much like what you start with when making a dish. The ingredients on their own aren't necessarily as tasty as when they are brought together in the right amounts and applied in the right sequence. Concepts, I find, are often the same and brainstorming to me is an effort to find the constituent components and constructing concepts that are bigger than the sum of their parts from that balance of ingredients and their sequence.

Re-Creations (Re-Purpose, Re-Configure, Re-Assemble)
Going back to the Play analogy - sometimes it is about taking known things and playing with them, turning them on their head, using them for something completely different. Kids have an amazing capacity to use objects in ways not even imagined by adults - a wheelbarrow can become the roof of a lair, steel bars for safety become a climbing frame etc. Being relaxed and free in our imagination allows us to look at familiar objects in new ways, reconfigure their use and purpose and again, create something completely new.

Displacements (Pretend, Project, Time Travel)
Pretending to be someone else for a moment is also a useful excercise, whether it is being a kid, disabled person, your boss, member of the management team, your customer etc. Flexing your point of view allows for new things to be seen and discussed - again familiar elements in children's play, but an ability we use less and less when we get older.

Time alone, Time Together
Sometimes you just need to collect your thoughts - many things have surfaced in discussions and ideas are brewing - you can feel it, but struggle to articulate them in a group. This is a good time to take a few ingredients, or a topic and find yourself a private spot where you can sit, undisturbed and simply organise all the thoughts flying to your mind into ideas that make sense. Initially it will feel confusing and quite difficult and your mind can easily start wandering off, but as you persist - things will begin taking shape in your mind. Come together after 20 Min's or an hour and share your thoughts, this will again spark more ideas in the minds of others and ultimately move the conversation on much further than just sitting in a group all the time.

 

And now for something completely different
Breaks are as important when brainstorming as is the brainstorming itself - don't attempt to do more than hour and half maximum at a time - people get tired, discussions run in circles - allow people to stretch their legs and move about, have a break and come back. A pause helps everyone gather their thoughts and also move away from ideas they might have got stuck on. Sometimes things still get stuck and that's where the Monty Python-esque 'Now for Something Completely Different' comes in - find a fun activity, whether it is playing with some toys, bouncing on a trampoline, whatever - but preferably a little physical at least - do it for half and hour to an hour just to break up the day, make people get rid of some nervous energy and encourage them to laugh and have fun. Laughter relaxes us and doing something completely different jolts our brains from whatever groove we got stuck in and helps us think more openly and freely again when we get back into a brainstorm.

So there we go - my list of important 'non-method' things to do to get people's creative juices flowing - and remember, if you have to think of fun concepts - it is impossible if you are not having fun yourself!

Humble Leaders - An Oxymoron?

Someone once told me I was too polite to be a great leader. Asking people to do stuff and saying 'please' was apparently not a sign of setting strong direction and providing uncontested leadership. 'Women often do that... apologising for giving orders' they continued. Their argument was that 'please' opens things up for discussion and that is the one thing you don't want when leading people.. apparently.

To me this conversation was a leaf out of 'command-and-control-R-us' school of management thinking, where the presumption is that none of your reportees will have relevant, or even useful input to whatever direction you are setting. A way of behaving, which is further augmented by the 'knowledge-is-power' mentality of not freely sharing available information, but hoarding it instead to gain an advantage later.

Can we even recognise the appropriate traits in our leaders?
Interestingly, when asked her sentiments after the verdicts of Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling, Sherron Watkins, the Enron whistle-blower, stammered something about being satisfied that justice prevailed, but unable to put into words the sense of sadness of what could have been. (Time Magazine, June 5, 2006). She openly wonders if we recognise and value the appropriate traits in our leaders. As she puts it: "We want honest leaders, who are decisive, creative, optimistic and even courageous, but we so easily settle for talk that marks those traits instead of action. Worse, we often don't even look for one of the most critical traits of a leader: humility. A humble leader listens to others. He or she values input from employees and is ready to hear the truth, even if it's bad news. Humility is marked by an ability to admit mistakes."

Level 5 Leadership
An excellent report in the Harvard Business Review by Jim Collins Level 5 Leadership - The Triumph of Humility and Fierce Resolve seems to support this. Collins argues that the key ingredient that allows a company to become great is having a Level 5 leader: an executive in whom genuine personal humility blends with intense professional will. These leaders attend to people first, strategy second. As Collins puts it ' they get the right people on the bus, move the wrong people off, usher the right people to the right seats - and then they figure out where to drive it." Level 5 leaders also confront the most brutal facts of their current reality and take full responsibility for it, yet simultaneously maintain that they will prevail in the end. They hold both disciplines - faith and facts - at the same time, all the time. Instead of lurching back and forth with radical change programs, reactionary moves and restructurings, level 5 leaders also maintain a relentless, but consistent push forward until momentum takes care of the rest.

The Hedgehog Concept
Ultimately, Collins identifies what he calls the 'Hedgehog' concept to be behind the level 5 leaders' stewardship of companies that have managed to transform from good to great. The concept actually stems from a famous essay by the philosopher and scholar Isaiah Berlin, where he describes two approaches to thought and life using a simple parable: The fox knows a little about many things, but the hedgehog knows only one big thing very well. The fox is complex, the hedgehog simple. And the hedgehog wins. Collins' research shows that breakthroughs require a simple, hedge-hog like understanding of three intersecting circles: what a company can be best in the world at, how its economics work best, and what best ignites the passions of its people. Breakthroughs happen when you get the hedgehog concept and become systematic and consistent with it, eliminating virtually anything that does not fit in the three circles.

A Culture of Discipline
Collins puts emphasis on level 5 leaders' ability to engender a culture of discipline: disciplined people, disciplined thought and disciplined action. When you have disciplined people, you don't need hierarchy. When you have disciplined thought, you don't need bureaucracy. When you have disciplined action, you don't need excessive controls. When you combine a culture of discipline with an ethic of entrepreneurship, you get the magical alchemy of great performance.

The Yin and Yang of Level 5
Collins identifies these as personal humility mixed with professional will. Personal humility demonstrates a compelling modesty, shunning public adulation and never boastful. A level 5 leader acts with quiet, calm determination and relies on inspired standards rather than charisma to motivate. S/he channels ambition into the company, not the self and sets up successors for even more greatness in the next generation. Level 5 leaders take responsibility themselves for poor results, never blaming other people, external factors or bad luck. The professional will of level 5 leaders is demonstrated by an unwavering resolve to do whatever must be done to produce the best long-term results, no matter how difficult. S/he also looks to apportion credit for the success of the company to other people, external factors and good luck.

Do these leaders exist? Jim Collins thinks so and in his fantastic report spanning 5 years of research into what makes companies consistently great, he not only identifies the key factors, but also gives us examples of leaders who have done it. This gives me hope. And determination to not only aim to be one myself one day (I can hope!), but also hope that I will be blessed by working for such a leader. Truly inspired!

Don't Box Me In!

So these things happen. You go to a wedding, get asked the regular question of - ' what are you up to these days?' and end up explaining you are in the process of changing jobs. Always a dangerous discussion starter, as people invariably feel the need to offer their take on what you should do, regardless of whether they understand your industry or not. All of course with good intentions, but it gets a bit tiresome after a while. I'm sure you all know what I mean.

In my case things are on the up, just accepted a new job, which will to some seem like a radical departure from what I was doing so far (product development), but to me is simply widening my knowledge, business understanding and strategic thinking. What I'll be doing next is focusing not so much on product development in the traditional sense, but instead developing services, events and experiences in partnership with the fan community. Interestingly, I touched on the topic of community-driven innovation in an earlier post about The Conditions for Thriving Innovation as well as the design maturity of an organisation in Decoding Apple's Success: Why Only Great Leaders Know the True Power of Design - both critical factors in taking a company beyond the commodity trap and into an experience-driven realm. Summarising design maturity of an organisation:

Download design_maturity.pdf

1. No use of design. In these companies, design is a hidden aspect of product development. It is  generally the task of nondesign disciplines to develop the functionality and aesthetics of a product.

2. Design as styling. Design is seen as the final styling of a product. The task may or may not be undertaken by professional designers.

3. Design as process. Design is not an end result, but rather a work method adopted at an early stage of product development and requiring the involvement of several different disciplines, including design.

4. Design as problem-solving. Design finds new opportunities by solving existing problems.

5. Design as strategy. Design has been adopted as a central aspect of the company's business base, used as a means of encouraging innovation, for instance.

Of course it not just about how a company sees the use of design, it is also how designers themselves behave, Lazlo (1992) differentiates among five generations of designers:

1. The first generation designer is considered an expert and specialist in the design process. She studies the situation of the group and decides which is the best solution for them. 


2. The second generation designer is akin to the classical consultant who asks for information from the members of the group, and then analyses it and gives them a solution according to her perception of their needs. These two first generations design for others.  In contrast, the last three generations of designers design with others. 


3. The third generation designer gets the group involved in the creation of alternative solutions, but at the end of the process, she nevertheless selects the best alternative for them. 


4. The fourth generation designer works to create an adequate group environment that facilitates the processes of generating alternatives and selecting solutions. 


5. The newest generation, the fifth generation, not only involves the group in the design process, but also helps the group to learn how to learn to facilitate.  A group that does so can sustain the continued design process by themselves (Banathy, 1996.)

For me, it's about maturing as a designer. Invariably, if you are doing design as a freelancer or consultant, you get stuck on levels 1-2 as companies have a pretty defined idea of what they want you to deliver and don't want you asking the big questions. Often, because there is not a process in place in the company for asking the big questions, without being perceived as challenging management and clients seldom want to be seen to be rocking the boat.

Going full-time invariably means that you may be hovering around Levels 3-4 (if you are lucky), but still seen more as a doer than a thinker and even if you are in-house, your task is invariably to solve problems others have defined. This is not to be discounted as an exercise, but it tends to produce iterative, incremental improvements to product lines rather than cutting-edge innovation. Level 5 innovation can only really happen if the company management is populated by Level 4 leaders i.e Strategists, who generate organisational and personal transformations or even better, Level 5 leaders, commonly referred to as Alchemists, who generate society-wide transformations. Both are rare, and level 5 leaders even rarer (companies who have caused society-wide transformations are Apple, Amazon, EBay to name a few).

Design is about a desire to create meaning
Back to the wedding and the discussion about my next move, I got asked - 'isn't design for you about the passion of form and function of objects?' and I had to reply no. Design is bigger than that. Level 5 design is about framing the challenges that face the organisation, setting an agenda, outlining the boundaries and axes of interest, and moving design from executing strategy to shaping strategy. Or to put it more bluntly, what drives me is a desire to create meaning. Meaning is beyond simply obsessing about the form, finish and function of an object - it is about the meaning we assign an object in our lives. Companies like Harley-Davidson, Ducati, Apple to name but a few have created transformational products, products that have such meaning to their fans that the products have become part of their identity. These products have meaning, which is greater than the sum of the parts. As a designer aspiring to mature to higher levels, it surely must be about understanding ALL the elements that come in to play to create such a transformational product, rather than simply obsessing over one or two parts of it?

Ironically, it is not my design colleagues who have given me a hard time about my decision. Everyone can see the value of it, understanding how designing with users creates better solutions than merely designing for them, instead it is the people outside the design industry who have voiced their concerns. This leads me to thinking that part of the difficulty in creating a culture within a company conducive to successful innovation is the tendency of other disciplines to want to box in designers to having a very narrow role in the wider creation of a product solution. Whether these people idealise designers and envy their skills, or simply see them as yet another discipline that needs to have input on a product, in both cases we are talking about design as part of a process, often devoid of greater meaning. Check the hilarious photos below!

How do we take the complex task of creating a service or product, split it up into it's constituent 'boxes' (i.e people who almost like automatons, are expected to perform a very specific part, but are frequently discouraged from thinking about wider aspects of the problem they are trying to solve)  and orchestrate all these to create something greater than the sum of its parts?

Users and fans create meaning, they fall in love with products that have meaning. Surely designers should aspire to working more closely with them and creating frameworks for including them in the design process? That is want I want to do. I believe it is possible to reach level 4 or level 5 of design maturity specifically by creating mechanisms for empowering the fan community to have a greater say in the definition of their products. It won't be easy and I have a lot to learn, but God forbid if I ever end up in a job where I have very little to learn - boredom will not be far behind!

Photos courtesy of Hemmy.net

The Curious Subject of Incentives

Started reading Levitt & Dubner: Freakonomics - a great book that despite its cheesy cover has a capacity to pull together facts and figures to reveal many of the truths hidden under such phenomena like why high-school teachers cheat, why prostitutes earn more than architects, why drug dealers still live with their mothers, why your name matters more than you think and why knowing what to measure, and how to measure it, is the key to understanding modern life. If you ever read Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point, which explains how little things make a big difference this will certainly be up your street. A little edgier and snappier than Gladwell's book, Freakonomics pulls together all sorts of curious facts to reveal astonishing logic to often complicated social phenomena.

Take incentives for instance. Economics is, at root, the study of incentives: how people get what they want, or need especially when other people want or need the same thing. Ironically, the founder of classical economics, Adam Smith, was first and foremost a philosopher. Smith was entranced by the sweeping changes brought about by modern capitalism sweeping the nation at the time of the publication of his book, 'The Theory of Moral Sentiments' in 1759 and particularly the way icapitalism was influencing how a person thought and behaved in a particular situation. Smith's true subject was the friction between individual desire and societal norms and how economic incentives influence how we behave in a particular situation.

We all learn to respond to incentives, negative and positive, from the outset of life. An incentive is simply a means of urging people to do more of a good thing and less of a bad thing. But most incentives don't come about organically. Someone - an economist or a politician or a parent - has to invent them. There are three basic flavours of incentive: economic, social and moral. Sometimes social incentives work better than economic ones and in other cases it is a combination of all three. A good example is the naming and shaming of prostitutes - that works better than simply a $500 fine as nobody wants to be singled out by their friends, parents or neighbours as pimps or prostitutes.

In other cases incentives, although intended to work to deter undesirable behaviour, actually end up encouraging it. Take the recent World Cup match between the Netherlands and Portugal. Here are two countries pretty well balanced in terms of skill and ability and potentially the ideal ingredients to make the beautiful game truly come alive. What happens? Due to the card(trigger)-happy referee this match collected a total of 16 yellow cards and 4 red ones - an all time record, because rather than deter players from fouls, they quickly realised that if they could frame the opponents by diving and falling, they stood to benefit. The frequent ditching out of cards broke up the game, removed difficult opponents from the pitch, opened up the possibility of a penalty shot or were a small price for injuring the opponents, preventing them from playing properly. The opposing team quickly realised the same and thus the competition was more about who they could take out than the goals they could score. A sad day in football history.

Another subject frequently on the agenda these days is the environment. All of us are aware of the effects of global warming and the primary cause of it: fossil fuels. Plenty of moral incentives to change our ways, yet we do nothing. The sales of 4x4s and gaz-guzzlers are continuing their march of triumph, regardless of the environmental damage they cause. We know what's wrong, yet we can't help ourselves. The economic incentives to change our ways are simply too lame to make us do anything and socially it is still aspirational to have a big car, so the reasons to change aren't really that big - personally we are not willing to trade the convenience of a big car with the greater good of saving the environment - if everyone else is doing it why can't I?

In some cases the incentives don't even have to be grounded in reality: an illusion is enough. The promise of glamorous lives associated with sporting heroes, movie stars and drug dealers to name but a few make people form a queue right around the block just to have a chance, forgetting how intense the competition is and the fact that only a fraction of all the willing will ever make it. That is not what we get told. Drug lords apparently revel in money, cars and women, yet we are not told of the countless footsoldiers they rely on, with a 1 in 4 chance of getting killed (which is higher than sitting on death row in Texas), peddling the drugs for less than the minimum wage per hour with no prospects of ever making it large. Nor all the countless hopefuls moving to Hollywood to try to become moviestars, ending up waiting tables and never making a decent living. The 'Cinderella' stories are more attractive than the stories of struggling through college, working one's way up the ladder and maybe making a decent living at the end of the day - the perceived economic incentives are so strong, yet bear little or no relation to the actual ones and due to culture, media and communication they have entrenched themselves in our imagination and are enough for us to keep deluding ourselves even in the face of harsh reality telling us the opposite.

Interesting book, definitely recommend for all those of you who want to uncover the reality beneath the myths we are sold.

 

The Art of the Start

Started a post just now, but must confess that because I'm tired and slightly fed up just now I'm struggling to convey my trademark optimism and hopefulness in a way suitable for this blog. So better hold on to that post until I can make it less cynical. Why do I bother? Because there are far too many blogs out there cynical about mostly everything and cynicism is the enemy of creativity so I refuse to go there.

Moreover, I refuse to drag all of you in there too - it's almost Friday, which means we have plenty to look forward to. With that in mind I wanted to share with you a video that cheered me up hugely today: that of my favourite blogger Guy Kawasaki doing an excellent presentation at TiECon on the Art of the Start.. watch and learn! Guy, you rock!

       

The Secret of Happy Employees

“The quality of a person's life is in direct proportion to their commitment to excellence, regardless of their chosen field of endeavor.” ~ Vince Lombardi

Whenever I travel, I have a habit of wandering across to the bookshop at the airport to have a look at the latest releases in a number of genres. What amazes me is the seemingly endless output of business writers on the subject of being a great leader, motivating your troops, being successful and managing the **** out of anything, whether it is your life, your lover, your job, department, organisation, pet, you  name it. If I was to judge the state of affairs according to most popular book titles I would say we are all out of control - business success is more voodoo than logic and none of us really has a clue of where it is all going. Hence our insatiable appetite for books that tell us how it should 'really' be done.

Mind you, I don't have a PHD in management science, or whatever the degree is called these days - so you may want to take what I say with a pinch of salt. After all, a selection of nifty acronyms after my name surely would make me sound more credible? What I'm about to propose is sadly not rocket science, nor is it very advanced thinking either, but somehow we have lost sight of those simple facts and fallen victim for an ever increasing appetite to have experts tell us what we already know deep inside anyway:

3 steps to happiness:
What makes a great workplace and happy employees? It's not countless training courses or 'away-days' or even a selection of free cakes and an office dog. It is three very simple things:

1. Respect - To be respected for who you are and what you know and to be treated decently and above all fairly in areas such as pay, benefits and job security. Nobody wants to have to keep politicking to keep their jobs and if you have to scratch someone's back to have greater job security, you really start wondering whether it is worth it.

2. Achievement - as the quote above, we need to be able to be proud of our jobs, our accomplishments and recognised for them, and we need to be able to be proud of our employer too.

3. Friends - It is infinitely more fun to come to work if you have friends there, people you genuinely like, respect for their skills and knowledge and people you have productive relationships with. Together with these people you excel beyond what you could do on your own and the camaraderie makes it all a great deal of fun.

I have been giving managers a hard time in a few posts recently, but that is not to say that they are defunct. We need managers and above all we need good ones. People who not only know what they are talking about, but are people we respect for their knowledge, skills and ability to not just deliver on the points above, but also to instill an evocative purpose to all the work. Indeed, the book Built to Last lists numerous examples of companies that have managed to raise their ethos above and beyond merely making money, and are heralded as some of the most successful companies around.

This article by the Harvard Business Review, provides some great insights on how to create a culture through good management, which addresses the issues above. It has been brought to my attention that the list I had been sent and was using in this post before, was in fact an indirect infringement on copyright, so for the real McCoy, follow the link above! My sincere and humble apologies!

The Elusive Concept of Success

What is success? Is success about money, a sense of purpose, seeing the smiling faces of one's children, or a flash career? Seems the further we travel on the road of life and career, the more this question occupies our minds, having a nagging doubt in the back of our minds that all the vestiges of success we have been striving to acquire are essentially hollow. We want something more, but struggle to understand what that something could be.

"The basic problem with the flow of success is that life can look very good when it really isn't," writes Harvard Business School's Joseph L. Badaracco Jr. His new book, Questions of Character, uses literature to look closely at issues of leadership. Below is an excerpt of an article on the book:

In his novel I Come as a Thief, Louis Auchincloss introduces us to Tony Lowder, a lawyer in his early forties. Tony has a promising political career ahead of him—in a recent election, he almost beat a heavily entrenched incumbent. Tony makes two extraordinary decisions. First, he commits a serious but brilliantly undetect