2018 - McGee's Musings

Review – Dare to Lead by Brene Brown

brown-daretolead-cover Dare to Lead: Brave Work. Tough Conversations. Whole Hearts. Brene Brown

I’m a latecomer to Brene Brown’s work. “Dare to Lead” is her most recent book and the first I’ve had the chance to read. My loss and easily correctable.

If you go to Amazon, limit your search just to books, and enter “leadership,” you get over 70,000 results. An evergreen topic to be sure and, as a student of organizations, one I’ve been tuned into for decades. This entry is worth your attention.

Brown starts with a definition of a leader as “anyone who takes responsibility for finding the potential in people and processes, and who has the courage to develop that potential.” Leadership is about how you act.

I found it particularly interesting that she deems curiosity to be an essential and central element of effective leadership. Leadership is a willingness to pick a direction and walk into the unknown. Brown draws on work by Ian Leslie who makes this observation:

Curiosity is unruly. It doesn’t like rules, or, at least, it assumes that all rules are provisional, subject to the laceration of a smart question nobody has yet thought to ask. It disdains the approved pathways, preferring diversions, unplanned excursions, impulsive left turns. In short, curiosity is deviant.

This is a take on leadership that may not mesh with conventional cliches. But Brown builds a persuasive case.

She has practical advice as well. Leadership is a skill that develops with practice; learnable, probably coachable, likely not teachable. Among the many ideas Brown offers are two that I expect to add to my own practice immediately. The first is a call to “paint done,” which asks for more imagination than a more conventional “define what equals done.” I can see how I would tackle that.

The second is a conversational gambit Brown calls “the story I make up…” The premise is that we are always making up stories to account for the behavior we see in others. Those stories are generally wrong on multiple dimensions—Google “fundamental attribution error.” Brown’s insight is that if we share the assumptions we are making and defuse them by acknowledging that they are just stories, we can get to a new, shared, story that will let us make real progress.

This is a book I will be returning to. Brown brings a rare blend of research skills and direct leadership experience to her work. Leadership is always in shorter supply than what the world demands.

You can’t separate learning and doing

If I’m not careful when I introduce myself, “Jim McGee” gets heard as “Jimmy.” Curious as that was what I was called growing up. Outside of family and a few cousins, there were only two people who regularly called me “Jimmy” One was the director of the college theater group I was in. The other is a friend and colleague I worked with during my doctoral studies.

Although it’s a pretty common name, I take a certain perverse pride in laying claim to “jimmcgee” or “jmcgee” as a user name in places like gmail and twitter. It’s a marker of being an early adopter on multiple technology platforms.

You learn stuff by playing with it. But learning and play are suspect activities in most organizations. Outside of schools, the presumption is that you’ve learned what you need to know on someone else’s dime. Even in schools, you pay for the privilege of not knowing and being a learner.

This model works in a stable or slowly-evolving environment. There are places where you learn and places where you do. If you are in a doing place and the learning places are lagging, you might find it a good idea to create a private learning place to bridge the gap. But the idea of doing and learning remain separate.

I could argue that this is fundamentally wrong for all organizations and all times; that the separation of learning and doing is an artificial distinction that only works with the right confluence of factors and only for limited periods. We’re no longer in one of those periods.

We’ve been living through an extended period of accelerating change; it’s become an empty cliche. This is a cliche that you ignore at your peril. The half-life of what we know continues to shrink.

Half-life is a notion borrowed from nuclear physics. Radioactive elements and isotopes transform at a predictable rate; the transformation of Carbon-14 into Carbon-12, for example, is one of the facts that tell us that the world is more than 6,000 years old. The time it takes for half of the Carbon-14 in a sample to decay into Carbon-12 is the half-life and is a fixed and measurable rate.

Shifting back to knowledge and knowledge work, much of what we knew from our school days has decayed in similar fashion. By some estimates an engineering degree has a half-life of less than 10 years.

If you maintain the fiction that learning is something that occurs in learning places and is separate from doing, then you hire young computer scientists, move a handful into management, and replace the rest on a regular basis. A stupid management strategy, even it is appears to be a common one.

In work with a university research lab that was dealing with growing pains, I found the phrase “smart people doing smarter work” a helpful entry point toward a more effective response. There’s been a trend in knowledge intensive organizations toward hiring more people with Ph.D.s. At first glance, this can be viewed simply as seeking out people with more recent expert knowledge. The deeper truth is that a Ph.D. is someone who lives at the boundary of learning and doing; someone who understands that it is not, in fact, a boundary.

When I was a student, teachers were the people who had answers. If you had questions, you found the expert who had answers. When I was a consultant, I was an expert. When I reached the edge of what I knew, I looked for the next expert. Eventually, I reached a point where I ran out experts who knew. Since I was still operating from a learning and doing are separate things perspective, I went back to a learning place.

What I discovered was a community of fellow explorers who introduced me to a new practice, which was to say “I don’t know, let’s find out.” I was at the place with the half-life of knowledge problem was being created and attacked in parallel.

It’s certainly possible to treat this spot as just another place for experts. You can choose to be an expert at the edge, asking questions and passing answers back the chain to others who desire answers. What’s more interesting is to ask how to respond in a world where all of us operate closer to the edge of “I don’t know, let’s find out.” What if we looked to those already operating at the boundary between learning and doing as guides for traveling in this strange territory? What tools, practices, and habits of mind can we adopt to travel more effectively and safely in an environment where change is a feature not a bug?

What problem are we trying to solve?

Lever “Give me a lever long enough and a place to stand and I will move the Earth” doesn’t work if you are standing in the wrong place.

It’s tempting to focus on the lever—to make it longer or stronger or out of some new material. What you aren’t likely to do is take the lever you’ve got and look for a new place to stand. Nor are you likely to ask whether a lever is the relevant tool.

One of the courses I teach is on Requirements Analysis and Communications. The goal is to equip students with the tools to articulate a problem with enough detail and precision that a effective solution can be designed and implemented. That phrasing is awkward because all too common practice is to define problems in terms of known solutions.

It’s the inverse of children with hammers pounding everything as if it were a nail. It’s claiming you have a nail to be pounded because someone with a hammer has come along.

None of this is any easier in a world rife with voices clamoring that they have the magic hammer for X.

Everybody has an answer. Everybody is selling a solution. Everybody has a hammer.

How do you learn

to take the time
to ask the questions
that will define the problem first?

The root question is always “what problem are we trying to solve?” The first several rounds of answers to that direct question are always statements of a solution, which is not a statement of a problem.

Asking effective questions is a learnable skill. I can give you a list of useful questions and I can lay out a process for asking them. But, what you really need is an opportunity to observe effective questioning in action, to practice in a safe environment, and to get feedback.

What I’m describing, of course, is the case method—either law school of business school flavor—or problem-based learning. What’s less emphasized is that these are inquiry processes; they are about questions, not answers. That makes them frustrating when you’re accustomed to being rewarded for answers, whether in school or in life.

The way out of that frustration is to understand the goal is building a skill not parroting an answer.

Review – Measure What Matters

Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs. John Doerr

I have a collection of T-shirts received as Christmas gifts from my wife. In that collection is one that expresses an all-too-common management practice, “the beatings will continue until morale improves.”

Most management books strive to offer better advice. Long-time venture capitalist, John Doerr, has been an evangelist for OKRs, an approach developed at Intel and in vogue across Silicon Valley. “Measure What Matters” is Doerr’s effort to package the approach for wider dissemination. It’s an approach well worth understanding.

OKRs is short for Objectives and Key Results. Doerr characterizes it as “a collaborative goal-setting protocol for companies, teams, and individuals.” Doerr and the other advocates for OKRs are engineers by training and temperament; they think in terms of elegant, interlocking systems. Well-designed OKRs are just that; the kicker is that “well-designed” is the hard part and it’s easy to miss that in the cheerleading.

Doerr defines the system as:

“A management methodology that helps to ensure that the company focuses efforts on the same important issues throughout the organization.” An OBJECTIVE, I explained, is simply WHAT is to be achieved, no more and no less. By definition, objectives are significant, concrete, action oriented, and (ideally) inspirational. When properly designed and deployed, they’re a vaccine against fuzzy thinking—and fuzzy execution. KEY RESULTS benchmark and monitor HOW we get to the objective. Effective KRs are specific and time-bound, aggressive yet realistic. Most of all, they are measurable and verifiable.

Who could object?

The rest of the book elaborates on this and walks us through a number of case studies of the challenges of putting the theory into practice. Doerr is quite explicit that the “regimen demands rigor, commitment, clear thinking, and intentional communication.”

He acknowledges that “ideas are easy—execution is everything.” Digging into the case studies and thinking about the richer stories that are compressed into the retelling is essential. Doerr tells us this if we are paying attention; “what’s neat about OKRs is that they formalize reflection.”

Today’s organizations and markets are too complex for a single mind to comprehend. You need to engage as many minds as possible to wrestle with the complexity. OKRs give you a process and a language system but success depends on the conversations that you have with the language.

Doerr only hints at the communications challenges that lurk underneath. How do you distinguish a “goal” from an “objective?” I’ve seen that conversation go in circles for hours. You can have theological debates about OKRs as well. It tempting to talk about the theology, but progress comes when you bring the conversation down to the level where you agree on specifics.

If you’re so inclined you may want to start with Doerr’s TED Talk but “Measure What Matters” needs to be on your reading list.

Process and Ritual

While there’s no obligation to explain your process to anyone, working it out for yourself does matter. There’s an observation from Aldo Leopold that’s pertinent:

The last word in ignorance is the man who says of an animal or plant, “What good is it?” If the land mechanism as a whole is good, then every part is good, whether we understand it or not. If the biota, in the course of aeons, has built something we like but do not understand, then who but a fool would discard seemingly useless parts? To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering.

In my previous post, I spoke about the broad spine of my process. There are aspects that feel important although I’ve yet to fully understand their fit and there are other elements whose purpose escapes me but I’m reluctant to set them aside. Learning, for example, appears in multiple non-obvious ways. I allocate substantial amounts of time to reading, of course; the world moves too quickly to rely simply on the accumulation of experience. I also try to have some topic I’m learning that is new to me; as a teacher, I want to always know what it feels like not to know something.

My writing practices have evolved over the years. I’ve gradually become more comfortable with letting writing evolve. When I wrote my first book, Ernst & Young provided us with an editor to work with us as we developed the manuscript. One day, John met me in my office. As I handed him the draft of my most recent chapter, I had to take a call from a client. As I spoke with my client, I was puzzled as John flipped past the first three pages and began reading the draft at the top of page four. When the call finished, I naturally asked John why. He gently explained that he had learned that I had a habit of clearing my throat for several pages and burying the lede; page four turned out to be a fairly predictable first place to look. I’ve gotten better at discovering my lede without outside assistance and putting it where I think it belongs intentionally.

Some find writing by hand a useful element of their process; my handwriting is both too slow and too illegible to help in that regard. What I have learned, however, is that it is valuable to capture snippets of ideas and phrasing as they occur to me. Technology makes that a more reliable process. What warrants further improvement is moving from snippet to finished product.

One practice that has helped at the outset of new projects is to write a “memo to self” that outlines a storyline of the effort as a whole. This is something other than a project plan. A project plan focuses on the sequence of tasks; the storyline is an attempt to find the intellectual thread that will connect facts, insights, and conclusions into a path forward.

I can’t necessarily explain why this works. But I treat it as a form of ritual. Whether you understand the ritual doesn’t matter; what’s important is that you commit to the practice. The open question is how to make these elements more visible to the people I am working with.

Quest for the organizing thought

I thought of starting this piece with an observation that talking about my process risked spiraling out of control until I realized that feeling was, in fact, a part of my process. The most satisfying part of my work is bringing new things into existence. An essential step is generating enough raw material to ensure that something good and pleasing is likely to emerge

The process is about designing new capabilities. The domain is technology use to support organizational performance. The process and the domain combine to define a practice but it’s helpful to treat them separately.

My process has evolved over the years based on my exposure to other thinkers and on the lessons learned over multiple iterations of the cycle. In today’s vernacular, I would call it a process of design thinking. It starts with someone declaring that a problem exists. What follows is a classic problem-solving process;

searching out the facts to tease out a picture of “ground truth,”
immersion in the stew of ground truth and the broader context, adding new morsels and tidbits until there is a super-saturated solution,
flashing on a crystallizing phrase or formulation that causes insight to precipitate out of the super-saturated solution
elaborating the implications of the crystallizing formulation for what the next world needs to look like
bringing the next world into being in thought and deed

The process works in multiple environments. It has to be coupled with domain expertise and local environmental insight to be practical

There are two elements of this process that have proven to be important for me, although I haven’t seen them talked about much. This could be a hint that there’s something to be developed further, or it may simply reflect my idiosyncratic perspective. The first has to do with the step I’ve described as “immersion.” I think of it as a deliberate practice of staying in the question rather than pushing on quickly to old answers we find comfortable.

The danger of staying in the question, of course, is that you never move on; something that others warn against as “analysis paralysis.” This leads to that second element. My signal to move on in the process is when I hit on a short phrase that encapsulates my take.

For example, I was working with the director of a university research lab who was wrestling with the problem of how to better manage a group of professors, post-docs, and research analysts that had grown rapidly. After an initial round of interviews, I was reviewing my raw interview notes to see what I might have learned. The phrase that popped into my head was that the Lab Director was asking how could we help “smart people do smarter work.” Nothing exotic and certainly nothing Pulitzer Prize worthy, yet it was a signal to me that I had found a thread I could now work with.

The Persistent Myth of Five Year Plans

I marvel that the myth of the 5-year plan persists. Without the invention of the spreadsheet it might have already passed away. You would think that the “success” of 5-year plans in the former Soviet Union would have been a better clue. Regardless, managers continue to stress over their ability to predict the future and manage to those predictions.

There are only two ways to make plans that can survive a 5-year test. One is to operate in a stable/stagnant enough environment that the future can be seen in today’s reality. The second is to take so few risks that you convert your local environment into something that can pass for stable.

Smart organizations and smart managers approach planning differently. When we started Diamond in 1994 we talked about our 23 and 1/2 year plan. This “plan” was a simple picture that showed 3 1/2 years of high growth followed by a 20-year line of sustained, steady, growth. The point of that simple picture was to set a shared direction. The first task was to establish an organization and a culture. The second was to manage that organization for the long term.

There was no way and no point to make or believe predictions about what we would be doing in 5 years. But our aspirations gave us insights into the organizational capabilities we needed to build. Without the sense of direction, we would have no way to make choices about what to work on and what to ignore.

We were indeed trying to build a business but there were also insights to take over into building a body of work perspective. Chief among them was to focus on the skills and capabilities we needed to develop. Planning was about understanding the skills we had and the skills we hoped to develop next. If you have choices about what projects to take on, then one filter is what new paths does each project open up.

Questions about questions

One of my professors, Warren McFarlan, made an observation about the choice of questions that has stuck with me. He argued that you could either ask questions that would get you published or you could ask questions that mattered.

He might have been a bit more diplomatic in his phrasing but that was the essence. Were you going to be driven by safety or by curiosity?

Most of education and society drives our questions to safety. We learn which questions lead to the answers that our teachers and managers are looking for. “Will this be on the test?” is the default question. The ways we suppress curiosity while pretending to encourage it are limitless.

I had a classmate in business school who liked to chat with our professors after class, which earned him a reputation as a brown noser. The notion that you might be genuinely curious about the subject was a foreign concept to most of our classmates. I got to know Phil as the year went on and discovered that he already had a Ph.D. in the History and Philosophy of Science. I may have been the only one in our section that he revealed this to; he believed, rightly I suspect, that this would only brand him further.

Curiosity is a dangerous value; it has killed more than cats. Suppose you also believe it is important regardless of the risks. How do you encourage, promote, and nourish real curiosity in environments that fear and suppress it?

How do you learn to ask questions that matter?

I’m making a claim here that I’ve avoided this problem and navigated the system with my curiosity intact. How did I manage that? More importantly, are there any lessons to learn?

School was a place where most things came pretty easy. But the culture still rewarded right answers and compliant behavior. As I listen to others tell tales of the pressures to achieve they faced from parents and teachers, they strike me as foreign. I was certainly praised when I did well, but I never felt pressured. My mom was always a believer. She was pleased with my results. But, she never talked about expectations. I imagine that with my six younger siblings to wrangle she was mostly relieved that I was operating on my own.

Looking back, my dad was pretty tricky. It was never “were you the best?” The question was “does this represent your best work?” If the answer was yes, the actual grade was immaterial; if the answer was no, then an A was no defense. That got me through high school and by the time I reached college I was comfortable chasing my interests instead of grades. I took courses based on my interests at the time, not based on my grade point average. As I often tell my students today, I managed to collect at least one of every possible grade.

Grades served as feedback, not measures of my value.

My work in the theater taught a second important lesson. Working on stage productions was always about scarce resources and hard deadlines. You can generally negotiate an extension on a class assignment; you can’t move opening night. On a show, the question is always “does this make what the audience sees better?” That leads to a second question, “if the audience can’t see it, why are you doing it?” There’s no good reason to paint the back side of a set.

The question is not about effort; it’s about value. We track effort because we can’t always wait to measure value; effort can be an appropriate early warning signal. Demanding maximum effort is a lazy manager’s way to avoid thinking about the value you are seeking to create.

The old adage is “if something is worth doing, it’s worth doing well.” I encountered an improved version on the bulletin board of a doctor friend:

If something is worth doing, it’s worth doing well enough for the purpose at hand. It is probably wrong, and certainly foolish, to do it any better.”

Throwing resources at problems is rarely an effective strategy despite the frequency with which it is employed. Acceptable as a strategy if you are resource rich, questionable if the problems and opportunities exceed the resources available. Getting the most leverage out of resources starts with learning how to ask better questions.

Dangerous magic–casting technology spells without understanding

I just gobbled up Charles Stross’s The Labyrinth Index, which is the 9^th book in his Laundry Files series. The series is the hybrid that might result if you threw Ian Fleming’s, Robert Heinlein’s, and H.P. Lovecraft’s fiction into a blender. I love it; your mileage may vary.

The underlying premise of the series is that computation and applied mathematics is magic. Not magic in a metaphorical sense; real magic that can unleash demons and eat souls. The Laundry is secret British organization that tries to keep the average computer science student or random hacker from accidentally destroying the universe.

In my last post I talked about understanding the magic in technology. I remain puzzled by people who are content to not understand, who are content to accept something as mysterious and get on with it. As we continue to build and deploy technology we are putting magic in the hands of many who can inadvertently wreak havoc.

More often than not, they inflict harm only on themselves. But that is small comfort. Consider the example of the Morris Worm that crippled the early Internet because of a programming error that turned an unwise experiment into a catastrophe.

Clarke’s Third Law posits that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Gregory Benford, another science fiction author suggested the variation, “any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.”

Those who market technology are fond of promising magic. Too many individuals and organizations treat that claim as operational guidance rather than puffery. Stross offers a reminder that we do so at significant risk. The answer lies not in further insulating people from the technology they employ, but in working to reduce the magic factor. We have to get better at making the technology beneath the magic accessible and understandable.

Understanding and explaining the magic

Skokie Benefit Rehearsal 2003 The place where technology, organizations, and people come together has been a continuing focus of my work. That interest was birthed in stories of the wonders and dangers of fantastic new inventions. Like a lot of future scientists and engineers I was raised on the stories of Isaac Asimov, Arthur C . Clarke, and Robert Heinlein.

Somewhere in my early, unsupervised, reading I encountered Arthur C. Clarke’s “Profiles of the Future,” long before I was mature enough to grasp much of it. I’ve since returned to it multiple times over the years. One thing stuck from the earliest, Clarke’s Third Law:

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic

That notion gestated in the back of my mind as two strands played out. First, I encountered and learned about technology in multiple manifestations; mathematics, physics, carpentry, programming, electricity.

Second, I created magic in the form of live theater. Group effort focused on creating illusions that touched the heart observed from a spot where all the illusion was exposed. It’s an odd experience to watch a singer bring an audience to tears while listening for the key change that is the cue to dim the lights and adjust their color; all of which reinforces her voice and triggers those tears night after night.

Where this has taken me is showing people that the magic is understandable. Revealing the technology that creates the magic gives people power to create their own magic and power lets you solve problems.

There is a moral question of whether you hoard or distribute power. I land on the distributing side; the problems we face need all the power we can collectively muster. Hoarding crimps the flow of total power we need.

You transform magic into technology in stages. The first is to shift perspective and take people behind the scenes. That involves telling the story twice; once from the magic side and again from the technology side. Next, you break down the experience into its component parts and reveal the seams. Finally, you help people learn to create and assemble their own designed experiences.

The venue for this transformation can take multiple forms. It can be as simple as a telling of the tale from the right perspective. Or, it can be a guided tour. With enough time and resources, the best choice can be a “build your own” experience with a veteran guide at your side.