Author: Jim

The Siren Call of Proven Systems

Seductive SirensOur admiration for the assembly line is so deep that we are suckers for the promise of “proven systems” regardless of their feasibility. We so treasure predictability and control that the promise seduces no matter how many times it is broken.

I started my career at what ultimately morphed into Accenture. That tenure coincided with the development of one of the early systems development methodologies—Method/1. The methodology was an attempt to make the process of understanding, designing, and implementing a technology solution to an organization’s business problem something that was manageable and repeatable. Method/1 made Accenture a lot of money and can be seen as a distant ancestor of a host of systems for building systems; agile, scrum, rational unified, waterfall, extreme programming—the ingenuity of marketers in packaging and labeling ideas is endless.

All are variations on a theme. They embody a desire for control in a turbulent world. If Ford could manufacture identical cars and McDonald’s could guarantee the consistency of fries and shakes from coast to coast, then we ought to be able to turn out information systems with similar confidence in quality and predictability.

There seems to be an uptick in promises of proven systems in multiple settings; not simply in the arena of design and development. Given their appeal, it’s critical to recognize the limits of these promises.

The first limit is the dangerously thin data from which these proven systems are built. One of the first ideas pounded into your head when you are compelled to study statistics and research methods is that “data” is not the plural form of “anecdote.” Yet most proven systems are based on a handful of prior examples that happened to work.

Look at the history of Method/1. The late accounting firm Arthur Andersen & Co.—which birthed Accenture—automated the payroll department of a GE manufacturing plant in the 1960s. That first project failed and Andersen rebuilt the system at a loss to make good. Andersen’s sales pitch to their second client boiled down to we’ve learned what mistakes to avoid while our competitors have yet to make them. Several projects later, Andersen consultants documented what they had done and packaged their ad hoc approach into a standard project plan for internal use called the “client binders.” As an accounting firm, Andersen was accustomed to protecting client identities and to thinking of audit processes as something common and repeatable for all clients. Consequently, the client binders were devoid of client specifics and mirrored the look and feel of standardized, repeatable audit processes.

In spite of their limitations and the thin data they were built on, the client binders gave Andersen’s consultants a better starting point for new projects and helped Andersen extend and consolidate their lead in the market. They worked best in the hands of experienced consultants who could use these materials to organize and support productive conversations with clients and prospects about how to structure and manage new efforts.

Then the methodology zealots took over. The experts took the crib notes that were valuable to experts and rewrote them into recipes for reasonably smart people with limited experience to follow. Repeatable, industrial, processes promise good economics to those who invent them and acceptable quality to those who seek the outputs.

The fundamental problem is that today’s knowledge work doesn’t consist of repeatable, industrial, processes no matter how much we wish they did or how often we claim they do. I’ve written before about the problems this strategy presents (Repeatable Processes and Magic Boxes).

Where does that leave us?

Be suspicious of claims about proven systems. Look for the demands for creative leaps and flashes of insight hiding within seemingly innocuous steps. Look for potentially endless cycles of analysis with no stopping rule. Find the magic box. Be wary of maps that don’t show where the roads end and the dragons hide.

Searching for the secret class

permanent whitewaterThere was a time when I wanted to get my hands on the syllabus for the “secret class;” the secret being how to navigate the real world outside the classroom. Think of me as a male version of Hermione Granger; annoyingly book smart and otherwise pretty clueless. Classes were easy; life not so much.

Most of us spend enough time between classes in hallways and playgrounds to soak up the necessary experiences to get a clue. Through a peculiar set of circumstances and events, I was late in encountering and absorbing these experiences. My wife is on record that she would have crossed the street to avoid that earlier me. My therapist assures me that these lessons are learnable as long as I put my heart in circuit between my brain and my mouth.

Because this arena was foreign to me, I had to study it much as an anthropologist might; observing, cataloging, and making sense of what I see. The biggest risk for an anthropologist is to “go native”; to leave the edge and to immerse themselves in the action. Life demands immersion.

I make no claims about life in general. Life within organizations, however, is a place I understand. Thinking about secret classes and learning in organizational settings turns out to be a fruitful path. Really smart people, like Chris Argyris and Donald Schon among others, have thought a great deal about the things people need to learn within organizations. They talk about skills and perspectives that are effectively secrets and acquired by way of experience rather than classrooms.

Experience alone is rarely sufficient to impart these lessons; managers and executives become effective by way of reflective practice. They must process and digest experience to transform it into effective managerial practice. Classic examples of this deliberate reflection are Chester Barnard’s The Functions of the Executive and Alfred Sloan’s My Years with General Motors.

These are valuable and insightful analyses of complex organizations and executive work. They also highlight critical ways that reflective practice must evolve. It’s a common trope that organizations operate in an increasingly fast and complex environment. It’s common because examples to demonstrate it surround us. In the early days of my career, we were still converting paper-based business processes to electronic. Today, we’re knitting together digital processes spanning multiple organizations and continents.

That plants us in a world where the volumes of digital data threaten to collapse into a wall of noise and this wall feels more like  the leading edge of a tsunami rather than a fixed landmark somewhere “over there.” Simply coping with the onslaught consumes our attention and drives too many of us and our organizations into reactive mode. We become driven by events. Planning feels like a luxury and the notion of reflecting seems an unrealistic, academic, dream. Peter Vaill makes a compelling argument that we now live in a world of permanent whitewater and have to learn to operate accordingly.

We have a conundrum then. A changing world demands changed responses, yet the pace of change leaves no time for the reflection needed to transform experience into new practice. What are the elements of a strategy that might even our odds? How do we make reflective practice work in the organizational environment that now exists?

Peter Vaill offers a clue in the title of the book where he talks of permanent whitewater, Learning as a Way of Being. Learning is not something neatly distinguishable from practice; we pursue learning while doing. Elsewhere, I’ve discussed the notion of observable work as a pre-condition for making that kind of learning possible. Then, there are various techniques, such as after action reviews that should be in any knowledge worker’s toolkit.

There is no “secret class.” Even it one existed, it wouldn’t make sense to take it. Instead, we structure experience so that learning is a continuing parallel element of doing the work.

Effective Executives Are Design Thinkers

DruckerEffectiveExecThe Effective Executive: The Definitive Guide to Getting the Right Things Done (Harperbusiness Essentials) (Peter F. Drucker and Jim Collins)

There are certain smart, articulate, thinkers that provide anchors for my thinking; Peter Drucker is high on that list. Somewhere around the time I was figuring out that organizations caught and held my attention, I also stumbled upon Drucker.

Not too long ago, I added a copy of The Effective Executive to my Kindle and chose to revisit Drucker’s observations about effectiveness. I’ve been uncomfortable about the surge in attention around efficiency and productivity of knowledge workers and thought Drucker might have relevant insight.

He does.

Drucker was credited with coining the term knowledge worker and the bulk of his work focused on why they mattered and what to do about it. The Effective Executive was originally published in 1966 and was reissued in a 50th anniversary edition. It’s a bit scary to contemplate the level of insight available for the taking.

Organizations consist of two kinds of people; those who follow scripts and those who write them. For a long time—and certainly in 1966—the overwhelming majority of headcount fell into the first category. Drucker’s attention was always drawn to those who wrote the scripts—executives. What’s changed since then is that scripts have become the responsibility of software. Organizations are gradually—and not so gradually—eliminating people who follow scripts.

That makes Drucker’s observations and advice about the script writers orders of magnitude more important than it was then. Drucker argued that “working on the right things is what makes knowledge work effective.” Doing the right thing is more important than doing things right, regardless of how much of the visible activity in organizations seems to be about doing things right. The Effective Executive is Drucker’s extended examination of how to systematically go about doing the right thing.

Drucker’s worldview was not tainted by today’s slavish devotion to shareholder value. In Drucker’s world, organizations exist to create and serve customers; there is no possibility of value creation, much less maximization, until a customer exists. And customers exist outside the organization. This creates a fundamental challenge for executives, which Drucker characterizes as follows:

Every executive, whether his organization is a business or a research laboratory, a government agency, a large university, or the air force, sees the inside—the organization—as close and immediate reality. He sees the outside only through thick and distorting lenses, if at all. What goes on outside is usually not even known firsthand. It is received through an organizational filter of reports, that is, in an already predigested and highly abstract form that imposes organizational criteria of relevance on the outside reality.

He goes on to say that

The fundamental problem is the reality around the executive. Unless he changes it by deliberate action, the flow of events will determine what he is concerned with and what he does.

Regardless of the changing dynamics of organization and environment, executive effectiveness consists of judgments whether a particular situation fits within the parameters of existing organizational scripts, will yield to one-time improvisation, or calls for developing a new script.

What this implies, and what Drucker argues, is that

effective decision is always a judgment based on “dissenting opinions” rather than on “consensus on the facts.” And [effective executives] know that to make many decisions fast means to make the wrong decisions. What is needed are few, but fundamental, decisions. What is needed is the right strategy rather than razzle-dazzle tactics.

Several things flow from that. Most importantly, effective decisions require meaningful chunks of time. Here, Drucker’s thinking connects closely with Cal Newport’s more recent discussion of deep work.

As is so often the case with Drucker, his insights get picked up and repackaged. Drucker’s analysis of effectiveness means that executives are engaged in design thinking. More importantly, it is design thinking that strives to synthesize the analysis and insights of multiple specialized perspectives.

There is much more in this short book. It bears close reading and regular re-reading if you aspire to do meaningful executive work. To wrap this up, I want to examine one aspect of this design thinking perspective that appears to run counter to rhetoric of many strategy efforts and many consulting proposals and reports. Let’s look at Drucker’s own words once again,

To get the facts first is impossible. There are no facts unless one has a criterion of relevance. Events by themselves are not facts.

The only rigorous method, the only one that enables us to test an opinion against reality, is based on the clear recognition that opinions come first—and that this is the way it should be. Then no one can fail to see that we start out with untested hypotheses—in decision-making as in science the only starting point. We know what to do with hypotheses—one does not argue them; one tests them. One finds out which hypotheses are tenable, and therefore worthy of serious consideration, and which are eliminated by the first test against observable experience.

The effective decision-maker, therefore, organizes disagreement. This protects him against being taken in by the plausible but false or incomplete. It gives him the alternatives so that he can choose and make a decision, but also so that he is not lost in the fog when his decision proves deficient or wrong in execution. And it forces the imagination

If finding the time and the money to pursue an MBA is currently difficult, consider adding The Effective Executive to your reading stack and put it near the top.

Don’t connect the dots; solve for pattern

Last time, we looked at the limits of a rhetorical strategy (”connecting the dots”) as a tool for planning. There are too many dots forming too many possible pictures, yet we want to take advantage of what we know has gone before to set a way forward. There is a better way that resides in “solving for pattern” a phrase I first encountered in an essay by Wendell Berry.

During my first weeks of business school, marketing mystified me. I had a decent background in accounting and project management; those classes I could make sense of. In marketing, I was lost during the discussion. When the professor laid out the analysis at the end I was no more enlightened than I had been eighty minutes earlier.

I concluded that the fatal flaw of the case method was its failure to provide neat pictures I could lay over the dots scattered throughout the case. Shortly before the midterm exam, a second-year student offered a review session with a roadmap for how to make sense of any marketing problem. I now had the picture that I could lay over the dots and connect them myself. The faculty was very distressed by this review session. We thought it was because their secrets had been revealed.

Perhaps.

I still made a mess of the midterm.

It was much later, after I worked as a case writer, when I began to grasp that the faculty was pursuing a deeper agenda. The case method is not about learning how to connect the dots; it’s about learning how to solve for pattern. That second-year student’s crib sheet was no help for dealing with a supply chain problem masquerading as a marketing problem.

Elements of Solving for Pattern

Organizations are stuffed with people ready to solve problems once they’ve been labeled. What is rare—and more valued—is the ability to frame and structure problems so that they can be solved. There are no simple pictures hiding in the environment waiting to be revealed and pointing to pre-determined responses. The proliferation of dots are signals in the environment worth attending to; ignoring them is not wise. If we’re not looking for dots to connect and trigger responses, what are we to do? Solving for pattern is a problem framing and response design process that better fits the world we occupy.

Wendell Berry introduced the term in an effort to contrast industrial farming strategies with family farming strategies. The strength of the strategies Berry advocated came not from swapping corporate managers for family ownership but from treating farms as complex systems rather than faux factories. As a trivial example, Berry points to replacing chemical fertilizers on crops with the manure produced by the milk cows feeding off those same crops. Connecting those two isolated systems into a larger dynamic system produces better outputs, reduces costs, and has other positive effects that ripple through other components of the overall farm system.

Much of solving for pattern is a change of perspective. It starts by viewing the current situation as a dynamic equilibrium producing outcomes that are a mix of desirable and undesirable results. The goal is not to fix a component in a bigger machine but to push the system into a new stable equilibrium with a better balance of desirable and undesirable outcomes.

This strategy of solving for pattern melds pattern recognition, systems thinking, design skill, and change management practices to effect these rebalancing efforts. Pattern recognition and systems thinking are the tools we need to understand where we are and the trajectory we are on. That understanding feeds into the design and change management efforts needed to envision and shift from the pattern we have to the pattern we want.

In his essay, Berry was exploring the complexities of managing the miniature ecosystem of a working farm. Whether you call them problems, opportunities, or messes, the situations that arise on farms —and organizations—never come with labels or instructions attached. Nor are they neatly isolated from whatever else may be going on. Tackling those situations effectively starts with choosing a better point of view.

The limits on connecting the dots

connect the dots exampleI was a big fan of Sherlock Holmes and various other fictional detectives growing up; I’m still drawn to the form when I want to relax. There’s a basic pleasure in trying to match wits with Sherlock and figure our who the killer is before the final reveal. Connecting the dots is a rewarding game but it’s a flawed strategy.

The picture is always clear after the fact. But to jump from that fact to the assumption that you can recognize the dots earlier and connect them into one single, compelling, inarguable picture that triggers right action is a leap too far. Detective stories have an advantage that truth lacks; the writer knows where they intend to go.

The problem is that connecting the dots is such a well worn story telling and story organizing technique. The key to using this as a story telling technique is to manage the ratio of story dots and noise dots. Looking backward to make sense of the outcome that came to pass, the storyteller emphasizes the dots that reveal the picture and shares just enough other dots to suggest the work our hero had to do to see the hidden picture. As a good storyteller you might add a clever twist or put our hero in just the right spot to see what others have missed.

Suppose, however, that in the real world our potential hero was looking in the wrong direction or trying to separate the relevant dot from a thousand irrelevant but similar dots. Now our hero might be portrayed as a fool or an incompetent. Our hero’s reputation and future hangs on the objectives of the storyteller, not on the events in the field.

The appeal of the connecting the dots rhetorical strategy obscures its flaws as a thinking strategy. There are two principal flaws from a problem-solving perspective. One, it suggests there is a single, correct, picture of what is going on waiting to be discovered as soon as someone draws the correct thread through the data points that otherwise appear to be noise. Two, it presumes that recognizing the picture offers sufficient, timely, insight into appropriate action steps.

There are always too many dots; in a big data world we seek more dots in the hope that the picture will emerge. All the analytical tools will do, however, is add more possible pictures that might be hiding in the dots. Any collection of dots might form multiple pictures; more dots simply suggest more pictures.
Which brings us to the second problem; how does recognizing a picture connect to effective response? In our detective stories, our goal is to bring the killer to justice, perhaps to intervene before the killer strikes again.

In the world of more dots than time, our goal is to devise a response soon enough to make a difference. We wish to create a new story to be told. The dots behind us are only useful in suggesting where to place the dots that are not yet part of the picture we are in the act of creating.

March for Our Lives as a pop-up organization

March for Our Lives ChicagoLast Saturday, Charlotte and I joined the Chicago instance of the March for Our Lives. A powerful event in  Union Square and a more powerful one across the country. I’m not qualified to offer an opinion on the policy or political dimensions—although I certainly have them. I am qualified, however, to have an opinion on the event as an equally remarkable example of organizational innovation and entrepreneurship. So, I called an audible in my current organizational development class this week and we took a look through an organizational lens.

Five and one half weeks after the school shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, survivors of the day organized and staged a march in Washington, DC and 800 additional locations that drew on the order of a million people to listen to their demands. What lessons and insights can we draw from this effort? What does it tell us about the environment for innovation and activism that is now available to anyone?

A crystal clear and compelling mission is the best starting point for an organization you can get—much better, in fact, than a pile of money. It’s about as strong an example you can find of Simon Sinek’s argument that organization that succeed and thrive “Start with Why” The more powerful the message you articulate, the more degrees of freedom you are granted; the advantage goes to speed over precision and detail in getting that initial message out. This is the power of the social media and internet ecosystem available to be leveraged. The students organizing this effort grabbed the marchforourlives.com domain via godaddy.com on February 17th and announced the march on the 18th. They created a Facebook group page at the same time.

Imagine that initial meeting of the survivors planning this effort just a few days after the event. Maybe there’s a whiteboard or a flipchart with an evolving list of immediate tasks. Everyone has a laptop, tablet, or smartphone. Brainstorm a name, search for a domain, grab it, register it, launch a placeholder website and start building it as the meeting unfolds. You’re crossing items off of your todo list as you’re writing it. Someone starts taking notes in a Google doc or fires up a board in Trello. Your organization is a few hours old and it already has an infrastructure.

As the work to be done gets defined, you can see the transition into an embryonic functional organization.  Someone steps up to looks after the new infrastructure. Someone else takes on the communications work. A third takes on investigating the logistics of the march idea that’s just been announced. And finally, someone needs to start work on the the back office details of taking in, tracking, and managing the money that will be required to make this all happen. The outline of the work to be done shapes the organization and the talents and interests of those in the room shape how the work and the people are matched up.

There’s an aspect of entrepreneurial reality that gets skipped or ignored in the conventional tellings of Adam Smith’s pin making or Henry Ford’s Model Ts which is that no one operates in a vacuum. That growing to do list that is driving this organizational bootstrapping effort includes a host of tasks that no one in the room has any idea of how to execute.

Being clear that you don’t know everything is a feature not a bug and our new organization starts to reach out and ask for help. March for Our Lives links up very quickly with Everytown for Gun Safety, an advocacy group funded by Michael Bloomberg, and Giffords: Courage to Fight Gun Violence. This gives our new organization access to the knowledge and experience acquired from other groups who’ve pulled off similar events; those big to dos get transformed into executable tasks and supporting details. They transform their visibility into access to knowledge and resources they don’t have.

As the last several weeks played out, you can see that this is a group that naturally thinks in network terms. For example, sibling marches spawned in multiple cities; the sibling marches shared collateral and elements of the infrastructure, the central organization set general parameters and guidance. The ready-to-hand social media and technology infrastructure let the organization move from idea to execution without having to wait for things to be provisioned or contracts to be negotiated.

This is a remarkable example of just how much today’s ecosystem enables ideas to be transformed into action. It will be interesting to monitor where things go from here independently from the underlying issues—important as they are.

Practical Action, Volatile World

HBS classI’ve lost the certificate but I was once honored by my classmates for the “best bluff when called on unprepared” in a managerial decision analysis class during my first year in business school. I’m fuzzy about what had happened the night before as were most of my classmates so some celebration had taken precedence over opening the day’s case, much less actually reading it. Anyway, it’s now 8:30 and Professor F opens by saying “Mr. McGee, could you please take the role of John Smith for today.” Professor F then proceeded to name two other victims and paired each of us with classmates who were lawyers. We were dispatched to the hallway, while Professor F briefed the rest of the class on what what going to happen next. Out in the hall, I turned to my new partner, Jay, and asked him the key question on my mind. “Who is John Smith?” Jay’s response was “you’re the CEO of Acme—keep your mouth shut and don’t do or say anything unless I tell you to.” This was advice I was qualified to handle.

We returned to the class and played out the scenario laid out in the case I hadn’t opened. I followed Jay’s advice and we escaped unscathed until the debrief. Bruce, one of our classmates who had been at the same celebration and knew my level of non-preparation, asked Professor F how he had selected his victims for the day. His answer was, “picking the lawyers was obvious, of course; I then chose Mr. McGee since I knew he would have already cracked the case and, therefore, would follow the correct course of action.” This provoked the reaction you might expect and I was forced to confess.

The obvious lesson is do your homework and surround yourself with people you can rely on. For many years that was all I took away and it wasn’t bad advice. But it’s proven to be incomplete and the second order lessons have become more important. What’s interesting is the changing relationship between the lessons of experience and the challenges thrown up from an environment that is more volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA if you are in to trendy shorthand) than what was contemplated in that classroom several decades back.

A manager’s job is to use of what Tom Peters calls “a bias for action,” and move in some direction. Analysis and experience influence the direction chosen. Movement generates new signals about how the environment is reacting and you keep moving, possibly in a slightly different direction. I’ve written before about Donald Schon and the role of “reflective practice.” In Schon’s formulation, effective managers engage in a continuing process of formulating hypotheses, acting, and adjusting actions based on outcomes. The value of cumulative experience lies in making better choices about the direction of movement.

In familiar territory and established markets, action choices are clear. You only need or want enough analysis to distinguish between available action choices. In new markets and developing territory, action choices are less clear and possibly opaque. Action and understanding have to coevolve. There is never enough time to prepare; the world happens at its own rate and managers must act ready or not.

The value of experience changes in this world. Experience gave managers an inventory of familiar situations and responses that worked once upon a time. In this environment, situations don’t map to those we’ve seen before. Managers can’t simply select from a menu of responses that are known to work; they must design new responses fit to new realities.

Review – Sound advice on managing collaboration in teams

Collaborative IntelligenceCollaborative Intelligence: Using Teams to Solve Hard Problems. J. Richard Hackman.

I first met Richard Hackman in my doctoral studies. I was taking his course on the social psychology of organizations and the twenty five page reading list was an early hint that I might not have fully understood what I had signed up for. The enrollment was small so there was no place to hide. I did survive the experience and learned much of what was on that reading list. Better still, Hackman was THE authority on creating and leading teams.

This book grew out of his work with the U.S. Intelligence community post 9/11. That work flowed out of the belief that “what is most needed these days to generate the insights that policymakers demand are interdisciplinary teams that cross traditional institutional boundaries.” That is a need that is central to the mission of any knowledge intensive organization operating in today’s environment. This book is Hackman’s distillation of decades of work with teams of all forms and missions.

The essential message of the book is that the biggest payoff in quality team results comes from the work the goes into setting the team up for success at the outset. Getting the initial conditions right and crafting good performance strategies proves to be far more important than team-building, coaching, or process management along the way. Think of it as empirical support for the adage “well begun is half done.”

The book is organized around exploring and elaborating on six enabling conditions that set a team up for ultimate success. These six conditions each get their own chapter:

1. creating a real team (rather than a team in name only),

2. specifying a compelling direction or purpose for the team,

3. putting the right number of the right people on the team,

4. specifying clear norms of conduct for team behavior,

5. providing a supportive organizational context, and

6. making competent team-focused coaching available to the team

Much of what follows is solid, but unsurprising, advice for creating and directing teams. That doesn’t make it any less valuable, particularly given how often it is ignored in practice.

There are interesting insights that are especially relevant for teams doing knowledge intensive and innovative work. For example, Hackman points out that “only rarely do teams spontaneously assess which members know what and then use that information in deciding whose ideas to rely on most heavily.” This is part of a larger problem that managers generally don’t seem to do a very good job of designing work to take advantage of what teams can bring to a problem. Managers seem to be biased toward carving tasks up in a quest for the illusion of manufacturing efficiency rather than on “ways to elicit and integrate the contributions of a diverse set of performers.”

In an interesting parallel to Fred Brooks’s observations about the “mythical man-month”, understaffing teams seems to produce extra motivation and energy, while overstaffing appears to mostly lead to problems not benefits.

Diverse, interdisciplinary, teams are assembled on the premise that pooling team members collective knowledge and expertise will produce more innovative solutions. Here is Hackman’s cautionary take on that goal:

Perhaps the greatest advantage of teamwork is that team members have diverse information and expertise that, if properly integrated, can produce something that no one member could possibly have come up with. It is ironic, therefore, that teams typically rely mainly, and sometimes exclusively, on information that is shared by everyone in the group. Information uniquely held by individual members may not even make it to the group table for review and discussion. For decision-making and analytic tasks, that can significantly compromise team performance.

This reinforces his advice that team effectiveness depends greatly on the design of team structure, membership, and performance strategies. Putting the information in the room is not sufficient; you must also explicitly design for surfacing and sharing that information.

One of the most interesting findings about effective teams comes from research that Hackman worked on with his colleague Connie Gersick. They discovered an interesting pattern in how effective teams managed their time over the course of a project. They found that

every group developed a distinctive approach toward its task immediately upon starting work, and then stayed with that approach until precisely half-way between its first meeting and its project deadline. At that point, all teams underwent a major transition that included altering member roles and behavior patterns, re-engaging with outside authority figures or clients, and exploring new strategies for proceeding with the work. Then, following that midpoint transition, teams entered a period of focused task execution that persisted until very near the project deadline, at which time a new set of issues having to do with termination processes arose and captured members’ attention.

This would seem to contradict assumptions about what constitutes best practice in project management circles. Project managers are trained and rewarded for their ability to develop an initial plan and carry it to conclusion. Few project managers are likely to prepare or submit project work plans built around the assumption that the plan will be scrapped and rewritten halfway through the effort.

The way that I reconcile this apparent contradiction is to observe that many projects are not about exploration or innovation but about executing to a well specified final result. Hackman and Gersick’s observations appear to be most relevant to teams tasked with addressing the non-routine. It suggests that project managers need to be very careful to understand and communicate the limits and relevance of mainstream project management practices when dealing with less well-defined questions. This is increasingly relevant in the turbulent environment that more and more organizations are compelled to work in today.

This is not a long book, but it is dense. There is a lot of wisdom within that is grounded in a combination of rich field experience and rigorous thinking.

Goals and journeys

Saints John and James Church - FergusonMy dad is 96. He’s never been a big talker, but there is one story that I’ve often retold. It wasn’t one that I learned until I was probably in my thirties.

Dad served in the Navy during WWII. He had to cheat on his pre-induction physical because of his eyesight; he memorized the eye chart while standing in line. He ended up stationed in San Diego, pretty much as far away from his home in Delaware as you could get and still be in the country.

After the war, Dad went back East and got a degree in mechanical engineering on the GI Bill. In 1950, he packed himself into his car and started west to return to San Diego. If you’ve seen both Wilmington, Delaware and San Diego, you can understand the attraction.

Around about St. Louis, he ran out of money, found a job, and started going to the local parish church, while saving up to resume his journey. One Sunday after Mass, he asked the parish priest if there were any nice Catholic girls he might get to know. It turned out to be seven children and nearly forty years before he finished that trip to San Diego.

Goals are important. They set you on your way. But, what you learn on the journey is equally important. It’s trite. I know. I don’t like trite. But I need to be reminded that it is the shared human experience underneath the trite that is important. I am distracted by bright, shiny, objects all of the time. For me, this story is a reminder and a warning to worry less about the particulars of my plans and keep the human goals top of the list.

UPDATE: With the help of some of my cousins, I was able to track down a photo of the church where Mom and Dad were married, Saints John and James Catholic Church in Ferguson.

Learning is harder in the digital world

Snowboard lesson Most of us have crappy theories of learning. The better you were at school the more likely your theories about learning are distorted. I ran into this phenomenon while I was the Chief Learning Officer at Diamond Technology Partners in the 1990s. My partners were full of well intentioned advice about how they thought I should do my job based on their school experiences years or decades earlier in their lives. I had my own, somewhat less ill-informed, theories based on my more recent school experiences convincing my thesis committee to let me loose on the world.

Fortunately, I also made the smart decision to go find several people smarter than I was and hung around with them long enough to soak up some useful insight. Two in particular, Alan Kay and Roger Schank, were instrumental in shaking me free from my poor theories. Very different in temperament, they did agree on fundamental insights about how learning worked.

Learning is what happens when our expectations about the world collide with experience. As we adjust our expectations to be better aligned with reality we learn.

Schools are dangerous places for learning because they are too isolated from the real world. On the other hand, the real world can be straight up dangerous if we haven’t learned how to behave correctly in the situation at hand. All learning is learning by doing, whether we’re learning to turn on a snowboard or solve a differential equation. If we had unlimited time and were invulnerable, we could figure anything out on our own. As it is, it helps to have someone who knows more than we do to arrange the experiences we can learn from in a reasonable and safe sequence.

The name for this strategy is “apprenticeship” and remains the most effective from a learner-centered perspective. All other approaches are compromises to make the economics work or to solve scale mismatches between the number of those needing to learn and those with mastery to pass along. Anthropologist Lucy Suchman showed how to extend this notion of apprenticeship to all kinds of learning beyond the trade/craft connotations we attach to the word. She talked of learning and apprenticeship as a process of “legitimate peripheral participation.” You learned how to repair copiers by handing tools to the senior repair technician and carrying their bags. You learned how to handle the cash register by watching someone who already had it figured out. You learned how to put a budget together by doing the junior-level scut work of helping your boss transform a handwritten budget into a typewritten one.

It’s become a cliche that learning has become an ongoing requirement in all kinds of work. The problem isn’t simply that work demands more learning more often. The changing nature of work also makes learning qualitatively harder as well. This was never a problem for physical work and for much of the knowledge work of the 20th century. Nearly everything you might want to observe was in sight. You could watch how a repair technician selected and handled tools. You could see an editor’s corrections and notes in the margins of your manuscript.

As work has evolved to be more abstract and more mediated by technology, the task of learning has gotten harder. Whether we call it apprenticeship or legitimate peripheral participation it becomes difficult, if not impossible, in environments where you can’t see what others are doing. Previously, the learning called for within organizations occurred as a byproduct of doing work. It now takes conscious and deliberate effort to design work so that it is, in fact, learnable.