Category: Knowledge work

My sister-in-law and her husband owned a retail business for 45 years in the town where they, and my wife, grew up. Conversations at their dinner table often revolved around people they went to elementary school with and still interact with.

This mystified me for years. When I married into that family, I had lived in over twenty different places. Outside of my immediate family, I had no connections to the people I had grown up with. I’m not sure I had the concept of having grown up with someone who wasn’t family.

I’ve heard it said that the vast majority of humankind is born, lives, and dies within 25 miles of their birthplace. I understood this as an intellectual datapoint. Not so much as an emotional anchor.

Charlotte and I have been married for coming up on 39 years. We’ve had multiple addresses over that span. Most recently, we’ve been living in Nazaré, Portugal.

The cliche here would be that we have each other as anchors. While there’s certainly truth to that, the more interesting observation is that we’ve been part of two church communities. Ten years in Boston, Twenty seven in Chicago. Mainline Protestant (despite, or perhaps because of, my Roman Catholic upbringing). Neither the theology or the liturgy are central. What is central is a commitment to making community work.

I’m pretty sure you can’t be effective without community. You need something that resembles the history and connections that my sister and brother-in-law take for granted. You have to be able to predict how others will react to the unexpected. It takes time and effort to build and maintain community. Organizations are reluctant to invest in the long slow work of building community and resilience.

Organizations prefer to deal with the unexpected by eliminating it. This is the false appeal of efficiency. Lock everything down and define every response. The universe, however, insists on being unpredictable.

Our family moved to St. Louis in the Fall of 1964. I was 11. Mostly this was hugely disruptive for a bookish, introverted pre-teen. A year later, I was switched from the parochial school just up the hill to a private all-boys school, a 40-minute drive away.

One of the saving graces in all of this turmoil was my dad’s new job. He had moved to St. Louis to become one of the lead test engineers for the Gemini spacecraft built by McDonnell Aircraft.

How could it get any better for someone absorbing every science fiction title he could lay his hands on at the local public library? Everyone was following the space program. My dad was part of it. I had pictures of him working with the Mercury and Gemini astronauts. I was a nerd before there was a word for it.

All of this directed my gaze outward. Not terribly unusual for a young boy in that time and place. What I also had was a glimpse at the complexity behind the scenes. Everyone saw the show on TV. I saw the testing and rehearsal and adapting that happened before or on the side. I didn’t have the words or the concepts for it at the time, but these were the seeds that grew into my fascination with innovation and creation.

Efficiency is boring. It’s interesting only to those who like piling things (money) up. Efficiency is isolating and inward looking. It stops at the edge of the system. You can’t even begin to think about it until you’ve worked out all the hard (and, therefore, interesting) problems.

The first few times you try anything new, you have to settle for effectiveness. Did it work?

That means looking at the bigger picture. How does this new thing fit in with and interact with the larger system? Effectiveness is about constantly running experiments in the real world. Can you make some predictions about what might happen next? What potential catastrophes do you have to guard against?

To me, I’ve always been mystified by those people who settle for efficiency. Who are content to do the same thing once again. Where’s the fun in that?

You get the behaviors that you reward. A truism of management.

A quick glance at my resume would persuade most people that I’m book smart. I got rewarded for doing things that schools find easy to reward; taking tests, making the teacher look good, saying clever things (at the appropriate time and place). So I continued to do those things.

There’s an implicit (and unexamined) assumption that the things that get rewarded correlate with underlying knowledge and skills in a broader way. Doing well on the tests was taken as a marker that you were putting in the necessary work employing (and developing) the more general learning and study skills that would stand you in good stead later on. Not necessarily the case. I got a lot of things on raw horsepower rather than on good work habits.

Other elements of the surrounding environment are meant to provide guard rails. Study groups, working with fellow students on problem sets, socializing with the group who had ways to police those who varied too far from the norms. For a variety of reasons that don’t bear on this tale, those other elements didn’t apply to my circumstances. I wasn’t part of the “classes” that took place outside of the classroom. I was in front of a pack that I didn’t know existed.

For a long time, I found myself in settings where I could prosper operating inside of systems that I couldn’t see. I would hit speed bumps that I attributed to other people being stupid or to me not being smart enough to outthink the problem. I was glib enough to talk my way out of most of the problems I found my way into. I wasn’t insightful enough to see how many of those problems were of my own creation.

I started building a theory built around stupid people and how to avoid them. There is enough actual stupidity in the world to make this a dangerously seductive theory. Fortunately, as a scientist at heart, I was committed to following the evidence. Everyone else couldn’t be consistently that stupid. It wasn’t stupid people, it was me being people stupid.

There’s a longer version of the quest to follow this line of thought. For now, it’s enough to note that looking inward was the essential step. For all that I was a quick study in knowledge intensive settings, I was slow to grasp how to navigate this terrain. The tests weren’t something I could power my way through. Not alone. I had work to do on learning to balance my head with my heart. Complicating that was an additional factor; attention deficit disorder. We can save the discussion of whether ADD is over diagnosed or not really a disorder. What was important to me was learning that there were things others found easy that I found nearly impossible. Raw IQ points and a quick wit were not the answer to every problem.

I didn’t discover any of this until well into my career. Raw IQ points and a quick wit can take you a long ways. Just not all the way. I’m still working to develop skills and compensating techniques to deal with the limitations of my brain.

The essential step to dealing with any problem effectively is to be able to name it.

Alan Kay has been one of my heroes for a long time. Feel free to Google him if the name doesn’t trigger anything for you. One of my favorite Alan stories comes from his early days at Xerox PARC. Xerox PARC comes from the days when smart organizations carefully walled off the crazies from the rest of the organization in search of new ideas.

Xerox PARC was situated in the heart of Silicon Valley, a continent away from Xerox headquarters in Connecticut. A team of executives was on site to review the work going on in Palo Alto. Alan and his team of software engineers walked through one of the research projects underway. Alan carefully explained that this was ongoing research; experiments were as likely to fail as to succeed and the goal was to learn something interesting that might lead to the next experiment.

The suit from Stamford nodded along in approval. His closing remark was “I understand, but you’re only running the experiments that succeed, right?” In his universe, “failure is not an option” was not a motivational challenge, it was a risk to be avoided at any cost.

If you commit to the path of asking questions, you also commit to the reality that you often won’t get answers. You’ll certainly get answers you don’t want.

The false promise of efficiency is that you can guarantee control. You carefully limit the questions and the answers to obtain that control. And, that can work for a time. If nothing important changes.

Reorienting from efficiency to effectiveness is, at heart, accepting that important change always happens. There are no guaranteed answers but you have to keep asking the questions anyway. Your only salvation is developing deeper skill at asking more effective questions.

I’ve spent a lot of time in and around theaters, most of it behind the scenes. Everything you do is about the experience you want to evoke from the audience.

There’s no point to paint the back of a set.

If the audience can’t see it, it doesn’t exist. You often spend a good bit of time figuring out “sight lines.” Can everyone in the audience see what you want them to see? Not see what you want to conceal?

This is at the heart of learning to be effective. What is the end effect you want to accomplish.

I went to business school long enough ago that Fed Ex was still a relatively new company. We had a case study in our marketing class about the rollout of a new service called the Courier Pak (Yes, this was a long time ago).

Someone in the class thought it would be a clever idea to send a Courier Pak to our marketing professor. It would contain items from earlier case studies. We went to the local Fed Ex office to arrange to send the package and have it delivered during the next day’s class session.

The manager of the local Fed Ex office was a very smart person. Rather than send the package through the Fed Ex system and risk a late delivery, they stored the package in the safe overnight and delivered it personally to class the next day. We got our joke and Fed Ex protected its image. Actually sending the package was an unnecessary risk.

The first step is always to work out what the problem actually is.

Back in the mid-1980s I was running an internal project for the consulting arm of Arthur Andersen & Co, before it split off to morph into Andersen Consulting and then Accenture. We were creating a system development center to provide all of the tools and facilities to support large scale systems implementation projects. This was in the day when serious development was done on mainframe computers and setting up an environment for productive work could chew up a lot of time and fees without adding value for Andersen or its clients. The centers turned out to be a successful venture for several years.

Setting up the first one was a large scale project management problem in its own right. There were some challenges in creating a work plan and work breakdown structure for something that hadn’t been done before, but nothing out of the ordinary.

One odd conversation from that effort still sticks with me. It was Monday morning, well before 8AM, and I was parked in a partner’s office. I had learned that the only way to guarantee Mel’s attention was to catch him before he got wrapped up in anything else. He rolled in a short time later and the conversation unfolded like this:

Me: I’ve been going over the project plans for the development center. We’re on track, but I’m worried about the scheduled install of the mainframe next month.

Mel: So?

Me: Do we deal with it now or wait until it’s a full blown crisis?

Mel: Wait until it’s a crisis

You need to understand that Mel was an excellent manager and leader.

I was greatly puzzled.

Isn’t management supposed to be about anticipating problems and dealing with them before they get out of hand?

Working out why Mel was right and I was missing a bigger picture took me back to graduate school and eventually a Ph.D. in organizational design and innovation. It isn’t enough to have the right answer for the problem at hand. The right answer, deployed at the right time, gives you the opportunity to continue to play the game. Eventually, it may give you the opportunity to shape the game to make it a better game.

It was an actual shower aha moment.

My business card said that I was the Chief Knowledge Officer for the hot consulting firm. We had a NY Times bestseller on how to compete with this new thing called the Internet. We had our pick of clients and our pick of MBA graduates. In seven years we had grown from 25 people to over a thousand.

I was trying to solve the problem that all knowledge management people were fighting. How do you get smart people to share what they knew with the other smart people in the organization? Incentives didn’t seem to work. Neither did measurement and reporting systems. Or formal systems and practices.

One morning in the shower it hit me. I was the problem. Not that I was doing a bad job as CKO for the organization. I was doing a bad job as a knowledge worker sharing knowledge with myself. Until I could share knowledge with myself, I wasn’t likely to share it with anyone else.

The smart people in my organization weren’t hoarding knowledge out of some Machiavellian desire to enhance their position. At best, they were struggling to identify what it was they knew that was worth sharing. At worst, they were embarrassed at how woefully haphazard their personal practices and systems were at surfacing knowledge and insights that felt worthy of sharing.

Adopting a new perspective on a problem sets off a chain of reasoning. Knowledge management as a personal problem rather than an organizational one pushes you away from questions of efficiency and towards questions of how to think about outcomes and effectiveness. Can you put systems and practices in place that nudge individual knowledge workers towards finding more effective ways to learn from and leverage their experience?