Category: Learning

My undergraduate years were dominated by the theater. Most of my free time and a substantial percentage of what should have been class time was spent working on some aspect of the Princeton Triangle Club. By the time I graduated, I had done most every job backstage that existed and been elected an officer of the Club.

Shortly after I graduated, I was elected a Trustee of the Club. Members of Triangle that you are likely to have heard of include Jimmy Stewart, Jose Ferrer, Josh Logan, and Brooke Shields. My four years flowed into an additional ten as a Trustee.

That continuity gave me some perspective about organizations that I might not have gotten otherwise. This perspective had to do with history, tradition, and time horizons. At that time the club was about 90 years old. We had lots of history and history implies traditions. But I discovered a curious thing about traditions. For most members of the club, history was whatever happened during their four years.

There was no way to differentiate between a tradition stretching back decades and an accidental string of events covering your undergraduate tenure. I was frequently bemused and amused by how often I heard undergraduates tell me “this is the ways it’s always been done” about something first done three years earlier.

I suspect this had a lot to do with my focusing on the interplay between innovation and organizational change. The part of me fascinated by technology seeks out change. What new way have we dreamed up to make some piece of technology obsolete? Who needs a bank teller when we have an ATM? Why bother with cash when you have Venmo?

The Triangle Trustee part of me that sees a tradition crystallized out of a short span of experience is sympathetic about those who’ve just figured out how to swipe their credit card and are tripped up by the new card with a chip instead of a magnetic stripe. Doubly confused, perhaps, when the new card has both a stripe and a chip.

In a sense, we’re all stuck as undergraduates. Whatever we encounter is always “the way it’s always been done” as far as we can tell. It takes time and deliberate effort to separate the threads of useful tradition and accidental stability.

It was shortly after midnight. The cast was seated or sprawled in the aisles in the house. I was onstage, clipboard in hand, with the Director, Choreographer, Band Leader, and Tech Director. We had just completed Tech Rehearsal. We opened in four days. We were about to do “Notes”, where the Director and others would walk through all of the things that needed fixing or adjusting. As Production Stage Manager, I was poised to capture all of those to dos on my clipboard. 

Milt Lyons, the Director, had been working with the Triangle Club since 1955, two years after I was born. Scarcely his first rodeo. 

We had worked together before, but I was unprepared for his very first note.

He deputized two of the cast to escort me to my dorm and put me to bed. I turned my clipboard over to my assistant and left with Milt’s deputies. Fifteen hours of sleep later I was back on stage. A bit of quick arithmetic indicated that I had been working on three hours of sleep a night for the preceding week. Nor had any of my professors in any of my classes seen me that week. 

This intervention didn’t lead to any sudden epiphany; I continued to make poor choices about how I managed my time and energy. But it did plant an important seed. A seed that did take root and eventually led to more respect for balance in creative work. We talk about knowledge work in abstract, cerebral, terms. Bodies are simply transport systems for moving brains from place to place. 

When circumstances tempt me to pretend that my brain operates in splendid isolation. I remember that moment. There’s Milt announcing that the health of an entire production needed one foolish young stage manager to go get some sleep.

My first job out of college was with the consulting arm of Arthur Andersen & Co. (which has since morphed into Accenture). Andersen invested heavily in training their staff and went so far as to buy their own college campus west of Chicago to house staff while attending classes. I spent many a day there as student and faculty.

Andersen may have been the only professional services firm to have its own liquor license. The training center was in the middle of nowhere and the partners deemed it smarter to set up a bar on campus rather than set hordes of recent college graduates loose after class. Days were spent learning the practicalities of auditing or computer programming. Evenings were devoted to knitting people into the culture.

I don’t know that that was a design criteria for the facility. It was certainly a result. After classes, students mixed with faculty, junior staff with partners. Over beers, the stories of successes and failures were told. Connections were made face-to-face that made later conference calls more effective. We were all turned into “Androids” and pleased with the result.

Two decades later, I’m part of a small core group creating a new consulting firm. There are about 25 of us at the start, refugees from Accenture, McKinsey, and elsewhere. But we aspire to much; our goal is to grow and compete with the organizations we had left. Six years later we have more than a thousand professionals across the U.S. and a foothold in the E.U.

We’ve all seen what investments in training and a strong culture can do. But we don’t have a college campus handy. We’re operating out of offices sublet from our lawyers. Our consultants, when they’re not at a client site, work from wherever home might be. Our only rule is that consultants must live near an airport large enough that they can reach client sites on Monday mornings.

One of the core mechanisms we used to create and reinforce a culture of our own was to convene All Hands Meetings once a month. Everyone came to Chicago. We did training and shared updates on the business.

It took some fighting with our CEO, but we designed the agendas with lots of time between sessions. And partners picked up the bar tabs in the evenings.

We did one more thing to jumpstart creating a culture out of nothing. We sought out “signature stories” of client incidents and events that represented the culture we sought. Some we shared in the formal agenda. Some we dropped into hallway conversations. Some we saved for the bar.

I got involved in theater early on in my high school days. I was quite happy working backstage in various capacities. There was a production that a friend, Kathy, persuaded me to audition for with her. It was terrifying, a disaster softened only by being mercifully brief. Clearly, I was not cut out for the stage; I wasn’t brave enough.

My teachers had another agenda. They expected me to do readings at the lectern during Daily Mass. That led to being voluntold to deliver a brief talk on the first anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination. That led to a Science Fair project that required me to present my work to judges multiple times as I gradually worked my way up through the statewide competition and eventually a trip to NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.

Through all of this I was absorbing lessons about knowledge work, although I didn’t have that vocabulary at the time. First, public speaking isn’t about courage so much as it’s an exercise in rehearsal, repetition, and practice. Second, curiosity is an excellent driver of energy that can be channeled into sharing what you’re learning. Third, it’s hard to make an impact without sharing.

Knowledge and knowledge work exists to be shared. It won’t share itself. If you want what you learn to make a difference, you have to take the stage.

We rolled the last road box up the ramp and onto the truck. We were done. The truck was on its way to Chicago, our next stop. The stage was now bare, empty of the sets, lights, and cast that had filled it a few hours earlier. I had one last task as the Stage Manager before heading off to the cast party now in more than full swing.

My last responsibility was to make sure that the “ghost light” was on. The theater is replete with custom and tradition. You never wish a cast member “good luck,” it’s “break a leg.” It’s “The Scottish Play” never “Macbeth.” And, you never leave a stage dark; there’s always at least one light left on over the stage. They’ll tell you it’s a safety thing; you don’t want someone to walk off the edge of the stage by accident. But, it’s really to keep the ghosts away.

The thing about a bare stage is that it exists between an ending and a beginning. There are old stories to be told and new stories to create. Either is a worthy task; it’s a choice of perspective. 

Economist Joseph Schumpeter developed the notion of “creative destruction;” the idea that innovation depended on getting rid of the old to make way for the new. It’s easiest to see in the demolition of old factories to make room for new ones. It’s harder to suss out when we’re talking about shedding obsolete ideas. 

This seems to be a relatively unexplored aspect of knowledge work. While we talk about the half-life of knowledge and the speed with which new knowledge proliferates, I can’t think of any advice about how to effectively mark the ending of dead ideas. While we want to learn from history, we also want to avoid being trapped in it. Better to adopt the iconic question from The West Wing, “What’s Next?”

I often find that I give myself pretty good advice as long as I remember to revisit what that advice was.

Two years ago I read Peter Morville’s Planning for Everything: The Design of Paths and Goals and managed to post a review here—Review: Planning for Everything: The Design of Paths and Goals.

My advice then was that this was a book worth rereading. It is and I just have.

There’s a separate discussion to be had about whether there are better strategies than rereading. I’ll save that for another day.

Morville observes that “while a plan may be defined as a series of steps, planning itself is nonlinear.” This is something that you come to understand over time, but is easily overlooked. You can forget it as an experienced planner because it is down at the level of muscle memory; it happens too fast to be noticeable. It can be harder to discern when you are learning how to plan.

We tend to focus on the artifacts of planning; project charters, statements of work, work plans, schedules, Gantt charts. We gloss over the complexities of developing those artifacts as our understanding of a problem evolves.

This is akin to when we are learning to write complex arguments. How many of us wrote the outlines to our papers after the fact? That’s because we didn’t recognize then that the struggle to find and impose order on our notes and research  or the multiple iterations of our opening paragraphs were essential to the creative process. We were inclined to see them as accidental complexities that threatened to reveal our ineptness when, in fact, they were essential to the creative process.

Perhaps this simply reveals my naïveté, but for many years it never occurred to me that books weren’t written in the order that we read them. How did Orwell dream up “it was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen,” out of thin air?

Our first encounters with plans are much like our first encounters with writing; we see the finished product neatly ordered and polished. The iterations, false starts, and multiple revisions don’t show up in the final product, but they are essential to getting there. Learning to plan, like learning to write, requires rolling around in the messiness. We need to acknowledge and accept that.

Becoming adept at planning is as much about attitude and expectations as it is about technique.

My early theater experience involved staging original productions. We started with a scheduled opening night months in the future and possibly a general concept for what the show would be. More often than not we began without a script. But it was the theater after all and we all believed that “the show must go on.”

Turns out that is enough. Creation is messy and chaotic. There’s always a lot you don’t know. What you learn is that collectively you know something and, with some luck and improvisation in the moment, you can take another step toward opening night. Repeat that loop multiple times, opening night arrives, and there is a show.

Essential to making that work is that everyone needs to be clear about what they do know and what they don’t know. Not knowing is accepted and expected. What is not acceptable, often dangerous, and occasionally life threatening is trying to conceal ignorance.

I didn’t appreciate how important those lessons were while I was learning them. Who does?

There was another set of lessons on offer at the same time. They’re still widely available in lots of environments. These are the lessons about celebrating what you think you know and concealing your limitations.

I believe those have always been dangerous lessons despite their prevalence. The organizational environment that we now inhabit makes those old lessons obsolete. I am most troubled by those who cling to those lessons even as they disintegrate.

Ignorance is a correctable problem; willful ignorance is not.