When human resources have been properly loaded at about 80% of capacity, it is quite feasible for everyone to take on a little heavier load for a reasonable transition period.  But that does not seem to be what is occurring in this cycle.  People in many organizations have been carrying the extra load for too long already, and as opportunities for growth pop up, organizations are expecting people to figure out a way to take on even more, but may be asking too much.

To be a bit more specific, we keep hearing from client managers that they are booked in meetings 6-9 hours per day, often double or triple booked.  They, and everyone else, are trying to multitask in each of these meetings — stay aware of the meeting topic, but also get some email done and keep information flowing, because there is no “office time” for getting to email.  Meanwhile, everyone is being asked to represent their function in more and more projects, all on top of their “day job.”

In our opinion, there is no manager  (not even the most talented micro-managers) and there is no software that can keep track of everything people are being asked to do, keep all the competing and changing priorities clear, and give people the sense that they are in control of their own time and their own success.  Each individual has to take responsibility for managing themselves in alignment with those changing priorities.  This requires managing what and how much is committed to, and it requires the ability for individuals to safely say “No, I can’t commit to do that in that timeframe and meet the commitments I’ve already made.”  Because without these signals of overload flowing up to the decision makers, they will have no reason to consider pushing out that exciting opportunity until next quarter, or choosing a project to take off the list, if a better one needs to be added.

Being willing to say “No” rather than over-commit, taking the initiative to create a climate where it is safe to say “No”, this is the leadership that is going to be needed to get things back into balance.  Another solution is for everyone to “get creative” and figure out how to accomplish more with less, but this type of creativity does not occur when everyone is over-committed.  Organizations are going to need the following to come out of this current business cycle and stay on top of their game:  operating from commitments; each individual managing commitments really well; team members holding each other accountable for their commitments; and creative solutions to breakdowns.  Who is going to lead?

Let me begin by admitting that mixing in the circles of the famous and powerful is not my comfort zone.  Since my wife is an Executive at a well known Fortune 100 company, I am thrown into those circles periodically and I’ve learned to hold my own.  I am much more drawn to the “Magic Mountain” side of Davos – the one referred to in the New Yorker article title.  The Magic Mountain is a reference to Thomas Mann’s novel of the same name.  It is one of my favorite books and I read it every few years.  The critics insist the book is an allegory for pre-WWI Germany.  But to me it is a 700 plus page exploration of the contrast between fully engaging in society vs. living the secluded life of the mind.  I occasionally wish I could withdraw, live in the mountains, and simply research and write about human organizing.   Technology is making it easier to do that.  The problem is that you don’t really learn anything by simply generating and espousing ideas, you have to put them in play.

So I was destined to mesh with “society on steroids,” but first I made a pilgrimage to the Berghotel Schatzalp, The former respiratory sanatorium (now a hotel) up above the valley of Davos that inspired the setting for Mann’s novel.  The place was fittingly huddled in snow and practically deserted.  We had a wonderful lunch overlooking the narrow mountain valley with the “model train set” town below and the ski slopes on the other side.  Then it was time to take the funicular down to fully engage with the society’s upper crust.

Upon my return, friends and colleagues wanted to know what it was like.  For me, it was reading about world events in the Herald Tribune at breakfast each morning, and then seeing and sometimes meeting both the people you read about and the people who wrote the articles.  It was similar to being at other educational conferences in the daytime, except when you realized after the fact that the leader of your breakout group was Chairman and CEO of some household name company.  It was a competition of evening parties.  Yes, we were at that party where Mick Jagger was dancing, but not when he was there.  We did meet Fareed Zakaria at that party and found him to be as sincere and down to earth as he is in his global reporting.  There was some excess – they were serving 25-year old single malt scotch over fist-sized chunks of glacial ice at that party.  I’ve been driving a compressed natural gas Civic for over 10 years in order to save those glaciers, so I figured the glaciers owed me one fist-sized chunk.

What does any of this have to do with stakeholder analysis?  The New Yorker article credits Klaus Schwab with founding WEF but neglects to describe where his credibility came from and why he started it.  Schwab made his name by pointing out the value of understanding who our stakeholders are for getting things done in organizations and in the world.  Not a trivial contribution.  And he put his theory into practice by creating a meeting place for people with large stakes in the global economy (back in the ‘70’s when not many people thought about it as a global economy).  Interestingly, as the economy has turned truly global, Klaus realized that everybody has a stake, and he has slowly been making WEF much more inclusive.  In amongst the world leaders, conglomerate CEOs, financiers, pundits and academics are representatives of NGOs, charitable foundations, emerging technologies, educators, youth entrepreneurs, social entrepreneurs, etc.

The New Yorker article cautions that a person cannot possibly fathom what WEF is from only one visit.  But I’ll take a stab anyway.  The world economic forum is a market.  It is a market where money meets ideas and in this case large amounts of money meeting potentially very impactful ideas.  Money is an integral part of what puts ideas into play, so without markets like WEF more good ideas will go unimplemented.  And as long as all the stakeholders have a voice (representation), better ideas should bubble up to the top.  And we all have a stake in that.

Many team building models show trust, communication and other so-called “soft” skills as  foundational to team building.   A recent example is Patrick Lencioni’s best selling “The Five Dysfunctions of a Team”.  His pyramid model shows lack of trust as the first dysfunction that must be overcome.  Lencioni’s book is a quick read and a pretty good example of how to get a team out of dysfunction.  If you’ve read it, you may recall that while the protaganist calls a series of “executive retreat” meetings, what they do in the meetings is real work:

1. getting very clear about priorites and top goals so that they have a way of knowing if they are improving,

2. reviewing progress with the permission and the expectation that peers will hold each other accountable, and

3. hashing out how resources should best be utilized in order to ensure top priorities are met, etc.

As the leader takes the team through these steps (in the book) she makes it very clear that no team member can be successful unless the entire team is successul.

At the end of the story there is a summary about how to progress through (get past) the 5 dysfunctions.  After demonstrating that team building occurs while doing real work, I thought this section fell back into the fallacy of team building as separate from doing the real work.  Even so, Lencioni points out that to get through the first step of overcoming lack of trust, team members need opportunities to make promises to each other and follow through on them.  At Ensemble, we put a huge emphasis on this with our Commitment-based approach.  Work review meetings are designed to make sure team members are making and meeting promises (commitments) to each other every week throughout a project.   With the CBPM approach, every meeting is a team building meeting even though zero meetings are dedicated to team building activities.

As always with commitment, some of the importance aspects, as Bergman describes are:

1.  Get crystal clear about what this new course of action is (what, when, where, who)
2.  Make a decision to follow the new course now, and do things to make it difficult to back out
3.  Tell others about your decision

Now imagine if you were on a team where everyone was adhering to these techniques in a systemic way.  The effect is magnified when you have a group of people applying this discipline to a complex, interdependent task.  What you are imagining is what we call Commitment-Based Project Management (CBPM).

]]> http://ensemblemc.com/2012/01/23/hbr-guy-says-commitment-is-not-motivation/feed/ 0 http://ensemblemc.com/2012/01/04/the-hardest-lesson-to-learn/ http://ensemblemc.com/2012/01/04/the-hardest-lesson-to-learn/#comments Wed, 04 Jan 2012 16:23:28 +0000 Timm J. Esque http://ensemblemc.com/?p=1736 This is obviously a judgement call and you may have your own opinion of the hardest lesson to learn.  I encourage you to make a Comment and share your own view.  Based on over 25 years of observing, helping and participating with project and process teams, I believe the hardest lesson is – slow down in order to go fast.  The purpose of slowing down of course is to do things right the first time.  Most of the time lost in execution is lost re-doing things that were not done properly the first time.

We’ve all experienced making time consuming errors when we rush to complete even minor tasks.  The risk and the impact go up exponentially when we’re talking about a team of people working interdependently with each other to get things done.  On waterfall projects, this often means having to rework large parts of the ultimate project deliverable.  On agile projects you find out much faster if you are making errors or heading down the wrong track.  But in the rush to get started “doing productive work”, even agile teams can have costly mis-starts.  Agile software teams often don’t take the time to get clear about how their outputs will integrate with the larger intended outcome.

This is not a new observation and experts are pointing it out all the time.  In an Forbes article from earlier this year, McGuire and Tang from the Center for Creative Leadership point out how speed is entangled with complexity and uncertainty.  In a complex and uncertain environment, speed requires clarity and clarity requires some time spent up front having appropriate conversations.  A new book I will be writing more about is called Strategic Speed: Mobilize People, Accelerate Execution.  Based on a combination of studies and cases, the authors say that the key to speed of execution comes down to clarity, unity and agility (view author interview).  Clarity and unity especially require time in the planning stage to make sure people are pulling in the same direction and that it is clear why it is worthwhile to do so.

Because this problem is systemic, it can be difficult to know where to start to address it.  In our experience the problem starts with the top down deadline that is often given to project teams before they even begin planning.  The first step to slowing down to go fast is for the sponsor’s of projects to replace the top down deadline with a request.  The request is for the team leadership to get with their team and define what it will take to achieve the project goals.  Generally, there is too much uncertainty for the team to know exactly how long it will take.  They need to set and monitor short term deliverable goals and report on their ability to meet these “horizon” plans.  Over time it will become apparent if the team is likely to achieve the necessary time goals.  But either way, teams given the chance to have input into the plan and to operate from their own goals, will achieve those goals without shortcuts that lead to costly delays later in the project.

Those of us in business schools in the late 1970′s and interested in human behavior at work learned similar principles based on research from the 1950′s by Frederick  Herzberg, Rensis Likert and others.  You may be aware of the distinction between extrinsic and intrinsic motivation which comes from this research.  Herzberg concluded that money is not a motivator.   It is important and will cause problems if  it is unsatisfactory (he labeled it a “hygiene” factor), but it is not what causes people to succeed.  The new research concludes that money can be a motivator and even improve performance, but only when tasks are simple and predictable.  Any of you working with those types of tasks on your projects?

If problem solvers and innovators are not primarily driven by extrinsic rewards, we need another way of ensuring that we can get and keep the interest of the most talented people.  What causes people to commit to solve complex problems and ensure team success?  What causes people to commit in an environment of inherent uncertainty?

Forced to adapt or concede to mediocrity, the general manager of the Oakland A’s starts looking for new ways to compete.   Open to possibilities, he notices an unlikely source of scouting information.  A young economist who has radical ideas about how to evaluate ball players.    The key premise is that if you ask the wrong questions, the answers do not lead to reliable results.  The economist shows the GM how searching for desirable player characteristics by watching them play and noting the most basic individual statistics does not address the key question – what individual performances add up to a winning team performance?  I won’t ruin the ending of the movie for you, but let’s just say it was worth taking a new look at player evaluation.

Project management also has its traditions.  Some are already being questioned by agile, lean and commitment-based approaches but others still seem pretty engrained.  What happens when we look at project management through a totally different lens?  The lens I would suggest is a field called human performance technology.  HPT starts with a different set of questions about organizational performance.  When it started in the early 1960′s, the big questions were:  what is performance and how do you measure it?  This led to the insight that accomplishments (outputs, deliverables) are valuable and activities (effort, tasks) are costly.

When you apply this logic to projects, you start to wonder, why is so much focus put on estimating effort and so little put on getting crystal clear about who is delivering what to whom?  The HPT perspective on management also says that timely feedback is critical to effective decision making.  Teams and team members need to know exactly where they stand against their goals or commitments in order to know when to raise a flag before it is too late to stay on track to goals.  If your teams don’t know exactly who needs to deliver what to whom by when (and to what quality standard), and/or if they don’t know exactly where they stand against their plans at all times throughout the project, they are not being set up for success.

Full disclosure – I happened upon this human performance technology (HPT)  perspective as I was finishing up grad school and I have been active in the society that promotes it for 25 years – the International Society of Performance Improvement.  We at Ensemble have built the HPT principles – what science tells us about what performance is and how to measure and change it – into our Commitment-Based approach to project management, and everything else we do.  Learn more about HPT at www.ISPI.org.