Foolish Ends - 'Leadership' in the Digital Age

Can we finally kill the hedgehog (concept)?

2012-02-15T20:01:00.000-08:00

There is a certain peace in having our assumptions and interpretations verified by external evidence. In fact, I am occasionally (often) victim of selective bias in the information that I allow to shape my perspectives on the world. My self image is built more fully on the good photos of me than the bad. My daughter's overall character is more selectively groomed from her good days than her bad. Even my worst behaviour has assumed the character of 'object lesson' or 'growth experience' in hindsight.

It is therefore not surprising that so much of the leadership literature tries to provide easy answers to extremely complicated questions. We all want to be able to 'blink' and know what to do. Our own subconscious will do the hard work of making reality align with our expectations.

The 'hedgehog' concept is a particularly pernicious cognitive shorthand that drives me a little batty. If you're unfamiliar with the concept, it is the mental and literal equivalent of a Venn diagram. Successful companies, the research tells us, have found the sweet spot among where their passion lives, what they are good at doing, and what drives the economic engine. How these forces are not seen as interdependent, in a near-constant conversation with themselves, is a bit vague.

Philip Tetlock's rather depressing twenty-year study showed that experts were not particularly adept at predicting the outcomes of complex economic and political processes. The whole 'hedgehog' concept has ancient origins, but its use as a philosophical tool came from the work of Isaiah Berlin. Berlin never really intended the intellectual exercise to be taken seriously, but alas, a cottage industry has arisen espousing the 'big idea'. Tetlock's aforementioned gloomy research found that the hedgehogs favoured by Collins and others performed worse than those that were willing to be flexible (the 'foxes').

The long and short of it is that regression analysis is a better predictor than any one expert. Groups of experts on the other hand ...

And that is why I would like to see the hedgehog die. Not because it offers a particularly hazardous heuristic for taking action. The larger concern is how it nudges and pokes other ideas out of the room so that it may cavort in splendid isolation.

The attraction to one 'big idea' is obvious. I wish I could go through life like some Batman villain, making choices about my life and business based on the results of some perfect model. Sadly, models are maps, and when we're doing important things (like finding a campsite or a really cool club) we need to rely on more than one interpretation.

The Importance of Metaphor – Scrum

2012-01-24T11:58:00.000-08:00

Scrum is a management framework that attempts to addresscomplex issues by leveraging incremental development, cross-functional teamsand the emergent qualities of self-organizing systems. It falls within theconceptual reach of agile practices and supports a structural paradox that Ifind attractive.

It is idealistic about the capacity of people to solve complexproblems yet it is brutally realistic in identifying impediments and adaptingto change.

Agile and its related approaches are derived from conceptsand ideas originating in Japanese manufacturing processes and softwaredevelopment. At their core, they are focused on iterative and incrementaldevelopment, where requirements and solutions evolve through collaborationbetween self-organizing, cross-functional teams. It promotes adaptive planning,evolutionary development and delivery, a time-boxed iterative approach, andencourages rapid and flexible response to change.

Lean is the approach that has the most current traction inNorth America. Essentially, lean is centered on preserving value with lesswork. Lean manufacturing is a management philosophy derived mostly from theToyota Production System. Lean manufacturing is a variation on the theme ofefficiency based on optimizing flow; it is a present-day instance of therecurring theme in human history toward increasing efficiency, decreasingwaste, and using empirical methods to decide what matters, rather thanuncritically accepting pre-existing ideas.

All agile approaches believe that embodied assumptions arethreats to performance and different approaches have emerged to suit the givencontext.

Scrum attempts to deal with more complex challenges. Wherelean attempts to remove deviation and waste, scrum assumes that deviation and‘waste’ are inevitable and applies relentless reality checks to exposedysfunctional constraints and assumptions. Scrum is value-centered andexplicitly believes that all members of an emergent, self-organizing haveleadership accountability (much like lean). The unit of measure is built on atraditional (paleolithic) family units of 5 – 9. Scrum is intended for thekinds of work people have found unmanageable using defined processes –uncertain requirements combined with unpredictable technology implementationrisks. It requires true commitment (at all levels) to self-organization and isnot suited to repeatable activities.

I completed by Certified Scrummaster training in 2011 andhave implemented Scrum for a couple of highly complex projects we are workingthrough. I am enamored of Scrum, and was pleasantly surprised to hear that themetaphor of scrum was applied by Ikujiro Nonaka, another thought leader Iadmire greatly.

The metaphor derives from rugby, where the team will movethe ball as a cohesive unit. I had the good fortune to work withinterdisciplinary teams while working as a corporate trainer within MitsubishiMotor Company in Aichi-ken, Japan. The more traditional approach to projectmanagement employed in Western Europe and North America was less firmlyentrenched in Japanese business practices and different overarching metaphorscould be supported.

I lack the research to support this, but I was often struckby the differences in collaborative action in Japanese rice cultivation versusthe large-scale grain agriculture we are familiar with in the West. Rice plotsare intensive and collaboratively harvested. Community members collectivelywork their way through each paddy, with very little task specializationemployed. Western agriculture, due to questions of scale, followed a moremilestoned approach to cultivation. Certain times of year required intensiveactivity and much of the work was done by paid staff. Timelines were well-knownand resources allocated to meet the needs of the season. Rice cultivation isfar more variable with small differences allowing for different requirements.

It should be no surprise then, that highly scheduled projectmanagement has been hard-wired into our social customs. It should also, then,come as no surprise that ‘scrum’ a metaphor from a Western game, found a moreready home in a nation where collective behaviours were patterned differently.

The growth of scrum in software also shouldn’t be asurprise. Software, unlike physical manufacturing , requires quality and fit toexist in a single source. The distributed product is identical to the piecefrom which it is cloned. Assembly manufacturing requires a stream of quality asduplication suffers from quality issues in physical equipment and human attention.

A simple shift in metaphor (from traditional or ‘waterfall’approach to scrum) aligns behaviour far more easily than a detailed set ofinstructions of process notes. Ken Schwaber, a grandfather of scrum in NorthAmerica, states that scrum is, “not a methodology – it is a pathway”. I believeit is telling that until the emergence of competing models of projectmanagement, no metaphor existed for the dominant. The introduction of newvoices necessitated the qualification of traditional practices as ‘waterfall’.Widening the narrative space allowed new ideas and models to emerge. Sadly, anentirely new industry needed to evolve before the need could clearly be seen toNorth American audiences.

by Jerry McGrath

this article was cross-posted to www.upriver.ca

Why Metaphor Matters > Opening the Narrative Space

2012-01-19T15:27:00.000-08:00

The header of this site states that,

The defining metaphors of our times are changing and new metaphors are necessary to pattern the complexity around us.

The obvious question then becomes, why do metaphors matter?

Nietzsche believed that, "Tropes are not something that can be added or abstracted from language at will—they are its truest nature." He argues that there is "no real knowing apart from metaphor".

That was never really the intent of insisting on a need for new metaphors, however.

Thinking is a discontinuous string of discovery, emergence, closure and reopening. Each of us, over time, develops a set of perspectives and heuristics, or experience-based techniques for problem solving, learning, and discovery. These perspectives and heuristics are ways of encoding experience so that problems become easier. They are highly adaptive in that they allow us to provide simple 'rules of thumb' to complex events.

Our available solution set is defined by the patterns we apply to experience. Over the course of human development, the available range of new experiences has been fairly limited and some perspectives have been hard-wired in as instinct. It is not a heuristic to flinch when something large and hairy jumps out from our peripheral vision.

Social activity has also generated a fair quantity of shared perspectives that proved beneficial in advancing our common purpose. The phenomenon of inequity of attention in organizations is an example of how perspectives can influence behaviour in a way that was once adaptive. Essentially, in traditional organizations, people develop or innately possess the perspective that the ideas and opinions of those above you in the hierarchy are more worthy of attention than those more junior. To ensure the smooth operation of communities concerned with predictability and the efficient deployment of resources, this heuristic makes perfect sense. Those at the top needed a sense that their wishes would be reflected in the activities of the whole. Being right or wrong was less critical than being sure.

Metaphors then become ways of capturing perspectives and heuristics in ways that facilitate transmission.

As an example, the story of Little Red Riding Hood speaks volumes to societal changes in perspective of natural spaces over time. The first stories ended tragically with a wolf devouring our heroine with little fanfare. The meaning was clear based on the times. The woods were a menacing place.

During the Industrial Revolution the story shifted as Little Red Riding Hood suffered sexual assault at the hands of the wolf. Nature had been disrupted to support industry in the countryside and with industrialization came young men from the city. Nature became a place of social and physical danger.

During the 1950s, Little Red Riding Hood found her savior in the woodsman. A woman's honor and security was guaranteed in the form of nuclear family. Nature had been subdued by men with axes.

The modern story sees our heroine fend for herself. Nature is a spectator to the events as a strong female presence emerges.

Organizations are similarly defined by the stories we tell. Reframing a problem through a different perspective offers a broader solution set to draw upon. Encoding problems in new ways can generate incredible innovation. The batch processing system that supported quality improvements in Japan evolved from an ability to move away from an assembly-line approach to production. This advance would have been much more difficult in Western business where assembly-line thinking dominated perspectives and narratives.

Opening up the narrative space allows for new solutions to emerge. I tell my daughter the story of Little Red Riding Hood in my own way. The woods are a dark and mysterious place full of danger. However, being prepared and aware can allow her to enjoy what it has to offer while appreciating the risks involved.

‘Stepping up’ and ‘stepping aside’ – the challenges of succession

2012-01-11T15:30:00.000-08:00

This article was initially published in the Banff Centre's Leadership Compass and a PDF version can be found here. As a part of our work, we have been exploring the challenges of executing succession in our Alberta partners. Across industries, sectors and geographies we have seen patterns of challenges that make developing succession pools a difficult task.

Leadership Compass - 2011

One of the most complicated issues facing leaders and organizations today is how to identify, develop, and retain the next generation of leaders. In order to examine how the leadership of organizations is changing and how organizations need to adapt, we hosted a workshop, Leadership Fitness: Succession and Readiness to Lead, at The Banff Centre. The intent of the workshop was to hear directly from those responsible for supporting succession, and to see where The Banff Centre can play a role in advancing readiness in our partners.

In conversations with partners and in our applied research, succession consistently emerges as a critical concern. Organizations are seeing a profound demographic shift with mass retirements of middle- and senior-managing baby boomers, and as intense poaching of talent and richer incentives lure leaders to healthy sectors and organizations. According to Statistics Canada, by 2015 one in five workers will be aged 55 to 64, which brings succession to the forefront of organizational challenges.

According to research, “growing talent within organizations yields leaders who, through their historical knowledge and experience in the organization, have earned the trust of the organization and are more likely to be accepted as knowledgeable, capable leaders”.

Although definitions of succession differ broadly, participants in the workshop agreed on the need to carefully consider succession for roles, recruitment, leadership capacity, and organizational integrity.But how?We assume that organizational members will deliberately volunteer their strengths to the team. What we found in exploring stories of succession during the workshop, however, was that empathy, respect, and trust play critical roles in the willingness of leaders to ‘step up’ and existing leaders to ‘step to the side’.

We often focus on the ‘planning’ of succession, and there is a thriving industry in consulting and advising on succession strategies. However, people responsible for implementing succession realize that implementing the plan requires different tools and a different mindset.Throughout the 2-day workshop, participants surfaced two dimensions to successional issues within organizations, regardless of industry or type.

The ‘planning’ components of succession were defined in terms of processes, activities, and culture.
The ‘doing’ components of succession asked participants to explore respect, trust, and empathy as critical components of building organizational futures.

The reality is that succession can only succeed when the ‘planning’ components are supported by a deep connection to those we want to lead and be led by. Our workshop dialogue revealed that leaders are concerned with employees who don’t leave but refuse to ‘step up’, so they lose interest in the changes happening around them. Additionally, current senior leaders are unable to appreciate the ideas and energy of a new working generation, so they never find the courage to ‘step to the side’.

Not surprisingly, we discovered that succession is hard. The structural challenges are known, and planning can ensure that new challenges are met. However, effective planning requires the commitment and energy of those who currently lead, as well as future leaders. This is where individual acts of trust, respect, and empathy can support the succession vision.

Another imposing issue that surfaced during the workshop was the changing reality of organizational life, shifting demographics, and the need to understand succession in the context of larger systems of value creation. Some lament the loss of loyalty as employees move from role to role, although others believe that loyalty is adopting a new face. Participants believed that the needs of future leaders are complex and tied to larger conversations than organizations alone can support.

According to author William J. Rothwell, succession “rules, procedures, and techniques used in the past appear to be growing increasingly outmoded and inappropriate”. According to our workshop group, the skills and resiliency required to support succession are of a different character than the skills necessary to plan the succession. Ultimately, trust, respect, and a shared sense of purpose will allow leaders the comfort to ‘step up’ when required and ‘step to the side’ when a new response is needed.

[1]American Society for Training and Development, Oct 2006

[2]Rothwell, William J. Effective Succession Planning: Ensuring Leadership Continuity and Building Talent From Within: 4th Revised edition. Amacon. Toronto. April 29, 2010.

by Jerrold McGrath

Welcome to The Banff Centre

2012-01-02T10:06:00.000-08:00

A new year brings many new changes, and The Banff Centre is no exception. We are saying hello to our newest President and CEO in Jeff Melanson. trained singer and leading arts manager, Jeff Melanson has served as executive director and co-CEO of Canada’s National Ballet School since 2006. He has emerged as a significant international arts leader, having also served as dean of The Royal Conservatory of Music School between 2000 and 2006. He was appointed special advisor on Arts and Culture to Toronto mayor Rob Ford in 2010.

Although he has been here at the Centre for a few months getting to know the space and faces, today was his first day in the new position and one of his first acts was to send out a greeting to all of us working here.

Dear colleagues,Welcome to the Banff Centre 2012.
As I have now officially stepped into the role as President, I thought I would write this short note of welcome and appreciation.

I would like start by acknowledging the incredible contributions of Mary Hofstetter. Mary has made a lasting impact on the Banff Centre and she has made this transition as smooth and seamless as possible. She has left the Banff Centre in good shape, well poised for our future adventures together.

This fall, I had the opportunity to meet most of you at various functions, on campus or in the town. Over the course of six weeks through October and November, I believe I likely met close to 3,000 Banff Centre friends and stakeholders here in the Bow Valley, Edmonton, Calgary, Vancouver and Toronto. As such, I must admit to exceeding my capacity to put the right names to faces. Each of you is important to the Banff Centre and I am looking forward to getting to know you all better. Please continue to be patient with me as I re-introduce myself to the Banff Centre community over these next few months.

As you are all aware, our world is experiencing a challenging period of economic, social and cultural change. Fundamental economic assumptions are being challenged, technology is changing the ways we connect with each other and our world, and cultural/creative industries are in a period of considerable flux.

I believe the Banff Centre, through its focus on enabling access to and excellence in creativity and innovation, is uniquely well positioned to address these challenges and to help foster a national and international dialogue that will see our world champion the best of what we as human beings are capable of. Whetherthrough our exceptional arts programming, our leadership development, our hospitality and conferences, or other programming we will develop together, theBanff Centre will continue to be a leader in inspiring creativity, encouraging our participants and ourselves to dream big.

I am excited to serve as your President for this next period of growth, innovation and experimentation.
Our success will be shared. We are all collaborators in this process and we all have a role to play in ensuring we are building on the Banff Centre's incredible legacy while also stepping boldly forward. As such each and every voice counts.Our future success depends on our capacity to listen to each other, to push boundaries andto create an environment where the impossible might be worth a try.

I look forward to seeing you all around campus.

Warmest regards,Jeff

So there you have it. My favourite quote about the Banff Centre dates back 30 or so years. In an article talking about the release of year-round programming a journalist remarked that The Banff Centre has never been accused of thinking small.I believe that a leader's role is to articulate a better future. It is our responsibility to live into it. I feel like we're off to a good start.

Educational Technology and 'Aesthetic' Approaches to Learning

2011-11-15T12:54:00.001-08:00

from Aichi Triennale - 2010

In our work at Leadership Development at The Banff Centre, we make use of natural spaces and the expressive arts to help people and organizations access tacit understanding that would otherwise struggle to surface. ‘Surfacing’ involves talking about the things that we know deeply yet struggle to make explicit. The disconnect between what we know and what we make explicit can create a friction that is both disconcerting and generative.

We adhere to the belief that organizations, institutions and most of the networks we perceive as real are made up of powerful conversations. It is not always easy to start a new conversation when our points of access are already set out for us. Powerful aesthetic experiences can trigger new dialogue as they circumvent the pre-formed language that defines a lot of what we do day in and day out. Art has always served this purpose, allowing creator and audience to access the essence of issues. Natural spaces can also inspire that friction and the energy to start a new conversation. The Banff Centre integrates these elements into our leadership programming.

With so much of our lives spent in a digital world, what role can digital expression serve to encourage powerful conversations? If anything, digital media has been accused of limiting the space available for dialogue as our processes and our task become increasingly mechanized. Others, however, see the potential for digital media to support a different kind of conversation; a conversation that is supported by the strengths of its carrier -- collaborative, scalable, not limited by geography and supportive of rich experiences.

My learning objectives are tied to the need to understand the role of new media in creating powerful aesthetic experiences for our participants.

Integrating Educational Technology into Programming

The distinctive nature of our programming and the complex challenges of our partners make the task of integrating supportive technologies more difficult. We continue to critically examine the feasibility and fit of technology-supported program elements across our partner organizations.

Develop Craft Skills in Various Environments

We view the curatorial power of mobile applications as a rich space for growing new transformative tools for our programming. Developing the craft skills necessary to support learning in this space will be essential to my long-term success.

Develop Capacity as a Change Manager for Educational Technology

When educational technologies are implemented in organizations, the change management process can be difficult. This is particularly true when the decision makers already "know" how the technology needs to be used. We believe that any change initiative centered on new technology that requires human beings to serve only as spectators will fail. Change initiatives require a level of permission from those being changed.

Our work affords organizations and their members the tools to imagine new frameworks for approaching today's complex challenges. We believe that any division between how we learn and how we work will create unnecessary disconnects that make application more difficult. The reality of work for many of us is digital and interdisciplinary and therefore our approach to building capacity must be supported by digital and interdisciplinary approaches.

What do street art, Lean production and fractals have to do with leadership?

2011-11-14T20:41:00.001-08:00

Banff, Alberta - where I live and work

My name is Jerry McGrath and I am a Program Manager with Leadership Development at The Banff Centre. I am currently tasked with ensuring that Leadership Development’s client partners receive a leading edge, innovative, exceptional program experience, that meets or exceeds the client’s and the participant’s expectations and ties into long-term leader and leadership needs. Primarily, this involves performing ongoing needs assessments with partner organizations in order to recommend, design and deliver learning solutions for their members. I am not generally a facilitator, but leverage our relationships with over 75 faculty and Advisory Council members across Canada and the internal resources of The Banff Centre to provide training and leadership development.

I also perform a research function, integrating and sharing our internal content expertise and some of the more exploratory work that we do. Although ensuring measurement and tracking of program impact and evaluation is a component of my role, the ad hoc nature of many of our engagements makes assessing the true impacts of organizational interventions difficult.

In my time at The Banff Centre I have managed over 90 program offerings for over 1500 participants. We provide recurring learning programs for several client organizations and consult on HR planning and employee engagement with several others. I am perhaps most proud of the work that led into our Leading through Change program, a new open enrolment offering from Leadership Development that develops leaders’ capacity to engage with complexity and creation.

We conduct regular forums for conversations around challenges facing senior HR leaders in Calgary and take a truly co-creative approach to program design. As the demands made of HR departments have shifted, we have filled a need within the community by offering facilitated dialogue around pressing HR issues. I believe that I bring innovative and creative approaches to organizational and professional development and leading research on best practices for learning, organizational development; HR planning; employee engagement and future learning requirements.

Personally, I am passionate about new media art (including street art), Japanese business customs (I worked as a relocation trainer in Nagoya, Japan for 5 years) and leadership in the digital age. 'Leadership in the digital age' is a bit misleading as any leadership that occurs in the developed world is by definition leading in a digital age. Sadly, few leader or leadership development providers face this reality directly. It`s much easier to learn from the past than try to craft a response to a chaotic present and an unknowable future.

My attraction to new media artists, graffiti, and Japanese methods are not incidental to my work. The defining metaphors of our times are changing and new metaphors are necessary to understand the complexity around us. Old assumptions become dangerous when not critically considered and by looking at the arts and the lessons learned from other cultures we gain insight into our own assumptions about how the world works.

Toyota`s well-documented Lean advances only make sense when considering the cultural norms and activities that existed to support them. The idea of kouhai and senpai are embedded in Japanese culture from the elementary school level. The kouhai - senpai relationship then becomes a natural carrier for Lean and vice versa. The fractal nature of these pairs allow for practices and improvements to rapidly disseminate and again, the concept of fractals are central to Japanese artistic traditions, particularly as seen in the work of Hokusai.

Digital media artists and street artists offer us similar insights into the `reality`of modern life. They serve as a critical indicator of where our culture sits and trying to pretend that shifts in artistic expression are separate from larger trends is a dangerous pattern that we`ve often seen repeated.

Our work at The Banff Centre affords organizations and their members the tools to imagine new frameworks for approaching today's complex challenges. The reality of work for many of us is digital and interdisciplinary and therefore my curiosity is around approaches to building capacity that are supported by digital and interdisciplinary approaches.

We're beginning to see that digital leadership requires a strong(er) bias toward action. The world moves too quickly to wait for the `right`answer when the `right` answer is unknowable. I also believe that leading in the digital age requires building capacity at the periphery, where the organization interacts with its larger ecology. This doesn`t mean that my work isn`t appropriate for senior leaders (where much of it occurs now), just that we ask them to shift their focus from the conceptual centre of the organization to the fringes where innovation occurs.

This space is intended to be a journal of work being done in the field of 'digital leadership' and a place that integrates my work at The Banff Centre and my independent work done through upriver Innovations. Leadership Development at The Banff Centre, besides being the coolest place to work on earth, affords me opportunities to work at the cutting edge of leadership and leader development practice. My work with upriver Innovations lets me explore 'what's next?' and my own curiosity about supporting interdisciplinary, innovative and highly collaborative teams.

Alberta Innovates Technology Futures - Strategy and Execution

2011-10-06T09:55:00.000-07:00

This will be our next to final effort at unpacking the sessions I attended at the AITF Tech Futures Summit. This set of talks I attended spoke of some of the on-the-ground planning and action that is supporting the larger dialogue around the role of government in supporting, catalyzing and delivering on innovation in the province of Alberta.

Ray Bassett is the Assistant Deputy Minister with the Premier's Council for Economic Strategy. Over his career, he has had extensive experience in policy development, program development and delivery, preparing legislation, federal/provincial relations, and project management.

His talk was entitled, "Challenges in Creating Policy to Improve Alberta's Competitiveness" and although the focus ostensibly on 'challenges', we were left with the sense of possibility that great challenges engineer. Alberta is highly dependent on commodity markets and on the US consumer. Some are frustrated that this dependency has persisted for so long and there are very few examples of resource-based jurisdictions that have been able to make their economies less dependent on natural resources.Rather than suffering a sense of helplessness, however, Mr. Bassett's presentation spoke of possibility and the role that the public sector must play to generate broader economic options.

Mr. Bassett defined public policy quite succintly:

Public policy is a course of action adopted and pursued by government to guide and determine present and future decisions (that is) administered through legislation, regulations and administrative practices

The Province of Alberta currently works with around 25 major strategy documents. One central theme to the Premier's Council for Economic Strategy (PCES) final report is the need to invest in people development.

Alberta needs all its citizens to develop the mindset and skills to thrive in today’s world and drive economic growth – to be resilient, lifelong learners, healthy and productive, eager to achieve and perform, globally connected and informed.

This was summarized well as a need to shift from an economy of circumstance to an economy of intent. In hearing this, we wondered at what capacities are required to be resilient. The industrial model has traditionally relied on predictability to drive economic growth. The return on assets could be closely monitored to ensure the productivity gains necessary to improve our collective standard of living. Unfortunately, it seems that the returns on fixed assets are diminishing and new sources of productivity must be found to improve the lot of our children and our children's children.

Resiliency in this context seems to be the ability to be creative in the face of very real constraints. The requirement to shift mental models is no longer a gradual luxury. Adaptive capacity is the agility to look beyond the tools already in our belt.

One approach to building this innovative capacity was presented by Axel Meisen, who holds the Chair of Foresight at AITF, working on long-term, strategic issues where AITF and Alberta can excel in building globally competitive commerce. Specifically, he leads the annual Jasper Innovation Forum where important opportunities for Alberta are explored. He spoke of the need to build innovation capacity through international experience and spoke compellingly of how China looked ahead and supported many graduates in advancing their educations through overseas assignments.

We have seen that the most impactful way to move past behaviours that are no longer adaptive is by experiencing first-hand other approaches that work. Support can be offered to reflect on these placements as unexamined experiences remain simply experiences, while critical examination can lead to a process of integration and application that would benefit the larger community. The concept wasn't presented as a comprehensive response but clearly illustrated how our shared understanding of the challenges ahead might be addressed.

Alberta Innovates Technology Futures - Innovation Policy

2011-09-21T16:00:00.000-07:00

Understanding innovation as a product of a system as opposed to dedicated organizations or teams requires a reframing of the role of government and quasi-governmental agencies in supporting generative spaces for innovation.

Richard Hawkins, Canada Research Chair in the Social Context of Technology and Fellow of the Institute for Sustainable Energy, Environment and Economy at the University of Calgary, spoke about the challenges of telling if innovation policies are working.

If we understand policy activity as a critical catalyst in supporting innovation then issues of additionality must be addressed when recommending public investment. This refers not just to measuring impact but understanding what impacts are being measured.

The OECD defines innovation as any new combination of factors that produces new sources of value. Joseph Schumpeter defines research and development (R+D) as creative work undertaken on a systematic basis in order to increase the stock of knowledge.

Both of these cases serve to invert the tacit understanding of R+D as an output of an innovation system. Traditionally we perceive new technology as being the most easily understood product of innovation or R+D. Both definitions above explicitly define the output as either 'new sources of value' or as 'an increased stock of knowledge'. If policy is intended to serve as a catalyst for supporting innovation then it ought to be less concerned with generating technology (an 'input' of research and development) and more concerned with improving the efficacy of measures intended to surface new sources of value or new knowledge.

The byproduct of our current bias is that innovation policy ignores innovation in 90% of the economy. In Canada, 75 companies perform 50% of R+D, while another 19,000 do the rest (out of 2.2 million companies overall). The assume that this ratio holds for innovation, particularly as defined by the OECD omits a great deal of the work being done that doesn't generate 'product' in the way we expect to see it.

So the questions must be asked: What can governments do that affects innovation?

The list is not a comprehensive one (as my pen was slower than the presentation) but I have captured some of the most compelling here:

make rules
educate and train the public
basic research
procurement
direct subsidies
networking
community
knowledge transfer
capitalization
fiscal subsidies
business support

The activities that are most likely to lead to accomplishments (such as basic research) are also more difficult to track in terms of additionality. Those activities that are easier to track, such as business support, may offer less investment efficiency over time. And those activities that serve to catalyze the system (networking and community as examples) contribute in ways for which adequate measures may not even exist.

I have been strongly influenced by the symbolism of seeing innovation as a living system, perhaps due to my background in the environmental sciences. Explicitly making technology an input to the system shifts the role of catalysts significantly. Direct subsidies to drive new technology misunderstand the goals of innovation. If we are trying to generate new knowledge and new value then increasing the frequency and quality of interactions would be a far more effective approach.

Alberta Innovates Technology Futures - Partnerships and the Innovation Ecosystem

2011-09-12T12:32:00.000-07:00

After the more general content of Chris Trimble's opening comments, more focused sessions allowed for deeper dives into relevant areas of concern. I was particularly struck by a set of presentations about collaboration and the necessary connections among universities, the private sector and the public sector to truly accelerate and deploy innovation here and elsewhere.

Here was clear evidence that the needs of the innovation sector would not be met through isolated pockets of brilliance. Professor Wolfgang Wahlster, Director and CEO of the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), explained the German model of public private partnership and how 'shareholding' allows for the long-term research roadmaps of DFKI to be aligned with the business development goals of the shareholding companies. The pursuit of quality requires highly intentional innovation catalysts to specific carriers to facilitate the emergence of specific innovations.

Essentially, the German model is a living lab with networks vested in larger ecosystems. The strength of the system is therefore not tied to the individual performance of the system's members (although they are essential) but rather the ability to catalyze discovery throughout the system to move application-oriented basic research into final projects and delivery. This understanding of innovation systems as being highly planned, agile, emergent and tied to market needs requires very different skills of those driving innovation. Rather than creating a space of 'blue ocean' the scope and scale of technological advancement requires a highly intentional co-evolution of collaborative relationships. Simply put, monocultures can be highly productive (like a farm) but diversity is required to evolve new forms. Niches need to be seen as unique spaces to support the larger system, rather than an opportunity to isolate an organization or individual from market forces.

The conversation then moved to Cameron Schuler, Interim Executive Director of Alberta Innovates Centre for Machine Learning. Mr. Schuler described the practical challenges of university-industry collaboration. What we heard is that the primary disconnect is the inability of academically-minded innovators to meet the customer "at their level" and the tendency to generate "solutions looking for problems". This supports our sense after Dr. Wahlster's presentation that all parties to the innovation ecosystem must look at ways to leverage the extant context to support the larger generative system.

Getting attention requires a relevancy to the larger conversations and the ability to execute is the ticket to entry. Invention, he reminds, is not the solution.

The final talk was with Richard Brommeland, Director of Business Development and External Relations for Canada's National Institute for Nanotechnology (NINT) in Edmonton. He attempted to capture the lessons learned from successful and unsuccessful collaborations and joint commercial activities. Amongst many excellent points, he pointed out that too many in the innovation ecosystem fail to understand the pathway to market. Risk occurs at every stage of development but failures, in his experience, tend to be business failures rather than technology failures.

He advocated for a narrow technology focus with industry-standard facilities and services to ensure connectivity with the larger value system. He also spoke of the importance of getting as many components of the system involved in the final outcome as possible. Public accountability for commercial impacts is increasing and at the same time, Alberta's researchers are not able to make industry a stakeholder in their innovations. Researchers are also disconnected from those deciding on funding, so they often fall into a white space, an isolate from the larger innovation dialogue.

I have undoubtedly done a disservice to the brilliant speakers on hand but the above represents my reactions and notes to the initial set of presentations. The Japanese industrial system has long understood the need for tight collaboration among government, the private sector, academia and community organizations. They work in structured and mutually-supporting arrangements that are intended to maximize the long term aggregate benefit of those involved. Our culture, and particularly our industrial behaviour, is patterned on a form of 'game theory' that makes conversations about long-term gross benefit more challenging. We have a bias to a competitive ecology and collusion is a serious accusation.

We heard speakers comment on the plight of emerging or small players as they benefit less from a designed ecology for innovation. They may execute and find their supportive niche but their share of the 'pie' won't be realized for some time. The urge to insist on commercialization internally is a powerful one as benefit can be realized without sacrifice to the larger system and this leads to many innovations leaving our province and our nation when the major players can't make a seat at the table. It also reflects a capacity gap in smaller technology companies as their leaders can drive performance but may lack the skills to develop strong partnerships and engagements with outside players.

Alberta Innovates Technology Futures - Deploying Innovation

2011-09-06T09:03:00.000-07:00

I had the good fortune to attend the annual Alberta Innovates - Technology Futures summit in Banff, Alberta and feel slightly overwhelmed by the quality and intensity of conversation. There is always a risk in attending unfamiliar conferences, but the lack of assumptions about the topics under consideration allow for rich discovery and dialogue.

Established on January 1, 2010, the purpose of Alberta Innovates - Technology Futures (AITF) is to help build globally competitive commerce in Alberta. The summit's focus was on Deploying Innovation, which is of particular interest to me. The recurring message we heard was the impossibility of disentangling research and discovery from the larger Alberta innovation ecoystem. We also heard, in any number of ways, how innovation and ongoing operations are always and inevitably in conflict.

Chris Trimble - The Other Side of Innovation

Chris Trimble has dedicated the past ten years to studying a single challenge that vexes even the best-managed corporations: how to execute an innovation initiative.

Any project that is new to your organization and has an uncertain outcome.

From here he examines the three main models of innovation that appear in organizations. The first model encourages all employees to pursue innovation on their own initiative. In these environments, free time becomes the performance limit as people must create space for innovation to occur. How innovation is rewarded may not be consistent and individuals must weigh the risk and reward of allocating scarce time to new projects. Huge breakthroughs can create personal and team success but the risks are assumed by the individual rather than the organization.

Results: Did the team hit their target?

Actions: Did the team do what they agreed to do?

Leading: Did the team run a disciplined experiment?

What we found most interesting about this presentation was the audience. Chris's audiences tend to be business people or MBA students and to have an audience of predominately scientists and researchers created some lively questioning. Some of the audience saw 'management' as a dirty word, and essentially argued for the status quo that protected the activities of lone geniuses working in their labs. Others seemed taken back that they, as pure researchers, would need to consider the larger innovation ecosystem in their activities. Not that they were opposed, but that it increased the sphere of inquiry they were accustomed to occupying.

Supervisor On-boarding Process

2011-08-25T11:53:00.000-07:00

This was an early stage for us in trying to support organizational readiness and talent development or training synchronously. Looking back on this (2009) we can see how we were trying to sneak in some of the cultural pieces that would ensure the success of training interventions but a more honest and transparent approach now defines our engagements.

Client Profile

The client provided support services to a health authority. They were in the process of creating a new leadership on-boarding program designed for new supervisors and managers to assist them with their integration and transition from being a unionized bench worker to an exempt leader.

What they envisioned was a 3-5 day extensive strategic leadership training program. What they also envisioned was not just “training” where new leaders are fed information, but also an opportunity for these new leaders to practice new skills with each other and receive feedback. After some conversation and clarification we determined a few other criteria or assumptions

the shift required was developmental and ongoing
the primary classroom for learning would be situated in the day-to-day organizational and business dynamics and challenges of the workplace
the primary means of developing their leaders would be through increasing their ability and capacity to learn
the personal character and experiences of the participants were central to the outcomes of training
they would need to learn both alone and in community with others
to encourage risk-taking, the participants would need to practice in a safe and supportive environment

Step I: The Leadership Learning Plan

At the beginning of the on-boarding program, new supervisors would spend some time reviewing the program competency focus 1:1 with our advisors and their supervisors. This review aimed to focus the participant on developing a personalized learning plan for the program. This learning plan assisted the leader to focus their learning outcomes. Our team provided ongoing support for the learner throughout the program

Step II: Pre-Course Participant Engagement

Participants had pre-course readings, assessments or activities to prepare them for their learning experience. This included guided dialogues with their Supervisors to create a program learning plan to focus their learning on key growth areas. Pre-course assessments included scheduled pre-program learning advisor calls to debrief feedback and outcomes in order to support focused learning in program.

Pre-Course Supervisor Engagement

Supervisors needed to be as equally involved and committed to the learning process as the participants. To ensure engagement we hosted a Supervisor Orientation session. We found this method to be highly effective in helping managers understand the intention of the program. It also engaged managers in the developmental process and supported linkages between program content and the client's management processes and tools.

In addition, we provided Supervisors with pre-course packages and guided questions to help participants establish a structured learning plan.

Step III: Workshops

Workshop 1: Developing Others

We recommended a workshop focused on developing others through the soft skills of leadership. The intended outcomes of the program were:

to develop competence in employing a variety of effective communication techniques
to navigate conflict with greater confidence
to develop a stronger leadership presence

Workshop 2: Self Awareness and Leadership

We recommended a workshop tied to building self awareness or emerging leaders needing to understand their personal leadership style and how they can contribute to lead others with impact. The intended outcomes of this program were:

to discover the power of personal vision and values
to learn to understand the power of choice
to deepen understanding of your own personal leadership style

Workshop 3: Developing Teams

We recommended a workshop for emerging leaders needing to acquire new tools, techniques, and strategies to help enhance team performance with finesse. The intended outcomes of this program were:

to increase awareness of how personal behaviours and leadership style influence team development
to discover new strategies to encourage active participation and effective decision making
to develop skills for addressing counter-productive team or individual behaviours

Step IV: Follow-up Process

At the end of a program, participants engaged in an Action Planning process. Creating an Action Plan allowed participants to transfer the skills, behaviours, and knowledge they acquired during the workshops back into their workplace. Our team was available to help make this transition.

It was vital that the participants be able to transfer what they had learned back on the job. As such, we worked closely with the client to develop an approach that supported learners as they integrated their learning and action plans back into the workplace.

Personal Leadership + Crafting New Solutions

2011-08-18T14:26:00.000-07:00

The client brought together youth that were active in social issues in their communities to develop a network of young leaders while offering learning opportunities to develop their capacity to contribute. Our contribution was a single-day event tied into a larger conference and we were asked to provide approaches to 'personal leadership'.

Our Solution

Based on our ongoing conversations, the 1-day program focused on enhancing personal leadership through exploration of communication, coaching and team development. The challenges of the 21st century demand more than good leadership – they require the adaptive capacity to craft new solutions and the presence to act in the best interests of the larger community.

Our program sessions were designed as a unique way to introduce participants to the importance of cultivating creative leadership as a means to prepare for and address the many personal and professional leadership challenges of the 21st century. Participants engaged in serious play, cultivated leadership presence and deepened their personal awareness and self-awareness as leaders. We ensured engagement and direct sensory participation by employing highly experiential activities to help learners embody the lessons and their leadership character. This included communication skills, creative problem-solving and brainstorming activities that all supported adaptive capacity.

Each of the three learning sessions ended with facilitated debrief to provide the appropriate context and links for developing a more creative personal and professional life. Due to the size of the group, we split them into three smaller groups and asked each group to approach a general challenge through a facilitated encounter. All participants experienced all three learning experiences, finishing with a large group debrief at the end of the day to surface key learning and insights.

Our overall objectives were for participants to:

Deepen their understanding of their own personal leadership character
Develop the capacity to imagine new things and see existing things in new ways
Increase confidence in their communication and problem solving skills
Develop an awareness of what shapes and shifts team culture
Learn new ways to communicate within teams and surface new ideas
Overcome change hurdles that block creativity

Session 1

Team Challenges

This activity allowed participants to explore how teams work closely together. We carefully designed the activities to achieve the program objectives and incorporated the natural surroundings and uniqueness of the program location. The ‘on the ground’ challenges quickly assisted the participants in developing trust, building cooperation within teams, communicating and coaching.

Session 2

Percussion and Deep Listening

This highly interactive hands-on session encouraged the group to experiment with a number of percussion instruments and drums as a means for sparking the creative potential and passion of the team. Through the “serious play” of drumming, participants discovered new insights into the importance of deep listening, adapting to change, and the fundamental elements of creating dynamic teams through enhancing group connection, cooperation, and collaborative inquiry.

Session 3

Leading Creatively

Improvisation tools and techniques can provide an opportunity to practice challenging patterns. The group practiced team development and adapting to change in positive and innovative ways. Participants explored various ways of using narrative, storytelling, and improvisation to increase team members’ capacity for building trust, creative risk-taking, enhanced communication skills, and increased personal presence.

Debrief Session: What Next?

Participants regrouped as a larger community to explore the day’s activities. We facilitated an open conversation in which participants could reflect on the day, explore insights, and make powerful connections between their experiences and their personal leadership style.

Outcomes

It is particularly difficult to gauge the effectiveness of an encounter over such a short period and with a cohort with so little exposure to this kind of learning. Adult learning principles suggest that learning is best supported when participants can bring their own lived experiences. As the group was comprised of youth, the degree to which they were able to access lived experience was variable and some seemed to benefit less than others.

The feedback was overwhelmingly positive (response surveys) but the long term implications of the intervention remain an open question.

Tolerance, Talent and Technology - Instruments of Innovative Organizations

2011-08-03T19:04:00.000-07:00

Richard Florida has been a significant influence on my work and on how I see the world. Community is a concept that has seen surges and retreats in popular Western culture and all of us struggle, to some degree, with the freedom and release of self expression and the comfort and warmth of community. Florida offers us a vision of community compatible with our best and worst creative urges. A system of development that accepts our showy self-love with a wink and a nod can't help but be irresistible. He posits a credible narrative that sometimes leans to the optimistic but offers a path out of a persistent sense of separation.

The driving force behind any effective economic strategy is talented people. We live a more mobile age than ever before. People, especially top creative talent, move around a lot. A community's ability to attract and retain top talent is the defining issue of the creative age.

- Richard Florida

Florida could as easily be describing organizations as urban centres and his insistence that communities require tolerance, talent and technology to be successful is attractive and coincidentally aligns with how I see our work.

At it's most basic, organizations need good ideas (talent), the ability to communicate and refine them (technology) and the wisdom to not refuse them out of hand (tolerance). We love the quote from Rudyard Kipling (that is often shortened on one end or the other to support a particular worldview) when offered in it's entirety.

For the strength of the Pack is the Wolf, and the strength of the Wolf is the Pack

I take this quote to heart in all our engagements. Developing talent (say through leader development) is only effective if the energy generated has a space within the organization to be released. Truly effective personal development programs generate significant dissonance and we expect at least a 25% turnover rate for our participants in our development programs. This could mean finding a new pack to run with. RIM is seeing reduced engagement and employee departures beyond the current set of layoffs as evidenced in a recent article in the Star.

The firm’s post-layoffs workforce of 17,000 is a sclerotic bureaucracy where a relatively small number of high-achievers are loaded down with 15 projects each while empty suits abound. “Getting decisions on minor issues takes weeks, on major decisions months,” another of the anonymous RIM employees writes.

Also, tolerance is only meaningful if the talent exists to improve on the situation and the technology is in place to let others know that the failure occurred. Mitsubishi in Japan was systematically covering up defects and came to be involved in what many consider the largest corporate scandal in Japanese recent history. The first failure could have offered an opportunity for restitution and improvement. The first few defects were publicized in 2000, but again in 2004 Mitsubishi was required to admit to cover ups and unreported defects. A few senior people tolerated the errors and the assurances of their reports but the larger talent pool wasn't properly leveraged to prevent recurrence nor was technology employed to inform the full organization of the scope of the situation.

Finally, tools must exist that connect the individual to others to enable collective action. Tolerance of new ideas and enormous talent are wasted if the tools don't exist to allow for effective coordination. There is no shortage of corporate failures attributed to functional silos that could never learn to cooperate. Nokia is undergoing a period of critical self-examination about how it has come to it's current state that is neither a product of its talent or a paucity of good ideas in its many areas of research and exploration.

Work, at it's best, provides us a discipline to master, a larger purpose to surrender to and the tools to effectively coordinate our talents for the greater good. Failure in any of these areas inhibit growth and the potential of organizations to adapt and innovate. Richard Florida offers a compelling vision of creative cities, and more recently, the dark underbelly of the new reality, and we see organizations following a similar pattern, with the need to coordinate instruments of tolerance, talent and technology to ensure sustained success.

Innovation Paths: Differentiation vs. Neutralization vs. Optimization

2011-07-22T09:13:00.000-07:00

This is a short clip from a larger piece that looks at innovation in a very different way. Geoffrey Moore manages to capture a fairly important concept in understandable language. Basically, he states that innovation can take the form of setting a product or service apart in a meaningful way, reducing the gaps between the value of the product or service and outside innovations or delivering the product or service more efficiently. He also believes that individuals, teams and organizations can develop a bias to certain types of innovation or even more dangerously, try to blend innovation types into projects at the planning stage.

Having a bias toward differentiation, as an example, isn't necessarily a bad thing. Always wanting to come up with the next best thing can generate enormous benefits. However, if effort isn't allocated to ensuring that improvements developed elsewhere are integrated into the design then the value of the offer will suffer. The joy of innovation is that it is emergent in any system and believing that innovation can only be generated internally is a recipe for disaster. Additionally, not optimizing on the delivery or affordances of the product or service can lead to a differentiated product that is painful to use. How much technology fails because relatively simple fixes weren't applied as energy and resources were focused on making it a more perfect mousetrap?

Interestingly, strategic decisions can also hamper innovation. Each of the innovation paths (differentiation, neutralization, and optimization) generate 'power' that can then be used to advance the strategic interests of the organization. However, each of the innovation paths require a different orientation and different measures of performance. Differentiation finds new ways to create joy in the user. Neutralization requires a hard look at the competitive landscape to ensure that you're still in the game. Optimization is far more inward looking, and asks hard questions of how resources are being used and where they can be freed up.

So What?

I am a Certified ScrumMaster and believe in the power of agile methodologies to drive product and service development for my clients. Agility is paramount. Scrum is a management framework for getting things done incrementally using multidisciplinary, self-organizing teams. The framework offers a structure of roles, events, processes and artifacts but the focus is really on supporting people rather than processes in generating innovative solutions to client and stakeholder-driven requirements.

Other organizations employ their own processes and structures to support innovation. Regardless of the process in use, however, teams must be clear on the type of innovation being sought. Furthermore, the innovation type should be driven by those accountable for the product or service's success to align with overall strategic goals. We know that many engineers see differentiation as a more glamorous activity and will pursue new features at the expense of optimization when given the freedom. If differentiation is not in the best interests of the organization at that time, hard decisions must be made and processes in place to switch quickly if the context shifts.

A leaked memo from Nokia’s CEO, Stephen Elop, captures this concept well. The bolding is ours.

The battle of devices has now become a war of ecosystems, where ecosystems include not only the hardware and software of the device, but developers, applications, e-commerce, advertising, search, social applications, location-based services, unified communications and many other things. Our competitors aren’t taking our market share with devices; they are taking our market share with an entire ecosystem. This means we’re going to have to decide how we either build, catalyse or join an ecosystem.

Building an ecosystem would be an explicit commitment to differentiation. Catalysing is an optimization strategy and joining an ecosystem (like Android's) would neutralize some of the value gap. The choice will define Nokia's future and any effort to do more than one of these will likely extend the gap between Nokia and its competitors.

Not all innovation is flashy. Microsoft remains a master of neutralization and built enormous power on their ability to integrate new innovations quickly. Some would argue that the Japanese industrial complex is an oscillating wave of neutralization, optimization and then differentiation. From the level of individual contributors to senior leadership, clarity on the type of innovation required and allocation of resources to make it happen are critical to sustained performance.

Creating Creative Teams: Photography to Share Knowledge

2011-07-19T15:06:00.000-07:00

Client Profile

The client was hosting a series of conferences to allow all of their staff to participate in a conversation about the future of the organization (165 employees). Due to the nature of the work they were involved in, having the entire team together at the same time was a physical impossibility. Therefore, they were looking for an activity that would bind the four conference sessions together while generating productive conversation going forward.

Essentially, senior leadership was asking all employees to take a more active role in fostering innovation across the organization. They wanted their people to be more 'creative'. However, there was no shared experience or history that defined what 'creativity' looked like.

Our Solution

We delivered four half-day sessions. Our process used the medium of the visual and photographic arts to examine how creative processes influence team dynamics and to surface shared assumptions about meaning and value of key organizational initiatives. When we refuse to rely on language, which falls into predictable patterns, quality of dialogue is greatly enhanced. By asking every employee of the organization to pay attention, to personalize a collective ambition, to imagine a desired state, and to inquire collaboratively, we allowed for critical assumptions about what innovation and creativity meant to surface.

We also knew that a move away from language into images can be useful in breaking blocks in thinking. Through personal exploration and group discovery, participants created photographic images to be used as symbols or metaphors that highlight the multiple levels and unique characteristics of creative and innovative leaders and teams.

Outcomes

With the number of participants that went through the process we received a wide range of responses but the quality of the discussion was powerful and allowed for future conversations to occur within the organization. Specifically, the team identified:

increased clarity around the context of the challenge
new processes to ensure full discovery of potential solutions
patterns of conversation that supported critical inquiry to craft creative responses

Strategic Planning Facilitation: Avoiding Groupthink

2011-07-18T14:09:00.000-07:00

Client Profile

This client offers support solutions to oil and gas concerns throughout North America. This includes temporary and permanent space requirements; resource drilling and completions support; and, remote workforce accommodation. The organization is primarily made up of former oil and gas executives that wanted the freedom of an entrepreneurial environment and who value integrity and innovation.

In consultation with the client we discovered that they were seeking a facilitated conversation around strategic direction. The group was seeking:

a discussion on growth and inherent challenges
unfiltered feedback from each person on the challenges within the executive team
a 30,000 ft. strategic brainstorming session
different ways of thinking about their business
processes to draw out opinions
opportunities for each executive member to articulate their strengths and weaknesses
exercises to get them where they wanted to go

The predominant style of the executive team was 'realist' – all members were comfortable in this style. Although some had ‘analyst’ and others have ‘idealist’ as primary styles, they all could ‘speak’ the realist style and so this style is a major part of the culture of the group (and therefore the company).

We spoke to the group about determining what qualities such a realist group would have and then keep the good ones and mitigate the risk of the downsides. The group also displayed a tendency to convergence. Opportunities to explore the issues were diminished and often limited options before conversation had really begun.

Our Solution

We offered a 1-day facilitated dialogue for 9 key business leaders. The intent was to lead a discussion on growth and challenges and to look at the business in different ways through innovative processes. As the process was an emergent one, the activities required an agile and prepared facilitator to maximize value in the single day intervention.

Outcomes

Client Commitments

continue to meet once a year so sit face to face to discuss issues
enable systems to support quick responses to opportunities
consensus-based decision-making (even though they may disagree in the group, outside they all show agreement)
think more before taking action
more direct contact with employees operating at the periphery
active mentorship of the next level of leadership and staff
more critical and appreciate conversations across Business Units
seek 'common culture' and synergies to support the existing 'common vision
find and exist in the ‘places of most potential’
remember that vision without technique is blind

Strategic Priorities Identified

Recruitment and personnel development that is organized and structured
Inter-sectional and cross-functional work opportunities
Move away from performance and compensation driving personal agendas to establishing a corporate agenda
Information systems that allow ideas to come up through the company including IT dashboards for measuring and monitoring)

Moving Beyond Change: Strategies in Implementing Online Learning Communities

2011-07-11T10:31:00.000-07:00

This is a continuation from the previous article on dealing with the impacts of introducing a learning community. In this case, the primary issues were around

'Emergent' Collaboration vs. 'Structured' Collaboration

Top-Down vs. Grassroots

Priorities

Control

The actual substance of reactions to proposed changes are important but not critical to successful delivery.

Rather, the process of surfacing resistance was critical to supporting delivery and uptake.

We adopt an appreciate inquiry approach to change initiatives. Appreciative inquiry asks us to discover what is already working, and then frame change as a way to extend those activities. This contrasts in substance and philosophy with traditional problem solving where we look for what is not working and focus on fixing systems to reduce the frequency of negative outcomes.

We aimed to create a future that multiplied successes and crowded out the less successful pieces. An interview process allowed our implementation to be grounded in dialogues about real-life experiences and organizational history directly from members of the organization. This dialogue created a positive sense of ownership of the information and a heightened commitment to making changes to the current state.

We also tried to be as transparent as possible about the assumptions of this process so that participants knew where we were coming from:

In any human system, something works
What we pay attention to becomes our reality
All realities are equally valid and tied to the current context (reality changes)
Dialogue shifts people into a new reality
People have more confidence and comfort in the unknown when the known is validated and integrated into the process forward

What did we do?

This is a bit of a paradox. The process of hosting interviews around what a learning community could look like served to generate grass-root support as long as the feedback was respected and integrated into design and delivery considerations. The dialogue could not occur until a readiness was created within the group to fully understand the implications of any recommended change.

Too often communication is framed as "the decision makers" distributing information to the "users". Sadly, this approach is intrinsically doomed. Even those that rationally support a change initiative will, paradoxically, resist it as a short-term self-defense mechanism if they are not enlisted as participants in the initiative's creation and if a state of readiness doesn't exist to internalize it. Traditional research thought that resistance to change was a product of inadequate will. Research by Kegan and Lahey at the Harvard Graduate School of Education indicates that individual beliefs and their interactions with the collective mindsets of organizations create the defense mechanism that thwarts a majority of change initiatives and that 'will' is not a contributing factor to change success.

The trick is that no change can be properly integrated until a readiness is created to deal with adaptive challenges. Change is too often framed as something to be 'dealt with' or 'coped with'. The reality is that in addition to dialogue around expectations, people must be developed to generate adaptive solutions. The core of my work is developing adaptive capacity and any change initiative must therefore include an educational component that develops the ability to deal with ANY adaptive challenge.

Stage I: Workshops

When we were asking people to step into the 'unknown' we ensured that they had the tools and confidence to deal with uncertainty. All too often, organization members offer technical solutions to non-technical challenges. Applying a well-known skill set to an adaptive challenge is self-defeating. Workshops allowed participants an opportunity to explore their own growth and obstacles to achieving it. No mention was made of the virtual learning community, but rather conversations occured around what collaboration and interdisciplinary community were and how they tied to meeting the growth needs of the community.

Stage II: Craft Skills

Once the team understood the adaptive nature of future challenges, we offered them situated practice in embodying the necessary craft skills. This also offered an opportunity to capture real use cases to model within the community site. Collaboration and interdisciplinary work became situated activities tied to the growth objectives of the participants. No virtual component existed yet as we were still modelling the ideal use of a virtual space.

Stage III: Overcoming Obstacles

We then could put the energy of the group toward identifying and removing obstacles to delivery. This stage needed to occur after the other two as we had short-circuited the paradoxical response by building capacity and situating craft skills to support delivery. This is the stage where we surfaced the challenges, but only after the workshop participants had placed themselves into the story and had a chance to reflect on the emotional and mental impacts of what could be.

Virtual Learning Communities and Change Management

2011-07-10T17:55:00.000-07:00

Not surprisingly, the technical challenges of delivering an online learning community, in whatever forms, are relatively minor in comparison to the change challenges inherent in asking people to do things differently.

Client Profile

The intent of the virtual learning community was to support collaboration across disciplines in a truly multi-disciplinary educational institution. We were commissioned with creating an online space that would allow participants to exchange knowledge and stories; sustain dialogue with partners; and support interdisciplinary exploration and creation.

We moved toward a persistent community that allowed the freedom to curate in service to strategic goals and to keep connections fresh. The primary measure of our success would be the quality and durability of engagement with the portal and the nature of the new commissions that emerge.

Specific objectives included:

Enrich engagement between participants, guests and staff
Leverage existing & emerging technologies and on-line communities to extend marketing reach and brand
Make staff efficiencies a key focus in all technology implementations

We identified a number of high level requirements and functional objectives that drove the creation of an implementation strategy. Change management was a central piece.

Change Challenges

Any program designed to 'improve' things will run into trouble early if it doesn't understand the impacts it will have on those intended to support it or be supported by it. We came to understand what specific measurable and observable results we intended to gauge our relative success by.

But this wasn't our first question.

Our first question was finding out how we would know that we had made things better.

Resistance is a natural byproduct of change and any effort to ensure support must be founded on an honest desire to understand and to do right.

Change interviews allowed us an early appreciation of where we risked stepping wrong, and opportunities to include stakeholders that supported our success.

'Emergent' Collaboration vs. 'Structured' Collaboration

When we started speaking to potential users we heard time and time again that they feared a solution that was 'contrived' and they doubted our ability to create a collaborative space that was truly emergent as opposed to 'structured' collaboration like that found in business applications. Others were concerned that the open nature of the space would cheapen the individual disciplines. How could quality be maintained and why did collaboration even matter?

Top-Down vs. Grassroots

There was also significant resistance to top-down implementation of a learning community. The general impression was that senior leaders didn't appreciate the workload implications of these projects. As a stated objective of the project was to realize staff efficiencies this was a real and present concern for many. This led us to focus on results and change the culture along the way. We proposed building on the sub-optimized systems and methods already in place to generate specific buy-in and directly involved those most impacted early in the process.

Key Question: How will this truly affect my work and whose interests are represented in this process?

Priorities

Some felt that the ambition was a noble one, but likely one that needed to fall a few levels down the priority list. We realized that presenting an intact vision alienated many and we began hosting more appreciative interviews that allowed us to capture what 'collaboration' needed to do, and then building the vision around it. By focusing on essential needs first, a critical mass of support could be maintained.

Others saw collaboration as a skill that needed to be developed before any space should be created to spotlight it. This impacted our eventual delivery greatly. The question of, "What do I need to learn?" needed to be answered, particularly in light of the already heavy workloads.

Key Question: Why does this matter and how do I have a say in how it matters?

Control

The nature of interdisciplinary collaboration sometimes results in silos being eroded and issues of authority and control coming to the forefront. Marketing was particularly concerned about how the space would be controlled and understanding this allowed for more intentional dialogue about their legitimate concerns around external perception and internal accountability.

Other areas expressed similar questions around control. Some wanted to be able to segregate content from the larger space for their audiences due to inherent differences in different disciplines while others wanted control over production values. Another group was concerned that a virtual community put unnecessary emphasis on technical proficiency and believed that a reliance on technology makes us "dumber".

Key Question: Who owns this and who's accountable when it goes horribly wrong?

Stay tuned for Part II where we describe how we worked with these various groups and concerns to build engagement and ownership in the implementation!

Leading Technical Professionals

2011-06-27T19:17:00.000-07:00

A study by BlessingWhite Inc. in 2006 entitled Leading Technical Professionals remains relevant today and has informed a lot of my work around supporting technical professionals in their transition to leadership. Although the paper focuses on the leadership of technical professionals, it also provides evidence of the challenge that leaders face when transitioning from technical expertise to leadership.

In countries such as Japan, employees are generally employed for life and finding the right fit between the individual and the role is critical. As a relocation trainer in the automotive industry in Japan, I was often struck by the lack of polish and technical competence of engineering managers. How were these individuals promoted when their peers has so much polish and perseverance? The answer was quite simple. Unlike in North America, leaders were selected on their ability to support the uniquely Japanese consensus-building processes and project management approaches that make them successful.

In North America, we often promote technical experts because it is the natural progression. The reality, however, is that the skills required of an effective leader are distinct from the technical skills necessary to earn the promotion in the first place. In fact, it becomes doubly restricting as leaders come to believe that they are valued for their technical expertise and are extremely reluctant to abandon those skills to take up the necessary skills of leadership.

The primary challenges outlined in the BlessingWhite paper for technical leaders are not surprising. The top 5 challenges are identified as:

delivering on projects with fewer resources
balancing my team's coaching needs with my own project responsibilities
keeping up-to-date on industry advances
developing the skills of the technical professionals I lead
developing myself personally and professionally

Although each of these is not surprising in isolation, seeing all five is quite striking. This appears to be evidence of an inability to balance the responsibilities of a new role with new accountabilities. Time and time again we have seen new leaders continue to do the things that got them promoted while supporting a team, maintaining the primacy of their experience, providing technical mentoring and looking after their own development. Of course they become exhausted and engagement suffers.

The simple fact is that leading others requires the courage to relinquish the things that got you into the role and trusting that the distributed efforts of the team will deal with some of the challenges above. Specifically, micro-managing of project members can lead to challenges in delivery. Feeling a need to always be on the forefront of new knowledge requires significant effort which is likely being duplicated by others on the team without leadership responsibilities. Technical mentoring may be a useful attribute but there certainly exists others on the team with technical competence but without an accountability to general coaching needs.

The fact that encouraging risk taking and innovation within the team is the least important leadership activity listed is also telling. Leaders lead through service. Releasing the capacity of the team would contribute to making the five challenges listed less severe. As BlessingWhite summarizes, leaders of technical professionals need to:

be leaders of people, not managers of projects
understand what makes technical professionals tick
be just enough of an expert to lead, not do
increase their influence outside of their team or department

None of these can be effectively achieved without developing competency in other areas. Specifically, the 'soft skills' of effective communication and self awareness are central to naturally building the capacity to inspire, motivate and surrender to the emergent leadership needs of the team.

An Unsuccessful Proposal - Learning from Failure

2011-06-22T12:57:00.000-07:00

Client Profile

I am beginning to see a trend in these client profiles where we deliver on what is asked but are less than impressed with the outcomes. I am a strong proponent of a feedback-rich environment, particularly the progress and pivot concepts of lean startups. I have a predisposition to seeking improvement and although none of the client profiles are going to highlight 'perfect' solutions, I should add that our approval scores (limited to Kirkpatrick 1 or 2) are well over 85%. We do good work. We can do better.

We had worked with this engineering company for some time and we took it upon ourselves to propose a process to support the development of adaptive capacity within the organization. The pace of innovation and technological change, the emergence of new markets, shifts in culture and demographics all required our client to be more agile and better-rounded. The economic climate at the time was impacting immediate performance and the types of leadership challenges that the client was addressing.

However, the long-term health of the organization remained tied to their vision of leadership, relationships, agility and performance and the individual capacity of leaders to deliver this vision.

We proposed a process to identify key capacities required during increasingly frequent periods of change or transformation and by focusing on the steps necessary to enhance individual performance, team effectiveness, and long-term organizational strength. Leadership often focuses on the individual leader – personal skills and abilities – but rarely do we have an opportunity to explore the context of leadership and the emerging world in which leaders live. The leader’s context also defines the parameters for success and failure, which can change over time.

We still believe that the health of any organization is a function of its ability to evolve new leadership capacities and strategies based on changes in the marketplace, customers, vendors and employees.

Our Solution

We proposed a 3-day facilitated retreat to explore the client's current leadership challenges and to map a path forward. We proposed working closely with key stakeholders and, using our extensive knowledge network and proven learning processes, we would help them define the current leadership climate, set a path forward and develop a plan to build the internal capacity to meet the challenges ahead.

We proposed a facilitated forum to:

identify required organizational and personal leadership capacities to deal with emerging challenges
set a path to increase internal capacity in the identified areas
articulate an action plan to implement a strategy to achieve sustainable organizational change

Using collaborative, experiential and self-reflective methods and tools, senior leaders would explore current challenges, generate potential solutions and build an action plan to implement the required change.

Intended Outcomes

identify and bring clarity to the leadership opportunities and challenges facing the organization
discover and practice productive strategies for idea generation
use creative and divergent thinking processes to respond to complex leadership challenges and perceived capacity gaps
use critical and convergent thinking to craft plausible solutions
practice advanced strategies for rapid prototyping of solutions
discover techniques on how to move new ideas from vision to reality
learn techniques to refine and sustain innovation

Outcome

The proposal was rejected. Although the outcomes were desired at all levels of the organization, there were several reasons offered for why the session was not viable.

business planning processes and methodology are normalized across the organization and from a timing and scope perspective they would have wanted to align the conversation into the larger processes
given the economic climate the senior leaders were focused outward on business development
a general readiness for this scope of discussion was some time away

We learned quite a bit from this rebuttal and have integrated the feedback into our planning and proposal processes. We ensure that any intervention supports larger systems and processes, aligns with internal messaging and that a readiness exists before the proposal is sent. I still believe that the proposed session would have benefited the organization but it was poorly aligned with internal processes which made rejection inevitable.

Customized 360 Assessments

2011-06-21T08:42:00.000-07:00

Client Profile

The client was a geographically distributed government agency operating across Canada. They were looking for a tool to have conversations around relative strengths and development gaps in their distributed management team. Travel was not a viable option as many of the participants were operating from remote communuties. Rather than a conversation about working together, they were seeking a shared language for how those conversations might happen.

Solution

Customized 360 Assessment

An essential element of developing a strong suite of leadership competencies for individuals is feedback. We work with various partners to design and deliver online tools that link organizational competencies to 360 degree assessment processes. We support the generation and development of behavioural statements that provide direct evidence of competency as well as assistance in crafting competency language around behavioural statements surfaced during appreciate inquiry interviews.

The reports allowed participants to receive essential feedback on their leadership behaviours and practice. In addition to completing the assessment, the cohort was asked to solicit feedback from supervisors and colleagues in the workplace. Their responses anchored the learning to organizational priorities and provided insight along their development journey.

Leadership Competencies

Although there are various definitions of competency, all of them include the description of a competency as a set of skills required for taking effective action. The skills are important, as is the knowledge of when to use them and when not to. Competencies define a set of actions that must be learned and executed in a way that creates a chosen outcome. Leadership competencies, then, are workable groupings of skills that support personal, team and organizational resiliency in the face of change and complexity.

Leadership Skills

Skills are defined sets of acts that have a specific effect or accomplish a specific task. Often skills will suggest a certain sequence of action that needs to be taken for the tasks to be completed. Sometimes skills can be used in a variety of orders or combinations to accomplish a related task. Skills can be combined and recombined to deal with a number of demands and situations. Skills can also be combined and recombined to create new competencies. It makes sense that the more skills that can be learned the more adaptable and able is the leader to address a greater variety of situations. The skills are the basic building blocks of building leadership capacity.

Outcomes

The group had a limited budget which forced the application of the assessments out of scope. We prefer to offer telephone review of the data with our development coach who assists in developing and implementing strategies to continue to enhance areas of strength and to develop areas where gaps have been identified. Ideally, the coach guides the process of learning for the purpose of helping the leader to consciously choose behaviours that improve their competencies and thereby assist the bottom line of our partners and their key relationships.

In this case, the organization took ownership of debriefing the assessments internally. Although they had excellent professionals equipped to host these conversations, our preference is to participate in the entirety of the intervention to assess impact and opportunities for future improvement.

Drumming with an Intact Team

2011-06-20T12:34:00.000-07:00

Client Profile

The client provides rentals to the oil and gas industry on monthly or annual term supply contracts. The client leverages relationships to support the logistical needs of moving product via tank car or railroads. Their organizational focus and mission is on their team's ability to creatively craft responses to logistical challenges across the continent.

They were seeking a supportive component to their annual Christmas party and wanted to build positive energy going into the following year as the price competition and a general decline in the sector was pushing work pace to unsustainable levels.

Our Solution

Drumming

Drumming is a simple and effective way to get people to listen to each other and to understand the importance of reflecting on teams and the interactions that support collective effort. The session is highly interactive and hands-on with limited post-session engagement. The facilitator encouraged the group of around 35 (and their spouses) to play with a number of percussion instruments and drums as a means of drawing attention to the creative potential and passion of the team.

Topics for exploration were around the importance of deep listening, and the foundations of dynamic and innovative teams – enhancing group connection, adaptive capacity, and collaborative inquiry.

Desired Outcomes

Outline and reinforce community within the workplace
Communicate through deeper listening
Adapt to change in a team environment

Outcomes

The connection to the party afterward made the 'serious play' less serious and ultimately we didn't feel that this was a detriment to the session. The spouses were uncertain of whether they should participate and this led to a number of important conversations around the role of family and other supportive structures in organizational success. The session was brief, but powerful, and the group has stated their intent to work with us again.

The New Map of Leadership

2011-06-19T10:09:00.000-07:00

We are playing a new game by old rules.

-Barnett, a Pentagon’s New Map

The Centre for Creative Leadership offers a webinar entitled A New Map of Leadership: Global Trends Impacting Leaders and Leadership Development that speaks volumes of the need to address organizational challenges from a new perspective and with a new framework. The session provides synthesis and analysis of popular global trends and current CCL research and has been instrumental in defining and enhancing my practice. Specifically, the workshop addresses the following questions:

What global trends will impact organizations in the coming years?

How will these trends affect leadership and leadership development?

Are there differences in current leadership practices and future needs of leaders in the United States, Europe, and Asia?

What developmental approaches will be necessary in the future?

We lack a shared story for our times.

- Kelly, Powerful Times

What does this mean for tomorrow’s leaders? How can we best prepare them for the future? CCL conducted extensive research on over 800 leaders from their programs from 28 countries. 84.3% of the leaders surveyed believe the definition of “effective leadership” has changed in the 5 years prior to the research being conducted. Several trends were identified that will have the largest impact on the development of leaders going forward.

Ground Truth of Globalization

The nature of the global economy asks for new tools for cross-boundary collaboration. The shift is toward interdependent decision making, emergent strategy and distributed action. 93% of leaders surveyed believe the challenges they face are more complex than 5 years ago. The response has been to see innovation as an organization-wide competency and we have taken this to heart in our own practice. The democratization of innovation is a critical condition for success in a complex world. By addressing the business challenge as the central frame and content, all members of the organization are empowered to drive innovation in an adaptive and context-sensitive manner.

5 New Leadership Skills for a New Time

Adaptability
Paying Attention
Co-Inquiry
Risk Taking
Navigating Challenges

Assessing our Creative Problem Solving Style

2011-06-17T12:12:00.000-07:00

Client Profile

We were working with a fully integrated real estate development company with offices across Western Canada. They were seeking better, more effective communication between members especially pertaining to project work:

improved flow of information
seeking and reaching consensus
making decisions
follow-through
an increased ability to adjust decisions/the team when necessary

The organization began moving toward a team-based business model around 2003. An independent consultant was hired to evaluate the people and functions of the current operation and made recommendations. They still continue to work with their consultant and continue to evaluate and structure the business model.

The team itself was fully formed in 2007. They have a strong belief in teamwork but lack the skills to effectively work within a team.The team has experienced more successes in events and team-building exercises than on the project work but with a clear desire to expand that to the work realm more thoroughly.

When asked, most of the team responded favourably to opportunities to improve their interactions with each other. Our observation was that there were conflicts and differences of opinion and people struggled with how to resolve and deal with these positively. There was still trepidation about treading on others toes (preventing full disclosure sometimes) and a bit of with-holding information because people wanted to feel secure in his/her role in the group.

The demographic split was not extreme with two members between 45 and 49; three members between 40 and 44; four members between 35 and 39; two members between 30 and 34; and one member between 25 and 29.

The group hadn't done much training and development with outside help. The group was experiencing a high level of change due to restructuring of the people and the way they approached their business. The biggest issues surfaced were around company and industry job-losses, although none were anticipated for this particular group.

The financial market conditions and economic situation in Western Canada was (and remains) volatile, particularly in the housing industry. They were beginning to see different needs in the marketplace where more negotiation was required with outside groups where previously the organization dictated conditions. There was also an awareness that there was a requirement for broader understanding of corporate objectives rather than individual agendas - for this team that meant better understanding of how each of their roles and responsibilities meshed within the team and within the corporation. Their business model was highly leveraged by outsourcing much of the detail work - every member of the team was in a position to be leading an aspect of the project.

Solution

We offered a blend of an assessment tool, experiential activities and facilitated dialogue to work toward the desired outcomes of the group.

Orient the team to new challenges
Examine individual team member strengths
Explore their preferred communication style and learn to be more effective
Solve problems through creative negotiation
Develop personal leadership capacity

Learning themes: creative problem solving techniques, creative capacities for navigating complex challenges, team innovation and adaption, collaborative inquiry, risk and trust as critical factors for team success.

Source material: Leaders Edge – D.Horth/C.Palus

Assessment Tool: FourSight Breakthrough Thinking Profile

FourSight is an assessment tool for understanding creative styles when approaching team problem solving – solution finding. It reveals patterns in innovation and breakthrough thinking in individuals, groups and organizations. The creative process is universal – it has discreet steps and each step requires unique mental skills. Most of us prefer some components of problem solving over others and those biases show up as strengths and potential blind spots when solving problems in teams. The four stages in the creative process are as follows:

clarifying the situation
generating ideas
developing solutions
implementing plans

Awareness of our own style and the styles of others allows us to:

leverage style differences
build better teams
short circuit conflict
improve performance

Embodied Work

Using the medium of physical theatre we offered the group opportunities to explore and experience creative ways of cultivating and maintaining “personal presence”. The theatre can provide us with a wealth of tools and processes that create a safe environment to challenge “real life” patterns that stop us from being present in our daily lives. Having the explicit knowledge of the assessment and the faciltiated content, this allowed the group the activity to live into the changes and challenges they were being asked to confront.

Outcomes

When asked what elements of this workshop they found most relevant the group commented on the value of spontaneity and trying to think like others. This theme recurred as the group came back time and time again to the need to understand varied perspectives and to lead with empathy.The importance of play was also critical as it allowed the group to break down barriers within the team. They also commented on the need to balance clarifying activities and brainstorming sessions. When asked what they thought would improve the session we heard that more time was necessary.

Interestingly, long-term behavioural change was difficult to track with this group as shortly after our session the team suffered significant attrition due to repeated failures in the housing market. Although the group enjoyed the session it was not enough for them to collectively address the challenges they faced and we are unable to comment on the long-term implications of our intervention.

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