Dan Erwin

Quotation of the Week: Solveig Torvik

Ours was a family bound by an unacknowledged credo; it does not exist; if pain is given no voice, it lacks power to harm.

            --Solveig Torvik, Prologue to her novel, "Nikolai's Fortune.

Anthropology teaches us that what we name exists.  If we don't name it, it does not exist in our world.  Knowledge is a social reality.  In other words, we create by naming and labeling and defining.

Careeers: How to Get Smarter Every Day

In a previous post, I laid out the basic debriefing format in three simple questions:

• What's going well?
• What needs to go better?
• What have I learned from this?

It takes a while to make debriefing an essential part of your repertoire, but those wanting to go up the ladder, be able to take advantage of opportunities, and get the jobs they want will take the necessary steps to insert this into their front brain lobes.  Successful career development is a systematic process, and debriefing shouldn't be overlooked. 

Once you get familiar with my basic model, the fast-trackers will want to do more with debriefing.  The payoff can be immense.  You can turn your work learning into continual on-the-job behavior. 

A Harvard Management Update, has an intriguing idea about why many business people don't use debriefing:  The reason is that old news is considered irrelevant.  Most professionals are forward-looking:  they tend to forget that they can make what happens next week far more efficient if they spend some time debriefing the past.

In that same issue, the writer lays out a more detailed debriefing process for teams and organizations.  Although I've used it when consulting with teams, I find it especially helpful when I'm working on a more complex skill for myself, or having difficulty gaining a new competency.  (Yeah.  Some competencies are more difficult to learn than others.)

Here's the four step debriefing process from that same Update, which I've adapted for personal use.  You'll notice that it's not rocket science, and it can be applied in absolutely any setting.

• What did you set out to do?  Define the purpose of the action and, in specific terms, the expectations for its successful execution.
• What actually happened?  While the event is fresh in your mind, reconstruct what occurred and figure out the most accurate account of the results.
• What were the differences between the desired and actual results, and why did they occur?  Diagnose any discrepancies, establish cuases and effects, and be ruthlessly honest.
• What are you going to do next time?  Specify and implement actions for the future, including successful steps to be repeated and improvements to be made.

I'm well aware that many business people see systematic processes as a pain in the ass.  I come from that same world, but I've learned that if I want to succeed I'll need to roll over and learn the processes.  There is some very good news about processes aside from their long term value:  the more we learn them, the faster we can learn them and the more useful they become. 

Better Time Management: Make Room for Think Time

This recession has had a seriously negative impact on those who’ve been laid off—that’s obvious-- but also upon those who’ve been retained.  Recent statistics report a high level of fear among workers today.  That means that employees will be putting their best foot forward, and working hard and long to show their bosses that they are worthy of retention.     

Fears of potential job loss often reinforce the need to work faster and faster and take on more and more work.   That can jeopardize our ability to perform at a high level.  Fears keep us from what Thomas Eriksen calls “slow time.”  Slow time, what I call “think time,” is the kind of time and space that gives you an opportunity to consider your tasks and projects in the detailed, focused and unhurried ways that make possible high performance.

On numerous occasions, execs have complained to me that they don’t have the time to think about strategic issues, and that they need to create that opportunity for themselves.  That’s been true for execs over the past 20 years, although it’s exacerbated in this environment.  Senior execs, who have been forced to lay-off people are often in deep pain, with little to no think time available.  This economy is not just about the people who’ve gotten laid off.

But many workers, with only two or three years in the workforce, also face the loss of think time—a loss that shows up in their performance and negatively in the performance of the organization. 

FYI:  Teresa Amabile of Harvard Business School, one of the most knowledgeable persons on business creativity, has studied the impact of downsizing on performance.  She finds that project creativity often takes a heavy hit in an environment decimated by lay-offs and fear.

Triage your tasks

You’re going to have to be clear about your objectives in order to get needed think time.  In other words, put the key things you want to accomplish into your schedule first, so that everything else falls in line.  One of the important tasks for an overloaded employee is figuring out what you can say no to.  Of course, you’ll want to talk over your schedule with your manager to gain his/her support.  But don’t go to that meeting half-cocked.  Be clear about your reasoning, and ready to answer your manager’s questions.

Change your work rhythm

Many experts suggest a simple two-by-two matrix to identify your priority tasks. 

1. Urgent and important tasks.
2. Not urgent, but important tasks.
3. Urgent, but not important tasks.
4. Not urgent and not important tasks.

The more time you give to important, but not urgent work, the more control you have over your schedule.   Specifically, it means you’ll be giving less time to putting out fires.  But why do so many of us have difficulty reducing the time we spend on urgent, but unimportant tasks?  Stephen Rechtschaffen’s book, Timeshifting, has a unique response to that question.  He suggests the answer has to do with entrainment.

FYI:  Christian Huygens, a Dutch scientist, found back in 1665, that when two pendulum clocks are placed side by side on the wall, they influence each other.  Even though he swung the pendulums at a different rate, they would eventually end up swinging at the same rate, what he called entrainment.

Once you’re in a rhythm, you’ll tend to stay in synchronization with that rhythm.  The result is that 1, 3, and 4 activities (see above), which we manage at a high level of speed, continues into other tasks that need think time—slow time.  If we’re working really fast in 1, 3, and 4, then when we get to 2—the important, but not urgent tasks—we have difficulty focusing on those tasks. 

Initially, I though Rechtschaffen was nuts.  However, as I observed myself I found that when I should be using think time to great advantage, or maybe needed to get creative, I was attempting to work at the same speed as I had in most settings.  That dog wouldn't hunt. 

When I slowed down, I reminded myself that time is of the essence, that I need to keep up my fast pace, so I don’t succumb to guilt.  As a result, it was difficult to slow down and my creative work suffered.   My feelings hijacked me.  In Rechtschaffen’s terms, my feelings created a perpetual motion machine.  There are just some situations in which we need to deal with those feelings.

What I’ve learned is that different tasks require different rhythms.  So when, for example, I’ve got some creative work to do, I gear down to a different rhythm.  Sometimes, I merely get up from my desk and take a walk, head for the coffee shop to talk to some of my cronies, or listen to Mozart.  It’s still difficult to switch from my lightning pace to think time pace, but I’ve made serious headway in the process.  

For Managers:

The all-time most popular Harvard Business Review Article:  Who's Got The Monkey     Available free on the web

 

Personal Creativity: Google's Nine Notions of Innovation

Contrary to conventional wisdom, creativity is a learned behavior.  That includes both creative thinking as well as creative action.  Google has laid out nine notions of innovation, and I want to reinforce them for your personal use.  Some of them may not be obviously applicable.  For example, some of us may not be perceived as brilliant enough for Google.  But don't let that stop you. 

Marissa Mayer, a Google exec, made them public in BusinessWeek.

Ideas come from everywhere.  (My rule is beg, borrow, steal, plagiarize and everything else.)

You're brilliant, we're hiring--(don't get intimidated by this.)

A license to pursue dreams.  Employees get a "free" day a week.  Half of new launches come from this "20% time.  (You'll have to go with the flow on this one.)

Innovation, not instant perfection.  Google launches early and often in small beta tests before releasing new features widely.  (I prefer, "do it wrong quickly, and revamp.")

Don't politic, use data.  Mayer discourages the use of "I like" in meetings, pushing staffers to use metrics.  (We all need to personally internalize the use of data--and cut the use of opinion and the ever-present, often false intuition.)

Creativity loves restraint.  Give people a vision, rules about how to get there and deadlines.  (You'll have to do your own self-managing on this one."

Worry about usage and users, not money.  Provide something simple to use and easy to love.  The money will follow.  (This is magnificent.)

Don't kill projects.  Morph them.  There's always a kernel of something good that can be salvaged.  (This is an immensely practical proverb.)

Related Post

Creativity: There's Gold in Them Thar Hills

Analyze This: Can Personality Theory Help You Work Better with Your Teammates?

Individual personality tests have a long, useful history in business.  The most popular is the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), an inventory known for helping individuals understand differences in work style.  However, I've found that MBTI has a life span in organizations and teams of about a year.  After that, it's out of sight, out of mind.  Part of the reason is that the MBTI has 16 categories.  Decades ago, research suggested that once we get to the magic number of seven categories, issues or ideas, our memory takes a hit.  My corporate bank account has twelve-digits, but though I’m no slouch at memorizing, it took a concerted effort to insert that set of numerals into my long term memory.  Some of the more recent personality tests have upwards of 30 or more categories.  You can be damned certain they will have a short life in the business memory.  Still, we humans have an endless interest in understanding ourselves, so we're often suckers for this kind of material. 

Yet, understanding my preferences for thinking, learning, gathering information, making decisions and communicating enables me to pinpoint strengths as well as potential loopholes, and point to needed changes.  Although I have extensive background in complex testing instruments, I've found the four-quadrant Gregorc Thinking Styles to be among the most practical.  A number of my clients have internalized it.  Furthermore, it’s free on the web.

The Gregorc maps an individual's thinking and learning styles with two types of preference.

• Perceptual:  abstract (reasons and intuition), and concrete (the senses)
• Ordering preference:  sequential (linear), and random

By combining a person’s preferences, you get a person’s style. From there, you can draw on the test read-out for further insight.  

The limitations

Edgar Schein of MIT has said that “Taxonomies of personality give you only an illusion of understanding.”  I like to say that they are a snapshot of your personality the day you took the test.  That’s not to say that you will change drastically, but you can and probably should make changes with the information.  It’s important to recognize that tests imply unchangeable characteristics, leading to a kind of personal determinism:  the very act of labeling yourself may be used to justify staying stuck in a personal rut.  However, tests can provide useful information to enable you to perform a kind of gap analysis of your strengths and weaknesses—and from there you can design your own interventions, and make changes to expand the range of your skills.

Using the Greorc for yourself

I happen to be very high concrete random which means that I don’t necessarily arrange data in linear fashion, but connect the dots for myself.  One of my clients said to me years ago, “God, Erwin, your ideas can be off the wall, so occasionally you’ll have to tell me how you got there from here.”  Furthermore, like many creatives, I can let data slip between the cracks.  It’s unusual for a PhD to be random, and, of course, I had to make some thinking changes to earn that research doctorate.   Since 40% of my clients have been technology people, the majority of whom are quite sequential, you can be certain that I’ve adjusted to an extreme linear model.

Using the Gregorc with others

As you gain familiarity with your own preferences, you’ll quickly learn that you can identify other’s preferences.  Since most business people are fairly detailed and incremental in their thinking and communicating, I’ve learned to get out of my comfort zone and adapt to that style.  With just a basic understanding of a person’s preferences, it’s possible to figure out what strengths and weaknesses they’re liable to have on a project, and build a supportive team around the weaknesses.  You’ll know, for example, that strongly random people may be fairly effective at marketing ideas, and that sequentials tend to be quite thorough. 

Although 95% of corporate managers tend to be concrete rather than abstract, you’ll wish you had a few experienced abstract thinkers around to satisfy your big-picture needs and help you think more solidly about strategy.  People can learn to think big-picture when they put their mind and resources to it, but you won’t find many at lower levels.  That kind of learning requires experience with successful big-picture people, so you’ll want to protect and develop them when you find someone with that preference.

Let’s get real.  There is no fully, well-rounded person in business, so it’s very important to identify complimentary preferences, and access those people for your own managerial and personal success.  

I worked, on one occasion, with an EVP of one of the largest firms in America.  She showed herself to be merely an average manager of people and knew little about strategy.  But she was highly successful.  It took me a while to figure out how.  After building a relationship with one of her directors, I revealed how I saw his boss.  He chuckled and said that I was spot-on.  Why was she the EVP of that group?  She was a genius at selling multi-million dollar contracts to leading health-care organizations.  Once her group had updated her on an organization’s possible needs, she could tie up a sale in the neighborhood of $10 to $50 million with little difficulty.  She was a smart executive with a team that made up for her weaknesses.

Once you understand how you and others process information, make decisions, learn and communicate, you can begin to expand the repertoire of skills and aptitudes needed for particular problems.

Related Site 

Gregorc Learning Styles

Careers: The Lost Art of Personal Debriefing

In the military, where the notion of debriefings originated, personnel returning from a mission are questioned thoroughly.  Sometimes gently, sometimes aggressively.  Their interviewers want to make certain that everything they've noticed and learned has been evaluated and shared with the right people.  That's among the fundamental reasons that the US military has the finest and most well-trained forces in the world.

However, you don't have to agree with the popular notion of business as guerilla warfare to benefit from personal debriefing.  Furthermore, the less you associate debriefing with critical and unusual events the better.  You'll learn a lot more by debriefing yourself on those everyday events that are a normal part of your responsibility.  And the more you integrate debriefing into your personal activities, the more useful tool it becomes.

FYI: Contrary to conventional wisdom, studies show that where there are processes by which tiny factors of influence or change are recognized and acted upon they will accumulate to produce meaningful outcomes.  This research provides the background for the idea of small wins, the notion that sucessful learning takes place in staggering baby steps.  Attempting huge steps of learning is a formula for both failure and demotivation.

Make debriefing a regular expectation.  I debrief myself in three different situations:  While learning and practicing a new skill.  When I have an important success.  When I have a failure. 

Debrief as soon after the experience as possible.  Whether I'm in a team meeting, coaching an individual, working alone, or learning a new skill, I inevitably take a few minutes afterward to assess my experience.  I've learned that the sooner I debrief, the more likely my insights will make sense, stay in my memory until I can get to paper and pencil, and figure out who can give me further insights.  The emotions of an experience drive my thinking and analysis, and the longer I wait to debrief, the more quickly the emotions and drive will dissipate.

Create a personal debriefing structure.  I have a template of questions in my front lobes that I can refer to instantly for debriefing.  What went well, and why?  What needs to go better and why?  What am I missing?  On occasion I also ask myself who I need to check in with.  The last question is the most important: How can I use what I've learned in the future?  I spend much time on what went well. 

Years ago, I coached an agricultural economist who was a purchasing director of a major foods company.  He told me that he'd been working on his weaknesses and failures, and that he spent time nearly every evening figuring out how to "fix them."  Because of his lack of success, he'd hired me to help him with his problem.  After listening to his frustrations, I suggested that he try on a new approach to his development.  Instead of thinking through that day's frustrations, I recommended that he pay attention to his for that day.  Then, debrief those successes: figure out what made them successful.  I suggested he follow up that debriefing by tracking his reasoning and behavior.  That would make it possible to leverage those learnings into new situations.  He was initially resistant, but committed to a two week trial run of the new approach. 

About three weeks later, when I walked into his office, he was lit up with a smile.  "You've already earned your fee," he said.  "That approach worked like a charm."  The following year he took me out for lunch to the nicest restaurant in town to celebrate his promotion to vice-president.  He is now an EVP at the General Mills Company.

Although the typical modus operandi for personal development is to focus on strategic weaknesses, that approach should never be used in isolation.  More often than not, once we've learned how to carry out a thorough debriefing of our successes, we'll find that we can learn as much or more with that approach.  This is the kind of learning that's transferable to other situations.  Whether we're focusing on weaknesses or successes, technique is everything.  Chunking learning into tiny bits more readily results in small wins.

Remember the power of stories.  Even the most valuable facts, concepts and learning can be easily overlooked or forgotten unless you've put them into a story.  So when I'm jotting down info, I'll add the situation, the people and the action to my notes.  It provides a verbatim for myself, a story to tell to others when I'm coaching, as well as input for an article or book.  Stories make my learning memorable.

Daniel Coyle, the author of The Talent Code, says that because of the time needed to develop the subject matter and expertise, the best coaches tend to be in their sixties and seventies.  Since I'm in my mid seventies, I agree.  However, one of the major keys of my success has been personal debriefing, a skill I've refined and used regularly since I was in my late twenties. Debriefing is a vastly underused business and personal strategy that provides unlimited opportunities for growth and development for anyone.

The Shuffle President: Multi-tasking, the Internet and Barrack Obama

One of the most intriguing writers on national politics in today's world.   He's smart, funny, insightful and really knows how to spin a great story.  But he's especially brilliant at looking at things in a unique way, reframing them so you see things you don't expect to see, and drawing analogies you can't ever imagine.  It strikes me that Gen-Yers would understand Bai better than any other generation.  Here are two paragraphs in which Bai explains things about Obama, the internet and multi-tasking that I would never have realized.  He calls his essay The Shuffle President. 

Barack Obama is a born storyteller, which makes it all the more confounding that as president he refuses to inhabit a neat political narrative. Obama’s themes are clear enough (salvaging the American economy, reversing the Bush years), but his legislative priorities seem to rotate in and out like so many suitcases on a conveyor belt. One day his presidency hinges on health care, then he’s lobbying for a cap-and-trade plan to reduce carbon emissions and then he’s out there trying to re-regulate the financial world or sell a new treaty with the Russians. “An administration about everything is an administration about nothing” is the way the conservative columnist Peggy Noonan put it in The Wall Street Journal. Colin Powell made a similar point, telling John King of CNN, “I think one of the cautions that has to be given to the president — and I’ve talked to some of his people about this — is that you can’t have so many things on the table that you can’t absorb it all.”

Obama is the nation’s first shuffle president. He’s telling lots of stories at once, and in no particular order. His agenda is fully downloadable. If what you care most about is health care, then you can jump right to that. If global warming gets you going, then click over there. It’s not especially realistic to imagine that politics could cling to a linear way of rendering stories while the rest of American culture adapts to a more customized form of consumption. Obama’s ethos may disconcert the older guard in Washington, but it’s probably comforting to a lot of younger voters who could never be expected to listen to successive tracks, in the same order, over and over again.

The essay from the NYTimes Sunday Magazine is on Bai's website.

"Sticks and Stones May Break My Bones, But Words . . .

The recent altercation between Prof. Gates and Policeman Crowley in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has taken on a life of its own since the president made a comment about "stupid" police action.   All three are going to have a beer together at the White House. 

Although that issue is about a unique American social problem, racial profiling, an article in today's New York Times brought to mind a proverb I learned as a kid:  "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words cannot hurt me." 

We know the proverb is an overstatement.  Obviously words can be cutting.  But as a skinny, runt of a kid, it became part of my repertoire.  Until this morning when I read an interpretive article in the NYTimes, the proverb had not crossed my mind for decades.  The writers, Michael Wilson and Solomon Moore, analyzed differences in tolerance among humans, a trait immensely important in the business world.  Some people let words roll off like water on a duck's back, while others stew and get angry over slights.  Indeed, the Honor Code of many Southern males and the urban responses to being "dissed" are all part of the same problem:  how do you deal with disrespect?  It's an issue that belongs under the rubrics of emotional intelligence and social skills.

A Delicate Issue for Officers on the Street is one that I hope will be digested and talked over.

 

How Secure Do You Feel in Your Job?

Job security, in a recession where more than 10% are unemployed, is under attack.  In a poll reported by the August, Money Magazine, the numbers are enlightening, but not encouraging.  Here are the results:

    20% feel extremely secure in their job.

    35% feel fairly secure in their job.

    19% feel a little insecure in their job.

    26% feel not secure at all in their job.

The conclusions represent slightly over 57,000 responses from New Yorkers, so they're merely pointers when it comes to the rest of the country.  They'd be quite different  in Nevada, where unemployment is something like 12% and more than 170,000 residents looking for work.  In contrast, North Dakota has a 4.6% unemployment with companies looking for workers.  If you can stand the wind and cold, you might think about moving.

So, really, how am I to make sense of these figures?  Those of who are social scientists know that there are two very important issues that factor into a poll like this.

Consider the psychology of the individual giving the response.  Some people, for any number of reasons, are more secure than others in most any job situation.   Sometimes it's because they've had successful experience with job loss, have worked on their competencies so that they're readily transferable, or they have a big slush fund they can draw on should they find themselves jobless.  Your general psychological health has a big impact on your fears, often more than the environment.

Just as important, though, is the company environment, and poll figures don't take that into their purvey.  People in the banking industry have more reasons to be insecure about job loss than most physicians.  In other settings such as union-oriented companies, certain educational districts, or governmental jobs, there's a good amount of inherent security. 

Why does Money Magazine do this?  Since most of us go nutty over statistics, it's a great way for a magazine to create dissonance and keep the reader coming back.  It's little different than getting hooked by serialized "soaps."  (Are all soaps serialized?)

The real issue of this post was to get you thinking about how you view statistics.  What do you do with stats when you come upon them?  It's an important issue related to the quality of your decision making. 

The poll, however, is meaningless.

Quotation of the Week: Malcolm Gladwell

"Incompetence annoys me.  Over-confidence scares me."

        --Malcolm Gladwell