Articles by Rich

Value Realization

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I suppose it shouldn’t surprise me (but it always does) when people inherently believe in the value of what they are doing, without being able to connect it to how it benefits anyone else. The reason is abundantly clear. Each of us has invested in learning, in some skill, some competencies. Those skills become our identity, our personal path to value, they are what WE get paid for. One problem is that we don’t always think clearly about whether that is relevant or inherently valuable in the context of the problem we are trying to solve. When our identifying with current skills or competencies often leads to a narrowing of focus, we call this specialization.

The specialist brings a specific set of tools, skills, practices and competencies to bear on any problem. He may not recognize that there are other paths to solution that require other tools, skills, practices or competencies, or how their own might be amplified by complementary skills from other specialties. The specialist’s worldview is through the window of their own skill.

The Nature of Work and Performance

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In physics, a force is said to do work if, when acting, there is a displacement of the point of application in the direction of the force. There are there components here: force, acting and displacement (movement).

In an employment context, there is effort that is like force, there is activity, the application of effort to a task, and there are results, that are like displacement.

What is missing in this analogy are the performance factors. Performance is always measured against a goal. Performance can be thought of as having several dimensions: speed, efficiency, effectiveness, endurance, capacity.

Performance considers opposing forces, be they static like an obstacle to maneuver around, or varying along one dimension or another.

Back in the employment context, what differentiates performance among individuals is often decision making. Even in mostly manual labor, decisions are an extremely important input to performance. Working at capacity leads to problems along the endurance dimension. Working at speed may introduce problems in the efficiency dimension. Working at the limit of endurance may lead to problems in the effectiveness dimension. These circumstances point toward decisions addressing pace.

As work grows in complexity, rather than simply repetitive tasks, the order of activities may be important for different reasons. Capacity may vary dramatically by activity. Activities may introduce wait times. In these cases sequencing decisions become important.

In the end what passes for skill often boils down to two basic decisions: what to do next and how fast to go.

I’m not saying that knowledge of how to do a task is not important. What I am saying is that I can train people to do a task, but most people learn to make decisions by making bad decisions. It’s easy to assess task competency in interviews, but much harder to assess decision making.

When we have team work, who on the team decides pace and sequence? When we lead individual contributors, how do we inform their decisions about pace and sequence? When we coach leaders how do we help them influence pace and sequence?

Working, Good, Easy!

Software Team
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Make it work, Make it good, Make it easy!

While I have had this framework in my head for a long time, I recently shared it with my product team so that they also could have it and use it to make decisions about priorities.

  1. Make it work!
  2. Make it good!
  3. Make it easy!

The product that the team is working on is a service orchestration tool, with a UI to define the integration points and another to build the orchestrations.  Everything we do is to make it easy for someone else, but how do we prioritize?

From our internal perspective, I want to define how we apply each of these concepts, so that we can all try to apply them the same way.

Make it work – The product doesn’t blow up.  The product does the right thing, when given a valid input.  The product behaves consistently.  The product tells me when I have made an error.

Make it good – The product user experience is “intuitive”.  The product provides intelligible or comprehensible messages when valid input is not available.  The product prevents me from entering invalid input.  The product presents information in a way that makes choices reasonable.  The product has default values for things that meet an 80/20 rule.  The product doesn’t let me pick things that will never work.

Make it easy – The product allows convenient navigation that does not require “back tracking”.  The product is sensitive to context; “reduces” options based on prior decisions (filters lists based on earlier inputs).  The product presents an intuitive flow of activity to support frequent use cases.

What I would like us to do, as we create ideas (e.g. generate/elaborate stories and identify bugs), is to think about which of these categories each idea falls into.  Probably there are a hundred scenarios that I haven’t contemplated here.  I am sure that over time we will think of many.

As we implement each new feature, I want us to continue to work in this order, and to have the freedom to resist when we are being encouraged to work in a different order.  Obviously, if the cost/effort difference between working and good is “insignificant” we should make it good.  Likewise if easy is not significantly more than good, we should make it easy.  Sometimes, we will decide to make it easy, because it makes it easy for ourselves, (e.g. message ingest) however this should be the exception rather than the rule.  All of you will ask about the meaning of the word “significant” – and of course I will say it depends.  What I want is for us to have a framework to ask the question “is it worth it?” before just doing it because we thought of it.

Epidemiology rather than psychopharmacology

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Business Architecture has been likened to psychopharmacology. We are using capability models and process design so that we can see the organization in a new and enlightened light. But I think Business Architecture is much more like epidemiology. We are studying the health of populations. The capabilities are the populations we are studying and the processes within those capabilities are modeled so that we can perform health studies.

A capability model expresses an organization’s activities in a way that is agnostic of both product and organization structure. The divorce from these two dimensions often causes cognitive dissonance among business practitioners, as it ignores the two most important dimensions in favor of what appears to be a subordinated dimension. Still, in order to contemplate what a company does, across organizational units our product lines, one needs an independent dimension, capability.

The relative health of business processes in terms of effectiveness, resource efficiency and cycle time are important to the health of the business as a whole. The ability to inspect populations of processes involved in the same value activity across diverse products and organizations enables the cross pollination of ideas into remote areas and can enable consolidation our other business optimizations.

Epidemiology is the study of diseases in populations of organisms to oversee the effectiveness of suggested prevention and treatment protocols. Capability management is the study of populations of business activities to oversee the effectiveness of standardization and adaptation protocols.

Post reality.  It’s a thing.

Culture
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As marketing guru Seth Godin calls it, post reality is a thing.  It’s funny to me that a marketing guy would get upset with this.  What he is talking about has another word: persuasion.  Marketers do that all the time.  Persuasion itself is a science.

We need to get over ourselves, acting like we care about facts.  Our brains don’t really work like that.  We see patterns, then we hypothesize an explanation for those patterns. A hypothesis is nothing more than a rationalization. These rationalizations when held by a large group of people over a long time become beliefs.

 All science is is us trying to figure out which of our hypotheses is righter that the others.  Science isn’t fact, it’s proof, but just good enough proof, to sustain belief.

If you want to understand this more, consider the following reading list:

Influence, by Robert Cialdini

Thinking Fast and Slow, by Daniel Khaneman

Learning with Statistics

Culture, Leadership
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I have been blogging now in one form or another for a little less than nine years.  I have always blogged for myself, as a learning tool, as much as for an audience.  I needed a collaboration partner, to help me figure things out, and I decided that “the internet” was going to be my partner.  You know the old expression “if you can explain it to someone else, you can tell whether you understand it”.  I usually blog about something that is frustrating me at work, and try to find a way forward out of that frustration.  I rarely “rant”, because while cathartic, it isn’t that productive, as focusing on the negative tends to keep me stuck.  I look for ways to make progress, to change or adapt, to help others get unstuck.

I have a little less than 250 blog posts on this blog (I have two other blogs).  Today I was looking at the stats and I was amazed that two posts pretty much have more traffic than all other posts combined.  Each of them have almost 3000 views – since I moved to a self-hosted WordPress a few years ago.  And the closest competitor has like 208.  Its ridiculous. The interesting thing is that they are two of my favorite posts as well.  I often re-read older posts, to see if my opinion has changed, or if I have learned new things that make the older posts less important.  I treat this blog kind of like a journal of work frustrations, in that regard.  One thing these posts have in common is that they are comparisons – they have versus in the title.  Another thing they have in common is that they are on common popular topics: productivity for one, and agile project manager for the other.

So I thought that I would re-share my two most popular posts, and ask my collaboration partner, why these have more traction than anything else:

Performance vs. Effectiveness and Productivity vs. Efficiency

Agile Delivery Manager vs. Project Manager

 

Avoid the meeting takeover -part 4

Culture, Leadership
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I hope you have enjoyed this little vignette about meeting preparation.  I have spent lots of time in meetings.  I work in an organization that has a highly collaborative culture, and that leads to lots of in-person face-to-face meetings.

Over the years I’ve learned that in order to have effective meetings, there needs to be some preparation done.

I want to add this resource:  The Modern Meeting Standard Al Pittampalli has a ton of resources around this and it has been his focus.  His view is slightly different than mine, but we agree on many, many things.

There are only two basic types of meetings:

Information sharing meetings And Decision making meetings

Everything else can be boiled down to some variant or combination of these two.

The key to a successful meeting is to spend as little time as possible to share the information or make the decision.  That is the goal. That is always the goal. There is never a different goal.

To that end, there are a couple of things to consider:

  1. The amount of time you plan to spend says a lot about the pace of the meeting. If you want the meeting to take less time, plan to accomplish the meeting objective in less time.
  2. That assumes you have a clear objective for your meeting.  Right?
  3. That you have a plan to accomplish that objective.  This plan is usually called an agenda, which is Latin for “to do list” – seriously, look it up.
  4. The necessary people are present.  Which implies that no unnecessary people are present.  The more people in the room, the more time it will take, and the more (of everyone’s) time you will spend.

Remember the key to a successful meeting – starts with spending as little time as possible.

Information sharing meetings

The key to information sharing is knowing what information, to which audience, for what purpose. So start with purpose.

  • Why does this audience need to know this information?
  • What actions is this information going to inform?
  • How does knowing this stuff help them?
  • What response are you looking for?
    • Feedback?
    • Acknowledgement?

The sad part of information meetings is that often, we could simply share the information and let people consume it on their own.  The problem is that often, left up to their own devices, people simply will not read or watch or listen.  Thus, the meeting is as much about holding them accountable for information that was presented as it was about informing.

Decision Making Meetings

The key to decision making meetings is first knowing what decisions are required, who can / should make those decisions, and how they will make them.  But people don’t really like to make decisions, so decision meetings are really about urgency.  What is the impact of not making this decision? This is known as the cost of delay.

  • Why does this decision need to be made?
  • What work is “queued up” waiting for this decision to be made?
  • When does it need to be made?
  • Who needs to contribute to the decision?
    • What is their contribution?
  • Who needs to be communicated to, once the decision has been made?
    • Why do they need to know, what actions will it inform?

If you are coordinating or facilitating decision making meetings, the priority of the meeting and the urgency of preparing for the meeting as all related to the cost of delay.  This information is always important to the decision maker and all of the contributors.

I have read articles that talk about 4 or 6 types of meetings, but I think they are all back to these two or some combination of the two.  See if this mapping resonates with you:

  1. Training or Skill Building – I think these are largely information sharing meetings, often with a retention or comprehension diagnostic at the end.
  2. Innovation or Brain Storming – These are decision making meetings, where the decision directly informs the output/outcome of the meeting.  Often the decision maker appears to be the whole group, because they feel very collaborative. Often, one participant can be deemed the decision maker for the purpose of the meeting and she can break a tie vote or keep the pace of the meeting going.
  3. Problem Solving – Problem solving meetings are also collaborative, but they have a large information sharing component and a decision that is often a sequence of proposed solutions (what to try in what order).
  4. Workshops – These are almost all decision making meetings, but the decision is largely – [when] is the work product “good enough” for some other activity to take place.  These often are product, plan, or presentation development sessions.  They are often held with some regularity.
  5. Client or Sales Meetings – These are always decision meetings – your client is always the decision maker. And there are almost always some information sharing components – but the pace and depth of that content must be focused on enabling the decision.  If you don’t know what decision you want your client to make, start with keeping you as a supplier.
  6. Team Building – Team building meetings are often more of an event than a meeting.  There are information sharing components, and maybe some collaborative, cooperative, or competitive activities.

On Meeting Agendas

Since every meeting has a slightly different objective or goal, and the key to success is to accomplish the goal in as little time as possible, then the plan to do that will be determined by the objective.  Like any other planning exercise, it is often helpful to work backward from the goal to get the steps or information required.

Also remember that all of the work doesn’t have to be done with everyone together in the meeting. In fact, the meeting will go a lot smoother, if as much work as possible is done before the meeting.  Part 3 of this series has an example or explanation of this for a decision making meeting.  So go ahead and create the agenda, then go back and decide which of those things can get done before the meeting.  Move those from the agenda to the meeting prep, and everyone will have a better meeting experience.

 

Avoid The Meeting Takeover – Part 3

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“That was a really great meeting!”, I told Carolyn as we walked toward the lunch room. “I already see the benefits of your mentor relationship with Jack. In fact, I’m kinda jealous.”

“Yeah. Preparation really pays off. Now that I know how, it is so easy.”, Carolyn was smiling.

“So it is really easy?”, I asked.

“Well – initially it was kind of confusing. I didn’t understand that there were different kinds of meetings. I didn’t understand that the objectives determine the kind of meeting and the agenda.”, she shared as we got into line to pay at the cashier.

“Different kinds of meetings, I don’t quite get what you mean. Can you explain?”, I said.

“Well, every meeting has a purpose. Something that you want to accomplish. That has to drive how you organize your preparation. For example – This meeting’s objective was to make decisions, but even with that, there are different strategies.  Some are collaborative – that the team works together to arrive at the decision. Other times, we already have a recommendation that we are trying to get “approved”.  Both meetings have a decision as the “objective” but very different preparation plan.”, Carolyn seemed to really get this.

“Some times the decisions we need are financial, other times they are plan formation, still other times, they are selecting from options. Each has different information required, but the most important thing to prepare for a decision making meeting is to know up front who actually has the decision rights. To be honest, it is the most obvious thing, but until Jack had asked me about it when I was preparing for this meeting, I had never thought much about it.  It hit me like a ton of bricks. I had no idea who was allowed to make the decisions.” Carolyn said.

“So for this meeting, how did you figure that out?”, I asked.

“It turns out that the executive sponsor of the program had delegated the decisions that we needed to three different people within the program, but had not broadly shared that information. After sniffing around, I ended up having to confirm with her that I had the right people. It was actually trickier than I thought, but that allowed me to meet with each of them before the meeting to ensure that they had everything they needed to make and formalize the decision.  The meeting became more of a formality after that, because I already knew what kind of decision framework each of them wanted to use to inform their decisions.”

“Decision framework? What is that?”, I was now totally curious.

“Jack explained that every decision maker has to defend their decisions. Most of them use some form of pre-established logic or criteria that determines how they will react to the information that they use to make their decisions. Most of them will review the framework with their boss or the program sponsor, even before all the information is available to make sure they have thought through things sufficiently”.

“I supposed that I never really thought about how people make decisions. This is pretty interesting. I don’t make very many decisions, but I would love my boss to trust me more.” I was thinking about my own situation.

“You probably make lots of decisions, and you don’t even realize it. Just not the big, visible, potentially career limiting ones.  I learned from Jack that when executives delegate decisions, they want to hold the delegates accountable for results, that part is obvious. Since the results can lag behind the decisions by months or even years, they need some kind of lead measure that they can assess to make sure that decisions are not made arbitrarily or for the wrong reasons.  The decision framework is that lead measure”, Carolyn was on a roll. “So once I understood how the decision makers worked, I could just work backward from there to ensure I didn’t schedule the meeting until that all the information was gathered, and that they had seen at least a preview.” she sounded like an expert.

“So what happens when all the information isn’t available, or can’t be gathered before a decision must be made? Does your method allow for that?”, I inquired, curious to see if there was more that I was missing.

“Jack had that covered, too.  He said that sometimes it is not possible to have all the information available when decisions are required. Then decision makers have to be transparent about this – especially with sponsors and stakeholders. These decisions have more risks. Often contingency plans need to be made to adjust decisions when information is available, but it is still between the decision makers and the sponsor to figure that out.”, Carolyn seemed very sure of her answers.

“What about consensus, it always feels to me like we make decisions by committee. That doesn’t really align with what you are telling me. I’ve been told over and over that we can’t decide until there is agreement. Am I missing something important?”, I asked, still trying to figure out if she had it covered or not.

“Consensus is one part of a decision framework that some decision makers require, but it is really for their own benefit, when they feel they are missing some expertise or experience required to make the decision. They can decide that they want agreement on their chosen course of action from others as part of their framework.  Alternatively, they can have those same experts help them build a more robust framework that they can execute independently – it is totally their choice.  Jack also said that sometimes the executive who delegates the decision will make suggestions knowing the limitations in the expertise of the decision maker.”, Carolyn shared with confidence.

“It seems like you really have this figured out.”, I provided, “I am really happy for you!”

“Truth is, I feel more confident than I have ever felt, at least about meetings. Last week, the sponsor commented about how well run meetings on the program were. I couldn’t help smiling. Jack was right – doing all the prep work really pays off.”

As Carolyn left the lunch table, I couldn’t help feeling like I had learned from her at least some of what she had obviously learned from Jack. I was also curious about the other kinds of meetings and how to prepare for them.

 

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