April 2008 - Posts
In class a week ago, we had a lively discussion on the
systems we use to keep on top of things. Many of us have evolved pretty good
(and highly varied!) systems for tracking to-do lists, getting things done, and
following up. Some of the things we mentioned:
integrating gmail or outlook with to-do lists
using Jott to
turn voice messages into email (including email to yourself)
using Backpack
or similar sites to keep your own to-do lists accessible from any browser; each
page has its own email address and your Backpack site can also include
calendars and email reminders which you can send to yourself
customizing your own iGoogle (or yahoo)
homepage: set up feeds from Stellar sites (15.990 this semester is: http://stellar.mit.edu/SRSS/rss/course/15/sp08/15.990/
)—to add this feed go to “add stuff” on your iGoogle homepage, then “add
feed” on the left to paste the rss url
to note new to-do items, phone message notes,
etc, consider using a gadget on your iGoogle homepage—e.g. sticky notes or
other To-Do lists such as Remember the Milk
One question we touched on in class, that I want to
underscore here, is: where is the time to look back at it all and
figure out what you're learning? And, do you have a system in place
that allows you to check if you have the right things on your to-do list
to start with? Answering these questions requires you to set aside time for reflection,
evaluation, and planning.
As a result of wrestling with such questions, you may find
that you want to set up a conversation with a coach, mentor, colleague, partner
or friend to go over some issues you need to resolve or experiences that you
want to make sense of. At its best, such a conversation could get you new
insights—for instance, a personal lesson learned that you resolve to remind
yourself of regularly. A review or feedbacks session may also result in your deciding
to cancel some of your projects or say no to new ones. These are second-order
changes, ones which have real potential to change the course of your life and
experiences. But of course they must be balanced with the daily challenge we
all face of just getting things done.
We talked in class about a Sloan alum, a venture capitalist
who sets aside one to two hours of his schedule every day—time that he
protected for this mode of reflection, planning, and research. It allowed him
to reexamine past decisions in light of ensuing events, something which he
otherwise might not have done. He spoke of the massive pressure that he and all
his colleagues faced to fill in every hour of his day with meetings and “work.”
But days full of “work” can leave little time for you to figure out how to work
smarter. How do you withstand such pressures?
I don't know a ton about the work in this area -- it is a domain in which the
links between the research and the popular advice are sometimes unclear -- but
I do know that the traditional "Coveyesque" (7 Habits of Highly
Effective People; links below) advice to start with the big picture,
first-things-first approach is designed to ensure that your list includes
things that are important but may not seem urgent. The David Allen approach
gives plenty of weight to the question of what should be on your list to start
with, but he advocates a bottom-up approach (just start getting things done) paired
with regularly-scheduled reflection and checkins, from the weekly to the larger
scale. But I think that we often neglect the latter. And, one thing often
missing in the chronically over-committed (not that I'm speaking from personal
experience....) is the feedback part: do you really compare budgeted to actual
time spent on tasks regularly so that you can update your heuristics for
assigning time to each future task?
With that in mind, here are a few resources I've found useful in this domain:
For lots of tips on time management: lifehacker
(One can spend an awful lot of time browsing on this supposedly time-saving
site!)
From a magazine, a recent overview
of David Allen's approach to Getting Things Done. Here is David Allen's site. A nice quick overview of GTD and some links.
A post on using
Google tools for GTD (search for more, too); another
one from Allen's company
And many of you already know that Stephen Covey's principle of beginning with
the end in mind. Start
here for some of his articles or go
to his site.
Now, make sure you tell me if you end up doing things differently.... (and of
course, what you make of the experience!)
How can you get better at having the conversations that are difficult? You may be dreading--or even completely avoid--such interactions because the other person is difficult to work with, because there is bad news to share, or because you need to ask for something or raise a topic with which you are not comfortable.
Several themes emerged in our class conversation. When saying no: consider how to soften, if that's a concern, in a way that doesn't muddy the waters by making your "no" seem ambiguous. See my notes in Stellar, which are updated slightly from class.
Now, exploring a problem with a teammate or work colleague is an even more challenging situation. You need to keep working with this person, so, how do you raise a touchy topic without creating more problems? We drew on the ideas from the book written by researchers at the Harvard Negotiation Project (
short news story listing main ideas). Their framework and some tips are presented in the materials I posted on Stellar.
I've been thinking about what we can learn from the work on giving and getting feedback.
The quality of a feedback experience depends on the stances taken by
both people. Ask yourself,
am I giving this feedback with the other
person's needs foremost? Before you even get going, then, there's a
kind of personal inquiry you must go through. Feedback recipients must
do the same: keep this in mind when you're on the receiving end of feedback by asking yourself, am I ready to use this conversation as a learning experience? And then, in the actual conversation, make sure that you
separate your actual feedback--observations you want to share with
them--
from your evaluation or assessment of the impact of the observed behavior. As for
advice and
suggestions, that's a third part of the conversation. A really
important skill is learning how to separate these elements of the
conversation. Sometimes you will need to pull back from offering advice or
suggestions--maybe even setting aside that part of the conversation for another time.
I've uploaded a great book chapter on this topic to Stellar:
Feedback: Express appreciation, offer advice from
Getting It Done: How to Lead When You're Not in Charge, Roger Fisher and Alan Sharp.
As the reading we've been doing underscores, it is the differences in points of view and perspectives that make such conversations difficult. The antidote is your own inquiry skills. Any change agent or leader must have such skills in their toolkit, so that they can truly learn from and collaborate with others. We all have different
experiences, and different world views. In many ways, skillful influence and persuasion require you to downplay differences and instead think of ways in which you induce others to associate themselves with you (think of Cialdini's work, if you've read it). But in conflict situations, we (inevitably) make attributions, and often have the opposite problem, assuming we know or understand the
other's point of view. These attributions can even become self-fulfilling, a situation that is garanteed to stymie learning.
Knowing that attributions are easily triggered and difficult to disprove may help you to avoid such traps. So remind yourself to pull out your inquiry toolkit when you are in any situation
where shortcuts in your thinking might be deleterious. In addition to difficult conversations, consider how important it is to avoid a rush to judgement when
brainstorming and problem-solving, as well as working with
stakeholders and trying to better understand your customers. In the
latter area, product designers and market researchers are looking to
new approaches for learning about others that are more descriptive and
less prescriptive. Here are
one practitioner's thoughts on the challenges entailed.
Hope this helps as you move ahead with your projects.
Let me know!
So, how do you best use your few minutes in front of a room full of people?First of all, let me say that I love having the chance to share my indeas and interact with others in classrooms, talks, meetings.
Second of all, I know I could be better. The good news is, I'm still learning new things! But I also feel pretty humble: over the years, the more I get to stand up in front of others and talk, the more aware I've become of my own responsibility to make the most of their time (and patience....).
I thought I'd start by taking this opportunity to thank all of you who've given me your time, attention, smiles, frowns. And especially those of you who've made comments, asked questions, or answered them.
I also thought I'd share with you some of the things I've learned, usually the hard way and usually by seeing other people do it better. I am sharing some resources here too.
Even if you only have a few minutes, planning and forethought are essential. You can be professional and engaging in even the shortest opportunity. You can be professional and engaging in very informal opportunities.
You may have to be. I was talking to an old friend who runs meetings--big meetings--at Google the
other day. She told me that her weekly meetings even draw attendees who don't
need to be there! I'm guessing they are pretty good.... one standard element of her meeting is a 5-minute "dig in" session. The task of the presenter
is to frame just one issue to share with the group. Here are some of
the things that people there use the "dig in" for:
- sharing new ideas
that they think will be generative, provocative, interesting, or useful
for the rest of the meeting participants (even if it's outside the traditional areas of concern);
- sharing a piece of new
learning that people will want to think about and possibly follow up on
later (such as a new development in the industry)
- sharing a specific issue or problem (e.g. in trying to work out
a new deal with a potential partner) to get some feedback on;
- eliciting
leads, contacts, or other info in cases when a project seems stalled.
So, there is such a thing as a
5-minute session! Going forward, you'll
sometimes have to present your current work, and even raise issues, in
very short time segments. This puts the burden on
you to figure out how
to frame the current situation as pithily as possible, and then to
figure out how best to elicit ideas, feedback, or other input. Being prepared (and experienced) are a big part of it. So prepare, act, reflect every time you get to talk in front of others, and seek as much feedback as you can. Sign up for extra opportunities whenever you can!
Any time you present, you should be thinking about how to engage your audience. This need for engagement is, naturally, highlighted in a session in which participant input is an explicit element, but to my mind, it should be your central concern in any presentation. Some things to ask yourself:
- why do they care? or why should they care?
- usually, you can't escape the related question: why do I care?
- what do they need to know? in what order?
- what can I cut?
- and perhaps the biggest of these questions: what do I want them to do as a result? this is not a trivial question, and it's worth asking it a few times. Imagine if your session went really well--what would the audience do next?
Once you have some answers, take a critical look at your presentation plan with these points in mind. (Hint: If you cannot imagine wanting them to do anything next, ask yourself, why I am doing this talk?) Reconsider your plans:
What can you pare back on? What can you present in a dramatic or humorous way? What can you hold off on telling them, so that you can move toward the action or result as quickly as possible? What information should you give them in response to their questions? If your session is an interactive one, you're also going to need to design this portion of your session.
Getting input: what kind of information do you want? In my current class, students sign up for class clinic sessions, in
part to get feedback or ideas on a pressing problem and in part to get
an opportunity to work on this key skill. In my class you have twelve
whole minutes! We think that's long enough to run a session that draws
in ideas and input from the entire class.
The most common usage of the time (it's up to students to choose how to
use their 12 minutes) is to elicit ideas from the rest of the class.
Usually, students run a brainstorming session of sorts. Brainstorming--which in this case is only feasbile in an abbreviated form--is aimed at generating as many ideas as possible to address a critical open issue or to come up with feature ideas, attributes, etc. Brainstorming makes sense in some situtations, but is not the best for every one. For instance, if there is a fairly clear set of choices, then brainstorming options may not make sense. So students also try the following approaches:
- given a specific case or situation, what are some analogies - for instance to generate a list of similar organizations, historical examples, or
other situations that heir team could research for ideas that might apply to current issues facing the project
- given the situation, what are the, say, three alternative courses of actions we should consider? What steps does each of these entail? What are the requirements of each? What are their pros and cons?
- asking for contacts,
information, or past experiences from the group, to enable the team to do more research; or
- getting evaluative feedback on a prototype or working idea.
Getting input: methods to try. I'll leave the many ideas for eliciting input from a group for another time, but here are a few things to consider:
- To get lots of ideas fast: run a game of sorts ("OK, you have 60
seconds, form pairs, and see how many ideas you can generate. the pair
with the most gets a prize!")
- To get feedback on alternatives: have people vote, then explain why. You may elicit these alternatives from the group or present them yourself. Give each alternative a snappy name.
- If a participant advocates a course of action, choose someone else (on the other side of the room) to take the role of the host or client and aruge against it
- Encourage them to take on the prespective of, say, a customer or a client to give you feedback
- Design forms or other methods for written input; try using post-it notes that can be reordered; try pros and cons lists, and set a goal (let's see if we can come up with 17!)
Your most effective use of
time may be to use the session to set up the issue or question you'd
like to explore, to get
some input from the group then and there, and
to set the stage for getting
more input from them afterwards. Perhaps
you can give everyone a paper form to fill out and hand in at the end
of class with at least one suggestion for you. Or perhaps you could ask
students for input in a follow-on email, or via comments on a web page.
Thought to leave you with. The best presentations--even the most formal ones--are conversations. They may not be traditional conversations, but to engage others, an excellent strategy is to have them asking and answering questions either out loud or even in their heads. Here's an interesting article by a consulting firm called "
Dialogue: Art or Science?" (they're British). Here's an excerpt from the piece:
Conversation, when it's working, is a receiver-driven affair....
we don't stare at each other. We tend to look all over
the place as we speak and come back to the listener - the receiver - to
get acknowledgement. That 'did-you-get-that' pause with eye contact
elicits a response, usually a nod, a grunt or some other signal that is
telling us that the idea is logged and we can carry on. So the listener is
driving the pace. If we get a quizzical or a bored looking response, we
react accordingly, using stock phrases or figures of speech such as: "are
you with me?" or "Do you see what I mean?" The listener is intimately
involved in the communication. He or she is forced to think about what
we are saying. That signal to carry on may be replaced by a comment
or opinion and so the dialogue gathers pace.
How are you building a dialog in your presentation? The article has an encouraging point of view--that you need your own style of conversation, and that you can draw on what works for you in one-to-one settings to build skills in front of groups.
I also found this post on Garr Reynold's interesting blog:
presentations are conversations (if the "Cluetrain" stuff leaves you cold, give it a pass!). And here is a nice short article--pretty general, but it could be helpful:
Executive Summary: A Guide to Effective Presentation Preparation.
Hope this helps! Let me know what else to add....