A
research study finds that you can reduce the effects of information overload:
Information overload:
why some people seem to suffer more than others
in ACM International Conference Proceeding Series; Vol. 189 (Proceedings of the
4th Nordic conference on Human-computer interaction: changing roles.) Ruud
Janssen, Henk de Poot. 2006. p397 - 400.
We studied information overload among senior managers in an industrial company.
We used the critical incident collection technique to gather specific examples
of information overload and coping strategies. We then used textual
interpretation and the affinity diagram technique to interpret the interviews
and to categorize our respondents, the critical incidents they described, and
the coping strategies they mentioned. Our results show that the extent to which
people suffer from information overload is closely related to the strategies
they use to deal with it.
In
other words, you can do something about it!
One
doctor has argued that the explosion of interruptions, input, and information has
generated a sort of Culturally-Induced Attention Deficit Trait. As one
web site put it, our poor brains just can't handle it all, and need time off,
less stimulation, more sleep, and more fun, among other things. How to control ADT’s ravaging impact on performance?
The doctor, Ed Hallowell.,
suggests:
Foster positive emotions by connecting face-to-face with people you like throughout the day.
Take physical care of your brain by getting enough sleep, eating healthfully, and exercising regularly.
Organize for ADT, designating
part of each day for thinking and planning, and setting up your office to foster mental functioning (for example, keeping part of your desk clear at all times).
Overloaded
Circuits: Why Smart People Underperform, Edward M. Hallowell. 2005. Harvard
Business Review, January. Get the pdf via vera, or find a download here.
Abstract. Frenzied executives who fidget through
meetings, lose track of their appointments, and jab at the "door
close" button on the elevator aren't crazy – just crazed. They suffer from
a newly recognized neurological phenomenon that the author, a psychiatrist,
calls attention deficit trait, or ADT. It isn't an illness; it's purely a
response to the hyperkinetic environment in which we live. But it has become
epidemic in today's organizations. When a manager is desperately trying to deal
with more input than he possibly can, the brain and body get locked into a
reverberating circuit while the brain's frontal lobes lose their
sophistication, as if vinegar were added to wine. The result is black-and-white
thinking; perspective and shades of gray disappear. People with ADT have
difficulty staying organized, setting priorities, and managing time, and they
feel a constant low level of panic and guilt. It is possible to control ADT by
engineering one's environment and one's emotional and physical health. Make
time every few hours for a "human moment" – a face-to-face exchange
with a person you like. Get enough sleep, switch to a good diet, and get adequate
exercise. Break down large tasks into smaller ones, and keep a section of your
work space clear. Try keeping a portion of your day free of appointments and
e-mail.
Online,
quite a few places post their summaries and advice following this article: here
are a few worth looking at
Advice from a consulting
firm
A
detailed summary from an executive coaching firm
Another
take from a professional organization
Finally,
this may be a nice complement to our toolkit ideas: Ed Hallowell's advice on scheduling
(scroll down).
If
you want to learn more about ADT (and ADD), check out the Halowell center site.
What allows you to be resilient?
An optimistic approach can help. Not too optimistic, of course, but an appropriately positive view of things can really help cultivate your ability to bounce back from setbacks. That's the message from the research on learned optimism.
I recommend you take the online quiz at the
authentic happiness site. Where do you fall? Do you think you should try to cultivate a more optimistic explanatory style?
If so, don't forget the ABDCE strategy--here's
a very useful summary of the main ideas, plus some tips on when to use optimism and when not to.
There's a similar suggestion from
psychologists Karen Reivich and
Andrew Shatte, who also consider the cognitive strategies to combat negative thinking in their book,
“The Resilience Factor.” They address tendancy of people who feel anxiety to catastrophize – “dwell
on a current adversity and within a few minutes have imagined a chain of
disastrous events stretching into the future.”
Reivich and Shatte outline a five-step method for countering catastrophic thinking:
1. Name your adversity and the
worst-case things you believe could happen as a result
2. Evaluate the probability that
each of these events will happen. You’ll see the odds are long against any of
them coming to pass.
3. Next, think of the best-case
scenarios possible. They should be so unrealistic that they make you smile, or
even laugh. You want to break your “doom and gloom” thinking.
4. Now that you’ve plotted the
extreme cases – you’ve identified the worst and the best results possible –
focus on the most-likely outcomes of the adversity.
5. Then, with your newfound
perspective, come up with a solution to remedy the problem.
Now, it might be that negtive thinking and pessimism are not problems for you and your team, and this advice might be moot! But tuck these ideas away in case they come in handy in the future for you or your colleagues, employees, or reports. A
Boston Globe article overviews some of these ideas in a piece entitled, "
Set priorities with a dose of confidence and resilience" that connects to work-life balance issues too. For more thoughts on the work of Seligman and Shatte, click through to read a
transcript of a radio interview in which they link neurobiology to how organizations can help their employees handle adversity and anxiety better.
I think that the main idea to remember is that the way you interpret things can have a massive impact on how you handle events. I don't want to end without mentioning another component of resilience that I consider important: a growth mindset. Like optimism, it's something you can cultivate in yourself--and even in others around you. This short, readable article,
the effort effect, gives you a sense of the work of Carol Dweck on how to cultivate an orientation that helps you enjoy challenges.
Finally, consider how to get your daily dose of happiness. This blog is one of those sites, like lifehacker, that I've spent a bit too much time looking at, but you may find it fun, too:
THE HAPPINESS PROJECT. The author shares blow-by-blow details of an entire year she
spent, in her words, “test-driving every principle, tip, theory, and scientific
study I could find, whether from Aristotle or St. Therese or Martin Seligman or
Oprah...[to] gather these rules for living and report on
what works and what doesn’t. On this daily blog, I recount some of my
adventures and insights as I grapple with the challenge of being happier.”Happy reading!
Earlier this year, I talked with students about what skills and attributes mark a successful management professional. We linked these to habits and practices, which my class seeks to build and reinforce.
Here's the question I've been pondering. Does managing your emotions--and others'--fit in there too?
What do you think?
If you want to see what researchers in this area say, start by considering the
Emotional Competence Framework, first published in 1998 as a distillation of a
variety of sources but heavily influenced by the work of Daniel Goleman. Their list of the key attributes:
First, in the
EMOTIONAL domain, there's
Self-Awareness, which includes:
-
Recognizing one’s emotions and their effects
-
Knowing one’s strengths and limits
- Sureness
about one’s self-worth and capabilities
Also important: Self-Regulation
-
Managing disruptive emotions and impulses.
-
Maintaining standards of honesty and integrity.
-
Taking responsibility for personal performance.
-
Flexibility in handling change
- Being
comfortable with and open to novel ideas and new information
and Self-Motivation:
- Striving
to improve or meet a standard of excellence
- Aligning
with the goals of the group or organization
-
Readiness to act on opportunities
- Persistence
in pursuing goals despite obstacles and setbacks
A second cluster of competencies lie in the
SOCIAL domain. First, there's
Social Awareness:
-
Sensing others’ feelings and perspective, and
taking an active interest in their concerns.
-
Anticipating, recognizing, and meeting
customers’ needs
- Sensing
what others need in order to develop, and bolstering their abilities
- Cultivating opportunities through diverse
people
- Reading
a group’s emotional currents and power relationships
And key Social Skills include:
- Wielding
effective tactics for persuasion
- Sending
clear and convincing messages
- Inspiring
and guiding groups and people
- Initiating
or managing change
- Negotiating
and resolving disagreements.
- Nurturing
instrumental relationships
- Working
with others toward shared goals.
- Creating
group synergy in pursuing collective goals
Visit the site to learn more--there's a body of research associated with this work, with quite a bit of validation in workplaces.
There's another approach that's also well-grounded in research, and it's similar in character. This work has its roots in positive psychology--remember the work of Martin Seligman on happiness, optimism, and explanatory style? Well, a recent handbook by Chris Peterson and Seligman lays out a framework for character strengths. Interested in their list? Check out their classification of character strengths.
The site is VIA Institute on Character, a non-profit organization
dedicated to advancing the science and understanding of character development
within the field of positive psychology by acting as a bridge between research and practice The VIA Survey, which helps identify individual character
strengths, was developed by Drs. Christopher Peterson and Martin E. P.
Seligman. It can be accessed online: http://www.viastrengths.org/
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....
Last week, I had the privilege of running a pair of workshops on facilitation, mostly for first-year MBAs, with my wonderful MIT Sloan colleague Maura Herson and much-loved consultant Lou Bergholtz. I found myself appreciating what everyone shared about their experience with facilitation--we've all seen it done well and done badly, and together the groups generated a pretty good list of ideas about how to facilitate effectively (more on these specifics
here). We designed every workshop exercise to focus on just a few things in each round. And as I reflected on the value of
picking just a couple of things to address, I realized how easy it can be for us to forget the most valuable ideas and insights that show up for fleeting moments in the stream of our experience--we might notice, for instance, how Lou handled a particular moment in the group discussion, and say to ourselves,
Oh, I should try doing that next time.... but the moment passes, and often the idea or insight is lost forever.
So, how do you remember to actually put into practice the new ideas that arise from doing it (or seeing it done) well or badly the previous time? An influential thinker on this topic, Marilyn Darling, argues: "It's a leadership act to say,
What did we learn from last time? If a leader or members of a team do not ask that question, they're unlikely to apply past learning to creating future success." (
source.) So, here's a leadership point to ponder: Do
you ask such questions in your teams?
Now, this approach can also help you develop personally. I think that we can each cultivate personal habits for our own learning that embed this sort of development into our own behaviors. In last week's workshop, we asked our students to do just this, in a short assignment we called "memo to myself." Because we knew that we would see these same students again in August, we made copies of each student's memo, allowing us see what they were noting as lessons learned or points to ponder--and also enabling us to make sure that we all remember to make the most of the (by then, likely long-forgotten!) insights just in time for their next experience as facilitator.
In 15.990, we explored this notion in some detail in the last class session before the break, when we looked at the After Action Review as a ongoing process of culling just 2 or 3 things to do from every round of experience. I gathered some materials for a
resource page, in case you want to see more. But here's the basic point: after you've executed a step, gather your team together, and ask yourselves a set of questions that can help you figure out what to retain or change for your next step.
Improvements are most feasible when your are engaged in something that
is repeated, so that each time you do it, you can figure out what
worked and what didn't:
For example, if you're
focusing on sales that didn't succeed, rather than just listing what
didn't work or your rationalization for why you didn't get the
contract, look forward. Before the next call to a prospective client,
ask: What worked last time? What didn't work? What got you closer to
the sale? What got you further away?
From Getting Better at Getting Better—How the After Action Review Really Works: An Interview with Marilyn Darling Leverage Points Issue 61.
One version of this from firefighters bears the appropriately rugged name of "the chainsaw AAR" (
source), in which a team gathers at the end of the shift and each member gives a single quick answer to each question:
-What is one thing that went well on this shift?
-What is one thing that went bad on this shift?
-What is one thing you would do different next time?
-What is one thing you learned today?
For this to be useful, you need to capture the answers, of course, and then make sure that you use them as the basis for your action in the next shift, project, sales call, or faciliation experience. There are multiple forms of discipline entailed here: asking the questions, keeping the answers very focused, writing them down or otherwise capturing them, and then using them the next time you start the action.
Is all this effort worth it?
Well, my intrepid students are doing it, both in their teams and individually in personal notes that they post to blogs by the end of every Sunday. We'll let you know what we make of it all in mid May!
I enjoyed the conversation about what makes for a skilled manager, change agent, leader--I guess the things we talked about are key for any professional who gets things done by working with and through others.
See the
wiki page I put together to capture our discussions,
in which I combined student comments from this week with thoughts from
past classes. I see a few key clusters of ideas. In brief,
my students admire the person who:- gets the important stuff done every day
- learns continually by iterating and testing
- works with the external environment (the organization, stakeholders, etc)
- knows and manages herself or himself
- communicates well in the moment
- builds shared commitment to move from ideas to action
- cares, develops, and enables.
Click through to the wiki page to see the full set of ideas developed in class. But come back here to consider some thoughts I want to share.
Many
of the ideas are still very general. In order to focus on specific
skills that you cultivate in any project or other joint work, you will need to
translate from the general idea ("gives honest, timely feedback") to
even more specific practices—e.g., "Sets up regular meetings with
teammates to seek informal feedback"; "develops and uses a simple
feedback framework at various points throughout a team project"; "backs
up feedback points with specific examples to keep it honest." Another
example: if we think that effective managers "build buy-in for
objectives"—how does this translate into practices you need to use now?
Whose buy-in do you need for a class project, for instance? How do you know if you
have it? Perhaps your team will plan to revisit objectives every other
week; perhaps after every meeting with your hosts, if an objective of
any sort is discussed, you follow up with an email to confirm. Remember
you also need to get faculty buy-in for your objectives; how do you do
that? Together, this set of practices provides the means for you to
translate the important idea of buy-in to action.
What else?Interestingly,
in looking over the list I notice we focus a lot on the "nice" things
bosses do, and didn't linger much on the stakeholder management issues
that are cruicial for any effective manager or team. So, consider the
following proposed additions:
- Saying "no"
- Telling someone they're wrong, off course, or simply not working out
- Negotiating and renegotiating (including engaging and disengaging partners)
- Technical expertise and skills in analysis, synthesis, criticism, testing
- Building and using deep knowledge about the organization, the customers, suppliers, etc
- Designing work and projects with falsifiablility in mind
- Gating projects to force go/no-go decisions at appropriately early points
- Walking away from "sunk costs" when appropriate
- Seeking feedback from others, learning from others, asking for input, managing expectations
- Examining, framing, and presenting failures to your stakeholders
Let me know what you think!
This week we had an interesting discussion about how much time and effort we should spend planning and hypothesizing about what might go wrong with the project you are working on. As with workplanning, there's a tradeoff between investing in upfront work versus moving into action mode. You can waste valuable time, and actually solidify commitment to a not-very-good plan, by investing in too much detailed preparation and fine-grained mapping of steps. And you could drive yourselves nuts with group sessions designed to ferret out every possible risk to your project. So, beware the paralysis of over-analysis!
Yet I'd argue that a bias for action may be a more likely challenge. When it comes to work planning, most students are pretty good at listing project tasks and timelines. Where I often see folks fall short is in figuring out how the team can keep tabs on how much it is accomplishing in terms of concrete progress towards its goals. Notice that I said
goals and not deliverables. Attention to goals enables you to identify the points at which, even if you make progress towards your deliverables, you are not achieving what you set out to accomplish.
The question of progress towards goals connects to another theme that's come up of late: what are the best indicators that will help you to monitor where you stand? Perhaps this is the most important discussion to be having at the early stages of a project, and it links to the questions of potential risks and predictable surprises, too. If you make sure you've listed at least a few of the likely problem areas or failure modes for your team project, then you'll be able to talk about what you think would be a good set of indicators that would allow you to assess whether this potential nightmare is, in fact, going to take place. So this is one set of progress indicators that are invaluable for your team to consider ahead of time. For instance, if your external partner's level of commitment to the project is a potential problem, then you may agree to keep tabs on their responsiveness to your communications, and to track their comments and questions during interactions. At team meetings, a quick check-in question could address partner responsiveness as well as their expressed concerns and questions. If you're seeing a pattern that may suggest worsening commitment, you'll need to try something new.
So use a conversation about predictable surprises to generate a list of potential indicators that things are going wrong. And then, of course, talk over with your team what you want to do about it, and at what point a response is warranted.
Every one of us, and every team, may have a natural tendancy to invest too much effort into one phase of your project at the cost of its other elements. If you know that you've been blindsided by predictable surprises in the past, then spend more time thinking about, discussing, and addressing the risks. If you tend to be slow to take action and instead make lots of plans and then contingency plans, perhaps now is the time to try taking more actions, setting aside time to revisit your plans once you've taken more steps.
When we looked at predictable surprises we found ourselves worrying that the list of things that could go wrong is infinitely long. But at the same time the workplace is full of people who can tell you on day one of a new project exactly how it will fail, and they will often be right.
The bottom line is that this tension between thinking and acting is here to stay. In many ways, as Minztberg and Gosling argue in a paper describing the orientations and skillsets fundamental to mangement, it is a fundamental tension in the life of any manager. They frame the tradeoff as one between reflection and action, but it really is the same thing we've been talking about:
Everything that every effective manager does is sandwiched between action on the ground and reflection in the abstract. Action without reflection is thoughtless; reflection without action is passive. Every manager has to find a way to combine these two mind-sets - to function at the point where reflective thinking meets practical doing.
Jonathan Gosling and Henry Mintzberg, “The Five Minds of a Manager,” Harvard Business Review Nov2003 p54-63.
NOTE THIS IS A DRAFT POST TO BE UPDATED
How do you make sure that your work is effective? First and
foremost, you need to get stuff done. Designing and using a good workplan is
key, of course. Last week’s post offers some ideas to get you started on workplanning.
For instance, you need to sort out what it is you want to have finished by the
end of the project (the awkwardly-named “deliverables”) as well as the time,
effort, data, and other resources needed to produce these things.
But working effectively also requires you to address some
big questions about the effect of your efforts.
For this post, I want to introduce some ideas that I think
could help you sort out two linked questions that get at effectiveness: What’s
our underlying model for how this project will actually work, and how
will we know if we’re right?
If your project is a real one—and a fun one!—your answers to
these questions will evolve. Our starting point for addressing the questions is
a set of structured approaches called theory of change or logic models or,
sometimes, evaluation models
Theory of Change evaluations make the team’s theories of
change explicit so that the work can best address the causal model that
undergirds the project’s plans and goals. A good theory of change includes
working versions of:
- situation
and stakeholder analyses
- actions
taken
- anticipated
outcomes
The reason to make it all explicit is to set up the team to
seek evidence as to whether the theory is matched by reality.
Example: boys and girls club http://www.evaluationtools.org/plan_theory.asp
introductory instructions:
http://www.uwex.edu/ces/pdande/evaluation/pdf/LMinstructions.pdf
source:
http://www.uwex.edu/ces/pdande/evaluation/evallogicmodelworksheets.html
for more please go to
http://www.uwex.edu/ces/pdande/evaluation/evallogicmodel.html
tutorial:
http://www.uwex.edu/ces/lmcourse/#
Other benefits of a theory-of-change approach, or why you
should address these questions (now and again!):
Where outcomes are expected only in the long term – perhaps
after the evaluation is complete - they give early indication as to whether
predicted changes are happening and therefore whether the intended outcomes are
likely to emerge in due course.
They are able to trace complex links between action and
outcome, so that the problem of attribution is diminished.
The process of explicating leaders’ theories of change can
be helpful in planning the initiative with greater clarity.
They also provide leaders with early feedback as to the
effects of their actions, making it possible for those actions to be modified
at an early stage and linking the evaluation process closely with the
development of the initiative.
Qualitative data (generated from interviews with a wide
range of stakeholders) and quantitative data are both useful for the evaluation
process.
The expectation is that, by the end of the evaluation
process, it should be possible not only to articulate the theory (and any ways
in which, by then, it has changed or has been contested by other stakeholders)
but also to present convincing evidence of the sorts of changes that are being
brought about by the project and to predict the sorts of long-term outcomes
which are likely to emerge.
More ideas?
Interesting to link this to your first cut at the rationale
for your project—recall our discussion of your projects via three simple
questions from Week 2:
- What’s
the problem?
- What’s
your solution?
- How
does it work?
If you go through the processes outlined in the resources
linked to here, you will have a theory of change. What next?
answer #1: talk this over with your team
AND (answer #2):
How are you testing this theory as you go? Do your
experiences and the totality of your emerging set of data fit with it? Do you
need to revisit your theory of change?
links:
http://www.wkkf.org/Pubs/Tools/Evaluation/Pub3669.pdf
http://ctb.ku.edu/tools/en/section_1877.htm
http://www.innonet.org/client_docs/File/logic_model_workbook.pdf
http://www.theoryofchange.org/index.html
http://www.aecf.org/upload/PublicationFiles/CC2977K440.pdf
http://www.uwex.edu/ces/pdande/evaluation/evallogicbiblio.html
for a bibliography, including research
IN RECENT CONVERSATIONS WITH MY STUDENTS, we talked about the value of the
simple exercise of boiling down your project plan into a very short explanation
(we aimed for 9 words!). But just explaining what the project sets out to do is not enough: we also need to be able to explain how the project will get there. To that end, I've been asking if you can tell us your story in three sentences:
- a statement of the problem, opportunity, or need that you are
addressing, from the client/host/target’s point of view, together with
- a pithy description of what you will do and
- how that will address the situation.
I want to underscore the importance of writing it down and then inviting
comments and discussion. There’s no substitute for that work. It can really
help you to figure out the key points on which your entire project hinges, and
in turn those are the open questions that are most urgent for you to tackle.
The underlying philosophy.
Such an approach is very much akin to treating your project plan as a
working hypothesis, which your actions will then test. This is an idea that, of
course, borrows from the scientific method. It’s also a cornerstone of many
consulting firms’approaches (see, for instance, this blog
post by a consultant; an explanation of the
McKinsey model (note the nice feedback loop at the top!); here's another
post outlining the McKinsey approach presented in the 1998 book).
The practical implications. Once you’ve talked through
your-three part project overview, use it as a screen for looking at your action
steps. In other words, your first cut (v1.0) of the project description should
serve as the basis for your project planning. For each action you’ve listed,
make sure you talk through with your team how it will help you shed light on
the key issues related to your project descroption v1.0. Note that this
description may--actually, it really should--evolve, but that you’ll
want to be thoughtful about when you allow such changes to enter, because they
will necessarily entail revisiting your project plan. So set aside such “big-picture”
discussions for only certain windows, not for every week!
What’s the next key step?
The second topic is related, and that is the question
of what’s the most important next step. The previous work allows some focus to
emerge. Use that insight to figure out the next critical step in your project.
Don’t forget, you do have time at the outset of the project to think things
through so that you design your work to be as effective as possible. I urge
students to use the resources of their class--and stakeholders, who we’re
discussing in class right now--to sort out a feasible project, set up realistic
plans, and build the team you need to get things done. At each step of the way,
ask yourself this question: what’s the next action? (shades of David Allen’s
GTD, for those of you into that sort of thing--more on that later). It’s often
pretty obvious what the one most important next step is. But surprisingly
often, people don’t actually do the
most important next step! The task for you and your team is to set up a
personal or team discipline for, first, figuring out the next step;
secondly, doing it, and third, figuring out what it
means for your next subsequent step. That’s, of course, the model
embedded in our course (prepare-act-reflect), and it’s one that I encourage you
to use every single week. So, this week's question: what's your next
step?
We talked in class about the inescapable tradeoffs in any
team planning effort—for instance, too much detail can be as bad as too little
detail in your workplan. And as you go, your team faces tradeoffs in managing
stakeholder engagement (who gets to have a say in the specifics of what you
plan to do, and how to they participate? If stakeholder participation is
necessary for buy-in, how do you ensure your plan is manageable and under your
own control?). There are some unique challenges to projects for learning: after
all, your professor and TA are also stakeholders, and need to be managed too. They
are, of course, also a resource, but like other stakeholders, if they are not
kept informed, they may not be as useful as they could be. What’s your plan for
managing stakeholders?
Another key issue to consider: how flexible is your
workplan? Have you built in the opportunities for your team to revisit the
entiree project plan at a couple of crucial points? When are these points, and
have you planned your work so that you will have the data you need to make the
needed revisions at that point?
Web resources for project management, workplanning, and
action planning abound. Many of you have used structured techniques and
software tools (e.g. software like Microsoft Project; online, I have used 37
signals’ basecamp and backpack for larger and smaller
projects, respectively). Some of the traditional tools for project management
include the Gantt chart, which maps dependencies (example),
and the more complex network-based PERT chart (which draws on an approach
called the critical path method), but these of course need to be embedded in a
process that makes sense.
To help you think about your project workplanning process, I
thought I’d share a couple of resources that I found online. Note that these
each come from a specific domain, and that you will need to adapt the approach
to one that works for your team.
My first resource is a set of basic
guidelines for planning that appear on a site called Free Management
Library. I can’t vouch that this is a definitive and fully referenced site, but
I think it’s likely to be a useful place to explore and to start learning more
about planning from a management point of view.
Every year I direct students to the work of Scott Berkun.
This chapter, How
to Figure Out What to Do, excerpted from one of his book, may be
overkill for some, and will require translation from his domain to yours, but
may be useful for many of you. I think it’s a good read. Here’s a
shorter blog post on critical thinking that has a very similar flavor
to some of our discussions in class. He may be approaching problem definition
from a design standpoint, but the ideas apply to projects for change, too.
More resources come from public-sector organizations that
support others’ projects (later on, we shall look at how grant-makers are also
doing this when we consider the theory of change framework). Without making an
evaluation of the organizations behind these resrouces, I thought I’d share a
couple. Civicus, an organization
dedicated to infusing participation into projects, offers a useful action planning
toolkit. And New Hampshire state’s Endowment for Health shares an online slide deck
that walks potential grant applicants through a useful list of issues to
consider as they devise a workplan.
For a more explicitly instructional view of projects, here’s
the
introductory chapter of a text on workplanning, Getting Started in
Project Management (by Karen Tate, PMP and Paula K. Martin, 2001, Wiley).
Finally, I’m asking for your feedback to be posted as a
comment. What approaches have you used that work well? What tools are useful?
If you’d rather weigh in on a related discussion about the role of proejcts in management
education, take a look at this blog post, Do
we need a project project? and add a comment about that here instead.
I was in a sold-out crowd of Atul Gawande groupies at his book reading in Brookline on Superbowl Sunday. He thoughtfully discussed his ideas about the moral dimensions of practicing medicine. The focus of his new book,
Better, is performance and how to improve it. As I reread the introduction, I couldn't help but think that the same imperatives apply to management. See what you think--this is straight from that section of the book, with a couple of my own additions (I'm hoping he doesn't mind my use of his work here):
This is a book about performance in medicine [management]. As a doctor [MBA],
you go into this work thinking it is all a matter of canny diagnosis, technical
prowess, and some ability to empathize with people. But it is not, you soon
find out. In medicine, as in any profession, we must grapple with systems,
resources, circumstances, people—and our own shortcomings, as well. We face
obstacles of seemingly unending variety. Yet somehow we must advance, we must
refine, we must improve. How we have and how we do is my subject here.
The sections of this book examine three core requirements
for success in medicine—or in any endeavor that involves risk and
responsibility. The first is diligence, the necessity of giving sufficient
attention to detail to avoid error and prevail against obstacles. Diligence
seems and easy and minor virtue. (You just pay attention, right?) But it is
neither. Diligence is both central to performance and fiendishly hard, as I
show through three stories [....]
The second challenge is to do right. Medicine is a
fundamentally human profession. It is therefore forever troubled by human
failings, failings like avarice, arrogance, insecurity, misunderstanding. In
this section I consider some of our most uncomfortable questions—such as how
much doctors should be paid, and what we owe patients when we make mistakes. [...]
The third requirement for success is ingenuity—thinking
anew. Ingenuity is often misunderstood. It is not a matter of superior
intelligence but of character. It demands more than anything a willingness to
recognize failure, to not paper over the cracks, and to change. It arises from
deliberate, even obsessive, reflection on failure and a constant searching for
new solutions. These are difficult traits to foster—but they are far from
impossible ones. Here I tell the stories of people in everyday medicine who
have, through ingenuity, transformed medical care—for example, the way babies
are delivered and the way an incurable disease like cystic fibrosis is
fought—and I examine how more of us can do the same.
Betterment is a perpetual labor. The world is chaotic,
disorganized, and vexing, and medicine is nowhere spared that reality. To
complicate matters, we in medicine are also only humans ourselves. We are
distractible, weak, and given to our own concerns. Yet still, to live as a
doctor is to live so that one’s life is bound up in others’ and in science and
in the messy, complicated connection between the two. It is to live a life of
responsibility. The question, then, is not whether one accepts the
responsibility. Just by doing this work, one has. The question is, having
accepted the responsibility, how one does such work well.
So, what do you think? Must management professionals sign up for these same three goals--diligence, doing it right, and ingenuity? What can we learn from Gawande? Take a look at
his site.
"Writing is rewriting." This is something anyone who's written pretty much anything has had to learn. Writing well is not so much about punching out a perfect piece the first time around as it is about rewriting, editing, refining, and then doing it again. And almost always, getting someone else's input is also essential. Distance can also help: taking a break from the work at hand while you do something different that might allow you to approach the work again with a fresh perspective.
The same holds for learning how to become more effective as a manager, change agent, consultant, or other kind of professional. It's all in the iteration. And I think the iteration is central for learning but also for performing. You might as well embrace it--refining, adjusting, updating, rescoping are part of getting things done in every setting. This holds not only for the presentation you give to clients or the pitch you give to funders, but also for the model you build, test, calibrate and refine as a tool for making policy decisions. Process improvement rests on iteration. And of course iteration is essential to the process of developing a new product, piece of software, or business plan.
I've been thinking about the implications for teaching and learning. Making room for iteration may mean
trading in ambitiousness of your project or assignment in favor of higher goals for learning and performing. The task itself may have te be
shorter or
smaller in scale to allow the repetition to work its magic. I've learned that often for MIT students this means scaling back on plans, and taking what might seem like a rather trivial step, like a routine meeting, and treating it seriously. For instance, beforehand you might set aside the time to ask yourselves what you want--and expect--to happen in that meeting; what you'll look for to indicate how the meeting is going or if your expectations are being met. It means taking notes and being a careful observer during the meeting, and checking these observations with others. It also means taking the effort to reflect on the experience and the indicators afterwards to generate some insight and ideas for things you will want to do in your next meeting.
Our spring class met for the first time this week. I talked about the expectations for the class being high: we expect students do something every week. But I do not expect each of these things to be big things--I do not want people to do massively ambitious projects. I am much more interested in figuring out what it takes to be effective and in sqeezing the most learning that is possible out of every step. This usually means a more well-scoped project that is more modest than students initially want. That narrowing-in process is our goal in the first weeks of class, and it's inherently iterative. So, I am used to us starting out with big plans and then scaling back as goals become more defined.
We learned from recent experience we can extract a lot of insight from the routine as well as the momentous events in one's work. For instance, even writing a single email is a prefectly fine and appropriate action for the week. Writing a letter is another; and setting up a meeting is a third. All three of these are actual examples from last semester--they were extremely useful steps that we explored in depth in class discussions and that we referred to several times over the semester.
So, iterating to learn means two things for our class: recognizing that smaller and more modest plans are needed for learning, and embracing the discipline of not only getting something done every week but also figuring out what you are learning from it all as you go. For me, gathering my thoughts in a blog is one way to do this. How's that for practicing what you preach!
So, what differentiates the person who learns from experience from one who doesn't? If 20 years' experience is, too often, just one year repeated 20 times, what might help to avoid the latter?
One answer might be that the person who is successful at learning from experience is
one who cultivates expertise with the right kind of practice.
Research on expertise points to the importance of repeated practice that is just challenging enough to increase skills: difficult enough to require some work, but not so difficult as to undermine motivation (see, for instance the
Scientific American article on experise I mentioned before; along similiar lines is a piece in
SEED with a
short accompaniment on how to be Tiger Woods or Mozart). Practice and experience can build the expert's (unconscious) repertoire of patterns to recognize and match, and a corresponding set of responses. The expertise--which is often labeled "instinct"--is manifested in a kind of automatic decision-making and action. The stories told by Malcom Gladwell in
Blink illustrate this.
As situations get more complex, expertise can be a double-edged sword. This is the pitfall that gives rise to Karl Weick's exhortation to engage in
sensemaking. Gladwell and Atul Gawande, a thoughtful doctor, reflected on the
limits of expertise in a recent presentation;
listen here. The ideas at play here: encourage experts to interact with others and to interrupt the automatic flow of judgment and response in favor or more conscious action. Crisis and complacency are two triggers for inappropriately automatic action by experts. For instance, the threat-rigidity response documented by psychologists is argued to play out in organizations when managers and others confront apparent threats and rely on overlearned responses.
But if we return to the question of how people get better at what they do, other streams of research on learning also point to something different, which contrasts with the practice-makes-perfect idea behind the study of expertise and connects to the ideas raised by those who point to the limits of expertise.
Proponents of this line of work argue that
reflection is essential for learning, in particular for professionals who must operate in a complex world. The advice here is for the learner to engage in a practice of stepping back, making sense of, and reflecting on experience. This was the key argument made by Donald Schon in
The Reflective Practitioner. He differentiated the kind of automatic action that one undertakes in the moment, in which improvisation, sensemaking, and problem-solving happen on the fly with its complement: a post-hoc, explicitly intellectual reflection in which the learner grapples more consciously with what happened. Calling the former reflection-in-action and the latter reflection-on-action, Schon and his colleague Chris Argyris argued that professionals benefit from taking both practices seriously, that the latter is often under-emphasized, and that coaching can help.
In the study of education, Jennifer Moon explores the role of reflection, which recent years has seen gain emphasis in the study of adult education (or androgagy). See
Moon's latest book. Plenty of ideas from education, as well as other streams of social science (such as Action Science), provide great starting points for an understanding of how reflection as a lifelong practice enables learning and development over the course of a career. But I haven't found much empirical research to show how such practices might play out. For instance, apart from the anecdotal, we know little about how effective practitioners actually embed reflection into their lives; nor could I find studies that document the career or job performance effects of teaching such practices to students in professional education programs.
In the vein of Argryis and Schon, other work on learning emphasizes the need for collaboration in reflection, as the work of
David Boud and colleagues shows (see
Productive Reflection at Work: Learning for Changing Organizations, edited by Boud & others). A book-chapter overview of experience-based learning appears
here, and
infed offers a trove of writings on reflection and rated topics. The notion of communities of practice and situated learning are also related, and an intriguing stream of management research connects change and learning in organizations to these ideas--more on this in a future post!
And to return to the question about learning from experience that I set out to explore today: Is it practice or reflection that makes perfect? The answer has to be, of course, both.