Why does transparency matter?

In a series of posts, called readers choice, I write on whatever topics people submit and vote for. If you dig this idea, let me know in the comments, and submit your ideas and votes.

This week it’s: Why does transparency matter? submitted by Nick Finck.

Whenever I hear talk of transparency I think of overhead projectors. This dates me significantly, but it used to be professors wrote their lessons on sheets of cellophane called transparencies. These were thought to be clever since the clear sheets let the light through, making what you wrote on them visible.

Transparency is good for this reason. It lets you see. In management literature these days transparency is seen as good. If Rupert and Marla can see what the CEO is thinking, or what the actual revenue numbers look like, they’ll better understand why they’re being asked to do whatever they’re doing.

So Level 1 of transparency is achieving clarity. You give access to more information so people can see what is going on and why. The challenge is the more others see of how things really work, the more complex it can seem. Reality is a mess. Most people, most of the time, don’t really want to know how the sausage is made, despite what they say (e.g. Many talk about food, but are afraid to watch Food Inc.). When you open things up in the spirit of transparency it can be disruptive and confusing if not done carefully. Or if you haven’t hired people who can handle so much of the truth.

And even if the top secret plans are well thought out and explained well, you have a new problem. What happens if Rupert sees flaws in the CEO’s thinking, now that its been revealed? Is it acceptable for Rupert to ask questions? Will the CEO accept them respectfully? Will he incorporate good feedback? If not, then transparency is one way, and has limited value. If my plan as CEO is to do something very stupid, say to start a chain of hamster-burger franchises, and the world hates hamsterburgers, yet I insist on betting the company on them, transparency doesn’t help much.

The real goal is Level 2: achieving better thinking.  But this doesn’t happen merely because people can see what’s going on. Better thinking happens only when leaders listen to feedback and incorporate better ideas into their plans.  Being transparent and open might increase the odds better thinking happens, but it doesn’t guarantee it. Leaders still have to behave graciously when criticized, and reward people who come forward with good ideas, and not with token praise, but with the true reward of improving the plan based on their ideas.

When it comes to marketing, transparency is more contrived. If someone is selling a product or service there are some things they will never say, even if they know them to be true. They will never say “This product is not as good as our competitors”, “Our customer service sucks” or “I know this sounds cool but we know almost no one uses it after they buy it”.  Wise consumers know this. We keep in mind there are a set of things marketers and sales people will never ever say. If the dynamic is sales or PR there are unsaid but fundamental limits to how transparent the message can be.

Social media rhetoric often uses the word authenticity, but it’s the wrong word to use. The web and social media have humanized sales and marketing, as the personality of human beings comes through in greater force.  But that’s not the same as being authentic. Marketing is the wrong school of thought to use to determine what is authentic and what isn’t, don’t you think? The words “old-fashioned” and “home-made” appear on goods made in large, new factories, thanks to marketers and their talents.

Trust is always more important than authenticity and transparency. On the human level, to say “Fred is so transparent” means something negative. We literally mean we see through him to his untrustworthy core. The more I trust you the less I need to know the details of your plans or operations.  Honesty, diligence, fairness, and clarity are the hallmarks of good relationships of all kinds and lead to the magic of trust.  And it’s trust that’s hardest to earn and easiest to destroy, making it the most precious attribute of all. Becoming more transparent is something you can do by yourself, but trust is something only someone else can give to you. If transparency leads to trust, that’s great, but if it doesn’t you have bigger problems to solve.

Applying Jazz to workplace creativity

Months ago I got a sneak preview of a book on two of my favorite things: the making of music and how teams in the work world function. I’d thought someone should explore crossovers between these worlds and thanks to Adrian Cho, that book now exists. It’s called The Jazz Process.

Adrian is clearly a special man with diverse talents – he directs the IJO jazz ensemble, yet also  manages teams of software developers. He’s the right guy to take this topic on. The book is finally out now and I interviewed him about the book.

SB. The corporate world seems superficially about as far from jazz, or any kind of music, as an environment could be. What made you think concepts from jazz might have value in the workplace?

AC: Jazz is an exciting and engaging style of music and method of performance. It exploits collaboration, innovation and agility through individualism, exploration, freedom and democratic decision-making. In the best jazz ensembles the musicians move easily and frequently between leading and following. According to stereotypes, corporations exhibit none of these traits. Instead they are conservative, rigid and steeped in conformity and compliance that discourages people from taking risks, moving too quickly, or treading beyond job boundaries.

There may be some truth to these stereotypes, but in many small corporations and in enclaves of excellence within large corporations, there are teams that perform very much like small jazz ensembles. There are also large corporations that recognize the need to apply principles of agility and innovation on a larger scale.

It’s important to separate domain-specific skills from general skills of collaboration. Along with jazz musicians, software developers, basketball players, and soldiers must possess specific skills to excel within their domain. The difference between these skills is obvious, yet each of these individuals must also leverage general skills of working together and overcoming challenges, allowing them to excel within their respective teams. Although it’s natural to look toward fellow disciples when seeking solutions to problems we encounter in our work, some of the best inspiration can come from people working in completely different disciplines.

Based on your book, musical improvisation seems heavily based on teamwork and trust, rather than on brilliance and going your own way. Do you find this counterintuitive notion difficult to explain to non-musicians?

I don’t find it difficult to explain once I’ve described some fundamental concepts. Most people have been in situations where they found it difficult or impossible to execute because they could not trust their colleagues to play their parts.  In jazz, as in other fields, the more one wants to explore and stray from the comfort of well-worn trails, the more important it is that such forays are supported by solid execution from others. It’s hard to take risks and explore unknown territory when you constantly have to worry that the foundation underneath you might fall apart.

Success in a team of brilliant individuals requires a balance between individual expression and team cohesiveness. It also requires an appreciation for the notion of team and project health and the ways in which instability can degrade health. Instability is an important element in high-performance teams, as I outline in the book, but when things become too unstable chaos can ensue and ultimately lead to crashing and burning.

As I understand, musical process is taught to young musicians almost entirely by playing with more experienced musicians. It’s an apprenticeship model. Do you think this exists in the corporate world, or the tech sector?

Should be it used more, especially where creativity is concerned?

Mentoring does exist in the corporate world and it should be used more but it needs to take a different form. In business, mentoring tends to exist in one-to-one or one-to-many forms. Individual mentoring exists in jazz too, but what’s most interesting is how jazz musicians learn from situations of immersive many-to-one mentoring. When presented with the opportunity to put together a band, young jazz musicians are often advised to hire musicians who are all better than themselves.

In this way the budding musician can directly observe and participate in collective improvisation of a higher order. It’s not learning creativity alone that is interesting but rather creativity in a group where everyone is putting out ideas simultaneously and everyone must respond to the ideas of others. This is why play-along records have limited value for learning how to perform jazz in a group.  One can certainly learn all the fundamentals of improvisation in this way, but there’s no interaction; there is no opportunity to learn how and when to lead or to follow. The soloist  does not learn how to respond when the pianist unexpectedly alters a chord or plays a substitution, or when the drummer riffs on a particular rhythm or when the rhythm section changes into double-time. In the corporate world, people are often unwilling to put together teams in which they are the least experienced person for fear of losing control.

Do you think jazz musicians can learn anything from how corporations work?

I’ve certainly learned some things from managing in business that I have applied to leading bands. However these are also things I could have learned in music alone. This affirms my belief that many fundamental and important principles are widely applicable. For example, it’s wise to have balance in a team with some people having a healthy appetite for risk and others who are risk-averse. In music it can be good to have people that play ahead of the beat, and others who play a little behind it, and others who play right on top of it. If too many people play ahead of the beat, then the music will rush; if too many play behind it, the music will drag. Jazz musicians and businesspeople alike can learn a great deal from one another.

In the Coda of my book I wrote that the book could also have been called “The Basketball Process” or “The Warfare Process.” There are also many opportunities to learn from nature. I can discover a lot from the behavior of a pack of wolves, a pride of lions, or a colony of beavers. Animals have been working together for a lot longer than humans have. There are many opportunities for learning and we can benefit from these if we’re willing to open our minds to the possibility that not all knowledge about productive teamwork is confined to just one field.

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You can download a sample chapter from the book, check out the book’s website, or buy it straight from amazon.

Life and death of great ideas (Idea approval index)

(Originally posted 11/07 . Revised 8/10).

Many leaders talk about progress and change, but overlook simple yet potent indicators for creative action. One simple measure is the idea approval index (IAI).

To get this number simply ask one question:

How many approvals are needed for an employee to deliver on an idea to a customer?

Think it through carefully. In most organizations it’s a high number. From committees, to boards, to review meetings, most successful companies create processes that inhibit change. It’s often a large number of people who have to either approve an idea before it can get off the ground, or can kill an idea even if it’s showing promise. Even if you are a VP, can you code the idea yourself? Design it? Will other VPs challenge your strategy, or force you to compromise to the detriment of the idea? There are always people to convince, cajole, or sneak past, and they should factor in the index.

As a rough measure, the higher the number, the harder it is for even a great idea to go anywhere. The lower the number, the better the odds. For example:

A) Rupert has an idea for a way to radically improve his WordPress blog. He stays up late and makes the changes himself. The next morning he posts it on his website. Idea Approval Index = 1. It’s just him – he thinks it, makes it, ships it. The history of innovation is dominated by entrepreneurs in part because their IAI is always very low.

B) Marla is a middle manager at Bigtech. He has an idea, and explains it to another manager. They bring it to their monthly senior idea review committee (10 people). The committee suggests they run it by the Innovation task force (8 people), who have some concerns they want addressed before they’ll approve, which takes weeks. Finally they show it to the group manager who loves it, and asks them to present it at the next executive strategy meeting (6 people), where the idea is praised, but never receives funding, despite hints to the contrary, due to other priorities. Idea Approval Index (IAI) = 24 .

Counting approvals is of course a rough guide – perhaps only some people have the power to veto, and others are only powerful enough to give feedback that is easily ignored. It also doesn’t cover the scale of the idea – a huge idea might need more approvals than a trivial one. But as a rough measure it tells you how many chances there are for an idea to get killed before it makes it out the door. The index makes no evaluation of the quality of ideas, nor ensures lessons are learned after an idea is followed to fruition. But it’s a fantastic rule of thumb.

If you want more progress, or faster exploration of new ideas, you want to lower the approval index. If you want more predictability and stability, raise the index. If you want both at the same time, lower the index for getting projects started, and raise it for getting projects out the door.

(If you dig this kind of thinking: you’ll love the new paperback edition of my bestseller, The Myths of Innovation)

How to fix a team

Many people never learn how to work on a team.

It’s sad, but the reason many projects fail has little to do with expertise or intelligence. Instead it’s the fact that as soon as you have two or more people working together, they have figure out how to share, collaborate and trust each other to be successful. And ‘playing well with others’ is something few adults are ever taught how to do. If we learn it, it’s by the good fortune of being on at least one good team early in our careers.

If you show me a project in trouble, I’ll show you a team that’s dysfunctional. I always look at the people and the quality of their relationships before I look at anything else. The plan can be masterful, they can have a 7 figure budget and wonderful gear, but if the people don’t trust each other, none of it matters. Agile, waterfall, six-sigma… it’s mostly noise in sorting out why a project is falling apart.

If you discover you are the leader of a team in trouble, here’s the simplest playbook I know. It’s roughly the same whether you’re new to the team or not.

Build a theory of what’s wrong. The superficial reasons a project is struggling are rarely the important ones. We notice symptoms first, not the causes. Racing to fix symptoms often just creates other symptoms (And cultures that always operate in panic mode have a culture prone to dysfunctional teams). Instead, go into detective mode for an afternoon or a day, which means listening to other people on the team’s theories about what’s wrong. Talk to people in private, offer confidentiality, and shut up and listen. What are the common frustrations you hear? (If none of them involve you, you haven’t heard the whole truth yet).  There are four major reasons: lack of trust, old wounds, conflicting priorities, or poorly defined goals. I’ve yet to encounter a struggling team that didn’t suffer from two or more of these issues.  As you talk to people one on one, let them help you translate their complaints into those reasons. If they don’t fit ask them to offer another bucket. Be patient. Pay attention to their language. Ask questions. Listen and look.

Identify people interested in change, enlist their help (Assets). In talking to your team, you’ll learn who is most interested in helping change happen. They might be the angriest, most critical people at first – but once they’ve vented, are they most passionate and willing to invest energy in working differently? Among them, who has the most respect of their peers? These are the people you need to involve in reviewing your assessment of the situation. Make a list of the issues you’ve heard, and work with them to rank the issues in terms of severity.

Identify people least likely to follow, and treat them with respect (Liabilities). Some people will resist change, even if they are miserable. This includes powerful people.  Despite their negative vibe, they can be just as useful as the positive folks are. Explain what you see as the problems, offer your strawman for fixing them, and ask for their feedback. See if there’s a way, even if the plan has to change,  to get them on board. If you can’t get their support, make sure to get their acknowledgment. “Ok Fred. I realize you don’t like this plan. And I understand your reservations. But I’m going forward, starting with those interested in change. But I want to make sure we continue talking about this as I go.”  Don’t fall into the trap of ignoring people who don’t agree with you: a great person, sufficiently upset, over enough miserable months, will be indistinguishable from a bad seed.

And either way, your critics can be the source of a key piece of feedback, however negative, that leads to a big insight.

Pick a small, easy thing to fix.  Morale and trust operate on momentum. If the team has been struggling for some time, it’s very hard to turn it around all at once. You need to identify one single point of pain that is small, but real and fixable. The first tiny shinny star, undeniable in it’s contrast to the dark night sky, can change people’s minds about what’s possible.  Let everyone know what you are going to solve first. Then ask them for their help in doing it. Once it has been fixed, report back. Ask for feedback? Is this better? If yes, you’ve now earned a small piece of trust that you can mortgage to solve the next problem. Go back and re-evaluate your assets and liabilities. Who is on board now? What feedback do they have?

In some cases the right move is to take big action: reorganizing the team, stopping the project, or dramatically change the goals.  It’s true some problems can only be solved with big moves, but most aren’t this way. If you believe in the long term health of a team, you have to be willing to grow and build it over time, and resist the temptation for the mythical complete and easy fix. Some organizations make big changes regularly (e.g. your standard bi-annual big company re-org), but they’re so confused as to what the problem was, or how it could be fixed, they never fix anything. They just keep making big changes, masking their ignorance of what’s wrong and why.

There are dozens of factors that might lead me to work outside this playbook. But all things equal, this is where I’d start.

(If you want more, you should check out Making Things Happen on What to do when things go wrong).

The end of performance reviews?

NPR has a story on a new book called Get Rid of the Performance Review, by Larry Rout. The book is based on a popular WSJ article from 2008. The NYT picked up the story in May of this year.

My favorite comment in all of these articles is from the always wise Bob Sutton, who says in the NYT article, “In the typical case, it’s done so badly it’s better not to do it at all.”

And perhaps that’s the problem. Almost no one in the entire chain of events required to perform performance reviews believes in them enough to either a) do them well b) fight for change in the process c) propose an alternative.

When I worked at Microsoft, reviews were a formality with good managers. We’d agree on the minimum we needed to do early on, and that’s all their was. If I wasn’t doing well, I knew about it early, and we’d talk about it at least once a month. The actual review meeting never held surprises. With bad managers, reviews became a legal battleground, where positions were established, and claims were made, in an ever-escalating and desperate attempt to make up for something fundamentally broken in how the relationship was working.

In my years since, and my many travels to many corporations, I’ve discovered how ridiculously similiar the review process is in most major corporations. There is almost no innovation here among the Fortune 500. Yet every HR department will proudly proclaim how unique and special what they do is. That somehow their magic “evaluation criteria” are superior and less porous than any of their competitors. When someone takes great pride in the construction of a form, beware for your soul.

The surprise to most employees who have never been a manager is how little relevance what they write in the review has on their rewards or bonuses. Often the decision for promotions, or raises, is made weeks or months before the evaluations are due. Which might be fine, if this were transparent: but it rarely is.

Have you seen a performance review process in action that worked well? Or can imagine one of your own invention? I’d love to hear about it. Links welcome.

How ideas escape their prisons

In a series of posts, called readers choice, I write on whatever topics people submit and vote for. If you dig this idea, let me know in the comments, and submit your ideas and votes.

This week: Helping great ideas escape your prison (e.g. research lab)

Any time you think of where you work as a prison, for you or your ideas, you’re in big trouble. Prisons are hard places for anything to escape from – that’s why they’re called prisons.

But the comparison is apt – if you were actually trying to escape from a prison, you’d start getting very smart about how the place works. You’d study the behavior of the guards, their bosses, and the prisoners who might be in a position to help you, until you understood how they work better than they do. Only then will you see the opportunities for getting out. Every prison has a black market, and that market is driven by people smart and motivated enough to out-think the system they’re in.

Questions to ask:

Have any ideas escaped at all? A research lab, in theory, has the goal of bringing ideas to someone. It could be to the VPs of other parts of a company, or to a government, to other organizations. The first question to ask is – is this true? What is the last ideas that ‘escaped’? Was it a product? a feature? A research paper? A prototype? How did they do it? Whose help did they get? Follow their trail and pick their brains for advice. If no idea has ever escaped, you have very big problems, as you might truly work in an idea prison. If so, why not go to a place more friendly to ideas, even if it pays less or has less prestige?

In the end every prison, real or metaphoric, is a series of doors, and people with keys to those doors. What are the doors and who has the keys? It is possible the doors and the keys are already yours.

Who else is interested in escaping? Go watch The Great Escape (even if it’s the 24th time). The only way these prisoners of war could escape a Nazi prison involved dozens of people working together with a shared goal. Who else do you know that wants their idea(s) to escape? Partner with them. Share notes. Conspire together to use your collective assets, improving your odds of success.

Don’t expect to be rewarded. If you think the system you are in doesn’t reward good work, and you want to do good work, why on earth would you expect to be rewarded for it? The value system you are in is the opposite of yours. It will be hard work to get a idea of yours out there, but when it happens, it’d be silly to expect everyone you just had to work around to be thrilled about it. The old quote “It’s amazing what you can accomplish if you don’t care who gets the credit.” Perhaps the only ideas that thrive are the ones your boss thinks is hers. Or for an idea to thrive it you will have to take a bad review, or give up a raise. The long history of people with good ideas often involves others not accepting them until after they’ve seen the ideas in use. You might need to sacrifice the next six months or a year, to get the idea going, placing a bet once it’s in use your superiors will reward you then.

Fail more often. There are many creative cliches around failure. “Fail faster” people say, forgetting how not fun failure is. But the spirit of this is sound. Each time you try to get an idea to escape, you have the opportunity to learn something about your research lab you didn’t know before. If you pitch a brilliant idea in front of the senior staff, and are soundly rejected, there might just be one person in the room who comes up to you after and offers to help. He’d never find you if you hadn’t ‘failed’.

Where does our best work come from?

In a series of posts, called readers choice, I write on whatever topics people submit and vote for. If you dig this idea, let me know if the comments, and submit your ideas and votes.

This week’s reader’s choice post: Where does our best work come from?

I think four factors explain most kinds of performance.

  1. You are motivated
  2. You’re assigned a task you’re both confident in and challenged by
  3. You are well led and working for someone who respects you
  4. You are working with people you trust

The surprise is how rare in most people’s working lives are all four at the same time. Or even three of the four.

Personal motivation even by itself is tricky for most people to master. How to pick work that will be interesting day after day, or to stay focused on the long term payoffs even if the short term experience is difficult or frustrating at times. The real challenge of many things (including writing books), and the reason so many people fear them, has less to do with the work, than the fear of the commitment to the work.

Good leaders (#3) and working with people you trust (#4) are almost the same thing. A good leader will push out people who betray trust (See the No-asshole rule, and what Pixar’s Ed Catmull has to say). A good leader also puts trust in their team (delegation) and encourage people who have trust to offer to lend it to their peers.

Working alone, as I generally do, demands I take care of all 4 myself. Assuming I trust myself (#4), and treat myself with respect (#3), two things that can be surprisingly tricky, my performance is gated by picking the right projects and ensuring I have long term goals that motivate me.  The challenge of self-employment is making sure I provide all 4 factors – I have to be the employee and the leader all at the same time.

And if work with clients, you are in some sense picking your leader or source of respect (#3/#4).

These four items seem very simple, which is why they’re often overlooked. But I’m convinced it’s rare in most careers for people to experience all of them at the same time. And when it happens, assuming we’re aware of how special the opportunity is when it happens, better work is almost guaranteed.

Great work can happen in spite of these factors, of course. And for some people the sense of overcoming a bad boss, or team, or situation, is a source of motivation – they have something to prove.

Stop Reinventing Wheels – BusinessWeek

My latest article for Business Week is now up:

Stop trying to Reinvent the Wheel:

Right now, in meetings at corporations around the world, the wise are suffering. They are trapped in rooms where debate rages over how to solve a problem. The rub is that the problem has already been solved, just not by someone in the room—and solutions from outside are ignored. This is the disease known as “NIH,” or “Not Invented Here” syndrome, and it’s alive and well in 2010. Despite our many technological advancements in communication, none have eliminated this perennial waste of time. Why is this problem so hard to shake? Will we always be confronted with people who insist on reinventing wheels?

Read the full article here.

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Finger on nose: how to make fast decisions

There is an old adage in leadership circles: sometimes it doesn’t matter what you decide, as long as you decide quickly and take action. Standing in front of an oncoming train debating if you should jump left or right is a good example. Too much time considering alternatives can lead to disaster, as sometimes it’s the lack of a clear decision, regardless of which choice you would have made, that leads to failure. Or being flattened by a train.

Even ordinary life is filled with little situations where someone has to do some annoying job or another, but since no one wants to do it, long debates ensue over who should do it or why. This could be picking up a bar tab, putting out the trash, or a thousand other little things.

My favorite solution to these decisions is what’s called finger on nose (FON) Nose Goes. The rules are simple.

Whenever there is a task no one wants to do, the following rules apply:

  1. At any time, anyone can put their finger on their own nose.
  2. This signals everyone paying attention to do the same.
  3. The last person to put their finger on their nose loses, and gets assigned the task.

It’s very simple and works fast.

While the decision is being discussed, quietly put your finger on your own nose and look at a friend. They’ll copy you, others will follow, and soon the person paying least attention is the last one, and gets stuck with whatever it is.

By this point everyone is usually laughing, increasing the odds the work at hand will actually be done. And next time, the loser of this round will be first to start the game to get revenge, ensuing the tradition continues.

I don’t know where this game started – but I learned it eons ago and I’ve taught it to many people. If you’ve heard of it before, or know the backstory, leave a comment. The web provided The Nose Goes rules page, The nose goes facebook group, and the nose variant of the card game Kings)

Next time you have a decision to make about who does something, give it a try.

How to Work with Stupid People

I write a lot about being smart and trying not to be stupid. Well, here’s a good post by Jason Crawford on how to work with stupid people. It’s not what you’d expect.

He takes a line of thinking I really like:

I consider myself reasonably intelligent, yet I have had no problem surrounding myself with people at or above my intellectual level. I’ve also had good relationships with co-workers at all levels of intelligence. Unless you’re a world-class genius (statistically unlikely), you are probably mis-diagnosing people as stupid.

He goes on to give excellent advice on rethinking how to behave when you’re in this situation.

In the comments I offered this:

The problem here is more psychological and emotional than intellectual. Not to assume the other guy is stupid means you have to be willing to acknowledge the stupid guy might be you. Which is something most people do not have the generosity, courage or patience to explore, even for 30 seconds. (How else will you ever learn anything?)

Read the full article here: How to work with stupid people


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