Seven Minutes of Terror

High stakes teaming at NASA

Have you looked at this video yet?  If not, I urge you to.  It was assembled by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and it tells the story of what went into planning the landing of Curiosity, the Mars explorer.

In addition to amazing computer animation, it is narrated by a few of the engineers responsible for Curiosity, so you get to meet these people in all their excitement and pride.

The statistics of this mission are staggering.  The spacecraft has covered a distance of 352 million miles over the last eight months.  Curiosity is the size and weight of a compact car, brimming with high tech gear including sensors and laser beams and computers.

One group of people, the Landing Team, has been at work on Curiosity for ten years.  Ten years.  All that time, all that effort, to figure out what needs to happen from the time the ship hits the outermost reaches of the Martian atmosphere until it touches down on Martian soil.

Did I mention that entire sequence lasts seven minutes?

Ten years for seven minutes.  There’s a singular focus if there ever was one.

I realize this is all in the past now.  We know of the magnificent success of the journey and of the landing early Monday morning.  Still, I can’t get over the size of the accomplishment.

And, I can’t stop thinking about the Landing Team.  What must it have required to meld that group of world class experts into a highly functioning team?

While I don’t know for sure, I can hazard a guess as to some of the characteristics that were probably present from the beginning:

• Clarity of purpose
• Close connection to the external environment (with regular recalibration)
• Leadership, rotating as required
• Commitment to outcomes
• Respect for one another’s capabilities
• Adaptability (includes learning)

As with many teams that operate in high stakes environments, much will be written about what happened to enable this one to be so successful.  I look forward to taking part in that conversation.

Awareness is Curative; Sunlight Disinfects

Telling stories together creates shared awareness and more choice.

I spent the morning with a client group (an entire HR department).  In the work they did over the four or so hours we were together, I was reminded of the powerful impact of sharing stories, even anonymously.

Creating a valid picture of what the group is saying to itself about itself sounds like it could be an exercise in redundancy.

The thing is, it’s rare for everyone in a work group to have the same story.  And that’s where the difficulty comes in.  Remember the blind men and the elephant.

Without making time and space to get the full elephant in the room (mixing of metaphors intentional), the stories exist only in pockets of the organization, and then in partial form.

The group conversation builds shared awareness; people see where they see things the same and can talk more about where they see things differently.

This leads to new conversations.  Someone observed, “We’ve never said these things to each other in a group before.”  A clear example of how speech is a creative act.  Through their conversation, the group was generating a reality that hadn’t previously existed: new agreements, promises, and requests.

And here’s a commercial:  it helped that the initial stories were played back by someone without a dog in the fight, i.e. someone like me.  People were able to trust that there was less filtering in the retelling, believed that my main interest was in helping the group get to where it wanted to go, not in executing some unspoken agenda.

Let’s also be realistic.  This group still has a great deal of work to do.  There will be slippages and repeats of old patterns.  And, there is already tremendous progress too.

The main payoff is that the shared awareness creates more choices for everyone.  More choices means more alternatives, more opportunities to find innovative ideas and solutions.

Now that the information is in the sunlight, there’s no going back.  How great is that?

Butterfly Wings Flapping

Small changes can make such a big difference.

As I mentioned in my last post, I am doing a fair bit of research into complex adaptive systems (CAS) and experimenting with shifting my philosophy and approach to be more in line with this way of being.

One of the core principles of complex adaptive systems is so-called butterfly effect.  This is the sensitive dependence on initial conditions in non-linear systems where a small change at one place can result in a major difference at a later time and place.  (See Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butterfly_effect)

In plain English, this means that small actions can have outsize effects, and we may not be able to predict the precise outcome.

The term “butterfly effect” comes from the idea that a butterfly flapping its wings in the rain forest in Brazil can lead to a tornado in Texas.  Not cause the tornado, but set off a chain of events that leads to it, or not.

Now that I’m training myself to look at my work in this way, I see butterfly wings flapping all over the place.

In the power of a good question, well timed in its delivery.

In the senior executive who chooses not to offer his idea of a “solution” to his team.

In the positioning of chairs in a meeting room so that different people are near to each other.

In the choice to speak the word “I” instead of “you”.

In the invitation of a new voice into the conversation.

Indeed, because organizations are complex places, it may be only these small actions that can be relied on to bring us closer to the results, productivity, culture, profits, changes, outcomes, improvements, or whatever we say we want.

What’s your experience telling you?

Rethinking Change in Organizations

A new and radical way to approach change.

A colleague just shared with me a terrific piece on change.  

The author, Leandro Herrero, offers an intriguing synthesis of many of the ideas I’m making increasing use of in my work: generative conversations, networks, complex adaptive systems, to name a few.

The key premise is the following: “Under certain conditions, a small set of behaviors has the power to create significant change.”  Referred to elsewhere as the butterfly effect, we operate in organizations as if this basic tenet in the natural world has no relevance.

Despite our pledged allegiance to teams and collaboration, we still refuse to give up on our top-down, command-and-control approach to orchestrating change, as if declaring that we are moving from A to B is enough to make it so.

Life, in organizations or anywhere else, is not linear.  However, we do things that create the illusion it is so.  We make plans, develop timelines, act as if cause and effect are proximate, and so on.  That’s not to say that plans and timelines have no value, it’s just that we usually put all our eggs in this basket of linearity.  It’s a question of emphasis.

Organizations are relationships.  These relationships are fueled by conversation.  And conversation creates the connections between people and determines the quality of their results.

We are finally coming around to thinking about the relationships that compose an organization as networks rather than the lines and boxes of an org chart.  And, of course, networks are not linear.

We are only just beginning to understand the power and influence of networks.  Few of us have learned how to exploit these networks in service of making changes.  Herrero shows us how.

The way to create sustainable change is by working at the level of individual behavior, starting with the people who reside at the key nodes of the networks in the organization.  The question to ask is, “Imagine if everybody engaged in the desired behavior, what kind of organization would we be building?

Engage the network nodes to lead the way in the behaviors you want to instill.  These will be the behaviors that will create the change you are seeking.  They will spread these new behaviors through role modeling.  This is distributed leadership in action.  Because the influence of these important individuals is not hierarchically defined, they will spawn imitation and social copying.  Stories will spread. 

“Stories flow every day and can be spread at any time producing a constant stream of ‘things that are now happening and that weren’t there before’.” 

I expect to write much more about this as I continue to play around with these ideas and practices.  How are you seeing this where you are?

What is Consensus?

We can get ourselves in trouble if we are not clear on what we mean.

Came across this piece on Forbes online about the evils of consensus.

Mike Myatt, the author, makes several really important observations about how to work effectively in groups: aligned vision and expectations, clear roles, sufficient resources, precision in execution, among others.

And then he goes on to malign the notion of “consensus” by equating it with “equality” and “groupthink”.

Where do people get these ideas?

Consensus is not the insidious killer Myatt suggests.  The problem is that he misunderstands and misapplies the idea.  If you are in a situation where you are operating as if consensus is the same thing as equality and that it leads to groupthink, you need to stop what you’re doing and call me.

To begin, consensus is not something that applies in all circumstances, as Myatt implies is the norm in many groups.  Further, a consensus decision is not something “we all can live with” in the sense that we’ve just rolled over out of fatigue or as a result of being barraged by the most vocally powerful person in the team.

Consensus is emphatically not muddling toward a watered down middle.  That is political compromise, a dramatically different animal.

Just because you think you are in a “team”, consensus decision making is not automatically called for.  As Myatt and several of is commenters point out, authority and skill differentiation are really, really important aspects of high-functioning work groups.

Consensus is just one of a host of decision making mechanisms that groups have at their disposal.  It should never be the default mode.  It is too time consuming for that.

However, when you need the total commitment of everyone on the team, when the stakes are that high, that’s when you need to invest the time, energy, and personal and political capital to reach consensus.  

A consensus decision is one we’ve sweated over.  One in which we all feel our points of view have been heard, and in hearing it all, we collectively recognize that in the name of what we are trying to accomplish, some ideas just naturally float to the top.

Sometimes, though, by putting everything out there, we can also reach a synthesis that is stronger than any of the individual ideas that were originally offered.

If that is what your circumstances require, if that’s the kind of innovation you think your business needs, then seek consensus.  Real consensus.  

Otherwise, do something else.