Tony Morales Interview

• Process for forming a consulting team:
  • Forming the consulting team happens on a case by case basis, as it depends upon the industry, function, and available people
  • Team is formed of principals, executives and residents at Inter-Growth, staff members, researchers, and experts
  • Experts are one of:
    • Functional experts (e.g. have deep experience in executive search, or deep experience in culture transformation)
    • Industrial experts (e.g. deeply familiar with transportation and logistics)
• Generating ideas on how to tackle the issue:
  • Need to understand first. Research team does the following:
    • Extensive analysis of the organisation from the outside perspective
    • Looks to understand the industry
    • Looks to understand competitors
    • Looks to see what’s going on in terms of industry trends (cyclical or not)
      • How are their competitors operating?
      • What changes are happening?
      • Are there any emergent trends in the industry?
• Client process and structure:
  • Seek to understand first from an outside basis (see above)
  • How can we learn about lived experience, the culture, the design, beyond what you can see written in a document?
    • Interviews and assessments
  • Cultural interviews:
    • Team members visited 100 client sites in a 90 day period to interview people, collect their notes, and put them together
    • These are ethnographic, and so it takes on an anthropological skill set
    • Don’t seek to guide or bias, just looking for the “grand tour”. Asking questions like:
      • What’s your job like?
      • What’s this organisation like?
    • This can give a piecemeal picture of what’s happening across the organisation
  • Assessment:
    • Inter-Growth uses a tool called “total for index”
    • This is an algorithmic assessment, that measures things like:
      • leadership
      • culture
      • experience
      • capabilities
    • Model comes up with actionable data which allows insights about what’s happening across the organisation
  • Deciding who to interview:
    • There’s not enough time to interview the 20,000 employees
    • Think about more than employees: what are consumers, partners, competitors all thinking?
    • Instead, draw a diverse sampling across the organisation
    • Looking to get information from different perspectives
      • geographically
      • seniority level
    • Broad bases, then focusing up on the executive team
  • Diagnosing team dynamics issues:
    • A lot of the problems that emerge will be cited time and time again in the interviews
    • Start off by looking for areas of shared concern from the interviews
    • Core findings will be common, but there may also be smaller one-off or isolated issues that could be addressed
  • Diagnosing organisation design issues:
    • Organisational design should be fit to achieve the target culture
    • There’s a culture that exists, and a culture that’s desired. Inter-Growth helps their clients move between these two states
    • Secondary to culture issues, business fundamental issues are also manifest in the organisation design:
      • cost saving
      • revenue generation
  • Other diagnosis tools:
    • Top team problems are always sensitive and delicate
    • Making sure that there is alignment with strategy and each other on the team level is important
    • Inter-Growth seeks to understand where there are areas of misalignment, and leading the executive team towards better alignment
    • Transport company had an executive team with different histories, and hence different ideas about what works and what doesn’t.
  • Other considerations:
    • Our client is a business who are looking to maximise shareholder returns
    • Culture and organisational design need to be aligned towards what will help the business most through:
      • driving revenue
      • cutting costs
      • maximising output
      • quality

Environmental Misalignments

• VW pollution masking scandal
  • Consumers have become less accepting of environmental scandals
• The external environment – something outside the team changes, but the team does not notice or adapt.
• Causes of misalignments:
  1. focus on shared information
  2. ignoring alternatives
     • recency bias
     • over-valuing outcomes
  3. Focus on self-interest
     • motivated blindness
• For all these reasons, teams fail to adapt.

Individual Misalignments

• One of the main causes in Microsoft’s decline in the 2000’s.
• Stack ranking assessment – reduced trust and damaged Microsoft’s ability to innovate
• Team goals should align with individual goals (WIIFM)
• Individual goals can change. Some examples:
  • Junior colleague develops new skills, gains new career aspirations
  • Things change at work (conflicts develop over time)
  • Things change at home (e.g. start a family)
• Psychological safety: an environment where team members can take risks.
  • Examples of risks:
    • admitting mistakes
    • addressing conflict
    • offering competing ideas
  • These are risks because no-one wants to feel left out of a group.

Systems Thinking Frame

• When attending a meeting, we must represent our own frame. However, it is also important that we adopt and listen, and take on other frames. Systems thinking is all about that.
• Analytical thinking: separate something into parts, understand the parts, and then see how the parts fit together
• Systems thinking (as opposed to our analytical framing) asks us to do something else. Take the part we are trying to explain, and see how that works in a larger system.
• Metaphor for Systems Thinking: Concentric Circles
• Example of car:
  • You can pull a car apart and understand all the individual pieces.
  • However, you won’t understand why it is the size it is, or why the size has changed since the 50’s.
  • Instead of viewing the car as a transportation machine, think of it as something to move families.
  • You only understand that when you think about the car’s role in society.
• Example of education:
  • School classes, 1 teacher, 20-30 children.
  • Why that configuration?
  • Need systems thinking to answer:
    • What is this preparing them to do?
    • What is being taught?
    • What role does that play?
• When we want to get the purpose, we need the systems thinking piece
• Getting rid of a problem does not necessarily led to what you want
• Is thinking about the system as a whole too much information?
  • It’s a different set of questions that we’re asking
  • If you’re really trying to understand purpose and possibility, that’s a different space
• Discovery space: not about getting rid of problems, but formulating problems in such as way that we can see possibilities that were not clear before
• By thinking of a goal and working backwards, we may avoid the constraints that block us going forward
• Analysis and synthesis
• Example:
  • People leaving a group
  • Was told this was because of monetary compensation
  • In the larger system, compensation is only part of the rewards system
  • What are the various monetary and non-monetary rewards?
• Considering the system rather than individualising issues or problems
• Win/Lose frame
  • If I give you something, I have to take something away from someone else
• Reframing: changing win/lose to win/win solutions

Diagnosing Problems in Groups and Teams

• We tend to think we bring together a group of people, and they will be high performing
• It doesn’t always work! How can we identify the problems?
• Example: steering committee on an organisational development initiative
  • Interesting patterns:
    • Every time the team met in person, lots of laughter and jokes. The were agreeable on almost anything that was discussed during the meeting
    • However, after the meeting, lots of emails sent raising numerous issues, which were not discussed during the in-person meetings
    • The next time they met, none of the issues were raised
• The culture of politeness
  • We’re interfacing with each other, face to face, we’re going to be polite
  • “Real” issues are secondary to being polite
  • Being polite gets in the way of learning in organisations
• The pattern of repeating
  • Even when contentious issues are raised, other people in the meeting disengage and lose focus. They’re not wanting to signal agreement or disagreement.
  • The speaker worries that they don’t get acknowledgement, so they repeat the same thing, a bit louder and more exuberant.
    • “I’ll do it again, and they’ll get it this time”
  • Not breaking the the frame, not stepping back or taking some sort of time-out.
• Conflict is often avoided
  • People don’t feel the need to confront each other
  • They’re not comfortable dealing with conflicts
  • Undiscussable issues are not discussed during meetings
    • Conflicts are discussed outside of formal meetings, over a lunch or a beer
• How to interrupt the negative cycle
  1. Pause, and raise the question of “What’s going on here?”
     • Make the pause part Ground rules.
     • Allow the team to re-frame and refocus
     • It needs to be a deliberate activity
     • The leader needs to help establish that this an effective and acceptable practice in the team
     • Examples:
       • work teams in factories can stop the whole production line
       • retrospectives
  2. Try to identify what the issue is
     • Where is the team is getting stuck?
  3. Collect a little data.
     • Ask everyone on the team:
       • What’s working well?
       • What isn’t working well?
     • Do an anonymous survey if people are uncomfortable talking in the open about what the issues are.
     • Don’t just make assumptions. Really try to figure out what people are seeing

 

I’m studying the course Culture-Driven Team Building Capstone on Coursera. These are my revision notes for week 1.

Tony Morales Interview

• Intergrowth:
  • a global leadership advisory firm
  • helping with talent and organisation issues, such as executive search, executive coaching, leadership development, organisational design, risk, culture transformation, strategy
  • Tony is a senior consultant at Intergrowth
• Logistics and Transportation Corp approached with an RFP:
  • Need an executive search firm to help find new CFO
  • Intergrowth was selected on the basis of that tasks, and then continued to engaged with the company in a number of other practice areas.
• CFO search – first impressions:
  • The problem looked a little funky for an organisation of this size ($2b enterprise)
    • No succession plan in place for their CFO
  • There were many other organisational dynamics issues that stemmed from their history
    • Origin story: two blue-collar immigrant workers, saved enough money to buy a bus, slept in it while building capital and expanding the business, until eventually became hugely successful
    • Problems with this:
      • the founders were never really operationally sophisticated
      • struggled moving from old economy thinking to digital age of transformation enterprises (e.g. Uber, Lyft)
      • there may be disconnects between how the company is currently operating, and how it ought to operate
  • This is a great story about how critical thought around leadership and leadership intervention can really benefit organisations
• The transportation industry:
  • is going through a lot of change (e.g. Uber, Lyft, Tesla)
  • Transportation isn’t what it was 30 years ago, or as it had been 100 years ago
  • An organisation in the transportation industry that is still being run in “mom and pop” style would have some problems around innovation management

What Are Teams?

• A team is any group of people that performs some collective task on which they have to work together, that is, they have to cooperate
• In businesses, there are many tasks that require coordination. It’s the job of management to make sure that people coordinate on these tasks.
• It is the cooperation in the performance of a task that makes a group a team
• “We” intentions versus “I” intentions

A Closer Look at Culture

• Culture is whatever people learn from other people, and transmit to other people, especially by interacting with them.
• Culture:
  • ways of behaving and speaking
  • how to think and reason
  • values and goals
• Embodied culture is the things we don’t event need to think about (e.g. dribbling ball, singing anthem, attitudes to horse meat)
• Values and goals that guide our actions
• Teams need their preconceived routines, their ways of reasoning about the world and their goals and values

Being Unaware of Culture

• We are not even aware of a lot of culture we acquire from others
• For example, how close we stand to each other
  • Proxemics is the study of the amount of space people feel necessary to keep between themselves and other people
    • Intimate zone (0 to 18 inches in America)
    • Personal zone (18 inches to 4 feet in America)
    • Social zone (4 feet to 12 feet in America)
    • Public zone (beyond 12 feet in America)
  • These distances vary based on your cultural upbringing
• Cooperation on teams involves expectations of this sort.
• When the expectation are violated, the performance of the team can suffer

BART

• BART stands for Boundaries, Authority, Roles, and Task
• BART is a way of thinking about teams that emphasises psycho-dynamic processes
• Boundaries
  • e.g. time, physical setting, psychological, etc
  • Time boundary examples
    • people arriving late, checking mail during meeting, etc
    • In many cultures, commencing a meeting on time is considered very important, a trademark of being very professional at work.
    • In other cultures, they’re very lenient. It’s OK to stary a meeting 15 minutes later than the scheduled time.
  • Perhaps the team does not value boundaries.
• Authority
  • e.g. who wields authority, who has formal or informal authority
  • e.g. the person who was the designated leader was not the actual leader. The acutal leader was another team member who was a subject matter expert.
  • Who is considered to be an authority in the context?
  • We have formal and informal authority
• Roles
  • e.g. formal and informal roles
  • e.g. one team had a member who was seen and designated as the contrarian
    • every point that was made, he felt called upon to disagree, contract, argue
    • he was really their critical thinking partner, so that turned out to be positive
  • Think about what the role says about the group or team and how you can understand that
• Task
  • e.g. at least 2 tasks
    • work task
      • What is it that we’re assigned to do?
      • What is our purpose?
    • survival task
      • How do we sustain ourselves?
      • How do we continue our activity?
  • Teams can often get confused between their survival task, as opposed to their assignment

Managing Reward Systems

• Reward systems in the workplace like performance reviews, bonuses, and promotions are powerful ways to shape culture and create an atmosphere of inclusion
  • They can also be a source of implicit bias.
  • Disadvantaging certain groups of people, even if they appear to be totally neutral.
  • If you’re serious about boosting diversity on your team, you have to think about the unintentional forms of bias that could be hiding in your reward systems
• Symphony orchestras
  • Few of them reflect the population of the cities they represent
    • Just over 10% of orchestra musicians are people of colour
  • This is due to:
    • unequal access to music education
    • hidden biases in systems of reward and advancement from an early age
  • People of colour are tenured at a rate of about 30%, which is way lower than their white colleagues
    • Peers nitpick small imperfections in their performances and character that they would normally let slide with white musicians
    • This can happen totally unconsciously and in small ways
    • Those small unintentional forms of bias lead to fewer opportunities for people of colour at a large scale
• Same effect can happen with informal rewards systems. Such as praise from supervisors, recognition for team members’ achievements, or even just who we listen to at meetings
• How to combat biases?
  • Measure outcomes
    • When you set specific targets for diversity, and measure progress toward achieving them, you can uncover unintentional bias in an objective way and that leads to better accountability.
  • Post results publicly
  • The Shield (see Promoting Diversity in the Workplace)
    • The unspoken rule on the team was men direct the conversation at meetings
    • Mazzara created a new rule for the team. He told them that no one should be interrupted when they were pitching an idea

Addressing Representational Gaps

• Representational gaps: gaps in perception about team problems, including the team’s ultimate task and what’s important to execute team goals
• Representational gaps arise from:
  • differences in knowledge sets
  • differences in value sets
  • conflicting interpretations of new knowledge
• How to reconcile incompatible views?
• An intentional effort is needed on teams to reconcile different perspectives.
  • This is important because functionally diverse teams often lack shared knowledge
  • Compatibility is established by providing adequate time for team members to build relationships and get to know each other
• Key is for team members to mutually understand the values, beliefs and attitudes represented in the team
• There needs to be a shared understanding of how individuals within teams identify problems
• Four keys to representing any problem: GAEO
  • Goal hierarchy: how we prioritise goals
  • Assumptions: how we assume others behave, or how we assume others are limited in time or resources
  • Elements: components of the problem that are changeable
  • Operators: the ways that the components of the problem can change
• Companies can set ground rule expectations that establish these shared ways of understanding problems.
  • Teams can recognise that different behaviours may exist, and these behaviours are unique to particular countries or cultures
  • This recognition and acceptance of differences helps to establish shared knowledge, and creates opportunities for mutual understanding among team members
• At an organisational level managerial staff must set an example for valuing diversity on teams.
  • Examples:
    • Mentoring relationships
    • Job shadowing
    • Relationship building time
    • 360 feedback
  • Watch out for the potential to blur roles and to reduce creative solutions
• Managers need to be strategic in drawing out their teams’ creativity
• Jim Shaw, former executive vice president of MTV networks
  • a “left-brain” guy in a “right-brain” organisation
  • Initially responded to creative suggestions by discussing possible ways where the idea could go wrong
  • This had the effect of shutting down the idea
  • Instead of diving in with his perspective on the suggestion, Jim learned to incrementally share contingency planning information.
  • This way creative people can fully explain themselves and get their ideas on the table
  • No two people on Jim’s team thinks alike, and this needs to be accounted for
• Example from the last section of team that broke apart (Beth & John):
  • Remaining four called themselves the “Small Beautiful Team”
  • Set out to reestablish goals, roles and norms for their team
  • They managed representational gaps between them through establishing frequent check-ins for information sharing and goal setting
  • The norms of active and deliberate listening where critical to their building compatibility across their views and mutual understanding of each other’s perspectives
  • Decisions were much slower and more deliberate than before.
  • One conversation when the new CEO (Nigel) called attention
  • Roles because more evenly distributed and more clearly defined
  • Representational gaps will inevitably exist, but with thoughtful intention, compatibility across individuals and high function can be achieved when mutual understanding is the goal

Course Structure

1. Write a paper:
   • What are the potential issues you think this company could be facing
   • What factors would you as a consultant need to consider?
2. Peer Review
   • Read someone else’s paper and comment on it
3. Make a diagnosis
   • Write 5-8 questions down that you would want to ask the client to find out more relevant information about their situation

 

Late last year (the end of 2016), Andy Parker and I were talking about a frustrating problem common to many senior people in teams: how to improve or positively affect the people we work with so that we were all happier and more effective? These discussions have lead me through one of the more intensive periods of growth and learning that I’ve experienced for a long time, and have ended up with a nice gem of a study on the effectiveness of stand-ups. This post is a description of the journey I’ve taken over the last 6 months or so…

Culture and Ethnography

Our first problem: how to get people to change? Andy and I agreed that we can’t make people change. It comes down to a matter of ways to influence people. We thought that this was an aspect of culture, and so our thoughts went to the tools of anthropologists. Perhaps we could learn something there? We knew that anthropologists use ethnography tools to study people and cultures. Perhaps we could look in that direction?

Fieldwork

Andy had heard about Fieldwork, a company that specialises in the study of company culture. Most interesting to us, they had published a guide on how to conduct ethnography fieldwork and a DIY Ethnography Kit.

With this guide, Andy and I both started observing and documenting events that we saw about us at our companies. I started writing posts on our internal company blogging platform, and Andy did the same.

I spent a number of months making observations between my daily work duties. I found these enormously useful, and it helped spark a number of productive conversations.

However, it got to the stage where we had a lot of observations, but no clear idea of what to do next.

On a whim, we searched for online courses which might help us in our quest. As it turned out, there was an excellent course available on Coursera…

Culture-Driven Team Building

Culture-Driven Team Building is a specialisation run by the University of Pennsylvania through Coursera. It is made up of five separate month-long courses. Each course lasts for four weeks, and takes about four hours of study per week.

I’ve learned a huge amount of useful information in these courses, and I can recommend them as a good way expand your skills on leading and influencing teams.

Some of my key takeaways:

• The Secret to Successful Culture Change: the new culture must appear to grow organically out of the old culture (from Effecting Cultural Continuity and Change)
• Team culture types (from Diagnosing Team Problems)
• The importance of Psychological Safety (from Diagnosing Team Problems)
• Social Identity Theory (from Team Diversity Basics)
• Techniques for reducing bias (from Team Diversity Basics)
• The importance of framing and reframing (from Introduction to Framing and Systems Thinking)
• How to observe teams and groups (from Developing Groups and Teams for Positive Organisational Impact). This was particularly relevant to the ethnography fieldwork I had been conducting earlier
• The conditions for learning (from Fostering Innovation in Groups and Teams)
• Liberating Structures (from Fostering Innovation in Groups and Teams)

There’s lots more, I’m glad I kept details notes. I’ll be referring to them for years.

Grounded Theory

Remember the fieldwork we were doing earlier? I all my coursework I never really picked up on how to turn the observations into theories and models. Jeff Fredrick hit upon the key phrase and sent me the link: Grounded Theory. This is a systematic methodology in involving the construction of theory through the analysis of data. Finding this was a bit of an a-ha moment for me.

I think when I finish all the coursework, my next point of call will be to return to the ethnography study and apply some more powerful tools as provided by grounded theory.

Daily Stand-up Meeting: A Grounded Theory Study

This all leads me to the last gem: I found a link to a study on the effectiveness of stand-ups:

• The Daily Standup Meeting: A Grounded Theory Study

I love to see some real scientific studies on the effectiveness of our practices. There’s too much gut-feel and cargo-culting in team practices, so some hard data is always welcome.

Some key recommendations and guidelines from the study:

• Don’t use stand-ups for reporting status (plan for the day instead)
• Keep the stand-ups short
• Keep the number of participants small
• Don’t hold the stand-up first thing in the morning

Since March 2017, Andy Parker and I have been studying the Culture Driven Team Building specialisation from the University of Pennsylvania (delivered through Coursera). The specialisation is composed of 5 different month-long courses. I have published blogs containing detailed study notes for all these courses. This post collects links to all those blog posts in one place.

• Course 1: The Power of Team Culture
  • Why Culture Matters in Organizations
  • Corporations in Culture
  • Team Rituals and Symbols
  • Effecting Cultural Continuity and Change
• Course 2: Building High-Performing Teams
  • Setting Team Foundations
  • Diagnosing Team Problems
  • Coaching Emotionally Intelligent Teams
  • Managing Common Team Types
• Course 3: Optimising Diversity in Teams
  • Promoting Diversity in the Workplace
  • Team Diversity Basics
  • Managing Conflict
  • Diversity Case Study
• Course 4: Creating a Culture of Continuous Learning
  • Introduction to Framing and Systems Thinking
  • Diagnosing Strengths & Barriers to Learning on Teams
  • Developing Groups and Teams for Positive Organisational Impact
  • Fostering Innovation in Groups and Teams
• Course 5: Culture-Driven Team Building Capstone
  • Capstone: Introduction of Case
  • Capstone: Diagnosis of Organisation
  • Capstone: Candidate selection
  • Capstone: Final Recommendations

I’m studying the course Creating a Team Culture of Continuous Learning on Coursera. These are my revision notes for week 4: Fostering Innovation in Groups and Teams.

Introduction & Learning in Ambiguous and Uncertain Environments

• How do we balance what we don’t know with what we do know?
• Organisations need to enable a learning environment:
  • Organisational enablers of continuous learning
  • Concepts of Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS) and liberating structures
  • Working with ambiguity and unpredicatbility
• Uncertainty can enable creative solutions.
• Suggested reading:
  • Michel, A., & Wortham, S. (2009). Bullish on uncertainty: How organizations transform individuals. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Conditions for Learning

• Complex Adaptive Systems:
  • Main characteristics:
    • self-similarity
    • self-organisation
    • complexity
    • emergence
  • Traditional models of change: there are experts who can instruct others
  • Sometimes there are no experts, there is no solution to transfer
  • The solution must be discovered
• Self organisation:
  • the tendency of an open system to generate new structures and patterns based on its own internal dynamics.
  • Organization design is not imposed from above or outside; it emerges from the interactions of the participants in the system.
• Conditions for self-organisation:
  • Container
    • sets bounds for the self-organizing system. It defines the “self” that organizes.
    • The container may be physical (e.g. geographic location), organisational (e.g. department) or conceptual (e.g. identity, purpose, or procedures)
  • Significant differences
    • determine the primary patterns that emerge during self-organizing processes.
    • A difference between two agents may be reflected and reinforced by other agents in the system, which then establishes a system-wide pattern.
  • Transforming exchanges
    • These form the connections between system agents.
    • Information, money, energy, or other resources are the media for transforming exchanges.
    • As the resource flows from agent to agent, each is transformed in some way.
    • These patterns of individual change lead, ultimately, to adaptability of the system as a whole
• CAS are necessary tools
  • Hierarchy isn’t going to get us there

• Decision making under certainty and uncertainty
  • Rational: e.g. back a cake, build an airplane
  • Socially complicated versus technically complicated
  • Unknown systems need a different frame of mind
    • Focus on exchanging knowledge
• Suggested reading:
  • Definition of Complex Adaptive Systems: http://betterevaluation.org/en/plan/approach/developmental_evaluation
  • Article by Wendell Jones on Complex Adaptive Systems (2003): http://www.beyondintractability.org/essay/complex-adaptive-systems

Organizing Under Uncertainty

• In traditional organisations, change is perceived to be top-down.
  • Current state, target state, steps to get to the target state
• Team structures need to be more emergent in complex adaptive systems
  • Change is in response to changes in the environment, and how to fit better in the new environment.
• Solutions can come from anywhere in the system (not just at the top of the hierarchy)
• Self-Organisation:
  • the tendency of an open system to generate new structures and patterns based on its own internal dynamics.
  • Organization design is not imposed from above or outside; it emerges from the interactions of the participants in the system.

Scenario: Team at GURD, Part 1

• Background:
  • GURD Limited
  • Software development services company
  • Works primarily with pharmaceutical companies
  • New client that they’ve asked to a develop a CRM tool
  • Team will test the program in 3 months
• Stephanie (Project Manager):
  • Welcome everyone, glad you can be here
  • Hey Mikki (who is remotely dialed in on video)
  • As you know, we have an amazing project. It’s a big dal for GURD. If all goes well it could lead to many more projects. If there are any snags, the client could lose al ot of money. A big financial loss, for us as well as them. We just want to amek sure that everything is rolling along as it should for the testing in 3 months. So, where are we at in regards to that?
• Gigi (Testing Lead):
  • We right now are just concerned about the compatibility of systems. We haven’t done any testing so far.
• Jacob (Software Development Lead):
  • Good point, but that’s why we did due diligence before we started this project. We’ve been working hard and really studying the client systems, and making sure that it mirrors the development systems.
• Mikki (Software Development Lead):
  • We can still have technical issues creeping in during the testing phase. We don’t have any control over those client systems, and that due diligence was done a little while ago. They may have done software upgrades since then.
• Stephanie:
  • That’s a really valid point. It could be a really high risk situation if we don’t get on it. What can we do?
• Gigi:
  • I checked the knowledge repository. We have a lot of history here with our previous clients.
• Jen (Client Services Lead):
  • I will definitely be in touch with Theresa at the clients office with regard to IT. I’m certain that they’ve done multiple technology upgrades.
• Stephanie:
  • Good. I think the Software Development Departement really needs to look over this beforehand, right? John’s going to find out all the information from the client. Find out if there’s anything we need to do to adjust and to integrate with their system before three months time. So, you’re going to get that to Mikki and Jacob. They’ll review it over the next few days, maybe over the weekend as well. Next week we’ll meet at the same time, and see where we stand at that point. Sound good?
• Jen:
  • I’ll send you guys an email after I talk to her on Friday.
• Stephanie:
  • OK, good. So next point of business. Company picnic. Did you guys get the invitation?
• <<crosstalk> yeah
• Stephanie:
  • Anyone bringing your kids? Mikki, are you bringing your son?

Scenario: Team at GURD, Part 2

• Background:
  • After 3 weeks, the same team meets again
• Stephanie (Project Manager):
  • Thanks everybody for being back. So, hi Jan. Were you able to find out from the client any information about co-ordinating systems?
• Jen (Client Services Lead):
  • Yeah, I met with Theresa and the site team last week, and we put together a list of all the new information, and I sent that along to Jacob and Mikki, and we’re working through it.
• Mikki (Software Development Lead):
  • That was really helpful, they made a lot of changes and upgrades on the client end. So, we’re going to make some changes to our software, so it’s going to work smoothly.
• Stephanie:
  • So, how can we resolve the discrepancies?
• Mikki:
  • Well, I propose we do a dry run. So that way, we can do this thing in real time. If there’s any glitches, we can address them before it gets to user testing.
• Gigi (Testing Lead):
  • I think that’s a great idea. We can schedule a week or two ahead of testing.
• Jen:
  • I’ll let Theresa know so that the team over there is prepared.
• Jacob (Software Development Lead):
  • I just want to say, I’m not sure a dry run will grab everything. I was reviewing some of the implementations and I think it would be in our best interest to bring in a tech expert. Other projects have done it, they’ve been successful with it, I think we should try it.
• Stephanie:
  • Good idea. Should we just throw out some names for people who could do something like this? I’m thinking maybe Janine?
• Gigi:
  • Janine, or maybe Margaret even.
• Stephanie:
  • We do have budget for this.
• Gigi:
  • We put aside a little bit of funding for an expert review. We can get that done like one or two months ahead of testing.
• Stephanie:
  • All right Mikki, well, let’s get the ball rolling, then.
• Mikki:
  • You got it.
• Stephanie:
  • Did you get some of that potato salad yesterday? It was amazing!
• <<crosstalk>>

Debrief: GURD Scenario

• This is a team that’s working quite differently to most of the other scenarios we’ve shown you.
• They have quite a bit of flexibility, adaptability and engagement.
• There is an aspect of inclusion
  • Even though there is a remote member, they are incorporating him into their discussions and social engagements.
• Complex Adaptive Systems
  • It’s energising to be part of a team that is learning and adapting.
  • Simple problems:
    • In both meetings, there were some simple problems that recurred, and were addressed easily and readily. They have a formula or format for doing that.
  • Complicated problems
    • Knowledge mangaement repository
      • Someone’s been here before, what did we do?
  • Complex problems
    • Client environment is unpredictable. They have no control over the upgrades or changes on the client system.
    • Mark Twain:
      • “It’s not what you don’t know that will get you it trouble, it’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so”
  • The person who identifies problems is not shut down or blamed.
  • There’s a safe space created.
    • Safe spaces allow everyone to come up with their own perspective.
    • This enriches the conversation
    • Helps them to become more productive and effective
  • Customer’s world is constantly changing.
  • The team exhibited responsiveness
  • Diffusion of ideas
  • Knowledge management repository
    • Record of previous projects.
    • Ability to learn from past mistakes
    • Find out what has been done previously that can be applied now.
  • Emergent behaviour:
    • Teams that are future focused are more able to handle uncertainty and ambiguity
      • There are going to be variables that we don’t know
    • When teams handle emergent problems they need to constantly update their information.
    • Our work together on this team has been emergent
    • Helpful to add new perspectives

Liberating Structures: Examples of Team Exercises

• Enabling structures:
  • are ones that support teams and group working.
  • e.g. Rewards need to be structured so that they encourage teamwork
    • i.e. reward the team, not the individual.
• Liberating Structures:
  • We can invite people in the container (team, group), but we need ways to engage them, get them to engage, exchange view points.
  • Liberating structures can encourage the Complex Adaptive System to adapt, to be resilient and learn
  • Impromptu Speed Networking
    • How to get everyone engaged from the start? This technique gets everyone involved, indepentant of rank.
    • Think of one or two provocative questions that are pertinent to the meeting
      • Situation you’re in
      • Problem you’re trying to solve
    • Get everyone in an open space (a container)
    • A facilitator rings a bell and says “think silently for a minute or two, gather thoughts on the question that is in front of us”
    • After a while, the facilitator rings the bell again. Everyone finds someone in the room which they know the least well, and have a conversation with that person (up to five or ten minutes)
    • The bell is rung again, and pairs swap.
    • This is repeated for two or three rounds.
    • At the end, everyone sits together and asks:
      • “What did you discover about the question?”
      • “What were some of the insights that came out?”
      • “What do you now think about it?”
      • “How did your perspective change as a result of the conversations?”
  • 1-2-4-ALL
    • Not everyone feels comfortable talking or asking questions in a meeting. This creates a safe space for all those questions to be asked, and for others to listen to. Allows all voices to be heard
    • Participants in the meeting are given a chance to reflect on a problem, situation or question that needs to be answered
    • They pair in twos and discuss their reflections on the question
    • It then moves to a larger group of two pairs (4 people)
    • It then gets disussed in the whole group
  • Q Storming / Wise Crowds
    • Instead of taking questions one at a time, take 2, 3, 4, etc questions at a time.
    • This gives options about how to thread those questions together
  • TRIZ
    • A good way of discouraging the old disabler activies
    • The group asks the questions in order:
      • “What’s the worst possible outcome we can imagine?” or “What do we absolutely not want to happen?”
      • “What would cause this to happen?”
      • “What are we doing that is very similar to what would produce the bad outcome?”
    • Get rid of the last thing.
    • Defensive routines (Agyris):
      • An example of a taboo: asking “What’s not working well?”
      • Easy to answer the question “What’s working well?”, but the opposite triggers defensive routines.
      • TRIZ can help open up these taboo subjects.
  • Premortem
    • Start with the question: “What could go wrong with this project?” (at the start of the project)
  • Dissenting voices
    • Conflict is averted because it is no longer repressed
  • Empowering conversations
  • These liberating structures prevent a senior or alpha person from hijacking the meeting, asking the first question.
  • They break the frame of hierarchy
  • Everyone has to participate! (can’t zone out on a laptop or phone)
• Suggested readings:
  • Hackman, J. R. (2002). Leading teams: Setting the stage for great performances. Cambridge: Harvard Business School Press.
  • Liberating Structures: http://www.liberatingstructures.com/ls/
  • Lipmanowicz, H., & McCandless, K. (2010). Liberating structures: Innovating by including and unleashing everyone. E&Y Performance, 2,(4)

I’m studying the course Creating a Team Culture of Continuous Learning on Coursera. These are my revision notes for week 3: Developing Groups and Teams for Positive Organisational Impact.

What disables organisational learning?

• We need productive spaces and accountability, but we need discovery spaces too:
  • Doing space and discovery space
  • Exploit vs explore
  • Operations vs emergence
  • Staff meetings vs think tank meetings
• Major contributors to disabling organisational learning: time, resources and authority
  • Improvement teams are often set up as a bypass that’s not connected to other things.
    • They don’t really have time, resources or authority to effect change.
    • Sometimes set up as a way to keep people busy, to keep them from getting in the way or of the “real work”
    • How are the teams’ findings connected to the decisions that the organisation needs to make?
  • Time: the team has its work to do, but does it have the time to do it?
  • Resources: does the team have the resources to do it’s work?
  • Authority: does the team have the authority to make changes?
• Undiscussables can contribute to failure:
  • Things that are not talked about, but are important:
    • Assumptions that are made
    • Tacit norms within the organisation
    • It’s undiscussable to talk about undiscussables
    • Some things are considered sacred in organisations
  • This makes it like an iceberg.
    • It’s under the surface and hard to see
• Looking for flaws in ideas instead of exploring their potential inhibits creativity and innovation
  • Negating “but”: that sounds like a great idea, but…
  • “We’ve tried this before”
  • Stereotypes
    • We cannot discuss ideas because they are rejected
    • A leader asks for ideas, but everyone stays silent
• Information hoarding
  • People think that some information is their competetive advantage, and are reluctant to reveal it.
  • “If I give it away, I’m not needed any more”
  • “Thing” mentality. This idea is a thing, and I have it and you don’t. If I give it to you then you have it and I don’t (zero sum game)
• Leadership
  • Top level of management says middle management has no line of sight
  • Bottom says “we have no direction” (they have no idea what the leadership is doing)
• Focus on short term results
  • Task force comes up with long term vision, mission, etc
  • Gets back to work, and continues with fire-fighting, neglecting the vision
• No clear direction
  • The team is not able to set a clear direction because of confusion in the organistaion
  • Sometimes organisations set up task forces or committees to give the appearance that important matters are being discussed, but they may not really be interested in the outcome
    • They are given unclear directions
  • Disconnected goals
• Not aligning rewards with desired behaviours
  • Individual rewards (bonuses, etc) cause havoc with promoting teamwork
  • Most valuable player versus team
  • Different cultures have different norms regarding individual versus collective rewards

What enables organisational learning?

• Strength based change
• Clear timelines and deliverables
• Explicit and intentional
  • time, resources, authority
• Diversity in views
  • The group or team needs membership that represents the range of views in the organisation
• Design thinking is a form of solution-focused thinking – starting with defining an ideal or better future situation instead of solving a specific problem

Suggested Readings

• “Defensive routines are thoughts and actions used to protect individuals’, groups’, and organizations’ usual way of dealing with reality … Organizational defensive routines are anti-learning, overprotective, and self-sealing.” Argyris, C. (1990). Overcoming organizational defensive routines: Facilitating organizational learning. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall., p. 25
• Olson, E. E., & Eoyang, G. H. (2001). Facilitating organizational change: Lessons from complexity science. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass/Pfeiffer.
• Top, Middle and Bottom. Read more on Barry Oshry’s article. http://www.powerandsystems.com/resources-a-thought-starters/articles.html
• Hackman, R. J. (2002). Leading teams: Setting the stage for great performances. Harvard Business School.
• Martin, R. (2009). The design of business: Why design thinking is the next competitive advantage. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business School Press.
• Brown, T. (2009). Change by design: How design thinking transforms organizations and inspires innovation. HarperCollins.

Scenario: Executive Team at the Bank

• Background
  • Meeting between CEO and senior leadership
  • Things are going well for the company. They could assume that things will continue
  • They want to identify upcoming threats
• CEO:
  • Alright everyone, phones away
  • Our wallet share is up 12% quarter after quarter, we had a great review at our last shareholders’ meeting, and we’re holding steady for the last 3 quarters.
  • So tell me, what are we missing? What do we need to be thinking about now that things are going well?
• CFO:
  • It’s time to roll up our sleeves and help ourselves to assess our threats, to think about the future. No one was ready for the Global Financial Crisis in ’08. We don’t want to see something like that happen again. Now is the time, when we’re feeling good. We all know that things can change over night politically, economically, socially.
• Head of Strategy:
  • We have an extraordinary team with data, actuarial science, 35 PhDs that are weighing data against global benchmarks, international regulation, etc. I would urge all of you, please, trust this team, they’re a wonderful team. We did not see ’08 coming, but we’re in a much better position with this sort of data to predict this almost completely.
• Head of HR:
  • I feel so strongly that we have such great human capital. We have boots on the ground. Our team is fantastic. The problem in ’08 was that the information at the bottom wasn’t making it into the boardroom. Now we’ve done a lot of work to change that, but we really need to be putting them in a position where they can be heard.
• CEO:
  • This is good. This kind of friction helps us reveal our blind spots. We should be doing this on every department on every floor.
• Head of Retail Products:
  • There is concern in the product department as well, about the viability of the product. We want to review over and over the build of the product because demaind from the consumers is changing all the time. Everything is crowdsource now, where they always want something new. I don’t think we were covered before so well. I don’t think big data maybe had found any red flags on this yet, but I think we need to check with all the departments.
• CEO:
  • Yes, and we have to ensure that our products still align with our values. We can’t budge on that. Banks are supposed to prevent these kinds of financial disasters, no cause them.
• Head of HR:
  • I feel right now at this juncture, our greatest resource is our team. I will be a strong advocate for making sure their voices are heard.
• Head of Strategy:
  • I would also like, once again, to press this idea of big data. It is much more complex that what we know. It could very much shed a light on any blind spots.
• CEO:
  • This is not a zero sum game. We can rely completely on your expertise [nods at HR] and your expertise [nods at strategy], right? We need to be looking throughout the company for any ideas and information we can get, as well as outside the company.
• CFO:
  • Now we should be talking about this product’s situation, because I had this email from him
• <<crosstalk>>
• Head of Retail Products:
  • Yes, Daniel. He had a concern that the interest was too high on the new packet that we were talking about.

Debrief Scenario, Part 1

• That was an example of a discovery meeting.
  • The CEO creates a space where he says “yes, we’re doing well, but that’s not what this is about. What are we missing?”
    • This is a pivotal moment.
  • This creates a frame for discovery.
  • He’s turning to this team to invite them for ideas.
  • All the phone are put away, allowing everyone to be in the moment.
• Pause to reflect.
  • It’s so easy to lose yourself in the success.
  • Success can be limiting when we become complacent.
• Diverse team
  • Not just different departments, but different cultures.
  • Still able to work with each other.
  • Because it’s a diverse team, there were diverse ideas as well
  • Thinking about how we are going to diffuse information across the organisation.
• There was advocacy of ideas
  • Openness to other ideas, not just advocacy
  • It’s not a zero sum game.
• Productive conflict
  • We want to get different views out on the table.
• Understanding of each other’s contributions
  • How they were going to work together
  • CEO put both ideas in play. Didn’t make a false choice.
  • We want those differences expressed.
• Alignment of actions with values
• They bought in the voice of the customer, the bought in the voices across the floors.
• In many ways, it was about multiple stakeholders who were outside, the external environment.
• They are reflecting forward
  • What can we learn?
  • We’ve made mistakes, there have been problems. Let’s not do that.
• The Ladder of Inference (Argyris, 1990)
  • In these types of discovery meetings, you’re not just fighting your judgements and beliefs against someone else’s judegements and beliefs.
  • Let’s get down and talk about why we think what we think.
  • What are we assuming?

The Ladder of Inference

• Using the ladder of inference:
  1. Observe what are the beliefs and assumptions.
  2. What are the judgements made
  3. What are the conclusions drawn
  4. Are there any culturally attributed meanings
  5. Observe what people say and do.
• How do we go about observing teams and groups?
  • Be as descriptive as possible when you observe, avoid interpretation or conclusion
  • Things to pay attention to:
    • Observe the setting – the setting influences team behaviour.
      • e.g. meeting held in a cold room, everyone cross their arms to keep warm, but meeting organisers was interpreting this as everyone being defensive
    • Conversation
      • Jot down quotes (gives a sense of the language being used)
      • Particular language is often used over and over
    • Look for non-verbal behaviour
      • Connect this with what people are doing, what’s happening
  • Self-as-an-instrument: our reactions are important, they are only one data point. Keep track of your reactions. Look for data that corroborates that.
    • If you see someone that looks very angry, don’t just use your own reaction, but look at their tone of voice, what words they’re saying.
  • As you get better at observations, you get better at picking up things that you missed before. Sometime’s you’ll get hints at the undiscussable issues.
• You don’t have to be a leader to use the ladder of inference. By using it yourself, you invite others to do the same, and come to a different way of thinking about this.

Ladder of Inference Suggested Readings

• Merriam, S. B. (2009). Chapter Six: Being a careful observer. In S. B. Merriam, Qualitative research. New York: John Wiley.
• McCormick, D. W., & White, J. (2000). Using one’s self as an instrument for organizational diagnosis. Organizational Development Journal, 18(3), 49-62.

Diffusion of Ideas

• Encapsulation of ideas.
  • How do you get it to spread?
• Disablers of diffusion
  • Resistance to change
    • “That’s not how we do it here”
    • Not invented here
    • I don’t think it will work
  • Central group messages
    • Top down dictat – resisted at the bottom of the hierarchy
  • Xerox example:
    • Invented UPC code scanning
    • Was making money elsewhere, so the idea sat on the shelf
• Enablers:
  • Top level managers need to create space to enable teams to tell their stories to other parts of their organisation
    • That group has credibility and street cred.
    • They have the trust and respect of their peers to explain what they’ve done, and why they’ve done it
  • Learning is an iterative, recursive process
    • Uncertainty, ambiguity. No clear way forward
    • The uncertainty and ambigity calls for reframing, new ways of doing things.
    • Design thinking and design methods
    • Organisations and teams often do not see solutions in an iterative way
• Design thinking
  • Starting with “this is what ought to be”
  • Future does not have a roadmap
• Dialectical thinking:
  • In every solution is contained its own dissolution
• Shared understanding of a problem
  • Breaking the frame
  • Interpretation – “Rolling stone gathers no moss”.
    • Two opposed frames:
      • Rolling = action = good, moss = stagnation = problem
      • Rolling = chaos = bad, moss = stability = growth = good
• Need to explore and exploit

I’m studying the course Creating a Team Culture of Continuous Learning on Coursera. These are my revision notes for week 2.

Diagnosing Problems in Groups and Teams

• We tend to think we bring together a group of people, and they will be high performing
• It doesn’t always work! How can we identify the problems?
• Example: steering committee on an organisational development initiative
  • Interesting patterns:
    • Every time the team met in person, lots of laughter and jokes. The were agreeable on almost anything that was discussed during the meeting
    • However, after the meeting, lots of emails sent raising numerous issues, which were not discussed during the in-person meetings
    • The next time they met, none of the issues were raised
• The culture of politeness
  • We’re interfacing with each other, face to face, we’re going to be polite
  • “Real” issues are secondary to being polite
  • Being polite gets in the way of learning in organisations
• The pattern of repeating
  • Even when contentious issues are raised, other people in the meeting disengage and lose focus. They’re not wanting to signal agreement or disagreement.
  • The speaker worries that they don’t get acknowledgement, so they repeat the same thing, a bit louder and more exuberant.
    • “I’ll do it again, and they’ll get it this time”
  • Not breaking the the frame, not stepping back or taking some sort of time-out.
• Conflict is often avoided
  • People don’t feel the need to confront each other
  • They’re not comfortable dealing with conflicts
  • Undiscussable issues are not discussed during meetings
    • Conflicts are discussed outside of formal meetings, over a lunch or a beer
• How to interrupt the negative cycle
  1. Pause, and raise the question of “What’s going on here?”
     • Make the pause part Ground rules.
     • Allow the team to re-frame and refocus
     • It needs to be a deliberate activity
     • The leader needs to help establish that this an effective and acceptable practice in the team
     • Examples:
       • work teams in factories can stop the whole production line
       • retrospectives
  2. Try to identify what the issue is
     • Where is the team is getting stuck?
  3. Collect a little data.
     • Ask everyone on the team:
       • What’s working well?
       • What isn’t working well?
     • Do an anonymous survey if people are uncomfortable talking in the open about what the issues are.
     • Don’t just make assumptions. Really try to figure out what people are seeing

Scenario: Healthcare, Part 1

• Background
  • Hospital in a major metropolitan area that is busy 24 hours a day
  • Doctors and nurses are rushing about
  • There is tremendous paperwork behind every job that gets done
  • There is a grave problem:
    • Patients come in to the ER, and are waiting to be admitted to a bed in the hospital
    • Between their time in at the ER, and getting to the bed, there is a lag of time.
    • Sometimes, patients have waited up to 7 hours in a hallway in a gurney waiting for the bed to be available.
    • Who’s at fault?
    • Who can find a solution to this problem?
  • Cross functional team to solve the problem
    • Senior physician is leader
    • Representatives from nursing, facilities, safety, and housekeeping
    • Only 10% of the 2 hour meeting has everybody there trying to solve this
• Chief medical officer:
  • We have too many patients waiting in the hall.
  • We’re getting calls all the time, looking for beds
  • What’s the problem?
• Head of nursing:
  • By the time housekeeping has finished with the room, we have to put it in, confirm it, by the time we get the information to you (chief medical officer), it’s too late. Hours have passed.
• Head of health and safety:
  • It is an infrastructure problem. We need better phone lines, better IT
• Director of facilities and infrastructure
  • That is absolutely untrue. New phone lines, new IT system. That’s review board and a huge budget
• <<crosstalk>>
• Head of nursing:
  • We don’t even know if it’s going to work
• <<crosstalk>>
• Chief medical officer:
  • If it helps communication, I agree that it might be a good idea. We need to talk about it
• Director of facilities and infrastructure:
  • it’s just a way over the top solution.
• <<crosstalk>>
• Head of nursing:
  • It’s just another thing that I have to teach an entire staff of people
• Director of facilities and infrastructure:
  • I think the infrastructure problem is a personal infrastructure, there could be a way to open that.
• Chief medical officer:
  • Yes, but listen, we have the finances to do whatever we need
• Head of nursing:
  • If we have the finances, we should be hiring more nurses
• <<crosstalk>>
• Head of health and safety:
  • Is that the problem?
• Head of nursing:
  • Yes, that’s the problem!
• Head of housekeeping:
  • There are people in the rooms who are cleaning. They can do the job, they can report directly.
• Head of nursing:
  • Yeah, but we need to have checks in place
• <<crosstalk>>
• Head of nursing:
  • Unfortunately, your staff can not be counted on (talking to housekeeping)
• Director of facilities and infrastructure:
  • There is a huge competency problem. Huge! They don’t show up, they take 25 minute smoke breaks.
• Head of housekeeping:
  • You’re not even on our floor.
• Head of nursing:
  • But I am, and I feel like I consistently have problems and rooms are not cleaned consistently and adequately
• <<crosstalk>>
• Chief medical officer:
  • The problem is if the beds are not prepared, then we are in deep shit.
• Director of facilities and infrastructure:
  • There’s a way we could work within this infrastructure personally
• Head of nursing:
  • I just feel incredibly frustrated. I have almost no staff, and I have another team that feels unwilling to work with us, and if I could find a way…
• Chief medical officer:
  • How hard is it to pick up the phone? That’s what I want to know.
  • (walks off)
• Head of housekeeping:
  • (to head of nursing) My staff can work with your staff, they just don’t need to, they can go directly.
• Head of nursing:
  • I’m unwilling to have these conversation when not everyone is present
• Director of facilities and infrastructure:
  • Shall we table this for next week?
• Chief medical officer:
  • (walks back)
  • So, how are we doing?
• Director of facilities and infrastructure:
  • We are nowhere.

Debrief: Scenario, Part 1

• It was a shouting match, no one listening
• There was a lot of blaming
  • Chief of health and safety blamed an entire housekeeping department for not being competent
• Chief medical officer seemed very uninterested.
  • Not even physically available for the entire meeting
  • Left to take a call
• No solution focus
• When we’re in a “fight” situation, our guards go up and we protect ourselves from blame.
• Defensive routines (Agyris)
  • Triggered when we feel attached
  • “My group did our part”
  • “It’s not our fault”
  • There’s very little communication.
• Teams need to find a way to reframe “fights” to “an exchange of ideas”, or something constructive
  • Stepping back and listening, as opposed to just asserting your own view points
• Can we voice what the assumptions are?
  • That prevents them from going underground, getting buried

Scenario: Healthcare, Part 2

• Background
  • Let’s assess the previous meeting, so that we can make some structural changes to the way that they communicate
• Chief medical officer:
  • I think the last meeting was difficult. I think we need to find a way to make our meetings more effective so that we can solve the problem at hand
  • There’s no hierarch. Everyone is free to express themselves.
  • What did we do wrong in the last meeting?
• Head of housekeeping:
  • It was not good. Everyone talked over everyone else.
• Director of facilities and infrastructure:
  • Well, this is progress. We are laughing at each other.
  • I feel like if we’re really going to be focused on what we’re focusing on, we can’t keep taking calls in the middle of meetings.
• Head of housekeeping:
  • In regard to staying focused, I think we really need to listen to everybody. I did not feel heard at the last meeting. I felt there was definitely a pecking order going on.
• Chief medical officer:
  • Well, why don’t we  just go around and one person at a time take a minute, say what they need to say with no interruptions.
• Head of nursing:
  • We for me the last meeting was really frustrating because I felt ganged up on, and there was no one stepping in. We nurses are overworked as it is, and we hardly have a chance to catch a breath more or less. I think two or three times, steps down the line.
• Head of health and safety:
  • Guys, it’s easy to point fingers, and point out where other people drop the ball, but I think we could all do a lot better with less blame.
• Chief medical officer:
  • Something I really would like is if people could come from their own departments with ideas from their own departments that might solve the problem at hand, and think about it ahead of time.
• Head of housekeeping:
  • I feel like I did do that. I did come to a meeting with a solution I’d thought of that didn’t get heard. A lot of assumptions were being made about the skills of my staff. Nine times out of ten, the room is clean when the nurse comes to check it. My housekeeper could enter that into the system, get that message to the ER right way, save you time and work. I hired the staff. I know that they can do it.
• Chief medical officer:
  • I don’t think that the housekeeping are going to solve this problem. I mean, this is a really high takes problem, this is a big deal.
• Director of facilities and infrastructure:
  • Well, just to point out in the open format, you just made the assumption that Sarah was talking about, that housekeepers somehow can’t do it.
• Chief medical officer:
  • Okay, all right, duly noted.
• Head of nursing:
  • I does seem sometimes that we aren’t listening and we’re pushing too hard with our own ideas.
• Chief medical officer:
  • How about is somebody vould volunteer to write down what is being said in the meetings, because I know everybody’s got on their mind, and then distribute it.
• Head of housekeeping:
  • I’m happy to do that.
• Chief medical officer:
  • Great. Maybe write down your proposal.

Debrief: Scenario, Part 2

• The team takes time out, and is able to step back and review its own operation
• It will take time to get these “retrospectives” working well
• In this space, people have time, they are listened to, they are “in” the space.
• The leader plays an important role in shifting the focus of the meeting
  • They have to give a green light to allow the meeting to progress (e.g. without hierachies)
  • They have to be careful not to fill the meeting space with their own voice
• After Action Review
  • A meeting to assess what we just experienced
  • In the meeting you’re calling a timeout.
  • We want to examine what just happened, and figure out a better way.
• The leader models the behaviour
  • e.g. I’m turning off my cell phone
• Need to deal with specifics.
  • “We all need to listen to each other.”
  • No! Let’s examine the times when people didn’t listen to each other. Let’s be specific and detailed, not vague and general.
• Phased approach
  1. Leave the rank and hierarchy at the door
  2. The leader legitimises, role models the behavior, creates permission, ground rules, space
  3. Examine the process. What was going on? Being in the moment.
• It’s not about blame. It’s about effectiveness.
  • It’s about the interactions of the group, not about what you did.
  • We need to take our own responsiblity in this and focus on effectiveness, no blame
  • I’m in control of my response to what you did. I need to control my response.
• Conduct After Action Reviews frequently
  • Some teams set aside the last 5 minutes of ever meeting for this purpose
  • Keep continually learning about what worked well, what isn’t working, and how you can improve it.
  • “What worked well” is a good reframing. You can use it at the start of the next meeting.
• Appreciated Inquiry (Passmore and Woodman, 1987)
• Slow down the meeting.
  • Don’t let people jump in and claim the airtime.
  • Get everyone to write down a few ideas first.
    • What are some of your thoughts about how we could become more effective?
    • People are working in parallel
  • Make sure you respond to other peoples points and issues, don’t immediately jump in and add your own.

Our After Action Review

• This is about how I’m impacting you, and how we’re impacting each other.
• Am I thinking about the things that you’re thinking about.
• Are we meeting our goals?
  • Being clear about our goals
• Lack of immediate feedback from the learner
• Our group norms:
  • Questioning our rames, learning from each other
  • Giving concrete examples and cases that illustrate our points
  • Checking to make sure we covered the main points

Guide to the After Action Review

• Guide to the After Action Review
  • An AAR is centered on four questions:
    • What was expected to happen?
    • What actually occurred?
    • What went well and why?
    • What can be improved and how?
  • An AAR features:
    • An open and honest professional discussion
    • Participation by everyone on the team
    • A focus on results of an event or project
    • Identification of ways to sustain what was done well
    • Development of recommendations on ways to overcome obstacles
  • Contents:
    1. Planning the After Action Review
    2. Conducting an After Action Review
    3. Sharing the AAR Results

Skilled Incompetence (Argyris, 1986)

• Skilled Incompetence
  • Smart executive team, but unable to make clear decisions
  • What Causes Incompetence?
    • The culprit is skill
  • Where the Skillful Thrive
  • Defense Routines Emerge
  • How to Become Unskilled
    • The answer is unlearning

BART

• BART stands for Boundaries, Authority, Roles, and Task
• BART is a way of thinking about teams that emphasizes psychodynamic processes
• Boundaries
  • e.g. time, physical setting, psychological, etc
  • Time boundary examples
    • people arriving late, checking mail during meeting, etc
    • In many cultures, commencing a meeting on time is considered very important, a trademark of being very professional at work.
    • In other cultures, they’re very lenient. It’s OK to stary a meeting 15 minutes later than the scheduled time.
  • Perhaps the team does not value boundaries.
• Authority
  • e.g. who wields authority, who has formal or informal authority
  • e.g. the person who was the designated leader was not the actual leader. The acutal leader was another team member who was a subject matter expert.
  • Who is considered to be an authority in the context?
  • We have formal and informal authority
• Roles
  • e.g. formal and informal roles
  • e.g. one team had a member who was seen and designated as the contrarian
    • every point that was made, he felt called upon to disagree, contract, argue
    • he was really their critical thinking partner, so that turned out to be positive
  • Think about what the role says about the group or team and how you can understand that
• Task
  • e.g. at least 2 tasks
    • work task
      • What is it that we’re assigned to do?
      • What is our purpose?
    • survival task
      • How do we sustain ourselves?
      • How do we continue our activity?
  • Teams can often get confused between their survival task, as opposed to their assignment

The BART System of Group and Organizational Analysis (Green & Molenkamp, 2005)

• The BART System of Group and Organizational Analysis

Focus on Culture and Conflict in Teams: Part 1 – Culture

• Team that function well are able to deal with having a team member absent, and welcome them back on their return
• Power Distance (Hosftede & Hofstede, 2005)
  • The aspect of where and how authority empower distributed inthe organisation
• Project teams almost always have a pecking order
• It is imperative that the organisational culture provides or accomodates collaboration seamlessly across culture or across authorities when the situation so demands
  • When there are emergencies, to be able to rise out of the authority matrix and be able to chip in, get your points and thoughts across
• Effective teams have productive conversations. That is not about pecking order, but who has information
• Overt and covert norms affect the team
  • Overt norms: norms the team recognises
  • Covert norms: norms that are below the surface, not reconised.
  • Ground rules on norms
• Ground rules
  • Ground rules should be about the purpose of the team
  • There are also ground rules about the operational aspects of the team:
    • “it’s OK to disagree”,
    • or “let’s not interrupt each other”
• The evolution of Japanese management: Lessons for U.S. managers (marsland & Beer, 1980)
  • Japanese firms spent a lot of time planning, less on implementation
  • U.S. firms spent less time planning
  • Japanese firms spent much less time in implementation because they had spent the time planning
• Excitement about learning
• Culture orientations
• Subcultures
• Culture is a very important diagnostic lens

Focus on Culture and Conflict in Teams: Part 2 – Conflict

• Many organisations avoid conflict
  • Get the like-minded people together
  • This is a mistake
• We need to get the people with different views in the space and bring them into the team so the differences can be expressed
• Reframe conflict as “creative tension”
  • Is is tensions, there are different views, but it is creative
  • Getting undiscussable issues on the table can lead to insights. It’s ultimately where great transformation comes from

Summary

• We encourage you to:
  1. Acknowledge what is going on in the team
  2. Step back and identify issues that are causing problems (look at not just the symptoms, but the underlying issues)
  3. What is happening in the larger organisation that is impacting the team
  4. Collect some data (check assumptions)

Other References|Additional Readings

• Hofstede G. & Hofstede, G. J. (2005). Cultures and organizations: Software of the mind (2nd Ed.). New York: McGraw Hill.
• Marsland, S. & Beer, M. (1980). The evolution of Japanese management: Lessons for U.S. managers. Harvard Business Review.
• Smith, K. K., & Berg, D. N. (1987). Paradoxes of group life. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
• Darling, M., Parry, C., & Moore, J. (2005, Jul-Aug). Learning in the Thick of It. Harvard Business Review. Retrieved from https://hbr.org/
• Tavistock Primer II (Hayden & Molenkamp). Link: http://akrice.org/wp-content/uploads/primerII.pdf