"Everything happens in the context of relationships."
This concept was a revelation to me a few years ago. I'd been raised on a different business ethic: "Don't bring your personal life to work." In this way of thinking, your job specifies the 'role' you play.To be successful, you must not only embody the role, but also recognize the roles others are playing, and with them perform an unseen script. Bringing one's personal self to work, and interacting with others' personal selves, can't be tolerated, since this intrusion gets in the way of achieving business goals. Good workers must strive single-mindedly toward meeting the corporation's objectives. Those who do this well will be rewarded.
Being very driven operationally and technically, I was more than receptive to a de-personalized work place, and approaching my work this way usually produced good business results. But, when I sought feedback from peers and direct reports, I heard a consistent message that I was 'at times' not approachable. Those 'times' occurred when I was most intently driving to a business objective: meeting a project deadline; overcoming obstacles in reaching business goals. I was grateful that I had good enough relationships with others that they felt comfortable sharing this with me, and yet for years I failed to understand what I could do about it, other than try to play my role a bit differently.
And then a couple years ago, I came across what seemed a completely revolutionary thought: Everything happens in the context of relationships. If you care for those relationships, your outcomes will exceed your expectations. The person you are as a leader either enables or prevents others to be successful. If the people you lead are not being successful, look first to the relationship between you. Is it characterized by honesty and disclosure? Is it apparent to the other person that you care about his or her success, and that you bring a sincere interest in understanding both the facts and feelings of the relationship? As I've put this learning to practice, I have a growing appreciation for its power. A business is not a disembodied entity that people work for. A business is the people who work in it, and it changes measurably as the people within it change. It is simply the sum of the outcomes produced by those peoples' relationships, popularly called 'teamwork.' Moreover, the business exists within the environment of its community: consciously or not, the business contributes to community-based relationships, for good or ill.
Following the nation's economic news, I have come to realize a fundamental difference in the ethos of the community and that of many corporations. The people who work in businesses and whose communities are affected by them share a relationship-based ethos. Listen to interviews of workers who have been laid off recently. Whether the workers are young in their careers or have spent a lifetime with the company, they speak emotionally about their loss: not only of the loss of their livelihood, but also of the relationships lost to them. They speak of the close ties they have forged with co-workers, their 'second family' at work, and of the pride they have taken in what they accomplished together. People view work as more than an exchange of time for money. They bring to work not only their physical bodies but also all the complexities of their personalities, histories, emotions, and aspirations.They witness the contributions that they produce individually and with others for the business. All of the corporate talk of 'teamwork' just reinforces with them the importance of relationships as the singular engine for corporate success.
A corporation tethered by the concept of itself within its de-personalized person-hood can never understand the power that actually drives success in its business. The business's responsibility for its relationships with its employees and community trumps the profit imperative. In my work, I am responsible for profitability, and I take that responsibility seriously. So seriously, that I maintain that a business cannot be profitable both today and in the future unless its management understands that everything happens in the context of relationships. Failure to understand this leads to toxic debt packages that lead to rampant foreclosures that lead to ultimate insolvency (unless your business is 'too big to fail'). It leads to double-digit unemployment, with unimaginable human misery and long-term scarring with unknowable economic impact. It leads to toxic food, loss of life and health. The tolls are incalculable - and for what end?
Profits do not have to suffer as relationships are honored; my experience is that in fact, quite the opposite is true. This seems counter-intuitive only if you accept that the corporation is a mechanical entity that exists only to produce profits. However if you assume that the corporation is the sum of the people who work together to produce services or products profitably, and that the business exists within the context of the community upon which it depends, then it seems perfectly reasonable if not inevitable. I work in a company governed by a set of values that give shape to the relationships inside and outside the business. Not so coincidentally, the company has produced year-on-year growth every year (this one included) since embracing these values. The company's values are not just nice-to-haves; they are essential to the company's business plans and its success.
If all actions were based on the profit imperative, irrespective of relationships, human society as we know it would not be possible. Yet, even when our communities bear the manifold costs of the financial collapse caused by uncontrolled profiteering, society is reluctant to hold the bad actors accountable. I think our failure is partly grounded in an unmindful acceptance of their ethos, even when we do not share in it. We have accepted too readily that as long as it's legal, it's acceptable. But it matters how money is made. Legality is a low standard indeed for a society's norms, and you have to ask:who has decided what is legal and what is not?
Let us accept that human society is nothing if not the relationships that allow us to live together successfully to produce successive generations who may also thrive. Economic security and success are interwoven with those relationships. Everything happens in the context of relationships.
Monday, October 19, 2009
Monday, October 5, 2009
Lean takes on a new meaning
Update 8 October 09:
This morning's NYTimes reports that Costco has worked out a supply agreement with Tyson, allowing Costco to test Tyson's products prior to resale. And, there's some speechifying from the administration and Congress. Would be encouraging if this goes somewhere, but it's hard to see it will.
The Sunday NY Times featured a front-page story, shocking and deeply disturbing, that explained how E. coli contamination is allowed to occur in the US meat industry. In one example, meat sold under the product name "American Chef’s Selection Angus Beef Patties" was actually a mixture of meat products made by Cargill from three separate suppliers. None of these suppliers, nor the producer of 'American Chef's Selection Angus Beef Patties,' tested their products for contamination. Ms. Smith, a young woman who ate a hamburger made of this meat, became critically ill and is paralyzed.
But, you may wonder, I thought Sinclair's The Jungle changed all of this last century ... don't we have regulations that protect the consumer? That would be the USDA, and this is what they say:
No doubt Cargill has worked its supply chain relationships to drive down costs, but it's certainly not practicing Lean principles. This is old-fashioned greed. The article takes pains to point out that Costco, known for its supply chain and cost management, insists on testing the meat it procures: those suppliers who don't want their products tested (like Tyson) don't sell to Costco. Dr. Petersen should not worry about protecting the businesses he regulates. If they have to charge 30 cents more to produce meat that is clean, so be it. What consumer wouldn't prefer to pay an incremental difference for the peace of mind?
The kink in that argument is that consumer trust is badly eroded, because regulation has not been enforced where it exists, and it has been severely cut back. Protections we once enjoyed have been hacked away under the philosophy that government is bad. We are reaping the results now, not only in unclean food but also in huge economic failures. If consumers no longer trust that they are being protected, how can a business assure its customer that the higher price of its product is due to the product really being what it's labeled? Bubba Burgers, the article tells us, attempts to differentiate its product by this label: “100% whole muscle means no trimmings.” Until I read this article, I would have had no appreciation for what's behind this message (or what something called 'fine lean textured beef' really is - for starters, the raw material for this substance is up to 70% fat; centrifuges and ammonia are involved). If you're purchasing ground beef based on label information alone, which would you think the safer choice for your family: Bubba Burgers, or American Chef's Selection Angus Beef Patties? They both bear the USDA Approval label. What are you supposed to make of that?
And yet, I have little expectation that the article will have much more of an effect than grossing out its readers. Maybe Costco will get a brief uptick in their meat department. Maybe grocery store butchers will have more requests this week for grinding whole cuts of meat for customers. That's fine, but it's not the solution. Why shouldn't we expect businesses to eliminate costs by reducing waste, not by reducing quality? Why should we not insist that government do what we individually cannot do? Why are we paying the salaries of bureaucrats who seek to protect the industries they are supposed to regulate, at the expense of citizens? Why aren't we demanding substantive change?
President Obama campaigned on change, and surely that's the message that gave him a four-year lease at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. Yet since January, simply the prospect of change has become radicalized. Even in the face of incontrovertible evidence that the status quo is harmful, leaders are fearful of taking a stand for change, as if the safe position was to stand pat. Geoffrey Miller, in his book Spent, cites studies that correlate threat of disease in a population with low ratings of openness. The more people sense threats they cannot control, they become more resistant to change and fearful of outsiders. We can look around us and see catastrophe on all sides: environment, financial sector, housing, employment, education, health care. The response of some will be: "We need to do something about that!" Apparently, even more people will hunker down in their misery, and attack those who press for change.
You don't have to play to those fears, however. If they trust their leadership, people can be inspired to overcome their fears and act. Recently at work, we set a challenge for the stores to achieve sales levels never consistently met before. We were responding to the same economy that other retailers are using to justify hunkering down: cutting back, hyping poor values. But, we decided to inspire new levels of performance. I could give the stores no magic bullet, no certainty that they would succeed -- just my belief they would. I asked them to look only within the walls of their own stores to see what they could do to transform the experience of our customers, and deliver even greater value to them. And you know what? They did it.
This morning's NYTimes reports that Costco has worked out a supply agreement with Tyson, allowing Costco to test Tyson's products prior to resale. And, there's some speechifying from the administration and Congress. Would be encouraging if this goes somewhere, but it's hard to see it will.
The Sunday NY Times featured a front-page story, shocking and deeply disturbing, that explained how E. coli contamination is allowed to occur in the US meat industry. In one example, meat sold under the product name "American Chef’s Selection Angus Beef Patties" was actually a mixture of meat products made by Cargill from three separate suppliers. None of these suppliers, nor the producer of 'American Chef's Selection Angus Beef Patties,' tested their products for contamination. Ms. Smith, a young woman who ate a hamburger made of this meat, became critically ill and is paralyzed.
In combining the ingredients, Cargill was following a common industry practice of mixing trim from various suppliers to hit the desired fat content for the least money, industry officials said. [...] In all, the ingredients for Ms. Smith’s burger cost Cargill about $1 a pound, company records show, or about 30 cents less than industry experts say it would cost for ground beef made from whole cuts of meat [....] The listed ingredients revealed little of how the meat was made. There was just one meat product listed: “Beef.”
But, you may wonder, I thought Sinclair's The Jungle changed all of this last century ... don't we have regulations that protect the consumer? That would be the USDA, and this is what they say:
Dr. Kenneth Petersen, an assistant administrator with the department’s Food Safety and Inspection Service, said that the department could mandate testing, but that it needed to consider the impact on companies as well as consumers. “I have to look at the entire industry, not just what is best for public health,” Dr. Petersen said.
The kink in that argument is that consumer trust is badly eroded, because regulation has not been enforced where it exists, and it has been severely cut back. Protections we once enjoyed have been hacked away under the philosophy that government is bad. We are reaping the results now, not only in unclean food but also in huge economic failures. If consumers no longer trust that they are being protected, how can a business assure its customer that the higher price of its product is due to the product really being what it's labeled? Bubba Burgers, the article tells us, attempts to differentiate its product by this label: “100% whole muscle means no trimmings.” Until I read this article, I would have had no appreciation for what's behind this message (or what something called 'fine lean textured beef' really is - for starters, the raw material for this substance is up to 70% fat; centrifuges and ammonia are involved). If you're purchasing ground beef based on label information alone, which would you think the safer choice for your family: Bubba Burgers, or American Chef's Selection Angus Beef Patties? They both bear the USDA Approval label. What are you supposed to make of that?
And yet, I have little expectation that the article will have much more of an effect than grossing out its readers. Maybe Costco will get a brief uptick in their meat department. Maybe grocery store butchers will have more requests this week for grinding whole cuts of meat for customers. That's fine, but it's not the solution. Why shouldn't we expect businesses to eliminate costs by reducing waste, not by reducing quality? Why should we not insist that government do what we individually cannot do? Why are we paying the salaries of bureaucrats who seek to protect the industries they are supposed to regulate, at the expense of citizens? Why aren't we demanding substantive change?
President Obama campaigned on change, and surely that's the message that gave him a four-year lease at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. Yet since January, simply the prospect of change has become radicalized. Even in the face of incontrovertible evidence that the status quo is harmful, leaders are fearful of taking a stand for change, as if the safe position was to stand pat. Geoffrey Miller, in his book Spent, cites studies that correlate threat of disease in a population with low ratings of openness. The more people sense threats they cannot control, they become more resistant to change and fearful of outsiders. We can look around us and see catastrophe on all sides: environment, financial sector, housing, employment, education, health care. The response of some will be: "We need to do something about that!" Apparently, even more people will hunker down in their misery, and attack those who press for change.
You don't have to play to those fears, however. If they trust their leadership, people can be inspired to overcome their fears and act. Recently at work, we set a challenge for the stores to achieve sales levels never consistently met before. We were responding to the same economy that other retailers are using to justify hunkering down: cutting back, hyping poor values. But, we decided to inspire new levels of performance. I could give the stores no magic bullet, no certainty that they would succeed -- just my belief they would. I asked them to look only within the walls of their own stores to see what they could do to transform the experience of our customers, and deliver even greater value to them. And you know what? They did it.
Monday, September 21, 2009
Whose problem is it anyway?
One of our corporate departments is implementing a SaaS application across the company. The application requires that every employee register independently. This is not going well: despite a tremendous effort by the project manager and each location manager, the task deadline is blown and still not complete. The implementation team asked me to pitch in to get this task over the line, something I have been happy to support. And yet, I realize that the only reason we are throwing so many hours at what seemingly was a simple task in the project plan is that the vendor designed an extremely poor process. The application's functionality depends on the independent registration of all employees, using a method that has an overly-complex opt-in design. Just how wrong is that?
Well, the vendor, who only recently minted this application, is committed to the design and has taken the position that it's a 'user problem.' This takes me back to the bad old days of vendor arrogance. Engineers would dictate business processes to all of their clients, even though those engineers had no working experience in the industries or markets of their clients. That didn't work especially well, so technology companies started offering customization services. The end result was essentially unchanged: the business could only contribute to the user requirements documentation, using the vendor's consultants as a conduit. The vendor still retained complete control over the design and specifications. The attitude was: we'll tell you how to run your business. Errors that resulted because the client's employees failed to use the (increasingly complex) system correctly (that is, the way an engineer thought it should be used) were the responsibility of the client. If the client asked for changes to make it easier for their employees to use the system, the client had to foot the bill and increase their risk of process failures due to the introduction of new code.
This may be the world that your business operates in, still. For many, the only opt-out option has been to bring design and modification in-house, so that development can respond to the actual needs of the business and its users. Truly opting out has not been possible for businesses using ERP systems: the cost and time involved in system replacement, and the disruption to the business, are great.
But in this decade, a new model has arisen from consumer-driven technology, which has flipped design on its head. If a web page, or a cell phone, or a mobile app, doesn't work the way the consumer wants to use it, the consumer can easily abandon it. Exit barriers are almost nonexistent in consumer technology. Consumers expect plug and play. They expect to be able to cut and paste from one application to another. They expect the software to be very forgiving, and to let them interact with the software many ways. Consumer technology companies do not expect the consumer to read a user manual, or follow work instructions to use the software. And you know what? These expectations are increasingly met, consistently.
Maybe the signal difference is that the consumer technology business's customers are the users of their technology. Business technology providers still think that their customers are the company execs who sign the contracts (and may never use the technology), not the employees who use the software. If your current ERP provider had to pitch to your front-line employees, would they keep your company's business?
Well, the vendor, who only recently minted this application, is committed to the design and has taken the position that it's a 'user problem.' This takes me back to the bad old days of vendor arrogance. Engineers would dictate business processes to all of their clients, even though those engineers had no working experience in the industries or markets of their clients. That didn't work especially well, so technology companies started offering customization services. The end result was essentially unchanged: the business could only contribute to the user requirements documentation, using the vendor's consultants as a conduit. The vendor still retained complete control over the design and specifications. The attitude was: we'll tell you how to run your business. Errors that resulted because the client's employees failed to use the (increasingly complex) system correctly (that is, the way an engineer thought it should be used) were the responsibility of the client. If the client asked for changes to make it easier for their employees to use the system, the client had to foot the bill and increase their risk of process failures due to the introduction of new code.
This may be the world that your business operates in, still. For many, the only opt-out option has been to bring design and modification in-house, so that development can respond to the actual needs of the business and its users. Truly opting out has not been possible for businesses using ERP systems: the cost and time involved in system replacement, and the disruption to the business, are great.
But in this decade, a new model has arisen from consumer-driven technology, which has flipped design on its head. If a web page, or a cell phone, or a mobile app, doesn't work the way the consumer wants to use it, the consumer can easily abandon it. Exit barriers are almost nonexistent in consumer technology. Consumers expect plug and play. They expect to be able to cut and paste from one application to another. They expect the software to be very forgiving, and to let them interact with the software many ways. Consumer technology companies do not expect the consumer to read a user manual, or follow work instructions to use the software. And you know what? These expectations are increasingly met, consistently.
Maybe the signal difference is that the consumer technology business's customers are the users of their technology. Business technology providers still think that their customers are the company execs who sign the contracts (and may never use the technology), not the employees who use the software. If your current ERP provider had to pitch to your front-line employees, would they keep your company's business?
Monday, August 31, 2009
On Best Practice (or not)
Susan Cramm asks in a post today 'Why Do We Ignore "Best Practices"?.' She cites a CIO who has rejected using a proven project methodology on a high-risk project -- a decision that has now jeopardized his project. Cramm is interested in understanding why people who know better put their projects or even their jobs at risk by failing to use known best practices. The post suggests that the CIO engendered risk on his project because he ignored best practice. I suspect the dynamic is rather different: since the project was high-risk, he ignored best practice... because he knew better.
I wrote on this just about a year ago, when I was reading Ori and Ram Brafman's insightful book "Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior." Particularly when the risks are high, educated well-seasoned professionals abdicate the normal rules (rational but unnatural practices) for emotionally-based instinctive responses -- not what one thinks one ought to do, but what one feels should be done. At the moment the professional reverts to 'common sense' in a life-or-death moment, you might as well place your destiny in the hands of the evolutionary ancestor for whom this worked often enough to pass along his genes. He may have been a veteran airline pilot when your plane took off; in an emergency, you hope he doesn't turn into a Cro-Magnon mid-flight.
There's probably a biological reason why this happens, but our culture certainly reinforces it powerfully. The American culture deifies the action hero for whom normal rules do not apply. Interestingly, these heroes often have a skill set that is only acquired through much professional, rigorous training -- Rambo, Dirty Harry, Gordon Gecko. Because they are at the apex of their professions, we willingly grant them license to discard all of that and play by their own rules. We revere their irreverence for rules that lesser mortals (like us) have to live by. Maybe their Hollywood-style outcomes justify what we really believe is the 'best' practice - acting on instinct.
My older post reminded me of the project that inspired it. At the time, I needed to make a decision on how best to help the team get back on track. We shared the same goals, so alignment was not a problem. No one disputed the metrics; the team understood they were not hitting them despite being highly focused on them. We had a clear difference of opinion on what process changes should be made -- and since I'm corporate, it was easy to assume that I just didn't understand. The team really wanted to achieve their goals, and their confidence in meeting them was based on their belief in their solutions. It felt like an impasse.
So it's a year later: how did it turn out? The team achieved a break-through, and this year has consistently far exceeded what we previously thought would be high-performance results, based on prior benchmarks. Their results are inspirational, and I am awed by their achievements. Yes, we got back to 'best practices' in process improvement, but not by forcing it on them. Instead, I realized that I was working with a team that was highly focused on results. The team thought the goal was the metric, which felt high-risk because they didn't know how to move it. So, they brought their emotions to solving the problem. I simply changed their immediate goal: they would demonstrate to me their competency in process improvement. I agreed that they could implement whatever changes they could support with data from their process analysis.
In the end, they made only a slight change to the process. And yet - they are achieving far more out of their process than they did before. Why? Well, it turns out that during their process analysis the team started to understand why some steps were best practice even though they seemed counter-intuitive. All of the team came to embrace the process as written, and once it was no longer subverted by well-meaning team members who thought they knew better, the process started working for them. After their break-through, I asked one employee how they were so successful. He responded: "It's the process. Don't take my process away from me." It's now their process, not corporate's. I wouldn't dream of touching it now.
Cramm's CIO will never be convinced to change his course by rational argument, nor by increasingly dire metrics from his project. Because he cares deeply, and because he is professionally trained, he is all the more likely to continue with his decision, to which he's by now irrevocably committed. If his board were to take the risk off the table, and re-frame the task in a way that enabled him to bring his professional judgment back online, it's possible he could make a fundamental shift that would engender success.
I wrote on this just about a year ago, when I was reading Ori and Ram Brafman's insightful book "Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior." Particularly when the risks are high, educated well-seasoned professionals abdicate the normal rules (rational but unnatural practices) for emotionally-based instinctive responses -- not what one thinks one ought to do, but what one feels should be done. At the moment the professional reverts to 'common sense' in a life-or-death moment, you might as well place your destiny in the hands of the evolutionary ancestor for whom this worked often enough to pass along his genes. He may have been a veteran airline pilot when your plane took off; in an emergency, you hope he doesn't turn into a Cro-Magnon mid-flight.
There's probably a biological reason why this happens, but our culture certainly reinforces it powerfully. The American culture deifies the action hero for whom normal rules do not apply. Interestingly, these heroes often have a skill set that is only acquired through much professional, rigorous training -- Rambo, Dirty Harry, Gordon Gecko. Because they are at the apex of their professions, we willingly grant them license to discard all of that and play by their own rules. We revere their irreverence for rules that lesser mortals (like us) have to live by. Maybe their Hollywood-style outcomes justify what we really believe is the 'best' practice - acting on instinct.
My older post reminded me of the project that inspired it. At the time, I needed to make a decision on how best to help the team get back on track. We shared the same goals, so alignment was not a problem. No one disputed the metrics; the team understood they were not hitting them despite being highly focused on them. We had a clear difference of opinion on what process changes should be made -- and since I'm corporate, it was easy to assume that I just didn't understand. The team really wanted to achieve their goals, and their confidence in meeting them was based on their belief in their solutions. It felt like an impasse.
So it's a year later: how did it turn out? The team achieved a break-through, and this year has consistently far exceeded what we previously thought would be high-performance results, based on prior benchmarks. Their results are inspirational, and I am awed by their achievements. Yes, we got back to 'best practices' in process improvement, but not by forcing it on them. Instead, I realized that I was working with a team that was highly focused on results. The team thought the goal was the metric, which felt high-risk because they didn't know how to move it. So, they brought their emotions to solving the problem. I simply changed their immediate goal: they would demonstrate to me their competency in process improvement. I agreed that they could implement whatever changes they could support with data from their process analysis.
In the end, they made only a slight change to the process. And yet - they are achieving far more out of their process than they did before. Why? Well, it turns out that during their process analysis the team started to understand why some steps were best practice even though they seemed counter-intuitive. All of the team came to embrace the process as written, and once it was no longer subverted by well-meaning team members who thought they knew better, the process started working for them. After their break-through, I asked one employee how they were so successful. He responded: "It's the process. Don't take my process away from me." It's now their process, not corporate's. I wouldn't dream of touching it now.
Cramm's CIO will never be convinced to change his course by rational argument, nor by increasingly dire metrics from his project. Because he cares deeply, and because he is professionally trained, he is all the more likely to continue with his decision, to which he's by now irrevocably committed. If his board were to take the risk off the table, and re-frame the task in a way that enabled him to bring his professional judgment back online, it's possible he could make a fundamental shift that would engender success.
Monday, August 24, 2009
"And you may ask yourself..."
The rise of the agrarian culture. Health-care reform. Jared Diamond's book Collapse. Public dialogue about governmental and international policy. Talking Heads. Businesses that awaken too late to impending demise. Fear of failure. These are all on my mind today.
It all started innocently enough, as my husband and I, enjoying a lovely late-summer bike ride this morning, discussed our hypotheses on the establishment of agriculture by formerly migratory human populations. (I guess some people exercise to exercise -- that is, to become more fit or achieve athletic goals. I exercise to think; it's a marvelous way to give the brain what it needs to think creatively, and what great fortune that the rest of the body benefits as well!) So anyway, as we talked, I started imagining what it may have been like to live in a culture that started the transition from opportunistically gathering food from the surrounding environment, to creating sources of nutrition that could sustain a settled population.
I'd never really thought about this much. In school I was told that once people started farming, they weren't so mobile and they settled down and started creating social mechanisms to support and defend their settlement. I must have assumed that (1) this was the sequence of events (farming then settlement then defense and other infrastructure) and (2) this was a life style choice - like city dwellers leaving to start up farms in the countryside. But someone who has lived after the establishment of agriculture has the advantage of accumulated human knowledge: even if the individual knows nothing about farming, he or she can easily find out from people who know, and has access to markets that will supply the raw materials and tools that are required. What if there is no human knowledge to be had, and farming tools are nonexistent?
The first humans to engage in farming must have failed a lot before they succeeded. Creating knowledge is like that: you start from ignorance, and try things out. You learn what works and what doesn't from the mistakes you make. Risk of failure must be quite high: a lot of effort with poor yield in the beginning, and long lead times (a growing season) before you know whether your efforts were successful or not. Meanwhile, you're caring for yourself and others who need nutrition every day, and your movement is limited, since you have to remain close to the plants you're trying to grow. Chances are, the area where you've settled is not overly rich in naturally-occurring food, or why would you be putting so much effort into farming your own? The risk of failure is quite high -- starting from ignorance, it's probable that initially, failure is certain. People die if crops fail and they aren't able to supplement their diet sufficiently with nutrition from the immediate environment. How is it that people stayed with this endeavor long enough to accrue the necessary knowledge to become successful?
I can only imagine that the immediate risks of not doing it were much higher than the risks of doing it. Groups of people do not assume any risk, much less one that could only have resulted in death amongst their own population, unless they are compelled to do so by a much more extreme and inescapable risk. As a species, we are extremely unimaginative. Risks that could eventuate next year - much less in your child's lifetime -- are just not compelling enough. It could happen -- and the optimistic, here-and-now human brain thinks "Yeah, but it's also possible it won't happen, so let's not rock the boat." It's not enough that the status quo produces hardship and loss; if we've become accustomed to these, they are less fearsome than the fear of the unknown. Diamond's book explains eloquently how one civilization after another faced imminent collapse because of the choices they made, and how many of them clung to the catastrophic choices that ultimately destroyed them. So whatever was happening in these proto-agrarian societies must have been fearsome indeed. Some populations probably decided they could not change their practices, and they perished. Some did, and generations have been sustained by their decision.
There's a lesson here, regardless your viewpoint on how to tackle the many issues facing this nation and those around the world. You can take your pick of disasters: the status quo is unacceptable in any of them. We have to make different choices. We have to do things differently than we've ever done them before, and because we will be novices, we will fail as we seek to learn how to be successful. It could be that, as in the apocryphal Thanksgiving parable, we can metaphorically learn from others how to plant corn and stave off the impending starvation of the colony. It can also be the case that we face some things (how to maintain peace in an increasingly volatile nuclear world; how to sustain the environment as the atmosphere starts to boil) as a species for which we have no collective wisdom.
On a smaller scale, businesses need to do the same: both Wall St and Main St businesses have failed to see disaster looming, and even after this recession's corporate body blows, so few businesses have actually taken on the equivalent of the migratory tribe's foray into agriculture. Too many businesses are just waiting for the bubble to return; that's their plan. Unfortunately, some will stick with the plan until they are no longer around -- wiping out the livelihood of their employees and adding to the continued rise of unemployment. And if the business is considered too big to fail -- well, we'll all pay for that, won't we?
It helps me to realize that what I see around me is the same as it ever was; not that this is comforting, but at least it it helps me understand why so many are clutching desperately to fictions rather than face what is blindingly apparent. And yet, there's a part of the human psyche also that can be thrilled by the adventure of going 'where no man has gone before.' Leaders need to do a much better job of tapping into the uplifting aspect of adventure and opportunity in the face of adversity, while steadfastly loosening the population's terrified grip on the deadly status quo.
It all started innocently enough, as my husband and I, enjoying a lovely late-summer bike ride this morning, discussed our hypotheses on the establishment of agriculture by formerly migratory human populations. (I guess some people exercise to exercise -- that is, to become more fit or achieve athletic goals. I exercise to think; it's a marvelous way to give the brain what it needs to think creatively, and what great fortune that the rest of the body benefits as well!) So anyway, as we talked, I started imagining what it may have been like to live in a culture that started the transition from opportunistically gathering food from the surrounding environment, to creating sources of nutrition that could sustain a settled population.
I'd never really thought about this much. In school I was told that once people started farming, they weren't so mobile and they settled down and started creating social mechanisms to support and defend their settlement. I must have assumed that (1) this was the sequence of events (farming then settlement then defense and other infrastructure) and (2) this was a life style choice - like city dwellers leaving to start up farms in the countryside. But someone who has lived after the establishment of agriculture has the advantage of accumulated human knowledge: even if the individual knows nothing about farming, he or she can easily find out from people who know, and has access to markets that will supply the raw materials and tools that are required. What if there is no human knowledge to be had, and farming tools are nonexistent?
The first humans to engage in farming must have failed a lot before they succeeded. Creating knowledge is like that: you start from ignorance, and try things out. You learn what works and what doesn't from the mistakes you make. Risk of failure must be quite high: a lot of effort with poor yield in the beginning, and long lead times (a growing season) before you know whether your efforts were successful or not. Meanwhile, you're caring for yourself and others who need nutrition every day, and your movement is limited, since you have to remain close to the plants you're trying to grow. Chances are, the area where you've settled is not overly rich in naturally-occurring food, or why would you be putting so much effort into farming your own? The risk of failure is quite high -- starting from ignorance, it's probable that initially, failure is certain. People die if crops fail and they aren't able to supplement their diet sufficiently with nutrition from the immediate environment. How is it that people stayed with this endeavor long enough to accrue the necessary knowledge to become successful?
I can only imagine that the immediate risks of not doing it were much higher than the risks of doing it. Groups of people do not assume any risk, much less one that could only have resulted in death amongst their own population, unless they are compelled to do so by a much more extreme and inescapable risk. As a species, we are extremely unimaginative. Risks that could eventuate next year - much less in your child's lifetime -- are just not compelling enough. It could happen -- and the optimistic, here-and-now human brain thinks "Yeah, but it's also possible it won't happen, so let's not rock the boat." It's not enough that the status quo produces hardship and loss; if we've become accustomed to these, they are less fearsome than the fear of the unknown. Diamond's book explains eloquently how one civilization after another faced imminent collapse because of the choices they made, and how many of them clung to the catastrophic choices that ultimately destroyed them. So whatever was happening in these proto-agrarian societies must have been fearsome indeed. Some populations probably decided they could not change their practices, and they perished. Some did, and generations have been sustained by their decision.
There's a lesson here, regardless your viewpoint on how to tackle the many issues facing this nation and those around the world. You can take your pick of disasters: the status quo is unacceptable in any of them. We have to make different choices. We have to do things differently than we've ever done them before, and because we will be novices, we will fail as we seek to learn how to be successful. It could be that, as in the apocryphal Thanksgiving parable, we can metaphorically learn from others how to plant corn and stave off the impending starvation of the colony. It can also be the case that we face some things (how to maintain peace in an increasingly volatile nuclear world; how to sustain the environment as the atmosphere starts to boil) as a species for which we have no collective wisdom.
On a smaller scale, businesses need to do the same: both Wall St and Main St businesses have failed to see disaster looming, and even after this recession's corporate body blows, so few businesses have actually taken on the equivalent of the migratory tribe's foray into agriculture. Too many businesses are just waiting for the bubble to return; that's their plan. Unfortunately, some will stick with the plan until they are no longer around -- wiping out the livelihood of their employees and adding to the continued rise of unemployment. And if the business is considered too big to fail -- well, we'll all pay for that, won't we?
It helps me to realize that what I see around me is the same as it ever was; not that this is comforting, but at least it it helps me understand why so many are clutching desperately to fictions rather than face what is blindingly apparent. And yet, there's a part of the human psyche also that can be thrilled by the adventure of going 'where no man has gone before.' Leaders need to do a much better job of tapping into the uplifting aspect of adventure and opportunity in the face of adversity, while steadfastly loosening the population's terrified grip on the deadly status quo.
Monday, August 17, 2009
How not to enroll others in your process
My daughter's music school recently sent me a letter stating they were eliminating paper statements and required that we set up an online account. After too much effort and frustration, I now have set up the account. It only took about 10 failed attempts on their website, a trip to their business office, four e-mails, and a 20-minute phone call to finish this task. And my benefit is ... oh yeah, I get to receive electronic statements instead of mailed statements, twice a year. Lucky me.
Now that my gall has (mostly) subsided, I can see where this went off the rails. Whoever directed their process was focused on one outcome (security of student data) to the point of being unmindful of the larger outcome: successful enrollment of customers into their new paperless process. This is an all too-easy mistake. Here are the traps:
1. Not explaining the benefits of enrollment to customers. Academic institutions are not historically customer-focused, even when they are funded by their academic customers. In academia, enrollment just means getting on the class rolls. Customer enrollment requires selling an idea or process to others so that they want to sign up for it. After reading the school's two-page letter, I still didn't really understand why I should care or even participate. I understood that they wanted to eliminate their costs of printing and posting statements, and reduce their delays in receiving payment. But why should I care about that? Not considering the customer's perspective resulted in my starting the process with a grudging attitude. It went downhill from there. This is something to keep top of mind whenever you roll out a process, whether within your company or with your customers. Whatever your project's objectives, when you seek participation from others you have an obligation to enroll them. It isn't enough to direct them, even if they work for you.
2. Not providing all of the information required by the process. Their account set-up process required two pieces of data: an ID and an activation key. I understand they don't want to put both pieces of data in the same piece of mail for security reasons, and the letter contained the activation key. OK - then that's a problem to be solved, which they could have phrased this way: how can we make sure our customers have everything they need before they start the process? Had they sought to enroll customers in the process, this question would have come naturally; since that wasn't their stated outcome, it simply would not have occurred to them. In the end, this customer had to solve the problem: my husband drove to their business office to ask for the ID#. If the school were thinking about the customer's outcomes, they could have solved it easily and saved us a trip and the increasing aggravation. I could have been successful on the first attempt. They'd have me on their side.
3. Providing security keys in a font featuring ambiguous letters. After multiple unsuccessful attempts to validate the activation key, I began e-mailing their support desk. We tried to work out (unsuccessfully, in the end) whether one character was the number 1, the capital letter I, or the lowercase letter L. This issue is unfortunately all too common. Apple's iTunes gift cards suffer from the same issue: I almost never enter the ID codes correctly the first time because the typeface has ambiguous letters. Number 0 or letter O? It's just trial and error, since they have not considered the design of the type face from a usability perspective. I have to believe that for Apple, a company that is extremely design conscious, this is a manifestation of how much (or little) care is given to the customer's experience. I assume someone chose the font because they thought it looked cool. I now have an aversion to buying iTunes gift cards: it's not just the annoyance with having to retype a long random key multiple times; it's the resentment that I'm giving money to a corporation that really doesn't care about how annoying they can be to customers. You don't have to be Apple to make this mistake, and if your stated outcomes don't embrace the customer experience, you're likely to stumble too.
The fact that I dutifully worked through my issues in setting up the music school account will just reinforce with them the 'success' of their project. I have no doubt the project's metrics are aligned with their desired outcomes and not with their customers' experience, and I was aware of this all the way through the dreary experience. I just decided not to sweat it since my desired outcome is that my daughter continues her musical development. The experience just taught me that although I know her teacher also shares this outcome, the school probably does not. I now have an online account with them, but I'm not enrolled.
Now that my gall has (mostly) subsided, I can see where this went off the rails. Whoever directed their process was focused on one outcome (security of student data) to the point of being unmindful of the larger outcome: successful enrollment of customers into their new paperless process. This is an all too-easy mistake. Here are the traps:
1. Not explaining the benefits of enrollment to customers. Academic institutions are not historically customer-focused, even when they are funded by their academic customers. In academia, enrollment just means getting on the class rolls. Customer enrollment requires selling an idea or process to others so that they want to sign up for it. After reading the school's two-page letter, I still didn't really understand why I should care or even participate. I understood that they wanted to eliminate their costs of printing and posting statements, and reduce their delays in receiving payment. But why should I care about that? Not considering the customer's perspective resulted in my starting the process with a grudging attitude. It went downhill from there. This is something to keep top of mind whenever you roll out a process, whether within your company or with your customers. Whatever your project's objectives, when you seek participation from others you have an obligation to enroll them. It isn't enough to direct them, even if they work for you.
2. Not providing all of the information required by the process. Their account set-up process required two pieces of data: an ID and an activation key. I understand they don't want to put both pieces of data in the same piece of mail for security reasons, and the letter contained the activation key. OK - then that's a problem to be solved, which they could have phrased this way: how can we make sure our customers have everything they need before they start the process? Had they sought to enroll customers in the process, this question would have come naturally; since that wasn't their stated outcome, it simply would not have occurred to them. In the end, this customer had to solve the problem: my husband drove to their business office to ask for the ID#. If the school were thinking about the customer's outcomes, they could have solved it easily and saved us a trip and the increasing aggravation. I could have been successful on the first attempt. They'd have me on their side.
3. Providing security keys in a font featuring ambiguous letters. After multiple unsuccessful attempts to validate the activation key, I began e-mailing their support desk. We tried to work out (unsuccessfully, in the end) whether one character was the number 1, the capital letter I, or the lowercase letter L. This issue is unfortunately all too common. Apple's iTunes gift cards suffer from the same issue: I almost never enter the ID codes correctly the first time because the typeface has ambiguous letters. Number 0 or letter O? It's just trial and error, since they have not considered the design of the type face from a usability perspective. I have to believe that for Apple, a company that is extremely design conscious, this is a manifestation of how much (or little) care is given to the customer's experience. I assume someone chose the font because they thought it looked cool. I now have an aversion to buying iTunes gift cards: it's not just the annoyance with having to retype a long random key multiple times; it's the resentment that I'm giving money to a corporation that really doesn't care about how annoying they can be to customers. You don't have to be Apple to make this mistake, and if your stated outcomes don't embrace the customer experience, you're likely to stumble too.
The fact that I dutifully worked through my issues in setting up the music school account will just reinforce with them the 'success' of their project. I have no doubt the project's metrics are aligned with their desired outcomes and not with their customers' experience, and I was aware of this all the way through the dreary experience. I just decided not to sweat it since my desired outcome is that my daughter continues her musical development. The experience just taught me that although I know her teacher also shares this outcome, the school probably does not. I now have an online account with them, but I'm not enrolled.
Monday, August 10, 2009
Just Great Movies - and more
The Traverse City Film Festival (TCFF) this summer was an amazing film-goer experience creatively, intellectually, emotionally. This weekend, as I read through the list of films that won awards at the festival, my appreciation deepened as I realized that my husband and I had seen only a small subset of all the films exhibited. Despite what I felt as a relatively aggressive film-viewing schedule (for someone not in the industry), we had obviously seen a very small pool of the total films, and almost none of those presented with awards. Of the eleven films we saw, only one was average; the remaining ten were each, in its own way, extraordinary and deeply provocative. I have a profound appreciation right now for the many intensely committed, insightful and outrageously imaginative people around the world who make these small films, many of which only find an audience through small film festivals such as TCFF. I need to keep this in mind as pundits criticize the thin gruel that is the fare of the multiplex cinema industry: let's just not call it 'the film industry' but rather 'the corporate multinational film industry.' There is an entire world of film outside the realm of comic book sources, silly chick flicks and crude adolescent male comedy -- all of which patronize and minimize the audience. Most of us just have limited access to this other unenfranchised world. Hence, we are witnessing a rapid rise of small film festivals that are meeting in a limited way a demand that the corporate film industry is unwilling to supply.
If your only film festival experience is from reading accounts in newspapers about Cannes or Sundance, it's important to note a critical difference between those festivals dominated by corporations and the small festivals such as TCFF. Those high-profile festivals are all about big: big names, big cash, big deals, lavish swag and parties. The only things big at TCFF are ideas, choice of films, passion -- you know, all of those things that aren't easily commercialized. Although TCFF does have sponsors who help fund the festival, most if not all of them are small local businesses. Looking at the event as an operation (which, sadly, I cannot prevent myself from doing), its most significant engine is volunteerism. The people responsible for running the festival take leaves of absence from their real jobs and volunteer their time and skills. All of the operations staff are volunteer -- and the size of this temporary work force is staggering. But what is truly amazing is how well they did their jobs, and how committed each of them was to make the experience delightful for every film-goer . Just the logistics of putting together this temporary organization (creating the org charts, hiring, shift scheduling, communication, training, managing resources, problem-solving) is mind-boggling; but additionally they are able to create a culture and mission and enroll every volunteer in it, so that the festival can rely on every part-time volunteer to communicate these behaviorally in every customer interaction. That's not only amazing, it's inspiring.
Think about what it takes in your organization to align hundreds of employees culturally and operationally. Now consider the environment in which this alignment takes place: there's a corporate office, with full time, permanent management. There's company e-mail for communications. The company uses newsletters and meetings held at the employees' workplace, on the employees' work time, to communicate significant messages. The company invests in infrastructure that is permanent and maintained every day of the year. The company has 52 weeks every year to respond to issues and correct them.
The festival does have some advantages not enjoyed by most organizations. The festival only has to get it right for one week - the commitment of its volunteers is passionate but very short-lived, and people can put up with just about anything if they know it will end soon (as I'm reminded with the latest crop of Woodstock anniversary accounts - if it lasted much longer than three days, it might have been disastrous). And, as with the small subset of the films that I saw, similarly I encountered a relatively small number of volunteers, and have no insight into whatever problems the festival organizers and managers handled during the week. But the point is that to this customer, it appeared to be all good, and in my experience this only happens when an organization is getting most things right.
Looking from the outside in, I can only say that I have no idea how this worked operationally. I wish I did. I'm simply inspired.
If your only film festival experience is from reading accounts in newspapers about Cannes or Sundance, it's important to note a critical difference between those festivals dominated by corporations and the small festivals such as TCFF. Those high-profile festivals are all about big: big names, big cash, big deals, lavish swag and parties. The only things big at TCFF are ideas, choice of films, passion -- you know, all of those things that aren't easily commercialized. Although TCFF does have sponsors who help fund the festival, most if not all of them are small local businesses. Looking at the event as an operation (which, sadly, I cannot prevent myself from doing), its most significant engine is volunteerism. The people responsible for running the festival take leaves of absence from their real jobs and volunteer their time and skills. All of the operations staff are volunteer -- and the size of this temporary work force is staggering. But what is truly amazing is how well they did their jobs, and how committed each of them was to make the experience delightful for every film-goer . Just the logistics of putting together this temporary organization (creating the org charts, hiring, shift scheduling, communication, training, managing resources, problem-solving) is mind-boggling; but additionally they are able to create a culture and mission and enroll every volunteer in it, so that the festival can rely on every part-time volunteer to communicate these behaviorally in every customer interaction. That's not only amazing, it's inspiring.
Think about what it takes in your organization to align hundreds of employees culturally and operationally. Now consider the environment in which this alignment takes place: there's a corporate office, with full time, permanent management. There's company e-mail for communications. The company uses newsletters and meetings held at the employees' workplace, on the employees' work time, to communicate significant messages. The company invests in infrastructure that is permanent and maintained every day of the year. The company has 52 weeks every year to respond to issues and correct them.
The festival does have some advantages not enjoyed by most organizations. The festival only has to get it right for one week - the commitment of its volunteers is passionate but very short-lived, and people can put up with just about anything if they know it will end soon (as I'm reminded with the latest crop of Woodstock anniversary accounts - if it lasted much longer than three days, it might have been disastrous). And, as with the small subset of the films that I saw, similarly I encountered a relatively small number of volunteers, and have no insight into whatever problems the festival organizers and managers handled during the week. But the point is that to this customer, it appeared to be all good, and in my experience this only happens when an organization is getting most things right.
Looking from the outside in, I can only say that I have no idea how this worked operationally. I wish I did. I'm simply inspired.
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