3. Reliability, Resilience and Results in Operations:
Success That Creates Its Own Failure

In many organizations, the sheer number of moving parts, diverse customers, advanced technologies and process complexity creates a system full of unavoidable surprise and unexpected events. Little or subtle changes can make big differences. Occasionally, small events combine and “propagate” to create happy surprises or dangerous disasters that cannot be anticipated.

The unexpected emanates from complex system dynamics in which the causes and effects are causes and effects of themselves. Causality is not linear but circular. Causes and effects are not separable and therefore not manageable in isolation. Problem solving in isolated parts can feed a weakness or make the situation worse. As John Muir suggests, “When we try to pick up anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.”

Our admirable desire to “figure it all out” through design, analysis and evidence gathering creates a blind spot regarding how well we manage inherent complexity and the unexpected in day-to-day operations. Our success—in figuring out so much—creates its own failure.

Participants will “lean into” this paradox as we explore operations improvement.

KEY CONCEPTS AND PRACTICES
• How to appreciate, integrate, and sustain two distinct approaches:

))) Designed autopilot – an efficient, evidence-based, and process-focused set of resources aligned to achieve pre-determined aims by minimizing what might go wrong; and,

))) Collective mindfulness – a creatively adaptable set of people and resources that cope with (and build on) whatever surprises might unfold.

• Management practices including: sense-making; reluctance to oversimplify; attraction to expertise not rank; distributed control with min specs; continuous communication; cultural resilience; and, sensitivity to surprise.

LEARNING RESOUCRES
• Karl Weick, Kathleen Sutcliffe, Managing the Unexpected: Assuring High Performance in the Age of Complexity , Jossey-Bass (2001).
• Lance Gunderson, C.S. Holling, Panarchy: Understanding Transformations in Human and Natural Systems, Island Press, 2002

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4. Leader As Bricoleur:
Creating What Is Needed Out of the Materials & Imagination At Hand

Great leaders move forward toward a destiny while improvising in-the-moment, working with what is at hand. This does not mean leaders are unprepared – far from it. Leaders know-the-knowable and manage-the-unknowable by sensing or awakening emerging opportunities.

Improvising with the materials at hand is a key success factor. In French, it is called “bricolage.” The ability to create what is needed at the moment out of the materials at hand. Bricoleurs ask, “What can I create from what is available and working here & now?” not “How can I plan and budget for what I need to do?”

This session will focus on how to lead rapid design and creative prototyping initiatives. Organizational momentum requires fast cycles for action, learning from successes and failures, and then building on discoveries. Case studies from successful organizations will be explored.

Participants will deepen their appreciation for system interdependency and flexibility through the use of surprise. Rather than preparing against surprise, participants will build readiness for surprise. We will engage in a recursive, seriously-playful learning process that builds on what is exciting and adds new value.


KEY CONCEPTS AND PRACTICES
• Designing successive approximations in very short-cycles
• Building momentum with rapid cycles: failing early and often (failing forward)
• Assembling a complex system from pieces that operate independently (chunking)
• Letting go of local efficiency to gain system effectiveness
• Embracing distributed, self-organizing activity (patching)
• “Sculpting” boundaries and group size for creative adaptability
• Using minimum specifications to guide self-organization (min specs)

LEARNING RESOURCES
• Reuben McDaniel, Dean Driebe: "Complexity Science and Health Care Management,” 2001, Advances in Health Care Management
• Michael Shcrage, Serious Play, 2000, HBS Press
• James Carse, Finite and Infinite Games, 1986, Ballantine

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5. Integrated-Autonomy:
Unleashing System Vitality & Synergy

Many people in newly formed systems find themselves betwixt and between: neither integrated nor autonomous. The promise of synergy (1+1=7) is a strong attractor for system formation, yet nothing much happens.

Competitive rivalries, the-way-we-do-things-around-here traditions, and loyalty to the “home” organization seem to hold people in their sway. Executives and managers spend time preserving what is unique about their organization. It is a full-court defense of culture, identity and their way of succeeding. It is a positive attraction to what works.

Yet clinging to this cultural attractor pattern seems to stunt system development and synergy. System level interactions become a self-fulfilling prophecy: “THEY are trying to destroy us… again! They ARE the dark side.”

Successful organizations learn to combine integration and differentiation.  A leadership focus on integrated-autonomy – a paradoxical state of two cultures transcending and including their individual identities within a system - amplifies the real challenges faced by people in the organization.

Participants will explore “fast at the bottom, slow at the top” dynamics of organizational change as well as how leaders can responsibly let go of control. This session will introduce case studies and a set of useful approaches for “leaning into” this paradox.

KEY CONCEPTS AND PRACTICES
• Uncovering & working with paradox, not sweeping it under the rug
• Transcending and including individual cultures in a system
• Creatively destroying practices that keep people from their highest purpose
• Differentiating areas that serve your highest purpose by increasing collaboration or competition (or both)
• Using open space technologies and min specs to launch collaborative work

LEARNING RESOUCES
• Jeffrey Goldstein, The Unshackled Organization ,1994, Productivity Press
• Kevin Kelly, Out of Control, 1994, Addison Wesley
• Scott Kelso, The Complementary Nature, 2006, MIT

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6. Innovate or Evaporate:

Leadership As Serial Disruption

Leaders rarely lead transformational change in their markets. They are often left badly diminished by a nearly imperceptible form of market competition. Incumbents are faced with the “innovator’s dilemma.” During a period of disruptive change, doing what you do best is the road to ruin. For example, listening closely to your best customers, suppliers, financial advisors, and marketing experts causes you to lose customers and overshoot the market.

Incumbent organizations don’t innovate, markets do. And, the evolution of markets is driven more by the entry and exit of firms than the moves made within incumbent organizations. While incumbents are keeping up with the Jones’ (direct competitors) by investing in new technologies for the most profitable market segments, a simpler, lower performance product or service, sought by less desirable market segments, is being introduced by a competitor with a fundamentally lower-cost business model. These low-cost innovators move up market as their products improve. While the incumbents, with high return requirements and growing overhead, continue to overshoot a shrinking high-end market.

In this session, the following strategies will be explored:
1. Ignore the upstart innovators and ride out your term into the sunset, focusing on maximizing efficiency and return
2. Try to grow the disruptive innovations from within, keeping your culture’s “immune system” from killing the unconventional upstarts
3. Spin out new innovative approaches and business models, competing directly with your current operations

KEY CONCEPTS AND PRACTICES
• Fitness landscapes, communities of practice, and co-evolution
• Design charettes and rapid-cycle “design parties”
• Letting direction arise from the fringes and patching
• Wicked questions that draw out creative paradox
• Ecocycle dynamics (birth~maturity~creative-destruction~renewal)

LEARNING RESOURCES
• Clayton Christensen, The Innovator’s Dilemma, 1997, HBS
• Dee Hock, Birth of the Chaordic Age, 1999, Berrett-Koehler
• Stuart Kaufman, At Home In The Universe, 1995, Oxford University Press
• S. Brown & Kathleen Eisenhardt, Competing On The Edge, 1998, HBS
• “Innovation Types Framework,” Doblin Group
• David Kelly, 10 Faces of Innovation, Currency, 2005

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7. Conversation As A Consensual Hunch-In-Progress

In most meetings, we very carefully choose who will speak. We narrow the subject with the agenda and expert information. We choose to critique, discuss and analyze participant contributions as the way to find a solution, answer or path forward. All these practices are a perfectly rational and conventional way to manage conversations toward an end or a single decision.

This conventional approach works well when conditions are stable (near equilibrium) and people are close to agreement. When conditions are unstable and people need to explore many ways forward, a structured-yet-improvisational approach is useful.

A dialogue process called Conversation Cafe flips conventional notions by: opening conversations to very diverse participants (even strangers), shifting conversation from small talk to BIG talk (e.g., what does it mean to be an American after 9/11?), and moving away from critique toward collaborative inquiry. This approach is particularly appropriate in confusing and complex situations.

With a minimum structure—a set of participant agreements—Café conversations often turn out to be wonderfully creative, deeply meaningful, and focused on productive novelty. Patterns and purposeful themes emerge spontaneously. The raw unpredictability, power and creativity take participants by surprise. Individuals lose themselves as a collaborative hunch about “reality” unfolds, jointly created as a result of their interaction. Without a script or agenda for the conversation, participants feel more confident in moving forward together.

Participants learn through engaging in the Conversation Café process.

KEY CONCEPTS AND PRACTICES
• The inherent, self-ordering properties of conversation
• How meaning, identity and consensual hunches emerge through interaction
• Agreements or rules for creative conversations
• Tapping diversity as a strategic asset and source of novelty

LEARNING RESOURCES
• See www.conversationcafe.org  World Café and related links
• Ralph Stacey, (2001) Complex Responsive Process in Organizations: Learning and Knowledge Creation. London: Routledge
• Antonio Damasio, (1999) The Feeling of What Happens. Harcourt Brace

8. Advanced Facilitation:
Boosting Creative Adaptability

 

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9. Changing Change Agency:
Asking Others To Change As We Are Changing Ourselves

In an interactive practice-as-we-learn session, a variety of approaches to change will be explored. We will use group consultations to “flip” assumptions about how change unfolds and what change agents do to “move things forward.”

Group consultations will focus on real-time, work-in-progress rather than retrospective case studies or neatly told tales of success. Volunteer participants will share entangled, complex challenges on the forefront of their organization or community change work. Through brief storytelling, layers of inquiry, group consultations, and mini-lectures, participants help each other and learn new approaches to change agency. Expect to be surprised.

Common sense assumptions that we may “flip” include the following: to succeed, the change agent must: create detailed plans prior to initiating an intervention; secure the support of senior leaders; stay impartial & facilitate “calm sailing” for others; anticipate & overcome resistance to change; stay the course toward the intended direction; close gaps between current reality & the vision; discover high leverage points or archetypical dynamics-at-play; and, match the scale of the change to the size of the intervention (whole system change requires large-scale interventions). NOT!


KEY CONCEPTS AND PRACTICES
• how to create conditions that responsibly let go of control and unleash self-organization, simultaneously providing direction and freedom to explore
• how to engage authentically with others in response to unexpected changes as they arise
• how to focus attention on complex, interdependent challenges while “the world” values fixing discreet, independent problems
• how to create more reliable and resilient organization by focusing on surprise, sense-making, and collective mindfulness when “the world” values individual accountability, predictability and evidence for decision-making

LEARNING RESOUCRES
• Jeffrey Goldstein, The Unshackled Organization ,1994, Productivity Press
• Glenda Eoyang, Facilitating Organization Change, 2001, Jossey-Bass
• Karl Weick, Managing the Unexpected, 2001, Jossey-Bass
• Jerry Sternin and Richard Pascal, Your Company’s Secret Change Agents, HBR, May 2005

 

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10. Being In Charge But Not In Control:
An Introduction to Complexity Science

and Management

Scientific advancements on the forefront of many diverse fields – from evolutionary biology to physics to economics to computer science to relational psychology – are yielding profound new insights into how living systems change and evolve. Many of these insights, embodied in the emerging science of complexity, are triggering new approaches to leadership, innovation, and growth.

In this offering, leaders build understanding and confidence in using complex adaptive system principles and methods at work. Participants will be introduced to the origins of complexity science and practical applications.

Most leadership training emphasizes tools that bolster stability, agreement, and predictability. Yet the work of most leaders is filled with dynamic instability, uncertainty regarding cause-and-effect, non-linear growth patterns, and disagreement among reasonable people. They are clearly “in charge but not in control.” Participants will apply complexity-based practices and principles to complex challenges they face.


KEY CONCEPTS AND PRACTICES
• Stacey matrix (discerning simple, complex, and chaotic challenges)
• Min specs (specifying minimum specs in contrast to maximum specs)
• Good-enough vision (moving forward without all the details nailed down)
• Multiple actions at the fringes (letting direction arise)
• Generative relationship STAR (co-creating surprising results & diagnosing performance patterns)
• 15% solutions (focusing where you have influence and discretion)
• Wicked questions (framing questions that hold critical uncertainties on a creative-adaptive edge)
• Eco-cycle planning (recognizing when creative destruction or renewal is required to manage a robust portfolio)

LEARNING RESOURCES
• Brenda Zimmerman, Curt Lindberg, & Paul Plsek, EdgeWare, 1998, VHA
• Kevin Kelly, Out of Control, 1994, Addison Wesley
• Ralph Stacey, (2001) Complex Responsive Process in Organizations: Learning and Knowledge Creation. London: Routledge

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The very liveliness of a culture is determined not by how frequently explorers discover

new continents of knowledge, but by how frequently they depart to seek them. James P. Carse

 

New offering under construction...

 

Artful Leadership: Drawing-Out, Acting-Out New Direction

In many circumstances, thinking your way into the future is not productive. When developing new product or service, adapting in a disrupted market, or transforming behaviors/culture, over-reliance on thinking can stifle novelty. However, seeing or acting your way forward may reveal a surprising new approach…preceding logical, step-by-step understanding of what is emerging. [Yikes!]

Bringing the arts into management helps to amplify imagination, momentum and behavior change. For complex organizational challenges, shared discovery of new paths forward is critical and often perplexing. While it may be difficult for serious-minded professionals to accept, drawing-out and acting-out can be more productive than thinking-out.

In this seriously playful workshop, you will practice very simple visual and theatrical forms – drawing on paper with markers and pastels, improvisational role-playing with non-actors, and digital photography. The approaches are very simple to set up, fun to learn, and easy to bring into organizational life. No experience in the arts is required. (If you have experience, I will invite you to share your skills.)

Real-world examples from a wide variety of complex organizational change efforts will be shared: improv in eliminating spread of the antibiotic resistant MRSA bug; photography in prototyping healthcare service innovations; “illustrated storyboards” for meeting agendas; and, in-the-moment drawing (graphic facilitation) in introducing Smart Networks, Appreciative Inquiry and Positive Deviance change methods.

Location: Room with smooth walls and extra space for staging
Supplies: Bring along a digital camera
Schedule: 90 minute, ½ day and full day sessions can be designed
Participants: 15-30 participants
Audience: Managers, executives, board members, facilitators/consultants… everyone involved in strategic planning, new product/service development, or leaders of complex change initiatives

 

 

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