David Coleman on collaboration, with added seagulls: recording available…

The audio for the recent FitForum.org interview with David Coleman is now available. Aside from the uninvited guests (Brighton seagulls: the noisiest in the world?….), it was one of the most rewarding for me on a personal level.

Some background: David is the founder and Managing Director of Collaborative Strategies. He specializes in, amongst other things, online community and social network marketing & development, community management and various related fields. He is the author of 42 Rules for Successful Collaboration.

So what did I learn?
The big thing for me was the observation that most organisations need a ‘Collaborative Shift’ in terms of how they see things in this arena. In other words, in order to develop successful collaborative projects and teams, there needs to be a fundamental change in the mental models that organisations adopt. Fundamentally, they need to look at things holistically. Easier said than done, particularly given the silo structures and craving for certainty that configures much of the thinking of executives and managers. Yet it surprised me that, even after 20 years in this field, David’s experience is that organisations typically see issues of collaboration as being all about technology.

The extent to which emotional and relational intelligence is necessary for effective collaboration seemed to me logical, although again this is not a link  I suspect many organisations would make, let alone address with an explicit intention to develop people in order to enhance collaboration. The default strategy, in David’s experience, is to default to investing in technology.

We began to open up the role of fit and chemistry in collaboration, and the relationship to the notion of ‘liking’. There was not sufficient time to explore this, so we hope to have David with us again in the near future. Other themes to emerge during the interview, and there was a lot of good stuff in here,  were:

• The importance of taking a holistic view on collaboration , without which the chances of success are minimal.
• The TCOP Model, one of the main tools in David’s work.  Listen to the interview for a fuller explanation – it is worth it. The numbers in brackets are a weighting:
  • Technology (1),
  • Culture – OB (2),
  • Economics (3),
  • Politics – managements’ behaviour (4)
• The recent addition of a fifth dimension: Space, defined as the local context the individual finds them self in .
• The difficulty of quantifying the benefits of collaboration.

The recording can be accessed here.

Fit Forum Event: thought leader David Coleman joins us for a conversation…

The FitForum.org, of which i am a co-founder, has an event this coming Monday. Join in, or listen to the interview on the site afterwards….

The recent Football World Cup in South Africa provided a number of remarkable examples of what happens when collaboration and interpersonal fit works, and when it is truly dysfunctional. If the teams from France and England offered fine examples of dysfunctional collaborative relationships, then Germany’s team was the polar opposite, as was that from the USA. And the coalition government in the UK is, arguably, an on-going collaborative inquiry….

Following on from the interview with Collaboration Specialist Kjetil Kristensen, we are delighted to have another thought leader in this field with us shortly. David Coleman is the founder and Managing Director of Collaborative Strategies. He specializes in, amongst other things, online community and social network marketing & development, community management and various related fields. He is the author of 42 Rules for Successful Collaboration.

We hope to be able to drill deeper into the relational nature of collaboration, and the significance or otherwise of ‘fit’ in this context. We may even talk football…

How can I join in?

The interview and Q&A will start at 5pm UK time (GMT +1hr).

The dial in number is + 1 712-432-3100 and the code is 152585. We’ll also be recording the call.

You’re right but I’m even right-er…

I was listening to a debate on the radio the other day between two politicians, one Conservative and the other Labour. They were discussing reports that some Government departments may be required to make cuts of up to 40% in their budgets, and it was a heated conversation to say the least. Now this is an emotive topic, and, depending on your view as to whether  financial institutions globally are going to pay their fair share of the deficit back through a Tobin tax or similar, or believe that the public sector has become way too big, you will probably run to one or other of the barricades currently being constructed.

As the Labour politician harangued his opponent, I was struck by his repeated insistence that the reason for all these cuts was mainly ideological and had little to do with the need to reduce public debt; for him, Conservatives are hard wired in their desire to roll back the state, whatever the impact on people at a local level. But things are rarely that simple. For example, arch skeptic Ben Goldacre helpfully drew my attention to a recent article in the British Medical Journal on How cognitive biases affect our interpretation of political messages. Authors Martin McKee, professor of European public health, David Stuckler, research fellow, note:

There is considerable evidence that people presented with balanced arguments place weight on those they already agree with, exhibiting what is termed confirmation bias.

You may be a leader, but do you ‘get’ transitions?….

I ran a workshop at Brighton University recently on the theme of Responding to Change. The participants were mostly recent graduates, and all were entrepreneurs of one sort or another. A minority had experience of working in organisations, in particular the public sector. One section of the workshop involved exposing them to several of the main models that have influenced organisational thinking in the field of managing/leading change, giving them an opportunity to critique them and relate them to their own experience. I began by asking them to compare the following:

• John Kotter‘s 8 steps for leading change, which can be summarized as:

PHASE 1:
1. Acting With Urgency
2. Developing the Guiding Coalition
3. Developing a Change Vision

PHASE 2:
4. Communicating the Vision Buy-in
5. Empowering Broad-based Action
6. Generating Short-term Wins

PHASE 3:
7. Don’t let up
8. Make change stick

• A change curve, based as many are on Elizabeth Kubler-Ross‘s work e.g.:

Leadership success? It’s all about relationships…

I am always struck by the fact that relationships are seen as a ‘nice to have’ and worth cultivating in times of plenty, yet as soon as money evaporates then the last thing businesses seem willing to invest in equipping staff ‘relationally’. It is oxymoronic to suggest that success in business (or life in general) is anything other than dependent upon the quality and frequency of interactions between people. So I was struck by some of the advice Ian Davis, the outgoing CEO of McKinsey, recently offered to his successor in an open letter. For those of you who are not CEOs, no need to run away, this stuff applies to anyone who is in a leadership role, managers included…

In essence, it is a ‘Transition Checklist’, consisting of the following:

1. Have I reflected on the context of my transition—not just from my own perspective, but from that of all key stakeholders?
2. Have I established in my own mind the time frame and intended outcomes of my leadership transition?
3. Have I established my initial set of priorities with a full understanding of what others expect of me?
4. Zzzzzzzzzzzzzz…..

Joking aside, all good stuff for you budding Masters of the Corporate Universe out there, but around point 5., it gets interesting (my italics from now on):

Enough with “Change Management” – the term stinks

A witty and timely blog post appeared recently entitled Incomplete Manifesto for Leading Change. In it, Melissa Dutmers, a US based change practitioner, articulated a number of thoughts I have been having my self, plus a whole load of other ideas that neatly sum up why, even in the world of change professionals, every now and then we need a good dose of post-conventional debunking. By way of a taster, two of Melissa’s manifesto items are as follows, and I encourage you to read the rest:

5: Enough with “Change Management.”
The industry standard term “change management” stinks. It’s outdated and loaded with baggage. The ideas and practices that should make up “change management” have everything to do with leadership, keen observation, collaboration, judgment, and insight. You “manage” a schedule. You lead change.

13: Change Management is Not a Department.
Accounting is a department. Leading change is something you want everyone in your company doing.

‘Change Management’ too easily becomes a box within which uncomfortable decisions and choices can be put off, if not indefinitely, then at least until the point that the organisation has little choice but to do something, even if it is only to pay lip service to the notion of change leadership. I find myself increasingly curious as to what would happen if client’s started with how they wanted to manage/lead change, and then weaved everything else into and around that….

Gut feel decision making, or the myth of unbiased rationality (reprise)

I recently wrote a piece for OfficePolitics.com on decision making, and referenced a discussion between Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman and psychologist Gary Klein on the perils of intuition. Well, Andrew Campbell and Jo Whitehead, who are directors of London’s Ashridge Strategic Management Centre, have built on that in an article on the role of gut in decsion making. Essentially, they argue that it is impossible for human beings (let’s broaden this out and not limit it to the sub-species Homo Sapien Leaderus Maximus) to wholly eliminate gut intuition from decision making.

What they can do is identify situations where it is likely to be biased and then strengthen the decision process to reduce the resulting risk….This means that to protect decisions against bias, we first need to know when we can trust our gut feelings, confident that they are drawing on appropriate experiences and emotions.

Latest FitForum interview available for listening…

The audio for the recent FitForum interview with Collaboration Specialist Kjetil Kristensen is now available. In this interview we explored the territory of fit in relation to collaborative frameworks, through the lens of Kjetil’s work as a practitioner/researcher.

Themes to emerge include:

• Collaboration from a research perspective: what is it, and how does Kjetil see this area evolving?
• Collaboration vs mutualism: similarities and differences
• The relational nature of the collaborative framework
• The role of emotional intelligence in healthy and successful collaborative relationships

The recording can be accessed here.

Now why on earth did they decide to do that?!

[The following post was written for OfficePolitics.com, for whom I have recently become a Guest Adviser]

Ever been left bewildered by decisions your company makes? Curious as to what possessed the CEO to propose that strategy, when everyone knows it is barking mad? Baffled as to why you have just spent three hours in a meeting that was supposed to come up with a cunning plan, and all you are left with is a set of vague and fluffy actions requiring yet more interminably long strategy meetings?

Decisions! Decisions!

Most life changing events in our careers have at their root someone, somewhere, deciding something. Sometimes we may be present to influence that, others not. Either way, what, if anything, can we do about it? And how actually do humans make decisions? I mean, it’s a rational process, right?….

When I researched how executives bought and sold businesses, one intriguing thing to emerge was the role desire played in decision making. In other words, emotion was in full swing, not just cool calculation around facts and figures. How so? Well, behavioural neurologist, Antonio Damasio, has demolished the idea that emotion can, or should, be kept out of decision making in order to get the best results. And the more neuroscientists inquire into human decision making the greater the significance of the interplay between the emotional (animal) and rational sectors of the brain.

Gardiner Morse, a senior editor at Harvard Business Review, summarized it in ‘Decisions and Desire’:“Brain regions that respond to cocaine or morphine are the same ones that react to the prospect of getting money and to actually receiving it. It’s perhaps no surprise that chocolate, sex, music, attractive faces, and sports cars also arouse this reward system.”

So just maybe your sales team really are high?

Part of the problem is we (over) value decisiveness, and leaders who can act John Wayne style, relying on gut instinct and intuition to act swiftly. The issue, as Gary Klein – the author of several books on intuition – says, is “you should never trust your gut… you have to consciously and deliberately evaluate it.” In other words, think critically, check out your assumptions, look at what is actually happening.

So what can be done practically to ensure that decisions are made that make sense and meet the needs of all those involved?

Well, there is no guaranteed answer, but here are some suggestions that may help to improve the quality of meetings. I advise clients to work out beforehand:

• What are the questions the meeting is designed to answer?
• What outcomes are they looking to walk away with?
• How will they reach a decision? e.g. consensus, majority vote etc?
• What do people need to have read beforehand? (to avoid wasting time on briefing rather than dialogue)

Are you strong enough to value dissent?

The most robust decisions emerge from groups that are able to be straight with each other. And sadly this is one area many leaders are weak in, namely they are intolerant of challenge.

Stage the untimely demise of the Big Idea!
Hold a pre-mortem, a technique Gary Klein came up with, and one way of making it safer to voice that dissent. He describes thus:

“You say: ‘We’re looking in a crystal ball, and this project has failed; it’s a fiasco. Now, everybody, take two minutes and write down all the reasons why you think the project failed.’

“The logic is that instead of showing people that you are smart because you can come up with a good plan, you show you’re smart by thinking of insightful reasons why this project might go south. If you make it part of your corporate culture, then you create an interesting competition: ‘I want to come up with some possible problem that other people haven’t even thought of.’ The whole dynamic changes from trying to avoid anything that might disrupt harmony to trying to surface potential problems.”

It may seem counter-intuitive to focus on the negative, but what is interesting about the pre-mortem is how it helps surface issues that may otherwise lurk in the shadows and are never discussed.

Putting dissent to the test…

In writing this guest column for OfficePolitics.com, I went back and forth with site founder and editor, Franke James, many, many, many times discussing meeting strategies. She sent me this candid feedback on my article and suggested I consider Dr. Edward de Bono’s Six Thinking Hats system.

The Six Thinking Hats: WHITE: Facts and figures RED: Emotions and feelings BLUE: Control and thinking GREEN: Creativity and new ideas YELLOW: Positive constructive BLACK: Logical and negative

Franke wrote,

“On your blog post — I like it a lot… BUT I question the wisdom of surrendering the floor to the naysayers. Black Hat thinking is all around us. Corporations don’t need more encouragement to squash ideas. They need brave people with foresight who can champion innovative ideas and make them work. De Bono’s system is brilliant because it balances the forces of optimists, so-called realists and naysayers.

“In ‘Six Thinking Hats’ de Bono teaches a method for conducting meetings that I have found extremely effective. De Bono assigns a different color, and different thinking style to each of the six hats. It encourages groups of people to think in one direction at a time, to allow optimistic ideas to grow, and also negative ideas to be aired. It’s a very systematic style of meeting that can effortlessly control the naysayers in your group. The naysayers will want to speak up — but if their comments are negative they can only speak when everyone is wearing the Black Hat. This gives them an incentive to think with the full spectrum of Thinking Hats.

“Ideas that you might have missed by going through a more conventional meeting style come to the surface. Everything is considered because you are methodically going through a checklist. Everyone gets to have their say. The Six Hats system generates a wealth of ideas from 360 degrees. It works to build consensus and make better decisions.”

So there you have it. Two differing opinions thrashed out virtually across the pond.

What do you think?

Which process do you like better? The pre-mortem or the Six Hats? And why?

Let us know in the comments.

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References & useful resources

ARIELY, D. Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape our Decisions, 2009
HEARSUM, S. Interpersonal ‘fit’ in Mergers & Acquisitions due diligence – unpublished Masters dissertation, 2008
KLEIN, G. Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions, 1999
KLEIN, G. The Power of Intuition: How to Use Your Gut Feelings to Make Better Decisions at Work
LEHRER, J. Decisive Moment, the: How the brain makes up its mind
MORSE, G. (2006) ‘Decisions and Desire’ in Harvard Business Review, Jan 2006 pp42-51
McKinsey Quarterly, ‘Strategic decisions: When can you trust your gut?’ Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman and psychologist Gary Klein debate the power and perils of intuition for senior executives. March 2010

Integrating ‘hard’ metrics and ‘soft’ communication

A lovely piece on Leading Outside the Lines – Integrating formal metrics and informal communication can lead to new levels of performance was published this week on Strategy & Business.com. Building on a post I wrote recently on how Relationships account for up to 40% of differences in performance, it further supports the argument that purely rational – or conventional – models of organisation and leadership are ill-equipped to deal with the complexity of human systems.