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Posts tagged ‘Organization Development’

May 19

Five rights

In our work on the Kansas EMS transition curriculum project, we’ve been creating media and activities. As an outsider to EMS, I was struck late yesterday with a decision tree that is used to think critically about medication delivery. It has “five rights” or things that must be true in order for the medication to be given:

  1. Right patient?
  2. Right medication?
  3. Right dose?
  4. Right route?
  5. Right time?

I am considering how these critical thinking questions can be translated into an organization’s or individual’s decision making process:

  1. Is this the right person? Team? Client?
  2. Is this the right action? Process? Intervention?
  3. Is this action in proportion to the situation?
  4. Is this the right course? Means? Direction?
  5. Is this the right time?

The other reflection is how often I assume information doesn’t apply to me. I can quickly jump to the conclusion that a process used everyday by EMS providers doesn’t impact me. Yet every moment is an opportunity to actively engage in learning. All that’s required is that I reflect on my encounters with information, people, and organizations – seeking to learn and integrate my experiences.

What are the opportunities you have to reflect and integrate?

May 18

Time to play

I was not surprised when I heard a nearby 12-year-old complain, “I’m bored.” But I was taken aback when a recent college graduate told me, “I’m bored with my work.” She was working in her field of choice, about a year into an entry-level job. She said that she didn’t mind doing the routine work, but she wanted to be challenged, to have opportunities to try new things, meet new people, and grow. I connected her comments with the frustrations that multiple Millennials have expressed about their workplaces. And, the frustration extends beyond the Millennials as seen in a 2010 survey that shows only 45% of the workforce is satisfied with their job.

While I understand that every workplace has certain tasks that must be routinely completed, I am thinking about what it means to create a playful workplace. This would be a workplace that moves beyond employee engagement to serious play. What do kids do when they’re the opposite of bored? They’re playing, which results in having fun! In my neighborhood, they go outdoors and ride bikes on the trail, build forts in the woods, get together to eat pizza and play video games, or just hang out eating cookies and drinking soda pop on the back porch. A more defined view of play sees these activities as exploring, creating, relating, generating, and reflecting. When these activities are happening, I never hear, “I’m bored.”

The challenge for our organizations is to embrace those who say, “I’m bored.” It is time to stop saying, “I don’t have time to deal with this – just get on with it.” It is time to expand our thinking – to engage in serious play.  I don’t know that there is a road map for serious play in organizations, but I do know that the beginning is taking time to relate to everyone and set an intention to listen and hear new ideas, create space to imagine new things, and find ways to adventure into new territory. I believe it’s time to stop changing incrementally and be willing to experiment with new ideas and fail and try again.

In the end it’s not about creating the next best piece of technology or the nifty new software app or the perfect organization chart. In the end it’s being willing to get down on the rug and build a new Lego truck that can fly to the moon today, then take it apart and use the Lego blocks to build a whale that walks on land tomorrow. In the end, it’s about the journey and the people with whom we choose to ride the trail. Just maybe, we’ll all be less bored as we discover and create the way to the future together.

May 16

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Idea for reflection – 8

Climber in Spring

Do not depend on the hope of results. When you are doing the sort of work you have taken on, essentially an apostolic work, you may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself. And there too a great deal has to be gone through as gradually you struggle less and less for an idea and more and more for specific people. The range tends to narrow down, but it gets much more real. In the end, it is the reality of personal relationships that saves everything…

The big results are not in your hands or mine, but they suddenly happen, and we can share in them; but there is no point in building our lives on this personal satisfaction, which may be denied us and which after all is not that important.

The next step in the process is for you to see that your own thinking about what you are doing is crucially important. You are probably striving to build yourself an identity in your work, out of your work and your witness. You are using it, so to speak, to protect yourself against nothingness, annihilation. That is not the right use of your work. All the good that you will do will come not from you but from the fact that you have allowed yourself, in the obedience of faith, to be used by God’s love. Think of this more and gradually you will be free from the need to prove yourself, and you can be more open to the power that will work through you without your knowing it.

– Thomas Merton

Idea for reflection – 7

May 15

creative confidence

It’s a cool, rainy Saturday on the Great Plains, which provides time for reflection. I’ve been considering a question asked in an encounter this week, “How do I know which method or process to use with an organization that is having a hard time finding its way?” My first response was that there isn’t a tidy checklist or rule book for people who work with organizations. Organizations are made up of people, and those relationships rarely go by a checklist or rule book.

How then should an organization development practitioner proceed? There are many different processes that I’ve used successfully from Appreciative Inquiry to World Cafe to Strategic Visioning. I’ve facilitated with organizations that were willing to begin with a central question and allow the process to emerge, evolve, and engage the group through our time together. Ultimately the practitioner has to have what David Kelley calls “creative confidence“. I have to be willing to step out into uncertainty, ambiguity, and fog and enter into the organization’s journey.

This isn’t magical. A good practitioner brings along their toolbox. A couple of months ago I discovered a new toolbox from the d.school at Stanford: Bootcamp Bootleg. In it the students and faculty from the Stanford d.school share their mindset along with modes and methods that they use to engage organizations and people when the solutions, and sometimes even the questions, aren’t obvious. They set an example of resilience, of not being willing to give up with the way ahead is uncertain, ambiguous, or wrapped in fog.

To respond to the original question: my personal goals as an organization development practitioner are to sharpen my tools while continually adding to my toolbox – to be willing to start a conversation for change, be willing to fail, be willing to try again – to welcome the unknown along with the known – to practice with creative confidence.

May 8

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Work is a team sport

Gone are the days when the most valued words in an organization were, “It’s ATCO” (all taken care of). Generation Xer’s and even Boomers were focused on taking work from those above them and just getting it done — independently. But a new generation is entering the workforce, shaking things up with their arrival. 

While everyone in the workplace has the ability to work on teams, the Millennial Generation (also known as Generation Y or Generation Next) have been raised with “team.” It began when they were taking their first steps and were cheered aloud by their families. It continued as families with two working parents or a single parent interacted like teams with each person fulfilling their role. The Millennials have done group projects in school, participated in team sports at an unprecedented level, and embraced on-line social networks. 

In a recent survey by Select Minds Research, 77% of Millennials stated that collaboration was the most important driver of work satisfaction; and, 28% reported leaving a job because they felt isolated or disconnected from the larger organization. Yet the older generations have often said, “We need to figure out how to get them to conform to the workplace. Welcome to how “real life” works.” I will argue that it is more productive to take the approach of discovery.

Organizations can discover ways to jumpstart the desire of Millennials to reinvent work as a team sport by creating ways for new Millennial hires to connect with all generations in the workplace. Two ideas that I’ve encountered are to create multi-generation special interest groups and young leader groups.

Both of these ideas have been used to good effect with unexpected outcomes that exceeded everyone’s expectations. The special interest group has created an external team that interfaces regularly with the community, supporting a wide variety of community events and presenting a professional face for the organization that has not been seen in the past. One of the new leader groups that I’m familiar with is now presenting their ideas about engaging the next generation around the U.S. — with full support from upper management. 

Millennials are inventing teams in ways that Generation Y and Boomers have not been able to imagine. Engaging the new generation and any new workforce entrant brings opportunities to change processes and challenge the status quo. The resulting innovations, ideas, and skills have the potential to benefit organizations and communities who are willing to embrace their desire to collaborate.

Apr 27

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Turning off the autopilot

I was recently working with an organization to identify their values. Some would say that values are yesterday’s news, a 1990’s activity for an organization to do. Others would argue that listing values becomes another exercise that gets posted on the break room wall and ignored.  I would argue that remembering values is something that should be done daily: we, as individuals and organizations, must intentionally choose to act from our values.

When we interact with each other, with those who purchase our services, with our friends and families, when we make decisions, when we innovate and create new opportunities, the question is: Does that fit with one or more of our values? Or not …?

I challenge all of us not to confuse values with priorities or with our core business philosophy. Values don’t change easily. My values include trust, honesty, integrity, kindness, and positive action. I seek to act based on those values. Values provide an underlying framework, supporting the systems that make up our more visible maps of the world or mental models.

To spend time identifying and make values visible, is to choose to act consciously. It is to choose to turn off the autopilot and check our systems, decisions, and actions to make certain we are acting in concert on our journey.

Here’s a short exercise to try: After your next meeting, spend five minutes considering which of your values you saw on display? Which values of your organization did you see represented? Try the exercise after your next decision or your next conversation. Are the values the ones you expected to see?

Apr 20

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Lead with Positive Desire

(This is a guest post from Justin Anderson. Justin is a Licensed Sport Psychologist and Principal of JSA Advising, a Minneapolis/St.Paul consulting firm that specializes in optimizing sustainable performance and harmony in family-owned businesses.  Justin’s worked with athletes/teams from all competitive levels, and over the past five years, he’s used those experiences to help family-businesses build thriving and sustainable legacies. Justin can be reached through JSA Advising. Thank you, Justin!)

What motivates you to act?  Contemporary thought can reduce human motivation into two basic modalities; fear and desire.  If you are like most, you will likely find that you do many things in your daily routine out of fear.  For example, many people get up in the morning with less than ideal sleep, not because they desire the feeling of being tired.  Rather, they do it because they “fear” the consequences of not getting up “on-time”.  For many, not getting up “on-time” means missing work and missing work means getting fired and getting fired could mean losing the house.

It’s not too often that we consciously connect all the dots.  Rather, we typically go through our routines automatically, because it’s what we “need” to do.   It’s why so many of us are tired, stressed, and anxious.  Taking consistent action through the fear perspective leads to higher levels of anxiety and tension which, over a longer period of time, leads to poorer health, less meaningful relationships, and a decreased ability to process information clearly.

In addition, taking action from the fear motivator can lead us to be critical of ourselves or those around us.  Negativity breeds negativity.  Like an out of control snowball, if you find that fear is your dominate motivator, than it’s likely that you could be contributing to a work place environment that is more judgmental and paranoid.  And a workplace that is judgmental and paranoid will create more negativity and fear.  Ultimate result: a work place where creativity and productivity is stifled or even frowned upon.

The solution to ending the negativity spiral can be found by developing a keener sense of self-awareness and self-accountability.  It calls for us to slow down and reflect on the “why” as we check-off our to-do lists.  It requires us to retrain our neural networks to focus on things we can control as well as to be able to let go of the things we cannot.  And, it requires us to focus our attention on the things for which we are grateful and that give us positive energy.

This final requirement is not as easy as it sounds.  The human mind instinctively wants to solve the “problems first”, a practice that served our ancestors well when they were looking for food and avoiding predators.  But today when our physiological needs are fairly secure, this type of thinking doesn’t do us any favors.  Instead, it creates a negative lens that primarily focuses on problems that we cannot control or those things that we are still “missing in our lives”.  Being able to retrain the brain to instinctively focus on the things we can control and are grateful for creates a greater sense of tranquility, thus relaxing the tension, opening the mind to new and innovated ways to get our needs met through our desire motivator.

Don’t abuse: Like all good things in this world, too much of a good thing can lead us right back down the negativity path again.  By suggesting that we operate out of our “desire” motivation, I’m not suggesting that we ignore all the rules and moral guidelines and become hedonistic.  Rather, I am simply pointing out that on the spectrum of motivation, many of us act far too often from fear. If we acted more firmly from our desire modality (within reason) we would also find that positivity is contagious.  Similar to how negativity can breed negativity, positivity and gratefulness can breed a healthy and energetic environment, fostering increased creativity, greater productivity, and more meaningful relationships.

If you are a leader or manager, consider what motivator drives your actions.

Apr 19

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Renewal by fire

Kansas Flint Hills Spring Burn III

Each spring Kansas Flint Hills ranchers use prairie fire to create renewal. The fire burns weeds and dead plant material, clearing the brush and dead grasses in its path.  

Kansas Flint Hills Spring Burn II

Last weekend we watched as ranchers sowed fire across the prairie creating landscape that looks otherworldly.   

Kansas Flint Hills Spring Burn I

And I pause to reflect on what fires are burning in my life and the organizations to which I belong. Do I spend too much time fighting the fires rather than allowing them to burn away the deadwood? What do I need to stop doing, to let go of, to turn away from so that new ideas, new life can spring up?   

On our trip through the Flint Hills, a rancher told us that it takes about 4 days for new grasses to spring up, providing stunning green vistas. And on the Kansas flatlands, the winter wheat – dormant all winter – is growing again. 

Kansas Prairie Spring I

And so, I reflect and revisit my dreams, hopes, and goals looking for signs of renewal in my life and in the wider systems of which I’m a part.

Mar 30

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The case for resilience

As human beings we spend much of our time attempting to create consistency, producing a constant product, creating reliable and repeatable interactions. We all have mental models into which we attempt to shoehorn daily events and interactions. And yet our survival is tied not to constants, but to our ability to deal with variables – with change.

The dictionary defines resilience: “the ability to bounce or spring back into shape, position, etc., after being pressed or stretched. Elasticity. The ability to recover strength, spirits, good humor, or any other aspect quickly.” Resilience allows us to respond to and tolerate all kinds of variables. Our bodies can manage and respond to wide temperature variations, heal cuts and scrapes, speed up or slow down metabolism, and continually rewire our brain’s neural pathways. Add to this our ability to be intelligent, to learn, interact with others, and design and create things beyond ourselves. Our bodies are a good example of a resilient system.

It is easier to see stability than resilience. And, without a whole-system view, it is easier to value stability over resilience. For example: Just-in-time deliveries have stabilized inventories and often reduced costs. But, a look at the larger system shows that the just-in-time model makes the entire production system more vulnerable to shipping delays caused by weather, technology downtime, and other uncontrollable variables.

Systems, whether our bodies or our organizations need to be managed to ensure resilience, not its opposite – constancy, rigidity, and inflexibility. And yet, we are easily and continually distracted by individual events – a conversation, an e-mail, or a news story. We need to find ways to maintain a larger system view. Some of the ways to do this are to assess events by considering the history, information, relationships, and dynamic data of the whole system. We can mindfully look at and reflect on the system, its structure and relationships.  Time spent thus increases potential to discover ways of increasing our organization’s ability to restore itself, be creative, and build elastic walls that allow the organization and ourselves to not only bounce back from unforeseen events, but to embrace change.

Mar 11

Before the cart and the horse

I’m reflecting on the adage, “Don’t put the cart before the horse.” There is truth here. Too often organizations begin at the end of a process and end up with unintended outcomes; they put the cart before the horse. In the end there wasn’t the needed energy or passion or drive to keep the process moving forward. Or in the worst case, the cart is wrecked as it cruises out of control as it is pushed by the horse.

Even organizations that begin by going out to the barn and hitching the cart behind the horse may miss the road. They rush into the latest idea and fad, rolling down the road, chasing their perceived competitor at top speed with their best people holding the reins. But they’re on a road to an unknown destination.

In my experience, it is most helpful to spend time reviewing values, philosophy, and history before heading out to the barn. Time spent considering how the process fits the organization, its people, values, and dreams can allow the process to be tailored to reach the goal. Or in other words, the process will be designed for finding the right horse and the right cart and the right road for that organization.

Spend time designing a process before considering content. As Alexander Graham Bell said, “Before anything else, preparation is the key to success.”

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