The first is making many mistakes and admitting to them.

Discover: I am not talking about being sloppy. The universe is relentlessly complex. Try many things and admit when it is not working out as you expected. “Reflect early & often“. Most people and organizations I encounter actually have a hang up with being able to look straight in the mirror and say that they made a mistake. The fall into a trap of predictive thinking for complex stuff. They think they can tame complexity easily. In both cases of people or organizations, not being able to admit and make mistakes shuts  down the whole approach to learning. By not admitting we made a mistake we drop the practice of the scientific method  and shut down simple open inquiry. Said another way we stop seeking feedback and shoot any messengers with bad news. Innovation and creativity are born from a sea of attempts and most of those attempts will not pan out (call them mistakes or whatever word works for you).

The second step is to never stop trying.

Persistent: ”It dosn’t matter how many time you get knocked down it only matter if you get back up.” Even when you cannot succeed at something a committed person or organization will keep trying. Trying in an almost mindless way. And sometimes still succeed (the hard part is we just don’t know where success will show and it is hard to know when to stop and try something else). The difficulty is learning how to back off and point your energy elsewhere. Again a habit of reflect early & often. For organizations this can be especially trying and can create a tension in tying to redirect energy elsewhere. Often people take it as a personal failing and feel like their position is being undermined by being asked to stop working in a direction that has not yielded any favorable results. The classics response is to get tough with them but, this fails to engage them fully on the next task because they never deal with the regret. An emotionally healthy thing to do is to help them let go and transition. The other end of the spectrum is organizations who behave so frenetically that they never really try because they are changing direction all the time. They trample their own ethics into the ground.

The third step is learning to be comfortable with success.

Win: Is perhaps the most fuzzy and elusive of the three steps. It is not about enjoying the after effects of success. It is more about being in the moment and amplifying that success and seizing it instinctively when it is at hand. For some, being in the lime light is the only thing they desire and they flourish at this step but, the above two steps constantly befuddle those types of people and organizations. Really the above two steps are sequential for those who are not innately comfortable with success. You almost need permission to give it your best and be dramatically successful. Being told you are good at something creates a state of affirmation that empowers those who are uncomfortable with success. The person or organization who is uncomfortable with success is chronically humble. Now the interesting thing is that “Reflect Early & Often” does not apply. It applies afterwards but, you have to learn to be comfortable in the moment and there is no time to learn as success is happening. Simply smiling and saying thank you is a right display of behavior but, you have to do more than that you need to feel comfortable in your skin at that moment in time so that your instincts respond correctly.  If you do not feel comfortable in your skin you will dampen your instincts on what is working and not react smart when opportunity passes by.

Learning to be comfortable with success.

Hope this can serve you as it has served me.

- Doug

The conversation went something like this.

“People who know they are being assessed will pay more attention in a training course or at their daily work. We need to use exams and assessments to getthem to pay more attention because otherwise they will just flake off. People are inherently lazy and we need to make sure they work.”

The conversation above sounds like a hidden threat. The threat I see goes something like… If you miss something you are in trouble on the exam or “Pointy Haired Dude” is watching…. This is an old school paradigm that destroys critical thinking in my experience. For example, the issue of an Exam has dogged classic PMP training and has generally pulled down the quality of critical thinking across the spectrum of corporate environments. It dogs classic workshop training when the conversation moves from “whats the best way to think about this ….. to ….. will this be on the Exam? If not on the exam then, can we move on to stuff that will be on the exam?”

When people become more concerned about the exam or assessment they have often stopped thinking critically. For agile training, which is most of what I do these days, people can easily fall back to old learning styles of known answers to known questions. Most of today’s business problems are demandingly complex and do not have predictable outcomes. A test or exam is a simple predictive Q/A model and that includes the situational stuff as well. For situational stuff, I just memorize the abstract pattern for which the situational question is written for and then answer according to the pattern. To deal with complexity people need an empirical thought process for the finding stuff we don’t know we don’t know. Cramming more factoids into adult heads is counter productive. As adults we typically have more than enough information crammed in our heads. The question becomes “Can we make better use of what we already know or have experienced to deal with uncertainty?”

In my experience, open reflective learning will occur and empirical behavior will result when, as a trainer/leader to I make the environment safe for learning. As a manager/director of people the same policy holds true, if you punish people for making mistakes they will stop making mistakes by trying not to do to much beyond what is painfully obvious that needs doing. In either case, learninig is shut down for knowlege workers. Sharing of knowledge, both tacit and explicit, comes to a halt and the organization’s ability to learn atrophies because those muscles are no longer being used. At this point the best we can achieve is a pursuit of efficiency and what you find is a focus on faster / cheaper / quicker. Anything that is different and innovative gets squeezed out by the fear of not doing something that is well understood and controllable.

Innovation is needed across most areas of today’s corporation. Learning should be part and parcel to every engaging job and challenge. For innovation to occur people need to focus on learning and that means expect mistakes. If they do not feel safe they will make feeble attempts to do some new things but, never really bravely reach out of their comfort zone. If you are hiring for factory / robot type positions then expect robots but, knowledge workers are key for innovative culture and fresh ideas.

People in my workshops pay attention because they care and I care. It is a social bond. As a leader/trainer you set a behavior pattern that will be modeled. Are you modeling “I am watching you!” ? People that work/report to me pay attention because we both care to do the best. Those that don’t care can and should be asked to leave or excuse themselves until they sort out their destructive tendencies. I call not caring destructive because it destroys empirical behavior .

Generally, it is useless to retain people that do not care. In most cases the overhead of managing them is in excess of not having them there. Which sadly means I am better off doing the job myself. As a leader or trainer your first job should be to foster an atomosphere where learning is safe and encourage your people to become learning machines. Better teams make better people who make better products.

• At the forefront of learning is where innovation occurs.
• Learning is about knowledge creation (see Nonaka’s paper).
• Knowledge creation is an interactive process.Organizations that foster learning reach new heights.
• People that are in learning mode are paying the best kind of attention.
• A good scrum process enables the team learning process.

Maybe I am completely off my rocker but, I found the conversation interesting.
Comments?
- Doug

Discussion: The word self organizing is a little fuzzy for me.

The way I think about self organizing teams is that they are  pre-assembled. After assembly a pressure is applied to respond to a demand. The demand is articulated
in the form of a story/project (don’t want to dice those words right now!) And the pressure is from a business that provides support as long as … You produce something of value! “Eye on the Prize”

The demand is applied such that we get feedback. That feedback has a sensitivity that can be adjusted or tuned like a dial. The dial for agile/scrum teams is easily seen in the form of a story (Chunk of Work) level  and can go up to the thickness of a project/product. If the demand goes unfulfilled then there is an implied threat of dissolution against the team or even loss of job individually.

Sometimes the support is so strong that we can ignore the demand and turn our noses up in the air. Big government / orgs often feel like that to me. It just do not matter because nothing bad will really happen so why sweat the small stuff. Even if that is not true and something bad will happen if it feels like nothing bad will happen then the behavior often develops a “don’t sweat the small stuff” approach.

Is self organizing the best way? I think that depends if it humanizes the workplace and makes better people with more compassion while igniting creativity to help the business thrive. Demands must be seen as real and consequences for failing to work well with others must be imposed.