Enabling Others to Act

Two of my close friends are going through a transition, trying to move to the next level. They are in such different places in their lives, yet, strangely enough, they are in the same situation. One of them chose work over education due to circumstances at the time and believes he hasn't been able to be "successful". The other one went on to complete his masters, land his dream job, has done really well, but thinks he has "plateaued". I was kind of surprised to have similar conversations with two people on opposite ends of the spectrum. Both are looking for ways to be more, do more and grow and our conversations over the last few months have been quite insightful for all of us. 

Based on our conversations, here is a list of skills, attitudes, behaviors that we thought would benefit us:

• Gratitude: All three of us agreed that the firstly, we need to be grateful for where we are in life. Each of us made a choice based on certain considerations and we are where we are as a consequence of those choices. Being thankful for the present also entails acceptance about the current situation. It may not be the best, but here we are, it's good and let's see where we need to go from here and what we need to do to make that happen. So we all agreed that showing gratitude was where we start.

• Holistic Outlook: During our conversations, we realized how focused (obsessed?) we were with our professional lives and how much we thought about work & career. Given that we aren't growing any younger and there are so many things & places to experience, so much focus on work-life did not seem healthy. We agreed that we needed to look at our lives holistically and experience more of life, not just stay within the circle of our work-life. While this may seem counter-intuitive to finding ways to grow in your job, it really isn't. The varied experiences are going to enrich us even further, help us gain perspective of things, do things that are outside our comfort zone and that is going to transfer into our work-life too. Being more open to ideas, to people, taking initiative, showing the willingness to take risks are just a few of the attitudes and skills that we stand to gain

• Education/Continuous Learning: While this was directly correlated to professional growth for my friend who had dropped out of college, the remaining two of us agreed that continuous education will help us expand our horizons too. So while friend #1 is out checking out the degrees and diplomas that can benefit his career, friend #2 is exploring his new passion, photography, he is exploring formal and informal learning options in this area. I went ahead and enrolled in a French language classes. Oui!

• Energy management: All of this exploration and taking on new stuff can be tiring and time-consuming as well, so we ended up discussing ways of finding more time to do things. But of course that's not possible because there are only 24 hours in a day!  Friend #1 stumbled across this 2007 HBR article on Energy Management. As the article suggests "energy comes from four main wellsprings in human beings: the body, emotions, mind, and spirit. In each, energy can be systematically expanded and regularly renewed by establishing specific rituals—behaviors that are intentionally practiced and precisely scheduled, with the goal of making them unconscious and automatic as quickly as possible". Each of us decided to do practice a different ritual, friend #1 decided to practice awareness throughout the day and keeping a log every day; friend #2 who is in the "exploration" mode and therefore in a zone of uncertainty & transition decided to exercise everyday to calm his nervous and I decided to take up yoga.

We'll see where this journey takes us but we are certainly supporting each other and positively enabling each other to take a good look at our lives and make some small but critical changes.

Disclaimer: All images are from google images and used for educational purposes only.

Challenging the Process

The act of challenging evokes images of a duel, an impending fight, or opponents up in arms; however, 'challenging' as a descriptive word brings to mind words like demanding, difficult, and requiring effort.

So what would 'challenging a process' encompass? According to Kouzes & Posner, to challenge the process "you search for opportunities by seeking innovative ways to change, grow, and improve, and you experiment and take risks by constantly generating small wins and learning from mistakes." 

Image source: http://lollypop.biz/media/1929/12d65a162c9f74809ba4205dda62c55a.jpg

With an intention to find new ways to help my organization, I had a brain-picking session with a few colleagues about ideas and innovations we could use. Some ideas we tossed around were Appreciative Inquiry, Complex Adaptive Systems, Design Thinking & Action Learning. We zeroed in on Design Thinking for a variety of reasons elaborated further in this post, the most important ones being innovation, agility and learning from mistakes.

Image source: http://inchoo.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/design-thinking-3.png

These two websites provide the history or design thinking: Website_1 and Website_2. When we think of design, we automatically co-relate it with aesthetics; however Tim Brown, the guru of Design Thinking defines it as "...a discipline that uses the designer’s sensibility and methods to match people’s needs with what is technologically feasible and what a viable business strategy can convert into customer value and market opportunity." (https://designthinking.ideo.com/?p=49). However, he questions if there is a general definition of Design Thinking and whether it is useful to have one. This concept now has a wide variety of application besides just in the technological field.

Image source: https://thumbs.dreamstime.com/z/design-thinking-23211111.jpg

As the two websites about the history of Design Thinking suggest, it began as a method or a tool, but is now come to be a mindset. In his HBR article titled Design Thinking Comes of Age, Jon Kolko, VP of design at Blackboard; founder and director of Austin Center for Design; and the author of Well-Designed: How to Use Empathy to Create Products People Love (HBR Press, 2014) refers to Design Thinking as "applying the principles of design to the way people work" and identifies these principles as "empathy with users, a discipline of prototyping, and tolerance for failure (as) chief among them". He takes this a step further to having a "design-centric culture".

I think at this point, my organization would most benefit from having a design-centric culture. Using the evolution of design thinking explained in this blog cited earlier, my organization is probably doing the rounds between Participatory Design and User-Centered Design, maybe sometimes Service Design; but where we need to get to is Human Centered Design. 

Very Brief Summary of the Evolution of Design Thinking (Ref Blog: I Think Therefore I Design)

This transition is important given the changes that are taking place in organizations today (our client organizations), especially in the field of learning. Social learning is playing a big part in helping employees learn informally; employees are leveraging instant messaging to gain information and are surfing the internet as well for quick "how to" videos. Content curation is rising and will continue to do so, thereby increasing the need for creating learning solutions in collaboration with the users. The speed at which things change is so quick that there is hardly time to go through the normal development cycle to create solutions/products; stakeholders demand quick iterations which they can review and provide feedback on, so Agile is the need of the hour. What's more important that design thinking needs be a "culture" and not a department in the organization because all employees in my organization are involved in bringing the solution to life.

Implementing this innovation is sure to bring about disruption in the organization and its way of functioning but it will certainly help handle market uncertainty and complexity much better. Here, the design principle of tolerating failure (from Jon Kolko's article) will of utmost importance to the organization . As noted by Jon "a design culture is nurturing. It doesn’t encourage failure, but the iterative nature of the design process recognizes that it’s rare to get things right the first time." 

 My organization will probably have to remind itself of this principle once it is on the path of adopting Design Thinking. This also goes back Kouzes & Posner's point about challenging the process being all about taking risks and learning from mistakes.

Disclaimer: All images have been taken from google images and are used for educational purposes only.

Modeling the Way

We've all been there and done that, when it comes to modeling the way. We have, at times, been the one to follow the example someone set for us—an older sibling, parent, coach, or teacher; or we were the one setting an example for someone—our younger siblings, our kids, coworkers. Having been on both sides of the aisle, we know that modeling the way is all about "walking the talk." In their book, The Leadership Challenge, Kouzes & Posner make this insightful remark, "To walk the talk, you have to have a talk to walk." 

Now this is staring to seem like peeling back the layers of an onion! To be able to do what you say, first know what to say. To be able to know what to say, find out who you are what you believe in. So it all starts with values and beliefs. Especially for a leader, it is critical to know what those values and beliefs are because most times these may become the shared values and beliefs of the group or the organization at large. These shared values and beliefs in turn come to be seen as the culture of the organization. In fact, Edgar Schein, the guru of Organization Culture, says that the characteristic that is uniquely associated with leadership is the creation and management of culture. So in the larger scheme of things, when leaders are modeling the way, they really are setting an example for the entire organization and creating organizational culture. 

The debacle at Well Fargo that has recently come to light and created a (maybe permanent or very long term) dent in the reputation of the bank and it's customers' trust poses some critical questions about leadership, culture and modeling the way (rather how not to). This News_Article about the toxic sales culture at Wells Fargo is disturbing and brings forth so many questions about inspiring a shared vision and modeling the way. Is it possible that the vision that was "inspired" was too short-sighted and not based on the foundation of ethics? Was someone modeling the way, which as it turn out, was not the right way? If 5,400 employees were fired for indulging in unethical practices, is it even possible that leadership was not aware of the existence of these practices? Or did they fail to find their own voice and speak out for what they believe in? Was this incident the Halloween version of inspiring a shared vision and modeling the way?

On an individual level, each of us at times is called upon to model the way in our personal or professional lives. My role as an external-consultant-based-at-the-client-location required me to do this in several different ways. Firstly, I was representing my organization to the client, secondly, I was representing the client organization to its clients. I was a service provider to a service provider. To have to best represent both organizations and their values, to provide excellent customer service and to also balance the needs of my virtual team, required leading by example each day. It involved among many other things, working late nights, going the extra mile each time, and checking and rechecking my work, to make sure that the feedback I give to others is something that I have implemented for myself first. It is not easy to walk the fine line between being part of the client team and providing excellent customer service to my colleagues. But who said modeling the way was easy? 

The leaders who do model the way for their employees, customers, and shareholders walk many fine lines each day, setting examples, shining light on the way forward. And the times when they fail to do that, like in the case of Wells Fargo, the consequences are so severe that they may cause irreparable damage to the organization.

Disclaimer about images: All images have been sourced from Google images and used for educational purposes only.

Inspiring a Shared Vision

For the Org Design & Development class this Spring, we had to create a proposal on an Organization Development challenge or opportunity. Since my organization had just gone through the process of creating the new vision, mission and values, I chose to focus on the opportunity to internalize the new VMV for my organization. As part of the data analysis, I administered the Organizational Culture Assessment Instrument (OCAI) Survey to a few people in the organization and followed it up with a focus group discussion.

As seen in the snapshots above, while the Clan culture is dominant overall, the Hierarchy and Market culture are take precedence when it comes to measuring success, and employees are understandably confused and unhappy with that. This made for a very interesting discussion during the focus group where some colleagues shared their vision of the organization.  They envisioned for the organization to be more innovative, entrepreneurial, and creative. They also wanted the existing clan culture to be taken to the next level and have a team-based structure. Having been part of this organization for over 10 years, I could see where my colleagues are coming from and also where they are trying to go  with this vision. 

Traditionally, we have always been a market driven, results-oriented organization, whose major concern is to get the job done. This is  largely because our work is project based. This also makes operational excellence and competitive pricing a necessity . Both of these translate into limited scope for innovation because doing what we know takes less time and effort. Also, we are always striving to accomplish as much as possible with as few resources as possible. Coincidentally, this also leads to the same resources/employees working in the same team for long duration resulting in the dominant clan culture. Talk about going around in circles!

Given this history, my colleagues' desire for innovation seems justified. I actually believe that innovation will be of utmost importance to our survival and to creating a competitive advantage. This is because the environment and space (educational and corporate learning) we operate in has seen the emergence of so many disruptive trends that if we don't innovate, we might get left behind. And this applies as much internally (to employees) to the organization as much as it does externally (out in the market/competition). Employees who don't get an opportunity to upgrade their skills and knowledge and apply new trends and technologies are soon going to deliver products that will be outdated as well. And we are all well aware of what happens to organizations who can't get out of this type of a spiral: they are either acquired or they perish. So innovation seems like not just a smart choice, but a necessary choice that our leadership needs to move toward.

Their second vision about having a team-based structure makes complete sense given the strong Clan culture of the organization, the fact that we work on project basis, and that employees end up working in the same team for months if not years. There is tremendous rapport, sense of caring, openness and empathy that these team members share and they become such a cohesive unit that at the end of the project it is really difficult to single out one team member to credit for the success of the project or hold accountable for the failure of it. It is therefore only fair that they be judged as a team for their success or failure. This will encourage them even more to help and support each other to make the project a success and thereby achieve the one goal that the organization strives so strongly to achieve: client satisfaction and repeat business, eventually leading to a successful organization.

It is indeed interesting to note that the vision that so organically emerged in the minds of my colleagues relates at such deep levels to not just the sustainability of my organization but to its very existence and continuity itself. This fact highlights how important it is for a leader to be in touch with employees at the grass root level and to solicit their input when making strategic decisions, because the ideas that come from the employees "who are in the weeds" and "living it everyday" are many times far more practical than the plans on paper made behind glass doors and a true visionary leader understands the difference between the two. 

Disclaimer about images: All images have been sourced from Google images and used for educational purposes only.

Meaningful Ways For My Colleagues & Confidants To Support/Challenge My Learning

Being a professional in the field of learning and a self-professed life-long learner, it is no coincidence that learning plays a critical role in my day-to-day life. Whether it is improving a skill or acquiring a new good habit or just gaining new insights, I am always up for learning. I distinguish meaningful learning from mere acquisition of information/knowledge in the sense that learning results in change. This could be change in behavior, perspective, intention or action.

No matter how self-directed we are, there is only so much we can learn on our own. Our context, whether it is the workplace, family or society, contribute immensely to our learning because learning cannot take place in a vacuum. And I believe that the context provided by people around us contributes the most to what we learn. As captured in the infographic below, the top three ways that my colleagues and confidants can support and challenge my learning in meaningful ways are Feedback, Dialogue and Compassion. 

Feedback: And I am refering to constructive feedback here. My most important "aha" moments have been a result of the constructive feedback provided by colleagues and confidants who cared enough to observe something (behavior, action, words) and had valuable inputs to provide on how that something was either great and useful or could  be improved upon. Not only was this constructive feedback informative, but it was also though-provoking and many times has led me to challenge my assumptions and even bring about a transformation in me.

Dialogue: Another powerful way that some deep insights and learning has come my way is through engaging in dialog. This is a wonderful way of sharing perspectives, especially contrarian perspectives, and to really understand what the other point of view is and where it is coming from. Dialogue is the foundation of critical thinking because it brings to attention those perspectives that I may never have been able to get a peek into, had I not talked about it with that colleague or confidant. It literally provides "food for thought". Many times it has also been a way of affirming that I am not completely crazy and that my thoughts are coherent enough to make sense to someone other than me!

Compassion: This one may seem a little out of place; what's compassion got to do with learning in meaningful ways, right? For people who place a high value on success and cringe at failure, it is not easy to learn when we fail. We are already quite critical of ourselves for failing, so when the trusted colleague or confidant is also critical about something we failed to do or learn, it very becomes difficult to look at learning and/or failure positively. Here compassion is extremely critical to help people like me believe that it is okay to fail and that one can learn from failure. Compassion provides the encouragement we need to keep learning in spite of failure instead of giving up. It is also possible at times that for whatever reason, I may not be able to immediately grasp what my colleague or confidant is trying to communicate or "teach" and in times such as these, a little compassion will go a long way so that they don't give up on me, but more importantly, it will also ensure that I don't give up on myself!

Note: Images have been sourced from Google Images and have been used for educational purposes only.

“Getting it right!” a Top 5 List Describing “Best in Class" Learning Organizations

A Learning Organization, according to Peter Senge, is an organization "where people continually expand their capacity to create the results they truly desire, where new and expansive patterns of thinking are nurtured, where collective aspiration is set free, and where people are continually learning to see the whole (reality) together."  In a learning organization, "leaders are designers, stewards and teachers. They are responsible for building organizations where people continually expand their capabilities to understand complexity, clarify vision, and improve shared mental models." Whereas Organizational Learning as defined by Harvard Business School professor David Garvin, is the "process of creating, acquiring, interpreting, transferring, and retaining knowledge and using the new knowledge as a basis for responding to a changing environment."  Organizational learning is a process to ultimately become a Learning Organization.

The aspects that stood out to me in Senge's definition of the Learning Organization were:

• Getting the desired results 
• Nurturing new patterns of thinking
• Leadership involvement
• Continually learning to see the whole reality together
• Investment in learning (although this point is not very explicit above)

 Every year, the Association for Talent Development awards organizations that "get it" and are "best in class." This link provides information not only about the names of award winning organizations for 2014, but also lists attributes that make them best in class. Most of the attributes resonate really well with the five points listed above.

• Getting the desired results entails two aspects a) fulfilling individual goals b) achieving organization's strategic goals. This is possible only if there is alignment between individual goals and organizational goals, as well as between L&D objectives and activities and the business. As the article notes, best in class learning organizations "demonstrate enterprise-wide success as a result of employee learning and development" as well as "use the learning function as a strategic business tool to get results". This may takes various forms such as having robust talent development programs or building organizational capability by taking a systems approach to business needs and then training and developing talent to meet those business needs.

• Nurturing new patterns of thinking goes to the heart of having a "culture of learning." It involves first and foremost, allowing new ideas to flow in, critically analyzing them, and then adopting the best parts of those ideas as new patterns of thinking and "doing". This is a big deal! Most organizations are so stuck with "this is how we've always done things around here" approach that they don't even entertain new ideas, let alone adopt them. This is especially true of successful organizations. However, it is really important for organizations to let employees explore new ways of thinking and doing to bring in new ideas that will help the organization adapt to the ever changing external environment. This attitude will foster innovation and we all know how important innovation is to scoring competitive advantage in today's environment.

• Leadership involvement is crucial to any organizational initiative that hopes to see the light of the day. The idea of leaders being responsible for " building organizations where people continually expand their capabilities to understand complexity, clarify vision, and improve shared mental models" speaks to the role of leadership in creating the environment that provides opportunities for individual learning, team learning as well as systems thinking. It clarifies that leaders are not just relegated to the business and financial aspects, but involved in every aspect of learning and development.

• Continuous learning to "see the whole reality together" comprises two aspects, a) continuous learning b) systems thinking. The idea here is to look at things from a systems perspective as a team or an organization. This is the heart of team learning and using the skills of reflection, inquiry, and dialog for group problem solving and learning. It allows the organization/team to gain insights which would not have been possible individually.

• Investment in learning is a pre-requisite, and this does not have to be limited to monetary investment alone. The investment of time and effort, especially from leadership is equally valuable (one could argue that you can quantify time and effort investment and show a dollar figure), but the benefits derived from these investment certainly will be beyond tangible or quantifiable. When employees see their organization investing in their learning and development, in providing them opportunities to innovate, there is no limit to what an organization can achieve.

To the above five, I would add the following equally important practices that best in class learning organizations adopt:

• Integrating learning with performance: In today's global workplace, when technology has become all pervasive and we are collaborating with team members from different parts of the world, we cannot afford to draw a line saying this is where "learning" ends and "work" begins. Organizations cannot afford to separate learning from performance, simply because that distinction does not exist.

• Flawless execution: Many organizations and L&D functions are good when it comes to planning on paper, but falter during execution when faced with unanticipated challenges. Navigating these challenges and staying on course to make sure the initiative/s reap the desired outcome is absolutely essential to their success.

• Measuring the impact of learning initiatives: Finally, there has to be data to support that the initiatives have really been successful and effective. And measurement does not refer to surveys asking users if they liked the "training," rather, it involves measuring the impact of the initiative on business results, because that is ultimately the goal of learning. Measuring often, but appropriately will also gather data that will help quantify "success" and generate more stakeholder buy-in for future initiatives.

References for link & images:

https://www.td.org/Publications/Magazines/TD/TD-Archive/2014/10/BEST-Intro

https://freedomtwo.files.wordpress.com/2013/08/learning-org-1.jpg

http://sosleadership.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Executioncartoon.gif

https://beyondlean.files.wordpress.com/2010/11/dilbert-105395-strip.gif

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/DilbertData.gif

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjwTfMKIkX03ev5bpgJoNiEQILfSqE8GmoJjLg8RHtj9VOboQ0WVcBr7Ljxnwj-vcxhjwweNzriTukBs8O4WDYBFaN4ovg1PzlJP0-SOYAUkeksRctxt_F2puH8xLCTyEzMo9DbYIFFFv-m/s1600/mistakes5.gif

Book: The Fifth Discipline by Peter Senge

Learning Checklist for Fostering Meaningful Conversations in Teams

The Merriam-Webster¹ dictionary defines conversation as "an informal talk involving two people or a small group of people" and "an oral exchange of sentiments, observations, opinions, or ideas."  The word "meaningful" as defined by Merriam-Webster ¹ dictionary is "having real importance or value." From a team perspective then, meaningful conversations would mean "an exchange of sentiments, ideas, observations, or opinions that have importance or value." Note that I have deliberately left out the word "oral" and you'll see why later in on. Since we are focusing on fostering meaningful conversations in teams from a learning perspective, it becomes inevitable to discuss team learning.

Image 1

According to Peter Senge, Team Learning2 is one of the five disciplines for building a Learning Organization and involves using the skills of reflection, inquiry, and dialog for group problem solving and learning. Senge stresses on an organization's and group's ability to reflect collectively. However, just reflecting is not enough, there has to be collective dialog, what he refers to as reflective conversations. He even goes on to distinguish between discussion and dialog. Discussion is suggestive of a back and forth of ideas, where "the subject of common interest may be analyzed an dissected from many points of view provided by those who take part." However, in a discussion there is a sustained emphasis on winning, where one person's views are partially or completely accepted by the group. While discussion is valuable to a team to gain varied perspectives, it does not serve the purpose of team learning as well as dialog, which is "a free flow of meaning between people," and allows for a larger pool of common meaning, which cannot be accessed individually." The various uses of dialog as noted by Senge are:

• Gain insights that would not have been achieved individually

• Access a larger pool of common meaning

• Explore complex difficult issues from many points of view

• To make individuals the observers of their own thinking as well as to observe the collective nature of thought

These collective insights and contexts are what make conversations meaningful for a team.

Image 2

Another great tool to foster team conversations is Appreciative Inquiry3, a model for organizational development and change developed by David Cooperrider, professor at the Weatherhead School of Management at Case Western Reserve University. Based on the assumption that "every organization has something that works right," Appreciative Inquiry focuses on discovering, understanding, and fostering innovations in social organizational arrangements such as teams and processes. Instead of negation, criticism and spiraling diagnosis, there is discover, dream, design and destiny. One can see why Appreciative Inquiry can help foster meaningful conversations in teams.

Image 3

Besides the above, of course mutual trust, respect, a positive environment and belief in individual and team potential will form the basis of meaningful conversations in teams.

References:

1 https://appreciativeinquiry.case.edu/uploads/whatisai.pdf

2 http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/conversation

3 http://www.soapboxorations.com/ddigest/senge.htm

Images credits:

Image 1: http://gregorme.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/shutterstock_193983560.jp
Image 2: http://image.slidesharecdn.com/cmabrigopaarlnbwforum-131211230642-phpapp02/95/libraries-as-learning-organizations-25-638.jpg?cb=1386803368
Image 3: http://www.hr.ubc.ca/learning-development/files/AIdoc.gif