I was wrong and here is what I learned

How often do we say "I was wrong"?  I know I don't do it that often and when I do, I'm likely to brush it off as a small error in judgment, giving myself a chance to move on quickly. I am rather good at self-justification and denial when it suits me.  We all are.

After reading Matthew Syed's Black Box Thinking, I followed up with Mistakes Were Made (but not by me), by Travis and Aronson, both of which inspired the following question which should be asked of job applicants:  "Have you ever been convinced of something only to change your mind when confronted with evidence that you were wrong?  Tell me about it."  It's an interesting alternative to "tell me about a time when you failed at somethinig?"

I was wrong and here is what I learned.

Based on my interpretation of past experience, I was convinced that a Pause and Learn session (group reflection activity) is best implemented with minimal preparation on the part of the participants.  The standard process involved a planning meeting between the session facilitator (me) and the point of contact within the project (typically the project manager or his deputy) to idiscuss who should be invited to the Pause and Learn session and what the key topics or areas of focus might be.  While the standard Pause and Learn questions are generic enought to work in 90% of Pause and Learn session, the fact that they are so generic can throw people off a little.  With some advanced knowledge of the project's experience and key topics to be addressed during the session, the facilitator is better able to guide the conversation without necessarily mandating that the specific topics be addressed.

It is also not unusual for the project POC during that planning meeting or even before that meeting, to inquire as to what he/she needs to ask the participants to do to prepare for the meeting.  I generally respond that while they should obviously feel free to think about their experience, what they've learned, what went well and what could have been done differently, they do not need to prepare anything. My fear in this context has always been that each attendee would come ready with their individual lessons in PowerPoint format and the session would turn into a dozen or more individual presentations of individual lessons.  These types of presentations do not lend themselves to discussion or group learning.  Once something is written down as a lesson on a PowerPoint chart, it is more difficult for anyone to dispute it than if someone makes a point verbally within a conversation.

For these reasons and the fact that the No Preparation method is what I was taught by the Chief Knowledge Officer when I was still in training mode with regards to Pause and Learn sessions, I have consistently tried to dissuade teams from doing written prep-work.  

I have also, over the years, learned to be flexible. My role is to help the projects document their lessons, not implement a rigid, standardized process.  Some projects have done just fine documenting their lessons without my support, implementing their own process.  

A couple of weeks ago, I was approached by a project to conduct a Pause and Learn session and I could immediately tell based on early email interactions that the team was planning on doing some pre-work. Two positive points here:  1) they approached me.  I didn't have to chase them down; 2) they are volunteering for some extra work and they obviously take this very seriously.  

My initial instinct was to convince them not to go that route.  Finally, meeting face-to-face with the project POC, we came to an agreement, openly discussing my reservations about the approach and coming up with mitigation strategies to ensure that my concerns would not materialize but they would have the benefit of pre-work. 

* While each of the participants would prepare some written materials, these were meant for discussion and each participant would need to prioritize their lessons.  There would be only time to discuss 2-3 key lessons per person.

* No specific file format was mandated.  The draft lessons came in as PowerPoints, emails, Excel spreadsheets, and Word document.  No template for documenting a lesson was mandated or even suggested, Some came in the form of well-thought out paragraphs while others followed a standard template with a lesson title, context section, lesson description, and recommendation section. Allowing people to articulate their lessons freely without too many format constraints is important at this stage.  That's a hypothesis more than a fact.  One could also argue that it's difficult to reconcile different formats and interpretations of what a lesson really is unless a standard format and template is provided to all. 

What happened?

I gained confidence in the approach when I saw the initial draft lessons learned coming in ahead of the session.  There were a lot of high value lessons for discussion.

Throughout the session itself, the Project POC played a key role in helping me to control the flow of the conversation so that we would keep moving and not lose momentum in rabbit holes.  His intimate knowledge of the existing team dynamics were particularly helpful.  Whereas he knew when someone's silence was perfectly normal and expected, I didn't.  Whereas he knew who was going to wander off with tangents and he could stop them early, as an outsider to the project, I didn't.  

This high performance, highly disciplined team proved to me that this new approach could work very well.  Would I recommend it for every team?  No, but it's definitely an option to consider.

Lessons/Insights/Recommendations

• It is possible to change one's mind even after it has been made up, but it does take some work. It's uncomfortable. Being open minded and flexible means being willing to reconsider assumptions and prior experience -- without completely ignoring prior experience, hence the uncomfortable tension.  In this case, open discussion of the potential drawbacks of the approach, and active mitigation (both in the planning and implementation of the session) were very helpful in addressing my discomfort/anxiety.
  
• Be willing to experiment with new approaches, and treat these experiments as serious opportunities to learn.   If the new approach works, ask yourself questions:  Why/how does it work?  Under what conditions would it work/not work?

Mapping Your Speech

I've been a member of Toastmasters for a couple of years.  During that time, I've used a number of methods for preparing speeches, including notecards, fully developed and highly polished text, slide decks, and maps.  I find the map to be the most effective method for quickly developing an organized speech and a set of notes that will fit on one piece of paper.

Here is an example of a map I developed for my latest speech.

Click on the map to open as a larger image in a separate window.

Depending on the intent of the speech, the map can also become a handout for audience members.  A much simpler map around the same theme could also serve as outline for an hour long workshop, allowing audience participants to start thinking about developing their own learning plans.

Uncertainty vs. Ambiguity

I wrote an article for an internal organizational newsletter recently about ambiguity and decision making in the context of project management ("Ambiguity, Decision Making and Program/Project Management," pgs. 22-24, The Critical Path, Winter 2016).  The impetus for the article had nothing to do with current political issues, but now it keeps coming back to mind.  The point I was trying to make in that article is that our aversion to ambiguity makes us dismiss ambiguity rather than force us to tackle it with critical thinking.  It's a cognitive bias we need to be more aware of.

People keep saying that we don't like uncertainty, but what they mean to say is that we don't like ambiguity.  What we are facing with the Trump transition are conditions that resemble ambiguity rather than uncertainty. Uncertainty can be characterized by known risks and probabilities associated with those risks being realized. Ambiguity is characterized by unknown risks and an inability to come up with the probability of various outcomes being realized. When faced with known risks and probabilities, we have risk management analytical tools that allow us to assess the risks and deploy various strategies to address them.  With ambiguity, we tend to hide our heads in the sand, which is never a good idea.  Ignoring a challenge because we don't know how to address it doesn't make it go away.

Regardless of our individual political affiliations, we need to acknowledge that what we are facing is an ambiguous situation rather than an uncertain situation.  Critical thinking skills will be at a premium.  Sharpen your minds!

The Entrepreneurial Learning Curve in a Context of Effectuation

This week I came across the concept of entrepreneurial effectuation in a MOOC taught through Coursera by Phillipe Silberzahn.  A key concept behind "effectuation" is that rather than conduct thorough market studies to develop a very detailed strategy and business plan, entrepreneurs tend to launch themselves into the unknown (and sometimes the unknowable) in order to co-create new products and services by working closely with stakeholders, viewing clients almost as partners in the co-creation of new markets.

I wanted to try to elaborate on the learning aspect of this approach, which isn't emphasized in the MOOC.

In the traditional entrepreneurial approach, a great deal of learning happens in the planning phase, as she searches for all the data available about the existing market for the types of services or products she wants to provide, and the data she finds might actually redirect her ambitions towards specific services and products, abandoning an initial idea based on the data collected.  Learning in the planning phase has a huge impact on the strategy eventually being deployed and the nature of the business plan to be implemented.

In the context of effectuation, market research is assumed to have limited value and could constrain the entrepreneur's creativity and ability to develop new markets.  Instead, the critical factor for success is the entrepreneur's ability to learn from its early efforts and evolve the approach, developing the services and products over time and continuously learning and improving.

I would argue that an entrepreneur is therefore engaged in intensive action learning in the early phases of her adventure.  While the intensity of the learning may diminish as the "successful approach" emerges, the learning habit remains and continues to serve the enterprise well over time.

I don't think the entrepreneur has to completely abandon the traditional approach.  There is value in developing a tentative business plan and learning from other's failures and successes in the market she is interested in.  The key is to acknowledge the plan's weaknesses in terms of the assumptions being made and inadequacies of historical market data.  In addition, keep track of ideas that might have been too quickly dismissed by the narrow analysis of the current market.  Effectuation promotes the creation of new markets which could not have been easily predicted by traditional market analysis.

In short, here are a few steps to follow to integrate a strong action learning approach in the entrepreneurial adventure:

1. Develop a plan, but don't treat it as set in stone.  Psychologically, it can be useful to have done some work, to feel a little more prepared, even if the unknown and the ability to create a new path, develop a new market is precisely what attracts the entrepreneurs.

2. Plan for regular reviews, plan to pause and learn, with your key stakeholders.  It's easy to get pulled in all kinds of directions and try many different routes but at some point decisions have to be made about which path is truly going to be successful.

3. Don't become complacent when success is on hand.  Keep learning, improving, creating.