Questions to Ask When Starting a New Job

There was a very timely article by Michael Watkins in the Harvard Business Review a few days ago titled "Questions to Ask When Starting a New Job."

I decided to spend some time with the five key questions mentioned in the article and apply them to my context, which of course, turned into a map.  I have not yet started this job.  Therefore I anticipate that the map should evolve. In fact, I have a long list of questions ready to be asked and my plan is to continuously come up with new questions to feed a very hungry continuous learning plan.

If you've been here before, you know the drill, you can't read the map unless you open it in a different window.  Click on the map and the magic will happen.  

And I should revisit maps 28 and 29 which offered two visual approaches to "First 100-days on the job:  Map Your Experience, Optimize Your Learning." 

Quantification Bias

"Give me one example of a  time when a lesson learned was used effectively by a project."
You'd think one example wouldn't be too hard to find.  I'm not being asked "What's the percentage of lessons in the database that are actually applied?"

Then someone will also ask, "What's the ROI of lessons learned activities?  Does it save us any money?  How many failures have lessons learned ever prevented?"

This eternal conversation is one that I'll admit I've avoided at times, perhaps because it's just challenging.  It's challenging to provide an answer that will satisfy the person asking these types of questions.

I've addressed metrics in small bites throughout the years, most recently in a metrics anecdote post. Quantifying "learning from experience" is daunting.  Sometimes I almost want to say "I know it when I see or hear it."  In fact, it's more likely that I'll notice that a lesson has NOT been learned, when I'm having a déjà vu experience during a lessons learned session and I'm hearing something I've heard multiple times before. I could point Management to those lessons that keep coming back.  I've done that informally.  I have not kept quantitative data.  I can't tell you how many times it's happened in the past year.  I could, however, do a more thorough job of documenting specific instances AND perhaps even more importantly, figure out why it's happening again.

The answer to "why are we not learning this lesson" is never a simple one and it's usually not a single point failure and easy to fix problem.  Sometimes, as I've pointed out in the previous blog post, the root cause of the failure to learn is related to the ownership of lessons.  Making sure Management is aware of the repeated problems isn't the end of it.  In my experience, nothing I bring up to Management is completely new to their ears.  However, in the knowledge manager's role, I also facilitate dialogue between key stakeholders, including Management, through knowledge sharing workshops.  The topics selected for such workshops are typically based on recent themes emerging from lessons learned session.  And so we try to address the pain points as they emerge, but I'll confess that we don't quantify any of it.  Correction, we do the obvious of counting how many people attend the workshops.

There is a general quantification bias in many aspects of work and decision-making.  Everyone wants to make decisions based on evidence.  In most cases, evidence is taken to mean hard data, which is understood to be quantitative data (as opposed to soft, qualitative fluff), as if hard data was always correct and therefore much more useful and reliable than anything else.  The words "evidence" and "data" have now been completely associated with quantitative measures.

When people say "where is your data?" they don't mean what are your two or three data points.  That's easy to dismiss, it's anecdotal.  The more data points you have (the bigger your dataset), the more accurate your conclusions must be.  Under certain conditions, perhaps, but certainly not if you're asking the wrong questions in the first place.

I recently came across Tricia Wang's TED Talk, "The Human Insights Missing from Big Data."


Given that Ms. Wang is a data ethnographer (very cool job!), her point of view isn't surprising and given that I'm more or a qualitative methods person, the fact that I find it relevant and relate to it isn't surprising either.  That's just confirmation bias.   Ms. Wang brought up the quantification bias, which I have often been struggling against in my work.  It manifests itself in questions such as "how many hits do you get on the lessons learned database" or "how many new lessons were generated this past year?"  These (proxy measures of learning) are the simpler questions that have (meaningless) quantitative answers.  Is having a meaningless quantitative answer better or worse than saying that something can't be measured.  I should never say "that can't be measured."  It would be better to say "I don't know how to measure that.  Do you?"

I wouldn't suggest we should all turn to qualitative methods and neglect big data.  We should, however, do a better job of combining qualitative and quantitative approaches.  This isn't news.  It's just one of those lessons we learned in graduate school and then forgot.  We learn and forget just so that we can relearn.

My own bias and expertise stands squarely with qualitative approaches.  It could be simply that my first degree being in political science, I always have in the back of my mind that decision-making isn't simply a matter of having access to information/data to make the right decision.  It's part of what makes us human and not machines.

The Art of Focused Conversation (Book 22 of 30)

Title: The Art of Focused Conversation: 100 Ways to Access Group Wisdom in the Workplace
General Editor: Brian Stanfield


In a previous post, I mentioned facilitated group reflection activities.  These are group conversations that are facilitated with a specific purpose in mind, and that purpose is to reflect upon what has happened and what can be learned from it. The groups are gathered to reflect on a common experience, which allows for group learning and not just individual learning. Sometimes, there is also a proactive element to the conversation and as the facilitator, I may ask, "given what you've just learned, what are you going to do next?"

This book takes a broader approach to conversations and helped me broaden my understanding of the value of facilitated, focused conversations.  People in general do not want to attend yet another meeting, especially if you tell them that it's going to be a "conversation".

As a side note, I created a series of events which I purposefully called "Critical Knowledge Conversations" rather than the more standard Knowledge Sharing Workshops.  It takes time for the vocabulary to change in an organization.  When people RSVP for the events, they're still calling them workshop or training sessions.  Once they've attended a couple of theses conversations, they understand the difference.

Getting back to the book... a quote:

"Besieged by information overload and seduced by knowledge from books, tapes, and the Internet, many people -- especially in their work lives -- suffer the tyranny of data, feeling the loss in the form of the fragmentation and alienation of their relations with one another.  More and more, people appear to have forgotten the value of wisdom gained by ordinary conversations.

But, at different times in history, conversation has been regarded as an art form -- a crucial component of human relations.  Conversation has the power to solve a problem, heal a wound, generate commitment, bond a team, generate new options, or build a vision.  Conversations can shift working patterns, build relationships, create focus and energy, cement resolve." (Back Cover) 

I've found that in the process of facilitating conversations, there is a danger of becoming group therapist.  Perhaps that's a good thing, as long as you're prepared for it.  The conversations can have a therapeutic impact on the team.  This can happen perhaps simply because some individuals were finally able to say something they've wanted to say for months and couldn't say in a regular staff meeting.  I consider that a secondary benefit.   My goal is to get the team members to talk to each other so that they can help each other articulate their thoughts and insights.

In a typical session, the team members start by addressing their comments to me, they are looking at me as I stand with my flip chart and write key comments.  Ideally, within the first 15 minutes, they start talking to each other and almost forget that I'm in the room.  Then I only need to stop them once in a while to redirect, repeat to make sure I captured an idea correctly, ask a question to clarify something that was said, ask if everyone agrees, and keep the conversation moving.  Often, the team members will start talking in circles and I have to stop them and ask, "So, what's the lesson?  What do you want other teams to know?  What should they do differently?"  If enough of the team members have already participated in one of these group reflection sessions, one of them might even interrupt the conversation and ask "what's the lesson here?"

I could write a lot more about what I've learned in 9 years of facilitating these sessions but the book is a great source of practical guidance for a much broader range of work-related group conversations, an excellent resource. Another useful resource is Michael Marquardt's Leading with Questions.  When facilitating a conversation, asking the right questions the right way is critical.   Leading with Questions is also a great way of getting Results Without Authority.

From a KM perspective on conversations, I would highly recommend Nancy Dixon's blog, Conversation Matter.  Nancy's blog is also a great example of what I would call a substantive blog because each post is really a short, very well written essay.  Of course, David Gurteen in inescapable on the related topic of Knowledge Cafes.  Note that Gurteen recommends knowledge cafes be scheduled for 90 minutes.  I wonder if that's a limit on cognitive loads for optimizing conversations. In my own experience, if the conversation is still going after 90 minutes, people are either repeating themselves or they've drifted into action planning.

This is all quite difficult for an introvert, by the way.  I find it difficult to facilitate these types of conversations for more than 90 minutes.  It's extremely energy draining because of the focus it requires and the need to be very quick on your feet in analyzing the conversation that is ongoing and acting quickly to manage it. It requires being "in the moment" as much as possible rather than in your own head.  I can analyze a conversation to no end after the fact, but with experience, I've learned to do it much better on the spot.  It's still extremely draining.  I come out of these sessions both hyper and exhausted, as if I had finished a half-marathon.

TO DO:

• There are 7 general types of conversations highlighted in the book.  Pick one in each category, study it and find an opportunity to APPLY it.  If any useful insights emerge, blog about them.
• Develop a presentation on group conversations from two perspectives: 1) How to facilitate effectively; 2) How to participate effectively (individual perspective/PKM).

Related Topics/Resources

• Leading with Questions: How Leaders Find the Right Solutions by Knowing What to Ask, by Michael Marquardt
• Storytelling - see The Springboard (Book 6 of 30).

What is it that we are not learning?

An interesting question was asked of me recently.  What is it that we are not learning?

I was giving a presentation about my work over the past 9 years helping projects document their insights and lessons from experience and facilitating knowledge flows across projects and across the functional areas of the organization (project managers, scientists, engineers).  One of the questions I was trying to answer was "Are we a learning organization?  Are we learning?"

My answer was "Yes, but perhaps we're not learning fast enough.  We're not adapting fast enough to keep up with rapid changes."  I was trying to emphasize the dynamic nature of knowledge and the fact that knowledge flows and the learning process itself are becoming more important than ever, whereas static knowledge assets are becoming obsolete more rapidly.

A member of the audience asked, "What is it that we are not learning?"

I can identify two situations where we are not learning:

• First, if we define learning as changing a behavior or a process as a result of a lesson and the lessons is really only LEARNED when some action is taken, Identifying the correct action is not always simple. Getting agreement on that action is not always simple.  Getting the right people to take action is not always simple. In short, the assumption that once a lessons is identified it can easily be translated into action is unrealistic in many cases.  

• Second, there are many unknown unknowns we are not paying attention to.  What is it that we are not seeing?  These things are not even on our radar.  One way to try to discover/uncover these is to involve experts in other fields who will see what we are doing through a completely different set of lenses, using a different frame of reference.