Problem-Solving Facilitation

I (James Lucas) just sat through a conference that was so excruciatingly boring it could be used either to produce medically induced comas or to get terrorists to talk.  It was advertised as a problem-solving, solutions-oriented, strategic thinking conference.  This is akin to calling the clown-stuffed car at the circus “thoughtful entertainment.”

The problems with this conference were legion: no new thoughts, no takeaways, no meaningful discussion.  They actually thought they could spend 3-4 hours doing “breakouts.”  Now, a breakout can be a good thing, if there has been content given to set it up, if there is a thoughtful exercise, if there is time to discuss the topic thoroughly, and if the report-out is well done.  That’s a lot of ifs, though, and these facilitators hit none of them (we have seen very few facilitated sessions that hit all four of these, but this one was special). 

The exercise, with no setup, was to have each person at a table fill in an “absurd” solution to a given problem on a 4-quadrant page.  Then these sheets were picked up and handed to people at another table, who were told to fill in a less absurd follow-up to the absurd “solution.”  Then back to the first table to fill in the 3rd quadrant with a more reasonable follow-up, and…well, you get the idea.  They gave people 1-2 minutes to do their fill-ins, which minimized actual thought, and allowed no time for discussion at the table, which minimized development of the idea (but maximized disinterest).  Report-outs were handled as a “pick one at your table to share.”  They were as lively as a day at the dentist.

What is this so-called “adult learning method” all about?  Well, like so many of these methods, it’s trying to be cute but it’s too clever by half.  It leaves people and their needs out of the equation, and is more concerned about busywork than about improving work.  It doesn’t matter how your facilitation and breakouts are structured if no one gets anything useful out of it.

At Luman, we have a simple yet sophisticated approach to facilitation.  We start with provocative content, designed to challenge status quo thinking and to get people to give up their illusions and face reality, all part of our Diamond of Excellence development model.  Then we break people into groups based on the content they’ve just heard and ask them to have a wide-ranging, dynamic, no-holds-barred but guided conversation.  We tell them that each group has to come up with at least 5-8 ways to use or implement the content.  And then we have a detailed report-out driven by a facilitator who can add even more to the discussion as it evolves.  Lots of depth, lots of takeaways, lots of interest.

Adults in organizations don’t need “adult learning” methods that simply get people to complete an exercise that has no value to the participants.  The conference I attended today made it even worse by being so incredibly boring, but “interesting yet useless” is still not worth very much.  The key is good adult-learning methodology tied to first-class content. 

If you want rich content followed by rich dialogue, leading to real ideas to improve your organization, Luman has what you need.  But if you want cute and worthless, contact us and we’ll give you the name of today’s conference facilitator.

Italicized terms are trademarked property of Luman International.  All rights reserved.

The Bell Curve – Great Tool for Things, Terrible Tool for People

Bell curves are terrific tools in the right application – for example, in statistical analysis and quality management.

But as so often happens in leadership and life, a wonderful tool for managing things can turn ugly when we apply it to people.  People aren’t things.  They don’t respond in a linear, cause-and-effect way, they have passions and emotions, they can even respond negatively to being evaluated with a statistical tool.  Unlike systems, people can fix themselves – they can lose bad attitudes, stop making mistakes, improve performance, offer creativity where none was even expected, grow and mature.

Bell curves build in artificial distinctions between people.  This person is an A (high performer) or a C (low performer) or a B (okey-dokey performer).  There they are, clearly pegged, labelled, categorized.  But an A can become cocky and arrogant and put our organization at great risk.  They can leave for greener pastures.  They can treat other people like inferiors.  A C can have an epiphany if we haven’t beaten them down and cast their C-ness in concrete.  And a B – classified as average, maybe high average, maybe low average – can resent their status.  They can go be an A somewhere else, or stay with us and sink into the abyss of C-ness. 

Entire performance evaluation systems are built around this destructive bell-curve mindset.  As a leader, even if all of your people are operating at an A level, you can only rate a small percentage as an A.  A lot of A’s are called B, with all of the discouragement and anger that this can produce.  A few even have to be called C, which is worse than wrong – it’s stupid.  A high B can legitimately ask, “What can I do to become an A when I’m already doing everything I know how to do?  Low B’s and C’s can legitimately ask, “What’s the point of working here?”

And why on earth would any leader want a Bell-Curve Organization?  Shouldn’t we want as many people as possible operating at an A level?  We’re never going to get everyone there – there will always be the 5% – but one of the most important differences between good and great leaders is the wisdom to know that you can’t achieve top-tier performance with just 10 or 15% of your people operating at an A level, no matter how good they are.

At Luman, we’ve built our courses and assessments around helping leaders break the bell curve mindset and instead go about Building a Passionate Organization.  You can end up with an S-curve skewed to the right – 95% “all in,” 5% needing to move forward or move out.

Jack Welch gave us a lot of outstanding leadership concepts.  The Bell Curve for People?  Not one of them.  If you’ve fallen for it, you can lose it today.  That would not be too soon.

Note: All italicized terms are trademarked property of Luman International.  All rights reserved.

Sprint, Poster Child for Dysfunctional Culture

Sprint became an early and dominant player in telecommunications.  They seemed to have it all going for them, as they built a headquarters campus roughly the size of Paris.  It turns out that they should have spent that money on fixing their culture and its strategy (culture’s natural outflow).

Since 2007, when the current CEO took over to “fix” the company, the S&P has lost roughly 18% of its value.  Sprint has lost 80%.  Their current “strategy” involves paying $600 for IPhones (over $30 billion worth) and selling them for $200, which should give them a breakeven point around the mid-point of the century.  The board, we’re told, wrestled with this.  The real question is, “Why weren’t they laughing?”  They do have a parallel strategy – suing AT&T over its potential merger with T-Mobile.  You know when your approach to competition is to use the federal government as a hammer on your peers that you are at the ugly end of your life.  As a bonus, they’ve managed to get the approach to lawsuits changed, so the government can now allow, invite or encourage competitors to join in anti-trust suits.

What went wrong?  The same thing that continues to go wrong.  James Carville told Bill Clinton that “It’s the economy, stupid.”  In organizational life, “It’s the culture, ….”  Sprint is notorious for paying people a lot of money to do nothing, creating a non-competitive, entitled culture.  At the same time, it managed to change course and lay off so many people so many different times that it created a personally competitive, fearful culture.  A lot of people with no real voice, fighting to be the last one standing.

Culture is king.  If it is designed well, it can lead to great things as you go about Building Passionate, Thinking, Pure-Performance Organizations.  Smart, experienced people – of which Sprint has had very many – can commit, trust, challenge, innovate, and talk about the truth, all on the way to building something that doesn’t make incomprehensible decisions and take wildly unproductive actions.  I have met many current and former Sprint employees, and I almost always think 2 things: 1) What a potential powerhouse, and 2) What a waste.  Good people get locked into the pay and benefits, even as they get locked into a cultural death spiral.

What’s the solution?  It’s all about what we call Cultural Design.  We have spent nearly 30 years looking at hundreds of organizations and thousands of leaders up close and personal.  We’ve seen what works and doesn’t work to produce a culture that not only yields pure-performance but does it in a sustainable and continuously renewable way.  The Sprint board made the mistake of thinking it was all about marketplace strategy and having a strong CEO who likes to be on television.  But it isn’t.  It’s all about a culture that is so strong, so dynamic, so honest, so intelligent, so focused on results that if there’s a way to win it will find it.

Sprint is a current extreme example of dysfunctional culture, but great leaders realize that the default position on culture is dysfunctional.  Without design, without building in the 40 attributes that define a truly winning culture, as a leader you get whatever human nature can serve up – seldom at its best, often at its worst.   With good design, as long as you have a real market to serve, good results are as sure as the turning of the earth.

Note: Italicized terms are trademarked property of Luman International.  All rights reserved.

Case Studies – The Backward Way to Learn Leadership

For a century, case studies have played a major role in the development of leaders.

The thinking goes like this: Let’s study what happened to a particular organization and see how they responded – what they did right, what they did wrong, what they learned. Or let’s see what aggressive moves a new CEO made to shake up a company. Then let’s try to squeeze some useful ideas and practices out of their experience and apply it to…everything else.

The problems with this are many. One is ignorance. Do we really even know all of the relevant facts? Do we truly understand their context – economy, market, competition, regulation, etc.? What is their culture really like? Is this the whole picture or just a snapshot? Nothing is more difficult than understanding something fully enough to make pronouncements based on that understanding.

Another problem is applicability. Even in the same line of work, what does the experience of a $50 billion/year company have to do with a $50 million/year company (or the other way around)? If it happened even a short while ago, have times changed enough to render their experience much less than meaningful? What is the effect of a different workforce makeup – more or less technical people, or blend of personalities, or spread of ages?

A third problem is confusion and contradiction. In many situations, there are case studies that prove a point and others that disprove the same point. Faced with a similar challenge, one organization wins by “sticking with their knitting” and another one wins by “breaking out of the box.” So what’s “right?”

The overall problem with this approach is that it approaches leadership from the wrong end. Instead of finding leadership principles that work over time because they are connected to the real world and to what it means to be human in a team environment, they survey a variety of shapshots and then hope to draw something that makes sense out of the pictures.

At Luman, we believe that great leadership consists of having an array of powerful principles that work in all times and places, along with a toolbox of practices that can be applied and modified as necessary to allow leaders to win in specific situations. We’ve learned that examples can illustrate a principle, but can never create one or prove that it works.

Telling a story about how a leader or organization applied a principle and saw it work can be very encouraging. Telling that story to teach leadership is an exercise in wishful – and backward – thinking.