Rethinking The Benefits Of Conversation In Business

Recently I attended a workshop on ‘Implementing Knowledge Cafes‘ run by David Gurteen. The workshop was held in the very pleasant Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA) building near Embankment in London.

I’ve been to a number of David’s free knowledge cafes in London over the years and have also written about them (Arup and BT Tower). They’re always stimulating affairs as well as being excellent for networking.

My interest in the workshop was to get the underlying thinking behind the ‘cafe approach’ and to understand better the real-world applications (these aspects are only briefly covered in the free events). I’d then be in the position to try out a ‘knowledge cafe’ with my own customers eg as a fresh way of addressing a business issue where standard techniques hadn’t worked or were too limiting.

One of the original motivations for developing the cafes was that many business communications revolved (and still do) around slides and ‘talking at people’ and these can often be ineffective. So, motivated by ideas from Theodore Zeldin and others, the productive role of conversations became highlighted.

So, how can we better use conversations for business advantage?

One immediate problem is that conversations are usually not regarded as something critical in business. In fact they’re often viewed as just relaxation or a distraction and thus incidental. This is in marked contrast to our personal lives where conversation can often play a critical role, both for understanding things better as well as for motivation. So there’s an interesting and rather unnatural dichotomy here!

David then went through his set of tools, techniques and experiences to extract value from conversations in a business setting. Very illuminating!

There were a whole host of interesting points but two highly relevant and useful insights for me were:

• It’s very helpful to differentiate between knowing more, understanding better and coming up with solutions and it may be good to focus on each separately.
• It’s crucial to generate an environment where different viewpoints are welcomed and then explored – the best example was the day itself – but thought needs to be given to this as it won’t just happen.

I think this cafe approach and variations on it could have wide application and I’m planning some posts on this in the near future.

As a by-product of the day I started thinking about personal situations where the role of conversation had been especially and consistently productive. The best example I came up with was from my time as an academic. I spent two years as a Research Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Dublin. In my area of research, the main person at the Institute was Professor Lochlainn O’Raifeartaigh.

In hindsight, Lochlainn was permanently running ‘knowledge cafes’ (of a sort) without my appreciating it! On many occasions, I’d turn up for morning coffee (late starts for academics…) and a conversation would start in the kitchen/coffee bar on a research idea that someone found interesting. If productive this could easily carry on for hours with other people coming in, sometimes participating, sometimes just listening and then wandering out (creating a fluid, creative environment).

The aim was to get to the heart of things and not to just dabble on the surface and all views were welcome. I’d never experienced this way of working before and it was quite a revelation (of course there were also periods when you went away and carefully thought things through by yourself).

Lochlainn had perfected this group conversational style – he produced over 200 papers with over 60 collaborators and established a worldwide reputation for his precise and clear thinking. it would be interesting to see how elements of this could be transferred to a business setting.

Picture credit: see here.

Meanies Earn More?

I’m afraid this seems to be the case, in so far as you can actually prove such things – see here:

The researchers analyzed data collected over nearly 20 years from three different surveys, which sampled roughly 10,000 workers comprising a wide range of professions, salaries and ages. (The three surveys measured the notion of “agreeableness” in different ways.) They also conducted a separate study of 460 business students who were asked to act as human-resource managers for a fictional company and presented with short descriptions for candidates for a consultant position. Men who were described as highly agreeable were less likely to get the job.

I can see it now – a new commercial opportunity, workshops on how to be mean!

Picture credit here.

The Big Risk Test

I came across the BBC Lab UK recently in connection with following up some articles and discussions on risk.

The BBC Lab provides an opportunity for anyone to take part in generating ‘groundbreaking’ science. It was launched in 2009 and since then has launched a series of major experiments that can only work with a very large number of participants.

The aim of the Lab is to:

• Create new knowledge
• Use approved scientific methods
• Be secure and anonymous
• Contribute to learning
• Always publish findings

Regarding the last item, here’s an example of a recent publication in a peer reviewed journal, the BBC well-being scale.

The topic of risk which originally caught my attention, The Big Risk Test,  covers:

• Feelings about risk
• Knowledge of risk
• Understanding risk
• Risk behaviour
• Calculating risk
• Appetite for risk

It aims to be the biggest study of risk ever undertaken!

Risk is obviously an important concept as it permeates our personal as well as professional lives, although often in very different guises, so getting a broad overview will be interesting and hopefully very illuminating.

Here’s a short video on risk featuring Prof David Spiegelhalter who is the designer (with Dr Mike Aitken) of the experiment.

Picture credit here - rather corny I know!

Why Is It So Hard To Work At Work?

Jason Fried of 37signals (Basecamp etc) talks about why it’s so hard to get good work done at work.

The reason is distractions of course.

These can be both voluntary (Facebook, Twitter etc where you choose to do something at a time convenient for yourself) and involuntary (meetings etc where someone else decides your time allocation for you). The latter are usually the difficult ones!

He offers three suggestions for starting to make the office a great environment to get good work done:

• No Talk Thursdays (give everyone the regular gift of an uninterrupted block of time)
• Reduce Face-To-Face Interactions (use collaborative software more)
• Cancel Some Meetings Entirely (just do it…)

Appropriately, now’s a good time for making some business resolutions for 2011!

Africa, Aid and Outliers

I recently read a very provocative article by Kurt Gerhardt on rethinking the principles of development aid for Africa, first paragraph here:

Development aid to Africa has been flowing for decades, but the results have been paltry. Instead, recipients have merely become dependent and initiative has been snuffed out. It is time to reform the system.

Money plays a lucrative role, of course, for all sides, but in addition it can cultivate a predominantly ‘numbers’ approach to the issue:

The urge of foreign aid workers to quickly produce results promotes quantitative thinking and gives short shrift to efforts aimed at helping locals learn how to develop themselves. One example of this erroneous notion is the goal among donor companies, adopted 40 years ago, to donate 0.7 percent of GDP in the form of development aid.

It makes no sense to establish amounts before discussing the projects that should be funded with that money. The worst thing about this discussion is that it, once again, is purely quantitative. It feeds the disastrous attitude that more money necessarily means more development. In this way, lessons learned over the past decades are completely ignored.

Instead, people like Bono and Bob Geldof are allowed open access to our governments, where they propagate the “more money” idea — and where they become stumbling blocks to African development.

To be fair, I’ve heard this argument many times before but it seems that now the situation is becoming critical and perhaps everyone is actually prepared to try out some very different and perhaps more politically radical approaches.

In this light, there’s been quite a lot of publicity on Positive Deviance recently (see eg here) as an alternative ‘bottom-up’ approach to some of these sorts of problems.

Positive deviance? It is an awkward, oxymoronic term, but the concept is simple: look for outliers who succeed against all odds. Such individuals are outliers in the statistical sense – exceptions, people whose outcomes deviate in a positive way from the norm.

…

But it is also important that those in authority (e.g., village chiefs, funding NGOs, CEOs, etc.) be committed to giving the process a try. It is a bottom-up approach that entails a leap of faith that, first, those in the ranks below include some with winning strategies and practices and, second, that when the community (not the experts or those in authority) discovers this wisdom in their midst they will adapt it without the usual exceptionalism that thwarts top-down “best practices” initiatives.

Very thought provoking and challenging stuff!

There’s a Basic Field Guide to the Positive Deviance Approach here. The approach is not limited to aid work of course and can be applied to many organisations.

Picture credit here.

Project Lessons Learnt And Shu-Ha-Ri

It’s interesting how the issue of trying to learn from project failures and successes is a somewhat timeless and seemingly generally unappetising and difficult activity, see for example here and here and other posts on this blog.

As an example, take the recent discussion motivated from a meeting at the BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT:

Talking to colleagues, most seem to absorb project management best-practice in the following order:

• personal experience;
• adherence to standards;
• ad-hoc, anecdotal experience of others; and
• published technical literature.

Nowhere on this list are the formal review findings of previous projects’ performance. What’s missing is the opportunity to learn from past experience at a local level, for example in one particular corporate environment or a niche sector.

However an interesting new aspect is to make a connection with martial arts concepts!

The second observation is one of personal development. The realisation that the more experienced you are, the less you know – as your expanding circle of knowledge increases in area faster than your expanding sector of expertise.

An alternative way of expressing this is through the martial arts concept of Shu-Ha-Ri.

This concept describes three stages of learning of a martial art, namely Shu (approximating to -beginner), Ha (journeyman) and Ri (master).

Expressed this way, the Shu-Ra-Hi concept sounds very similar to the more Western-leaning theory of Four Competencies, there is a key difference, that being the cyclic nature of Shu-Ra-Hi. When you reach the Ri stage of any one discipline, you realise the limitations of what you have mastered and are ready to embark to the Shu stage of a related discipline or area of expertise.  This self-reflective realisation is missing from the Four Competency theory (although some have tried to modify it to allow this) and perhaps explains why project managers are reluctant to learn formally from previous projects.

Picture credit: Wikipedia.

Lessons From The OGC

The Office of Government Commerce (OGC) is an independent office of HM Treasury, established to help Government deliver best value from its spending.  The OGC works with central Government departments and other public sector organisations to ensure the achievement of six key goals:

• Delivery of value for money from third party spend
• Delivery of projects to time, quality and cost, realising benefits
• Getting the best from the Government’s £30bn estate
• Improving the sustainability of the Government estate and operations, including reducing carbon emissions by 12.5% by 2010-11, through stronger performance management and guidance
• Helping achieve delivery of further Government policy goals, including innovation, equality, and support for small and medium enterprises (SMEs)
• Driving forward the improvement of central Government capability in procurement, project and programme management, and estates management through the development of people skills, processes and tools.

Recently they’ve published the ‘lessons learnt’ from the (so-called) Senior Responsible Owner role. The SRO is ‘the individual responsible for ensuring that a project or programme of change meets its objectives and delivers the projected benefits’.

Lessons Learned – The SRO Role in Major Government Projects provides a number of recommendations on how the effectiveness of SROs can be improved and builds on existing OGC guidance for SROs. In summary, the SRO role can be made to work more effectively by addressing a number of factors including:

• Better understanding of the role;
• Selection of the right people to act as SROs;
• Giving SROs real accountability and business authority to resolve issues;
• Ensuring SROs have relevant delivery skills and experience, including commercial awareness;
• SROs dedicating sufficient time to the role;
• Improved continuity of the role through the project life-cycle;
• Improved tools, guidance and development opportunities for SROs;
• Provision of adequate supporting resources.

This is an illuminating example as the OGC themselves provide guidance on good project management practice, including capturing and disseminating lessons learnt.

It’s good that the observations are candid but at the same time it always amazes me how key problems can often be highly predictable. It often amounts to putting an inappropriate person in the job in the first place or else not giving them enough support or resources. I’ve seen this happen over and over again.

What will be interesting is to see how they plan to actually make these changes stick in a recession when support and resources will be even more stretched (although at the same time there are likely to be less projects). There never was a time when excellent project management including learning quickly from mistakes was more important!

Your Misatkes Are Valuable

From the Project Management Guide:

But what we should all be trying to do is make sure we are not the only ones to learn from our mistakes. Making sure others in our organisation, or even our profession, get the benefit of our experience is an important part of our professional lives.

So how do we go about this? Well, first of all, we need to recognise when we have made mistakes, when we have not taken the best action in a given situation. This needs a certain amount of honesty, and to be done well, it needs time to really consider the project as a whole.

The best way of doing this is to analyse the project when it comes to an end. Hopefully, the project will come to an end successfully, with the end result we wanted delivered. But it may be that the project has been stopped early, for whatever reason. Regardless, at this point we need to evaluate a number of things:

• Exactly how successful was the project really?
• What actions did we take that helped?
• What actions did we take that didn’t?
• What problems occurred?
• How did we deal with them?
• Were there things we could have done better?
• Were there things we didn’t do that could have helped?

As you can see, there is a lot of ground to cover. You will also note that a lot of this involves honestly looking at your own work. Now, this can be tough, especially when looking at places where we messed up. But it is only by examining our mistakes that we can learn from them.

This should be standard project management practice but often this ‘figuring out what went right and wrong’ gets cut short as staff get quickly moved on to new projects and interest levels and commitment wane. It’s very useful to have a running ‘lessons learnt’ activity going on from the start of every project that incorporates insights from other programmes and projects as well. This is tricky to set up but if done appropriately can yield enormous benefits and a justifiable return on investment.

See also here.

PS Deliberate misspelling of course…

The Role Of Luck In Life And Projects

In a previous post on profiles of exceptionally successful entrepreneurs I mentioned the possible role that luck might have played in their careers and whether this aspect could be better understood.

There are many views and preconceptions on luck and it’s impact eg you often hear, that project succeeded mainly through luck!

We also know from our personal lives that some people are passive and reactive – ‘if it happens it happens’ – whilst others are proactive and try to make their own luck, even sometimes going for long periods without any stunning or inspirational success.

Prof Richard Wiseman has made a study of luck and some headline conclusions are on his ‘luck’ website and there are further details in his book ‘The Luck Factor’ which came out over 5 years ago.

The main claim is that you can actually create a luckier life by following his ‘Luck Principles’!

The first two principles are (with my own comments):

A. Maximise your chance opportunities
This is helped considerably by having a relaxed and open approach to life. One possible approach to this is to say ‘yes’ to most opportunities and then use your gut instinct rather than your logical mind to judge whether it is worth keeping the opportunity going.

B. Listen to your lucky hunches
My biggest successes in academic research were always based on hunches that I followed even though they were niche activities at the time. That was the good part.

However, looking back, a mistake I made was not giving them up when their potential had been more-or-less realised. I should have been more open to competing opportunities! So following your hunches should be never-ending even if things seem to be going really well in any one area.

These two principles are usually easy to convince people of.

The second two principles are not so obvious:

C. Expect good fortune
This is an attitude of mind so not so easy to just adopt!

D. Turn your bad luck to good
Basically this means seeing the positive in any situation and learning constructively from events. This is linked to the whole topic of ‘lessons learnt’ which is a key theme of this blog. This is also, at least to an extent, an attitude of mind.

It’s interesting to speculate on whether this analysis of luck for individuals might apply to project teams as well. Clearly the individual luck of team members is potentially inherited by the project but you also have to get the commitment of the team as a whole to optimally progress any lucky opportunity that arises.

Revisiting these principles in a project context:

1. Be More Aware Of Project Opportunities
In projects there is usually great emphasis on identifying and managing risks and probably to a much lesser extent opportunities. Either way, the team should be proactive and open-minded to chance opportunities and even expect them!

2. Make Space For Hunches
Projects have a lot of logic hardwired into them – plans, schedules, milestones, deliverables and so on. There’s not always a lot of room for benefiting from intuitive hunches so a special place needs to be made in the project framework for this.

3. Expect Project Good Fortune
Acknowledge that you should expect good things to come your way no matter what the starting conditions and resources available and you need to be able to capitalise on this. Having an unduly negative attitude will make this very hard to achieve.

4. Quickly Learn Lessons
Often lessons are not even adequately captured let alone learnt (during or) at the end of projects. This is a major wasted opportunity and should be viewed as such.

In fact it could be helpful to discuss the role of luck and how it can be better changed in project reviews to put a lively and creative flavour on a topic that can sometimes become a little stagnant.

I know this might come over as quite fanciful and airy-fairy, especially when read in conjunction with the recent daunting ‘lessons learnt’ posts here and here but then again maybe not!

What do you think?

Picture credit here.

Heartfelt Story Of A Software Startup

I operate mainly on the Mac platform these days, having made the transition from Windows about 6 years ago. I was attracted partly by the elegance of the operating system (Windows was so damn clunky) as well as the wealth of innovative, unusual and often free applications.

In particular, applications for note taking. This may seem quite an esoteric niche but in all my consultancy and research work I found that taking ‘smart’ notes was something that easily repaid itself.

When I first joined the Mac community there weren’t too many note-taking programmes, now there’s a veritable flood.

In no particular order I’ve bought: Circus Ponies Notebook, MacJournal, Curio, Tinderbox, DEVONthink, Evernote (free version available), Omnioutliner as well as a few others. They all do very good note-taking.

In this category there is also Journler which was originally quite a rising star although sadly it has recently (formally) expired. So what went wrong, especially as Journler still does a really good job if you fire it up now?

Screenshot Of Journler

There’s a heartfelt explanation here – this is an extract:

I attribute the downfall of Journler to its success. As the number of users grew so too did the problems. In response to feature requests the program’s code became exceedingly complex. Bloat crept in. The volume of emails increased to a level I was not able to manage. The forum exploded with activity and I was no longer able to read let alone address every post. The support requirements were becoming too much. I would spend hours helping a user with damaged data. It would take me days to track down an esoteric bug a single user was experiencing which I could not reproduce. I could easily spend all my time on support alone. I needed to hire extra help but was in something of a bind. I was still not charging for the application. I had in fact promised that I would never charge for Journler. But as my job ended I broke that promise and began explicitly to request that users purchase the program.

It’s illuminating to read the whole article, especially in conjunction with a previous post on this blog. A new business is a scary and frustrating place to be, expecially the financial and management aspects!