Teamwork
Going for the Gold
By now many of us are working through the withdrawal symptoms of POSD, or Post Olympic Stress Disorder. The quality of coverage keeps ratcheting up every time, particularly with the clarity of HDTV, bigger screens, and cameras suspended in truly agile systems. I am amazed at how the athletes perform at levels that continue to redefine what is humanly possible and just how little the difference is between the first and the fifth placers … often a fraction of a second. High performance is redefined.
The human interest stories take a peek under the hood and into histories revealing that the road to high performance is not easy, ridden with adversity, overcoming pain, loss and, a host of challenges. Hours of practice and more hours to build capability under the watchful and critical eyes of coaches deliver world class fitness. That fitness enables world class performance wherein the medal is but one definition of winning.
What rings very true is the recurring theme that fitness precedes performance. It is as true in sports as it is in life and particularly in the world of business. Achieving sustainable business performance does not come from buying tools and handing them out with “how to” manuals and books, on-line streaming, or the overused cheerleads of “You can do it!” It comes from relentless hard, focused, effort pointed towards a goal that demands excellence, not trying hard. High performance will always demand focus, discipline, and follow-through.
How fit are our organizations to compete in races where competitors are improving rapidly? Are the standards of high performance outpacing our fitness to keep up, win, or just catch up? Years ago I was speaking with a former Olympian who coached our high school gymnastics team. He was sharing what it was like and how his coaches set goals. He said, “John, for many years the standard for this event was set by the East Germans. Year after year, the kept raising the bar, literally. We would watch and believed that we would become winners if we could jump as high as the East Germans were jumping. Our coaches would not settle for such low goals. Our coaches demanded that we jump to the height that would beat where the East Germans would be jumping at the next Olympics or world event.” The bar is always moving.
High performance is a slippery slope, one that a former world ice skating champion learned all too well last week. Capability is now set dynamically by the moving requirements. Often, by the time we find out the requirements, it has moved again. For those who lock down requirements very early the development or innovation process, the planning rigidity will result in missed targets, oops, it moved. Ask the telecommunications providers who deliver 3G, particularly iPhones, what happens at high concentration events like football games …. Hmmmm … the models don’t always anticipate ….
Some say that the tea leaves foresee an improving economy, perhaps the beginnings of better times ahead. These leaner times have been an opportunity to build better fitness, better capability to compete.
- How prepared are we?
- Are we jumping to the heights of the last competition or where the competition will jump tomorrow?
- Have we overcome the adversities and come out stronger, or has performance obesity found a way to ride out the storm?
- How do we measure and determine if our fitness will win? What motivates us?
- What do our coaches demand from us?
- What does focus, discipline and follow-though look like, and feel like?
- Do we compete as individuals or as teams?
Love that Potential!
A long time ago I studied engineering, mechanical engineering. I loved the subject and the lenses it brought. It was and is about transformation, solving problems, creation, leverage, and making new things that work and making old things work better. Engineering teaches how to open the hood on what we observe and appreciate the many systems at play when something happens or doesn’t happen. Later on, when I studied business, the engineering lenses were very helpful again, but now I could apply the business lenses to the engineering world and, wow, I could really see great stuff happening.
I recall several lectures on the subject of energy, particularly the contrasts between potential energy and kinetic energy. Basically, potential energy is work that we’ve done (force stored in a bottle) that is in a state that can be used to work we want to do (make something go or move), kinetic energy. Some may bristle at this folksy definition, but it will do for now. The battery in our car has potential energy stored that can be unleashed to turn a motor to start our car. When the car is running, it turns a generator that sparks the plugs (so that we can use the potential energy in the fuel) and returns some energy back to the battery for storage. Our bodies do the same thing with what we eat. By the way, if we let the battery stand around long enough it drains and loses the potential energy inside (sort of leaks out slowly). All the potential is gone and has to be recharged or replaced. Use it or lose it.
The business lens is the same isn’t it? We hire, develop, train, build capability and skills, staff up, put money away, and buy all kinds of equipment and supplies, right? All of that has lots of potential. Why? We do so use it to start and run our processes, projects, and respond when necessary. We make it kinetic! In doing so, we trade the deliverable for another type of potential energy, money. The cycle goes on and on between potential to kinetic and then again, but not always. We tend to waste lots of kinetic energy in activity that doesn’t produce something. We also leave lots of potential underutilized, and if it goes too long before we use it, we may find it as useless as a dead battery.
So,
- Do we know how well we build our “potential energy” within the enterprise?
- Where is that potential stored? Is it available and convenient?
- How much potential is leaking out and becoming unusable?
- Do we buy or build too much potential? Do we know?
Living in Florida, we need to prepare for hurricanes. We store potential in batteries, fuel, food, even a generator. If you ask me where they are stored, I would have to show you, because they keep moving from potential to kinetic and replaced with fresh potential capacity. Otherwise, they will be of diminished value when we really need them.
Do we have storms in our enterprises?
Thinka Linka Do
“Divide et impera”, or in English, Divide and Conquer is a phrase that we’ve all heard, many have experienced, and the clever have overcome. Forms of it have been attributed to Philip of Macedon and Julius Caesar and some incorrectly to Machiavelli, who in fact was denouncing it. It speaks to the power of effecting fragmentation, disintegration and dissolution of unity as a means to overcome adversaries or as a means to break down tough problems. Many problem solvers apply the technique, sometimes inappropriately to systems issues.
As a business practice, divide and conquer has been the effective stick that clever folks have applied to groups of competitors. The tool has been effective across almost any competitive environment, be it military, political, intellectual, athletic… endless arenas. It has been very effective when leveraging the shortcomings of traditional communications and transparency to events. But in the world of business, not so anymore. In fact, the world today may often give the advantage to the apparently fragmented, but virtually networked. Yes, the strength can be invisible and the responsiveness astounding. I would pose that a new adage might follow Sun Tzu’s logic and proclaim “Appear Divided, then Conquer.”
Here’s why … the big are always fighting entropy, the tendency towards disorder (it’s a rule of the universe). To those not anally retentive, entropy can be cool, it can be a tool. But to the big, entropy creates variability and variability looks bad. To the big, fighting entropy requires policies, controls, standards, inspections, oversight, hierarchies of non value adding resources, in other words, stuff that adds costs, time, and conservatism. Lots of that is necessary for many processes, but it is never free and mostly builds rigidity. Change comes hard and slow. The rigid can find that they are dead before they learn that they are sick.
When the fragmented could not connect, they became easy pickings. Not a hard one to figure out. In the business world firms typically have what the Japanese call an either “product out” or “customer in” philosophy and practice. Simply, it means that a business has a bias for promoting and selling who and what they have by persuading a customer that it is the best solution, or the business can configure and fit a solution specifically to the customers’ needs and circumstances. A big factor in this game has been bandwidth or resources, capabilities and talent. So there are factors of strategy, solutions and resources at play. Hard to make all the calls right, but historically the bigger had the larger catalog to show. The show of force and one stop shop can be a powerful tool to instill an image of reliability and capacity to a prospective client. But the bandwidth, capacity, catalog and resources have a cost. It’s a trade-off and balance issue. Balance is the operating word. We think of balance on a scale of weights, a static view. Today’s challenges call for dynamic balance, the kind you might see in an agile athlete or a top gun in a fighter jet.
Now … this is not about big is bad or sinister, and little is good. Good and bad have little to do with size, but rather principles and values. This is about agile is good and rigid is bad. Big or small, rigid is bad for the business and the customer. Here is how the game can change!
Never before has the capability to build and operate as a virtual enterprise been greater. The advent of technology is a tsunami of possibilities. The calamities of the recent economic failures have precipitated the freeing up (some call it unemployment) of armies of talent. Those that connect that talent virtually and create networked configuration of solutions can win the game with superior customer in.
Think then link, then think linked!
Lots to think about on this one …. Because agility is within reach to the big or the small. It’s less about size and more about paradigms and practices.
What do you think? How are you linked?
“Ouch! Labor Hurts!”
Yesterday was Labor Day in the US. When I was growing up, it was usually a milestone close to the end of summer and a signal that back to school was here. The contributions and needs of labor did not weigh into my view or feelings about the day back then. They are a big deal today and weigh heavy. The US Department of Labor describes it as “Labor Day, the first Monday in September, is a creation of the labor movement and is dedicated to the social and economic achievements of American workers. It constitutes a yearly national tribute to the contributions workers have made to the strength, prosperity, and well-being of our country.” I have to say that yesterday did not evoke the celebratory intent described by the Labor Department.
Today is really different in lots of ways for the labor force (force is gone as an appropriate noun). There is adequate coverage of the calamities, sea changes, and outlooks to send appropriate shivers across our economic spines. But today’s outlook is very asymmetric and unstable. That means that its impacts are not so bad for some and terrible for others. It also says that the future is more dynamic and unpredictable, such that those who are inflexible will suffer much more. Today is multi-polar in a flat world. Today precipitates sufficient anger and emotions to feed the political dreams of some, elevate fear for others, and generate too much fodder for spectators in newsrooms to provide confusion disguised as news. I won’t comment on the plethora of macroeconomic efforts in play because they provide little in the way of addressing some of the fundamental issues concerning me about the future.
The issues that frighten me are about the extent of inbred rigidity we may have created thorough specialization, division of labor, business controls and the underinvestment in thinking, flexibility, and agility. Somewhere in the evolutionary mess of the relationships and rules between enterprises and workers (of any collar color) we may have become very good at what we “don’t do this or won’t do that” because of function, classification, grade, pay scale, university degree, time in grade, rank, floor, size of office, legacy, traditions, preferences, and an endless list of restrictors disguised as value adding rules. We have compounded the rigidity with a significant yoke of added controls and compliance requirements that address fears much more than the real risks requiring attention. I suspect that the temptation to resist hubris has been too great for some and has led otherwise good leaders into instruments of harm to enterprises, investors, human resources, and society. Maybe it’s time to rebalance and redefine how to play in the sandboxes?
This coming year is chock full of opportunity. It is likely to belong to the ones that replace the better mousetraps with alternatives to mice needing to be trapped. I believe that we are in a great time to get better at replacing “me” with “we” across historical boundaries, perhaps redefine competition, controls and truly leverage the boundless power of our connected and networked world. For one, the images conjured up by using the term “labor” to describe human contributors compartmentalizes a continuum into categories. It breaks up continuous systems into attribute systems, creating unavoidable disconnects.
There is opportunity in every storm.
- How should we harvest the ones ahead?
- How do we move from rigidity to agility? What about the ones that can’t? Won’t?
- How much of the burden belongs to me and how much to we?
- Can we overcome nostalgia or the desire for justice and face the challenges of reality?
“Band of Brothers”
In their book, “The War for all the Oceans”, Roy Adkins and Leslie Adams give us a journey through the eyes of those participating in the battles for dominance of the seas during the Napoleonic Wars. Filled with firsthand accounts, the lens yields a brilliant view into and from within the players that created that history. It is a gold mine, full of insights and overflowing with unfiltered reality.
A must read chapter is “Battle of the Nile.” For me, it resonates with the importance of knowing your competition and your real estate (where you are competing), planning, innovation, and most of all, empowering your team to win. It also serves as a vivid example of how much the rigid controls of an adversary created wonderful opportunities for execution with agility and surprise. Our controls and predictability become the tools for our competition to overcome us. This is a point that September 11, 2001 made painfully clear to the world and those guardians blind and surprised.
An interesting insight is the origin of the term battleship; from line-of-battle ships. The important part of the name is the line-of-battle part. As you likely know, ships would form a tight line across from the enemy’s line and blast away until one was destroyed or retreated. It was a strategy with high consumption and high control as a business approach. It meant that bigger was better, more guns beat fewer guns, and the business model was pretty much set. Horatio Nelson thought that these paradigms of naval thinking might create an opportunity, and agile one.
I highly recommend at least a Google journey through that battle. In brief, the French were lined up for battle, just off an island in the Bay of Aboukir. With their backs protected, guns and staging were all set facing outward where the British fleet would set up for the fireworks. Night was approaching and conventional battles were fought during the day, so there was plenty of time before conflict. In brief, a group of the British fleet split off from the anticipated formation and navigated behind the French line. They did begin firing at night. The results were catastrophic for the French and legendary for the British. The successful event brought into use the term “Band of Brothers” for the fighting men (Shakespeare deserves the credit for the term. It comes from the wonderful soliloquy of Henry V on St. Crispin’s Eve before the Battle of Agincourt, another must read)
The Battle of the Nile is all about today. It is about our businesses and enterprises. It is about the proposal we are writing through this weekend. It asks us about our strategy and organization to go to market. It warns us that what made us strong yesterday makes us vulnerable tomorrow. It begs us to read Sun Tzu and to anticipate the unthinkable. It tells us not to forecast the actions of others with our own lenses and spyglasses, but look at ourselves from the outside, as customers and competitors do. It reminds us that capability in the hands of those to execute coupled with empowerment to adapt (do an OODA Loop) is essential. In fact, it is precisely what Storming Norman Schwarzkopf did in the first Gulf War.
So, do we want to get in line?
“Go or Check, Mate?”
Chess and Go are two games that require a real time combination of strategic, tactical and analytical skills to master. They have military emphasis, with conquest as an objective, but are worlds apart in terms of what how success is measured, and consequently, how the game is played. To masters of the games, my discussion may be an oversimplification.
Chess origins are still under debate, but many sources trace it to India around the 6th century AD. It moved on to Persia and the name Chess comes from Shah, Persian for King. The objective of the game is to kill the opposing king, Checkmate, a derivation of Shāh māt, Persian for kill the king. The chess pieces have evolved over time and the ones we know today bear a very European characterization. (The most notable, and most powerful character, is the change from the Vizier, or Wizard, to the Queen, the character closest to the King). It is a game that has interesting features that have implications for play far beyond the board. It is one where pieces have specific roles and rank, both defining what they can do and not do. Pieces can move only in restricted directions, determined. This is not any different than engineers can only do engineering; accountants can only do accounting and so on and on. In chess, it is strictly forbidden to change how individual roles can behave. The game typically follows a path of mutual destruction and high consumption of resources. Winning requires the destruction of the competitor. Degrees of freedom are lost through consumption and positioning.
Go is a game originating in China around 2500 BC that has spread and evolved across the Far East. All pieces are identical and there is no differentiation in roles or functions. The objective of Go is to capture the maximum amount of territory and competitor pieces on the board. The game also includes strategy and tactics, but more so around the placement of pieces. Go is also a game of war, but very different in philosophy. Given that the objective to capture as much territory and opponents, it also includes the goal of doing so with the minimum number of pieces placed in the least amount of time. In Go, consumption has a cost, and efficiency has rewards. The objective is not to destroy and remove from the board, but to capture.
These games provoke questions about the influence of how the way we perceive the games we play in business drive our strategies. Do we have consumption paradigms that require incremental spend for incremental progress? How far ahead do we think through what our decisions will be and to what extent do “degrees of freedom” play in our choices? Does an objective of capturing a competitor drive different thought processes than destroying the competition? What level of externalities does capture versus destruction deliver to society?
There are countless books about the parallels between military strategies and business strategies. For me, there appear to be three complementary and symbiotic strategies:
- Conquest (Project)
- Occupation (Process)
- Abandonment (Exit and waste removal)
Any one of the three requires the other two as part of the decision. We pay a high price when we decide and execute with only one in mind.
Shall we play?
“Hurry Up and Wait!”
This morning I was traveling. It was a long flight, but the flight crew made great time. In fact, the pilot announced that we would be in a half hour early, at the gate. Great news! I could feel those around me perk up at the news. We landed smoothly and proceeded to taxi to our gate, when we stopped. Yes, our gate was still occupied. Other gates were open, but ours still had a yet-to-depart flight. The airline knew we would land earlier as did the air traffic controllers. I’m glad for that part. Yet, we had to wait 20 plus minutes. In fact we did not “arrive” on time. Been there? It gets better.
I had to check my bag, so I waited at baggage claim, and waited some more. The video screen indicated that all the bags from my flight were delivered, but no bag. The friendly and very helpful agent at the baggage claim office indicated that my bag had been unloaded from the plane, so it was at the airport. I followed her as she went through several checks, then I waited while she tried to sort out my mess. As I waited, five other people asked if she was checking on the same flight as their bags had not arrived … while we shared frowns, one bag showed up, then a few more started showing up. It turns out that our flight had two loads to deliver, but cleared the video as complete after the first. Been there? It gets better.
I exited the terminal and crossed to where the car rental bus picks up the renters to shuttle us to a central hub. The line was about a half city block long! I had not seen a queue that long since the long security lines of 2001. I asked another individual in line about the cue when the person in front of me said, “Oh, it’s Monday. It’s like this every Monday.” I responded, “There’s a Monday every week! Why haven’t they figured this out by now?” So, we waited. Then two buses showed up together. Once we boarded our bus, the driver was burning calories helping folks get on, taking their luggage and endeavoring to get us going, with a great attitude and demeanor.
Three in a row. Coincidence? Luck? Memorable? I was glad that I did not have a meeting to run to. All three were examples of great people doing their job with energy and focused on their customers, but in virtual isolation from one another. By now, this stuff is not supposed to happen. I am certain that these organizations all have, by now, invested millions of dollars in process improvement strategies, , and lots of mapping up, down and across their individual enterprises. So why do still see disconnects and short circuits?
Who is accountable for my end to end travel experience? Who knows about what happened today? Was this captured in a record, metric or log? Do the car rental companies that rent space at the hub know what was going on at the pick-up end? Who was the process owner responsible for wait queue length and time? Did anyone follow up with the baggage handlers about how to clear a delivery posting?
How about our enterprises? What would our customers say about us? Do we execute as a coordinated relay race without dropping the batons? Are we getting better or slipping?
If we are finding out about our disappointing service from reading blogs, what’s in store for us?
How many times am I likely to tell this story?
“It’s Not Your Problem!”
Travel mess-ups happen. If you’ve been on the road for some time, you accumulate enough stories to play one-up-on you with fellow road warriors. My wackiest experience was when I and a customer were in Suriname (Dutch Guyana) and had to get back to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil for some important business. Unfortunately the local airline “decided” (no reasons were ever given, apparently) they were not going to fly to Rio for an undetermined number of days. We had to get to Rio, really had to get there, and the prospect of an extended stay was not a very pleasant option to pursue. My customer’s travel team got us to Rio, creatively, but painfully. We got there by way of Amsterdam and Paris. Yep, we went around the city to cross the street. It was a bizarre experience, but it has given me the winning zinger story when comparing travel tales.
But the across the ocean to get over the rainforest is not my favorite travel story. That one took place in Scotland. When I was doing work in the UK, in the mid 1990’s, weekends were a wonderful opportunity for short trips to new destinations. Travel and hotel deals were incredibly affordable, particularly when they included some of the top hotels in the promotional rates. One such weekend, the destination was Edinburgh, a jewel of a city in Scotland, replete with sights and single malts. The flight to Edinburgh was short and uneventful. After retreiving my checked bag, I took a cab to the Caledonian Hotel, or the Cally, on Princess Street in the heart of the city. The Caledonian is wonderful. It breathes and feels traditional and is a keeper for me. It has lots of outer and inner architecture and elegance and lots more to boot, service, really great service.
The check-in process was smooth and, upon reaching my room, began to unpack. That is when the “all is going so well” changes to “oh crap” in a flash. I did not recognize any of the stuff packed in my bag, particularly since I was not anything close to a cross-dresser. Mind you, my bag was pretty unusual. I had not ever seen another like it. So, with the bag zipped up, I took the lift down to the lobby and crossed it ready to hail a cab and return to the airport. Halfway across the lobby, a staff member spotted me and very nimbly approached and asked if there was anything amiss. I explained my calamity and before I could ask for help with cab, she smiled and said,”Sir, you are at the Caledonian. That is not your problem anymore, it is ours now.” She then gently took my bag and continued with, “It is a beautiful day outside and a great time for a walk around the city centre. I’ll have a shaving kit sent up to your room for you to freshen up. When you get back from your walk, we should have this sorted out.”
Wow, I really love surprises like that one. It is among my top three customer service stories to share. I felt like a guest, the most important guest, one who should feel like little things should not interfere with my stay because “you’re at the Caledonian.” I’ve had very good travel calamity recovery experiences over the years. I’ve had upgrades, baskets of goodies, free meals, all done as a means to overcome a shortcoming on the part of the venue, and most done smoothly. I attribute all that great recovery effort to sound management and well executed training, empowerment and great people at the facilities. Nothing for me has topped the sheer agility and proactive hospitality I witnessed at the Cally.
I have reflected over the years what it was that was so memorably remarkable. I’ve concluded that it was that the staff at the Caledonian approached any customer problem as an opportunity for a truly positive guest experience. My problem was not one with the room size of comfort, faulty faucets, missing towels or any other execution shortcoming by the hotel staff. My problem, becoming their problem, was that my customer experience was going to be less than what it could be at their place. The folks at the Cally took to heart the importance of the total customer experience, long before consultants were selling the concept.
I’ve heard the phrase used in films, “Your enemies are my enemies.” I will suggest that the better phrase for all of us who serve customers should be, “Your problem is not your problem anymore, it’s ours.”
So, … “what’s your problem?”
“The Summer of 69″
It was the summer of 1969, a hot, balmy Miami midsummer night, and I was between high school graduation and my first quarter at college. For me, the summer of 69 represented a big transition from the euphoria and fun of one phase of my life into the passageway to the next filled with uncertainties and high expectations. With many friends going in different directions the coming fall, including some in new uniforms to Southeast Asia, the memories of that summer remain, vivid and reflective. That particular night was July 20th, forty years ago today, and the night that many of us heard the phrase crackling over the TV and radios, “The Eagle Has Landed.” That day man stepped on the moon. That day, science fiction became mankind’s science fact, and a sea-change of what we believed we could achieve as people took place across the world.
It all had started many years earlier, with a wake-up call given to us, by our loss in 1959 of the first leg of a race to space to the Russians. In fact, they won it before we knew we were really racing. The real race, the one against ourselves and our fears, began May 25, 1961 with John F Kennedy’s wonderful visionary speech to Congress (See the “Fly Me to the Moon” posting). We won that race, not just we as the US, but we as a society that had learned to find a way for both the public and private sectors to set a shared goal and reach it, overcoming those real and imagined impossibilities, those created by constraints in knowledge, technology, and paradigms. Other big challenges waited, including the greatest example of business and leadership agility in modern history, the Apollo 13 rescue (coming soon to this theater near you…) That fall, I started my undergraduate studies in aerospace engineering at Georgia Tech.
The world we know today, one filled with lifestyle defining technologies, GPS, the web, and personal gadgetry, had its infancy in the very same work places and laboratories that launched those modern day Flash Gordons and Buck Rogers. Some know the very people who tackled those challenges. Today we face some pretty stiff challenges. We face problems that tap into our fears and have demonstrated that they too can redefine lifestyles, currently for the worse for many of us. But, we should remember that 40 years ago we put a man on the moon! With the right vision, leadership and shared purpose, problems were then, as the are now, springboards for not only solutions to problems, but springboards for unbounded innovation for the common good.
Whether we serve in the public sector, private or both, we are lucky to live in this time of challenge. We do not have a constraint in the quality of DNA needed for overcoming this challenge. We have a challenge in how we energize and focus a call to arms between the many needed to solve problems and create new value. Many years ago, a much wiser colleague asked me during an engagement with an important customer, “John, are we trying to be right, or are we trying to be helpful?” As we look within and across our organizations, how are we facing our challenges?
- Do we face one another across the table with the tools of PowerPoint and FingerPoint?
- Do we sit all on the same side of the table and collectively face a shared challenge?
- Do we as leaders set the tone for our teams to motivate them to “be right” or expect them to “be helpful”
- Do we believe that what we see as insurmountable is truly a real “it can’t be done?”
I think I can hear Neil Armstrong, “One small step for man…”
“That’s Not What You Wanted?”
Have you ever played Gossip, the party game? It’s simple, great fun, and revealing. In Gossip, the participants line up in a row or a circle and the first player is given a sentence, or better yet, a number of sentences to memorize and then “whisper” the information to the next player in line, who then whispers the information to the next. The whispering continues until the last person then reveals to all what the message was, followed by a reading of the original message, word for word. There is almost always an astounding change in the message between the original and the final. Not only was the message phrase different, it very likely changed completely in meaning as well. Did you ever wonder?
- Who in the chain changed the message? How many people changed the message? “Who should we blame?”
- Why did the players change it? “Why didn’t they follow instructions?”
- How did the change take place? Was it the meaning or a the actual message? “What kind of goof-up was committed?”
- How much did the change in the message matter? “What would the last person do with the message versus the first if they required action to be taken?”
- At what point was the “phrase” at risk of changing adversely? “When did we get into trouble?”
Retracing the transformation of the message and meaning may have proved nearly impossible. It was fun at the party, but is it fun when it happens at work?
So, now ask, do key messages and meanings change within, up, down, and across our organization? Do we experience substantive differences between what is intended and communicated to what is eventually interpreted and subsequently executed? Do we know if, where, how, and why these changes in message and meaning take place? How does the intent of direction get disconnected from the actions and results? Do we find out after it is too late? Who is impacted? Does it include customers?
Perhaps one of the more frustrating challenges to executives is the extent of the “disconnects” that exist within the organization. These disconnects mean the sometimes large difference between what the leadership intends that be done and what is actually getting done. Whether the view is down and up the hierarchy of objectives or across the structures and functions within processes and projects, these disconnects can result in no results, poor results and the wrong results too often. The extent of the pain may also be compounded by the language, format, compartmentalization, and perspectives that business plans, budgets and policy edicts can precipitate. If we listen, like a fly on the wall, we can hear how language and focus change as we move through the enterprise.
It is fascinating just how much organizations, functions, departments, teams and projects develop their own language. Words, slang, and acronyms take on meanings that are derived from group history, culture, business environment, and functional disciplines. These often redefine to how success and failure are evaluated across an enterprise. As we move across or down an organization, as the nature of execution changes, so do the verbs and nouns change and the language that supports those activities. What we do affects what we say and what words mean, and the words affect what we do. When you hear terms such as “making our numbers” as a surrogate for performance, they don’t necessarily mean the same thing from one group to the other.
So, do we have a way to knowing:
- How do the objectives that we ask the enterprise to accomplish change in language (verbs and nouns) as they are translated down the hierarchy from intent into actions? How is the Voice of the Business change into the Voices of the Processes and Projects?
- How do the goals and requirements change as we move across the organizations between and through the different functions and departments in our processes and projects? Do they resemble the Gossip game?
- Does the language of our tools and planning and control processes translate well into the language of execution?
- Do we have a dynamic Rosetta stone for the bridge between Engineerese and Accountantese, or better yet, Customerese?
- Did we miss something that mattered? Was it an opportunity, compliance requirement, customer problem? Oh my!
- Who should we blame? It’s a people problem, isn’t it?
