Tuesday, April 27, 2010

How to Start a Movement - Followers, stand up!

Turns out that tribes, and movements, need followers, not just leaders :)  Having just posted that tribes need leaders (people without role power to step up and promote an idea or a change), I just came across this - that movements need followers!  Of course we know that, but the way that this is presented is excellent (video link below).

Derek Sivers maintains that while the leader is over-glorified, the guy who should get the credit is the first follower, because s/he's the one who transformed that "lone nut", the initiator, into a leader, by standing up and joining in, or joining the cause.

"When we’re told we should all be leaders, that would be ineffective.  If you care about starting a movement, have the courage to follow and show others how to follow.  When you find a lone nut doing something great, have the guts to be the first one to stand up and join in."

Check out this TED video.

Saturday, April 17, 2010

Tribes - They Need Us to Lead Them!

I'm loving this book: Tribes: We Need You to Lead US, by Seth Godin.  The premise is that tribes are groups of people waiting for a leader, someone to identify a compelling goal, to promote it and to convene people interested in that goal.  The leader also has to create avenues for communication between the group members, so that they're talking to each other - and the group takes on a life of its own!  Godin captures the mood exactly, recounting that the Greatful Dead  held concerts "not just for fans to hear their music - but to hear it together."   Brilliant.  There's even a restaurant in New York that only opens once in a while, and you sign up in advance to go there;  people are going not just for the food, but to be with their tribe members!

Godin proposes that anybody can be a leader; it's not about your position - it's about creating something that people believe in, generating exciting ideas - and that can come from any level of a company or organization.  Leaders are people who question the status quo, he says.  How nice to find validation for those of us questioners!

Strategic Plans - collecting dust?

How many times have you heard that a company’s strategic plan is collecting dust on the shelf?   I just heard it again – thankfully this time, the senior staff know that they don’t want to produce another place-holder on the shelf.  They know that they need to focus on implementation, and they need to develop a workplan for ongoing check-ins on their progress.  They understood their mistake in not focusing on implementation - and they needed someone to explain that to them.

Sometimes companies don’t know what they don’t know – so they hire someone to facilitate the strategic planning process, without realizing that this generates a change management process, and that they might need ongoing assistance with change management.  At the same time, it’s incumbent on us consultants to make this clear – strategic planning is just one piece of a longer process, and the company really needs to pay attention to managing the change.  That includes project management, managing the people side of change, and a communications plan, that says who needs to be kept informed of our progress, what they need to know, and how often they need to be updated. 

If we help companies manage the change and implementation, they’ll have more room on their shelves – for the books that we recommend, or that we write!

Setting the Bar High for Organizational Learning

How many CEO’s do you know who keep a daily blog of the workings of the organization, or of a hospital? (see footnote) Can you imagine making public the reflection and problem-solving process in the organization?  What a great example of organizational learning Paul Levy is setting at Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital in Boston.    In a remarkable display of transparency, Levy writes:

Regular readers know that I believe in administrative, as well as clinical, transparency in our hospital. I have trouble understanding why this is unusual, but I know that it is. I just can't imagine trying to solve the problems of an organization and having a common sense of purpose and direction unless everybody is aware of what's going on.

What do surgery and flying airplanes have in common?

Answer: they’re complex systems, wherein no one person can manage all the multiple events, problems, component parts. And, the way to improve the chances of success – successful surgery and a successful flight – is to use a checklist.

In his book Checklist Manifesto, Atul Gawande once again astounds with cutting-edge thinking, making connections between unexpected domains, and presenting tools for improving organizational effectiveness. I’ve blogged about his previous books, Better and Complications – and his new book is a suspenseful page-turner. Did you ever wonder what’s in those black boxes on airplanes, which are used to reconstruct mishaps during flights? Ever wonder who listens to those things and what they learn from them? Gawande is your guide – and then he applies the concepts to medicine. It’s all about learning from mistakes: how can we glean the learnings and apply them to the future?

Friday, April 16, 2010

Shared Leadership... and Balkan Dancing!

Obvious connection, right? ;0  So, I'm a Balkan dancer - these are usually line dances from Bulgaria, Macedonia, Greece, Albania, etc., with one person leading a line of dancers.  These range from the easy, Pravo Horo, to the more advanced, Jove Malah Mome.  Notice in Pravo Horo that the leader calls out a new step - and the dancers, who know the dance, know to change the steps.  These are choreographed dances, so there's a pattern to them - but not everyone knows the steps!  In some videos, you can see the dancers looking at the leader's feet, and they either know the step, or try to figure it out while they're dancing!  To see a lot of people who know what they're doing, check out the Folks Art Center of New England!  (Try this one: 4th Saturday Dance, February 2009, with the Pinewoods Band).

Why am I telling you this?  Because I saw a fascinating lesson in leadership in the dance group that I've been part of for over 10 years.  There used to be 1-2 people who knew all the dances, and the rest of us deferred to them to lead the dance.  That meant that we didn't need to learn them well enough to lead them - we relied on the 1-2 experts.  But if they didn't come one Thursday night, we were stuck! and didn't know when to start or how to lead the dance.  We weren't cross-functional!

Women are circular, Men are Linear :)

Have you noticed that a lot of developmental models are linear?  Erikson’s stages of human development are linear, and women researchers have pointed out that women’s lives, and probably many men's lives!, don’t follow those socially-predicated stages.  We don’t all follow the sequence of  go to college, graduate, get a job, get married, raise children,  and their associated skills : developing trust, autonomy, intimacy, etc.  Many academics who work on developmental theory, tend to think of human development as circular – we go through one stage and accumulate some knowledge and skill, and move on to another stage – and we often circle back through those stages, gaining new insight from the lens of our current level of maturity.  So it’s a lifelong revisiting of those stages, and a cumulative building of those skills.

In a nod to circularity, I was fascinated to come upon the book “The Female Advantage”, by Sally Hegelsen (1995).   From her research with male and female organizational leaders, it turns out that many of the men whom she interviewed structured their organizations in a hierarchical way, whereas many of the women structured web-like, circular structures.

Thursday, April 15, 2010

Asking Doctors Tough Questions

In previous posts I mentioned the issue of getting doctors to wash their hands, and how hospitals are trying to do that - from an initiative to get patients to ask their doctor, to getting nurses to remind them.  So I was quite interested to see this new article from the Wall St. Journal:  Finding a Way to Ask Doctors Tough Questions .

For me it raises the question "Whose responsibility is it to get the Doctor to Wash his hands?"  The organization's or the patient's?  If the organization fails to make this happen, then it seems to fall on the patient.  Is that how it should be?  Is that even the right question?  Or, should we consider this a brilliant solution:  the distribution of responsibility to clinicians and patients?

Wednesday, April 14, 2010

When Deviance is Positive!

Speaking of Handwashing in Health Care Settings…  Have you heard about Positive Deviance?  Deviance in this case means going against the norm and achieving positive results. Sometimes, if things aren’t going well in some departments, you can look around to see if anyone in the organization is having success with that one issue.  If they are, they must be doing something right!  You want to figure out what they’re doing, and then you want to get other people to imitate that.

Atul Gawande is a surgeon in a Boston hospital, and he’s written 2 fabulous books on learning in health care institutions:  Complications and Better.   He describes how doctors, nurses, and administrators can learn – from their mistakes, from surgical errors, from places in the hospital where things are going right.

Tuesday, April 13, 2010

Oops, They operated on the wrong knee…

Did you see that some surgeons operated on the wrong knee of their patient last week? (Feb. 18, 2009, Providence, Doctors & Nurses Disciplined),  NECN said that “After the botched procedure, the hospital began requiring surgical staff to use permanent markers to mark where the doctor is supposed to operate.”   In a similar case  (Surgery) at Beth Israel Deaconess 2 years ago, the patient’s leg was marked and they still operated on the wrong leg.

The Sr. VP of Health Care Quality at BIDMC said “that medical workers used a marker to correctly label the side of the patient that should have been operated on but that, somehow, the surgeon failed to notice the marking…  Perhaps most crucially, the team of medical workers hovering in the operating room neglected to conduct what's known as a "time out" before the surgeon first placed his scalpel on the patient. Time outs are safety procedures that require the operating team to verbally call out, "Right patient, right procedure, right location."

Sunday, April 11, 2010

Using Social Networks for Behavioral Change

If you're trying to immunize people, or to implement a behavioral change, like safer sex, or reducing smoking, how do you apply the science of Social Networks if you don't know what the network looks like? 
The authors of "Connected" put it this way:  It is often not possible to discern network ties in advance in a population when trying to figure out how best to immunize it. (pg. 133)

So they asked a number of random people to name their acquaintances - and then immunized those acquaintances.  Turns out that the people who have many network links are more likely to be nominated as acquaintances, as opposed to those with few links.  So the people who were nominated by the randomly selected people are more likely to be near the hub than the randomly selected people!  Brilliant!  Can't wait for an opportunity to apply this (smile).

Saturday, April 10, 2010

The Surprising Power of our Social Networks

 Have you noticed that emotions are contagious?   If there was any doubt about that, this fascinating book lays them to rest: “Connected: The Surprising Power of our Social Networks and How they Shape our Lives”.  Great explanation of how emotions and moods can spread from person to person.  When I thought about the contagion of feelings, I was reminded of college days when everyone was studying for finals.  I used to leave campus because I felt affected by the panic and anxiety among the students – now I find out that there was a scientific explanation for my behavior!

The authors apply their theory to many fields, including relationships, finance, and health care.   In relationships:  how did you meet your partner?  We tend to marry someone who’s a friend of a friend, or within our extensive social network. 

Friday, April 9, 2010

Have Webinar, Will Travel

In this age of limited resources, companies are scaling back on travel.  But they’re  achieving “virtual travel” by providing web conferencing and webinars!

Have you participated in any webinars or web meetings recently?  If so, you've probably noticed that the field is advancing before our very eyes.  In my attempt to keep up, I started participating in webinars sponsored by various companies, such as publishers and professional associations.  It’s great because you get to see how these things are run.  I’m always interested in knowing:  How interactive are they?  Can the participants speak to the presenter or host?  How do you ask questions?   This exposure is helping me get over the “virtual hump”, and now colleagues are asking me what functionality is out there!

Thursday, April 8, 2010

How many KINDS of People do you Know?

If you were looking for innovative ideas for in your company, who would you ask?  Say, ideas for improving the supply chain.  Where, from whom, would you expect people to get those innovative ideas? 
Turns out someone has done some research on that, as reported in a fascinating new book "Here Comes Everybody - the Power of Organizing Without Organizations", by Clay Shirky.   Shirky describes the research of Robert Burt, University of Chicago, who has written a paper called "the Social Origins of Good Ideas".  (pg. 230-231)  The people with the best ideas (as judged by the managers) were those who had connections to employees outside their immediate department - their social network extended beyond their own departments.  The ideas of employees whose network focused within their department lacked the diversity of thinking and clash of ideas that sparks innovation.

Wednesday, April 7, 2010

Nay to Robert’s Rules of Order!

For those of us trained in participatory meetings and consensus building, attending a meeting based on Robert’s Rules of Orders can come as a real shock.  Here’s a case where the structure itself doesn’t maximize, and may not allow, inclusive conversation, and the decisions apparently arrived at may not be supported by everyone.  It feels constraining to me to define people’s comments as proposals, when we might just be thinking out loud.  Sometimes we need to hear ourselves think, or hear other’s thoughts, and see what the range of opinions could be, before we’re ready to think in terms of a “proposal”, yea or nay.

Tuesday, April 6, 2010

The Art of Intervening

We’ve all been there: someone’s dominating the discussion in a meeting, or the discussion is getting off-track.  What to do?  Does the facilitator stop the dominating voices, or refocus the group?  If not, do you sit there and put up with it?  Chances are you’ve experienced both scenarios.  As a facilitator, I see it these as two of my primary tasks: to rein in the dominators, to make sure that everyone has a chance to speak, and to keep the meeting on track towards its desired outcome.   But ask yourself – is it only up to the facilitator to intervene?  What power, if any, do the participants have?

I’m in favor of shared leadership and shared facilitation;  I think that anyone in the group can comment, and even recommend a shift, in process.  Sometimes the best interventions come from participants.  My students asked me recently for language that we can all use, as participants, to shift the conversation.  Interventions are most likely to be effective when they exhibit the following characteristics:
  •   They exhibit concern for the benefit of the whole group.
  •  They don’t come across as scolding or blaming.
  •  They come from a place of curiosity, and checking if others in the group share our perception of what’s happening.
  •  They come across as suggestions rather than dictating answers.

Wednesday, March 24, 2010

Where Cultural Competence & Organizational Effectiveness Meet

As an Organizational Development consultant, I get to think about how effective organizations are: their staff, their initiatives, their ability to deliver excellent service.  As I’m also trained in cross-cultural communication, I sometimes look at organizational issues through that lens. When I’m lucky, these two fields coincide, as in my visit last year to the administrative offices of a health care organization, where I saw a patient brochure about “hand-washing for doctors”.  You may know that this has been a focus in health care institutions, who are trying to reduce the spread of germs and infections.  This brochure said “Have you asked your doctor if he washed his hands?” 

Can you see anything wrong with this?  There are power issues inherent in this question. For one thing, we tend to defer to doctors, or any authority figure, particularly when they’re wearing  a white coat (or a uniform, or a stethoscope).  Even I, as a white woman, feel a little intimated in front of doctors.   Secondly, when you’re serving people from other countries and other cultures, who may not speak the language well, or who don’t feel fully acculturated, the authority gap is even wider.  They could have saved themselves time and money if they had convened some focus groups on this question (or they could have asked people like me! :)

Monday, March 22, 2010

Facilitative Leadership

Shortly after his administration began, Pres. Obama issued a document stating his commitment to open government and transparency.  In May, the administration invited recommendations to their new website "Open Government Brainstorming".  The organizations who have been involved in the planning of this include NCDD, National Coalition for Dialogue & Deliberation, America Speaks, International Association for Public Participation, and others.  Anyone and everyone can post suggestions on this website.  Here's my recommendation on "Training for Facilitative Leadership".

In order to create a program of dynamic public engagement, elected officials and government staff need training in the process and skills required to be successful – and this is a great opportunity to develop such trainings.

In order to support effective public engagement, leaders from federal, state and city government need to learn best practices for engaging the public, to understand:

* Facilitative leadership: they are the conveners of a process, whose purpose is to gather wisdom from many people. They need to identify and include the stakeholders who have a stake or interest, to help solve a problem that no one agency can solve by themselves. Government officials shouldn’t feel the need to have all the answers.

Sunday, March 21, 2010

What's our Impact??

As group facilitators, we're trained to examine our impact on the group. Skilled facilitators have developed radar that clues them in to how the group is reacting, and they can fix their delivery mid-stream.  We look for these clues in-the-moment, and also verbally check in with the group periodically.  We also ask for feedback at the end of a meeting, realizing that that's the best way to improve our skills.  This is also important to us in our role as change agents or consultants;  working with colleagues provides us a wonderful opportunity to get feedback during a client engagement – it’s a way for us to correct course, and to improve our effectiveness.

What about getting feedback as participants, about our impact on the group?  I’m thinking of workshops or professional development groups, particularly for facilitators and OD consultants. Can we include the opportunity to get feedback for participants in a group?  I think this is more readily done in a multi-day workshop, or in an intact group.  If we’re going to include this, we need to establish an atmosphere of trust and set the context for asking and giving feedback.  We have to set parameters and have people contract with one another.  One rule might be: ask for permission before you give feedback.  Contracting questions include: Are you/ Am I, open to receiving feedback?  From anyone?  Or from a specified person or support group?  Should we set aside a certain time for that?  If we are careful about the contracting, I think this can be done successfully.

Saturday, March 20, 2010

What do they hire us for?

I often ponder the gift that I/ we as Organizational Development (OD) consultants bring to our clients and to groups.  Some consultants come from "the expert" angle, where they think they have the answers.  But I’m convinced that it’s the quality of questions that we ask – skilled OD practitioners bring a talent for drilling down, focusing and helping the client get clarity.  So I was thrilled to come across this blog:

“This makes me think we look to experts more to frame conversation.  Experts ask questions similar to those that are burning in our own heads, but the experts ask sharper questions; the answers we can take or leave, but the questions change us.”

One of the groups that I convene is called “OD and Social Change”, in which we OD consultants discuss a current case from an organization – we kick it around and ask lots of questions, so that we can offer some useful suggestions.  The purpose of the group is mutual learning – for the client organization, and for us practitioners – we learn from the way that we each approach a problem, and from the questions that we ask.  This week we conversed with a non-profit director about his program, and as I reflect on this quote, I realize that we were doing that “asking sharp questions” piece.  What a gift to be able to ask good questions!

Friday, March 12, 2010

Music and Social Change!

We need inspiring stories to stoke our hearts, and these two fit the bill!  These two conductors are using music to promote peace and understanding.  Luis Szaran is a Paraguayan musician who is changing the lives of poor children by teaching them to play music. Daniel Barenboim is the famous pianist and conductor, who created an orchestra of Arab and Israeli young musicians, the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra.  Their concert in Ramallah in 2006 was an achievement that confounded logistics and expectations.  Some of us were lucky enough to hear the Orchestra when it performed in Providence in 2007.
from Daily Good

In "Sounds of Hope," FRONTLINE/World reporter Monica Lam journeys to Paraguay to meet Luis Szaran, a famous musician and social entrepreneur who has dedicated himself to helping redeem the lives of poor and neglected children through music.

Wednesday, March 10, 2010

What if they held a Civic Summit and... People Came?

Two years ago, the president of the City Council convened the Boston Civic Summit, with the builder of the Boston Convention Center, whose center has increased visitor traffic to Boston.  It was an exciting event with 400 attendees, and could have been a kickoff for energetic action.  It was wonderful to see people get excited, brainstorm and share their vision for the city – the kind of discussion that generates great energy that can be funneled into action teams.  Unfortunately, there were several problems, with the design and with the follow-up, that could inform future efforts of civic engagement activities.

For example, the Summit wasn’t sponsored by the city, nor by the city council, nor by the mayor – so it didn’t really have legs: No money, no ongoing support, no connection to projects other organizations were already working on. While the event generated 4 action groups to work on 4 identified action items, those groups needed ongoing support and guidance, not to mention resources. They needed to identify their goals, prioritize them, figure out how they were going to work together, and so on.  Without that support, 3 of the 4 groups did not continue to meet, and the fourth group lost participants as they continued to hold meetings.

Saturday, February 20, 2010

Making Peace with Your Enemy

I have been busy organizing events for  2 peacemakers from Israel and Palestine, who are members of Combatants for Peace.  These are Israeli soldiers and Palestinian fighters who have decided to lay down their arms and to pursue non-violent approaches to resolving the conflict.  Two representatives have come to the U.S. to receive a Courage of Conscience award at the Peace Abbey in Sherborn, on March 13, 2009.

The Palestinian, Bassam Aramin, lost his daughter when she was shot by an Israeli soldier on her way home from school.  He explains that taking a stance of revenge would be the easy thing to do; the harder avenue is to adhere to non-violence, and that's what he has chosen.  Bassam had been in an Israeli prison from the age of 19 for 7 years;  he recounts the dialogue that he had with his jailer, in which the jailer came to see Bassam as a freedom fighter, rather than a terrorist - and in which Bassam came to understand the fear of the jailer and of Israelis.

Yaniv Reshef,  the Israeli,  talks about his experiences serving in the army;   he and his unit, heavily armed from the war in Lebanon, were transferred to Gaza, a densely-populated civilian area where their equipment was inappropriate. They infiltrated houses in the middle of the night, and woke up families.   On one night, their unit of 6-8 soldiers gather up a family in one room, and as they're questioning the family, they hear scratching noises from a nearby cabinet.  They point their M15's towards the cabinet, ready to shoot the terrorist who's hiding there - only to find themselves targeting a family of rabbits that the family raises for food.

Wednesday, January 20, 2010

Obama: Accessing the Realm of Possibility

Bill Moyers recently hosted a conversation on his PBS program with Parker Palmer, author of “The Courage to Teach”, and “A Hidden Wholeness: The Journey Toward an Undivided Life.”  Palmer was describing how the Obama campaign engaged people, the electorate, in telling stories, and in thinking about the possibilities of his campaign. It was, Palmer said, the first campaign where he didn't feel that the candidate was being "sold" to him.  “I was not asked, to buy a presidential candidate as a commodity in a consumer culture... It asked me to tell a story.”

I'm interested in the use of stories in organizations and communities to discuss values, visioning, and determining impact.  For example, employees’ stories that can tell us about the values of the company, and how they fit with the individual; stories that reveal people’s hopes and aspirations; client stories about the impact that an organization’s services have had on them. Stories about hopes and dreams take us beyond the “actual”, they give us access to the right-brain and to our emotions, and they generate energy for future actions. So I was struck by the Telling of Stories, and the Questions about Possibility, that the Obama campaign asked people.