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.