Heretics, skeptics, and cynics: your ideal business partners!

Art Kleiner has written The Age of Heretics, celebrating those who are loyal to our organizations but see reality somewhat differently. Günter Grass wrote Aus dem Tagebuch einer Schnecke, celebrating, among other things, skeptics and questioners. Now the TP! Wire Service points to Working best: Cynicism not always workplace hindrance by Bill Repp of the Organization Development Group.

For more on the topic, see The importance of a focus on disconfirmation, Skepticism revisited, and Skepticism, numbers, and making sense.

The Age of Heretics: a review

I'm writing about a new book today, but first I have a disclaimer: I know the author, Art Kleiner, because I was on an extended panel discussion he led on organizational heresy that resulted in a small section of The Dance of Change: The Challenges to Sustaining Momentum in Learning Organizations. He and I have kept in touch from time to time since then, and he provided me a review copy of this book.

There. That's out of the way.

Art Kleiner has published a second edition of The Age of Heretics: A History of the Radical Thinkers Who Reinvented Corporate Management (J-B Warren Bennis Series). The executive summary: if you're in business, if you lead a business, if you consult to business, if you ever have thought of ways to make business work better, read this book!

Perhaps you read the first edition. So did I; I think I recommended it for the company library where I worked at the time and read it there. My recollection is that I liked that version, but I like this version so much more. Perhaps it's his new version; perhaps it's my added experience since I read that first edition (I no longer have easy access to check). Even if you read the first edition, read this one, too.

A heretic, in Art's view, is someone who simultaneously holds great loyalty to the organization to which they belong and a vision of a new truth the organization has yet to see. He has written about the evolution of organizational heresy by way of mini-biographies of archetypal heretics. There are too many for me to summarize, so let me simply refer to one as a way to whet your interest and to indicate what I think of the book.

I first discovered Chris Argyris's action science around 1992, about the time I began work with a group that eventually turned into a true high-performing work team. I had read The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization
and discovered reference to Argyris's work. As is often my custom when I read of new ideas, I like to find the original to learn more (perhaps I owe that to Dr. Malcolm R. MacPhail of Rice University, who would give extra credit in quantum mechanics for our reading related, primary research in its original language and writing summaries).

I picked up one of Argyris's books, probably about 400 pages long, and began to read. By the time I had read 50 pages, I had determined both that it was one of the most important books I had ever read and that I didn't have a clue how to apply its ideas. I kept reading.

At the same time, I was working with—managing—a team that had serious intra-group communications difficulties. I'd practice what I was discovering in meetings I held with them. Then I would come back to the book and try to discover where I had gone wrong. After a year or two of weekly meetings as experimental labs and after reading perhaps seven, eight, or more of Argyris's books, I discovered that the application of action science can facilitate breakthrough improvements in group productivity. I determined that action science has certain attributes:

• Action science requires great skills at discernment to see important incongruities in words that can help us improve our abilities to hold productive discussions in the presence of disagreements and even conflict. It also offers approaches to help us build our capabilities in discernment.
  
• Action science is a revolutionary approach that upends normal work cultures and offers the promise of real, revolutionary gains in productivity.
  
• There's an ethical principle that permeates action science. It's vitally important for each of us to find it and internalize what it means to us. That was, I think, central to my eventual understanding and use of action science.
  

Action science was perhaps the hardest material I've ever learned (even harder than some of the technical material I learned as an engineer). I think it was only the long, intense action research approach of reading, studying, reflecting, and doing (and often failing) that enabled me to comprehend and internalize it without a mentor or teacher.

Most books and articles I've read about action science (Bob Dick's and Tim Dalmau's Values in Action is a notable exception) attempt to make action science approachable, incremental, and easy to do. As important as some of those books are, I've come to the conclusion that those who see action science as anything but earthshakingly revolutionary and demanding of great personal courage and discernment have missed (or are hiding) the point.

Why this discussion? Because Art is the first writer I've seen who conveys that spirit in his description. He, like no other I've read, made that essence come alive. While you won't learn how to practice action science in the pages he devotes to Argyris's work, you may come away with a better impression of what it can do for you and for groups with which you work. Reading his words in conjunction with other material on action science may help you develop a deeper understanding and better practice of the approach.

Art did much the same for each of the heretics and their heresies throughout The Age of Heretics. He neither shied away from their warts nor downplayed the essence of their contributions. That has helped me put many past business and management developments into context, and that is why I recommend it so highly to you.

Now go read it!

Essential systems thinking for managers

This could be entitled "Lessons from teaching system dynamics."

As you may recall, I taught a graduate course in system dynamics at the University of Washington last winter, and I'm scheduled to repeat that course next winter.

While I won't write about that class nor about the systems thinking class I'm co-teaching at Bainbridge Graduate Institute, I wanted to note a few things I have come to think may be at the core of "systems thinking," at least in the system dynamics sense, as a result of thinking heavily about this in the process of teaching others:

• It's very important for people to understand that many of our problems are caused by the systems we create, not by externally-imposed actions. Understanding feedback ideas seems central to grokking that concept. Incidentally, grokking that concept should bring a bit of humility to each of us, and it also opens up possibilities: if we create our own problems, then we have some control over fixing those problems. That's a lesson worth remembering.
  
  
• Causal loop diagrams (CLDs) can be a key tool for making sense of the systems that create the problems we see. Better than that, their dialect, influence diagrams, as described by Geoff Coyle and others (for example, see SYSTEM DYNAMICS MODELLING: A PRACTICAL APPROACH), can be even more insightful and can replace stock and flow diagrams.
  
  
• While I'm not a fan of the "systems archetypes" you may have seen in The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization, there's a lot to be said for understanding what structures and what behavioral patterns are tied together. I don't mean understanding as in textbook knowledge; I mean understanding as in seeing the one and viscerally understanding the presence of the other. Can you look at data (for example, business results), find the pattern that contains the data, and use that to find the structure that likely caused the data? Can you see how to change the structure to make the data be like you wish? If you have the structure in front of you, can you work the other way to estimate the type of behavior you might expect to see? Can you test your theories through simulation or through comparison with real-life situations?
  
  
• Recognizing the difference between stocks and flows is every bit as important as I've written about before. Add to that being able to calculate mentally the changes you'll see in a stock, given the changes you're creating in a flow (mental integration, in other words), and you'll have a better understanding of the impact your actions may or may not have.
  

I came to the conclusion that understanding these ideas well would go a long ways towards helping anyone think more insightfully about tough challenges. Getting there isn't trivial: it seems to require a bit of math and a bit of simulation experience, and having a lot of both seem to help. By themselves, though, math and simulation aren't sufficient; this requires a lot of thinking.

What I'm coming to realize is that having people with these (and other) skills in the management meetings of our companies would be a great help. Instead of just arguing points based on best (unaided) intuition, someone might look at the data and draw some provisional inferences. Someone might think seriously about the type of structure that might have created that data pattern and look for evidence of it in the company and its environment, sketching and discarding diagrams as they go. People might understand the likely effect of interventions based on the current and proposed structure.

Many of you who read this may be able to do all of this already, and that's great! Is it helping you in your work? I hope so; it should.

Others of you may understand when you see others do this but not be able to do it yourself. That's okay; that's why Facilitated Systems is here. If you want to discuss whether your organization might benefit from these ideas, contact me today.

How to get ahead

"I love a challenge!" Those are the words of a young boy quoted by Dr. Carol Dweck, the Lewis and Virginia Eaton Professor of Psychology at Stanford University, words typical of the mindset that, according to her research, helps people achieve more, a mindset, she claims, we can learn and we can teach.

I found Attribution theory and Shreddies today, that led me to Guy Kawasaki's "The Effort Effect", which led me to The Effort Effect and to an interview with Dweck at Tech Nation. A bit more Googling turned up How Not to Talk to Your Kids.

If you manage people, if you teach students, if you raise children, or if you have responsibility for your own contribution and results (there: that should cover everyone who reads this!), read and consider her ideas. If her research is good (and, while it seems to be, I do encourage skepticism as part of learning), consider how you can apply her ideas in your work and life.

Why few organizations adopt systems thinking

Russell Ackoff wondered about that in his blog posting today. More than just considering that question, he wrote of ways we can learn to learn more effectively from the decisions we make.

He closes with a request that we end our published articles with a statement how we intend to affect the behavior or thinking of the reader. Here's my list for this short posting:

• I want to get some of you (and me, more of the time) to try his Decision Record idea. That's very related to the learning logs Bob Williams and I developed, with extra emphasis on our decisions not to act. It's very related to a idea from Peter Drucker mentioned on page 101 of Effective Change Management Using Action Research and Action Learning: Concepts, Frameworks, Processes and Applications
• I want you to ask me if I use jargon in ways you don't understand. If you don't understand something, it's likely others didn't, either. It may even be that I didn't understand it, at least not well enough to get my point across. Perhaps we'll all benefit by your asking a question either in a blog comment or by email or phone.

Thanks!

Calling your shots before you make them

In straight pool, you have to call your shots before you make them.

That's a smart approach for working with system dynamics simulation models, too. Most people showing simulation models to others have likely noticed that you can show a person a simulation model result and often get the response, "Sure, that's what I expected. What's the big deal?" If you ask that same person to "call their shot" (draw a graph of the expected behavior of key variables) before you run the model, though, you and they will often discover they won't have a good record of predicting the outcome. That's not because they are dumb; it's because nonlinear feedback systems of the sort in which we usually live and work exhibit behavior most of us find rather unintuitive.

So do I suggest you do this to make people feel foolish? Not at all. I suggest this to help them (and me) learn. When any of us sees a result and says "What's the big deal?", that person likely hasn't learned from the experience. When we call our shots in advance, using our best insights, and then compare our prediction with the results of a simulation, we often learn one of three things:

• Perhaps our current insights are pretty decent after all, and we can be even more confident in our future predictions.
  
• Perhaps our insights aren't so good, and we can use the discrepancy between our insights and the simulation results to hone our intuition.
  
• Perhaps our simulation model is wrong, and we can use the discrepancy to build a better model of the problem we're facing.
  

There's more to this than just working with simulation models. As Bob Williams and I describe more fully in chapter 10 ("Learning Logs: Structured Journals That Work for Busy People") of Effective Change Management Using Action Research and Action Learning: Concepts, Frameworks, Processes and Applications, there are great benefits to be gained from calling our shots and then comparing those shots with what happens in real life. Done carefully, that becomes an action research approach to getting things done while simultaneously learning how to be more effective in the world we live.

Peer assists

Action learning has long had a process known as learning sets to help people develop the understanding they need to address their own problems. Now Bellanet and the University of Ottawa have described something quite close to this in a short Flash session on Peer Assists (also available in French). (Thanks to colleague Nancy White of Full Circle Associates for the lead.)

I've found that journaling can be a helpful adjunct to such a process. Perhaps the learning logs Bob Williams and I created may be of help to you. As a bit of practical advice, I've also found that it helps to inject new ideas into your thinking, either by reading or listening, while reflecting through journaling and working with a learning set.

If you're interested in studying action learning or its close cousin, action research, check out the excellent, free, online (asynchronous) AREOL course offered twice a year by Bob Dick. AREOL 25 begins February 2007; sign up soon!

Listening: how I started doing project retrospectives

When I became software quality manager at my former company, responsible to help improve the software development process so our products would make our customers even happier, I realized that reading up on processes used elsewhere and then telling the software engineers how to do their work would be a quick route to becoming excluded and ignored, but what else was there?

I was a member of the then-active arlist-l mailing list, and I took the action research notion of a learning set to heart. I went to a project team and offered to facilitate project retrospectives. I'd listen, I'd take notes, I might ask a few clarifying questions, and then I'd summarize and publish the notes.

It seemed very important simply to listen, and it seemed very important to produce summaries that were useful, approachable, and complete, so each report started with a 1-2 page summary and action plan (theirs, not mine), followed by a more complete transcript of what seemed like key quotations from the tape I made as data. That is one of the few circumstances in which I have taped sessions, for I wanted to make sure I reported their words and not my interpretation.

The first retrospective or two were published both in paper form to all project members, project managers, their managers, and the R&D manager and in electronic form on the internal 'notes' (USENET) system.

After a couple of retrospectives with various teams, one project team said they were tired of repeating the same problems in each project. Could I help them figure out how to change? We agreed that I'd take weekly data, this time from a short survey, and feed that back in the same manner.

Without giving you the entire history, I listened, asked clarifying questions, and summarized. They spoke, read, and changed. That work, coupled with a few other initiatives, began to make a real, noticeable difference in the development of products, their quality at release, and the timeliness of the releases. Product release decisions, which had been big, important events, became more of a check-off, for there were no longer surprises, at least with project teams which had made heavy use of retrospectives.

As evidence of the magnitude of the change, a project team member came to me one day, incensed that a project manager leading another project accused her team of lying on their retrospectives (I don't think that project manager's teams took me up on the retrospectives offer). He said that no project could run as smoothly as their retrospectives had shown. While I would have wished that his projects had tried them, too, and I would have wished that he hadn't accused the other team of lying, it did make clear the distance we had come with a very simple approach. That was the start of my work doing retrospectives.

How is your organization learning from past experience to improve in the future?

"Just listen to your heart"

On the surface, it's not a good week for rational thought, at least judging by my reading. First came Blink : The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, Malcolm Gladwell's new book, to talk about how our quick judgments often are better than our careful ones. Then I discovered Die Intelligenz der Gefühle in the Goethe-Institut's Markt online, which points out that our gut feelings and intuition may do a better job in many circumstances than our logic and reason. Often we're better off sleeping on major decisions to let our unconscious process things.

This article points out that, when reason and gut feelings diverge, it's a signal to try to understand the reason for the difference. It also points out that reason can keep our gut feelings in line, preventing us from doing really dumb things, and it can help us develop our gut feelings. So I guess I'm seeing a common thread, all unified around the action research cycle of acting and critical reflection, around the interplay of gut feeling, intuition, and reasoning.

I think I'll go sleep on it.

Business cycles (no, not those cycles)

blink is Malcolm Gladwell's recent book on how we think "without thinking," as he says.

The Logic of Failure is Dietrich Dörner's explanation of the logic behind bad decisions we make.

Gladwell writes about improv groups that can put together seemingly unrehearsed sketches or plays on the spur of the moment. In fact, they rehearse the process intensively so they can react well on the fly. That sounds a bit like business; no matter how much we plan, reality always seems to have little surprises for us.

Dörner shows how our unaided mental processes let us down in certain situations and how the use of computer simulations can help us improve our understanding and ability to make good decisions over a wide range of situations. Simulations should improve our ability to react well when we don't have time for extended thinking.

Two books, similar story. There's a time for action, often without much time for reflection. There's a time for critical reflection, that period when we review what has happened and plan for the future.

The ability to practice can help in the critical reflection phase. Sometimes we can practice with others; actors and speakers do that. Sometimes we may find simulations effective. How often do we in business do that?