What is progress?

It's easy to think progress is measured by GDP, trade balances, or the number of things we have; that's what we read and hear about in the news. Yet there's an undercurrent that suggests such views have it all backwards.

The Glaser Progress Foundation has a program area devoted to measuring progress. Go there to see a video or hear an audio of a 1968 speech by Robert Kennedy suggesting that GDP measures all the unimportant things or to research articles they've assembled.

Thanks to Joost Bonsen's Maximizing Progress for the link. Thanks, too, to Cliff Havener and his Meaning : The Secret of Being Alive. I read that years ago, and I'm pretty certain he makes the point that Lord Kelvin was wrong: all the important things—love, peace, faith, art, ...—share the attribute that they can't be measured by numbers. I've looked, though, and can't find the reference; if anyone can provide me the page number, I'd appreciate it.

Food and fuel in the news

DrumBeat: April 25, 2008 offered two particularly interesting links.

First, Time offered How to End the Global Food Shortage, their suggestion on three actions we can take in the short term. I'm not sure I see a long-term solution there, for I sense that global population is still growing exponentially, while their solutions seem focused on taking current food production to a new level, not creating matching exponential growth in the production and distribution of food. Put in systems terms, I sense population is still driven by a reinforcing loop, while the three Time proposals seem driven by goal-seeking loops. The short-term effects do seem beneficial, as long as we don't forget the longer term.

Second, oil financier Matt Simmons has published more presentations. Check out The 21st Century Energy Crisis Has Arrived. Slides 9-10 should not be a surprise to any who took IMT 586 at the University of Washington last winter or who have worked the challenge on pages 212-213 in John Sterman's Business Dynamics: Systems Thinking and Modeling for a Complex World with CD-ROM.

While you're there, also see his Are We Nearing The Peak Of Fossil Fuel Energy? Has Twilight In The Desert Begun? He does offer optimism, but only if we act well and only after some, um, "transitional" times. If anything, I wonder if his estimate of the rate of decline of production is optimistic, for, with the high raw demand for petroleum these days, I suspect we will deplete available reserves at a rather rapid rate.

Fooled by Randomness: some thoughts

I read and wrote about Nassim Taleb's The Black Swan some time ago; now I'm reading his Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets.

I'm struck by the application of his ideas to environmental and ecological issues. It seems as if we're placing most of our societal bets on growth, a bet that has played well for centuries. Given the current news, though, those seem like some of the investment bets Taleb describes as foolhardy. A prudent "investor" (citizen or business person) at this stage in the Earth's development might place most or all money on bets that can't lose much. Betting on the ability of the planet to absorb more growth, on nonrenewable energy sources to remain plentiful, or on technology to increase efficiencies sufficiently yet again seems like a risky bet, given the news of the day (and year and decade).

That's consistent with the precautionary principle; do check out THE YEAR IN IDEAS: A TO Z.; Precautionary Principle from The New York Times.

What do you think?

For more on Taleb's book, see words by Andrew Gelman, Wikipedia, and James Glassman.

Business, Earth Day, and other thoughts

After teaching at my first Bainbridge Graduate Institute Intensive, I am very impressed. The administration, faculty, and student body seem, in person, even more focused on and effective with both words in "sustainable business" than they say they are. I confess that this MBA program truly excites me, and I am glad to play a small part in its work.

That led me to think about business, business practices, and Earth Day tomorrow (there is another Earth Day that passed last month). A bit of looking turned up Nice Guys Don't Finish Last, a Business Week article that indicates that international executives seem to think being green helps them. You can see more in The Economist's report.

A bit more looking turned up Climate Counts, which promises to help us as consumers and as investors, think about which companies have made more strides than others. If you're in business, see their scorecard to think about various dimensions to climate impact. While we might quibble about the weighting of the various dimensions and the focus on climate alone instead of also including usage of nonrenewable resources, social justice, and other issues of corporate social responsibility, we can probably learn from reviewing their measures. Even though I think my overall footprint as a company is quite small, it's prompting me to make an assessment and to think about additional factors that I think might be important.

If you're looking for other thoughts for Earth Day, check out the Donella Meadows Archive at the Sustainability Institute. After being part of the team that did the research and produced the original Club of Rome report, she wrote the weekly Global Citizen, which you can peruse in that archive. There's plenty of food for thought there.

What suggestions and thoughts do you have?

Grow or die

The title is a rough quotation from an interview I read by a CEO recently. It doesn't matter who it was; it's a common business notion, I sense.

I understand the sentiment, really I do. There is a real fear that, if we don't grow, we'll be overtaken by those who do grow. Or that we'll become stagnant and stale.

Yet I'm mindful that, if we all grow, we'll surely die (or at least suffer), too. Read Limits to Growth, if you're uncertain about my statement. Note that "limits to growth" in that book is not a statement of an environmentalist's hope; it's a statement of fact. We will face limits to growth. We can choose the nature of those limits (or at least we have had the chance), but stop growing we will. You can't exceed the carrying capacity of an environment forever.

So, if it's true that we all (or most all) want to grow (our companies, our houses, ...), and if it's true that we will face (and are already facing) real limits to that growth, what do we do?

I've written about growth a number of times, but I admit that I don't have all or even many of the answers yet. Perhaps I'll find out more in the next few months, for I'm co-teaching a systems thinking course at Bainbridge Graduate Institute.

If you're not familiar with BGI yet, their vision is "To infuse environmentally and socially responsible business innovation into general business practice by transforming business education," and they've got a good reputation in this area.

As I did when I taught system dynamics at the University of Washington, I suspect I'll learn a lot here, this time with a distinct focus on sustainability and business. I'm really looking forward to this experience. (And, as I did last time, I will refrain from telling you anything that goes on in class unless I have explicit permission, but I may tell you a bit about how I grew.)

One way to lose focus

Losing focus can be so easy. I understand. When I was growing up, I used to play the horn and didn't stop until I was well into my twenties. When I focused on making music, I really enjoyed it, but, if I ever paid attention to the presence of an audience or the state of my performance, I would get lost in a mild case of the nerves. Professionals know how to deal with such things; I was not a professional musician.

In Unschlüssigkeit bei Toyota?, Paul Bayer wonders about Toyota's president Katsuaki Watanabe's recent speech at the Detroit auto show. He translates part of Chet Richards' Ford: Faint signs of life, in which Richards wonders if that's a sign that Toyota has taken its focus away from making the best cars to being the biggest company.

My purpose here is not to criticize (or even analyze) Toyota (or Ford or any other company); as Bayer notes, there are other explanations for Watanabe-san's speech that don't bode ill for Toyota. My purpose is to use those comments to note how easy it is to shift one's focus from that which brought success to the trappings of that success and the risk that such a shift might destroy both the success and its trappings.

System dynamics, black swans, and the management of business

I'm currently reading Nassim Nicholas Taleb's The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. While I intend to tell you more of what I think when I'm finished, I have an early impression, based on stories such as what he calls "Hume's problem" (or the turkey problem). That's a problem in which everything seems to be getting better and better, only to change direction suddenly and drastically for the worse. In his example, the turkey sees life as a daily succession of friendly humans offering food, only to have it cut short in a manner seemingly quite out of character for life as the turkey has perceived it. (As Taleb points out, it all makes eminent sense to the butcher.)

I think that's part of the reason for system dynamics as yet another tool for thinking and working. As Geoff Coyle points out in his System Dynamics Modelling: A Practical Approach, top management is concerned about things such as the consequences of actions, the likely future, and robustness against uncertainty (p. 15). One of the basic parts of the system dynamics approach is to challenge preconceived notions of the extent of the system causing the current situation: are we looking over a broad enough time span, are we including enough of the actors and actions, and are we paying attention to feedback effects (what Taleb calls recursive effects on p. xxii), where something we do today might come back and affect the situation we face tomorrow?

While there are no guarantees, that unfortunate turkey, had she had good training in system dynamics (or a competent system dynamicist at her side), might have been inspired to look at life over a 5-10 year time span, not just the few months she had experienced. That might have surfaced the fate that led to her demise as part of a regular pattern (albeit one that occurred rarely compared to her lifespan). Had she looked not only at the friendly human feeding her and the other turkeys eating with her, she might have noticed the butcher looking eagerly over the fence from time to time and asked about his role in her life. Had she realized the implications of those observations, she might have decided not to become quite so friendly with her "caretaker," she might have decided not to eat nearly as much (if she were scrawny, might her fate have been different?), and she might even have encouraged the other turkeys to join her in an escape attempt.

Now I don't think that the use of system dynamics conveys infallibility; in fact, that's why I'm reading Taleb's work, to figure out more places my insights may be fallible so that I can make them more robust.

Taleb advocates tinkering as a way to make progress; I see system dynamics as a way to tinker faster and think more effectively in support of your (and my) goal of more effective action.

While my comments may be out of the main focus of Taleb's thesis (system dynamicists tend to focus on the deterministic, not the random, even as they seek to help you be able to respond better in the presence of the random), I don't yet see them in contradiction. I offer them to you in the hopes they are of use to you. Now it's my (and your) task to try to disconfirm them; the longer we can't, the greater the likelihood there's something worth attending to!

If you want to tinker faster with the situation you find yourself in but don't want to risk your business each time you tinker, let's talk.

Thanks to Andrew Gelman for his posts that led me to Taleb's work.

Looking from the outside in...in English

Realizing that the majority of those reading this blog may not read German, I put together a quick summary of Henrik Müller's arguments to which I pointed last Friday.

In his most recent article, he claims that, in a somewhat healthy economy, we have three feedback loops that would stabilize our economy and dampen out our current problems:

• People and the government would spend more to stabilize consumption.
  
  
• Government would borrow more in order to support its temporarily increased spending.
  
  
• The Fed would lower rates to encourage consumption (and, presumably, investment).

He claims all three are at their limits here. He quotes an OECD number that says our savings rate is -1.0%, and housing values are dropping, so we have nothing left to spend.

He says our Federal budget deficit is only 3% of the GDP, and our debt, at 60% of the GDP, is 60% beneath the norm in Europe, so we could increase the debt to try to pull us out. Unfortunately, because we save so little, the only people who can buy that debt are foreigners.

Finally, while the Fed has room to lower the rate, he sees banks as ready to absorb any excess cash rather than loan it out, and he worries about inflationary pressures that may present, thanks in part to an ever-weakening dollar.

In the current political scene, he sees candidates pushing protectionist agendas and hope, while he sees our real hope as lying in global product and capital markets. In fact, the only good news he sees is that the devalued dollar has increased exports and that foreign governments seem ready to invest huge sums in US banks, and he's worried that we don't see that for the good news it is.

What do you think? If you read German (especially if you read it natively), what important points do you think I missed from the two articles?

Looking from the outside in...

One of the things that doing enough system dynamics work teaches one is the benefit of perspective. Sometimes when you're in the middle of something, it's hard to see the forest for the trees. Standing back a ways and, just for a moment, trying to drop any emotions that are tied up in one's current situation can give one better insights.

That's what system dynamics modeling can often do: change a situation in which you're an intimate part to a situation you and your colleagues can look at with a bit of perspective. It also gives you the ability to test ideas on the model before you test them on the real situation.

When we can't get that perspective ourselves, either because of time limitations or because we can't figure out how to do it successfully, reading or hearing what others say about us can sometimes provide us similar perspective. Sure, those outsiders may not understand our situation as well as we do, at least in the details, but they may help us find a better perspective into which to place our more detailed understanding.

If you live and work in the USA, you've no doubt read much about our economic situation recently. I've suggested before that it's healthy to see how others see us. Recently Henrik Müller of the German business magazine manager magazin posted an article entitled Amerika steht mit dem Rücken zur Wand ("America stands with its back to the wall"), a follow-up to an earlier and more data-filled Nach der Orgie ("After the Orgy"). If you read German, or if Google Language Tools suffices, I encourage you to read these articles. He may not be correct in all his assessments, but he may give a better perspective than the headlines in the nightly news about sub-prime mortgages, foreclosures, and other problems. Certainly his earlier article does something I like to see: he gives graphs of at least some key data over a five-decade span, which is more useful for seeing patterns and gaining perspective than merely seeing what has happened this century.

How do your mental models compare with his? What are you doing in your company to adapt? What should you be doing?

Testing the speed limits

In the Fall 1990 Sloan Management Review, Christoph-Friedrich von Braun published "The Acceleration Trap," calling into question our focus on shorter time to market. He later published the related The Innovation War (Prentice-Hall International Series in Industrial and Systems Engineering) (a book still on my reading list).

Tom Peters blogged about it (briefly). Brice Dattée and Dr. David FitzPatrick published The Acceleration Engine: Pattern of Technological Development, a mathematical exploration of the topic from a slightly different perspective. Barry L. Bayus of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill wrote an interesting review of his book. Eugene Garfield wrote another review. Alexander Kandybin and Martin Kihn quoted von Braun's work in The Innovator's Prescription: Raising Your Return on Innovation Investment in strategy+business.

His words haven't been accepted universally, as anyone in a wide range of industries may attest to once they leave work at 9 or 10 in the evening. On the more literate side, Preston Smith wrote From Experience: Reaping Benefit from Speed to Market. It was the subject of a debate (Die Innovationsfalle) at the 2001 CeBIT.

If von Braun is right, there's another risk to growth besides running out of natural physical resources: there's running out of time. It's analogous to an addiction: we need to keep getting more and more of the substance in question (reducing time to market, in this case) to remain satisfied. If we can't maintain our "supply," we crash and go into withdrawal.

In this case, the risk von Braun pointed out was the limit to how short one can make product cycle times and the risks to any financial success that's built on steadily decreasing time to market. Perhaps we can eventually cycle through product generations faster than our customers will accept them (do you want to replace the computer you bought yesterday with a new generation today and then do it again tomorrow?). Perhaps we'll begin to hit physical limits to speed (zero time to market would seem to be a very hard limit to exceed). If we try to break through that limit, whatever it is, and fail, we lose the business benefits we've been sustaining based on constantly improving time to market in the past.

I'm sure many of us are tempted to say, "We don't know if there's a limit or not; we should push forward as hard as we can, and we'll let the real world tell us if there are limits." Unfortunately, if von Braun is correct, hitting those limits won't mean a leveling off; it will mean a crash, and that could have a ripple effect that none of us will enjoy.

Does this mean I'm against reducing time to market or cycle time in general? No. There are many places in our organizations where reducing delays can help, likely including the delay from a customer perceiving a real problem to being able to obtain a product or service to address that problem. Without thought and testing, though, it's hard to make generalizations.

I perceive that time to market reduction is like growth: neither serves as an eternal, prime goal, but each may have its place in at the right time and in the right situation. I do encourage you to do your own reading, think about it, and draw your own conclusions.

How do you know if it's the right time and situation for you? If you'd like to explore ways to discern whether now is such a time and this is such a situation for your organization and how you might create policies that further your goals, let's talk.

A rash generalization

Friend and colleague Jay Forrest and I talk about what I find to be interesting ideas from time to time. Stimulated by an idea he once told me, I've assembled this rash generalization:

• Income (living wages, one hopes) gets made off the production that's both necessary to support the status quo and possible because of the status quo.
  
• Riches can be made off the transitions from one status quo to the other.
  
• Some disasters are made off the mistaking of a transition (from point X to point Y) for a never-ending trend (from point X ever upwards at a constant CAGR) and the effort we expend to try to make it so even after we've passed that situation's limits to growth.
• Other disasters are made when we envy the growth others exhibit and try to force our steady-state situation to match their growth.
• Disasters may take time to materialize. Part of the art of business is recognizing turning points and responding appropriately.

What do you think? Where is your business?

Leadership and systems thinking

Colonel George E. Reed, director of command and leadership studies at the United States Army Way College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, has some interesting things to say about leadership and systems thinking in his article by that name.

His ideas seem related to many of my posts on systems thinking as well as my post on the lazy employee.

Thanks to the Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog and the Ackoff Center Weblog for the pointers.

Focus on the patterns, not the events

If you've ever seen the video that accompanies The Beer Game, there's something eerily familiar in the news about real estate in the USA. (Disclaimer: The video I saw was a VHS tape with a PBS segment on a previous boom and bust cycle in real estate. I can't promise the current DVD contains the same material.) Despite 50 years of knowing that the principles of feedback control theory apply to human and organizational systems, we still create systems with poor information feedback that get us into the ecstasy of boom times followed by the despair of busts.

What does this mean to us, assuming we're not directly impacted by current real estate woes? Where do you see the potential for boom and bust in your world? How do you know? How do you test your hunches?

I can't tell you when you'll experience a bust, but I can help you discover how you can design a business or organizational system that is less likely to experience such boom and bust cycles.

Incidentally, if you'd like to play The Beer Game but don't think you have an opportunity, check out the online version.

Finding a consultant - remotely

In less than a month, Facilitated Systems will have been in business for eight years. I've worked with people in Asia-Pacific, Europe, and the Americas, and yet I've rarely seen a client, for I work mostly from my office.

In today's world, that has distinct advantages. For those of you not used to working remotely with a consultant, I'll list a few:

Responsiveness

If I came to your site to work, I'd likely save up tasks until I had half a day, a full day, or perhaps several days of work at once (depending upon how far away you are), because it's more economical. That's a delay for you.

If I work remotely, you can get my attention in the size chunks you need: minutes, hours, days, weeks, or months. The delay from asking a question to getting an answer drops; if I'm available when you call, you'll start getting help immediately. If you do have to wait, the wait will likely be shorter.

Speed

You can get my help now, without waiting for me to fly, drive, or take a train. If I'm working on someone else's tasks, you need to wait for me to finish those. That's where responsiveness kicks in: if it's appropriate, you may well get some of my time starting today, rather than having to wait until I have full days available.

Lean

If I'm traveling, I'm not working for you. Sure, I try to work on planes when I can, but there is much to the travel experience that represents pure muda. Moving me to you is the essence of transportation and waiting waste.

Cost

If there's no travel, you don't pay for travel. Simple.

Carbon friendly

If I'm not traveling, I'm not generating as much CO₂.

Petroleum friendly

If I'm not traveling, I'm using less petroleum.

Congestion friendly

If I'm not traveling, I don't add to traffic congestion.

Resources

If you need a team, assembling a remote, distributed team from my contacts world-wide to help you brings all these benefits in spades.

How did I discover this? You folks taught me. When I started out, I expected to spend significant time in a car or on a plane, even as I expected to do some of my work remotely using the phone, email, and other online tools. With rare exceptions, you who hired me were quite happy to have me sit here and work there. As times have changed over the last eight years, your insights seem wisely prescient.

Some tasks do require a consultant at your site. I've done that, I will do it again, and I do enjoy working together with you in person. So call if you think that's what you need.

I have also discovered that it's possible to share ideas, build trust, work on problems, and make a joint contribution without being there in person. If that's what you seek, call me, too.

Which serves you best?

Transitions

There was a statement in the article about the lack of water in Atlanta that gives me pause:

Scientists have warned of impending disaster.

And life has, for the most part, gone on just as before.

The evidence seems clear that we on this planet are likely facing major transitions in the way we live. Yet, until this year, I still sensed a basic assumption that life would go on as it has been, that we could accommodate all of these transitions without changing the way we do business or the way we live in any significant way. Perhaps technology would save us, perhaps others around us (government, business, utilities) would save us from having to make hard choices.

I don't think that's prudent. Whether we think of it as business risk management or business continuity planning, we need to think of what these changes might do to our businesses and our societies, and we need to make the appropriate preparations.

What will your business do if some of these predictions come to pass? What will my business do? Here's an Australian view.

Oil

Yesterday I wrote about water; today it's oil. The Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas (ASPO) just concluded a conference in Houston, and The Oil Drum has published a series of reports:

• Houston ASPO - the Workshop day
  
• ASPO Houston: Day 1, part 1
  
• Houston ASPO Day 1 part 2
  
• Houston ASPO Day 2 part 1
  
• Houston ASPO Day 2 part 2
  
• ASPO Houston - a comment
  

It's also been covered in the news.

If you're not careful, you can get to feeling depressed by reading all this, or you can get overwhelmed, decide it can't be as bad as this, and ignore it. I don't think either are useful. Perhaps one way out is to listen to an interview with T. Boone Pickens' at ASPO. He clearly thinks we've passed peak oil, and yet he's not gloomy and depressed. He does point out some of the adjustments we'll need to make in business and in our personal lives (e.g., natural gas for transportation instead of heating while we search for alternatives).

What's your take on all this? If these sorts of changes come to pass, will they affect our businesses? How? What are we doing in our businesses to prepare for the sort of shocks mentioned here yesterday and today? What can we do? What should we do? What opportunities do these changes open up?

Water

Climate change is in the news, as is peak oil. On Sunday, the New York Times reminded us that we need to think about water, too. In The Future Is Drying Up, Jon Gertner has taken an in-depth look at water and the American West.

If you think this pertains only to the American West, check out Monday's Atlanta Shudders at Prospect of Empty Faucets, also from the New York Times. As the BBC's Why world's taps are running dry points out, it's a global issue, too.

Why did I tag this business as well as environment? Because business will be affected, and business can make a difference.

A simple way to evaluate a company's potential

Quoting from Darci Riesenhuber's quoting of Tom Peters on the Top Peters! blog: "LOOK AT A DAMN PICTURE OF THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS IN THE ANNUAL REPORT ..."

For a bit more explanation, see "Firms With More Women on Boards Perform Better Than Those That Don’t." Yes, I know: correlation and causality are different things. I suspect that the changes in a company's culture that would be necessary to get more diversity on a board are also those that would drive the changes that would lead to the reported results.

Other data, anyone?

What moves us forward?

What moves us forward? According to a recent article in the NY Times, The Unsung Heroes Who Move Products Forward, it's the creation of innovative processes and infrastructure.

Thanks to the TP! Wire Service for the tip.

Project management revisited

I've written about project management before multiple times. A new tool has become available, and so I thought it time to provide an update.

Project management was part of my professional life as an engineer from the start. My first manager took a course in Netzplantechnik and had me manage my design project using a paper PERT chart. At my second company, mainframe computers produced PERT data in tabular format, which I found far less user-friendly but certainly more voluminous. At my third company, I discovered and used MacProject, one of the friendlier and more intuitive project management programs I have seen.

Yet my third company also introduced me to process management and continuous process improvement. I started in manufacturing engineering and heard many a statement about improvement being continuous, having no end. I saw and participated in the great strides such approaches could make, even as we did run specific projects to accomplish specific objectives.

When I returned to a product development organization as R&D productivity manager, I struggled with what I saw as a project vs. process dilemma: projects seemed to be closed systems on far too many levels to be the unifying organizational approach. While certainly highly useful, they didn't seem to capture the reality of the world nor enable the strides I had seen a process focus capture. My manager was patient, reminding me of the business advantages of a project orientation that focused on achieving a specific goal with specified resources over a specific time frame.

With a few more years to reflect on the process vs. project issue, I now see the ideal as both-and, not either-or. To manage a business, there are many times when we are best served by dedicating fixed amounts of resources and schedule to achieving defined goals, and those call for projects and project management. Yet, to be competitive and to make a sustainable contribution requires a steady focus on getting better, a focus that isn't limited by a project release (or completion) date. I discovered an early statement of the idea of blending a project and a process focus in Experiences with Defect Prevention in the IBM Systems Journal from 1990, and I applied their notion of an action team to a project that reduced the prototyping time of printed circuit assemblies by 83% ("Emphasis on Business, Technology, and People Cuts Turnaround Time at Hewlett-Packard's Lake Stevens Division," National Productivity Review, Winter 1998-99).

I've updated the Project Management section of my Links page for new software that has become available. While GanttProject and TeXProject are still useful (TeXProject more for those who use LaTeX regularly), there's a newcomer to the scene: OpenProj™ by Projity. Some see that as a possible adjunct to OpenOffice.org; others see it as a tool that works with Microsoft Project files.

There are other solutions, especially for online collaboration. eProject offers a well-known commercial solution, and Projity offers its Project-ON-Demand™ SaaS. PHProjekt is a free alternative.

Whatever tools you pick, it's most important to think. As I related in the first links above, paper and pen with good project management approaches can work quite well; complex tools with poor approaches may get you nowhere (of course, complex tools may be necessary to manage the complexity of large projects). Certainly get the basics of project management down, but keep an eye out for new ideas such as critical chain theory (a decade old now) which may help you do better, and integrate project and process approaches in ways that serve your organization well.

Incidentally, chapter 11 of the novel Critical Chain by Eliyahu Goldratt is available online.

Scenario planning

Scenario planning is a business process we got largely from Royal Dutch Shell. If you just read The Art of the Long View: Planning for the Future in an Uncertain World, you should know things haven't stood still. Martin Börjesson has a very good reference site worth checking out.

If there's one thing I've learned about scenario planning, it's that it's a literary and creative process, not a mechanistic one. Those scenarios that offer the most value, that help me think the most, are also those that qualify as true stories, not as mechanical selections of various events.

Management style

Recently I discovered A love affair with micro-management,
courtesy of the TP! Wire Service. That led to The ins and outs of corporate control and Why Companies Love Micromanagers. The basic premise is the same: managers are increasingly hiring micromanagers, and that is hurting their companies.

Then, this morning, I read Dear Boss: You're a jerk; see you in court, an Associated Press article about states giving workers the rights to sue their superiors for creating abusive work environments. Perhaps you've seen that in your news, too.

Years ago, there was emphasis on theory X, theory Y, and, eventually, theory Z as ways to manage. Theory X was seen as the way to get poorer results, but these news stories seem to be saying it's making a comeback.

I'm curious: do you see this trend in your organizations? If you're a manager, what's your approach to management? Why did you pick it? How is it working for you, your organization, and the people who report to you?

If you're managed by others (that should be most everyone), which approach is used by those you report to? Why did they pick it? How is it working for you, your organization, and those to whom you report?

For each case (many of you are, no doubt, in both situations at once), would adjustments to the current style be an improvement or not? If so, is there anything keeping you from experimenting with a change?

Rehearsing

I often help people with presentations, and I've noticed that those who rehearse seem to be those who do better. Now Garr Reynolds of Presentation Zen has done an excellent job of explaining the creative process of presenting ideas to others in his Steve Jobs and the art of the swordsman.

Note the two keys to presentation success:

• Intense rehearsal in a team setting
  
• Absolutely no attention to technique or form in the actual presentation
  

Reread Garr's comments, if you need to, and note comments such as, "...once we allow our mind to drift to thoughts of success and failure or of outcomes and technique while performing our art we have at that moment begun our sure decent." [sic]

How can we possibly get through a presentation while following the second key? By following the first key until we have internalized what we want to say, how we want to say it, how others will hear it and respond, and what we can do if something goes differently than we expect. Then we have to rehearse it some more.

As someone once noted, we often rehearse something until we get it right. That means we may have done it wrong 20 times and right once; which do you think will stick with us better?

I think the same thing applies in other areas of our professional lives, and I think Dietrich Dörner and Harald Schaub might agree. That's why I wrote A somewhat unified view of decision making: to suggest the importance of spending time wrestling with what we do at a time that's apart from the actual doing. Whether we use computer simulation, scenario planning, role playing, or something else, the opportunity to rehearse what we do professionally before we do it and to learn from what we actually do afterwards to improve for next time is exceedingly valuable. And it's the cyclic action learning that helps us improve and helps keep us from getting fixated on a bad idea.

If you're still thinking of presentations, check out Garr's presentation tips.

Washington Small Business Fair

If you live in Western Washington (in case you don't, that's the part of the USA's Washington State that's west of the Cascade Mountains) and run a small business, check out the Washington Small Business Fair coming up on Saturday, September 8. It's eight hours of good, free information.

Is business getting worse?

Bloomberg says "CEOs See `No Clear Signs' of Crisis as Woes Intensify." Are things really getting worse, even as people put smiles on their faces, as that article seems to indicate?

We obviously won't know for a while. Even if things get worse for some companies, others will likely do okay, and some will thrive (or, if things go well, others will likely do okay, and some will suffer).

To a large degree, the key is being good at responding to what happens, not simply what happens. We get good by being lucky, by thinking clearly, or by having been in this situation before and having learned (or by some combination of those). While I have no help for you in the luck category, there are myriad approaches to thinking clearly, and I've tried to touch on a few in Making Sense With Facilitated Systems.

You might say that there's no way to experience the future before you get there (the third alternative). As Dietrich Dörner and Harald Schaub point out, that's not necessarily the case. Simulation (system dynamics, usually) is a way to explore challenges we might face in the future and to learn which strategies are likely to be more successful.

How are you preparing for the challenges you might face? If you'd like to talk about some of the possibilities, drop me a line.

Multi-Skill Pay System Design and Implementation

Okay, that sounds like a real exciting workshop, doesn't it? Yet if you've ever fostered the development of a high-performing team, you might have wondered how you can reward people who are now doing so much more than they did in the past.

Bob Gilbert, of whom I've written from time to time, is leading a workshop by that name at the University of North Texas Center for Work Teams annual conference on September 25, 2007. I first met Bob when he was the plant manager at the Rohm & Haas Bayport plant, and I had organized a tour of plants with innovative work systems in the US Southwest for manufacturing management at my company. While I haven't heard this presentation, I'm confident it will offer much of value.

While you're there, check out cellist Benjamin Wolff's The Art of Teams: Lessons in Self-Direction from the World of the Arts. I'm not familiar with his work, but I like the idea of linking art and business.

Counterintuitive Behavior of Social Systems

Jay Forrester's (new: link to several of his papers) Counterintuitive Behavior of Social Systems (new URL) is another classic worth reading and re-reading. The article offers food for thought, not final answers. If you start, I encourage you to keep going to the end (I'm saying that, because I know it's 28 pages of text and everyone's time is short). As a bit of encouragement, here are two quotations. First, from p. 24:

Figure 8 shows the world system if several policy changes are adopted together in the year 1970. Population is stabilized. Quality of life rises about 50 per cent. Pollution remains at about the 1970 level. Would such a world be accepted? It implies an end to population and economic growth.

Then, on page 27, he writes, "Our greatest challenge now is handling the transition from growth to equilibrium."

Start at the beginning to get the context for both quotations, and see what you think by the end. These are important issues; don't blindly accept his admittedly somewhat preliminary ideas (see section XI), but don't blindly reject them, either.

Thanks to the HPSIGWiki for the reminder.