Are Your Rituals ... Royal?

Today's royal wedding is a good reminder about the role and importance of rituals.  They are imbued with meaning and rules that reflect and exemplify the values and customs of a culture.  Most frequently they mark transitions—birth, death, and unions—or celebrate significant achievements or remember and honor significant sacrifice.

Every organization or community has its own rituals that, if appropriately attended to, can knit together meaning, shared values, and connectivity across generations of members, customers, or stakeholders.  Most tend to do well with the big rituals, whatever their equivalent of the royal wedding might be.  We understand the importance of managing well the major moments, ensuring they appropriately reflect and inspire the right tone among those engaged in the experience.

But too many miss the opportunity to better communicate their culture through the more regular routines that nonetheless are also rituals:  hiring a new staff member, orienting new volunteers, welcoming first-time attendees to a conference.  Each of these events will be repeated over and over again through the years.  They can be dull, boring, and merely routine, or they can be infused (through greater attention and planning) with meaning and values of a more significant ritual.

Regardless of how they occur, they send powerful messages about what an organization or community believes in, cares about, and thinks is important.  We all should pause periodically and reflect on whether or not our rituals and routines tell the story we want to tell.

Additional thoughts:

PCMA Convene column: 
The importance of respecting conference and annual meeting rituals your community values.

Deference and Difference: Who Yields for Innovation?

Youth to age.

Inexperience to experience.

Newcomer to veteran.

Minority to majority.

Intuition to data.

Outsiders to insiders.

This is how deference commonly occurs in group decision-making. 

If we are looking to enact a culture conducive to innovation, the deference often needs to be to the difference and the rules for yielding must be reversed:  the knowing to the fresh perspectives, veterans to newcomers, the norms to the differences, internal savvy to external freshness, the counter-cultural to the cultural.

When a city implements an innovative solution to make traffic move more quickly and safely—such as replacing stop signs with roundabouts—drivers have to pay attention more to other drivers and learn new rules for engagement and integrating themselves into the traffic flow.

For similar shifts to occur in our organizations, many are going to require a refresher course in driver's ed, relegating themselves to an Unlearning Permit in order to relax or let go of the mindsets and behaviors that often have served them well. If we want innovative results, we're going to have to change the habits of how we talk and go about creating them.

Leadership Limerick: Quit Killing Off the Caring

Every Monday, I offer a leadership limerick, highlighting an idea or strategy about effective leadership in limerick form.

We get involved wherever we care
Joining others whose passions we share

When red tape gets in the way
Of what we could do every day

The frustration hardly seems fair

Coordinating the efforts of volunteers is necessary, but too often coordination becomes control.  Appropriate checks and balances become expansive procedures and roadblocks.  Dee Hock, founder and former CEO of the VISA credit card association, often speaks of the chaotic and orderly dichotomy of organizations … what he refers to as "chaords."

We need organization and we need focus, but given the nature of volunteers, we also need to allow that it may be messier at times than if staff was doing all the work.  What we most definitely do not need are rigid controls that choke off volunteer initiative, passion, and contribution.  We must strive for what Hock refers to as elegantly minimal principles to coordinate the work being done.  Matthew May speaks similarly (if not in broader terms) in his books, The Elegant Solution and In Pursuit of Elegance: Why the Best Ideas Have Something Missing.

So take a look at your own systems for coordinating volunteers (or quite frankly, the internal processes used for staff work) and identify how they could be made simpler, less rigid, and more elegant.  Remove or minimize constraints one by one until you reach a point where any additional removal is likely to result in undesirable mayhem.

In his excellent book, Drive, Dan Pink highlights the three components of intrinsic motivation that he believes represent the next operating system for how we get work done in organizations: autonomy, mastery, and purpose.  The future of volunteering just may rest in systems that connect individual caring to organizational purpose, individual mastery to organizational efforts, and that do so in ways maximizing individual autonomy while achieving organizational deadlines.

Now that would be a truly elegant solution.

The One Question to Ask More Often

If my experiences of the 12 months are in any way representative of yours, all of us need to be asking one particular question much more often.

Too many meetings and too many conversations are producing less than desirable results because people lack clarity around the definition of success.

Should it be more obvious?  That doesn't make any difference.  It's not.

So let's start asking the one question that is likely to accelerate forward progress and internal satisfaction: what is it that we want to achieve here?

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P.S.  The one question I'm being asked most often right now is: what's your schedule like the rest of the year?


Answer:  I have availability for about 10 more speaking or strategy facilitation dates in 2011, so now's the time to firm up commitments for staff or volunteer retreats or workshops, strategy sessions, etc. to ensure you get your preferred dates.  And based on inquiries, I've also opened my scheduling for 2012.

Leadership Limerick: No Guarantees for Change

Every Monday, I offer a leadership limerick, highlighting an idea or strategy about effective leadership in limerick form.

If you're looking for a sure guarantee
Of how things will turn out to be

Then you've limited the range
For the degree of your change

To exactly what you can now clearly see

We have to challenge ourselves—and the systems in our organizations—in new and different ways in order to grow, learn, develop, and expand our capabilities.

If you only run as fast as you can, you might never surpass your best time.

If you only lift the weight you know you can bench press, your muscles are never taxed.

If we know something can definitely be achieved, doing so is not going to challenge us to do things differently, to bring out an even better level of performance than what we think we are capable of producing. And very possibly, a change that we can definitely achieve may not be the one in which others seek to believe.

So if you need a guarantee that things will turn out right, instead of sticking with the completely known and the doable, calibrate your decisions to reduce some of the risk inherent in exploring the unknown.

But do stretch yourself and pursue the unknown.  The possibilities it offers may hold just the solutions you seek.

Facilitation: Shift Your Attention to Shift the Results

In the facilitation workshops I lead people often ask how to handle a disruptive participant in a meeting or a workshop or deal with someone who dominates the discussion.

It is useful to remember that whatever we choose to pay attention to means we are not attending to other elements in the situation.

You could focus on managing the dominant participant, or you could focus on increasing the engagement of the under-involved participants.  In doing the later, you actually would solve the former.

So the next time you find yourself fixated on a particular focus, try shifting your attention to see how it might shift the results you are achieving.

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If you're interested paying more attention to your own facilitation skills, I hope you'll join me and what promises to be a great community of learners for a one-day facilitation intensive I am presenting for the American Society of Association Executives on July 19 in Washington, DC.  It will be a very hands-on learning experiences covering the core principles of effective facilitation, a variety of tools and techniques, and providing ample opportunity to apply them to the common situations we encounter in meetings, workshops, and our everyday interactions. Learn more here.

I, Too, Live in the Real World

"This is all well and good, but can you give me some examples of how this would work in the real world?"

This was the approximate question a participant raised in a recent workshop I led, one which caused me to react a bit defensively even though it had been posed in a fairly neutral tone.

I don't find the intent behind the question inappropriate at all.  In fact, it's quite legitimate and worthwhile: help me understand how I can use this information.

It's the all-too-common phrasing I find unhelpful because of the hidden assertion it represents.  By asking someone else to give real world examples, it somehow implies that the other person doesn't also live in the real world.

I'm pretty sure the world in which I exist is real.  That does not in any way diminish the fact that your world is equally real for you.  And that others also live in worlds they consider equally real.  But our worlds are not all the same.

To successfully apply ideas and insight from others' worlds often asks us to translate or modify them so they can be most useful for our own efforts.  Wholesale adoption of what works for another person is probably not nearly as common as adaption of what others have found successful so that it will work well in our own context.

So the next time you experience a disconnect with someone else's perspective, resist the temptation to summarily dismiss it, and try this language instead:  "I'm having some difficulty seeing exactly how the ideas you are introducing might fit in my current situation.  Can you help me make a stronger connection or see how I might adapt them?"

Leadership Limerick: The Data Can't Tell All

Every Monday, I offer a leadership limerick, highlighting an idea or strategy about effective leadership in limerick form.

 Data can put on quite a show
When you're deciding which way to go

But when it comes to its tale
Don't accept it wholesale

If innovation is what you want to grow.

Former Harvard Business School professor Gary Hamel often notes that innovation results from "insight into the unarticulated need."  While focus groups, surveys, and other forms of data collection often compile the articulated needs, they rarely specify the significant opportunities that might produce breakthrough, exponential shifts in value.

We're more likely to identify those opportunities looking beyond the decimal points, drawing on what Roger Martin, dean of the Rotman School of Management, refers to as abductive logic in his book The Design Of Business.  Abductive logic "creatively assembles the disparate experiences and bits of data that seem relevant in order to make an inference—a logical leap—to the best possible conclusion."  In short, it is the logic of what could be.  And what could be requires our individual and collective insight into the story that the data might be telling.

And when we have a sense of what could be (possible, desirable, valued, needed, dreamed of, worth pursuing, etc.) it's time to follow the advice of Jim Collins and Jerry Porras in Built to Last: try some stuff to see what works.  So by all means, do look to the data for guidance and insight.  It often will even point out where you may first want to try stuff or what stuff to try first.  Just don't expect it to direct you across the innovation finish line without some work on your own.

Think Outside the Building, Not Just the Box

People looking to innovate have long been admonished to think outside the box.  It's good advice so long as one remembers that over time every fresh perspective or new way of thinking will become a new box from which you must escape.

Harvard Business School professor and bestselling author Rosabeth Moss Kanter wants us to do more.  She suggests we need to think outside our building full of boxes, somewhat echoing Peter Drucker's concept of the "meaningful outside."  Kanter says:

"To foster innovation and transformation, leaders should focus on impact, not inputs. They should identify unsolved problems, map the wider system influencing results, and determine weak links to strengthen or gaps to fill. But to do all that effectively, they must first jump out of the box and leave the building."

Operationalizing this simple, but powerful philosophy means looking to other industries and professions for innovations you might apply in your own work, exploring partnerships and collaborations with organizations beyond your normal default options, engaging in creative problem-solving with individuals from outside your organization, viewing everyone who engages in work similar to yours as competition and not just those who share your same title or product line, looking to unlikely sources for inspiration and insight, and taking regular field trips into other environments and engaging in deep observation of what is done and how it is accomplished. 

I engaged in my own outside the building excursion recently when I did a week of pro bono work for an association, essentially becoming an adult intern temporarily residing and working in their headquarters for five days. It's something I try to do every year.

Re-immersing myself in the daily 8-5 routine, participating in and facilitating team meetings, holding office hours and consulting with individuals, doing project work, presenting non-mandatory staff training sessions, coaching individuals on how to handle situations, and being a guest at an all staff-board of directors luncheon exposed me again to the routines and rituals of another organization's culture.  I came away with dozens of observations—some tactical and some strategic—about organizational change, learning, and group dynamics. All of my future speaking and facilitation efforts will be richer because of this "Consultant-in-Residence" experience.

Leaving the building by default forces us to leave our boxes.  So get up from your desk and go outside.  The impact you need to consider and the information and insight you need might very well be there.

P.S.  An association has already sought me out for my 2012 pro bono residency, but if you'd like me to do a week or two as a temporary staff member of your organization, your investment is significantly reduced from normal daily consulting/facilitation fees.  Contact me to discuss the possibilities.

Leadership Limerick: Don't Wait for Opportunity to Knock

Every Monday, I offer a leadership limerick, highlighting an idea or strategy about effective leadership in limerick form.

Opportunity does indeed knock
But its arrival is never a lock

So create chances on your own
Blazing through the unknown

Experimenting around the clock

By the time opportunity knocks, your members or customers may be tired from waiting for you to provide new value in your programs and services.  And honestly?  When the opportunity is incredibly evident, it's usually either low hanging fruit you should probably have picked sometime ago or such an obvious need waiting to be fulfilled that doing so just keeps you in the game.  The time to pursue opportunity is before others demand that you deliver.

In their book, The Leadership Challenge, authors James Kouzes and Barry Posner remind us that extraordinary leaders search for opportunities, scanning the environment constantly and considering the possible unarticulated needs of their stakeholders.  Instead of waiting for opportunity to come knocking at our door, better to open your door to the opportunity to try some stuff and see what works, leveraging the power of small wins along the way.

For Innovators, Failure Must Be an Option

For some reason, a healthy percentage of folks believe that "failure is not an option."

If we are unable to fail at something, how can we hope to innovate at anything?

And besides, innovation is not a pass-fail course.  It is an interactive process in which we experience many small wins and successes long the way to discovering what really might be of value.

Here's my IGNITE Great Ideas talk (5 minutes) at Busboys and Poets, a great DC venue, recorded in late February this year.

The American Society of Association Executives (ASAE) sponsored this event for its Greater Washington Network and I encourage you to browse through some of the other talks on the YouTube channel.  Another round of IGNITE talks were offered at the Great Ideas Conference last month filling the room for both session time blocks.  Those also will be posted to ASAE's YouTube channel.

You can learn more about the IGNITE format here or a similar presentation format, Pecha Kucha, here.

Slides with narrative text for this talk are available here.

P.S.  I've submitted this talk to Ignite Google for consideration.  Nothing would thrill me more to be selected and once again don the priestly robes.