Leadership Limerick: Enable Others to Act

Every Monday, I offer a leadership limerick, highlighting an idea or strategy about effective leadership in limerick form. Searching for leadership limerick will identify previous posts.

Whenever there is much to do,

It can’t end up being just you.

Find others who care.

Responsibility? Do share.

And success will likely ensue.

Western culture tends to favor the heroic myth of the lone leader in control.  Will Apple survive without Steve Jobs?  Can Meg Whitman save HP?  If only President Obama would ______.

But one person can only do so much.  And often the most important thing to do is to get more people doing things.  James Kouzes and Barry Posner identified this as enabling others to act one of the five practices of extraordinary leaders identified in their seminal book, The Leadership Challenge.

Enabling others to act involves: (1) fostering collaboration by promoting cooperative goals and developing trust, and (2) strengthening others by sharing power and discretion.

So the next time all eyes turn to you, don't enable or perpetuate the falsehood that one person can do it alone.  Instead, look to enable others to act and build a more sustainable shared leadership, be it in a relationship with a partner, in an individual department or team, or throughout an organization or community.

If you're interested in learning how to facilitate greater commitment and contributions of others, on December 15 I will again be doing a full-day workshop in DC for ASAE on The Art of Facilitation. I'll share a registration link as soon as it is available, but mark your calendars now.

10 Tips for Facilitating Conversation About Big Ideas and Innovations

It's been two weeks of innovation as I was one of the facilitators for last week's National Summit on Association Innovation sponsored by the Wisconsin Society of Association Executives and as a volunteer, helped champion this week's ASAE InnovationTalks campaign.  Contributing to both events reminded me of some common sense tips about what is required to facilitate conversations about big ideas and innovations.  The list below is not meant to be all-inclusive, but to highlight some of the core considerations.

Determine the right time and environment. Participants need the right mental and physical space to think differently and more expansively.  Block sufficient time and create an environment conducive to sharing ideas, sketching possibilities, and freeflowing discussion. Intimate and flexible space; flipcharts, whiteboards, and walls covered with IdeaPaint; food, music, and props to sustain the energy. Modeling clay and other prototyping supplies. Each of these is a desirable environmental factor. 

Articulate the purpose and define success. Skeptics and fans alike need to understand just what the conversation is intended to produce in order to contribute appropriately.  It's hard to do the what if you don't understand the why.

Put the conversation in context. Don't make innovation something that occurs outside of your organization's efforts.  Connect conversations about ideas and innovations to your ongoing development of programs and services and incorporate these discussions into your regular planning routines.

Clarify the terms and process to be used. People need to understand the rules of engagement, whatever they are determined to be, as well as terms likely to be thrown about including creativity, innovation, value, et al.

Create, critique, construct. Remember these three types of thinking (usually attributed to Edward deBono and make sure your process addresses them in this order: (1) What's possible? (2) Which idea(s) do we choose to advance? (3) How will we efficiently implement the ideas chosen?

Facilitate assertively. What I routinely witness when facilitating ideation and innovation conversations is that participants too quickly abandon the stated process and move straight to problem-solving and implementation.  Don't let that happen.  Ensure people dwell longer in possibilities and more expansive thinking.

Start with observed behaviors. At the WSAE Summit, Thomas Stat, formerly with IDEO's Chicago office, reminded us that innovation begins with behavior, not ideas.  If you carefully observe member or customer behavior without judgment, the rich story their actions tell will instruct you as to where innovation may be needed.

Use disruptive premises to evoke creative possibilities. Once you've identified the opportunity areas to pursue, use disruptive hypotheses or unreasonable provocations as suggested by Luke Williams in his book Disrupt.  Doing so will help shift the subsequent creative thinking away from the traditional solutions and into potentially more inventive and interesting areas.

Listen for concepts behind ideas.  No matter how assertively you facilitate the process, our inner critics emerge too quickly in the discussions.  When you hear people reacting negatively about a specific idea (example: there should be set office hours), identify its underlying concept (example: flexible work schedules) and ask what other ideas people might that relate to it. This keeps the creative energy moving forward and is a technique called Concept Fan by Edward DeBono.

Identify opportunities to experiment.  Seeking small wins (James Kouzes and Barry Posner).  Try stuff to learn what works (Jim Collins).  Making little bets (Peter Sims).  Small innovations, not just blockbusters (Rosabeth Moss Kanter). Name your innovation guru and each has his or her own way of trying to quickly get us in action and in the process of discovery.  Instead of trying to 100% plan our way to success, we need to move quickly from planning to playing with some of the possibilities we have identified.

Leadership Limerick: The Power of the Little Bet

Every Monday, I offer a leadership limerick, highlighting an idea or strategy about effective leadership in limerick form. Searching for leadership limerick will identify previous posts.

If big challenges have yet to be met
But falling short will leave folks upset

Instead of making a big play

When you’re unsure of the way

You might want to make a little bet

Pursuing big and bold paths is often the way to produce the most innovative results, but getting in action can more easily be accomplished through experimentation and prototyping to quickly learn what works and what doesn't, refining your efforts as you go.

The idea of small investments is found throughout the literature.  Built to Last tells us to try stuff and see what works.  The power of small wins is extolled in The Leadership Challenge and most recently, The Progress Principle: using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Engagement and Creativity at Work.  But I really like how this thinking is expressed in Little Bets: How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge Through Small Discoveries:

“Little bets are for learning about problems and opportunities while big bets are for capitalizing upon them once they’ve been identified.” 

Association professionals around the world this week are talking about experimentation, innovation, and achieving better results as a part of ASAE's inaugural InnovationTalks, a week-long campaign to stimulation conversations about, and commitments to, innovation in the association community.  I had the honor of helping lead this campaign and of writing the Conversation Kit groups can use to design and manage conversations in their own organizations.  There's still time to join one of the public Talks or connect with your own colleagues in a conversation about innovation in your organization.  Lear more and download the Conversation Kit here.  And follow Tweets about the Talks at #asaeinnov

Leadership Limerick: How Do You Manage Ideas?

Every Monday, I offer a leadership limerick, highlighting an idea or strategy about effective leadership in limerick form. Searching for leadership limerick will identify previous posts.

Great ideas are easily lost
And bad ones often aren't tossed

You need a system to rate
and determine the right fate

Or else you'll pay a great cost

Ideas don't always arrive on a predictable schedule, so having an ongoing idea management system is important.  Not only for capturing the ideas, but also for effectively evaluating them and refining the ones identified as having the most potential.  A few reminders for doing so:

Collecting and capturing ideas:  If you're going to invite others to share their ideas, increase the usefulness of the submissions by succinctly defining the problem you are trying to solve or specifying the needs or aspirations successful ideas should reflect.  It's one thing for a hotel to extend an open-ended invitation for guest suggestions.  It's quite another for a hotel to ask "What one thing would have made the hotel feel even more welcoming and comfortable for you during your stay?" 

Evaluating ideas: People evaluating the possibilities should apply the same criteria for their feedback, some of which might be weighted as more important than others.  A search committee can't select the best candidate for a job if the committee hasn't already defined what best means and isn't rating resumes fairly similarly.  The same is true for considering which ideas in an area might have the most merit.  Having a common evaluation process can help limit personality conflicts that might arise from individuals applying their own definition of the best idea.

Refining ideas: Too often an idea that has potential is accepted as presented instead of further refining it.  Identify several core features or aspects of the idea to be further refined, and assign each one to a small group of individuals for their exclusive attention, i.e. "Make this publication more practical."  These parallel refinement deep dives can help improve the overall quality and value of the idea.

As you consider how to improve your own idea management process, be sure to examine some of the many online approaches worth emulating.  IdeaScale, Napkin Labs, and MindMixer are three of the many online idea management systems you could use for your own efforts.  My Starbucks Idea is a great corporate example of customer innovation and involvement in the ideation process, and Open IDEO models the various stages of community involvement in social innovation idea management.  Quirky.com is a "social product development" site in which the most popular customer suggestions and inventions are then turned into actual products.  The New York Times profiled Quirky in late August.

And don't forget that most innovations result from an iterative "trial and error" process in which a new product or service is shared with a small number of people and then refined based on their feedback.  You need real users to determine the ultimate usability of what you're creating, so embrace beta testing as discussed by startup guru Eric Ries in his new book The Lean Startup.


A few other posts about idea management:

Upending the Idea Approval Process

Creative More Moving Ideas By Moving Your Ideas

Driving Ideas on Your Innovation Highway

Searching for Hidden Damage

After the recent Washington, DC area earthquake, local and federal officials announced they would examine key infrastructure (bridges, train tracks, et al) and public structures like the Washington Monument for signs of hidden damage that needed repair.

In everyday life, we often experience individual or organizational earthquakes, unexpected incidents small and large that send tremors through our system.  It could be downsizing at work that requires us to take on more responsibility, or a major unexpected home repair forcing us to rethink our short-term finances.

But how often do we search for hidden damage?  Doing so is as simple as checking in with a friend to see if she is managing things OK, or as structured as scheduling team meetings to reconsider work flow and project management shifts that may need to occur.

Minor cracks over time give way to major fault lines.  We can prevent that by remaining connected at the interpersonal level and remembering that the naked eye often cannot see all damage at first glance.

Leadership Limerick: Is It a Labor of Love?

Every Monday, I offer a leadership limerick, highlighting an idea or strategy about effective leadership in limerick form. Searching for leadership limerick will identify previous posts.

On Labor Day, some stop to rest
That's not what Americans do best

We move from this thing to that
Shouting "No time to chat"

Stop.  Slow down, I behest.

Is the way you live your life right now sustainable?
And if so, for how long? And at what cost?

Take time this Labor Day to be thankful for those who have labored to ensure us the opportunity to do so in safe workplaces and at fair wages, particularly if you are fortunate enough to have the day off.

But also take time today to think about your labor.  What role do you want work to play in your life, now and in the future?  What implications does your answer to that question have for the financial decisions you are making right now?  Is what you do most days a labor of love? 

And if not, how long can your heart remain disenfranchised before it tells your head and your hands that enough is enough?

A once popular book was entitled Do What You Love, the Money Will Follow.  I'm not sure it is quite that simple.

But after 30+ years of working, I am sure of this:  if you don't do something you at least like, you won't be able to do it forever.

Avoiding Conversation Cruise Control

Too many of our language conventions stop progress, stop thinking, and stop dialogue. They simply trigger pre-scripted mindsets, personally and professionally.

When I hear someone say ABC, I automatically react with XYZ.  

We can't lead, work, or have strong interpersonal relationships on cruise control.

But if anyone would interrupt this conversational cruise control, we'd have to engage in actually driving the conversation again, just as tapping on the brakes of a car on cruise control requires us to reengage with the gas pedal.

The next time you are involved in a conversation that seems to be following the usual unproductive formula, be the person with a foot on the brakes.  You only have to tap it lightly to change the conversation.  And changing the conversation is the only way we will we get to our desired destination.