Hours in a day

Ever found that you have run out of hours in a day/week/month?

I seem to have that problem at the moment, and I wonder if it is due to the approaching summer?

Or maybe it is the culmination of some projects? Whatever it maybe, I have lost my focus...

On the upside though, this week has been highly successful. Today I submitted the web version of a Change Management Guide for the entire organisation. Some of you who follow me on twitter may have heard a mention or two of it.

As a project goes, this was a hard slog and entirely different to the day to day breadwinning, so to speak. Whilst this was a properly commissioned project, I only ever saw it as a think tank exercise to deliver a resource that left our organisation a little better off than without it.

The product was essentially a Change Management Guide which well and truly surpassed the intimidation point at 10,000+ words and 14 steps to success... Not to mention the language!

Actually, to mention the language is better... My own engineering/project management background combined with a colleague with a business/logistics background coupled with a particular academic interest in Change Management. If it is not obvious, we spoke diametrically opposed dialects which when painfully combined resulted in some indulgent verbosity. 

But why am I happy about this? Well there was a moment in the project where we introduced a second gateway. Like an Index to a Table of Contents, this second gateway offered a set of questions rather than a designed and stepped approach. The real bonus of this is its ability to embrace the power of the cynic, as noted by Dave Snowden as being so vital.

This is where the website (intranet only at this stage, unfortunately) comes into its own... although I still think that there is a need for a low-fi pamphlet for people to hold in their hands... With both of these in place, Change can be about improvement despite the best effort of some folks to make it about the process. 

Into the Pan

Part 3 in reviewing the set of workshops from last week is the one-dayer with the sister organisation of here and here. Now the focus was on repairing the Archetype Creation which had so spectacularly failed on the Monday. 

To open, I showed a couple of animations from the Dilbert site as I knew the organisation were familiar. Then I got them to discuss who their favourite characters were and why. After suggesting to them that the Dilbert comics were not actually written about their organisation and that people around the world can identify with them, the breadcrumbs had been dropped.

Importantly, I also changed the 'story-telling' prompt from 'Tell a story about a day at work' to 'Share your experience in dealing with your primary customer' (understanding that the earlier narrative capture had indicated that this would be fertile ground). In the second stage of emergence, I suggested that the character in front of them worked in their organisation and that they would have to adopt the role of their 'Best Friend', 'Worst Enemy' and 'Innocent Bystander'. I have some thoughts on this but wonder how that sits with other practitioners

Now due to the introduction of an example, I set myself a target for success which was to achieve no Dilbert characters in the Archetypes. I did not set one for the swapping of customers for members of the organisation, do you have any suggestions? In my opinion, this event was a success and once I get the characters finalised I will upload them.

To close on the Archetype creation, I will note that I backed  out of the Values and Themes elements for this workshop. Basically, I was uncomfortable with their use and was seeking to achieve a modicum of success through adjustment of the approach. I will have to invest some more headspace into how to prepare the Values and Themes.

On Sensemaker

I am drafting this in the QANTAS Lounge in Melbourne as I wait for my flight back to Adelaide in an 90mins. 

The reason I am in Melbourne is that I have spent Thursday evening and Friday at the Victorian Police Academy doing the Cognitive Edge Practitioner network catch up and Sensemaker Session which was fantastic to discuss some of the lessons identified from applying the Cognitive Edge Methods with new 'graduates' and also to meet some faces behind the blogs.

The Sensemaker session, I found to be quite straightforward and expect that the real learning points will be in playing with the data. I have in my mind a few applications in mind that I will be seeking to exploit (for want of a better word), the key will be getting funding to pay the licence fees.

A couple of criticisms of the day would be that the demo data had a major flaw which detracted from the logic in the conclusions in the case study. The other would be that the Ritual Dissent was limited in value due to the predominance of inexperience with the methods and software, thus not allowing much in the way of meaningful criticism. This latter criticism is of course the minor factor as it is merely a demonstration of concept.

All in all, a worthwhile event and I will definitely add my case study to the Ning Site, Steve

Baptism of Fire: The Sequel

As was started in a previous post, the following two workshops took the participants through Model Creation by Social Construction and Ritual Dissent. These activities went significantly better partially because the participants were more comfortable with the understanding where it would lead but also because the activities were broken up with some more familiar activities.

I have since delivered the resultant action plans to the Business Unit Manager, who was not put of by the AVT Creation failure, but instead is willing to take on some assistance to attempt to achieve a self-emergent continuous improvement. At this stage (given the proximity to the end of year), the move forward will be by delegation of the "Simple" tasks to any person and some "complicated" activities to  the appropriate person/s. In the new year, there is a plan to take on some of the "Complex" via a Social Network Stimulation which will assist in the induction process as well as giving credibility to the whole process. Needless to say, there is an opportunity to trot out the immanently released Change Management guide. This guide had a particular selling point of embracing the cynic... I promise I will post on this in the future as it is finalised.

To wrap up on the experience, the spectacular failure of the AVT Creation Workshop will remain more strongly in my mind than any minor successes over the three day, but isn't that the point?

This workshop was succeeded by another with a sister organisation, on which I will post on shortly.

Change is Goodness

It has been a busy week that will all but culminate tomorrow with a full-day version of the three half-days that began the week, with a sister organisation. 

Despite my confuddlement with the AVT Creation, I will give it another bash albeit in a new way. I was heartened with the success of the Model Creation and subsequent Action Planning that I mentioned previously. I look forward to deconstructing it all especially with Dave's kind offer and the upcoming Practitioner Workshop in Melbourne on Friday week.

But this post is not about that... instead on the sidelines of this week some great things have happened... A strategic change recommendation was implemented with gusto as some sort of silver bullet solution to a Crisis in a bigger job, which had seen me running down the East Coast. I think this was my first conscious attempt (and success) and a Randy Pausch Headfake.

The other was my renewed vigor to finalise the Change Management Guide in the form that I envisaged... I am hoping for completion by the Practitioner's Workshop... so expect some more as it crystalises

Baptism of Fire

Well I am convinced that I picked the absolute most completely unsuitable group to attempt my first Archetype Creation Workshop... It was a completely insular and stove-piped group of Aerospace Engineers, associated Technicians and Data Managers. 

I considered the organisation ready for something different for a number of reasons, not the least of which was the suggestion that the Business Plan was not working and a new approach was required. All of this being said, I am open to suggestion that everything looks like a nail at the moment, and this is my new Hammer...

To initiate the sharing of experiences I used the Wordle tool that I mentioned back in June. The learning point for me here was that using the word 'story' as part of the instructions was never going to go well with the audience. Add to this intolerance of ambiguity and we start to get the concept of how the morning went... That being said, I think that with some tweaks this could've worked much better, in particular taking it toward a Comparison

Despite all this some archetypes did emerge and some were nearly useful... but some lessons have been learnt in preparation for Thursday's one-dayer with a sister organisation... but Tomorrow holds a Model Creation by Social Construction amongst a communication game to pick up on where the Comparison would've gone. Wish me luck

The Future, Backwards

Yesterday I ran my second Future, Backwards  in my role as an internal consultant. The day was focussed on developing a plan of action in a changing environment.

The day was scheduled to conduct two simultaneous 'Future, Backwards' then to take the Turning Points from both as Sensemaking Items for use in the Cynefin Model Creation by Social Construction (corners method). The result was to role directly into a Domain-based Strategy Planning Session. There is nothing overly exciting about this as a methodology but it was my first attempt.

It is probably timely to recognise that I was assisted by team members that are not accredited practitioners, which had some impact but was not really the biggest learning point. There were a number, particularly the cognitive load that it places on the participants needs to be managed and exposing the executive to so much ambiguity does not necessarily lead to great results. 

The real take away for me was finding myself frustrated at the lack of imagination and extremely limited vision in the description of possible future states. On thinking about this I wonder if the issue is a 'dominant organisational narrative' in the form of a mantra. Namely, 'more people', 'more money' and  'more resources'...

I am particularly interested to know if anyone has come across a similar issue in their organisation or am I dealing with something peculiar

On the Cognitive Edge Course...

Through the Blogsphere I stumbled across a Course mate which inspired me to Blog in a similar vain.

I really liked Brad's list but I modified it slighly to a list of thought fragments inspired by the course:

• Politicians intuitively get complexity but expect Categorisation and Analysis from Public Servants
• Communities of Practice need to emerge not be formed
• Treat Data like a Crime Scene
• Formulate the hypothesis from the data
• Don't Pareto-ise
• Thoughts are stored as fragments but through telling and re-telling of experiences links
  (tags) grow with other fragments - leading to retrospective coherence.
• Training Stories form the ID of the organisation
• Replicate the Starting Conditions not the End
• Encourage positive trends and dampen the negative
• Manage the workplace not the work
• Consider the Roles (Crews) in an organisation (Loki, Journeyman, Master, Apprentice, White & Black Knights)

I have quite a good set of notes for my disordered mind and many ideas for application and development. I am keen to try the extant methods but can't help but to think that everything has changed. The principles of the Cognitive Edge experience have formed a strange attractor...

And finally, to vehemently agree with Brad (paraphrased):
my favourite line, “cynics are the people who care about the organisation”, since they are the ones looking for a better way to improve their organisations (ere, ere!).

The journey not the end...

If I were to tell you a story of a Superhero, you would expect a villain. And there would always be a villain or else the Superhero would become the villain and the people (police, DA etc) take the role of Superhero. (I am aware that this is more eloquently put by Harvey Dent in the Dark Knight)

Thus we have centered stories on a co-emergence for as long as Hero stories have been told... and even in Newtonian physics forces were described in this fashion. So why then do we engage in behaviours and expect it to asymmetrical benefits in the long term? If Lean is the Hero, who is the Villain?

And then there is from Villian to Hero

To draw on my observations... During a tender for outsourcing, a service provider may be able to underbid the incumbent which is a fantastic proposition (unless it is your job, but you will probably work for the outsource company anyway). But once the tenderer is selected what then occurs? the environmental constraints have changed and thus a lack of competition ensues and the performance adjusts the old environment and you run out of TP. So surely one might be able to see that the state of competition is in fact the better option and not the selection of the winner. I think that an attitude closer to this might allow us to avoid prescriptive recipe books like six stigma (Sorry Dave, I had to steal that... You can have Pathological Deconstruction)

I take this as not a mere coincidence but a fault of replicating the end conditions.

Or am I being too yin & yang?