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

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?

Safety Management

I wasn't really very surprised to find out that someone else had been thinking about a narrative database in terms of Aviation Safety. My experience with the Defence Aviation Safety Database is that it gets very wound up over the details and processes. For example, a defective part requires a defect investigation; an insufficient publication needs an amendment. Apart from the occasional question of whether the support systems are sufficient to respond to a booming safety culture that reports every near miss and even the nearly near miss etc, there is the murky circumstances where there was not necessarily a root cause. So this sets us a scene that you have to report a safety event, it is expected to have a root cause or several and something has to be done about it. So apart from a spiralling process driven bureaucracy it becomes unattractive for a person to engage in the safety reporting and thus the system ceases to be useful.

A reasonable person could potentially see that the bureaucratic overheads of telling your story might actually prevent the lesson being learnt. I say this with knowledge of Sensemaker but are there ways of adjusting the micro-culture to talk about its failure and thus change the system we have into something more useful, from the ground up?

Values Based Leadership and Emergence

A conversation about values-based leadership recently had me thinking about emergence, surely this values-based leadership has something more to it than Walking the Talk. This conversation irked me a little as the experienced guy spoke about pulling out this card with the values on it, reading it and then doing something inspired by that... I found this no different than rules based operations, for the blind adherence of idiots and the guidance of the wise... I would reference that, but not sure who to attribute it to.

Aspirational values are a lovely to have and serve as a gross-error check to see if you are really aligned to the organisation. In most cases they are fairly generic and reflective of some societally aspirational values. I suggest then that managing the environment and not the tasks is actually more of values-based leadership. The fact is despite what is on the wall the values of the workplace are often not nearly as aspirational as the writing on the wall. I daresay that during the job hunt or choosing an employee a fair bit of value-based decision making goes on but once the employee-relations is sorted, the values probably fall into a more natural order of seeking the lowest energy method for achieving the optimum outcome given the parameters (i.e. reward structure, workplace layout, regulations and consequences). Thinking about values reminds me of the Dave Snowden story of his daughter's birthday party... they should be monitored so that the good ones are encouraged and the bad ones cancelled out.

I put to you that sometimes the real values of the workplace are knocking off early on a Friday and if you have to look at a card in your wallet you might not really get it.

$58, no joke.

I have been somewhat slack... albeit a little the fault of my access to the net... Unfortunately, there is no access to social-networking behind the work firewall nor regular access to internet whilst in Wagga Wagga... Anyway, the direction of this blog is still working itself out.

Well I have some half-baked uses for the Cynefin framework that I intend to blog in the near future... One looks at training, which might actually be closer to KM than I anticipated and the other one looks at Military organisational structure.

Speaking of the Military, I wonder if the RAAF is aware of this revelation. This will not help their retention, I am sure.

To finish, I was shabbily in need of a haircut after my 3 weeks away so I went to the place I have used near work. Only to find that the Barbers had left for the week. This was fine I would simply find a place near home...

I googled a place in North Adelaide called Mens Hairdresser's (which seemed unambiguous enough for me) but once I got to the Village there was none to be found. So, now I wandered closer to home and started looking for a hairdresser. This is not hard to find on Melbourne St, but this uncomfortable feeling settled over me as I stood outside... I felt the need to ask if they cut men's hair... I avoid this and headed to the one with the picture of the bearded person amongst all of the women. Now I say bearded person because the model was somewhat androgynous and that should've been a hint...

I am still getting over the fact that they could keep a straight face whilst telling me that a man's haircut cost $58... I realised it was not a joke when they offered me 10% because it was my first time... Am I out of kilter with the world or did I miss something extra that was on offer here?