Say Yes to Everything

It’s a great time of year, the end of August winding towards the start of September.  Yes, Labour Day is early this year, but that just means that a whole bunch of things that begin with the Labour Day weekend start earlier too. I’ve heard of so many kids looking forward to going back to class on Tuesday.

Which is the way of looking at things I want to talk about.  I’m not talking about my relentless optimism, which is a part of my statements, but about something I learned in an improvisation class years ago:  Say yes to everything.  

In a scene that is part of a game in an improvisation class, this idea ( it’s a rule really ) of saying yes to everything is to remove all obstacles that will stop participants from playing.  It allows that first thing that pops into a person’s head, which is usually the best idea, to come into being, be supported and have that thought add to the fun. That fun gets added to by the next idea and then the next and in no time everyone’s rolling in the isles with laughter as things get outlandish and outrageous.

I’ve just finished reading Opposable Minds by Roger Martin, former Dean at the Rotman School at the University of Toronto and I followed it up with the Kelly Brothers of IDEO’s Creative Confidence.  Both of these books are pretty cool on their own, but together they reminded me of this rule, this consideration, from my time in improv school.  

Opposable Minds is at it’s core about how people can hold two seemingly conflicting ideas together in opposition in order to find a solution that is better than either idea alone.  Creative Confidence is about how to boldly design and create new things by unlocking a creative energy we all had as kids but may have lost along the way.  In digesting these two things, the rule of ’say yes to everything’ popped into my head again.  

'Yes and . . .’, which is what saying yes to everything sounds like in action, means that you have to hold two ideas in your head at once: your idea and that of the person you’re connected with.  There is no way to say 'yes and . . .' and continue the conversation with both parties feeling engaged and supported without holding onto the two ideas and moving forward.  And saying 'yes and . . . ' is like one of those mind dump exercises we’ve done where a once white wall or white board is covered in many colors of post it notes or marker scribbles with a diverse set of ideas all working towards a solution to a common problem. 'Yes and . . .' opens up the frame to include more space and territory and introduce all that many more possibilities.  We all know how 'yes, but' or just a flat out no makes us want to pack up our shovel and leave the sandbox.  We all know how that feels.  But we also know of those summer days when we were younger when everything was possible and we made so many things happen by just saying 'yes and  . . .' and what if?

So as the summer ends, think about how saying “Yes and . . . “ to a colleague or co-worker who has an idea that’s really different than yours might change things.  I can think of about four times in my life where saying 'yes and' has made all the difference: football, theatre school, business school, Argrestes and this blog.  Where can saying yes to everything open up a whole new raft of possibilities for you this fall?

Have a great long weekend! Enjoy the endings, beginnings and all those new things you’ll find when you say yes to everything!

Coming This Fall: More of this blog, guest blogs for KM Calgary and Micaura Consulting and the first Argrestes Consulting white paper on moving from a siloed organization to collaboration and innovation!! Also there’s a whole pile of new stuff coming online at NLP Canada Training. It's worth a look over there too!

See you next week!!

What Do We Mean When We Say Productivity?

I’ve been doing some reading lately and scanning the business press as I do to see if there is anything that piques my interest and I’ve noticed that the word productivity is making a bit of a comeback.  I wonder if that has anything to do with it being time for children to go back to school and for the universities to start classes again?  I have to admit that the word and how it gets used when we talk about business and employee engagement causes me some concern.

The problem that I have with the word is that there doesn’t seem to be a clear handle on what we mean when we say productivity, or its verb being productive.  I suppose the good news is that we can somehow measure productivity, by assigning a dollar value to tasks and then multiplying, but that’s also the bad news.  It means that time that isn’t assigned a value is all of a sudden give the label ‘unproductive' and we are admonished to throw that unproductive task or thing onto the trash heap. This is a particular problem if you’re in an industry using a billable hours model.

I think that the way the word productivity is used in the press and in our workplaces doesn’t allow for an understanding of how people work and get stuff done.  We all know that social media is where productivity goes to die, but is it really? Yes two hours spent down the 'angry cat' rabbit hole is most likely a problem, but is it possible that a five minute check of Facebook, Linkedin or Twitter could actually reset and recharge someone who’s been looking at the same word processing screen for four hours?  Or what about the artists who swear by mid afternoon walks?  In the corporate sense of productivity, that half hour to two hour time away from a desk or an easel is ‘unproductive', but I know from fantastic personal experience that the idea that shifts a stuck project or thought into new spaces and greater effectiveness more often than not pops into mind after I've gotten up, stepped away from my desk and gotten outside to breathe different air, see different things and hear different sounds.    

So with this information in mind, I think the conversation around productivity needs to shift.  I think that what’s at the core of the conversation about what we mean by productivity these days is actually about focus and attention. I have noticed that people are actually producing something all the time. Even when it appears like they aren’t, something is being ‘produced’. That something might be frustration or it could be a really successful attempt at emptying a mind of any thought, but people are never actually doing 'nothing'. People are most ‘productive’ in the way business would like them to be when their whole self, mind and body, is engaged and focussed on something in a relaxed way. Where and on what is just a matter of what a person's mind and body is pointed towards.

So the next time you see someone you work with or works for you stalk away from their desk in frustration and come racing back twenty minutes later, maybe with latte in hand, with more energy to throw at the task they were just made angry by because they had a new thought in the line at Starbucks, think about what small or larger breaks might do for how you focus on getting the important things done.

See you next week!

Do You Hear What I Hear?

Though Christmas is months away, I wanted to get your attention. 

Having done that, the actual title of this week’s entry is “Do you hear what your clients are saying?"

Recently, I was talking with a KM colleague and we were joking about how we can’t describe to our parents what we do in a way that makes sense to them.  We both laughed, and I thought that it’s a good thing that our parents aren’t our clients.  But what if they were? What if we’re letting a whole lot of potential work fall by the wayside because we can’t articulate what we do in a way that potential clients can understand and connect with? 

Step one in providing value is knowing what value to provide.   As much as providing value has been a topic of conversation all over the place in the business press and on the web, I think that the last part of my sentence tends to go missing. There are piles of stories in inc. and Profit Magazine about start ups and businesses who had brilliant ideas but floundered or couldn’t get off the ground because they couldn’t find a market or sell into the market they found.  I believe that anyone can describe the value of the thing they’ve created, but if the words you use to describe that value don’t connect to what your clients are saying is causing them grief, then I believe the journey to closing up shop has begun. It just might take a while.

So what are your clients saying? What are my clients saying? I think those of us in the KM and Strategy worlds get caught up in our jargon and what we’re saying to each other.  It is comfortable and reassuring to find like minded people you can talk to, especially if you’re a solo-preneur like me.  I’ve had a number of 'preaching to the converted' type of conversations where we talk about DMS and intranets and collaboration and innovation and we all feel like we have so much to offer the world.  Afterwards, when my attention turns out, away from the familiar and towards potential clients, I hear an erie kind of silence because my clients and prospective clients are not speaking the same language.

By and large, what people aren’t saying is that they need a better system of taxonomy or a better DMS or a need to convert tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge so they can leverage it.  What they’re most likely saying is that they can’t find that (insert expletive here ) form or document that they need right now. ( I heard this from across the hall from a lawyer at a recent client.  She said it at full volume as she came flying out of her office door looking for her assistant. ) Other clients might have several new people they’ve had to hire that need to get up to speed fast and only two or three senior people to teach them and those people can’t be taken out of the front lines for very long because the productivity can’t lag while the new people get on stream.  Other clients might have a whole bunch of senior people who’ve begun scheduling their retirement parties and there is no one around who can do what those people can do and they are scared for their business.

I spoke in an earlier post about knowledge management needing to fight to get back into the strategic conversation.   We can do that by proving our operational value by learning to hear what our clients are saying, then speaking in our clients’ language about the solutions we can provide. Every KM practitioner reading this knows exactly how they would address each of the pain points I used as examples. But there’s a gap. I feel that the gap is a semantic one.  We all can talk a really good game.  But almost none of what we say when we use the usual KM terms and explanations reflects back what our clients, regardless of market vertical, are saying.  

David and Tom Kelly, founders of IDEO, talk about empathy: going out to where end-users live with an intense curiosity and a willingness to let go of assumptions to find out about how a product might actually get used. They say that the source of innovative solutions is the surprises that pop up when you learn about end-users in their environment.  Linda Ferguson teaches about making connections and influencing people by starting with meeting people where they live.  Linda says that influence and change can only happen once genuine agreement between people has been achieved.  That agreement starts when you’re aware of where you’re at and where the other person’s at.

In order to prove our value, and this applies to anyone selling anything, we first have to hear what our customers or clients are saying and how they’re saying it.  Only then can productive sales conversations happen. Only then does a real answer to ‘How can I help?’ start to take shape.

See you next week!

The First Question in a Strategic Planning Process

I hope everyone’s having a great summer as we wind through the dog days and towards the fall and the start of the new school year.  Today’s post is short and sweet, but asks what I think is a vital question.

A few years ago, when I was a newly minted MBA and eager to use all my new found skills in the real world away from the soft and cozy halls of academics, I suggested to a friend of mine who’s business was going through a pretty serious transition that a SWOT or 5 Forces analysis would be very useful things to help steady the ship.  My friend had another friend, a long time veteran of strategic consulting, who gave her this advice after hearing of my suggestion: "You could do one of those. When you’re done, don’t look at it. That kind of thing’s not useful to you now, and maybe ever."

It took me a while to stop being all offended that my new expertise had the door slammed shut on it so quickly.  I wasn’t even asking for a fee then.  

Recently, though, I’ve begun to see the larger wisdom in the veteran’s statement. Although my story is about a crisis that has been nicely weathered since then,  I’ve come to understand that the first question that needs to be asked in strategy work is: Do you need to do the work? Does your current situation warrant everything that creating and implementing new strategy requires?  The answer to which comes hard on the heals of the answers to a few other questions: What are you doing now? How’s that working for you? What’s that getting you?  Have your markets shifted? Are there new fish in the sea? The answers to these questions will not only tell you if you need to embark on the project but they will start you on the road to the answer to the next question in a strategy process: What is it about what you’re doing that convinces your customers to pay you? 

That last question is my take on the first question of McKinsey’s strategy creation model.  I think it’s an immensely valuable one but only after seriously considering whether or not the effort required to create a new strategy is necessary, especially  knowing about the change work that will have to be done to implement it.  That’s a lot of effort if the process turns out to just be a make-work project.  And I know how we all feel about those.

So everything comes down to the first question:  Is all this useful?  Do you need to do the work? The careful questioning, analysis and creativity that strategy creation requires needs to be preceded by a bit of honest soul searching and inquisitively gazing out into your markets.  If the answer is no, you can focus your energies and efforts on continuing to execute what you’re currently doing as well as you can.  If the answer truly is yes, we need to do this work,  then all the questions you answered to get you to that knowledge will be very useful to you as you move forward to make new paths and avenues for success.

Let’s talk.