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 IKI Talks Questions

First, my apologizes for being a bit late with this post.  It's been a crazy month in a good kind of way.

In keeping my eyes open for new ideas and information, this arrived amongst the various Linkedin notifications that I get daily.  The Institute for Knowledge and Innovation South-East Asia Bangkok University, IKI-SEA for short, has interviewed 34 international KM practitioners and will be posting short videos for the next 34 weeks. The series is called IKI Talks. If you want to see the videos, the first three are up here.

I thought for this week’s blog post, I would consider and answer the five questions that were posed to the 34 KM practitioners IKI-SEA talked to.

And so: without further ado, here are the questions and my answers:

1. How do you explain the difference between information and knowledge?

I would start off by saying that in general terms, information is knowledge's work product.

Beyond that, information is also a bridge between one person's knowledge and another person getting that knowledge so that it's useful to them. When people recognize what they know and how they know it, in either in an explicit or back of mind kind of way,  they can start to tell stories or write things down, making tangible information out of knowledge that is sometimes hard to get a handle on. As this happens, knowledge becomes information that can be passed around.  Once some who will see it as new information gets it, they go through whatever their information processing model is, bringing the new information into their knowledge in a way that is useful to them.

2. What will be the most important topic in knowledge management in the future?

In my view knowledge management doesn't ask questions, it answers them. Knowledge Management is a set of tools to help organizations to become great.  So I think the most important KM question in the future will continue to be the one we are being asked to answer now: How do we best help those we work with achieve their strategic priorities?

There is a catch here, and that's that KM needs to fight to get a seat at the strategy table to be able to do that work. So I believe that the most important topic in KM in the future is: How do we learn to have better conversations with those we work with in order to do our work so that our clients or the organizations we work with get the world changing results?

3. How do you foresee knowledge management as a discipline in the future?

I see the discipline evolving beyond what has become traditional KM in organizations.  I see the leaps forward in technology, neuroscience and behavioural sciences changing our understanding of how and what we do to achieve our goals.

I think we live in a really exciting time with core financial market principles shifting and changing, with our populations aging, and with technology providers introducing world changing products on a regular basis.  I see KM, and it may not actually be called KM in the near future, becoming the way that all this noise gets clear and talks to each other.  I see great opportunity for people with an understanding of how people know what they know, the related science and the related technologies.  I think people who are able to work with organizations to leverage all these pieces becoming an key and essential ingredient for organizational success.  Key and essential in the way that if you've got KM you'll succeed and if you don't, you won't.

I think the only thing missing right now is that those of us who are KM practitioners and experts need to learn to have different conversations with those of who aren't experts.  We need to hear what our 'clients' are saying and then speak with them about what we do in a way that they can understand so that we can show our value and get to do our work.

4. How do you explain the link between knowledge management and innovation?

Innovation never starts in a vacuum. Something happens in an organization or firm's markets that asks a very pointed question. The organization then needs to recognize the question, clarify it and work to answer it. Making up that answer starts from the platform of skills, strengths, resources and information that is either explicitly or tacitly available to a person or group or organization.  Knowledge management's role in this process is to allow or make the conditions so that the most useful skills, strengths, resources and information are on the tip of the tongue or at the fingertips of the people looking to answer the question in a way that changes the world.

5. How do you foresee the future of innovation management?

People have been making new things and solving problems for centuries.  People naturally solve problems with what they know as a part of their daily lives. I think the future of innovation management lies in not managing innovation at all but in allowing and supporting people in what they do naturally.

Rather than managing innovation, we need to find the courage to encourage people to dream and play.  Day dreaming, following distractions, going for walks, watercooler conversations; things like this are all useful in that they allow the seeds of innovation to come into being and grow.

Once the seed is planted, then, yes, there is some managing that needs to be done, but usually the managing is to manage to get out of the way of the excitement and energy that making something new creates.

See you next week!

What's That Niggle?

There is something somewhere bothering you.  For the purposes of this post, considering the frame it’s in, we’ll assume that ‘something' is work related.  It could be about a process, or that piece of information you can’t find, or a question about a procedure you’re looking to talk to someone about or a feeling that the path your company is on isn’t quite the right one. That something is nebulous. out of focus and just uncomfortable enough to be a little disruptive.  It’s a sense that something’s missing, something’s stuck or something’s not letting you get something done and it’s succeeded in pulling your attention from more productive things.

I was thinking about my own ‘something’ like this last week. That got me thinking about the story of The Princess and the Pea, and that led me to scribble a thought on an index card.  Which is how I find out what the niggle is.  The niggle gets stable and focussed when I write down the thought that holds the niggle.  And unlike the princess who didn’t want to find out what was keeping her up all night, once that thought is staring at me from a piece of card, paper, whiteboard or blackboard I begin to dig through all the layers of mattress. I allow my mind and my attention to wander with a purpose, to sort out what might be going on with this thing that’s poking me in the physical or metaphorical ribs and not letting me sleep well. And when I find that thing, it’s time to look for solutions.

In the story, the niggle is a test: a woman comes in out of the rain, claims she’s a royal and so a test is set to find out if that’s true. In our lives and work, the niggle is also a test.  There is something going on that isn’t allowing us to become as royal as we want to be.  In the paths we have chosen something is in the way, or is on the side of the road, pulling our attention away from what’s important.  We are all princes and princesses.  Though we’re not necessarily looking for a wife or a husband, we all feel the pea when it matters.  It is well worth the effort to find out what that thing is and change distraction into renewed focus.

Let’s talk about how to dig through your mattresses, remove the pea and make new things.

See you in a week!