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!!

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.

 

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!