Engine For Change

When you’re driving change, often part of your journey is determining who is responsible for the whole or the parts of the area you wish to change.  Sometimes you’ll find that though someone or several people should be responsible, actually getting one or more of them to admit their responsibility is next to impossible.  Here’s a trick I use to visualize the responsibility gaps.  Try it out and see how it works for you.

• Choose a problem or area of contention to discuss.

• Attempt, as much as possible, to get all the people you perceive have some portion of responsibility into one room. This is often harder than it sounds and can be skipped in favor of a more speculative method, but that method won’t yield more than a quarter of the results if everyone involved is present.

• Label a point on a piece of paper or a white board as the problem spot then draw a large circle around it.

• Ask the parties involved what portion they perceive (or know through documentation) is their responsibility. As you draw the picture, show only those overlapping regions which the people in the room offer to you.

• When each “semi-responsible” party is listed in the drawing, follow up by asking the group if there are any areas where their responsibilities overlap.

• After correcting the drawing for those areas, ask if there are any areas where no one is responsible. Mark those unclaimed regions.

• The fun for the participants comes when you ask them “Who should be responsible?” This is often an easy answer for people to give because they get to do what they’ve long done non-visually, leave the responsibility with others.

• With this current state responsibility map, ask the group who benefits if this problem is resolved. Note any groups or individuals listed that have no responsibility in the map.

• Ask the group who suffers if this problem is resolved. Note any group or individual listed that has no responsibility in the map.

• Ask anyone present who has responsibility but defined in narrowly why they define their responsibility so narrowly. Listen for past incidents of punishment for exceeding perceived responsibility (e.g., the top leader punished me because I didn’t ask permission before I tried to fix that last time). Try to determine whether or not the conditions that created that situation still exist, e.g., was that the behavior of that person or is that the ongoing expectation of anyone in that position.

• Ask how we could free people to assume greater responsibility. To amplify this question, you should target it directly to those in the room who in the past have actively limited the responsibility of others. “Bob, what action will you take to free people to assume greater responsibility?”

• Ask the group to close their eyes, keep their eyes closed, and raise their hands only if they agree with the statement, “I will assume a different range of my responsibility tomorrow, and behave differently now because of this analysis,” raise their hand.

• Continue questioning until you see enough of the right people raising their hands to make near-term progress on the issue.

• Share your responsibility map with anyone who wasn’t present during the actions above.  Add their feedback to the map.

• Start driving change with those truly responsible.

You will never get to where you want to be unless you head in that direction.” – Unknown

Typically, when people are implementing change they feel confident about the destination they’ve chosen, but they seem quite awful at heading in that direction.  My observation is that they struggle with heading in that direction because they’ve rarely seen someone actually drive themselves toward a destination.

To be successful, you’ll act in ways you have never seen a leader act.  You’ll choose to turn your operation from a follow the rules at all cost operation into one driven by individual initiative.  Until your people assume creating change is their job and not yours, they won’t move toward your destination on their own.  Your goal is an organization filled with people who view the new, harder jobs as part of their jobs and  get excited to do them.

Rather than (Option 1) first barking orders then whipping–or at minimum having your underlings threatening to whip–those that don’t comply, instead you must (Option 2) discuss the destination and outline what steps you are taking to get yourself there first, to make ready the way for others.  Maybe this option would work even better if you shared the stage with their beloved local manager, who they trust more than you and who will be around to see them through the day to day challenges.

Rather than (Option 3) sending out hordes of auditors to seek out failure to comply, you would instead (Option 4) visit the work sites every two weeks for two months to inspect what you expect, supporting and praising the good behaviors and questioning and removing obstacles creating bad behaviors.  And Option 4 might be even better if you brought one of the budget department folks with you, so if you saw an obstacle, the people knew the funding would be on its way to fix it.

Don’t believe me that these behaviors would work to send you toward your destination?  Just try running the two scenarios through my motivation perspective mapping method. Which options move you in the direction you desire?

I’m encouraging you to try the mapping method for yourselves. If just one of you posts a comment saying you tried the method then I’ll follow up this post with a detailed proof of how I used the mapping method to create the four options.

Choose your destination. Find your heading.  Drive change!

[Thanks to Lyndee for including this week's quote as the tag line on her e-mails.]

Once you’re great at driving change, I bet people watching you will say you’re:

• setting an example,
• being a good listener, but not compromising on your values,
• continually teaching other people, and
• helping people pull away from their current practice and beliefs and move into the new philosophy without a feeling of guilt about the past.

W. Edwards Deming defined someone with these characteristics as a person transformed; a person who had achieved a place in a system of profound knowledge.

Captain Ralph Soule wrote up an excellent excerpt of Deming’s system description, cutting together vital definitions to make the abstract concepts hang together in one post.

If you don’t know Deming, read Soule’s post before continuing or the rest of this post likely won’t make as much sense as it could. (more…)

Today, I got into a disagreement over a blog post.

In the blog post, the author offers one way to move the people of an organization from stopped-and-waiting toward innovating-and-creating.

My response to the blog post was swift: That won’t work.

That: The actions (and cautions) the author prescribes.

Won’t work: Will not produce the capacity for independent innovation within the employees.

Sure, the manager will happily hold a meeting, define the conditions and maybe get some actionable solutions.  Yet, the goal of the actions prescribed isn’t to produce action at the moment, but the capacity for action in the future.

Now, why am I reacting so viscerally to what should be a harmless, one-of-many options blog post about generating a new culture?  Because too many of the options offered up in blog and magazine articles read like useful directions yet fail to produce the actual outcomes they claim to achieve.   My emotional response comes from my frustration watching well-meaning people squander their often limited energies on action that create the desired outcome less than 2 in 10 times.

With all the blogs out there (this one included) trying to help you create positive change, I bet you need some way to split the good advice from the bad directions, and test the effectiveness before taking any action.

As luck would have it, I have a method to show you how I map the options to find what will work. (more…)

I tried to write a typical review (what I loved, what I wondered about, so what) of Seth Godin’s Linchpin and I couldn’t.  I just couldn’t.

Instead, to show you how I saw Linchpin, I must draw you a map.

If you know me personally, and frequent the space near me, you’ve likely watched me scrawl some version of this onto one white board or another.  You’ll have to tell me if I’ve left out any of the good parts.

To the rest of you, I hope that over the imperfect medium of the internet, this somehow makes sense. I’m no Tolkien (really going out on a limb on this one), but I’m trying to draw for you my own Middle Earth, the map in my mind.

Here we go:

Before I read Linchpin, I was already thinking about maps, new maps. [Actually, new coordinate systems (but I'll just leave you with the link for now).]

Then, I found these lines in Linchpin:

Every day I meet people who have so much to give but have been bullied enough or frightened enough to hold it back.  They have become victims, pawns in a senseless system that uses them up and undervalues them.

It’s time to stop complying with the system and draw your own map.

Who am I to question Seth Godin?  I drew a map. (more…)