Tag: #questionable

If an Opportunity Presented Itself, Would you Notice?

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During a lecture at the University of Lille in 1854, Louis Pasteur remarked, “In the fields of observation, chance favors only the prepared mind.” Getting unstuck often starts with an interesting situation getting your attention. What makes a situation interesting enough to get our attention is that it deviates from the norm. We notice something and then have an insight that connects what we notice to an opportunity for an improvement. If the 3M scientist, Dr. Spencer Silver had ignored the result of his failed experiment to make a super-strong adhesive, we might have been stuck in a world without Post-It Brand sticky notes. If the Swiss engineer, George de Mestral had not marveled at the tiny hooks that allowed cockle-burs to attach themselves to his dog’s fur, we might never have benefitted from the hook and loop fastening system known as VELCRO®. Silver and de Mestral had prepared minds when an opportunity knocked.

Organizational leaders feel disoriented by the volatility and hyper-competiveness of today’s business environment. What’s worse, we can no longer rely on traditional management tools like business process optimization to produce predictable results. Process optimization doesn’t work when a process becomes obsolete. For example, why expend energy reducing the cost of producing music CDs when nobody wants them? Consequently, topics like innovation and design thinking have replaced process reengineering as popular skill sets for managers.

Unfortunately, leaders who have been trained to optimize business processes are not well equipped to take advantage of interesting situations that deviate from the norm. Generally speaking, the minds of today’s leaders are not well prepared to be favored by chance. For most of today’s leaders, chance is a nemesis; variability is the enemy of efficiency and productivity. When design thinkers encourage us to invite uncertainty and ambiguity into management processes, they create problems for leaders who have been trained to reduce surprises and variability. Anticipating the emerging challenge of preparing managers to become more innovative, Jeanne M. Liedtka and John W. Rosenblum wrote in a 1996 article for the California Management Review,

When we reduce variation, we increase the performance of the system in the short term. In the long term, we deprive the system of the new information that it needs to move forward.

Henry Mintzberg, a pioneer of strategic thinking made a similar point, “…tomorrow’s vision may grow out of today’s aberration.”

The “prepared mind” gets more chances to improve things because it can recognize opportunities that the unprepared mind ignores or dismisses. The prepared mind is curious and asks questions. The prepared mind has an expansive outlook and a flexibility of attention capable of entertaining a wide range of options. The barrier to improving our organizations may not be a lack of analytical skill or imagination. The problem may be that the unprepared organizational mind only knows what it sees, because it can only see what it already knows.

How about an Organizational Seder?

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At some point during the last few days, thousands of reluctant Jewish children were goaded into reciting the portion of a traditional Passover Seder known as, “The Four Questions.” Some no doubt enjoy the attention while others are scarred for life. I can still picture the unspoken enmity that arced between my mother and my daughter when my daughter refused to recite the four questions for a tableful of relatives at a Seder twenty years ago.

While I’m on the subject, let me share a clever Passover Seder ploy that my father came up with. Every year my father would offer the kids at the table money if we could isolate an unbroken, single row of matzo by eating around it. He would pay 50 cents for an end row and a dollar for a middle row. Years later I reminded him of the annual matzo challenge and he confessed that he only did it to keep us quiet.

Apart from the logistical and emotional challenges of gathering friends and family around a dinner table for hours of rituals and readings, there is something appealing to me about reconnecting with the purpose of our traditions once a year from the perspective of the communities’ newest members. The four questions all begin with the phrase, “Why is this night different from all other nights?” Each question focuses on an example of a difference: Why only matzos? Why bitter herbs? Why are we dipping our vegetables? Why are we reclining? By the way, if you’ve never been to a Seder and you are looking for definitive and unambiguous answers to the four questions – spoiler alert – the Rabbis disagree.

Young children get away with asking questions about things adults take for granted. In the same way, new members of an organizational community ask questions that long-tenured members of the community accept as part of the routine. The Seder would be a lot shorter if the leader answered the four questions by saying, “that’s just how we do it around here, now eat your bitter herbs.” Of course, when it comes to Judaism, the point of the Seder is to preserve tradition. When it comes to our organizations, naïve and potentially impertinent questions undermine traditions.

Imagine some annual organizational version of the Seder. Instead of town hall meetings with leaders laying out the operating plan for the year, what would happen if the newest members of the community were encouraged to ask four questions about what makes their new organization different from all other organizations? What questions would the newest members of your organizational community ask you?

#betterquestions #passover #fourquestions

Four Imperatives for Crafting Better Questions

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Since I’m in the business of helping people ask better questions. I shouldn’t be surprised when someone asks me, “What makes one question better than another?” That’s actually a good question. Before I describe why I think it’s a good question, let’s have a look at some classic categories of second-rate questions:

Questions that are actually advice or judgment masquerading as a question: Shouldn’t you unplug the toaster before trying to unjam that bagel with your knife? Just because it’s good advice, doesn’t make it a good question.

Questions that beget questions instead of answers: What should we do? Unless the situation in which this question arises is dire, the appropriate response is, “that depends, what is happening and what do you want to have happen?”

Questions that constrain rather than liberate: Should we build it ourselves or outsource it?

Questions that make it unsafe to answer candidly: The boss asks forcefully at the conclusion of a meeting, “I don’t see any reason why we can’t meet this deadline, do you?”

I apply four criteria when evaluating the quality of a question. I refer to each criterion as an imperative. Better questions satisfy four imperatives.

Imperative 1: Will answering the question help you avoid solving the wrong problem?

To avoid solving the wrong problem you must recognize the influence of underlying structures and cultural norms. It’s tempting to solve problems as they arise without questioning the cause, but when the problem persists or regularly reemerges, efforts to solve each problem in isolation become counterproductive. I can take an aspirin to make my headache go away, but if the headache keeps coming back I will need to understand more about what’s causing it.

“What can I take to get rid of this headache?” is not as good as, “Why do I get a headache every time I drink red wine?”

Imperative 2: Will answering the question reduce the risk of missing something important?

Being attentive to our environmental context and the competitive landscape reduces the risk that we will miss something important. The overwhelming amount of information available to us conspires with the relentless pace of work to narrow the aperture through which we learn about the world. If we keep our heads down and focus only on our functions and our objectives, we may miss emerging trends that could make the way we are currently framing our questions irrelevant.

“How do we leverage social media?” is not as good as, “What influences how our future best customers make judgments about a brand?”

Imperative 3: Will answering the question make it easier for people to take concerted action?

The answers to our most important questions involve and impact others. Crafting questions that are considerate of people who will be impacted by the answer is not just an ethical thing to do, it avoids unanticipated conflicts in priorities and improves your answers by including diverse perspectives.

“How do I get people to focus more on our customers?” is not as good as, “What conditions encourage helpfulness?”

Imperative 4: Will answering the question increase the novelty of your options?

Questions that allow for multiple and diverse options inspire fresh thinking. Those who value learning from mistakes ask different questions than those looking for options that simply improve the status quo.

“How will that work?” or “What are the benefits and risks of that approach?” are not as good as, “If we experimented with that idea, what would we learn?”

#betterquestions

What are you Listening for?

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When engaged in conversation, humans don’t listen to something; rather they listen for something. At the beach, we listen to the sounds of the ocean. At a concert, we listen to the music. Something changes when we listen to another person, especially when that person is responding to a question we’ve asked.

To say that we “listen for” something is to call attention to the fact that when we pose a question, we are meeting a need.

In conversation with someone, you are attentive in different ways based on the context of the interaction and the life experience responsible for the thoughts and feelings that accompany your listening. The police investigator listens differently to the question, “where were you last night?” than a concerned friend wanting to know why you didn’t come to her party. Imagine you have just returned from a tour of wineries in Bordeaux, France. You are standing with a group of people at a dinner party and you strike up a conversation with someone you have just met. You ask, “How do you know our host?” The person tells you that she met the host at a wine and cheese tasting event at the museum of modern art. Odds are that the reference to “wine and cheese” will be more salient than the reference to “modern art.”

The questions we choose to ask are windows into our thinking. What we listen for is influenced by the interplay of who we are and how we are thinking and feeling. The questions we choose to ask are in turn, influenced by what we listen for. Getting stuck often means that the information you get from the questions you ask does not alter anything about who you are and what you think and feel about the situation. If we are not changed by the information we are getting, we won’t change what we are listening for. If we don’t change what we are listening for, we won’t be able to think of better questions. I refer to this simplified version of confirmation bias as, “the inquiry loop.”

To illustrate how the Inquiry Loop influences the emergence of information and options, let’s deconstruct two possible versions of an interaction between a manager and a team member during a one-on-one performance discussion.

Manager’s Inquiry Loop

Version One

Manager’s Inquiry Loop

Version Two
Manager’s thoughts and feelings about the situation This will be a short meeting; getting information from Barry is like pulling teeth. He gets his work done and doesn’t complain. No point in making this conversation awkward for either of us. I feel like I count on Barry year after year, but I don’t really know much about him. He never speaks up in staff meetings and I sense that he finds these annual one-on-one’s uncomfortable. I’m going to challenge myself to break the pattern and see if we can’t build rapport.
What the manager is listening for The information I need to complete the performance development form Something I never knew before about Barry that might spark an idea for how to make work better for him and maybe even help him be better at what he does.
Question

(Asked by the manager)

 “I can’t believe it’s been another year. OK, Barry you know the drill. What are your three goals for the coming year?” Barry, before we get to the form I wanted to ask you something. The other day I went by your desk and saw a picture of you and maybe some friends dressed in some elaborate costumes. Forgive me for being nosey, but I was wondering what was going on in that picture?
Information

(How the team member answers the question)

 Barry slips a piece of paper to his manager, “I answered all the template questions in writing to save us time.” Barry blushes and looks away. After a moment he says, “It was a cosplay competition at an Anime convention. I actually won an award for that costume, but I’m sure you don’t want to hear about the weird stuff I do on the weekends.”
Given, the team members’ response, the manager’s thoughts and feelings  

I knew he hated these conversations as much as I do. Maybe next year, we can get this done by e-mail.

 

I have no idea what he’s talking about, but obviously there is a passion for creative expression that we are not tapping into.

 

Of course, things get complicated when you consider that there is an inquiry loop at work influencing what the other person in a conversation is thinking, feeling and listening for. For our purposes, it is enough to develop our awareness of what influences our own questions and to develop our own ability to listen for a change when we feel stuck.

If you are a student or a practitioner of improvisational theater, you already know the emphasis improvisers place on the skill of listening. For the uninitiated, it may seem counter-intuitive that actors and comedians engaged in improvisations would prioritize listening over having something interesting to say. Keith Johnstone is a British theater director, author, playwright and teacher who pioneered a number of theater exercises and techniques. Johnstone’s philosophy of improvisation has a spiritual quality to it. For Johnstone, the great improvisers are channeling an emergent creation by being attentive, not by being prepared. In Johnstone’s view of the art form, improvisers don’t get stuck because they run out of things to say, they get stuck because they try to be clever and impose something on a scene and end up losing the thread of what is being created. Even when listening, we can impose ourselves. If I’m improvising onstage and eager to try out the Russian accent I’ve been practicing, I will listen for an opportunity to introduce a character from Russia. Johnstone beautifully described what great improvisers and great listeners are listening for. He wrote,

Instead of telling actors that they should be good listeners (which is confusing), we should say, ‘Be altered by what’s said’ (1999, page 59)

When we listen with an intention to be altered, the unstuck strategies disrupt the stabilizing effects of the inquiry loop by allowing a better question to prompt new information that in turn alters our thoughts, our feelings, and ultimately what we are listening for.

Johnstone, K (1999). Impro for Storytellers. New York, NY: Routledge

Increase the Novelty of your Options

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How would you create a vehicle out of cardboard, pencils, soft drink cup lids, mailing labels, paper clips, rubber bands, toothpicks and scissors that could hold and transport ten Ping-Pong balls when blown across the floor by a leaf blower? By the way, you’re on a team of seven and you have five minutes.

When my three daughters were in elementary school, they participated in an extracurricular program called, “Destination Imagination.” Kids participating in Destination Imagination form teams and compete at creative problem solving competitions. Winning teams at the local level could move to their state competition and winning teams at the state competition are invited to the Global Finals competition held at the University of Tennessee each May. Since the program provided an engaging way for kids to explore three important subjects: creative problem solving, leadership, and teamwork, my wife and I became avid supporters and volunteers.

Teams participating in Destination Imagination solve two types of challenges. The teams spend months designing a solution to one of the published challenges and then present their solution at the tournament. While at the tournament, teams are given a second challenge, the “instant challenge,” which they have never seen before and must solve on the spot. After a few years with the program, I was asked to be an appraiser at the state tournament. The tournament officials assigned me to score high school teams solving an “instant challenge.” I watched twelve high school teams tackle a very tricky instant challenge at the state tournament that year with varying degrees of success.

At tournaments, teams check in at their appointed time for their instant challenge and then they are escorted to an instant challenge room. Teams pledge not to discuss what happens in the instant challenge room so that no team gets an unfair advantage by knowing what to expect. Only the appraisers and the team’s coach are allowed to watch the teams solve the instant challenge, parents must wait in a designated part of the tournament site. As a parent and former coach, I don’t know which is worse, not knowing what is happening in the instant challenge room or watching your team struggle with a challenge without being able to help. Destination Imagination has a strict non-interference rule, so if you’re the kind of parent that can’t keep your hands off the science fair project, be forewarned, Destination Imagination will be great for your kid and stressful for you.

That day the teams walked into a room to find a large open space on the floor and a table of materials. On the floor at one end of the room was a line of tape. Behind the line was a leaf blower. For their instant challenge, teams were given five minutes to construct a vehicle from the materials on the table that would hold and transport ten Ping-Pong balls. At the end of five minutes, the teams were to place the vehicle behind the line. They would have one minute to use the leaf blower to move the vehicle as far as possible across the room. Teams received points for distance travelled multiplied by the number of Ping-Pong balls remaining in the vehicle when they turned off the leaf blower.

Almost all the teams that day focused on the word, “vehicle.” Almost all the teams noticed that among the materials were items that looked like wheels (soft drink cup lids) and axles (pencils). Consequently, almost all the teams built some form or cart with a lid to contain the Ping-Pong balls. A few teams created a sail to catch the wind from the leaf blower. Given the power of the wind created by the leaf blower, the makeshift wheels and sails were as resilient as a kite in a hurricane. The diabolical scoring based on the distance travelled multiplied by the number of balls remaining in the vehicle left a lot of teams with a score of zero after the leaf blower wrecked the vehicles and scattered the Ping-Pong balls.

One team approached the challenge in a completely different way. They didn’t allow themselves to be constrained by the setup of the challenge. Instead of focusing on the word, “vehicle” or the suggestive nature of the materials, the team focused on containing and moving Ping-Pong balls. After thinking it through for a few minutes, the team rolled a piece of cardboard into a tube. They closed one end with a soft drink cup lid, filled the tube with the Ping-Pong balls and then sealed the other end with another soft drink cup lid; basically, they created a can filled with Ping-Pong balls. They laid the can down on the floor, turned on the leaf blower and watched in delight as it rolled across the floor and came to rest against the wall on the other side of the room with all ten Ping-Pong balls securely contained.

In his 1970 book Lateral Thinking, Edward deBono made a distinction between two thinking processes. He described vertical thinking as reasoning in a straight line or following a sequence of steps as one might do to solve a well-defined problem in logic or mathematics. By contrast, lateral thinking concerns itself with generating alternative ways of interpreting the problem. “Lateral thinking,” according to deBono, “is also concerned with breaking out of the concept prisons of old ideas” (1970, p. 8). The team that created a Ping-Pong ball can in response to the instant challenge used lateral thinking to create a novel solution.

Most of the problem-solving methodologies used in organizations (process reengineering, lean six sigma, kaizen, etc.) have strong vertical thinking orientations. Vertical thinking may not produce novel or unconventional solutions, but it will reliably yield a solution that improves the situation. Lateral thinking attracts intuitive leaps or insights by remaining open to information, ideas and connections that may seem irrelevant. As deBono put it, “Vertical thinking digs the same hole deeper; lateral thinking is concerned with digging a hole in another place” (p.15). In other words, vertical thinking will improve the status quo; lateral thinking will increase the novelty of your options.

Creative inquiry is not just about posing questions that spur new ideas. Creative inquiry is also about posing questions that reframe our assumptions. Once we define the problem we want solved, we inadvertently impose constraints. For example, If you manage a hotel that has been receiving complaints about how long it takes for the elevators to arrive, you might believe you have a “slow elevator problem.” If you focus on the people rather than the elevator, you might reframe the issue as, “a bored guest problem.” It’s easier to reduce complaints by putting mirrors and other distractions near the elevator doors than it is to upgrade the elevator system.

We are all Advising Professionals

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Colleen is a lawyer and works in the legal department of global retailing company. She wants business leaders in her company to consult with her earlier in their decision making process so she can mitigate risk to the company before agreements are finalized.

Jacob’s company produces advanced chemicals for use in manufacturing plants. The company has transformed its approach to selling. Instead of promoting the features and functions of his company’s products, Jacob now leads a sales team including chemical engineers who are expected to solve their customer’s problems with a combination of products, data analytics and on-going consulting support.

Alfie leads an agile software development team supporting the technology needs of his financial services company. Alfie often feels frustrated and overly constrained by requests from his internal customers. He wants to discuss options with business leaders before they become fixated on a specific solution.

One might presume that when it comes to their job descriptions, Colleen, Jacob and Alfie have nothing in common. Colleen is an attorney, Jacob is a salesperson and Alfie is a software engineer. They work in different industries. They have different functional expertise. Their success is measured in different ways.

Despite the obvious differences, they share a common mission. Like many of us, they want to help decision makers make better decisions. Colleen has expertise that would help her company’s leaders avoid costly mistakes. Jacob’s customers often miss out on valuable insights about how to use his company’s products and services. Alfie’s internal clients regularly overlook creative options for solving their technology problems.

Being the most skilled and knowledgeable lawyer, salesperson or software engineer does not necessarily mean that your expertise will be used. Professional expertise is necessary, but not sufficient. Professionals who want to help decision makers make better decisions also need advising expertise.

Advising expertise relies on the ability to influence and the ability to align. Advisors need a variety of tools and skills to influence and align. A Google search on “influence without authority” will turn up several books, articles and ideas for getting your professional expertise used by decision makers.

One promising and perhaps counterintuitive approach to helping advising professionals has been gaining traction lately: Instead of honing your ability to give advice, ask better questions. For example, the journalist Warren Berger has devoted his career in recent years to writing and speaking about the power of inquiry. The Right Question Institute hopes to create a movement that improves decision-making through the participation of stakeholders who learn to ask better questions.

In essence, a decision is an answer to a question. A decision maker looking at a menu is answering the question, “What do I want to eat?” A decision making team at a strategy offsite is answering the question, “Where will we invest our resources in the next three years?” A customer meeting with several sales teams is answering the question, “who do I want to do business with?” Let’s consider an example to highlight the difference between influencing the decision and influencing the question that the decision answers.

Imagine that a marketing executive in Colleen’s global retailing company brings her a contract to review. The marketing executive is trying to decide whether to commit the company to a one-year agreement or a three-year agreement with a vendor. Essentially he is posing the question, “Which agreement should we sign?” If Colleen reviews the contracts and renders an opinion, the company makes an informed, but limited decision. If Colleen focuses on influencing the question rather than influencing the decision, she might request a bit more context from the marketing executive about the vendor and their services. She might learn that the marketing executive has some concerns about using the vendor, but has a project deadline to meet. At one point in the conversation, Colleen might pose a different question to the marketing executive, “How can we use this vendor to meet your deadline without committing ourselves to a long-term contract?” After considering the question, perhaps the marketing executive would offer a new deal to the vendor: The retailer will sign the three-year contract if the vendor successfully helps the marketing department meet the deadline on the current project. A better question leads to a better decision.

When advisors think of their job as influencing the decision, they are limiting the value they can provide because they have implicitly validated the question being asked by the decision maker. When advisors think of their job as influencing the question, they are creating an opening for a breakthrough.

 

Ironic Outcomes: Three Questions to Ask When you are Getting the Opposite of What you Want

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A year or so ago I had a coaching conversation with a Human Resources Manager for a retail company. The manager confided in me that conflict made her uncomfortable. She described the lengths to which she would go to avoid raising challenging issues or delivering candid feedback. She feared that confrontation could destroy the rapport and trust she had cultivated with her colleagues; rapport and trust she depended on to ensure her colleagues included her as a thought partner and adviser.

By way of example, she described a damaged relationship with a colleague who had come to believe that she was trying to sabotage his career, “He accused me of going behind his back to his manager about complaints I had received from his direct reports.” As we talked, it became clear to both of us that her choice to avoid delivering timely, direct feedback to her colleague had metastasized into a judgment he now held about her motives. Her colleague no longer invited the HR Manager to his staff meetings and stopped visiting her office to seek input on key decisions. To put it another way: By going out of her way to avoid conflict, she had created conflict. She inadvertently got the exact opposite outcome that her behavior was designed to achieve.

Consider other familiar situations:

  • The person who wants to have close relationships with everyone yet ends up isolated because others judge his behavior as “needy” and overly personal.
  • The person who wants to avoid surprises and produce high-quality work ends up surprised by missed deadlines and avoidable errors because her micromanaged employees are afraid to take initiative and use their own judgment.
  • The well-intentioned manager, who wants to empower his direct-reports through delegation, yet ends up undermining everyone’s self-confidence when he is forced to rescue the project at the last minute after having steadfastly avoided giving any guidance along the way.
  • A co-worker who wants to influence the thinking of others by considering all sides of an issue, yet ends up being excluded from meetings because he is viewed as a contrarian that slows things down with useless observations and theoretical questions.

The behaviors described above go beyond simply being ineffective or even counterproductive. I refer to a situation where the result produced is the exact opposite of the result desired as an “ironic outcome.”

Ironic outcomes differ from outcomes that are unintended or counterproductive in that resolving the situation calls for a transformative level of self-awareness.

A Behavior Change to Fix an Unintended Outcome

When the consequences of our actions are unintended and unwanted, we can sometimes make a quick adjustment to our behavior to fix the problem. For example, a colleague gives me feedback that I haven’t requested input from one of my team members who seems reluctant to speak up in meetings. I start listening more actively to the team member and I notice greater engagement and better quality discussions.

Revising the way we Think and/or Feel to Fix a Pattern of Counterproductive Outcomes

When the consequences of our actions turn counterproductive, in other words our efforts are actually making things worse, we may need to look beyond our behaviors to our thoughts and feelings. For example, it might be uncomfortable for me to openly challenge my boss, but I’ve noticed that the boss actually seems to enjoy the give and take of debating ideas. She tends to favor advice from colleagues who openly disagree with her in meetings. Opting for a behavior driven by my anxiety has reduced my effectiveness as a team member. Perhaps I work on becoming comfortable with a more provocative style by finding non-threatening venues to try out the new behavior. Over time, I reduce my anxiety about speaking my mind candidly at team meetings.

Transforming our Beliefs when Confronted with Ironic Outcomes

When the outcomes turn ironic and what we’re getting betrays our intentions, it’s a clue that a pattern of behavior has taken charge. One telltale sign that we’re dealing with ironic outcomes is the way we justify our behavior. Instead of offering some version of “I don’t know. It seemed like a good idea at the time.” You might hear us offer a more rehearsed and philosophical justification: “I just think it’s wrong to…” or “People just don’t understand that…” etc.

Each of us, I suspect, has experienced the frustration of getting the opposite of what we want while offering a kind of righteous defense of our behaviors. When we invoke generalized value judgments to explain ourselves, we may be bumping up against situations where our underlying beliefs are at odds with the protocols of our roles. We can experience what Jack Mezirow refers to as a “disorienting dilemma.” We entertain self-defeating thoughts: “I’m not cut out for this job,” or “This is not the work I’m meant to do.”

Not all ironic outcomes augur catastrophe, but there is a long-term cost to repeatedly producing the opposite of what you want.

Three questions can help you rewire a pattern of behavior that produces ironic outcomes. A word of caution: the steps are few, but the elevation is great. You’ll either need the capacity to be brutally honest with yourself, or be fortunate enough to have someone in your life that can be honest with you without having his or her own axe to grind.

Question One: Where might you be exerting effort that is out of proportion with the situation?

In the case of our HR Manager, it took a lot of effort for her avoid and mislead her colleague. For example, when her colleague asked how she thought a contentious meeting had gone, she responded diplomatically, “People are a little anxious about all the changes, but I think everyone will be fine.” She felt in that moment the stress of holding back her true assessment of her colleague’s behavior and how it had led to several unproductive interactions.

Question Two: What beliefs are you using to justify your choices?

When pressed, the HR Manager admitted that she often avoids a confrontation because deep down she believes that leaders prefer to work with people who are supportive and positive. She assumes that her commitment to being supportive and positive will result in a seat at the table when leaders are making decisions. She also believes that because she is uncomfortable with confrontation, raising an issue will result in her appearing flustered and that will undermine her need to be seen as a competent professional. This is an example of what Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey call, “competing commitments.”

Question Three: Of the assumptions you use to explain your behaviors, which ones might need to be reframed? Which ones might be holding you back?

There are good reasons that we are attached to the belief systems that drive our behaviors. Our beliefs serve us well… until they don’t. Just because beliefs no longer serve us, does not mean that we can easily abandon them. Something valuable gets lost whenever we change our beliefs, and our aversion to loss makes change hard. The value that the HR Manager places on being supportive and positive has helped her become a trusted thought partner and popular boss.

The point here is not to abandon the belief, but to either demote it or re-conceptualize it. The HR Manager’s current and future roles will occasionally put her in situations where she will have to reconcile being “supportive” and “positive” with being “candid” and “direct.” For the HR Manager, learning to see candor and directness as supportive will allow her to raise issues in a positive manner, ultimately enhancing rather than undermining her professionalism.

Measuring for Improvement versus Measuring for Control

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In 1979, Domino’s advertised their famous, “30 minutes or free” guarantee. In 1993, Dominoes owner, Thomas Monaghan ended the guarantee citing perceptions that the policy encouraged the pizza delivery drivers to speed and drive recklessly. While restaurants offering food delivery learned their lesson from Domino’s, the idea that a customer can expect their order in about thirty minutes persists. I worked with a global chain of pizza restaurants years ago that felt pressured by what they referred to as the customer’s “30-minute mindset.” They wanted to speed up their operations, but they did not want to hold the drivers accountable to a standard that might encourage unsafe driving. Instead, they developed a standard for the time it took from an order being placed until the pizza was sliced and in a box waiting for the driver; the company referred to the span of time from order to box as the “in-store time.” They reasoned that the overall wait time for a customer could be reduced through a focused effort to reduce the in-store time.

The company created a bonus for restaurant managers who kept their overall in-store time below a certain number for a full month. After the incentive program had been in place for several months, a few district managers began noticing some unusual patterns in the various reports they received each month on restaurant performance in their respective districts. Some of the restaurants that had the lowest overall in-store time also showed a decline in sales. At the same time, the call center that logged complaint calls from customers had noticed that the complaints about late orders had declined, but the complaints about poor service when placing the order had increased.

When the district managers visited the restaurants with the best in-store times they noticed something disturbing. At the busiest times, the employees responsible for taking phone orders seemed to be ignoring customers who were on hold waiting to place their order. The district managers could see the blinking lights on the phone indicating that someone was waiting to place an order. It turned out that some of their restaurant managers had directed their staff to stop taking orders if the production line got backed up. A pizza oven can only handle so many pizzas at one time and you can’t speed up the cook time for a pizza. If the oven can’t accept any more pizzas, it creates a bottleneck and pizzas ready to go in the oven have to wait while the in-store time clock ticks away. If you want to ensure that the oven does not get backed up, just slow down the number of orders coming in.

The story of the pizza company illustrates a common organizational trap that I would summarize as the confusion between measuring for improvement and measuring for control. When a person purchases a fitness tracker and begins monitoring the steps they take each day, they want to measure something for improvement. If your car insurance company offers you a discount if you install a sensor that monitors your driving habits, they might advertise it as a way to improve safety, but they also want to control their costs. When you measure for improvement, you put the data in the hands of the people who can make use of it to change for the better. When you measure for control, you use the data to make comparisons that have consequences imposed on people by others with authority.

When I am a student and you grade my test, I learn how well I have mastered the subject. If the test score is only for me and not used for any other purpose, then it is a measure for improvement. If an administrator’s bonus is linked to my performance on the test and my score becomes a data point in the school district’s rating and the school district’s rating becomes a data point in determining property taxes, suddenly there’s a lot more than improving my mastery of the subject at stake.

The distinction I am making between measuring for improvement and measuring for control is elegantly explained by a principle known as Goodhart’s Law. A popularized statement of the law developed by the economist Charles Goodhart goes like this: When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. Goodhart’s original formulation from his 1981 paper on monetary policy in the United Kingdom is less pithy, but more consistent with the distinction I am trying to make. Goodhart wrote, “Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes.” Consider the law in the context of public school test scores. One might argue that putting pressure on teachers and students to meet test score performance targets will moderate the degree to which the test scores can be used to reach valid conclusions about what students are learning.

Measurement is the tool of choice for managing performance, yet we rarely stop to question whether or not we are paying attention to the right measures, or whether the very act of measurement creates dysfunctional behaviors. Through critical inquiry, we may discover that we have been equating success with what is easiest to measure rather than equating success with what we want to accomplish. Because of our addiction to managing through measurement, we find the closest quantifiable substitute for what we really want and then focus on measuring the substitute.

Eventually, the focus on the measure replaces a focus on the goal that the measure stands for. For example, we don’t want a society comprised of people with high grade point averages; we want a society comprised of well-educated citizens.

What’s worse, when authority figures incentivize achievement of a metric that substitutes for what we really want, Goodhart’s law kicks in and we end up with data tainted by people gaming the system.

The Flatland Trap: Two Dimensional Thinking in a Three Dimensional World

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A powerful lesson about the importance of contextual inquiry comes from one of my favorite books, Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions. Edwin Abbott wrote Flatland in 1884. In the book, Abbott created a two-dimensional world populated by various polygons as a satire of the social hierarchies of Victorian culture. In the world of Flatland, the more sides you have the higher your social status. In addition to a satirical commentary on nineteenth century social norms in England, Abbott provided an elegant analogy to explain how our frames of reference influence what we claim to know. The narrator of Flatland is a square, literally. In the first part of the book, the square describes for us life on a two-dimensional plane. One day the square is visited by a sphere, a three-dimensional occupant of Spaceland, and his life is turned inside out.

Imagine the experience of encountering a three-dimensional entity from the perspective of a sentient two-dimensional figure. When the sphere speaks, the square hears a voice that seems to come from all directions at once. From the vantage point of three dimensions, the sphere can see the inside of the buildings as well as insides of the inhabitants of Flatland. When the sphere gently touches the interior of the square, the square experiences the interaction as a sharp sudden pain in his gut. In an attempt to describe the nature of three-dimensional objects to the square, the sphere passes through the plane of Flatland. From a Flatland worldview, the intersection of the two worlds looks like a point that turns into a circle. The circle grows in size, then shrinks to a point and disappears.

For the square, knowledge of three dimensions gets constructed through interactions with the sphere. At first, the square ascribes unnatural powers to the sphere, “’Monster,’ I shrieked, ‘be thou juggler, enchanter, dream, or devil, no more will I endure thy mockeries’” (1884, p. 75). The square has no choice but to build an understanding of his encounter with a three dimensional object from his two-dimensional paradigm. Eventually the sphere disenthralls the square from both his plane and from his frame-of-reference by transporting him into space, “I shrieked aloud in agony, ‘Either this is madness or it is Hell.’ ‘It is neither,’ calmly replied the voice of the Sphere, ‘it is Knowledge…’” (pp. 77 – 78).

The square comes to a profound and novel understanding of observed reality that cannot be shared with the other inhabitants of Flatland. Had the square continued a dialogue with the sphere without the benefit of experiencing a three-dimensional world, the square might have acquired a new, but diminished – one might say, “two-dimensional” – understanding of three-dimensional reality. Without an experience of three dimensions, the square would be no better off than the inhabitants of Plato’s cave who strive to understand the world by seeing only shadows cast on the cave wall. Our quadrilateral hero must live with the burden of understanding that for all other inhabitants of Flatland, the existence of three-dimensional objects is both real and unknowable. Not surprisingly, the square has difficulty explaining his epiphany to other Flatlanders and is eventually jailed as a heretic.

We are trapped in our own versions of Flatland when we accept our daily experiences as the only reality that matters. The easiest way to miss something important is to keep our heads down and our attention narrow. Contextual inquiry is about widening our focus to avoid blind spots. When conditions are stable and predictable, we can operate on autopilot without getting stuck. In a volatile world where threats are unpredictable and opportunities arise from unexpected sources, we may need to expose and disassociate ourselves from the artificial constraints of our comfortable world-views.

 

A Situation Someone Wants to Change

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As teenagers, my three daughters shared a bathroom situated between two bedrooms. My oldest daughter, Abby had her own bedroom on one side of the bathroom. My middle daughter Hannah and her younger sister Bekah shared a bedroom on the other side of the bathroom. There are two doors leading into the bathroom from each of the bedrooms and two sinks in the bathroom, one per bedroom. In real estate jargon, this arrangement is referred to as a “Jack and Jill” bathroom, although in our case it’s more of a “Jill and Jill” situation.

Two of my three daughters wore little to no makeup in high school and did not spend much time caring for their nails. Hannah, on the other hand accumulated an ample collection of cosmetics, nail polishes, and other beautification equipment I’m too unfamiliar with to name. It was not unusual to find one sink of the bathroom splattered with mascara droppings. On the counter near the sink sat an open bag of colorful tubes and bottles. An electric hair device was permanently plugged in and often dangerously hot. There would be a hand-mirror here and a roll of toilet paper there. It would not be unusual to find a half-filled water bottle or two on the counter, evidence I suppose of some exertion related to whatever was happening on that side of the bathroom. You could say that the situation I’m describing constituted a persistent problem and that my wife Katherine and I felt stuck about how best to resolve it. By the way, the problem has been solved. All of our daughters have moved out.

I mention the situation with the messy bathroom because it illustrates two important points about problem solving and design thinking. David Straus, the founder of Interaction Associates and the author of How to Make Collaboration Work, defines a problem as, “…a situation someone wants to change” (2002, p.19). By this definition, when it comes to collaborating with my daughter on cleaning up the bathroom only one of us has a problem because only one of us has a situation he wants to change.

The second point illustrated by the messy bathroom situation has to do with the main principle of human-centered design thinking. If I want to use design thinking, I need to consider the motivations and needs of the people served by an innovative solution. A design thinker might reframe the challenge from “How do I get my daughter to keep her bathroom clean?” to something like, “How do we reduce the amount of nagging around the house?”

Perhaps you’re thinking that a more authoritarian approach to getting my daughter to clean her bathroom is called for. First, remember that creative inquiry is about novel options. Secondly, let’s look at the effectiveness of more traditional and direct parenting tools in light of David Straus’ definition of a problem. Let’s say, for example that I tell Hannah, “you can get your phone back when this bathroom is clean.” I have now created a situation that my daughter is motivated to change. In other words, she now has a problem to solve. Notice however that Hannah is not solving the problem I want solved. She is working on changing the ‘get-my-phone-back’ situation. I’m more interested in her making progress on the ‘show-respect-for-other-family-members’ situation. Consequently, I shouldn’t be surprised if Hannah succeeds in solving her problem, but in the long run it doesn’t really solve my problem.

Straus’ definition of a problem and design thinking’s bias for starting with desirability both suggest that getting unstuck through creative inquiry means identifying what I call the “targets” and the “tensions.” Targets are the people served by a new idea or option; the people whose lives you aim to improve are collectively the targets. Tensions are the needs or dissatisfying situations that a new idea or option will resolve. Robert Fritz introduced the concept of creativity as the resolution of a tension in his 1991 book, Creating. Fritz wrote, “There will always be structural tension at the beginning of the creative process, for there will always be a discrepancy between what you want and what you have” (1991, p. 27). For Fritz, the creation resolves the tension.

One way to use creative inquiry to help a leader, team or organization get unstuck is by clarifying and aligning on definitions of the target and the tension. In the case of the messy bathroom, the targets are the family members living in the house and the tension is the stress of constant nagging. There are any number of ways to choose a target and a tension.

A tension can exist in the current state for a target, in which case the target has a situation they are motivated to change. Envisioning a possible future that some target will want once they become aware of it can also create a tension. In other words, even if I am content with my current situation, once I see something that will improve my life, I now have a situation I am motivated to change. One can create tension for a target by working forwards from a dissatisfying present or working backwards from a compelling future possibility.