Recently, I attended a webinar by Net Objectives titled "De-mystifying Kanban." It was a very well done presentation discussing the basic principles and practices of a Agile software development variant called Kanban. They did a good job relating Kanban to the Agile software development practice of Scrum and also to the more general practices of Lean. There was a good discussion on how to use Lean's value stream analysis to organize the flow of the work. This post is not intended to be a full review of Kanban or the presentation. This opening paragraph is to set the context for a couple of points I would like to discuss.
Most of Kanban fits in the tactical organizational space. As in most Agile software practices Kanban emphasizes breaking software development into small distinct chunks usually expressed as a story and progressing them through various steps of development such as design, coding, unit testing, integration, etc. depending on what makes sense for the particular particular organization.
The Agile software development systems tend to emphasize cross training so that most everyone in the team can execute in all steps of development. Emphasizing predominately a team of generalists. There are some specialists for certain activities, such as database or build specialists, but the emphasis is on generalizing the roles so that any team member can, for the most part, pickup any story at any point in its development or even work in pairs in a fast paced test driven development pair programing model, switching back and forth between the tester and coder roles.
This emphasis on generalizing of roles in Agile software development seems to me to be different from the emphasis I see in Holacracy of differentiating and separating roles to focused onto an individual. While this seems to be Holacracy"s emphasis, Holacracy works very well with teams focusing on role generalization in their operational activities. There are a number of examples of Agile teams using Holacracy very successfully.
Back to the webinar, I heard many times the phrase "Kanban opens up the opportunity to have a conversation" on defining policies, roles, relationships, etc. It was always left at "having a conversation." No idea as how to structure the conversation. This is where the Governance practices of Holacracy really shine. The purpose, inputs, outputs, and meeting practices are very well structured and defined in Holacracy. This leads to very clear results and a clear way forward from these "conversations". Leaving the conversations undefined in Kanban, still leaves a lot of room for stalemates, politics, unclear definitions and directions, unproductive meetings.
I feel that Kanban has very strong operational characteristics for work that can be structured in such a way to effectively use it. Kanban should be well understood by many organizations as it can be surprising how often it can be useful. But it is not sufficient in itself, Kanban needs the governance practices offered in Holacracy to develop clarity for the Kanban practices to be as effective as possible.
Monday, November 5, 2012
Tuesday, September 25, 2012
Leadership
Recently, HolacracyOne posted on Facebook:
There is a lot of buzz about "Leadership Development". Enlightened leaders are indeed needed to make up for the lack of organizational capacity to digest whatever comes from the environment. Holacracy precisely helps building this organizational capacity, making leadership development much less necessary.
This comes at a time when I have just finished the book "The End of Leadership" which talks about the Leadership industry. The book and Holacracy tend to agree that the current offerings of Leadership development are not what they should be. The book says that the leadership industry is failing us and is a self perpetuation sham. The book contains many pages of real world example. Holacracy says that leadership is not need to the level that our organizations think that it is needed. Both seem to me to shed good light on the issue, but I have a slightly different view.
My knowledge about the material taught in the current leadership training is about how a single person leads and motivates groups of small to very large people to do what the leader wants.
From the examples in the book, even with current organizations this has not worked very well but since it is very attractive to leaders in organizations, it really strokes their egos to think that everything revolves around the leader, leadership consultants teach what brings in the money. And it is a lot of money, to the tune of $50 billion a year.
Holacracy proposes a radically different distributed power system from conventional organizations in which this leader centric training has very little value. There is still leadership, it is just radically different.
My proposition is that leadership training is very important, but not the leadership training that is currently being promoted by the industry today.
With current organizations the leaders at the top are usually very autocratic. They give the orders and everyone below marches always looking over their shoulders in case the leader does not like the way they are marching. Holacracy turns this on its head. Purpose flows down from the top, but how each marches is determined autocratically by the person doing the marching.
As everyone in the organization is an autocrat over their own identified scope, they do need leadership training on how to lead that scope effectively. As I indicated before, this leadership is fundamentally different. Instead of learning how to get others to do what you want, you must learn how to get yourself motivated, how to stay organized and focused to do what is needed by the purpose guiding that scope. Self-leadership is also need to effectively act a organizational sensors, to know how to recognize the tensions, how and when to speak-up to the organization, and how not to be personally attached to your idea as to how to resolve the tensions that you sense.
I see many people working in a conventional organization that will do nothing unless directly motivated and directed by the leader. This approach will not work in Holacracy. If a person executes a role with this do nothing unless externally directed approach, nothing will get done and after a while the holacratic organization will eject them as not being suitable for the role.
This failure is not a fundamental human weakness. All humans are capable of working is such a system. Instead, it is a weakness in training and socialization of the person. Most of the skill are not taught at all or even worse suppressed by the more effective conventional leaders. It is a positive feedback loop, the more effective the conventional leader, the more repressed and dependent the follower.
These self leadership skills are the skills needed in leadership training for the future. Even more, most people will need this training and refresher courses throughout their lives. This new direction would seem to be a larger industry than the current leadership industry, providing more revenue if teachers and consultants can get past the sunk cost put into the existing models and experience. Further more, the new direction would meet the real needs of organizations instead of simply massaging the egos of the leaders and repressing the lead.
There is a lot of buzz about "Leadership Development". Enlightened leaders are indeed needed to make up for the lack of organizational capacity to digest whatever comes from the environment. Holacracy precisely helps building this organizational capacity, making leadership development much less necessary.
This comes at a time when I have just finished the book "The End of Leadership" which talks about the Leadership industry. The book and Holacracy tend to agree that the current offerings of Leadership development are not what they should be. The book says that the leadership industry is failing us and is a self perpetuation sham. The book contains many pages of real world example. Holacracy says that leadership is not need to the level that our organizations think that it is needed. Both seem to me to shed good light on the issue, but I have a slightly different view.
My knowledge about the material taught in the current leadership training is about how a single person leads and motivates groups of small to very large people to do what the leader wants.
From the examples in the book, even with current organizations this has not worked very well but since it is very attractive to leaders in organizations, it really strokes their egos to think that everything revolves around the leader, leadership consultants teach what brings in the money. And it is a lot of money, to the tune of $50 billion a year.
Holacracy proposes a radically different distributed power system from conventional organizations in which this leader centric training has very little value. There is still leadership, it is just radically different.
My proposition is that leadership training is very important, but not the leadership training that is currently being promoted by the industry today.
With current organizations the leaders at the top are usually very autocratic. They give the orders and everyone below marches always looking over their shoulders in case the leader does not like the way they are marching. Holacracy turns this on its head. Purpose flows down from the top, but how each marches is determined autocratically by the person doing the marching.
As everyone in the organization is an autocrat over their own identified scope, they do need leadership training on how to lead that scope effectively. As I indicated before, this leadership is fundamentally different. Instead of learning how to get others to do what you want, you must learn how to get yourself motivated, how to stay organized and focused to do what is needed by the purpose guiding that scope. Self-leadership is also need to effectively act a organizational sensors, to know how to recognize the tensions, how and when to speak-up to the organization, and how not to be personally attached to your idea as to how to resolve the tensions that you sense.
I see many people working in a conventional organization that will do nothing unless directly motivated and directed by the leader. This approach will not work in Holacracy. If a person executes a role with this do nothing unless externally directed approach, nothing will get done and after a while the holacratic organization will eject them as not being suitable for the role.
This failure is not a fundamental human weakness. All humans are capable of working is such a system. Instead, it is a weakness in training and socialization of the person. Most of the skill are not taught at all or even worse suppressed by the more effective conventional leaders. It is a positive feedback loop, the more effective the conventional leader, the more repressed and dependent the follower.
These self leadership skills are the skills needed in leadership training for the future. Even more, most people will need this training and refresher courses throughout their lives. This new direction would seem to be a larger industry than the current leadership industry, providing more revenue if teachers and consultants can get past the sunk cost put into the existing models and experience. Further more, the new direction would meet the real needs of organizations instead of simply massaging the egos of the leaders and repressing the lead.
Thursday, September 20, 2012
Spreading a Practice
Holacracy is the most useful organizational practice that I have seen in my over 50 years in organizations. If you are not familiar with it, head over to holacracy.org and explore the links on the slide show.
As Holacracy is often on my mind, I have been thinking about how to spread it. This post is a brain dump to get the ideas out of my head to free up space for other things. Many of the ideas here have been action-ed by H1 and others in the community to some extent. This just allows me to get it out of my head and down on paper at overview level of the landscape. Each paragraph could be expanded into a much larger discussion, but this is enough for now. Hopefully, this describes a reasonable structure to the issue.
Most of our modern organizations are structured in a hierarchy with most of the power and control at or near the top. Holacracy is a true distributed power and control system. Thus, to move an organization towards a distributed system like Holacracy, you need to introduce it, either, when the organization is small before it grows and becomes fixed with power and control at the top of a larger structure or introduce it from the top down starting with the current power holders of the organization driving the transition. These are the two focal points to effectively spread Holacracy, such that implementations happen. Strictly informational opportunities would not be very helpful unless they influence the two identified focal points.
With fledgling or small organizations the keys are to identify and educate founders while providing a low enough cost of entry that these organizations can afford to adopt the well documented Holacracy practice instead of the normal an ad-hoc, seat of the pants, keep everything in your head approach most start-ups or small organizations use.
First we need to identify these small organization founders. If you want to hunt ducks, you go to a duck pond. For small business, one great place is small business expos. The cost seems reasonable to setup a booth, handout pamphlets, and engage face to face. Face to face time often has the most effect in infuencing a person and any opportunity to engage a person when they are in the correct frame of mind should be taken.
Keeping the costs in line for the available budget of a small organization has some challenges. The cost of bringing in a consultant can be beyond the means for many, so this leads to a predominately self help approach. Sending one person from the organization to the Holacracy Practitioners training can infuse a lot of knowledge to a small group at a reasonable cost. Joining the Holacracy community of practice opens up more resources and a place to ask questions. One possibly to consider is creating an identified Holacracy Hotline either manned or voice mail that gets responded to on a daily basis.
Big organizations can be a big challenge. While the resources can be sufficient for a well supported implementation using consultants, getting the attention of those in power can be very difficult. It is almost impossible to get face to face time with an executive unless you already know them or they are seeking you out. Past history indicates that the most productive entry is through organizational consultants all ready in a relationship with the leaders of an organization. The key here is to identify and educate organizational consultants and entice them to propagate Holacracy through their organization contacts.
Again where to catch the organizational consultants attention? There are a number of organizational forums and conventions where Holacracy can be presented. Also, there are a number of periodicals which may accept Holacracy articles. We also need to think carefully how to entice them to add/change to Holacracy in their offerings. Looking at the problems in the world today, mainstream approaches to leadership and organizational consulting are not working. The problem is how to get the consultants with years of vested interest in these systems to see, accept and embrace a new way. Most people with a vested interest turn a blind eye to anything contrary to the vested interest.
We also need to explore the various sets of motivations organizations have for adopting Holacracy.
The traditional areas of efficiency, productivity, profitability are motivators for some leaders. This is a strength of Holacracy that plays well with managers and leaders once you get their attention.
Emerging is areas of work-life balance, employee engagement, employee satisfaction, employee acquisition and retention.This is being driven from the bottom up, mostly from the younger employees. More younger workers are using some of these non-monetary attributes as a filter for positions. Just as the Arab Spring movement towards democracy was driven by the 20 somethings through social media. The principles that are an advantage of Holacracy needs to be spread to the 20 somethings through social media. If the kids coming out of college start asking for these things in their job interviews, companies will have to adapt to get the brightest and best employees. What better motivation can we have to entice the top of an organization to adopt Holacracy. Over time those that do will out perform those that don't.
As Holacracy is often on my mind, I have been thinking about how to spread it. This post is a brain dump to get the ideas out of my head to free up space for other things. Many of the ideas here have been action-ed by H1 and others in the community to some extent. This just allows me to get it out of my head and down on paper at overview level of the landscape. Each paragraph could be expanded into a much larger discussion, but this is enough for now. Hopefully, this describes a reasonable structure to the issue.
Most of our modern organizations are structured in a hierarchy with most of the power and control at or near the top. Holacracy is a true distributed power and control system. Thus, to move an organization towards a distributed system like Holacracy, you need to introduce it, either, when the organization is small before it grows and becomes fixed with power and control at the top of a larger structure or introduce it from the top down starting with the current power holders of the organization driving the transition. These are the two focal points to effectively spread Holacracy, such that implementations happen. Strictly informational opportunities would not be very helpful unless they influence the two identified focal points.
With fledgling or small organizations the keys are to identify and educate founders while providing a low enough cost of entry that these organizations can afford to adopt the well documented Holacracy practice instead of the normal an ad-hoc, seat of the pants, keep everything in your head approach most start-ups or small organizations use.
First we need to identify these small organization founders. If you want to hunt ducks, you go to a duck pond. For small business, one great place is small business expos. The cost seems reasonable to setup a booth, handout pamphlets, and engage face to face. Face to face time often has the most effect in infuencing a person and any opportunity to engage a person when they are in the correct frame of mind should be taken.
Keeping the costs in line for the available budget of a small organization has some challenges. The cost of bringing in a consultant can be beyond the means for many, so this leads to a predominately self help approach. Sending one person from the organization to the Holacracy Practitioners training can infuse a lot of knowledge to a small group at a reasonable cost. Joining the Holacracy community of practice opens up more resources and a place to ask questions. One possibly to consider is creating an identified Holacracy Hotline either manned or voice mail that gets responded to on a daily basis.
Big organizations can be a big challenge. While the resources can be sufficient for a well supported implementation using consultants, getting the attention of those in power can be very difficult. It is almost impossible to get face to face time with an executive unless you already know them or they are seeking you out. Past history indicates that the most productive entry is through organizational consultants all ready in a relationship with the leaders of an organization. The key here is to identify and educate organizational consultants and entice them to propagate Holacracy through their organization contacts.
Again where to catch the organizational consultants attention? There are a number of organizational forums and conventions where Holacracy can be presented. Also, there are a number of periodicals which may accept Holacracy articles. We also need to think carefully how to entice them to add/change to Holacracy in their offerings. Looking at the problems in the world today, mainstream approaches to leadership and organizational consulting are not working. The problem is how to get the consultants with years of vested interest in these systems to see, accept and embrace a new way. Most people with a vested interest turn a blind eye to anything contrary to the vested interest.
We also need to explore the various sets of motivations organizations have for adopting Holacracy.
The traditional areas of efficiency, productivity, profitability are motivators for some leaders. This is a strength of Holacracy that plays well with managers and leaders once you get their attention.
Emerging is areas of work-life balance, employee engagement, employee satisfaction, employee acquisition and retention.This is being driven from the bottom up, mostly from the younger employees. More younger workers are using some of these non-monetary attributes as a filter for positions. Just as the Arab Spring movement towards democracy was driven by the 20 somethings through social media. The principles that are an advantage of Holacracy needs to be spread to the 20 somethings through social media. If the kids coming out of college start asking for these things in their job interviews, companies will have to adapt to get the brightest and best employees. What better motivation can we have to entice the top of an organization to adopt Holacracy. Over time those that do will out perform those that don't.
Tuesday, September 18, 2012
On Being Happy
I saw a quote: "The secret to being happy is realizing that everything is already perfect." About the same time a friend on mine said something along the lines of "Stop seeking what you want, It will find you." So for the past few months I have tried to follow these two nuggets of advice. You may have noticed that I have not posted in this blog for a while as most of my posting was about how to make things better. But, if everything is already perfect, I don't need to post anymore. And if I should stop seeking, well what then?
I feel that it has been a partial success. But I find myself constantly stopping myself.
I see someone doing something in a way that I think could be done better. I start to speak, but bite my tongue and don't say anything. Maybe the way I thought was better is not better. Maybe what they were doing was good enough. If everything is perfect, then their actions are also perfect. Maybe they needed to do it that way to learn an important life lesson and if I interfered they would not learn it and get into bigger trouble later. Cool, no stress in trying to explain myself, no resentment from correcting someone, the task gets done and maybe they learned what they needed to learn.
I see something that I would really like to do but I am not in the position to pursue it. My natural instinct is to do everything I can to seek a path to be able to do it. So I stop myself, put it on my someday list and move on. If I had put in all the extra effort to seek the path, what would have been the cost. Maybe I would be exhausted all the time and get sick. Concentrating on that unattainable path would take all my concentration such that I would miss other opportunities that would have been just as interesting and useful without the pain. Some other natural paths that would lead to where I wanted to go may be missed.
However, there is a temptation to take these two quotes and start doing nothing, navel gazing if you will. After a bit of doing nothing, I get very unsatisfied. Is my purpose in this world to do nothing? (This the dark side of stop seeking.) If everything is already perfect I need not do anything. (This is the dark side of always seeing perfection.) Well, what now? How do I resolve this.
For the quotes above there others in the opposite direction just as valuable. I am sure you could come up with many, but some that I like are: "God helps those who help themselves" and "Every journey of a 1000 miles begins with one step.
If everything is perfect, then why do you need to help yourself? If you have stopped seeking, where are you going on the journey. Are we to just wander aimlessly in our life's journey and simply enjoy all the perfection we see? Well kinda but not really.
How wishy-washy can I be! There is a point in here somewhere!
We miss the point when we do as humans are most tempted to do and simplify everything to black and white. What we miss the the infinite shades of gray (and of course the colors.) We miss that there is stuff in the middle. We miss that the tension between the extremes generates an entire universe where everything is perfect, we don't need to sacrifice everything to seek a path, we get what we need (often more) and we have a purposeful journey with many accomplishments along the way. It is not that there is a fixed middle way. The middle way is a dynamic tension created by all the extremes pulling on each other. The middle way is flexible, ever shifting and always playful. It is like surfing, riding the ever changing wave without flipping out into the sky or falling under the water. The exhilaration of maintaining the present moment to stay in tune with the wave is what makes it playful and fun.
For myself, I am looking to be happy riding that wave again after some time off. What wave are you riding.
I feel that it has been a partial success. But I find myself constantly stopping myself.
I see someone doing something in a way that I think could be done better. I start to speak, but bite my tongue and don't say anything. Maybe the way I thought was better is not better. Maybe what they were doing was good enough. If everything is perfect, then their actions are also perfect. Maybe they needed to do it that way to learn an important life lesson and if I interfered they would not learn it and get into bigger trouble later. Cool, no stress in trying to explain myself, no resentment from correcting someone, the task gets done and maybe they learned what they needed to learn.
I see something that I would really like to do but I am not in the position to pursue it. My natural instinct is to do everything I can to seek a path to be able to do it. So I stop myself, put it on my someday list and move on. If I had put in all the extra effort to seek the path, what would have been the cost. Maybe I would be exhausted all the time and get sick. Concentrating on that unattainable path would take all my concentration such that I would miss other opportunities that would have been just as interesting and useful without the pain. Some other natural paths that would lead to where I wanted to go may be missed.
However, there is a temptation to take these two quotes and start doing nothing, navel gazing if you will. After a bit of doing nothing, I get very unsatisfied. Is my purpose in this world to do nothing? (This the dark side of stop seeking.) If everything is already perfect I need not do anything. (This is the dark side of always seeing perfection.) Well, what now? How do I resolve this.
For the quotes above there others in the opposite direction just as valuable. I am sure you could come up with many, but some that I like are: "God helps those who help themselves" and "Every journey of a 1000 miles begins with one step.
If everything is perfect, then why do you need to help yourself? If you have stopped seeking, where are you going on the journey. Are we to just wander aimlessly in our life's journey and simply enjoy all the perfection we see? Well kinda but not really.
How wishy-washy can I be! There is a point in here somewhere!
We miss the point when we do as humans are most tempted to do and simplify everything to black and white. What we miss the the infinite shades of gray (and of course the colors.) We miss that there is stuff in the middle. We miss that the tension between the extremes generates an entire universe where everything is perfect, we don't need to sacrifice everything to seek a path, we get what we need (often more) and we have a purposeful journey with many accomplishments along the way. It is not that there is a fixed middle way. The middle way is a dynamic tension created by all the extremes pulling on each other. The middle way is flexible, ever shifting and always playful. It is like surfing, riding the ever changing wave without flipping out into the sky or falling under the water. The exhilaration of maintaining the present moment to stay in tune with the wave is what makes it playful and fun.
For myself, I am looking to be happy riding that wave again after some time off. What wave are you riding.
Thursday, April 26, 2012
First Principles
Holacracy exposed to me a number of first principles that I never noticed before. Once my eyes were opened, I see them everywhere. That is why I call them first principles as they seem universal.
One, I will talk about in this post, I will call "reduction." Reduction to me says that if you break up a job or task or project into very small next steps (you only need to identify these as you go, another first principle under dynamic steering) it is easy to get started and easy to maintain momentum towards completion of the larger project. The smaller the step, the easier it is to attack it.
We see this in nature when a very small stream of water can cut a huge boulder in half by removing a single grain of sand at a time.
There is a saying that "a journey of a thousand mile begins with one step." If you look at the thousand miles it is so overwhelming that you cannot even begin. But one step is easy. Then the next step is easy. And so on. With each step you will see something new an interesting that you would have missed if you only concentrated on the whole journey.
In my job, computer programming, we used to plan out an entire project in fine detail, in very specific order, creating very complex charts to find critical paths, etc. This made it very difficult to get started, it was difficult to do and manage, people always took short cuts and it usually fell apart with much suffering by everyone involved. Agile software development applies the reduction principle, making software development much more productive and efficient, easier to start seeing results and remove most of the unnecessary suffering that we used to experience. Agile makes it easier to adjust to changing requirements, which almost always happens as projects take many months or years and reality is a moving target.
Holacracy expresses this principal explicitly by saying: "find the smallest next step and deliver it fast, see what you learn from that and repeat." Agile focuses this reduction principle into practices specific to developing software: pair programming, test driven development, refactoring, time box planning, etc. Holacracy expands the reduction principle to more general organization practices: meeting structure/purpose, integrative decision making, power distribution, organization structure/restructuring, etc.
Given the dynamic nature of Agile it is often at odds with traditional predict and control organizations. Grown from some of the same first principles, Agile fits well within a Holacracy organization. Agile provides specific software development practices that seem to be activity specific specializations of the same more general principles that for the foundation of Holacracy.
Every day I see more examples of the reduction principle. Once I started seeing them and realized the value in this first principle, I started actively looking for them. My life has become much richer from this change in perspective. Try to see these things and see how it works for you.
....
One, I will talk about in this post, I will call "reduction." Reduction to me says that if you break up a job or task or project into very small next steps (you only need to identify these as you go, another first principle under dynamic steering) it is easy to get started and easy to maintain momentum towards completion of the larger project. The smaller the step, the easier it is to attack it.
We see this in nature when a very small stream of water can cut a huge boulder in half by removing a single grain of sand at a time.
There is a saying that "a journey of a thousand mile begins with one step." If you look at the thousand miles it is so overwhelming that you cannot even begin. But one step is easy. Then the next step is easy. And so on. With each step you will see something new an interesting that you would have missed if you only concentrated on the whole journey.
In my job, computer programming, we used to plan out an entire project in fine detail, in very specific order, creating very complex charts to find critical paths, etc. This made it very difficult to get started, it was difficult to do and manage, people always took short cuts and it usually fell apart with much suffering by everyone involved. Agile software development applies the reduction principle, making software development much more productive and efficient, easier to start seeing results and remove most of the unnecessary suffering that we used to experience. Agile makes it easier to adjust to changing requirements, which almost always happens as projects take many months or years and reality is a moving target.
Holacracy expresses this principal explicitly by saying: "find the smallest next step and deliver it fast, see what you learn from that and repeat." Agile focuses this reduction principle into practices specific to developing software: pair programming, test driven development, refactoring, time box planning, etc. Holacracy expands the reduction principle to more general organization practices: meeting structure/purpose, integrative decision making, power distribution, organization structure/restructuring, etc.
Given the dynamic nature of Agile it is often at odds with traditional predict and control organizations. Grown from some of the same first principles, Agile fits well within a Holacracy organization. Agile provides specific software development practices that seem to be activity specific specializations of the same more general principles that for the foundation of Holacracy.
Every day I see more examples of the reduction principle. Once I started seeing them and realized the value in this first principle, I started actively looking for them. My life has become much richer from this change in perspective. Try to see these things and see how it works for you.
....
Thursday, March 29, 2012
Heroes in Organizations
In almost every organization there are heroes. Heroes are the people who "go the extra mile." Extending themselves to accomplish seemingly impossible tasks. Everyone either looks up to them or are jealous of them. We hold well known examples up before our children and encourage them to "be like Mike." The heroes often reap great rewards when they succeed and when they fall, suffer great disappointments. It is as though we worship manic depressive behavior.
With our current organizational models, we need heroes to "cut through the red tape" that keeps most people from accomplishing very much in their routine day to day work. The heroes become the heroic leaders in our organizations and are greatly sought out. Or organizations would fall flat without them. In a sense, successful organizations have become addicted to these heroic leaders.
This addictive behavior is a two way street. The heroic leaders cannot be heroes if the organizations were not structured to need them. How can one person standout so much if the organization allows everyone to be effective to their full capacity.
How often have you seen ideas and work by an average employee ignored and belittled when the same idea and work by one of these heroic leaders is readily adopted and heralded as brilliant. If organizations were able to listen to everyone there would still be differences in performance/rewards between people but not to the extremes we see today.
This pushing up the hero and pulling down the average person, creates a self fulfilling feedback loop, pushing the heroic leaders ever higher while demotivating and demoralizing the rest into an ever lower state. Following the basic yin-yang principle of the universe, we see that by needing and creating heroes, in balance, we also create the opposite in everyone else.
With this reinforcing loop in place, it becomes ever more difficult to break free into a more effective overall organization. So heroic leadership and organization need for heroic leadership is a co-dependent relationship.
Lets imagine an organization that did not need or have heroes, what would it look like.
First, everyone would have a voice that would be heard. Everyone would be treated as a valuable sensor of the part of the organization within their scope and have input to organization respected as from that scope. No one would be able to get their way based on ego values, but instead on the effect it would have on the organization to move forward towards meeting its purpose. No longer can an idea from someone be shut down by the fallacious argument of "I don't see it." This collective voice is not one of consensus (everyone agrees that it is good) but of consent (no one can see a definite harm.)
With this lower bar for decision making, it becomes easier to make most decisions. When decisions are easier, the risk and cost is lower to make most decisions. This leads to a feedback loop of making more, smaller decisions rapidly allowing the organization to vault up on the agility scale.
Next we would see that the leadership positions would not be overloaded to funnel more power and decisions into one person, but distributed over each team member and distributed over the entire organization increasing capacity accordingly. Information would not flow up and down at through one individual any point who could alter it or choke it. Direction and motivation would flow down through one person to a sub unit of the organization but feedback and sub unit health needs would flow back up through a different person. This would create a balance between the needs of the higher level to meet its organizational purpose with the needs of the sub unit to maintain a healthy environment to support those needs.
It should be easy to see that changing the basic organizational assumptions like this would reduce the dependence of heroic leadership, self empowering everyone in the organization to be engaged in the purpose of the organization, greatly increasing the capacity and agility of the organization without increasing the staff.
All of this is just a part of a new organizational operating system called Holacracy.
With our current organizational models, we need heroes to "cut through the red tape" that keeps most people from accomplishing very much in their routine day to day work. The heroes become the heroic leaders in our organizations and are greatly sought out. Or organizations would fall flat without them. In a sense, successful organizations have become addicted to these heroic leaders.
This addictive behavior is a two way street. The heroic leaders cannot be heroes if the organizations were not structured to need them. How can one person standout so much if the organization allows everyone to be effective to their full capacity.
How often have you seen ideas and work by an average employee ignored and belittled when the same idea and work by one of these heroic leaders is readily adopted and heralded as brilliant. If organizations were able to listen to everyone there would still be differences in performance/rewards between people but not to the extremes we see today.
This pushing up the hero and pulling down the average person, creates a self fulfilling feedback loop, pushing the heroic leaders ever higher while demotivating and demoralizing the rest into an ever lower state. Following the basic yin-yang principle of the universe, we see that by needing and creating heroes, in balance, we also create the opposite in everyone else.
With this reinforcing loop in place, it becomes ever more difficult to break free into a more effective overall organization. So heroic leadership and organization need for heroic leadership is a co-dependent relationship.
Lets imagine an organization that did not need or have heroes, what would it look like.
First, everyone would have a voice that would be heard. Everyone would be treated as a valuable sensor of the part of the organization within their scope and have input to organization respected as from that scope. No one would be able to get their way based on ego values, but instead on the effect it would have on the organization to move forward towards meeting its purpose. No longer can an idea from someone be shut down by the fallacious argument of "I don't see it." This collective voice is not one of consensus (everyone agrees that it is good) but of consent (no one can see a definite harm.)
With this lower bar for decision making, it becomes easier to make most decisions. When decisions are easier, the risk and cost is lower to make most decisions. This leads to a feedback loop of making more, smaller decisions rapidly allowing the organization to vault up on the agility scale.
Next we would see that the leadership positions would not be overloaded to funnel more power and decisions into one person, but distributed over each team member and distributed over the entire organization increasing capacity accordingly. Information would not flow up and down at through one individual any point who could alter it or choke it. Direction and motivation would flow down through one person to a sub unit of the organization but feedback and sub unit health needs would flow back up through a different person. This would create a balance between the needs of the higher level to meet its organizational purpose with the needs of the sub unit to maintain a healthy environment to support those needs.
It should be easy to see that changing the basic organizational assumptions like this would reduce the dependence of heroic leadership, self empowering everyone in the organization to be engaged in the purpose of the organization, greatly increasing the capacity and agility of the organization without increasing the staff.
All of this is just a part of a new organizational operating system called Holacracy.
Tuesday, March 20, 2012
Medical Records
As part of being alive, most of us have had some contact with the medical profession and institutions. I have been around long enough to have seen many changes in medical technology. One area that seems to drag slowly behind in the US is electronic standardized medical records. As a long time computer technologist, it seems a natural progression. So why is it taking so long.
I have seen the advantages of electronic records and standardization in the very conservative financial industry. Transactions are defined by an international standard and you can send funds and other financial information almost anywhere in the world very quickly. The process is automated and even has the common term of Straight Through Processing.
Recently, I have experienced the transition from paper records to electronic records in some of my Doctors offices. In one office after about 4 months of pain during the transition, the office went from 45 or more minute waiting time in the reception area to about 5 minutes. All due to gains in efficiency. I have not experienced any loss in quality, in fact the visits seem a bit more relaxed and personal.
So why do some offices show so much resistance. I observe fear. I have talked to some Doctors about it and have seen the fear in their eyes. Fear of change. Fear of the cost to convert and maintain the new system. Fear of the pain during the transition as the staff and patience adjust to the change. Fear of lowering the quality of care. Mostly just a fear of the unknown.
But we do have some real world examples. Back in the late 1990s, Denmark starting converting to an National online medical records system so we have well over a decade of data from it.
The Danish system reports an average of 50 minute a day per Doctor reduction in administrative work. With a population of 5.5 million, it has saved the equivelent of $120 Million a year. Translate those saving to the US population and that is almost $7 billion each year.
We in the US spend a lot of money to provide a high quality of care. Health care in the US costs $7,290 per person (16% of GDP). While in Denmark it is $3,362 per person (9.8% of GDP). But what does that buy us? Life expectancy in the US is 78.1 and in Denmark it is 78.6, not any significant difference.
To get the full value from electronic records, it must be standardized, portable and accessible by appropriate medical providers.
Imagine being unconscious in an ambulance. In the current system, no one know what medications you are on or conditions you have requiring special care, unless you carry that information all the time. How many of us do that. Being able to access your history would allow the best cars in the shortest time.
Imagine the data mining applications to help improve the medical industry once we have built up a few years of records.
I see two points to push for this situation. One, lobby every Doctor office to implement an electronic records system. Two, push for a standard at the National (or even better international) level to allow for seamless exchange.
I have seen the advantages of electronic records and standardization in the very conservative financial industry. Transactions are defined by an international standard and you can send funds and other financial information almost anywhere in the world very quickly. The process is automated and even has the common term of Straight Through Processing.
Recently, I have experienced the transition from paper records to electronic records in some of my Doctors offices. In one office after about 4 months of pain during the transition, the office went from 45 or more minute waiting time in the reception area to about 5 minutes. All due to gains in efficiency. I have not experienced any loss in quality, in fact the visits seem a bit more relaxed and personal.
So why do some offices show so much resistance. I observe fear. I have talked to some Doctors about it and have seen the fear in their eyes. Fear of change. Fear of the cost to convert and maintain the new system. Fear of the pain during the transition as the staff and patience adjust to the change. Fear of lowering the quality of care. Mostly just a fear of the unknown.
But we do have some real world examples. Back in the late 1990s, Denmark starting converting to an National online medical records system so we have well over a decade of data from it.
The Danish system reports an average of 50 minute a day per Doctor reduction in administrative work. With a population of 5.5 million, it has saved the equivelent of $120 Million a year. Translate those saving to the US population and that is almost $7 billion each year.
We in the US spend a lot of money to provide a high quality of care. Health care in the US costs $7,290 per person (16% of GDP). While in Denmark it is $3,362 per person (9.8% of GDP). But what does that buy us? Life expectancy in the US is 78.1 and in Denmark it is 78.6, not any significant difference.
To get the full value from electronic records, it must be standardized, portable and accessible by appropriate medical providers.
Imagine being unconscious in an ambulance. In the current system, no one know what medications you are on or conditions you have requiring special care, unless you carry that information all the time. How many of us do that. Being able to access your history would allow the best cars in the shortest time.
Imagine the data mining applications to help improve the medical industry once we have built up a few years of records.
I see two points to push for this situation. One, lobby every Doctor office to implement an electronic records system. Two, push for a standard at the National (or even better international) level to allow for seamless exchange.
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