Category: Process

To solve tough problems, we need the active participation of a diverse group of people. Instead of control residing only with managers, each person on a team should have the authority and responsibility to contribute fully. Rather than command them from above, the team leader should facilitate the team’s efforts.

Since the industrial revolution we’ve needed a lot of science to deal with the changing nature of work. Science in the form of organizational theory helped us structure giant corporations. And the scientific method made time-motion studies possible which vastly increased manufacturing speed. Frederick Winslow Taylor wrote a book in 1911 about the latter field, appropriately titled, The Principles of Scientific Management.

These days our work increasingly consists of complex problems that cannot be divided into simple, repeatable tasks. Take, for example, the Global Earth Observation System of Systems in which 60 countries have agreed to participate in a 10-year effort to collect and share thousands of measurements of the Earth. This data has a wide variety of applications, from monitoring pollution to predicting the weather. But this requires hundreds of scientists with different agendas to agree on thousands of decisions. As one of the project leaders says, “‘We have been able to make computers work together. The challenge of the 21st century is to get people to work together…’ noting that the problem will be overcoming bureaucracy, politics, and turf.”

Science alone wouldn’t have a chance to make this project work.

The work practices we used throughout the 20th Century are still important and useful. But for complex, 21st Century work they’re not sufficient. Because the problems are bigger, they require more people with more skills to solve them. These complex problems require the combined effort of people with complimentary experience, knowledge, and ways of thinking.

Working involving new combinations of people requires effective collaboration.

Collaboration requires each person on a team to have the opportunity to drive the processes and outcomes.

In other words, success with complex problems depends on sharing control with others. Joe Kraus, the founder of Excite and JotSpot has said, “Very early on, the founders of startups make an important choice. Do they want success or control? …I’ve picked success. And success implies giving up control – hiring people who are much better than you, or being willing to be the janitor if that’s what’s required.”

Of course, groups that have no leadership at all can easily slide into a death spiral of debate and fail to accomplish anything. Success today requires balancing control in the form of management with collaboration in the form of facilitation.

Try it now
On an interdisciplinary team, assign a team lead that is a contributing member of the team, but also has responsibility for two critical functions:

1. Facilitate the process – This is an art in itself, but it includes eliciting each team member’s best work, resolving conflicts, and finding alternative paths when the team gets stuck.
2. Make executive decisions – There will be times when team members will have opposing opinions and can’t resolve them. The team lead synthesizes everyone’s viewpoints, weighs the project priorities, and makes the tough decision, but only when absolutely necessary.

The tools we use to create and communicate should be so easy to use we rarely ever think about them. With simple tools we naturally focus on what the tool allows us to do.

The famous typography designer Matthew Carter has said that when you read you should not see the letters on the page, you should see through the type to the message. If printed type was the tool we’ve used to communicate for thousands of years, today we do our jobs using mobile electronics, software user interfaces, rapid prototyping devices, and so on.

And yet, as I write this in 2006, I still can’t use my computer to make an appointment with someone working for a different company and know that the meeting will appear on both our calendars. I may spend time trying, but I know this everyday task is still completed more easily (and with more accuracy) if I simply call the other person and schedule the appointment over the phone.

If your calendar software makes it difficult to schedule a meeting, use something simpler. If it isn’t obvious how to use the functions of your mobile device, get something easier. These tools should be just as transparent as the type you’re looking at now. Communicating and executing our ideas is too important to let technology get in the way.

Robust tools are seductive, but their complexity quickly results in diminishing returns. Adopt tools with as many features as you need, and no more. Usually a few essential features will enable you to do many things well.

Try it now
As you go through your days, write down a list of every tool you use to create and communicate. Mark those that are cumbersome, and find an easier replacement for each cumbersome tool. Do the same with your team.

So how do we tell the truth? Here are a few ways I found work:

Inform the uniformed: Challenging the accepted situation by citing reality may get you sent to Siberia. But it depends on whom you’re talking to. Over time executives become ill informed – ironically – because timid employees avoid giving them bad news. For the executives, the truth becomes a rare and valuable revelation, and you a valuable messenger if you relay the truth in a way that isn’t tied to your personal agenda.

Collectively decide to be honest: Being honest is much harder than it sounds. Much of the mediocrity in companies is a result of superficial niceties that make it impossible to productively critique ideas. Being honest means praising ideas worthy of praise, and criticizing ideas worthy of criticism. Before doing it on an individual level, everyone in a group should agree that honest interaction is necessary to improve the organization, and that honest expression is not personal condemnation.

Reframe ideas: Any current business issue stands on an implicit context of ideas that are part of the company’s culture. This collected wisdom is the frame through which new information is interpreted, even if the freshness date of those ideas is long past, such as growing for years but thinking, “We’re only a small company.” You can reframe the issues by presenting an alternate idea supported by a different context. “Now that we have 2000 employees and four offices, we have the capacity to consider exporting our products.”

Appeal to science: Disinformation is rare among scientists and engineers because their livelihood depends on working within the physical constraints of reality. You’re not likely to hear, “That’s right, Victor, we’ll have that Internet bandwidth commodity exchange done by Tuesday afternoon.” When I work closely with engineers and programmers, they ruthlessly critique business ideas because they know exactly what it takes to implement them (and know they’ll later be responsible if they don’t speak up now). Citing scientific reality – or aligning yourself with scientists – becomes a useful sieve to filter out disinformation.

Over time a company’s official history becomes ideology and people need the truth of reality to help them grow.

On my first trip to Berlin I toured the former Deutsche Demokratische Republik including a number of museums and memorials describing the former communist state, the Berlin Wall, and life within its boundaries. We’re now well aware of the reasons the totalitarian state collapsed. Central planning failed to provide for the needs of citizens. Official “full employment” resulted in idleness and dissatisfying jobs. And the need to further a core ideology made experimentation – and therefore innovation – highly unlikely. Nothing remarkable was possible, the human spirit suffered, and eventually the whole system collapsed.

It reminded me of some companies I’ve worked for.

“Comrade Lombardi, I think you are mistaken in your effort to respond to these so-called customers, as the Party Leader has already informed us, there are no customers. There are only distribution end points. I am sure that lowering your bread rations will help you understand this.”

This management-knows-all behavior creates fear that quickly overcomes the simple desire to tell the truth. When official disinformation is possible in entire countries, it easily happens in companies.

Central planning. Unnecessarily large teams. Official ideology. Poor moral. Are you working in a totalitarian company?

There are times when working with a single other person – pair management – is better than working alone or with a team.

Some professions such as police have a long tradition of working in pairs. Recently software programmers have started to practice pair programming where two people sit together and alternate roles of writing and reviewing software code. The resulting quality improvements can make this process more productive overall.

Pair management has some of the benefits of teams. A pair will generate more ideas than one person working alone. A pair generates a greater diversity of ideas, increasing the chances of having better ideas. A pair can work in parallel, going faster by simultaneously working on two related tasks. A pair can improve quality by working together on the same task. A pair of people can morally support each other, and people feel more satisfaction and learn more when working in pairs than alone.

A pair can work more quickly than a team because communication and coordination between two people is easier than among a team.

Do it now
Begin with a defined project or task that can benefit from more than one person but doesn’t require a team to complete. Collaborate with someone who has complimentary skills and select an interaction style from the list below.

Work with a partner who has complimentary skills, such as:

• Different skills with the same perspective, such as a more creative person to compliment a more analytical person
• Similar skills with a different perspective, such as knowledge from inside the organization to compliment knowledge from outside the organization
• Broader or deeper skills, such a range of relevant experience to compliment deep expertise in a particular area

When working with a partner, choose an interaction style suited to the activity at hand, for example:

• In continuous review one person does the work and the partner continuously reviews the quality of the work. The pair periodically switches roles.
• In problem solving both partners work together to solve a problem through tasks like generating ideas and building an analytical model.
• In complimentary tasks each partner does a different task that benefits from real-time communication with the other partner. For example, if you’re testing a prototype one person can run the test and the other person records the results.

The main pitfall to avoid when working in a pair is groupthink. Partners need to feel comfortable showing healthy skepticism toward each other’s ideas. Careful matching of personalities is important in forming effective pairs. For example, it can be difficult for someone to provide honest feedback to another person higher up in the organizational hierarchy.

There are times when working alone or with a proper team is better, see Work Alone and Work as a Team.

A group of people working as a team is often the best way to complete a project because teams can generate more work of higher quality than individuals or large groups.

Do it now
Form a team of people for a project requiring new ideas and more work than one or two people can do. Keep the team small (seven or fewer people). Include complimentary skill sets and knowledge in the people you choose. Establish a goal for the team and establish a way the team should work together. Ensure everyone knows the whole team is responsible for the team’s performance; no one person can succeed without the whole team succeeding.

A team can generate many ideas of a greater diversity because each person contributes their own ideas. A team can work quickly by simultaneously performing several tasks. A team can improve quality be checking each other’s work. Through collaboration (see Create by designing together), teams can apply complimentary expertise to one goal.

For small or well-defined tasks, teams can be less productive than other configurations of people. At some point the added communication and coordination required among a team results in diminishing benefits and it becomes better to work alone or in pairs.

The biggest pitfall is a group of people working together who think they’re a team, but don’t act as one. If each individual primarily works in his or her own department and collaborates by trading emails and meeting occasionally, this is not a team. A team is a small group of people collaborating closely on a daily basis to accomplish a defined goal.

There are times when working alone is more productive than working with a partner or a team.

Working alone is useful when you need to expand on an existing idea, to carefully synthesize information, or do imaginative thinking. Working alone can also be useful to finish a familiar task quickly without interference.

Working alone isn’t always the most productive; particularly when you want to generate a large diversity of ideas, accomplish a team’s worth of work, or check the quality of your own work. There are times when working with a partner or with a team is better.

Do it now
Reserve time on your calendar for working alone. Go to a quiet place that stimulates productive work, like a library. If you have a definitive goal, start by planning how you’ll use your time.

Working directly with other people to design or build something – co-creation – can produce significantly more productive results when creating a product than talking only.

Do it now
At the next meeting of your team, set a single goal for everyone to accomplish together. Post big sheets of paper on the wall and give each person a marker to contribute. Ask everyone to express his or her thoughts on the goal in the form of writing/drawing on the wall.

When talking, people may address the same topic but talk about it so that they further their own goals instead of the group’s goals. To align the group, set a goal that the product must produce and instruct them to work together to create a product that achieves that goal. The group can work on building the actual product, or design it on paper or electronically, though to Radiate information it’s often best to start with big sheets of paper or a whiteboard. By changing the style of work from discussion to creation the individual agendas become secondary to the shared agenda of designing the product.

Here’s a story: A programmer and a marketer were in a meeting talking about creating a new watch for runners. “If we use satellite positioning, we can show runners where they are at any time,” said the programmer, “it’s a killer technology.”

“So what?” replied the marketer, “it’s a novelty that will get old. Our research shows they want a watch that will make their daily run less monotonous. Maybe it plays a different melody at each 100 meter mark.”

“That’s definitely not a novelty,” joked the programmer. “We can’t charge more money for that, but we could if we included satellite positioning.”

Pulling out a big sheet of paper, they write down the goal: A watch that makes daily running less monotonous and can sell for $150. They brainstormed different ways of making running more fun, of using the available technology, and of which product features consumers pay a premium. Every suggestion had to make sense within those constraints. Eventually they designed a satellite positioning watch that plotted a different route for each run through the runner’s neighborhood.