Noise Between Stations

Month: December 2005

  • Work with a partner

    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.

  • 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.

  • Work alone

    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.

  • Create by designing together

    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.

  • Jeep Launches Cellphone TV Channel

    Now that’s a headline that made me stop and think…

    JEEP LAUNCHES OWN MOBILE PHONE TV CHANNEL
    Axe Deodorant Also Said to be Negotiating Similar Deal with MobiTV
    SAN FRANCISCO (AdAge.com) — In an effort to harness mobile phone TV as a major branded entertainment medium, Jeep is launching its own mobile phone channel with MobiTV. The content is available to about 500,000 subscribers using Cingular, Sprint, Alltel and other mobile networks.

    Most people I know don’t realize live TV on mobile phones is not only possible, it’s widely available. If you haven’t seen it, get a demo now. It’s a visceral demonstration of current technology, more so than video on an iPod or PSP.

    And notice that Jeep didn’t partner with a broadcast or cable channel — the traditional experts of live TV — to produce this channel; they as advertiser partnered with the technology provider directly. In essence Jeep has become a broadcaster in it’s own right. It’ll be fun to watch that value chain re-order.

  • Call an expert or toss a coin?

    Louis Menand reviewed Philip Tetlock’s new book, “Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?” which summarizes a twenty year study of people who make prediction their business. In short, their predictions are “worse than dart-throwing monkeys.”

    This is good news for strategists using future planning tools like scenario planning: they don’t need to be experts in order to find plausible (as opposed to probable) stories of the future. Unfortunately, the distinction between a futurist and an expert may be lost on many.

    Here’s my favorite bits from Menand’s article:

    [Experts] have the same repertoire of self-justifications that everyone has, and are no more inclined than anyone else to revise their beliefs about the way the world works, or ought to work, just because they made a mistake.

    “Experts in demand,” Tetlock says, “were more overconfident than their colleagues who eked out existences far from the limelight.”

    “Expert Political Judgment” is just one of more than a hundred studies that have pitted experts against statistical or actuarial formulas, and in almost all of those studies the people either do no better than the formulas or do worse.

    The experts’ trouble in Tetlock’s study is exactly the trouble that all human beings have: we fall in love with our hunches, and we really, really hate to be wrong.

    Most people tend to dismiss new information that doesn’t fit with what they already believe. Tetlock found that his experts used a double standard: they were much tougher in assessing the validity of information that undercut their theory than they were in crediting information that supported it… In the terms of Karl Popper’s famous example, to verify our intuition that all swans are white we look for lots more white swans, when what we should really be looking for is one black swan.

    …like most of us, experts violate a fundamental rule of probabilities by tending to find scenarios with more variables more likely. If a prediction needs two independent things to happen in order for it to be true, its probability is the product of the probability of each of the things it depends on.

    Tetlock: “Low scorers look like hedgehogs: thinkers who “know one big thing,” aggressively extend the explanatory reach of that one big thing into new domains, display bristly impatience with those who “do not get it,” and express considerable confidence that they are already pretty proficient forecasters, at least in the long term. High scorers look like foxes: thinkers who know many small things (tricks of their trade), are skeptical of grand schemes, see explanation and prediction not as deductive exercises but rather as exercises in flexible “ad hocery” that require stitching together diverse sources of information, and are rather diffident about their own forecasting prowess.”

    In world affairs, parsimony may be a liability—but, even there, there can be traps in the kind of highly integrative thinking that is characteristic of foxes.

  • 10 years of influential business ideas

    To celebrate s+b’s 10th anniversary, they looked back at the conceptual breakthroughs that appeared in the magazine — and invited readers to vote on which were most likely to last.

    1. Execution
    2. The Learning Organization
    3. Corporate Values
    4. Customer Relationship Management
    5. Disruptive Technology
    6. Leadership Development
    7. Organizational DNA
    8. Strategy-Based Transformation
    9. Complexity Theory
    10. Lean Thinking

  • The opposite of bad PR

    If the huge oil profits caused PR and political problems for energy companies recently, it’s only logical that taking the reverse action could have the reverse effect, which is what Citgo (U.S. arm of Venezuelan oil) did, and is getting big media attention here this morning…

    Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez added New York City to his program of selling discounted heating oil to low-income Americans, begun in Boston last month… “We want to help the poorest communities in the U.S.,” Chavez said in August. “There are people who die from the cold in winter in the U.S.”

    Skeptics interpret this as a way of embarrasing President Bush, but ultimately it’s a great humanitarian gesture that should shame other companies into doing the same.

  • Old school look at innovation

    There’s a flurry of innovation talk from the old school business guard lately. Reading through it, it seems like those concerned with innovation are repeating ourselves, possibly because we’re not aware of what other work has been done and because we’re using discovery tools that aren’t revealing anything new.

    Jaruzelski, Dehoff, and Bordia from Booz did some financial analysis and found

    1. You need to spend the right amount of money, not too much or too little
    2. Big companies have more to spend
    3. Process and collaboration are important

    BCG’s annual survey (PDF) found

    • Executives will increase spending on innovation
    • Generating organic growth through innovation has become essential
    • Less than half of the executives were satisfied with the financial returns
    • Globalization and organizational issues were two of the biggest challenges

    In both cases I’m struck by the research tool used: both firms use familiar tools that are useful but (IMHO) result in limited answers. Financial analysis tells us what happened quantitatively but not why. Surveys show us perception of the situation, but not necessarily the real situation. Neither used qualitative research that, incidentally, can help address the problems they uncovered.

    In Not All Innovations Are Equal, Govindarajan and Trimble talk about the wider application of innovation beyond continuous improvement and products to strategic innovations. That classification has existed in the form of Doblin’s Ten Types of Innovation. Their conclusion, that “Limits to innovation have less to do with technology or creativity than with management skill” has been discussed by Gary Hamel and is now championed by MIG.

    That these ideas are becoming more widespread is great. But unless this is all just marketing bravura, we need more cross-pollination of ideas and experience to make progress rather than repetition. I’ve got a little project started to make that happen, more details in the New Year.

  • SarbOx flawed, but fixable

    James Surowiecki’s Sarboxed In?…

    • The Sarbanes-Oxley Act was a political knee-jerk even the Republicans couldn’t avoid, in reaction to Enron, Worldcom, etc.
    • The complexity of the new rules went too far, requiring six figure enforcement costs, and possibly hindering small companies from going public. There are now talks of easing enforcement or modifying the Act.
    • But the problem SarbOx addresses is very real: to fake earnings and revenue, companies made acquisitions and hires they didn’t need. Two researchers estimate that companies who restated financials fired between two hundred and fifty thousand and six hundred thousand people between 2000 and 2002, slashing payrolls by more than twenty-five per cent, while other companies cut them by just 1.5 per cent.