In a recent piece in the Financial Times (FT, March 15, 2012), Ross Tieman addresses the challenge of moving effectively “from teamwork to collaboration” (http://on.ft.com/AvTvF4). Successful collaboration today, he observes, requires a fuller capacity, often guided by emotional intelligence, to work with individuals with different backgrounds, areas of expertise, and geographical location. Being a good team player is no longer enough in a time when teams and the situations or projects with which they engage are so varied and complex.
It’s a sensible conclusion but the real value of Tieman’s remarks emerges when teasing out two of the issues he raises. The first is simply the power of reflecting on the overuse of ‘teamwork’ or collaboration’ as an easy fix for whatever ails an agency or project. Familiar imperatives like hiring more team players or collaborating better across functions or even organizations can indeed be helpful but also often fail to provide any specific value or concrete way forward. The challenge is to be willing to pause in order to determine which specific forms of or approaches to collaboration will best serve the needs of a given project, partnership, or situation.
A second issue, complexity, has increasingly emerged as a basis for re-casting various longstanding approaches to management and leadership. Despite numerous definitions of complexity, the current emphasis on the term turns fairly consistently on a lack of predictability. By this logic, while complicated situations or projects may involve multiple elements or participants operating over a long period of time, their evolution and outcomes remain largely predictable. With complex situations, however, the different elements in a system or situation are interdependent and, as such, eventually defy predictability over time. A familiarly helpful contrast is between the traffic light operating in a complicated setting and the air traffic control system operating in a complex one.
Tieman references Pam Jones and the research on leading complex teams she has helped to conduct (often with Vicki Holton) for nearly a decade at the Ashridge Business School (UK). Their work has identified a range of different types of teams – ad hoc, multidisciplinary, dispersed geographically, working on complex projects, multicultural, spread across organizational boundaries, virtual and rarely meeting, and so forth – that are often overlapping and defy the formulation of any single approach for team members or leaders to succeed. Instead, they explore how different skills and competencies, many rooted in greater communication, willingness to share responsibility, and ultimately expand their emotional intelligence, can help develop more adaptable teams and leaders. Such exploration accords with some of relevant works from US management scholars, including Morten Hansen’s richly researched yet wonderfully practical Collaboration (2009) and Vijay Govindarajan and Chris Trimble’s guide to building the right teams for experimentation and execution, The Other Side of Innovation (2010).
Reflecting on the specific conditions confronting organizations and their teams and engaging more fully with the complexity of contemporary teams are two behaviors that will reward leaders of organizations and teams alike. In creative communication industries, where a long tradition of productive teams already exists, the call is often for more collaboration and teamwork, especially across increasingly blurring organizational boundaries. As research has shown and more popular pieces like Tieman’s reinforce, the more meaningful call should not necessarily be for more but for better collaboration – better-suited to environmental conditions and team member capabilities, better-aligned with organizational and strategic resources and priorities, and better-recognizing the complexity and interdependency characterizing today’s dynamic markets.
[This post will also appear in the forthcoming April newsletter of the Berlin School of Creative Leadership, at http://www.berlin-school.com/]
Friday, March 23, 2012
Tuesday, January 10, 2012
Doctors, Artificial Intelligence, and Creating Competitive Advantage: Reflect on Your Ways of Thinking (Differently)
When I ran the teaching and learning center at New York University, the NYU Medical Center was engaged in an ambitious development program to improve faculty teaching and student learning. At its core was the recognition that doctors today employ algorithmic thinking.
Put simply, doctors make diagnoses that are more and more precise when they have more and more input, like symptoms or test data, to assess. So if you tell your doctor you have headaches and chest pain, she may list one hundred possible ailments. But if you add another symptom, like tingling in your hands and feet, her list is reduced to 50 possibilities; another symptom, like a strong reaction to salty food, takes her list down further to 15 or 20. With blood or other tests, she ultimately is able to narrow your possible ailments to 2 or 3. The doctor thus analyzes your symptoms and other input in combination, processing them algorithmically to produce the most likely explanation for their occurring at the same time.
This way of thinking in medicine is explored in a fascinating piece by Vinod Khosla that appeared in TechCrunch:
http://techcrunch.com/2012/01/10/doctors-or-algorithms/
On its face, the piece approaches medical thinking as a challenge for Artificial Intelligence designers. It asks whether the future will see diagnoses generated through the algorithmic processing of increasingly precise inputs and rendered without the help of doctors as we know them today. What will be the response of medical profession and medical education, Khosla asks, to the potential emergence of Artificial Intelligence that enables more and more precise algorithms for diagnosing ailments? What will they do -- and, by extension, how might their way of thinking change?
While that's certainly a worthwhile question in itself, my reading of Khosla's piece is more general: if doctors indeed practice algorithmic thinking, what other ways of thinking are practiced in other professions? Is there an entrepreneurial way of thinking, for example, that empowers creativity through associating typically dissimilar elements? Or a leaders' way of thinking that reconciles the analysis of complexity in organizations or environments with the emotional sensitivity required to inspire and motivate others? And so on.
The point, of course, is not to put people or professions in simple categories or assume that everyone in a particular category thinks the same way. Rather, the potential advantage of identifying distinct ways of thinking for those in business or other competitive situations is to be able to think differently. Michael Porter, Harvardian guru of competitive strategy, says the "granddaddy of all mistakes" is going down the same path as everyone else and thinking somehow you can achieve better results. One way to forge and follow a different path is to reflect on your current way of thinking and then to try another way of thinking and see what value that can create.
Put simply, doctors make diagnoses that are more and more precise when they have more and more input, like symptoms or test data, to assess. So if you tell your doctor you have headaches and chest pain, she may list one hundred possible ailments. But if you add another symptom, like tingling in your hands and feet, her list is reduced to 50 possibilities; another symptom, like a strong reaction to salty food, takes her list down further to 15 or 20. With blood or other tests, she ultimately is able to narrow your possible ailments to 2 or 3. The doctor thus analyzes your symptoms and other input in combination, processing them algorithmically to produce the most likely explanation for their occurring at the same time.
This way of thinking in medicine is explored in a fascinating piece by Vinod Khosla that appeared in TechCrunch:
http://techcrunch.com/2012/01/10/doctors-or-algorithms/
On its face, the piece approaches medical thinking as a challenge for Artificial Intelligence designers. It asks whether the future will see diagnoses generated through the algorithmic processing of increasingly precise inputs and rendered without the help of doctors as we know them today. What will be the response of medical profession and medical education, Khosla asks, to the potential emergence of Artificial Intelligence that enables more and more precise algorithms for diagnosing ailments? What will they do -- and, by extension, how might their way of thinking change?
While that's certainly a worthwhile question in itself, my reading of Khosla's piece is more general: if doctors indeed practice algorithmic thinking, what other ways of thinking are practiced in other professions? Is there an entrepreneurial way of thinking, for example, that empowers creativity through associating typically dissimilar elements? Or a leaders' way of thinking that reconciles the analysis of complexity in organizations or environments with the emotional sensitivity required to inspire and motivate others? And so on.
The point, of course, is not to put people or professions in simple categories or assume that everyone in a particular category thinks the same way. Rather, the potential advantage of identifying distinct ways of thinking for those in business or other competitive situations is to be able to think differently. Michael Porter, Harvardian guru of competitive strategy, says the "granddaddy of all mistakes" is going down the same path as everyone else and thinking somehow you can achieve better results. One way to forge and follow a different path is to reflect on your current way of thinking and then to try another way of thinking and see what value that can create.
Friday, December 30, 2011
Challenge for the New Year: Innovate Management, Organizational Design, not just Products, Services or Teams
I'm a great fan of Gary Hamel's work on management innovation. Through his research and writings, especially at Hack 2.0: The Management Innovation eXchange, he goes beyond much of the current thinking and modeling of how to foster innovative ideas, products, and services (www.managementexchange.com).
Instead, though very much relatedly, his emphasis is on innovating management and organizations themselves. In a recent video, he discusses with a VP from Dell how the web and social media are not just tools but increasingly the operating system for our lives. The key lesson for leaders is the need for them to embrace the openness and adaptability of the web and social media in organizational design, operations, and strategy. Not an easy task, particularly with the ceding of centralized command and control it requires, but more and more a necessary one to enable success. The video is under 5 minutes long and very much worth the time.
su.pr/2pqnN0z
Instead, though very much relatedly, his emphasis is on innovating management and organizations themselves. In a recent video, he discusses with a VP from Dell how the web and social media are not just tools but increasingly the operating system for our lives. The key lesson for leaders is the need for them to embrace the openness and adaptability of the web and social media in organizational design, operations, and strategy. Not an easy task, particularly with the ceding of centralized command and control it requires, but more and more a necessary one to enable success. The video is under 5 minutes long and very much worth the time.
su.pr/2pqnN0z
Wednesday, December 28, 2011
What Alan Webber learned from starting Fast Company: A List to Hold onto
The following list, drawn from Alan Webber's blog, is a keeper. I also tweeted the link to the blog earlier, but the more I think about his lessons and insights for nurturing ideas and building businesses around them, the more inspiring and constructive I believe they are. Here are Webber's ten lessons and insights (the list appears in slightly expanded form at http://bit.ly/sOgz4W).
1. You have to believe in your own idea.
2. You have to be open to others' input on your idea.
3. The world does not need your idea.
4. Who you are and what you've done are often the best arguments for your idea. Your track record counts as much as the merits of your idea.
5. Do you have skin in the game? If you really believe in your own idea, how do you show your commitment?
6. What's your motivation? Love is more powerful than money.
7. It's all an iterative process of learning and doing.
8. If you plan some things you can leave other things looser.
9. Your idea is only as good as the people you attract to work on it with you.
10. Remember Gandhi: The means are the ends in the making. Be the project you want it to be.
1. You have to believe in your own idea.
2. You have to be open to others' input on your idea.
3. The world does not need your idea.
4. Who you are and what you've done are often the best arguments for your idea. Your track record counts as much as the merits of your idea.
5. Do you have skin in the game? If you really believe in your own idea, how do you show your commitment?
6. What's your motivation? Love is more powerful than money.
7. It's all an iterative process of learning and doing.
8. If you plan some things you can leave other things looser.
9. Your idea is only as good as the people you attract to work on it with you.
10. Remember Gandhi: The means are the ends in the making. Be the project you want it to be.
Tuesday, December 27, 2011
How to Invest that Gift Card in a Crucial Relationship
Building long, trusting, and mutually rewarding relationships with clients and customers has increasingly become an explicit aim of firms across sectors. Financial and investment firms are no exception. Yet the crucial relationship between financial advisor and client has rarely been addressed in accessible but still sophisticated terms that speak to both parties. Timothy Noonan and Matt Smith's Someday Rich: Planning for Sustainable Tomorrows Today (Wiley, 2011) fills that void. Written primarily for advisors, the book can actually be a valuable resource to be read together by advisors and clients who want to work together more closely and knowledgeably on the financial planning journey they share.
http://amzn.to/uclupO
(Full disclosure: Tim Noonan is an old and dear personal friend; his credentials as a successful financial advisor speak for themselves, however, and the insights and Personal Asset Liability Model presented in the book by him and Matt Smith have been proven with clients over more than five decades of combined advisory experience.)
http://amzn.to/uclupO
(Full disclosure: Tim Noonan is an old and dear personal friend; his credentials as a successful financial advisor speak for themselves, however, and the insights and Personal Asset Liability Model presented in the book by him and Matt Smith have been proven with clients over more than five decades of combined advisory experience.)
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