Get Me Jamie Notter

The Value (?) of Objectivity

 I am speaking to an association in Iowa next week on leadership, and a couple of the themes I'll be talking about are (a) how fast things change these days, and, somewhat related, (b) how social media is changing the game in general. And it's not about the number of people on Facebook or how many followers Oprah has. It's about more important change in behavior and some important shifts in what we value.

For example, take a look at Maddie's post earlier this week about some interesting dynamics about some bloggers that were compensated (free registration) at an MPI event. One of the issues is whether the bloggers would be "objective" in their coverage of the event. Some pushed back arguing that it is the very subjective nature of blogging that is valuable--what you are reading is (unapologetically) from the blogger's perspective.

It made me think that perhaps there is a big shift going on. Obviously, there is value in objective coverage of news. But that value USED to be a lot more, precisely because we were limited to such a small number of news sources. With social media, I am constantly being delivered news from a large number of (admittedly subjective) sources. Some of them are more objective than others, but because I get a large number, I can usually interpret through the aggregate what's "objectively" going on. 

I think about the earthquake that hit DC a couple of weeks ago. It was (thankfully) so small, that when it happened, I didn't know what it was. When I got on Twitter, I figured it out. I never turned on the TV to look to an "objective" news source to tell me what was happening, though I did visit NOAA's site. But that was just to get interesting details. Many of the objective facts were discernible through the collective tweets I could read. If someone had given me a very subjective and inaccurate report that there was catastrophic damage, for example, I would have discounted it in the face of all the other tweets.

Maybe I'm overplaying this example, but I wonder if the objective truth is easier to get these days, simply because we have access to so many more individual data points. We don't need the authoritative objective source as much as we used to. We just need access to more of a "crowd" of subjective ones. In that context, the subjective can become more valuable than it used to be. Knowing that I will get at the objective in the big picture, I can now listen more carefully to the beauty and insight of subjective interpretations. I can expand the boundaries of what I can learn. I can see opportunity where I used to see messiness. 

What is "valuable" seems to be morphing a lot these days. Is it still as important as it used to be for associations to be the authoritative source of information? Something to think about. 

Photo credit

Being Something to Everybody

Associations have a soft spot for wanting to make people happy. One of the mistakes we frequently make, since we all have diverse membership bases, is trying to please everyone. Trying to be everything to everyone. This is typically hard to sustain strategically. You spread yourself too thin trying to please everyone.

But in nearly every strategic conversation I'm having with associations these days, they are being drawn towards focusing on multiple niches. Our customers are less tolerant of receiving their value in packages that are generalized. Big, central, appeal-to-everyone events are down in numbers for my clients. Members want their piece, just for them. Social media is a factor--because it enables a more targeted or micro delivery of value. 

This tends to hurt our organizational brains, because we weren't set up to deliver value in such a distributed fashion (hence the spread too thin comment above). We designed our organizations to provide centralized value, not distributed. When a strategic imperative requires changes in organizational design or culture (as this one does), you may be in trouble, because in general, we don't know how to handle design and culture issues.

The Truth About Change

My last two posts about truth have generated some of the best comments this blog has ever seen. I quoted Joe Gerstandt's comment in the second post, and that one generated an equally awesome comment from Lindy Dreyer. Her question was bout leading change when you're in the middle:

You can only create change if you're in the position to do so. Yes, that can come from the middle, but only if you have the relationships and the trust of the people you work with--above and below.... I guess the challenge for folks in that middle position is knowing what you're capable of, choosing your battles, and fighting them valiantly.... When change comes from the middle, and the driver leaves, does the org default back to square one? How do you keep that from happening?

Short answer: you don't. If "you" are still in that organization (and the driver left), then you are probably the one who wants to default back to square one, although I doubt you would frame it that way. Change, for "you," is to valiantly fight to return to the wisdom upon which your organization was based.

 Maybe we need to debunk some myths about "change." I don't think change comes from the top, middle, or bottom. Change simply is. Time advances and the universe flexes and morphs, and your organization is constantly adapting. Frequently it adapts by maintaining consistency or the status quo, but that is still an adaptation. The turbulent universe is exerting force on it, nudging it slightly out of orbit, and it fights to stay in it. Or it attempts to go with the new force and break out of orbit, but it turns out to be a rather massive planet, so moving it out isn't so easy. Moving out of orbit is hard, but change is constant.

Tops, middles, and bottoms are all playing different roles at different times in each of those scenarios (pushing to stay in orbit and pushing to break out). There is not one single path to maintaining a beautiful orbit or moving out of a destructive one. 

But what speaking the truth does for all of us is shine lights on these orbits. We see more clearly what's happening, even if we can't control the change from our one position in the system. My favorite truth quote is from Gloria Steinem: 

The truth shall set you free, but first it will piss you off.

If we all (tops, bottoms, and middles) raised the bar on truth telling, then the orbits we are in--and their beauty and destructiveness--would be much more apparent. Some drivers of change would move on, and some status quo clingers would hold on even tighter. There would be some shake up. Some people would get pissed off. But in the end, I'd bet we would start to see better results, because more of the right people would connect in the same orbits. We'd have better alignment, and that would give us the collective power to move massive planets into and out of orbit more quickly. 

Perhaps I don't have practical advice for that person in the middle who wants to change the system. Maybe it's not your job to change the system. Maybe it's your job to connect the top and bottom together more directly (back to Lindy's point about trust and relationships with workers on both sides). Maybe Joe's advice is practical: step up and speak the truth, because when you do, you'll help everyone get clearer about WHY they are trying to move either into or out of an orbit.

A Culture of Truth Starts at the Top (?)

I clearly have some issues with hierarchy, and since I'm all about systems, I often find myself pointing out ways that people who are NOT in official positions of power can work to make things happen, change things, etc. In general, if someone says X needs to come from the top of the organization, I find myself pushing back, arguing that while the top certainly needs to do something, you (in the middle, at the bottom, wherever) also can be doing something.

But I wonder if that general philosophy does not apply as much to the challenge of building an organization where more truth is spoken. I've written before about the four different areas that need attention when you're building a culture of truth (walk, talk, structure, and culture). I always thought that gave any system lots of opportunities for building a more truth-friendly workplace.

But I think the issue of speaking the truth is much more closely tied to some built in assumptions about hierarchy and power than I had realized. Maybe this is not something that can come from the ground up. Although eventually your organization will need to undergo changes in individual behavior, public statements, specific processes or structures, none of that really gets started unless the core group (usually senior management) actually lives this new culture and models it. Before anything else happens, the people who are in charge need to make a change, and the people who are not in charge need to see that change in action. That is a prerequisite for all the other important work that needs to be done to build a more truth-friendly workplace.

What do you think?

Leading Broken Organizations

Bruce Butterfield has created an interesting dialogue over on the ASAE listserve when he compared the association community to the struggling/dying industry of newspapers. Maddie posted about it, as did Peggy. Glen Tecker did a pushback post, arguing that we shouldn't compare the plights of for-profit companies to associations because they have such different purposes. Quoting Glen, "Their [nonprofits] mission is to serve; not sell."

First, I'll have to write another post on the notion that for profit companies exist solely for profit. That makes no sense to me because for profit companies are made up of human beings who care about things like quality, meaning, careers, solving problems, etc. The notion that they are all profit-searching robots seems off the mark to me. 

But that's another post. In this post I want to re-focus on Bruce's original points. He was arguing that newspapers were faced with a situation where their industry was dying, and they weren't adapting. He suggests the same could be true for associations, and I don't think the tax status of the two groups is particularly relevant here. All organizations run the risk of dying due to adaptation failure, whether they distribute profit to owners or not.

Read Umair Haque's December "builders manifesto" post. It's fairly mind-blowing. He argues that even the word "leadership" is a relic of the past now. And one of his main points hit home regarding this conversation:

Here's the problem in a nutshell. What leaders "lead" are yesterday's organizations. But yesterday's organizations--from carmakers to investment banks, to the healthcare system, to the energy industry, to the Senate itself--are broken. Today's biggest human challenge isn't leading broken organizations slightly better. It's building better organizations in the first place.

Whether or not my organization/industry's mission is to serve or sell, the bigger question is, is it broken? And I don't mean that in the simplistic yes/no good/bad sense. I mean digging into the complexity of your system and coming up with some deep strategic insight about what's happening and how you need to change, and that includes actually being open to the possibility that the change might be radical. And then translating that insight into some experiments that can give some actual texture to this necessary change, and then building a new organization from there.

Why Do We Resist Learning?

I am quite proud that my guest post over on the SocialFish blog on whether your organization is human enough for social media got so much traction that it is third(!) on their post ranks. I'd like to unpack the post a bit over here.

The first point I want to explore is the idea of parallel processes. From the original post:

So even if you figure out the tools, the complexity of organizational implementation can be overwhelming. The big problem with “overwhelming” is that it translates into inaction. It translates to slow. And that’s a problem for social media (and for associations in general, if you ask me). Social media is fast. The game changes quickly, and it doesn’t wait for you to figure everything out first. Yes, you have to figure things out, but you’ll have to do it as a parallel process to the implementation.

The basic notion here (that I think is foreign in too many organizations) is that you can (a) implement something, (b) learn from it, and (c) apply that learning to what you're doing all more or less at the same time. Now obviously it can't all be simultaneous--you have to have DONE something to learn from it. But why is it not more normal to have your implementation and your analysis/learning happening at the same time?

In short, we don't value learning as much as we value doing. We are a doing culture and that's what we reward. That's what we measure. That's why we hire and fire people. Did it get done. It seems we have a strange resistance to learning. People talk a lot about resistance to change, and certainly that's there (it shows up in the "applying what we learned" part). But what about resistance to learning? Why is it somehow uncomfortable to get together as a team and talk about what we learned? And I mean really digging into the analysis, not just a "the participants gave it a 4.1" conversation. 

Turns out those are tough conversations. Egos are on the line. People worry about blame. People fear they might not get resources they used to have. There's one set of reasons why your organization may resist learning: fear, blame, and ego. They stop your learning conversations and people safely focus on implementation instead. 

I think that's a problem. If your organization cannot handle challenging learning conversations like that quickly and efficiently, then I think you'll get left in the dust. You won't be able to implement, learn, and shift in a short enough cycle to stay competitive. There's more to it than better conversations, but that's certainly a good place to start.

More on Being Human in Organizations

I have written two posts that are explicitly about being human this year. The first was building off Dan Oestreich's blog and the second was building off of Gary Hamel's awesome book, The Future of Management.  In both posts I make a fairly simple point: organizations are made of human beings, and human beings actually care about things like emotions, freedom, purpose, relationships, etc., so why do we avoid those things like the plague in our organizational lives?

This week I'm being hit again with this message by some other brilliant people, namely Lindy Dreyer and Joe Gerstandt. Lindy wrote a post about how to actually get clarity in your organization (so you won't have to worry as much about control) and Joe has written a few awesome posts about the connection between leadership and love.

Lindy: Clarity takes courage

Joe: I do not know of anything stronger or more powerful than love. And I know of few things that require less courage than bossing someone around with the power granted you from an organizational chart.

So here's the deal. Human beings, dating back to our ancestors who painted in caves, have been telling stories to guide their lives. Myths, legends, bedtime stories, Hollywood movies--they are all stories that suck us in, because they always get at what makes us human. They are always about love. They are always about conflict. They are always about courage. They are always about loss and change.

They are never about best practices in nonprofit governance. They are never about six sigma. They are never about data driven decision making. They are never about fiduciary responsibilities.

And those are not bad things. I love those things, actually (I'm kind of nerdy that way). But we have deluded ourselves into thinking that those things will take us to the next level. They won't. Those things took us to this level. That absolutely guarantees they won't take us to the next level.

Joe says the absence of relevant leadership is the defining issue of our time (that's leaderSHIP, not individual leaders), and I'm saying the same thing. Part of what makes our leadership systems irrelevant is their pathological avoidance of humanity.

Joe, Lindy, and I (and many others, of course) have grown weary of the old way, and we're moving ahead. Being explicitly human is a given now, and I'm ready to run with it. You want effective organizational strategy? You want high-performance teams? You want efficient processes? You want powerful leadership?

Then dive straight into the human side. That's where the growth is.

 

The Discourse of Complaining

In my consulting work, I work with clients to solve problems. That, of course, means we have to clearly identify the problems, which, in turn, means I am guaranteed to spend time with people who are complaining. It seems natural that having problems would necessitate complaining, but when I get into it, I often get push back. They insist before we start that I promise not to let it turn into a "bitch and moan" session.

While I am not a fan of incessant whining, I would like to step up and defend complaining a bit. Complaining is important and has value, though obviously not in a vacuum. If all you do is complain, you don't get anywhere. But it's an important first step.

In graduate school I was led through an exercise and it started with two questions:

1. What sort of things, were they to happen more in your [work, life, relationship...fill in the blank], would you experience as supportive of your effectiveness and development?
2. And what sorts of things, were they to happen less for you in that context, would be supportive of your effectiveness and development?

That doesn't sound like complaining, does it? Effectiveness and development? Actually, it is. Sure, it's got a positive spin because it is focused on effectiveness and development, but it is still complaining. It's saying I want what I don't have right now, or I don't want things that are getting in the way. But being clear about what it is (either more of or less of) that drives effectiveness and development, is a critical piece. 

This is called the "discourse of complaining" (this is based on the work of Robert Kegan, by the way). Make sure you build it into your problem solving. Work on getting better at it. Complain more effectively. Work on being able to come up with more nuanced complaints that clarify your situation. When you do this, you'll be able to move onto the next discourse (the discourse of commitment). 

More on that later.

Do You Have Time to Care About Learning?

The American Society for Training and Development (ASTD) published an article in their magazine recently by Tony Bingham about informal learning. These are training and development folks, so obviously their career focus has been on delivering training events--formal learning. But social media has been putting the spotlight on informal learning. As I mentioned not too long ago, part of my own passion for Twitter has been the learning I have gleaned quite unexpectedly from the people that I now follow. 

The article states that between 70% and 90% of all learning in organizations is informal, yet about 80% of the organizations they surveyed devoted less than 10% of their training budget to informal learning.

Yikes.

Budgets aside, how much do you in your organization support informal learning? Think about it. You may have an organizational budget to send people to conferences where they will hear speakers and learn things. You may even organize some brown bag seminars in the office or pay for a few webinars that people can watch in the conference room (if they have time). But what about the rest of the year? When you and your staff are actually getting the work done in your organization, ARE YOU LEARNING?

I feel like we make a rigid distinction between getting things done and learning. When we are in the office, our priority is to get things done. We are rewarded for getting things done. We get mad when others don't get done what we need in order to get our things done. We have team meetings and talk about what was done and what still needs to get done. But do we think about what we learned? Better yet, do we talk about what we are learning? Do we care?

I know if I asked everyone, they'd say they care. Who would say they don't care about learning? But our actions don't match our words, particularly in organizations. 

If you want to change this, you'll likely be venturing into the realm of culture change. But don't let that scare you. In fact, don't look at it or talk about it as a culture change project. Just keep your focus on learning. Start gathering important people in your system together and give them (and yourself) time to talk about learning, how it happens in your organization, and how you can support it. This will challenge you to look fairly deeply at what you do in your organization and why you do it. Of course you will still be able to maintain your commitment to getting things done, but hopefully in doing this you will also gain some insight about what to do differently that will support learning. As you start doing those things (and talking about them), you will be on the road to culture change.

But this will take courage, honesty, and time.

Laws of Attraction

I was able to briefly take part in the weekly "Association Chat" on twitter yesterday (if you didn't know about it, it's Tuesdays at 2pm eastern. Just follow #assnchat to take part in the conversation). The initial topic was about the different "interactive expectations" of different generations. At one point, one of the people on the chat posted:

I think attracting the younger is harder too - they just aren't as interested in the slowness of trad assoc models.

My response:

That doesn't make them harder to attract. It just points out we are not attractive. Big difference.

This reminds me of one of the worst association education sessions I have ever been to (about strategic planning, of course), where the presenter showed a model for describing the association's environment, and in the middle of the page, was the place where you placed your association. You then had to place other players in your system in various orbits around the "sun" that is your association. One member of the audience pushed back, arguing that your association may not always be the dominant player in the system, thus shouldn't be at the center. This suggestion was inconceivable to the presenter, who simply explained that in this chart you put YOUR association in the center (speaker tip: repeating your original answer rarely convinces an audience member who disagrees with you).

This "association is the center of gravity" perspective is starting to grate on me, and that one tweet represents it. Younger people are "harder to attract." They are somehow peculiar. They defy our attempts at attraction. It's their fault. It implies we need new tactics or techniques to more skilfully market our slow association models so these odd birds will (finally!) be attracted to us.

What about simply being more attractive? The trick is not in knowing how to attract people. The trick is knowing what people find attractive and letting them know you've got that. If you don't have what they want (and you can't change yourself somehow to acquire what they want), then forget about that group. They're not harder to attract. They're just not that into you.

Giving up on them may have serious implications, of course. If they are the future, you might want to be more attractive to them. But then you're attention comes right back to YOU and what you need to do to be more attractive to this group that currently doesn't like you that much.

Another angle: what is it about them that attracts you? Where are they learning, where are they doing great things? Where do you, as an association, want to be a part of their world? What if your goal was to do wonderful things together with your "target" markets, rather than attracting them all into your lair? Sounds attractive, doesn't it?