Leadership Perfection.
'Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things into his hands, and that he had come from God and was going to God...began to wash the disciples’ feet...'
The most powerful entity in the Universe.
He can do anything.
Be Anything.
Yet -
He chooses to kneel and do the job of a servant.
Washing the filthy feet of a friend who will fatally betray him.
All the libraries and rhetoric on Leadership offer less than this act.
'I have set you an example that you should do as I have done for you,' he tells them - and us.
Believe him the Son of God or a man of fiction, one could aspire to model their entire leadership philosophy and behaviour on this lesson of Jesus Christ.
'One is never so big
As when one stoops down.'
- David Byrne, Never So Big
Everything is the Consequence of Multiple Decisions.
'I was so incredibly lucky to grow up in the context of workshops...[I acquired] a natural understanding that everything...is made, and is the consequence of multiple decisions.'
- Sir Jonathan Ive, Senior Vice-President of Design, Apple Corporation.
Jony Ive understands and makes decisions. Apple has sold one and a half billion Widgets he designed.
A hundred thousand Apple employees and millions of shareholders and retailers rely on his decision-making.
He applies Widget Thinking. Steve Jobs described him as 'the most focussed human being I've come across.'
“I’m always focussed on the actual work, and I think that’s a much more succinct way to describe what you care about than any speech I could ever make.” He understands that design is ultimately about delivering something. It's all about the Widget.
Jony Ive is on a relentless pursuit of perfection. Billions of dollars depend on it and hundreds of millions of us benefit from it in our use of Apple products. How can he accommodate mistakes?
'Everything we make I could describe as being partially wrong, because it’s not perfect...We get to do it again. That’s one of the things Steve and I used to talk about: ‘Isn’t this fantastic? Everything we aren’t happy about...we can try and fix.’ ”
Our Process Serves our Widget.
'That's how I make decisions. I draw how I approach a lot of issues from aviation when it comes to the management of ideas. One of my favourite sayings is that if you muck up the approach you muck up the landing.'
- The Hon. Sussan Ley, Minister for Health & Sport
‘Check wheels,’ the Air Traffic Controller would radio to the student military pilot as he commenced his approach to land.
'Wheels down,’ the student would reply by rote and habit as he continued his descent with undercarriage fully retracted and the ‘Wheels Up’ alarm in the cockpit blaring.
Process is important.
We get good at it.
We turn up to our desk.
Read and type emails.
Attend meetings.
Write reports.
Go home.
Repeat.
The routine of our working day becomes the Thing We Do. The process gradually replaces our Widget as the Thing We Make.
We attend staff meetings and professional development days and listen and nod to sincerely but falsely acknowledge we’ve heard and responded to the 'Check Wheels' and cockpit alarms as our boss and peers and consultants and guest speakers and strategic papers and Ted Talks and even our own little voice warn us that we’ve forgotten to engage our Widget.
Our knowledge worker rituals and the clatter of weasel words that herald them deafen us to the feedback on our process and progress and obscure the Widget it is meant to serve.
If you tapped the student pilot on the shoulder at 500 feet from violently colliding with the runway and asked whether he was doing his job he would say 'Of course. I'm flying. Now let me get on with it.'
Tap any office worker on their shoulder and ask what their Widget is and in my experience, few can answer or even see it as relevant. 'I'm too busy being busy.'
The curt voice of the vigilant Air Traffic Controller radioing 'Go Around!' would interrupt the student's doomed approach and save him from belly landing in a shower of sparks and grinding metal.
Like monks being called away from their manual labour seven times a day to pray, bosses must regularly call 'Check Widget' and force us back into conscious, engaged, mindful recitals of our decision making process and the Widget it's ultimately serving.
How to Succeed Every Time.
'If you do something every day, its a system. If you're waiting to achieve it someday in the future, it's a goal...Goal-oriented people exist in a state of continuous presuccess failure at best, and permanent failure at worst if things never work out. Systems people succeed every time they apply their systems, in the sense that they did what they intended to do. The goals people are fighting the feeling of discouragement at each turn. The systems people are feeling good everytime they apply their system. That's a big difference in terms of maintaining your personal energy in the right direction.'
Good Decision Making is a deliberate process of inquiry that advances you towards where you want to be.
Integrity - doing what you said you were going to do.
Leaders with integrity apply a system of decision making that advances them towards their Widget, for the world to see, emulate, and learn from.
Change Your Mind About Changing Your Mind.
'The greatest enemy of any one of our truths may be the rest of our truths.'
- William James
Either/Or.
Guilty/Not Guilty.
Trustworthy/Untrustworthy.
Hired/Fired.
With me/Against me.
On/Off.
These black/white filters of information sabotage good decision making.
They shut out new information.
Our fear is that it may compel us to do that terribly humiliating thing:
Change our minds.
Information liberates.
It allows us to exercise the true test of our freedom:
Choice.
At a cost:
Anxiety. (I might be wrong.)
Which is why we get paid.
Be the naive inquirer.
Try this:
Treat all information that you receive as new.
'How interesting! Tell me more...'
The Art of Living.
‘Our life is an open question, an incomplete project, still to be brought to fruition and realised. Each man’s fundamental question is: How will this be realised— becoming man? How does one learn the art of living? Which is the path toward happiness?’ To evangelise means: to show this path— to teach the art of living.'
A good decision is one that advances us towards where we want to be.
Good decision making is a deliberate process of inquiry - asking questions - that advances us towards where we want to be.
A leader creates a path towards where she wants to be - illuminated by her decisions - that others choose to follow.
A leader seeks to become who she is.
A leader teaches us the art of living.
Step Back and Sit a Little Closer.
The fox fell silent and looked steadily at the little prince for a long time.
'Please,' he said, 'tame me!'
'I should like to,' replied the little prince, 'but I don't have much time. I have friends to discover and many things to understand.'
'One only ever understands what one tames. People no longer have the time to understand anything. They buy everything ready-made from the shops. but there is no shop where friends can be bought, so people no longer have friends. If you want a friend, tame me!'
'What do I have to do?' said the little prince.
'You have to be very patient,' replied the fox. 'First, you will sit down a short distance away from me, like that, in the grass. I shall watch you out of the corner of my eye and you will say nothing; words are the source of misunderstandings. But each day you may sit a little closer to me.'
- The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Step 1 in the Five Steps to a Good Decision is to Step Back.
We yield to the emotions triggered by information.
We sit with them. Wallow in them. Surrender to them.
Seconds. Minutes. Days. Months. However long we have.
The longer we sit, the less frightening the feelings become.
We tame them.
We understand them.
They become our friends. Teachers.
Our emotional responses to events aren't to be feared or ignored or avoided or overcome or denied.
They aren't to be crushed or suppressed as the Leadership Lore would have us believe.
Sit. Tame. Learn.
Become who you are.
Come to the Edge.
Come to the edge.
We might fall.
Come to the edge.
It's too high!
COME TO THE EDGE!
And they came
And he pushed
And they flew.
A perk of being a lawyer is that you learn a little about a lot in the course of taking instructions from clients and asking questions about their work and lives that will help tailor the legal advice.
An airman explained to me about microfails. The way I remember it, every new aircraft type is put in a test laboratory and subjected to flexing and bending and other forces that replicate the stresses it will experience in flight. The airframe's responses are electronically measured and calibrated into units called 'micro fails'. When the airframe finally breaks, the engineers and designers know how many micro fails it took to do so and therefore its tolerance to the unpredictable forces of flight.
An airframe's life is calculated as being as long as it takes to suffer a certain number of micro fails. An aircraft that does a lot of high stress manoeuvres that result in G forces on it will suffer more micro fails in a flight than if it flew straight and level. It will therefore have a shorter life.
Instruments in the aircraft detect and record each micro fail. The engineers monitor the total and when it reaches certain amounts, they will replace parts of the airframe, and 'rewind' the micro fail measurement instrument to zero.
MIcro fails are invisible. As the name suggests, they are tiny fractures of the integrity of the airframe that gradually degrade its strength until the point when one too many stressors adds the micro fail that breaks the aeroplane.
The airman who came to see me was alleging that the engineers were rewinding the micro fail measuring instruments to avoid having to ground the aircraft and put them into maintenance.
People have micro fails in response to forces around them in the workplace.
Missed promotion. Bang. A hundred micro fails.
Frustrating meeting. Shudder. Ten micro fails.
Brusque email written in haste. Ouch. Two micro fails.
A name forgotten. One micro fail. Catastrophic explosive decompression resulting in loss of a sense of proportion and humour and crash landing into stress leave.
Everyone has a unique total micro fail capacity before they break. A boss can rarely predict the stressor that will push the worker beyond their limit. It's not always the obvious less than perfect act of management. It might be an innocent misunderstanding. Crack.
Organisations wrongly assume that a new employee starts on zero (ignoring the legacy of their last job and their life in general) and assume to standardise the total micro fails for each employee by their contract, policies, pay and values.
People also wrongly assume that quitting a job and finding a new one will reset their micro fail metre to zero. There's almost always leftover fatigue that transfers to the new boss.
Organisations have various ways of doing the people maintenance that they again assume allows them to rewind the individual and collective worker micro fail meters to zero from time to time
Pay increases.
Leave.
Promotions.
Public praise.
Sometimes bosses just replace the people frames for new ones.
Worse, they introduce the equivalent of fraudulently rewinding the meter by running a professional development or team building day, introducing some new values of code of conduct, or emailing out inspiring and motivating words.
After the butchers paper has been binned, the mandatory training has been completed, the all staff email has been deleted - a boss chips a worker in front of their peers and deep inside the metal of each witness staff member, fissures grow and the individual micro fail tally resumes its countdown to breakdown.
Legions of experts, lawyers, consultants, therapists and researchers make their living both inside and external to organisations from training, advising, measuring, mentoring, coaching, facilitating, supporting, assisting, delaying, mending and covering up the human equivalent of the micro fail.
It's mainly placebos. Good and bad bosses alike are never sure what act of theirs will be the one too many.
A bad boss can routinely be bad and his workers will keep on building Widgets.
A good boss may omit one name from a speech acknowledging thirty others and the entire office is sprayed with debris and body parts from the disintegrating staff member for months afterwards.
So we keep on legislating, regulating, training, coaching and parenting in a vain attempt to smooth out the turbulence of the workplace and keep everybody happy.
It's not working. It can't. We can keep rewinding the meter or flying straight and level and avoiding tight turns and gravity, but we're deluding ourselves and each other.
As M Scott Peck wrote in the opening sentence of his book 'The Road Less Travelled':
“Life is difficult. This is a great truth, one of the greatest truths. It is a great truth because once we truly see this truth, we transcend it. Once we truly know that life is difficult-once we truly understand and accept it-then life is no longer difficult. Because once it is accepted, the fact that life is difficult no longer matters.”
The workplace is part of Life. It's difficult. The more we seek to protect people from the stressors of doing their jobs with good and bad bosses, peers, subordinates, clients, customers, machines, and gravity, the greater disservice we do to them by denying them the opportunity to confront Peck's Great Truth, learn from it, and to transcend it. All in a relatively safe environment - the workplace - compared to the unpredictability of the rest of Life where there is no boss to blame for what befalls us, and often no Widget to measure our bearings from.
I checked with my Aeronautical Engineer friend Francisco about my memory of micro fails. He'd never heard of them. He works on modern Boeing 787s.
'I think that you're referring to aircraft structures of the past that were built with a safe life,' he said. 'Newer aircraft are fail safe.'
We need to rethink our 'work frame' design and maintenance. We need to evolve from our artificial 'safe life' philosophy of minimising the consequences of engaging with the healthy human stressors that arise from doing any job that's worthwhile - ie Life. We need to stop demanding that the boss shields us from the natural turbulence and forces of doing innovative, creative, speed-of-sound work.
We need workers to become the equivalent of fail safe and bosses with the wisdom and bravery to allow it.
We need to come to the edge so that we can fly.
Peace Among the Thorns.
Per Ardua Ad Astra - Through Difficulties to the Stars.
The Latin motto of the Royal Australian Air Force.
Pax Inter Spinas - Peace Among the Thorns.
The Latin motto of the Benedictine monks.
This is that motto in a logo form as it was in the mid 20th century.
See the Pax - Peace - clearly surrounded by thorns with three nails at its base.
This is that motto in a logo form in 2014.
See the thorns that once surrounded the Pax have been softened into a laurel wreath? The three nails replaced by the 'Three Mounds of Perfection'? (Faith, Hope, Love.)?
I can hear the Marketing Consultant: 'The Peace bit is awesome. People will love that. Not so much the Thorns bit though. Like...Lose the Thorns. And Love. Can you, like, add something about Love? Love's a sure winner. Yeah. Peace and Love. And you know what? Wrap them in a laurel wreath. People love laurel wreaths. Olympics and all that. Awesome!'
In 2014 we want the Peace. We won't suffer thorns to find it.
Save us from Difficulties.
Just give us the Stars.
Leave the Idiot Work to the Idiots.
'Leave the idiot work to the idiots.'
A bishop's answer when asked to define Subsidiarity - so the story goes.
The blunt interpretation is proof that even the noblest values can be demeaned and misappropriated.
Subsidiarity is the principle that says a decision should be made at the lowest appropriate level.
Subsidiarity allows each person their dignity.
It is a principle of social justice that, while used by the Roman Catholic Church, is wrongly attributed to it (and therefore possibly ignored!) It predates the Church and has universal application to good decision making. Its universality is demonstrated in the fact that it is part of the Treaty on European Union.
'Subsidiarity' stems from the Latin subsidies, which means 'help, assistance'. And here, as with all good ideas, is where it goes wrong.
The person who is interested in power, practices subsidiarity by choosing what power to delegate to those below him in the hierarchy. To him, subsidiarity is throwing crumbs from the decision making table. This apparent act of generosity and power sharing upon which most organisations operate has its sinister side. The person receiving the crumbs becomes dependent on the person throwing them.
The other version of where subsidiarity comes from is subsidiaries, which means 'of or belonging to the reserves'. In the Roman army, the reserves waited in the rear in case the front line army needed them to overcome a superior enemy. The reserve army did not initiate action, it waited to be called up. It strengthened, reinforced and perfected an act already begun.
In good decision making, subsidiarity presumes that a person should be left to make their own decisions - even 'wrong' ones - without interference from a superior authority. That 'superior' authority can be in a family, a community, an organisation, a state, or the world.
A person will concede part of their individuality as part of their membership of one of those groups. They may also concede some of their decision making authority. But only to the extent necessary to benefit the whole, from which they benefit.
If the authority that the person has conceded as part of their membership of the group is exercised 'beyond the necessary', then the group begins to destruct. The reason is that the person is unable to exercise the talents that they have brought to the group. As the group can only define itself by its works - the sum of each person's talents - then the loss of part of those talents means that the group is not able to function.
In short - subsidiarity requires that each person has as much autonomy and responsibility as possible, and as much control or intervention by a higher authority as necessary.
Individual initiative should only be limited where it is absolutely unavoidable.
The benefit of subsidiary to the higher authority is that it can focus with greater freedom and energy and effectiveness to tasks belonging to it, and to which it alone can accomplish.
Ironically, subsidiarity is one of the reasons to have a higher authority. Such authority exists to create the space to enable people to discover their potential. If the higher authority moves into that space then it contradicts its reason for being. If the boss starts interfering - for well meaning or other reasons - in the decisions and actions of the workers, the boss isn't doing his job.
The higher authority assists by removing obstacles to the person that the person can't remove themselves, or that are otherwise more effectively removed by the higher authority so that the person can focus on their core business.
A Leader practises subsidiarity when they create the space; when they define the purpose and invite the right person to stretch their potential towards it; when they equip the person with the tools that they need to leverage their talents, when they affirm without intervention, when they retreat...
Sadly, it is a perversion of subsidiarity that is most commonly practised. It is that a worker starts as an empty vessel - a human resource. The worker is loaded with information and authority and power by the boss to the extent that the boss feels necessary. The boss adds or removes that cargo as he thinks fit. The boss sets that vessel adrift, attached to a rope.
In short - the worker's power only exists in as much as it has been given to him by the boss. This is what most people mean by 'delegation'.
A healthy organisation recruits people who have existing talents that the organisation needs. It then lets them get on with the job. The boss's job is to remove the obstacles.
And stay out of the way.
Challenge Them Into the Future.
Dr Fiona Wood, AM is one of the world's leading plastic surgeons who specialises in burns patients. Earlier this year she was interviewed about what she had learned from her surgical research and practice about Good Decision Making and Leadership.
She started where all Leadership and Good Decision Making begins - the Widget - or 'purpose' as Dr Wood described it:
'I think decision making is something that you have to really take on - I was almost going to say a level of aggression - but a level of purpose might be a better term. Because you have to make a decision. There is someone in front of you that needs your help - you have to make a decision.
Dr Wood acknowledged that decision making is cumulative - that each decision informs the next:
'That decision may not be right – you have to take that. You have to understand that the decision you've made, the action you've taken, has led to then making the next decision. Sometimes it will be right, sometimes wrong. You've just got do deal with it with a level of purpose. And so you bring to the table all your experience - the knowledge that brought you to that point. And it's a question really of visualising the outcome.'
Her Widget focus is paramount in her thinking, and relies on the systems that have been developed to support it:
'I see this individual....If you meet me as a professional you're having a bad day. So they are damaged, and now I want to use everything in my power, in our systems that we work in, in our systems and the knowledge that is out there to make their path to the outcome the very best it can be.'
Even though in each operation she is focussed on the person before her on that day, she maintains her disciplined focus on a more strategic Widget. Each patient illuminates the path to her Widget, yet in such a way that nether the immediate needs of her patient, or the longer term Widget journey is compromised:
'And the outcome that I've visualised for many, many years is scarless healing. We've changed the goalpost. We've inched doggedly there...are we there all the time? Absolutely not. But we're making progress. So it's visualising that outcome and making every play such that you can move it closer to that outcome day by day. And it's learning. It's always taking the blinkers off and learning so that whatever the decisions you've made today, you make sure that you make better ones tomorrow. And that has been actually an entrenched coping strategy to make sure that you critically analyse the work of today to make sure that tomorrow is better.'
Dr Wood's focus does not mean that she is blind to other new information that can serve her Widget:
'I see people out there that do nanotechnology, or genetics or all sorts of different things - psychology, neuroscience and they've got parts of my jigsaw. I need to get parts of that jigsaw and bring it in to play here. And therefore you have to make decisions on lots of different levels. But when you pare that all away you look at the person in front of you, you've got to get the removal of the dead tissue without them bleeding out such that you can repair them the best you can with today's technology such that you set them up for the best outcome.'
Her Widget focus allows her to quickly engage a surgical team with the needs of each patient:
'I teach my guys: As you walk in you make sure you connect with everybody in the room and if there's people you've never seen before you write everything on the board that you're going to do. You should not be making the decisions while you're doing it. You should have visualised it - you go in knowing what you're going to do and knowing your escape routes. So all of that has to be in your mind. And you have to see the landscape. What is it that you've got to work with in terms of your human resources - and engage them. Make sure they understand what you're trying to do and feel the passion - feel that for that period of time the only focus is for that individual. And that's a really important part of the whole. Engaging everyone.'
Dr Wood explained how the path towards the Widget is a meandering one, and that we should not measure our progress on the result of one decision alone:
'The outcomes have got to get better every day. And it's not linear. I don't live in an environment where every day that passes your chance of survival increases. It's not linear - it's a roller coaster. The waves of infection come relentlessly over, unless we've completely sealed - the person weakens and weakens and weakens. A third of the patients who don't survive will survive somewhere around three months. And they're hard days.'
Dr Wood affirmed Step 1: Step Back as being important in good decision making:
'We have this concept that 'Oh, it's macho to keep going'. But it isn't macho to keep going if your performance falls away. And so for a long, long time I've been very aware of people around me and trying to work out who needs to be rotated out...and so it's having that awareness and as I've got older, I don't stay in and so part of it is rotating yourself out, so that it becomes acceptable....
Dr Wood's ideas on leadership are consistent with Creating the Space and Defining the Purpose and inviting people into that space and using the focus on the Purpose as vehicles to reach their potential:
'I think leadership…Vision...is really interesting. Because I believe that everybody can dream. I think leadership is giving people permission to dream. Because I think if you take the time to listen to people you'd be amazed at what they dream. And then you encompass that dream into a vision.'
Yet always the laser Widget focus:
'I saw a child in 1985 and it changed my life. I thought 'That child is so badly injured from a cup of coffee?' We've got to be able to do better. I've carried that photograph around with me for a long time.'
Dr Wood addressed the potential for conflict between Widget focus and learning where we are in relation to our Widget, and the need to get the day-to-day work done. She described the importance of being disciplined in routine and preparation in order to be creative:
'What we want to be is innovative problem solvers but we want to generate outcomes on a regular basis. In every field of endeavour that is a conflict - on the surface of it. But when you start to dig a little bit deeper… I indicated that it is not appropriate to be making decisions about where you cut when it's right there in front of you. You've made those decisions previously. You've visualised. you've gone to the table - whatever table it is - with your outcome in mind and understanding the opportunities you've got to get there. So there’s an element of planning almost on the run all the time. It's getting into the habit.'
She affirmed the idea that good decision making is being confident enough about what you know, to be attentively curious about what you don't:
'What is it that I bring to the table? What's my experience? What's my knowledge? The lawyers do it all the time with precedent, looking back at old cases. Get into the habit that it's always ticking over. Questioning the landscape. And I think underpinning that is a fundamental belief that today is not as good as it gets. Not in that you criticise today. It's not bad. It's the best it can be - today.'
Dr Wood's approach to learning is to seek out feedback. She goes beyond a healthy belief in relying on the power of complaints to provide it. In fact, why wait for a complaint to inform you, and assume that if there is none that you are doing okay? She advocates declaring your understanding of your Widget to the world and inviting it to comment:
'As you've finished, as you've closed up and you walk away, you don't strut. You actually think 'Okay - given that same situation happens tomorrow, how could I have analysed it better, and then you go through the whole exercise again…the debrief. That's not specifically surgery, It's not specifically sport. It's part of exercising your mind. And the next step is doing that in public. Because that's when it starts getting exciting because there's absolutely no doubt we're in an environment where you need multiple minds to solve problems. And so you have to have that level of inquiry and sort of ticking over and then you connect. And you start to develop a language of innovation and visualisation. So you can push forward.'
Dr Wood shared her belief in the value of 'trauma' as a stimulus to growth, extending the literal trauma to her patients' longer term recovery and resilience, to a metaphor about character:
'I can track periods of my life where I went through post traumatic growth. And it wasn't painless. The hardest thing for me post Bali was that people wanted to know my name. Yet I recognised that as part of that I became stronger. And I became able to engage in this positive energy, in this positive good news stories. And I had my blinkers taken off such that i engaged with the community in a broader sense....How we can use energy that is so profoundly negative and turn that around - I think that's fascinating. It's tiring sometimes. And it's hard. But part of that post traumatic growth is having the infrastructure around you, having the people and connectivity around you that give you the ability to lead.'
She had some powerful advice to give on how to deal with criticism and how innovation challenges conventional thought about 'the way things are done':
'There's an element of inertia in practice. Whether that be clinical practice or business practice...This level of inertia is really quite an interesting animal. Because it's useful, but it's also a hindrance. We need to have a level of capacity to maintain things moving forward at a pace that can be managed. And equally, we have to have people testing out the front. And so I have engaged with surgical inertia up front and centre and I've had to make the decision not to engage in that negative energy but to continue to be driven by the positive outcome, collect the data, present the data. And as the things roll forward, the data will speak for itself. And so that inertia starts to be overcome. And I think that the challenge when you're in a situation with that level of inertia is to understand you've got a choice. You turn around and you fight it…and it's bigger than you. Or you stay out the front and you wait for them to catch up. And they get there.'
Yet always returning to the supremacy of the Widget - and the need for a leader to be clear about defining it to the team, regardless of how clear it is to her or how passionate she is about it:
'I had a really interesting lesson in leadership inadvertently in the early 90s. 1991 I hit the ground running. I was very focussed on time to healing. Every day in a burns unit is a day too long. I aggressively engaged in a skin culture programme....the social worker at the time who was a bit older than the rest of us came and said 'Stop!' I thought 'What do you mean, Stop? ‘Sit down. I need to talk to you. I've been asked to come and speak with you. Well you're too intimidating.’ (Give me a break! )‘We understand that what you're doing has got to be right. It's got to have some real benefit. But we don't know what it is. We can feel your passion. We have no idea how we can explain it to the parents, to the patients, to their relatives, to the new nurses when they come on. We're all at sea…’
Dr Wood learned the definition that a leader is someone who makes good decisions that others choose to follow:
'Leadership 101. No team - no leader. Done. The elastic was at breaking point and almost snapping behind me. And had I not had that energy that they all got caught up in, it would have snapped well and truly. So that's the point when I said 'Right. Everybody who's at this table is here for a reason. You've got to be able to be leaders in your own right....Passion on its own doesn't cut it. The communication bit has to be strong.'
A Leader retreats:
There is absolutely no point in me being so entrenched that as I get through my final kick, everything fades away. Succession is so important. It's not because I want to be remembered. It's because the people need treating! And they need to be treated better and better and better. So for me, it's delegation. But delegation with meaning. Empowerment in a real sense. I need to let them deliver. Such that I can get out of my head, get it on paper and challenge them into the future. But in a way that is not intrusive. Not imposing my surgical inertia on them. But allowing them to grow.
Dr Wood leads a team in Good Decision Making in life and death situations. It's not just theory to her. She is still able to use the language of 'dreams', 'visualisation', 'mistakes', 'passion', 'innovation' and 'personal growth' while literally operating at the leading edge of science.
If Dr Wood can save lives while still creating the space for these ideals that allow others to become who they are, then most workplaces have no excuse.
One Leader is One Too Many.
'It is easy to derail an expert and ruin their performance. All that you have to do is force them to follow the rules.'
- Andy Hunt, Pragmatic Thinking and Learning
We write the job advertisement.
An invitation.
Sparkling with carefully crafted words of seduction.
'Come! Work with us!'
'We want you to bring your best self and help us to be better!'
You accept the invitation.
'I offer my Best Self to you.'
We choose you. That Best Self.
Seduction becomes Induction.
Rules, policies, values, visions, missions, hierarchies, teams, codes, reviews.
We overwhelm You and turn You into Us. Into a Team Player.
Left!...Left!..Left, Right, Left!
Another job advertisement.
'We need Innovators!'
'We need Leaders!'
Good Decision Making Is Hard.
'Attempt #158: I’ve finally mastered the tungsten carbide battle axe. I can rip through a Mimic’s endoskeleton with a flick of the wrist.'
'Learning what would get you killed and how to get your enemy killed— the only way to know a thing like that is to do it.'
- Hiroshi Sakurazaka, All You Need is Kill.
The movie Edge of Tomorrow is based on the Hiroshi Sakurazaka book.
'Attempt #158' refers to the 158th time that the main character Keiji Kiriya or Major William Cage in the movie, is fighting a battle against the 'Mimics' - alien invaders.
Major Cage is a slick public relations officer, a natural with the the PR patter, but with no combat experience. He finds himself on the front line where he is infected by a substance from one of the aliens when he's mortally wounded. It 'resets' him back to the beginning of the day of battle each time he's killed.
Each time he's reset, Major Cage has to relive the day from the beginning, although with the benefit of knowing what is going to happen. He uses this information to anticipate and evade the source of his death last time. He lives a little longer with each 'reset' - until a new threat happens and he dies - and is reset back to the morning of the battle.
Far from making life easier for Major Cage, his advanced knowledge of what lies ahead makes it harder. With each new life, he spends hours reviewing, training, planning, strategising and finally applying his growing skills to advance him a few seconds further in his quest to defeat the aliens, only to begin all over again.
The more that he learns, the harder he has to work at thinking and acting. The harder he works, the greater his exposure to new information about his battlefield surroundings and new ways to die. He inches his advance towards the alien control centre, and is challenged by more information that he has to incorporate into his understanding of his environment to be able to survive a few seconds more.
A good decision is one that advances us towards where we want to be.
Good decision making is a deliberate process of inquiry that advances us towards where we want to be.
A good decision teaches us about where we are in relation to where we want to be.
We incorporate that new understanding into our next decision, and so on.
We have three reference points - constants amidst the uncontrollable chaos:
- Where we are
- Where we want to be
- Our process.
The first obstacle to good decision making is if we don't know where we want to be - our Widget.
The second obstacle is that we don't have a fixed process into which we can plug each variable - new information.
The third obstacle to good decision making is that it's hard work.
The more good decisions that we make - the more we learn - the more we learn, the more we have to incorporate that learning and apply it. Repeat. Forever.
Each decision exposes us to new information and therefore to the shame of ignorance.
It resets us back to where we began.
Our truth is dead, or at least discarded in the same pile as other people's opinions.
Either way, it hurts.
Kahlil Gibran described pain as the breaking of our shell of understanding.
Good decision making is painful.
Bugger that - let's just stick with opinions, positional power, and instinct.
Directly Involved Parties.
'They that have the power to hurt, and will do none...
...they rightly do inherit heaven's graces.'
- William Shakespeare, Sonnet 94
The Investigation into the loss of separation between Airbus A330 VH-EBO and Airbus A330 VH-EBS near Adelaide SA on 20 September 2013 continues.
It was estimated to finish 'no later than September 2014'.
On 17 November 2014, two months after it was expected to conclude, there was a progress update:
'Completion of the draft investigation report has been delayed due to other investigation priorities, and the draft report is now anticipated for release to directly involved parties (DIPs) for comment in December 2014. Any comments over the 28-day DIP period will be considered for inclusion in the final report, which is anticipated to be released to the public in January 2015.'
'Released to DIPs for comment' and 'any comments...will be considered for inclusion in the final report.'
Step 5 in the Five Steps to a Good Decision: Give a Hearing.
Allow any person who may be adversely affected by the decision the opportunity to consider your reasons for potentially reaching that decision, and to offer an argument why you should come to a different one.
Inviting a person affected by a decision is a powerful tool in good decision making:
- It harnesses the perspective, energy, focus and power of another brain (and heart) to contribute to your thinking (and feeling) while still works in progress and open to change.
- It informs you with the strongest argument against your own thinking - thus testing it - yet without the artificiality of appointing the 'devil's advocate' within your own team.
- It provides a forcing function to counter rote, systemic, thinking.
- It gives you a dress rehearsal of the likely criticisms that may follow your decision.
- It can counter groupthink.
- It reminds you of what is at stake for other people and thus focusses your attention.
- Those invited to contribute are more likely to accept the ultimate decision if it goes against them.
- It buys you time - thus creating more space (a mini- Step 1).
- It meets part of the procedural fairness required by law in many decision making processes.
- It shows transparency and evidence-based decision making.
Despite this impressive list in its favour, many decision makers avoid offering a hearing for fear that they will find out something that may undo all the time and energy invested so far; that it may create an expectation that they will be persuaded to change their minds; and that such an invitation undermines their authority.
A good decision maker acknowledges these fears, (perhaps even taking another Step 1: Step Back to indulge and then purge them) - then reminds herself of the logic of the benefits listed above, drafts the invitation to be heard such that it manages expectations, and reads Shakespeare or the writings of any good leader to understand that real power is demonstrated in the restraint in its exercise.
If You're Happy And You Know It - Thank Your Boss.
One would assume that our boss - one of the biggest influences on our well being and happiness, and thus productivity, and thus their own well being and happiness and productivity, is applying the results of years of research, data, education, pedagogy, heuristics and science on how to get the best out of us.
After all - aren't we our boss's 'most important asset'?
She's done all that training, right? She's attended courses on everything - First Aid, Equal Opportunity, Work Health and Safety, Mental Well-being, iPads, Performance Management, Mediation and Meditation, Work-Life Balance, Difficult Conversations, Code of Conduct, Recycling, Train the Trainer, and of course, Good Decision Making.
She's got KPIs and budgets and 360 degree feedback and performance reviews and lists 'Teamwork' and 'People Person' and 'Leading High Performance Teams' on her LinkedIn page.
She's being measured and measuring within an inch or 2.54mm of her life.
It's all evidence based - isn't it? This whole management thing?...
(Psst....We have proof. She's making it up as she goes along. Every boss in the World is.)
A discussion paper released by researchers in Germany has found 'little research' anywhere in the World on how bosses affect the quality of the lives of their workers. Indeed, it claims its data and findings are the first of their kind.
It's okay. The research evidence supports what a good boss has worked out for themselves.
The evidence 'is consistent with the view that boss competence is central to employee well-being and thus to the behavior of labor markets'.
The paper cites 'growing evidence' that ‘happier’ workers are more productive. (In true researcher style, they took into account potential for bias in more cheerful employees reporting higher levels of job satisfaction and boss competence.)
The researchers write:
'Bosses are, in principle, special workers because they are in charge. They make a range of important organizational decisions. Therefore, it may be desirable not to view a boss as just another factor of production, or as altering only the quality of an employee’s input through greater marginal product in the production function. Instead, it may be appropriate to view a boss as being able to shape the nature of the organization itself.'
The workers surveyed showed that while most thought that their boss couldn't do the worker's job if the worker was absent, their bosses were good at being....bosses.
Employees enjoy their jobs far more where the supervisor is assessed as 'technically competent'.
Indeed, the data shows that the technical competence of the supervisor has double the effect on employee satisfaction than does the employee's wage.
The researchers conclude from the data that 'the quality of workers’ lives is higher if the supervisor is highly competent, in a technical sense, at his or her job.'
They acknowledge that the results are so intuitive as to be 'obvious'. But they argue that now we have proof that our boss can make us happy and therefore more productive, we need to do more research on how our boss can make us happy.
Perhaps it will show that a boss will be more likely to make us happy if she is happy.
And what might make our boss happy?
Probably us doing our job.
(Could it be that there's other stuff that bosses are making up as they go along?)
Broomsticks with Feedback.
'Being right is occasionally useful in bars but it's very useless in life. It just doesn't open avenues for learning.
[Hospitals] engage in serious errors. The nature of Lourdes is that they don't get better at miracles because they're not learning from their mistakes.
400 years ago everyone believed that broomsticks could fly. Then these views of the world bifurcate and we have broomsticks that still don't fly terribly well and Jumbos that fly rather well. Jumbo Jets are just broomsticks with feedback.'
A Leader's decisions create errors that teach and invite us (educate - educare - 'to draw out') to overtake her, and make different errors for others to learn from and overtake us.
Contempt for the mistakes of others and fear of making our own are why true Leaders are rare.
Words Matter.
'Rhetoric . . . is not a set of techniques to impress (oratory, eloquence), nor a means of manipulating the will and emotions of others (sophistry, advertising), but rather a way of liberating the freedom of others by showing them the truth in a form they can understand.’
- Stratford Caldecott
Ian and I were 14 year olds in our Air Force cadets Flight Drill Squad that competed in the inaugural Squadron Drill Competition.
Our 17 year old Cadet Flight Sergeant didn't know how to execute the drill movements in the sequence that we were to be judged on. Correct drill was whatever his drill instructor had taught him. So he carried on the tradition and made them up.
We came second.
The next year Ian convinced the Flight Commander to allow him to lead the Squad despite just being promoted to Cadet Corporal. 'I promise you we will win, Sir,' the 15 year old told our forty-something Flight Commander. 'I've got a plan.'
Ian found a forgotten copy of the AAP 5135.001 Manual of Drill and Ceremonial, cracked open the spine and studied every drill movement until he knew each command, cadence, timing, foot height, toe angle and the two-three pauses in between by rote.
He then made us copies to study and learn for ourselves.
Our squad of teenagers spent hours and hours practising responding to Ian's commands.
We spent hours and hours practising without his commands.
We won the next two years' competitions. Second the third year. And won the year after that.
(The year we ran second it was to a team led by an ex-cadet from our squad who Ian had trained.)
Cadets Ian had led or who had been trained by ones he'd trained led winning squads from other Flights over the next few years.
Ian taught me to go to primary sources of information.
I took for granted that good leaders are teachers who aren't afraid of their students knowing as much or more than they do.
I haven't had a need to execute a right form from the halt, to the halt at all since then.
I sometimes wonder if should have practised piano for all those hours.
Naming the Widget.
'All consciousness begins with an act of disobedience.'
- Carl Jung.
The Widget can inspire rebellion.
'My life is not just making Widgets'.
'I'm a people person not a Widget person.'
'My work is not reducible to a Widget.'
'I don't like the idea of a Widget.'
'It's not that simple.'
Okay.
What is your life about then?
What does being a people person mean?
What is your work?
Why is it complicated?
Naming the Widget - the thing we serve eight hours a day, five days a week - may be confronting.
We awaken to how meaningful - or meaningless - our life is.
Or we confront that we don't know what it is that we doing with our hours.
Or we respond with the not the Widgets.
We declare: 'That's not what I do, not who I am, not what I stand for.'
'That's not what I've sacrificed my hours, my dreams, my relationships, my time with my children, my integrity, my soul for.'
The Widget is a reference point that can tell us were we are - or where we're not.
It can have as much or as little value or connection to reality for us as time, a clock, a compass, a map, our age, our name, our job description, our boss's feedback, or the money in our bank.
Our reaction to the concept of a Widget can teach us.
Even its rejection announces: We have a pulse!
Naïve Inquirer.
Scarlett's Mother: 'How do you feel after your [one year old] sister has screamed non-stop for an hour next to you in the back seat of the car?'
Four Year Old Scarlett: 'Puzzled'.
We Are Wide Open to Criticisms.
The Blue Angels is the United States Navy's flight demonstration squadron.
Its Widget is 'to showcase the pride and professionalism of the United States Navy and Marine Corps by inspiring a culture of excellence and service to country through flight demonstrations and community outreach.'
After every flight the team goes through a critical debriefing process which they consider is as important as the actual flight itself. They talk about what worked, what didn't, and 'no punches are pulled'.
'We are as wide open as can possibly be to criticisms. We want to become our own worst critics.'
The debriefing process takes twice as long as the flight took. 'Rank doesn't come into play.'
'We have a term that we use: 'Glad to be here''. It's a way of reminding themselves of the privilege of flying with the Blue Angels while their fellow pilots are doing night carrier landings in the Mediterranean Sea.
'We have two 'critiquers' on the ground that look at the manoeuvres and tell us their impressions basically.'
'We make these mistakes and we 'fess up to them and we do it every time we fly. It's an extremely important aspect of what we do. What we do after we've said it is 'I've made this mistake. I'll fix it. You always say you're going to fix it It leaves the rest of us with the feeling that you've recognised your mistake and you're going to take corrective action not to let it happen again. So it doesn't drop our confidence level in another person in the formation.'
'You gotta be able to learn each and every time you go flying because there's never been the perfect flight demonstration yet.'