When You Need Consensus, Stick Out Those Thumbs

Not every organizational decision needs to be made by consensus. Plenty of things are best handled by a senior executive or two making a rapid determination. But major shifts or cultural change typically require a lot of people to carry out new tasks in new ways and to think differently; these are things that are much easier accomplished when there’s widespread agreement on the shift.

A sophisticated decisionmaking device

As I wrote in posts about my work with a public media organization developing a digital media strategy, making a big shift usually means guiding a key group of people through decision points and action while planning projects—projects that allow them to learn by acting in new ways well before the process is complete.

Well, I did skip one critical problem: Passing through those decision points can be hard. Really hard. Getting certain groups of people to decide what to do—by building consensus among them—can be about as easy as corralling a bunch of feral cats.

For many people, consensus means getting everyone (or nearly everyone) to agree on the best course of action. In my experience, this is a recipe for failure. This kind of consensus often a) leads to a generalized and watered down conclusion, b) creates a more ambitious conclusion that lots of people say they agree with usually to please a senior manager, or c) leads to no true conclusion at all.

OK, you may ask, then how would you suggest we make decisions by consensus?

My answer: It’s all in the thumbs.

Making Change II: Key Steps, with Help from Rip Van Winkle

The guy sleeps for years and still gets an exercise named for him

In my last post I wrote about how difficult it is for organizations to make big shifts in direction or cultural shifts. The problem usually is that they know where they want to go, they just can't seem to get there—a problem I call implementation failure. I talked about a public media organization I recently worked with and explained that the first key step to avoiding implementation failure is finding the right group to guide the process. Once you've done that, there are two other steps worth highlighting.

II. Start To Define Success

In my media project, the very first time the group met, our discussion was about success. We started with a hypothetical: If you fell asleep and woke up 10 years down the road to find that this project had been wildly successful, what would it look like? And how would you know it was a success? (Yes, I sometimes call this the Rip Van Winkle exercise.) We wanted something that was ambitious enough to be inspirational without seeming pie in the sky. The public media folks developed a basic success statement; it said the organization would work toward a day when it had

Created a unique digital media presence with a broad range of dynamic content that reaches new and existing audiences, vastly increases their engagement, and enables the organization to raise major new streams of revenue. 

Not bad for the first day, right?

Making Change I: Key Steps to Avoiding Implementation Failure

When an organization sets out to change its direction in a big way or make a cultural shift—say, to be more entrepreneurial—it’s probably going to put those changes on paper, whether through a long memo, a strategic plan, or a report. There's a good chance, if it’s a report, that it will be well-written, look professional, and have some good ideas in it. There’s a good chance the report will be distributed among managers and key staff members, where it will have a prominent place on their desks, bookshelves, or computer desktops. And there’s a good chance the report will simply sit in that place of prominence, while every one of them gets busy with all the time-critical things they have to do.

There’s a good chance, ultimately, that very little will happen.

Another way to say this is that coming up with a solution is a lot easier than making sure it is implemented. And that’s why there is book after book after book written on the subject. Lucky for me, I’m not writing a book. But I recently worked on a project with a public media organization that highlights three critical steps that change efforts often miss.

Two Modest Techniques for a Happier New Year

This basketball may have been doing the two exercises

Whether 2011 was a real winner or a huge bomb, I think it’s pretty safe to assume that most people I know would be happy to have a little more happiness in their lives. This leads me straight to the field of positive psychology, which focuses on helping ordinary people thrive rather than treating illness. It’s a pretty fertile area that spends a lot of time looking at human happiness. I’ve been thinking about two research conclusions that have come out of the field, and some activities I’ve been doing that seem to fit with the findings.

Our Distorted Beliefs
The first is that people are pretty good at figuring out whether they are happy at a given moment. (When someone asks “How’re you doing?” it’s not that hard a question to answer.) On the other hand, the way memory works makes it very difficult to remember what has made us happy in the past or to predict what might make us happy in the future. Plenty of research has shown that people believe that the most intense or dramatic things, such as buying a house, having an illness, or breaking up with a lover, have the biggest impact on their happiness. But in fact these dramatic developments aren’t as important as you might think. One of the leaders in the field, Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert, elaborated on this in a recent Harvard Business Review interview about the science of happiness:

As it turns out, people are not very good at predicting what will make them happy and how long that happiness will last. They expect positive events to make them much happier than those events actually do, and they expect negative events to make them unhappier than they actually do. In both field and lab studies, we’ve found that winning or losing an election, gaining or losing a romantic partner, getting or not getting a promotion, passing or failing an exam—all have less impact on happiness than people think they will. A recent study showed that very few experiences affect us for more than three months. When good things happen, we celebrate for a while and then sober up. When bad things happen, we weep and whine for a while and then pick ourselves up and get on with it.

Finding My Nemesis

One way to relearn an old lesson

My nemesis is a parking meter.

A meter in Vancouver hoodwinked me, and it only took 15 seconds. I was supposed to be on a mellow vacation, yet it set off an inevitable cascade of events that had me running around one neighborhood of the city like a madman. I bought parking at the same place four separate times in one day, and paid nearly $35 for something I could have gotten either for free, or for $15 at the most.

My nemesis also taught me (or really retaught me) a lesson I sometimes need to relearn: at pivotal moments when the adrenaline is flowing, that’s when you most need to take a real pause and step back from the flow of events before you try to finish. I’ve found a similar principle in organizations. When you’re working on a team project that is 95 percent done, it’s that last 5 percent that can mean the difference between true excellence and the mediocre. If you don’t step back for a minute to figure out the last few things, you’re probably going to end up with the latter.

OK, now let me tell you the full story.

Being Good vs. Getting Better — What the Super Bowl Says About Mindsets

All the discussion about Super Bowl this week has me thinking about a key finding in motivational psychology: If you want to succeed at something, you should focus on getting better rather than on being good. It’s a little counterintuitive. Isn’t everyone's ultimate goal to be good? Or even great? That’s certainly what football players hope they’ll be when they step onto the field. But focusing solely on the end result leads people and organizations to perform worse and quit earlier when faced with extremely challenging tasks than those who focus on the process of improving.

Motivational psychology has
a few lessons for this guy

Focusing solely on the end result is evidence of something Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck calls a "fixed mindset." This is the belief that the reason you are going to succeed is because of your innate talents and abilities. (Think, for example, of a football team that believes it will win because it’s bigger, stronger, and better than the opposition.) But when people with a fixed mindset encounter truly major road blocks, or begin to fail, they don’t know what to do. They often give up altogether. After all, if you think you’re not smart enough or strong enough to do something, there’s no point in continuing to try.

Contrast a fixed mindset with people and organizations that have what Dweck calls a "growth mindset." They believe that talents and abilities are malleable and can be improved over time. When doing work, people with a growth mindset focus more on the process of getting better than on the end result. They are likely to look at each challenge as an opportunity to improve. They are likely to look at each failure as something they can learn from for the next time. Another motivational psychologist, Heidi Grant Halvorson, has conducted experiments showing that people can be taught to have a growth mindset. And those who have it are less likely than their fixed mindset brethren to get stymied by tough tasks. They persevere. Over time, they can learn to be gritty and resilient.

How does this relate to football? Good question. Maybe you can guess where I’m going with this.

A Second Guitar Lesson: The Six Month Rule

What happens if there’s not enough time to do this?

This post is about the neuroscience of learning. And I will get to that. But first, a brief interlude about delays, stops, and starts. Jinxed by my last blog entry about learning the guitar, I just went through a month when I really didn’t practice. Three weeks of being super-busy, then Thanksgiving holiday week travel when I couldn’t bring the instrument.

Delays can be fatal when you’re trying to make a change or when—like me—you’re trying to learn a new skill. It’s pretty easy to find examples of projects and change efforts that were delayed in an attempt to kill them off, as far back as ancient Rome and as recently as the Wall Street reforms under Dodd-Frank.

So what does a delay mean for learning a new skill? Maybe something like my slowly developing musical dexterity? Studies in neuroscience, and specifically neuroplasticity, suggest that it all depends on how long you’ve been at it. There’s pretty good evidence that once you’ve been working on a new skill for more than six months, your brain is much more tolerant of delays.