I just started a new job and decided that things weren’t going to be tumultuous enough, so, on the recommendation of my new manager, I signed up for a brand
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spanking new MacBook Air as my work PC. This after working with nothing but Microsoft Windows since version 3.0 back in 1991.
Wow…lots of things to notice…
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When I sit down to write, my first instinct is to spend time noodling on a topic I might have captured previously or something that I’m confronting or working through right now. I feel that somehow whatever I could come up with in a stream-of-consciousness sessions might resemble a walk through an unsightly neighborhood and not have much coherence. I need to give myself a break and realize that there is more coherence to following a path of thought than I give credit to the desire to write.
This is just such a post.
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I have been thinking about a post by Tac Anderson on his NewCommBiz blog about making mistakes, crisis-based decision making and how we learn. It specifically got me thinking about organizations that learn and those that don’t really, or at least not very well (or easily).
Things move terribly fast in today’s marketplace and the halls of business. We blame it on the Internet, on the 24-hour news cycle, on our growing propensity for being “always on and connected” and on “everyone else.” There have been countless barrels of ink spilled on the importance of failure for learning, both as individuals and organizations. Even just thinking about how you learn personally will confront you with the first attempt at doing something, assessing how well that went, tweaking, trying again, etc.
So why do we not get it? I’m not saying we drive for failure (although that seems to be the direction of some I’ve noticed….), but, short of life-and-death, why do we not accept that failing is at least as important as not failing?
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I’ve begun teaching my fall class in social media in business and have led the group in a collective moan about the sheer volume of data and information available, some of it valuable, but much of it ancillary at best and junk/noise at the far end of personal/professional value. It’s pretty easy to sell a good set of filters to allow the really good stuff onto our desktops and ignore the rest.
But at what cost?
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My Dad had two primary refuges from work and my brother and me. In the winter it was his shop in the garage and in the summer it was the yard and the garden. He had apparently inherited the ability to grow almost anything from my grandmother. She could take a fallen, brown leaf from a plant and nurture it into full health in the space of a year or two…..amazing.
One of the things I used to kid him about was his penchant for regularly moving shrubs, bushes and sometimes trees from one spot to another around our yard. We used to joke that he was never happy with where God put them and was trying to improve the arrangement. The moved item always seemed to thrive anew, regardless of where he planted it. Now I see what he was doing in a different light.
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Earlier this week I was fortunate enough to sit in on a quarterly meeting of some of the hardest working folks I know. My company calls them Product Planners. The difficulty of what they do is hidden by the simplicity of their title…if you’ve never worked in an enterprise that is tracking released products, fixing them as needed, and then planning new ones with the added uncertainty of forecasting their popularity, then you aren’t aware of the tricky dance these folks do. Years ago while watching one of my favorite Mystery Science Theater 3000 movies, I remember Crow T. Robot remarking, upon seeing a credit for someone tasked with Planning, “Oh, that’s what I want to do….I’ve always wanted to Plaaaaaan!”
I thought it was a bit odd too, at the time. Now I know better.
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I had lunch today with a close friend and colleague. Among other things (children, pets, home improvements, unusual heat in Seattle [which was about 86 degrees or so]…) we talked about getting bored. She’s has been with the same business unit doing much the same kind of job for nearly 7 years. She likes her work well enough, but feels, as she put it, “too comfortable”. It’s not that good things aren’t happening with her particular product or that there isn’t enough to keep her busy. It’s just that the challenges she faces now fill a kind of “Top 25 Things You Do In This Job” place in her mind.
We started talking about opportunities to move to other business groups or even to other companies. The conversation got very animated and the creative juices started to flow a little more quickly. It’s obvious that she’s got tons of creativity to spare and aims it, as she can, at the problems in front of her. But there’s more there…the workflow that she has for her current role has well-worn grooves (often called ruts…) and it works best when following the grooves.
I believe that taking a bright, creative person from one place and placing them in another “takes the blanket” off of their creativity, and the business can benefit mightily in the move.
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I was recently discussing the pros and cons of various personnel review and commitment systems/styles with a close colleague of mine. She was saying something like, “It’s just like a horse race. One year you put your all into the race and win. The next year you put just as much effort and work into the race as the year before, if not more, and nine others finish ahead of you.” The implication is that this gives the folks putting on the race the impetus to……what? Give last year’s horse sugar for running a great race? Trying the horse at different races? Retiring the horse to pasture?
It seems that the climate in many organizations implies a future involving a glue factory. Why is this?
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You’ve heard it before…
You’re in a meeting and someone is presenting an idea or proposal that they’ve placed an enormous amount of time and effort into. This is their BABY. It’s obvious they’ve done some research, talked to some experts and influencers. They got the data, did the analysis and did all the right things. There are some gaps, maybe…..perhaps a blind sport or two. Then it happens:
“What about XXX!?” (XXX = name of gap or blind spot goes here)
“That’s just obvious!” “How could you miss that?!” “Well, that’s no good…” “You’ll have to do better than that to convince me!” “We just need smarter people on this, apparently!” [Yes, I've heard that in meetings...]
“Don’t take it personally….it’s just business.”
I’m sorry, no. It’s never just business.
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A few nights back I was fortunate enough to attend a performance of the group Spyro Gyra at Jazz Alley in Seattle. I’ve been listening to their work since their first album (remember those? 
) in 1975, but this is the first time I have seen them perform. First I want to say I thoroughly enjoyed the show. Their music and style have evolved quite a ways from their early work in the 70’s. Their maturity as artists and desire to stretch what they can do together was evident.
While I was awash in the music and watching the band I became aware of a level of collaboration and team-focused performance that I began to mull over concerning how this looks in the world of other teams, businesses and organizations. A lot can be learned from this group.
My first impression is that this is truly a group. It isn’t “Jay Beckenstein and Spyro Gyra”, or anything like that….it is Spyro Gyra. They have an identity as a group that was evident throughout the show. This identity showed itself in a number of ways. For me the signifier was that each member was as absorbed in the work of the rest of the band as they were in contributing themselves. There were definitely five talented individuals on stage, but the individuality was clothed in the vision of the music. It reminds me of something I have written on my whiteboard in my office which says, “It’s not about you. It’s not about me. It’s about the music.” This helps remind me of the vision and the goal as I work to accomplish all the things I do while working to keep ego out of it. It’s not easy, but it is worth it.
