I’m participating in an engagement, and they were struggling to define my role. Someone mentioned that I’m serving as a ‘critical friend’, and the others cottoned on to it.  I hadn’t heard that term  so I explored, and liked what I found. Thought I’d share it.

So, ‘critical friend‘ is a term that originated in the education sector. The prevailing definition is:

a trusted person who asks provocative questions, provides data to be examined through another lens, and offers critiques of a person‘s work as a friend. A critical friend takes the time to fully understand the context of the work presented and the outcomes that the person or group is working toward. The friend is an advocate for the success of that work.

What’s key to me is that the role involves being committed to the success of the endeavor, but also being provocative. The latter is about  asking the hard questions and bringing in outside input that wouldn’t likely be considered otherwise. And I believe, based upon what I’ve dug into for innovation, that this is a valuable role.

So what I’m doing is getting to know the situation, rapidly consuming lots of documents, interviewing people, and sitting in on other information gathering sessions, to get to know what’s up. Then I’m floating some ideas that I think they really need to consider. The ideas are contrary to the  path they’re planning on but I’ve buttressed them with  some strong arguments. They make not take on all of them, but at least they’ll have explicitly considered them.

I’ve played this role specifically in a number of different situations (in fact, in some sense you could consider most of my engagements to have at least a facet of this).  I like to think that my 30+ years of work across cognition, technology, learning, design, and organizational implementation, with corporations, education institutions, government agencies, and not-for-profits, as well as my stockpiling of models, means I’ll generate some lateral and valuable thoughts in almost any situation. That’s certainly been the case to date.  And I really do want to help people achieve their goals.

It’s a fun, though challenging role. You have to get up to speed quickly, and be willing to offer ideas. I pride myself on also being able to suggest ways to accomplish ideas that aren’t obviously implementable at  the first go (all part of  Quinnovation ;).

When you’re looking at some change, getting some critical friend support on principle is a good idea. People challenging you for your own best interest isn’t always easy, but the outcomes are pretty much always worth it.  So, who’s your  critical friend?

In yesterday’s post, I talked about how new tools need to be coupled with practices to facilitate exploration. And I wanted to explore more (heh) about  what’s required.  The metaphor is old style exploration, and the requirements to succeed. Without any value judgment on the motivations that drove this exploitation, er, exploration ;). I’m breaking it up into tools, communication, and support.

Tools

So, one of the first requirements was to have the necessary tools to explore. In the old days that could include  means to navigate (chronograph, compass), ways to represent learnings/discoveries (map, journal), and resources (food, shelter, transport). It was necessary to get to the edge of the map, move forward, document the outcomes, and successfully return. This hasn’t changed in concept.

So today, the tools are different, but the requirements are similar. You need to figure out what you don’t know (the edge of the map), figure out how to conduct an experiment (move forward), measure the results (document outcomes), and then use that to move on. (Fortunately, the ‘return’ part isn’t a problem so much!)  The digital business platform is one, but also social media are necessary.

Communication

What happened after these expeditions was equally important. The learnings were brought back, published, and presented and shared. Presented at meetings, debates proceeded about what was learned: was this a new animal or merely a variation? Does this mean we need to change our explanations of animals, plants, geography, or culture?  The writings exchanged in letters, magazines, and books explored these in more depth.

These days, we similarly need to communicate our understandings. We debate via posts and comments, and microblogs. More thought out ideas become presentations at conferences, or perhaps  white papers  and  articles. Ultimately, we may write books to share our thinking.  Of course, some of it is within the organization, whether it’s the continual dialog around a collaborative venture, or ‘show  your work’ (aka work out loud).

Support

Such expeditions in the old days were logistically complex, and required considerable resources. Whether funded by governments, vested interests, or philanthropy, there was an awareness of risk and rewards. The rewards of knowledge as well as potential financial gain were sufficient to drive expeditions that ultimately spanned and opened the globe.

Similarly, there are risks and rewards in continual exploration on the part of organizations, but fortunately the risks are far less.  There is still a requirement for resourcing, and this includes official support and a budget for experiments that might fail. It has to be safe to take these risks, however.

These elements need to be aligned, which is non-trivial. It requires crossing silos, in most cases, to get the elements in place including IT, HR, and operations.  That’s where strategy, culture, and infrastructure can come together to create an agile, adaptive organization that can thrive in uncertainty. And isn’t that where you need to be?

I was listening to a tale  recounting a time  when an organization was going through a change, and had solicited help.  And the story surprised me.  The short story is that the initial approach  being taken weren’t leveraging  technology effectively.  And it led me to wonder how many organizations are still doing things the old way.

So the story was of a critical organizational change.  The hired guns (the typical consulting agency) came into to do their usual schtick, interviewing some people and making recommendations. The problem was, there was no way to interview an appropriately representative sample, and consequently the outcome was going to be less than optimal.  The resulting plan was large. dd

In this situation, a colleague stepped in and managed to arrange to use a social platform to do a better job of sharing the intentions and soliciting feedback.  You might not be surprised to hear that the subsequent process also yielded greater buy-in.  The process resulted in a fine-grained analysis of the plan, with some elements continuing to be executed by the initial partner, others taken on internally, and others discarded.  The ultimate cost was reduced  far more than the cost to implement this extra step.

The missed opportunity, it turns out, was that the process used didn’t get scaled and implemented for further changes. Some outside factors removed the instigator responsible for the change and it had been done as a ‘stealth’ operation, so awareness wasn’t spread. The hired guns, already entrenched, went back to business as usual.

The eye-opener for me was the fact that the approach initially taken  wasn’t  leveraging technology.  In this day and age, that strikes me as completely unjustifiable! They were better able to support transparency and communication, and as typically happens that yielded both better outcomes and  better engagement.  Of course,  that’s the point of the revolution, getting smarter about aligning technology with how our brains think, work, and learn. It’s just that I forget how far we still need to go.

Just thinking through changes, at every stage of initiatives there’s a benefit:

• collecting data and determining the issue, via surveys and discussion
• developing ideas and approaches in collaboration (transparently, showing your work)
• sharing visions about the resulting approach
• providing support for expected problems
• collaborating to address the unexpected problems
• maintaining focus through the change
• celebrating successes

All these can be facilitated through technology in powerful ways that can’t be done across geographies and timezones without tech.

So here’s my question to you. Is your organization leveraging technology appropriately?  And this is both at the level of L&D, and then also organization wide.  Is your L&D group working transparently, leveraging social media to both support effective performance and continue to develop? And then are you using that experience to spread the possibilities throughout the organization?  That’s the opportunity on tap, and I would really like to see L&D leading the way. Heck, we’re  supposed to be the ones who understand how people learn, and when it comes to change, that’s learning too. Let’s  own this!

Karen Hough kicked off ATD’s Core 4 event with a lively keynote talking about how improvisation reflects many core factors involved in successful organizational agility.  Going through her trademarked elements, she had the audience up and participating and reflecting on interpersonal interactions. She covered important components  of a learning organization like openness to new ideas, diversity, and safety and demonstrated ways to help break down the barriers.

In the movie, Field of Dreams, the character played by Kevin Costner is told “If you build it, they will come.” And I use an  image from this movie to talk about learning culture, in that you can put all the elements of the performance ecosystem together, but if you work in  a Miranda organization (where anything you say can and will be held against you), you won’t be able to tap into the power of the ecosystem because people won’t share. But it’s clear that the problem is worse; the evidence suggests that L&D overall is in a ‘Field of Dreams’ mentality.

A  new  report (in addition to the two I cited last week) documents the problems in L&D.  LinkedIn has released their Workplace Learning report, and one aspect stood out: Only 8% of CEOS see biz impact of L&D, only 4% see ROI.  And if you ask the top ways they evaluate their programs, the top five methods are subjective or anecdotal.  Which concurs with data a few years ago from ATD that the implementation of measurement according to the Kirkpatrick model dropped off drastically: while 96% were doing level 1, only 34% were doing level 2, and it went dramatically down from there. In short, L&D isn’t measuring.

Which means that there’s a very strong belief that: if we build it, it is good.  And that, to me, is a Field of Dreams mentality. It feels like the L&D industry is living in a world where they take orders and produce courses and trust that it all works.  I was pleased to hear that there’s testing, but there’s far too little measurement.

And, interestingly,  one other statistic struck me:”less than 1⁄4 are willing to recommend their program to peers”.   To put it another way, the majority of L&D are embarrassed by their outputs. This isn’t any better situation than the statistics I reported in my book calling for an L&D Revolution!

So, the complaints are predictable: too little money, too few people, and getting people to pay attention. Um, that comes when you’re demonstrably contributing to the organization. And that’s the promise I think we offer. L&D could and should be a big contributor to organizational success. If we were adequately addressing the optimizing performance side of the story, and ensuring   the continual innovation part as well, our value should and would be high.

It’s past time L&D moves beyond the ‘Field of Dreams’ status, and becomes a viable, and measurable contributor to organizational success. It’s doable, under real world constraints. It needs a plan, and some knowledge, but there’s a path forward.  So, are you ready to move out of the corn, and onto the road?

I was in a conversation with my colleague Charles Jennings  about organizational innovation, and one of the topics that arose was that of barriers to successful organizational function. In particular, we were talking about how the division of responsibility between organizational development (OD), leadership development, and learning & development is a problem. And I think the problem is bigger. Separating out functions into silos makes sense in a deterministic world, but that doesn’t characterize our current environment.

Now, separation of functions can be useful. Certainly in software engineering, having application program interfaces (APIs) have led to the ability to connect powerful capabilities.  A program can call a function and get data returned via an API, and  the software doesn’t have to care how the function’s carried out.

In the org equivalent we could have a business unit request a course, for example, and L&D responds with said course. In fact, that’s not atypical.  Yet it’s problematic in human terms. The business unit may not have done the due diligence, the performance analysis, that ensures a course is the right solution.

Ok, we could change it: the business unit could indicate the performance problem and L&D could respond. However, again there’s a problem. Without understanding how things are done, L&D’s solution won’t be contextually accurate.  Any intervention won’t reflect how things are done unless interactions occur.

And that’s the point. Any meaningful work – problem-solving, trouble-shooting, improvement, innovation, research, design etc – any  learning,  is complex. And, done right, they inherently require engagement and interaction.  Moreover, we also know that the best solutions come from  creative  friction, people interacting.  Communication and collaboration is key!

Engagement between silos works best when you mix members from each.  Or, to put it another way, breaking down the silos is the only way to get the best outputs for the important work, the work that will advance the organization whether removing errors, creating new products or processes, etc.

People are complex (the human brain is arguably the most complex thing in the known universe).  Solutions that tap into that complexity, instead of trying to avoid  it, are bound to yield the best insights. We’ve now got a lot of insight into processes that facilitate getting the best outcomes. It’s time to engage with it, to the benefit of the organization.

A twitter pointer led me to an HBR article arguing that We’re Thinking about Organizational Culture all Wrong.  In it, the author argues that it’s fallacious to think that there’s just one organizational culture, , and that all people buy into it.  I agree, and yet where the author leads us is, I think, misleading, or at least not as helpful as it could be.

The argument includes two major thrusts. The first is that the cultural values may be interpreted differently.  What you mean by ‘free’ and what I mean may differ.  Take, for instance, the  difference between ‘free beer’ and ‘free speech’ (a classic example).  And this certainly can be the case.  The second is that people may comply with the culture even if they don’t agree with it. There are multiple reasons, such as job security, that could support this.

The result, according to the article, is that corporate ‘culture’ isn’t a set of shared values, it’s a “web of power relationships”.  That’s quite a leap, but the point is apt: these relationships can facilitate,  or hinder, individual goals.  However, one statement near the end rings wrong for me:

“Reliance on culture as a way to create unity can mislead those in positions of power into thinking that the core values expressed by the organization are actually uncritically accepted by employees.”.

I agree, but I think it’s simplistic.  No one in power should  be naive enough to believe that anyone uncritically accepts any values.  Instead, the view should be to recognize what core values facilitate the most effective outcomes for the organization, and then  follow some well-tested rules about change:

• sell the vision
• make it a choice
• support
• know how to address the expected problems
• be prepared to address the unexpected
• evangelize
• reward
• test and tweak
• persist

It may make sense to start small and spread virally rather than make it an overall change initiative.  Still, I think it’s a worthwhile goal.

There is a clear value proposition about having a culture that supports innovation, and identifiable components.  Abandoning the effort because culture is complex seems a missed opportunity.  The benefits are big. Cultures are developed and do change. Doing so systematically, and systemically, seem to me to be the path to competitive success.  What am I missing?