Thursday, 28 July 2011
Employees First, Customers Second: Turning Conventional Management Upside Down by Vineet Nayar
A story of how a compaby albeit a high tech one, transformed itself and saved the business from a potential terminal decline. It really should be a must-read for today's managers leading organisations where we rely on the intellectual commitment of our teams.
There are echos of the Trust Quotient book I read last year but this one is nore about applying prnciples ina concrete way to a real business.
today the asset base of an organization increasingly resides in the talent and creativity of its employees. Knowledge-based businesses, especially, depend on excited teams of individuals who are eager to take on one challenging task after another and to act as custodians of the tacit knowledge in the organization. To manage them—especially Gen Y employees, and particularly in global organizations—requires a new set of capabilities. Vineet’s story shows how a company can focus on its value creators—the frontline employees—to achieve remarkable growth and profits.Read more at location 35 •
as CEO, or as any leader or manager, you must stop thinking of yourself as the only source of change. You must avoid the urge to answer every question or provide a solution to every problem. Instead, you must start asking questions, seeing others as the source of change, and transferring ownership of the organization’s growth to the next generation of leaders who are closer to the value zone. Only in this way can you begin to create a company that is self-run and self-governed,Read more at location 189 •
Management did not say to the employees in the value zone, “What can we do to help you?” Instead, we wasted their precious time and energy by requiring them to make endless presentations to us about irrelevant things and write reports about what they had or had not done. Not only did we have to stop wasting their time, but we also had to find a way to put the value zone at the center of the organization.Read more at location 473 •
Employees first. Customers second. Management … third?Read more at location 495 •
If your organization has more than a couple of hundred people in it, most of them don’t know you. You know you are trustworthy, but they do not. I believe that your personal trust quotient is lower than you think it is—probably quite a bit lower.Read more at location 712 •
The Trusted Advisor. Maister says there are four dimensions of trust:
Credibility: Credibility comes from professional expertise. If the person possesses deep knowledge and follows good practice, you feel trust in what he or she says and does.
Reliability: Reliability is revealed through actions over time.
Intimacy: This aspect of trust is about emotions. You instinctively feel that you can or cannot discuss many kinds of issues with a certain person
Self-orientation: The self-oriented dimension is Maister’s fourth aspect of trust. This one, though, reduces the trust quotient. It is about your motives and the things you care about. Can I trust you to think beyond your own self-interest?Read more at location 743 •
Opening the Window of Information The idea was to open the window of financial information.Read more at location 836 •
Opening Up the Office of the CEO: The U&I PortalRead more at location 875 •
Catalysts are simple actions, rather than elaborate programs of organizational transformation change that plod on for years and years, and they can help transform a locked-up culture into one that is constantly changing.Read more at location 1028 •
the value zone no longer lay in the technology itself and certainly not in any particular hardware or software technology. Customers could choose among many options, all of which would likely enable them to achieve their goals if implemented well. Something had to be different, then, about the way the technologies were brought together and implemented for each customer. Something more had to be changed about how we delivered our services.Read more at location 1095 •
enabled customers to cut down the cycle times in their most critical business processes, including these: Order to cash: from the moment of accepting a customer order to the receipt of payment for delivery of the order Desire to hire: from the definition of an open job position to filling it Concept to manufacture: from new-product prototype to finished production unitRead more at location 1121 •
And so we designed a survey that asked questions like these: Does this manager help you enhance the value you are delivering to the customer? After discovering that you have a problem, does this manager help you define the problem and help you identify its solution? When you approach the manager with a problem, does he or she respond by offering solutions or resolving the issues involved? If you can’t reach the solutions on your own, does the manager enable you to reach out to other people in the organization who help you achieve the solutions?Read more at location 1422 •
We saw that the EFCS concept, when applied to a large acquisition like the AXON merger, could generate such powerful results that we completed four more successful acquisitions in that year. With each of them, we proved that when a CEO focuses less on governing and more on enabling, the executive can accomplish much that might otherwise have been too risky to undertake.Read more at location 1869 •
The speed of thought, of change, and of implementation gets suffocated by too much hierarchy, wherever it may be. The only way to remove hierarchy in the organization is to recast the role of the CEO as one who asks more questions than he or she answers. The rest of the hierarchy will soon tumble.Read more at location 1880 •
Tuesday, 26 July 2011
The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood by James Gleick
I was intrigued by the title and then started to get put off by the fact that the book was more of a history of technology, the technology of information. But after sticking with it I became more and more fascinated by the strange chances of fate that occured to make the technology possible over many centuries.
Some nice references to Dawkins and Hofstader.
the liar’s paradox: This statement is false. The statement cannot be true, because then it is false. It cannot be false, because then it becomes true. It is neither true nor false, or it is both at once.Read more at location 2897 •
One reason for these misguesses was just the usual failure of imagination in the face of a radically new technology. The telegraph lay in plain view, but its lessons did not extrapolate well to this new device. The telegraph demanded literacy; the telephone embraced orality. A message sent by telegraph had first to be written, encoded, and tapped out by a trained intermediary. To employ the telephone, one just talked. A child could use it. For that very reason it seemed like a toy. In fact, it seemed like a familiar toy, made from tin cylinders and string. The telephone left no permanent record. The Telephone had no future as a newspaper name. Business people thought it unserious. Where the telegraph dealt in facts and numbers, the telephone appealed to emotions.Read more at location 3064 •
He instituted a Noah’s Ark rule, inviting two of each species so that speakers would always have someone present who could see through their jargon.Read more at location 3918 •
Some amino acids correspond to just one codon, others to two, four, or six. Particles called ribosomes ratchet along the RNA strand and translate it, three bases at a time. Some codons are redundant; some actually serve as start signals and stop signals. The redundancy serves exactly the purpose that an information theorist would expect. It provides tolerance for errors.Read more at location 4803 •
Certain proteins, capable of flipping from one relatively stable state to another, were found to act as relays, accepting ciphered commands and passing them to their neighbors—switching stations in three-dimensional communications networks.Read more at location 4835 •
The Selfish Gene—he set off decades of debate by declaring: “We are survival machines—robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes.”Read more at location 4874 •
a hen is only an egg’s way of making another egg.Read more at location 4890 •
The process is blind. It has no foresight, no intention, no knowledge. The genes, too, are blind: “They do not plan ahead,” says Dawkins. “Genes just are, some genes more so than others, and that is all there is to it.”Read more at location 4918 •
Such genes—these replicators, these survivors—know nothing about altruism and nothing about reading, of course. Whatever and wherever they are, their phenotypic effects matter only insofar as they help the genes propagate.Read more at location 4987 •
Whether the population of France is an even or odd number at any given instant is random, but the population of France itself is surely not random: it is a definite fact, even if not knowable.Read more at location 5278 •
Wikipedia also devotes an article to the number 9,814,072,356. It is the largest holodigital square—which is to say, the largest square number containing each decimal digit exactly once.Read more at location 5493 •
He confirmed that a great deal of computation can be done with no energy cost at all. In every case, Bennett found, heat dissipation occurs only when information is erased. Erasure is the irreversible logical operation.Read more at location 5864 •
We shed as we pick up, like travelers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it.Read more at location 6161 •
No sooner has one experience begun than the thought of what else is out there intrudes.” The embarrassment of riches. Another reminder that information is not knowledge, and knowledge is not wisdom.Read more at location 6670 •
Thursday, 30 June 2011
Incognito, the secret lives of the brain by David Eagleman
A very readable book outlining the advances in understanding mind and brains. The essence is that the conscious part (the part we call me) is actually a very thin layer on top of our existence. Almost all of what we do is unconscious, our conscious sense of self just rationalises what we have just done to make sense of it for future occasions. The only time we really use our conscious self is when setting goal sor long-term plans, but even then we are driven by our unconscious experience and desires.
The fact that what we think we preceive, is actually a construction of our brains and is quite often not so strongly connected with pyhsical external reality. The book does have some philosophical implications for freewill, mentions them but doesn't really answer the problems it raises.
The first thing we learn from studying our own circuitry is a simple lesson: most of what we do and think and feel is not under our conscious control.Read more at location 84 •
Most of its operations are above the security clearance of the conscious mind. The I simply has no right of entry.Read more at location 87 •
Consciousness developed because it was advantageous, but advantageous only in limited amounts.Read more at location 113 • You may wish to know what’s happening at any moment in your great nation, but you can’t possibly take in all the information at once. Nor would it be useful, even if you could. You want a summary.Read more at location 117 •
You gleefully say, “I just thought of something!”, when in fact your brain performed an enormous amount of work before your moment of genius struck.Read more at location 132 •
One does not need to be consciously aware to perform sophisticated motor acts. You can notice this when you begin to duck from a snapping tree branch before you are aware that it’s coming toward you, or when you’re already jumping up when you first become aware of the phone’s ring.Read more at location 169 •
try this demonstration: have a friend hold a handful of colored markers or highlighters out to his side. Keep your gaze fixed on his nose, and now try to name the order of the colors in his hand. The results are surprising: even if you’re able to report that there are some colors in your periphery, you won’t be able to accurately determine their order.Read more at location 391 •
The brain generally does not need to know most things; it merely knows how to go out and retrieve the data. It computes on a need-to-know basis.Read more at location 457 •
You’re not perceiving what’s out there. You’re perceiving whatever your brain tells you.Read more at location 522 •
From the natural laboratory of evolution comes a related phenomenon in humans. At least 15 percent of human females possess a genetic mutation that gives them an extra (fourth) type of color photoreceptor—and this allows them to discriminate between colors that look identical to the majority of us with a mere three types of color photoreceptors.36 Two color swatches that look identical to the majority of people would be clearly distinguishable to these ladies. (No one has yet determined what percentage of fashion arguments is caused by this mutation.)Read more at location 692 •
The bottom line is that time is a mental construction, not an accurate barometer of what’s happening “out there.” Here’s a way to prove to yourself that something strange is going on with time: look at your own eyes in a mirror and move your point of focus back and forth so that you’re looking at your right eye, then at your left eye, and back again. Your eyes take tens of milliseconds to move from one position to the other, but—here’s the mystery—you never see them move. What happens to the gaps in time while your eyes are moving? Why doesn’t your brain care about the small absences of visual input?Read more at location 829 •
consciousness tends to interfere with most tasks (remember the unhappy centipede in the ditch)—but it can be helpful when setting goals and training the robot. Evolutionary selection has presumably tuned the exact amount of access the conscious mind has: too little, and the company has no direction; too much, and the system gets bogged down solving problems in a slow, clunky, energy-inefficient manner.Read more at location 1175 •
Our conscious assessment of an activity as easy or natural can lead us to grossly underestimate the complexity of the circuits that make it possible. Easy things are hard: most of what we take for granted is neurally complex.Read more at location 1420 •
We live inside the umwelt of our instincts, and we typically have as little perception of them as the fish does of its water.Read more at location 1433 •
The chicken/shovel experiment led Gazzaniga and LeDoux to conclude that the left hemisphere acts as an “interpreter,” watching the actions and behaviors of the body and assigning a coherent narrative to these events. And the left hemisphere works this way even in normal, intact brains. Hidden programs drive actions, and the left hemisphere makes justifications. This idea of retrospective storytelling suggests that we come to know our own attitudes and emotions, at least partially, by inferring them from observations of our own behavior.Read more at location 2166 •
Minds seek patterns. In a term introduced by science writer Michael Shermer, they are driven toward “patternicity”—the attempt to find structure in meaningless data.42 Evolution favors pattern seeking, because it allows the possibility of reducing mysteries to fast and efficient programs in the neural circuitry.Read more at location 2248 •
Human programmers approach a problem by assuming there’s a best way to solve it, or that there’s a way it should be solved by the robot. But the main lesson we can extract from biology is that it’s better to cultivate a team of populations that attack the problem in different, overlapping manners.Read more at location 2394 •
“Evolution is smarter than you are.” If I had a law of biology, it would be: “Evolve solutions; when you find a good one, don’t stop.”Read more at location 2401 •
Libet’s experiments caused a commotion.15 Could it be true that the conscious mind is the last one in the chain of command to receive any information? Did his experiment drive the nail into the coffin of free will?Read more at location 2702 •
The heart of the problem is that it no longer makes sense to ask, “To what extent was it his biology and to what extent was it him?” The question no longer makes sense because we now understand those to be the same thing. There is no meaningful distinction between his biology and his decision making. They are inseparable.Read more at location 2842 •
main difference between teenage and adult brains is the development of the frontal lobes. The human prefrontal cortex does not fully develop until the early twenties, and this underlies the impulsive behavior of teenagers. The frontal lobes are sometimes called the organ of socialization, because becoming socialized is nothing but developing circuitry to squelch our basest impulses.Read more at location 2958 •
you choose neither your nature nor your nurture, much less their entangled interaction. You inherit a genetic blueprint and are born into a world over which you have no choice throughout your most formative years. This is the reason people come to the table with quite different ways of seeing the world, dissimilar personalities, and varied capacities for decision making. These are not choices; these are the dealt hands of cards.Read more at location 3478 •
As the quip goes: If our brains were simple enough to be understood, we wouldn’t be smart enough to understand them.Read more at location 3620 •
Friday, 17 June 2011
Viral Loop: The Power of Pass-It-On by Adam Penenberg
A book that covers the social media explosion, being used by companies to generate demand for thier products. It looks at measurement techniques to track how 'viral' your website is, and how you can make it more attractive (basically content, content, content and connections - provided by the users themselves since you can never scale as fast as they can).
It also looks at how becoming part of such communities is actaully good for you as well, thos ewith more social connections actually living longer.
Somewhere in the world a party occurred just in the time it took you to read this sentence. Almost 120 million people in one hundred countries will attend a product demonstration this year.Read more at location 661 •
Andreessen had uncorked a “network effect,” a term first used to describe the spread of the telephone in the early years of the twentieth century. Simply put, the more people who own a telephone, the more valuable an added line is to each person already on the network. The potential number of connections grows exponentially in relation to the number of people on the network.Read more at location 764 •
In 1992, 4.5 million people were plugged into the Internet and there were perhaps fifty websites. By the end of 1993, 1 million people had downloaded Mosaic, there were 6 million total users, and 623 websites. Within a year the online population jumped to 13 million with 10,000 websites. Web traffic shot up more than 300 percent, with users creating their own home pages, uploading photos, and setting up chat rooms. Today’s Web, with more than 1.5 billion users worldwide and almost 200 million websites, owes its existence to three men: Paul Baran of the Rand Corporation, who conceived the Internet; Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the World Wide Web; and Marc Andreessen, who figured out how to navigate it.Read more at location 787 •
Andreessen saw it as a simple equation: market share today equals revenue later; without market share, you don’t generate revenue, but whoever achieves and hangs on to it wins.Read more at location 873 •
These viral loop companies provide an environment that is, in theory, almost infinitely scalable, relying on the wisdom of crowds to create or aggregate masses of material to fill it. The more people, the more content; the more powerful the lure for those sitting on the sidelines, the more value the company has.Read more at location 1069 •
Why do we do it? What explains our BlackBerry-bearing, Twitter-tweeting, Facebook friend with the need for constant connectivity? As facile as it sounds, we do it because we are hard-wired to socialize. It’s in our best interests. One reason we gravitate toward communities is because they multiply the impact of each individual to bring greater prosperity, security, and fulfillment to all.Read more at location 1250 •
Research indicates that engaging with friends helps us live longer and better lives, with those with strong friendship bonds having lower incidents of heart disease. They even get fewer colds and flu. A decade-long Australian study found that for the duration of the study subjects with a sizable network of friends were 22 percent less likely to pass away than those with a small circle of friends—and the distance separating two friends and the amount of contact made no difference. It didn’t matter if the friends stayed in contact via phone, letter, or email. Just the fact that they had a social network of friends acted as a protective barrier.Read more at location 1258 •
“When our evolutionary predecessors gathered on the African savanna a million years ago and the leaves next to them moved, the ones who didn’t look are not our ancestors,”Read more at location 1351 •
“The more in control we are, the more out of touch we become. But the more willing we are to let go a little, the more we’re finding we get in touch with consumers.”Read more at location 2152 •
Thiel subscribed to a theory of human behavior known as “mimetic desire,” propounded by French historian and philosopher René Girard, who believed that people were essentially sheep who, without much reflection, borrowed their desires from others. This theory has been applied to describe financial bubbles and panics,Read more at location 2773 •
Where would she stash a photo of, say, her best friend on vacation at the Angkor Wat temple in Cambodia at sunrise with a monkey nicknamed “Filch” running off with a tourist’s backpack? In a folder labeled Vacation? Angkor Wat? Melinda? Monkey? Tagging allowed the photo to be easily found in all of these contexts. And since anyone could add a tag and a comment, it became a democratic mode of organizationRead more at location 3070 •
This led to MySpace being discovered by a powerfully viral segment of the population: teenaged girls, who joyfully shared coding tips with one another. Because it drained bandwidth and slowed down the site, MySpace engineers proposed putting a stop to this, but DeWolfe overruled them. He realized that fighting users was a useless exercise that would only limit their growth. Let Friendster alienate its user base. MySpace would out-friendly Friendster.Read more at location 3127 •
“People are going to go and socialize where their friends are, and once you have a person’s friends list in a social community locked in, viral growth really happens,”Read more at location 3136 •
Simplifying the instructions also helped. In fact, the rule seemed to be, the simpler he made things, the more viral the site became. People, it seemed, were turned off by anything that required them to think.Read more at location 3244 •
TravBuddy and Travellers-point connect inveterate travelers.Read more at location 3396 •
when the landscape was particularly barren and there was little utility for early adopters. “The value that people get is tied to how much information everyone is sharing,” Zuckerberg says. He and his roommates encouraged the first wave of registrants in the ramping-up period to share information through pictures. The second wave would see the information and attract the first wave back,Read more at location 3459 •
They thought of their target audience and realized that they—and the engineers they were hiring—were out of touch. Most people at Stanford didn’t use MySpace. They thought it was a joke. So before they would release an application, one of them would say, “Let’s hear what Sandi says,” and she would offer her impressions.Read more at location 3614 •
If there is one constant through time, it’s that conventional wisdom often misses the mark, especially in the early days of technological transformation. In 1876, the president of Western Union brushed off Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone as little more than an “electric toy,” and the company called Bell’s proposal to put one in every home “utterly out of the question.”Read more at location 3677 •
Advertisers advance the science of advertising, discovering all manner of ways of reaching us, then consumers become expert at shedding messages they don’t want to hear. In essence, it’s a media version of an arms race.Read more at location 3726 •
If you are in your forties or older, your parents didn’t talk about their feelings; today you can barely stop people from telling you their life stories. And today’s youth, congregating on social networks, share the most intimate aspects of their lives, hewing to an ethos of karmic bulimia. If they don’t announce something on Facebook it’s, like, it never happened. And they are shaping the privacy debate as profoundly as the corporations that mine our data, the banks that sell it, the credit agencies that profit from it, and the government that vacuums it up.Read more at location 3817 •
there is a phenomenon in peoples’ interaction. “The message you get, in a lot of ways, is actually less important than who you get it from,” he says. “If you get it from someone that you trust, you’ll listen to it. Whereas if you get it from someone you don’t trust, you might actually believe the opposite of what they said because you don’t trust them.Read more at location 3885 •
That is the premise of the viral loop application that you will find on Facebook, MySpace, and other social networks, or at www.viralloop.com. Download it and it will tell you what your viral coefficient is and your value—in dollars—to Facebook et al., based on the company’s current valuation, your level of activity, and the activity of your friends.Read more at location 3912 •
Monday, 6 June 2011
Reality is Broken (Jane McGonigal)
An intriguing book written by an ex-computer games designer / psychologist. The premise is that modern computer games encourage cooperation amongst groups of people to succeed at the highest levels. In addition it explains the underlying psychology of why such games can be so compelling (clear goals, clear feedback, difficulty constantly adjusted to be just stretching enough and most important of all - voluntary participation).
The most interesting part for me was looking at how these concepts could be applied to reality - which as the author says is (or should be) the most interesting game of all.
There were many references through the later chapters to novel group games (not played on computers) that encourage more social interaction - I'm sure some of them could be developed for team building activities.
Locn. 144-55 Hundreds of millions of people worldwide are opting out of reality for larger and larger chunks of time. In the United States alone, there are 183 million active gamers (individuals who, in surveys, report that they play computer or video games “regularly”—on average, thirteen hours a week).3 Globally, the online gamer community—including console, PC, and mobile phone gaming—counts more than 4 million gamers in the Middle East, 10 million in Russia, 105 million in India, 10 million in Vietnam, 10 million in Mexico, 13 million in Central and South America, 15 million in Australia, 17 million in South Korea, 100 million in Europe, and 200 million in China.4 Although a typical gamer plays for just an hour or two a day, there are now more than 6 million people in China who spend at least twenty-two hours a week gaming, the equivalent of a part-time job.5 More than 10 million “hardcore” gamers in the United Kingdom, France, and Germany spend at least twenty hours a week playing.6 And at the leading edge of this growth curve, more than 5 million “extreme” gamers in the United States play on average forty-five hours a week.
Locn. 167-70 The truth is this: in today’s society, computer and video games are fulfilling genuine human needs that the real world is currently unable to satisfy. Games are providing rewards that reality is not. They are teaching and inspiring and engaging us in ways that reality is not. They are bringing us together in ways that reality is not.
Locn. 212-14 Collectively, the planet is now spending more than 3 billion hours a week gaming. We are starving, and our games are feeding us.
Locn. 447-50 When you strip away the genre differences and the technological complexities, all games share four defining traits: a goal, rules, a feedback system, and voluntary participation.
Locn. 462-66 Finally, voluntary participation requires that everyone who is playing the game knowingly and willingly accepts the goal, the rules, and the feedback. Knowingness establishes common ground for multiple people to play together. And the freedom to enter or leave a game at will ensures that intentionally stressful and challenging work is experienced as safe and pleasurable activity.
Locn. 477 Playing a game is the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles.
Locn. 518-19 What makes Tetris so addictive, despite the impossibility of winning, is the intensity of the feedback it provides.
Locn. 529-33 In other words, in a good computer or video game you’re always playing on the very edge of your skill level, always on the brink of falling off. When you do fall off, you feel the urge to climb back on. That’s because there is virtually nothing as engaging as this state of working at the very limits of your ability—or what both game designers and psychologists call “flow”.4 When you are in a state of flow, you want to stay there: both quitting and winning are equally unsatisfying outcomes.
Locn. 597-98 Games make us happy because they are hard work that we choose for ourselves, and it turns out that almost nothing makes us happier than good, hard work.
Locn. 601-2 Brian Sutton-Smith, a leading psychologist of play, once said, “The opposite of play isn’t work. It’s depression.”
Locn. 799-802 games become hits and make money in direct proportion to how much satisfaction they provide and how much positive emotion they provoke—in other words, how happy they make their players. As a result, game designers have been taught to relentlessly pursue happiness outcomes, including flow—and they’ve innovated a wide range of other happiness strategies along the way.
Locn. 819-20 Compared with games, reality is depressing. Games focus our energy, with relentless optimism, on something we’re good at and enjoy.
Locn. 957-62 The Four Secrets to Making Our Own Happiness Many different competing theories of happiness have emerged from the field of positive psychology, but if there’s one thing virtually all positive psychologists agree on, it’s this: there are many ways to be happy, but we cannot find happiness. No object, no event, no outcome or life circumstance can deliver real happiness to us. We have to make our own happiness—by working hard at activities that provide their own reward.15
Locn. 979-83 As long as we are regularly immersed in self-rewarding hard work, we will be happy more often than not—no matter what else is going on in our lives. This is one of the earliest hypotheses of positive psychology, and a fairly radical idea. It contradicts what so many of us have been taught to believe—that we need life to be a certain way in order for us to be happy, and that the easier life is the happier we are. But the relationship between hard work, intrinsic reward, and lasting happiness has been verified and confirmed through hundreds of studies and experiments.
Locn. 1010-12 from a neurological and physiological point of view, “intrinsic reward” is really just another way of describing the emotional payoffs we get by stimulating our internal happiness systems.
Locn. 1095-98 Playing World of Warcraft is such a satisfying job, gamers have collectively spent 5.93 million years doing it. It sounds impossible, but it’s true: if you add up all the hours that gamers across the globe have spent playing
Locn. 1304-6 Part of me felt like I was accomplishing more in the Kingdom of Azeroth than I was in my real life. And that’s exactly the IV drip of productivity that World of Warcraft is so good at providing. It delivers a stream of work and reward as reliably as a morphine drip line.
Locn. 1468-71 Learning to stay urgently optimistic in the face of failure is an important emotional strength that we can learn in games and apply in our real lives. When we’re energized by failure, we develop emotional stamina. And emotional stamina makes it possible for us to hang in longer, to do much harder work, and to tackle more complex challenges. We need this kind of optimism in order to thrive as human beings.
Locn. 1638-40 If you know how to play Scrabble, then you already know how to play Lexulous—it’s just a slightly modified and unauthorized version of the classic board game, combined with online chat.1
Locn. 1666-69 Because you don’t have to be online playing at the same time, it’s easy to organize a game with anyone else, no matter where or how busy they are. You can easily keep up with the game by playing literally only a few minutes a day. And by keeping running games going with your real-life friends and family, you’re ensuring daily opportunities to actively connect with the people you care about most.
Locn. 1680-83 You’re motivated to act, but you have to wait for your Facebook friends to check back into the game. And because you often have no idea if your friends are still logged on or paying attention to the game, there’s an emotional buildup to waiting for their next moves. As one player puts it, “You have to be addicted AND patient.”10
Locn. 1693-95 Simply put, social network games make it both easier and more fun to maintain strong, active connections with people we care about but who we don’t see or speak to enough in our daily lives.
Locn. 1743-47 The more time we spend interacting within our social networks, the more likely we are to generate a subset of positive emotions known as “prosocial emotions.” Prosocial emotions—including love, compassion, admiration, and devotion—are feel-good emotions that are directed toward others. They’re crucial to our long-term happiness because they help create lasting social bonds.
Locn. 1782-86 Teasing each other, recent scientific research has shown, is one of the fastest and most effective ways to intensify our positive feelings for each other. Dacher Keltner, a leading researcher of prosocial emotions at the University of California, has conducted experiments on the psychological benefits of teasing, and he believes that teasing plays an invaluable role in helping us form and maintain positive relationships.19
Locn. 1790-93 Just like a dog might play-bite another dog to show that it wants to be friends, we bare our teeth to each other in order to remind each other that we could, but never really would, hurt each other. Conversely, by allowing someone else to tease us, we confirm our willingness to be in a vulnerable position. We are actively demonstrating our trust in the other person’s regard for our emotional well-being.
Locn. 2036-37 on the other hand, just because the kills don’t have value doesn’t mean they don’t have meaning.
Locn. 2043-48 How do we get more meaning in our lives? It’s actually quite simple. Philosophers, psychologists, and spiritual leaders agree: the single best way to add meaning to our lives is to connect our daily actions to something bigger than ourselves—and the bigger, the better. As Martin Seligman says, “The self is a very poor site for meaning.” We can’t matter outside of a large-scale social context. “The larger the entity you can attach yourself to,” Seligman advises, “the more meaning you can derive.”8
Locn. 2243-46 The world’s oldest known example of an epic built environment is the Gobekli Tepe. Discovered less than two decades ago in southeastern Turkey, it’s believed to predate Stonehenge by a staggering six thousand years. It’s a twenty-five-acre arrangement of at least twenty stone circles, between ten and thirty meters in diameter each, made from monolithic pillars three meters high.
Locn. 2410-15 Jean M. Twenge, a professor of psychology and the author of Generation Me, has persuasively argued that the youngest generations today—particularly anyone born after 1980—are, in her words, “more miserable than ever before.” Why? Because of our increased cultural emphasis on “self-esteem” and “self-fulfillment.” But real fulfillment, as countless psychologists, philosophers, and spiritual leaders have shown, comes from fulfilling commitments to others. We want to be esteemed in the eyes of others, not for “who we are,” but rather for what we’ve done that really matters.
Locn. 2513-14 We’re not alone. Chore Wars is one of the best reviewed and most beloved, if little known, secrets on the Internet.
Locn. 3503-6 Because a critical mass is so important to games like the Comfort of Strangers, in 2008 Evans and Johnson cofounded an annual Bristol-based festival called Interesting Games, or Igfest, for innovative outdoor games. The festival is meant to provide support for and exposure to other game developers who are working to make cities more interesting and friendlier spaces.
Locn. 3848-52 The two most frequently recommended happiness activities across the scientific literature are to express gratitude and practice acts of kindness. Recent research has shown that we don’t even have to know someone to experience the benefits of thanking and being nice to them. Even fleeting acts of gratitude and kindness toward strangers can have a profound impact on our happiness. And positive gestures from strangers can make a big difference in how rich and satisfying our everyday lives feel.
Locn. 4028-33 Tombstone Hold ’Em is meant to make remembering death easier and more rewarding, by taking advantage of the largely underutilized social and recreational potential of cemeteries. The central activity of Tombstone Hold ’Em poker is learning how to “see” a playing card in any tombstone, based on its shape (the suit) and the names and date of death (the face value). Once you can read stones as cards, you can spot “hands” all around you. The game works in any cemetery, as long as there are clearly marked tombstones. Here’s how it plays out:
Locn. 4714-19 Free Rice; together, according to the game’s FAQ, their efforts add up to enough rice to feed an average of seven thousand people per day. Why is Free Rice able to capture so much engagement? It isn’t just that it is a force for good; it’s also classically good game design. It takes just seconds to complete a task, meaning you can get a lot of work done quickly. You get instant visual feedback: grains of rice stacking up in a bowl, with a constantly rising total of grains that you’ve earned. Because the game gets easier when you make mistakes and harder when you answer correctly, it’s easy to experience flow: you’re always playing at the limits of your ability.
Locn. 4914-22 these four principles all serve the ultimate goal of building a compelling game world, satisfying game mechanics, and an inspiring game community. The Player Investment Design Lead will design the mechanics that drive in-game player reward and incentives: • So players feel invested in the world and their character. • So players have long-term goals. • So players can’t grief or exploit them, or each other. • So that content are rewards in and of themselves.
Locn. 5009-11 The game’s motto is “Got two minutes? Be extraordinary!” Players can log in to the game from wherever they are and browse a list of “microvolunteer” missions that they can start and finish in literally just a few minutes. Each mission helps a real nonprofit organization accomplish one of its goals.
Locn. 5365-71 Collaboration is a special way of working together. It requires three distinct kinds of concerted effort: cooperating (acting purposefully toward a common goal), coordinating (synchronizing efforts and sharing resources), and cocreating (producing a novel outcome together). This third element, cocreation, is what sets collaboration apart from other collective efforts: it is a fundamentally generative act. Collaboration isn’t just about achieving a goal or joining forces; it’s about creating something together that it would be impossible to create alone.
Locn. 6927-34 We can create any future we can imagine. That is the big idea we started with, fourteen chapters ago, as we set off to investigate why good games make us better, and how they can help us change the world. Along the way, we’ve gleaned industry secrets—more than thirty years’ worth—from some of the most successful computer and video game developers in the world. We’ve compared these secrets alongside the most important scientific findings of the past decade, from the field of positive-psychology research. We’ve identified key innovations in the emerging landscape of alternate reality design. And we’ve tracked how game design is creating new ways for us to work together at extreme scales, and to solve bigger real-world problems.
Locn. 7182-83 visit the website for this book, www.realityisbroken.org.
Locn. 7186-87 world—join the social network Gameful, at www.gameful.org.
The most interesting part for me was looking at how these concepts could be applied to reality - which as the author says is (or should be) the most interesting game of all.
There were many references through the later chapters to novel group games (not played on computers) that encourage more social interaction - I'm sure some of them could be developed for team building activities.
Locn. 144-55 Hundreds of millions of people worldwide are opting out of reality for larger and larger chunks of time. In the United States alone, there are 183 million active gamers (individuals who, in surveys, report that they play computer or video games “regularly”—on average, thirteen hours a week).3 Globally, the online gamer community—including console, PC, and mobile phone gaming—counts more than 4 million gamers in the Middle East, 10 million in Russia, 105 million in India, 10 million in Vietnam, 10 million in Mexico, 13 million in Central and South America, 15 million in Australia, 17 million in South Korea, 100 million in Europe, and 200 million in China.4 Although a typical gamer plays for just an hour or two a day, there are now more than 6 million people in China who spend at least twenty-two hours a week gaming, the equivalent of a part-time job.5 More than 10 million “hardcore” gamers in the United Kingdom, France, and Germany spend at least twenty hours a week playing.6 And at the leading edge of this growth curve, more than 5 million “extreme” gamers in the United States play on average forty-five hours a week.
Locn. 167-70 The truth is this: in today’s society, computer and video games are fulfilling genuine human needs that the real world is currently unable to satisfy. Games are providing rewards that reality is not. They are teaching and inspiring and engaging us in ways that reality is not. They are bringing us together in ways that reality is not.
Locn. 212-14 Collectively, the planet is now spending more than 3 billion hours a week gaming. We are starving, and our games are feeding us.
Locn. 447-50 When you strip away the genre differences and the technological complexities, all games share four defining traits: a goal, rules, a feedback system, and voluntary participation.
Locn. 462-66 Finally, voluntary participation requires that everyone who is playing the game knowingly and willingly accepts the goal, the rules, and the feedback. Knowingness establishes common ground for multiple people to play together. And the freedom to enter or leave a game at will ensures that intentionally stressful and challenging work is experienced as safe and pleasurable activity.
Locn. 477 Playing a game is the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles.
Locn. 518-19 What makes Tetris so addictive, despite the impossibility of winning, is the intensity of the feedback it provides.
Locn. 529-33 In other words, in a good computer or video game you’re always playing on the very edge of your skill level, always on the brink of falling off. When you do fall off, you feel the urge to climb back on. That’s because there is virtually nothing as engaging as this state of working at the very limits of your ability—or what both game designers and psychologists call “flow”.4 When you are in a state of flow, you want to stay there: both quitting and winning are equally unsatisfying outcomes.
Locn. 597-98 Games make us happy because they are hard work that we choose for ourselves, and it turns out that almost nothing makes us happier than good, hard work.
Locn. 601-2 Brian Sutton-Smith, a leading psychologist of play, once said, “The opposite of play isn’t work. It’s depression.”
Locn. 799-802 games become hits and make money in direct proportion to how much satisfaction they provide and how much positive emotion they provoke—in other words, how happy they make their players. As a result, game designers have been taught to relentlessly pursue happiness outcomes, including flow—and they’ve innovated a wide range of other happiness strategies along the way.
Locn. 819-20 Compared with games, reality is depressing. Games focus our energy, with relentless optimism, on something we’re good at and enjoy.
Locn. 957-62 The Four Secrets to Making Our Own Happiness Many different competing theories of happiness have emerged from the field of positive psychology, but if there’s one thing virtually all positive psychologists agree on, it’s this: there are many ways to be happy, but we cannot find happiness. No object, no event, no outcome or life circumstance can deliver real happiness to us. We have to make our own happiness—by working hard at activities that provide their own reward.15
Locn. 979-83 As long as we are regularly immersed in self-rewarding hard work, we will be happy more often than not—no matter what else is going on in our lives. This is one of the earliest hypotheses of positive psychology, and a fairly radical idea. It contradicts what so many of us have been taught to believe—that we need life to be a certain way in order for us to be happy, and that the easier life is the happier we are. But the relationship between hard work, intrinsic reward, and lasting happiness has been verified and confirmed through hundreds of studies and experiments.
Locn. 1010-12 from a neurological and physiological point of view, “intrinsic reward” is really just another way of describing the emotional payoffs we get by stimulating our internal happiness systems.
Locn. 1095-98 Playing World of Warcraft is such a satisfying job, gamers have collectively spent 5.93 million years doing it. It sounds impossible, but it’s true: if you add up all the hours that gamers across the globe have spent playing
Locn. 1304-6 Part of me felt like I was accomplishing more in the Kingdom of Azeroth than I was in my real life. And that’s exactly the IV drip of productivity that World of Warcraft is so good at providing. It delivers a stream of work and reward as reliably as a morphine drip line.
Locn. 1468-71 Learning to stay urgently optimistic in the face of failure is an important emotional strength that we can learn in games and apply in our real lives. When we’re energized by failure, we develop emotional stamina. And emotional stamina makes it possible for us to hang in longer, to do much harder work, and to tackle more complex challenges. We need this kind of optimism in order to thrive as human beings.
Locn. 1638-40 If you know how to play Scrabble, then you already know how to play Lexulous—it’s just a slightly modified and unauthorized version of the classic board game, combined with online chat.1
Locn. 1666-69 Because you don’t have to be online playing at the same time, it’s easy to organize a game with anyone else, no matter where or how busy they are. You can easily keep up with the game by playing literally only a few minutes a day. And by keeping running games going with your real-life friends and family, you’re ensuring daily opportunities to actively connect with the people you care about most.
Locn. 1680-83 You’re motivated to act, but you have to wait for your Facebook friends to check back into the game. And because you often have no idea if your friends are still logged on or paying attention to the game, there’s an emotional buildup to waiting for their next moves. As one player puts it, “You have to be addicted AND patient.”10
Locn. 1693-95 Simply put, social network games make it both easier and more fun to maintain strong, active connections with people we care about but who we don’t see or speak to enough in our daily lives.
Locn. 1743-47 The more time we spend interacting within our social networks, the more likely we are to generate a subset of positive emotions known as “prosocial emotions.” Prosocial emotions—including love, compassion, admiration, and devotion—are feel-good emotions that are directed toward others. They’re crucial to our long-term happiness because they help create lasting social bonds.
Locn. 1782-86 Teasing each other, recent scientific research has shown, is one of the fastest and most effective ways to intensify our positive feelings for each other. Dacher Keltner, a leading researcher of prosocial emotions at the University of California, has conducted experiments on the psychological benefits of teasing, and he believes that teasing plays an invaluable role in helping us form and maintain positive relationships.19
Locn. 1790-93 Just like a dog might play-bite another dog to show that it wants to be friends, we bare our teeth to each other in order to remind each other that we could, but never really would, hurt each other. Conversely, by allowing someone else to tease us, we confirm our willingness to be in a vulnerable position. We are actively demonstrating our trust in the other person’s regard for our emotional well-being.
Locn. 2036-37 on the other hand, just because the kills don’t have value doesn’t mean they don’t have meaning.
Locn. 2043-48 How do we get more meaning in our lives? It’s actually quite simple. Philosophers, psychologists, and spiritual leaders agree: the single best way to add meaning to our lives is to connect our daily actions to something bigger than ourselves—and the bigger, the better. As Martin Seligman says, “The self is a very poor site for meaning.” We can’t matter outside of a large-scale social context. “The larger the entity you can attach yourself to,” Seligman advises, “the more meaning you can derive.”8
Locn. 2243-46 The world’s oldest known example of an epic built environment is the Gobekli Tepe. Discovered less than two decades ago in southeastern Turkey, it’s believed to predate Stonehenge by a staggering six thousand years. It’s a twenty-five-acre arrangement of at least twenty stone circles, between ten and thirty meters in diameter each, made from monolithic pillars three meters high.
Locn. 2410-15 Jean M. Twenge, a professor of psychology and the author of Generation Me, has persuasively argued that the youngest generations today—particularly anyone born after 1980—are, in her words, “more miserable than ever before.” Why? Because of our increased cultural emphasis on “self-esteem” and “self-fulfillment.” But real fulfillment, as countless psychologists, philosophers, and spiritual leaders have shown, comes from fulfilling commitments to others. We want to be esteemed in the eyes of others, not for “who we are,” but rather for what we’ve done that really matters.
Locn. 2513-14 We’re not alone. Chore Wars is one of the best reviewed and most beloved, if little known, secrets on the Internet.
Locn. 3503-6 Because a critical mass is so important to games like the Comfort of Strangers, in 2008 Evans and Johnson cofounded an annual Bristol-based festival called Interesting Games, or Igfest, for innovative outdoor games. The festival is meant to provide support for and exposure to other game developers who are working to make cities more interesting and friendlier spaces.
Locn. 3848-52 The two most frequently recommended happiness activities across the scientific literature are to express gratitude and practice acts of kindness. Recent research has shown that we don’t even have to know someone to experience the benefits of thanking and being nice to them. Even fleeting acts of gratitude and kindness toward strangers can have a profound impact on our happiness. And positive gestures from strangers can make a big difference in how rich and satisfying our everyday lives feel.
Locn. 4028-33 Tombstone Hold ’Em is meant to make remembering death easier and more rewarding, by taking advantage of the largely underutilized social and recreational potential of cemeteries. The central activity of Tombstone Hold ’Em poker is learning how to “see” a playing card in any tombstone, based on its shape (the suit) and the names and date of death (the face value). Once you can read stones as cards, you can spot “hands” all around you. The game works in any cemetery, as long as there are clearly marked tombstones. Here’s how it plays out:
Locn. 4714-19 Free Rice; together, according to the game’s FAQ, their efforts add up to enough rice to feed an average of seven thousand people per day. Why is Free Rice able to capture so much engagement? It isn’t just that it is a force for good; it’s also classically good game design. It takes just seconds to complete a task, meaning you can get a lot of work done quickly. You get instant visual feedback: grains of rice stacking up in a bowl, with a constantly rising total of grains that you’ve earned. Because the game gets easier when you make mistakes and harder when you answer correctly, it’s easy to experience flow: you’re always playing at the limits of your ability.
Locn. 4914-22 these four principles all serve the ultimate goal of building a compelling game world, satisfying game mechanics, and an inspiring game community. The Player Investment Design Lead will design the mechanics that drive in-game player reward and incentives: • So players feel invested in the world and their character. • So players have long-term goals. • So players can’t grief or exploit them, or each other. • So that content are rewards in and of themselves.
Locn. 5009-11 The game’s motto is “Got two minutes? Be extraordinary!” Players can log in to the game from wherever they are and browse a list of “microvolunteer” missions that they can start and finish in literally just a few minutes. Each mission helps a real nonprofit organization accomplish one of its goals.
Locn. 5365-71 Collaboration is a special way of working together. It requires three distinct kinds of concerted effort: cooperating (acting purposefully toward a common goal), coordinating (synchronizing efforts and sharing resources), and cocreating (producing a novel outcome together). This third element, cocreation, is what sets collaboration apart from other collective efforts: it is a fundamentally generative act. Collaboration isn’t just about achieving a goal or joining forces; it’s about creating something together that it would be impossible to create alone.
Locn. 6927-34 We can create any future we can imagine. That is the big idea we started with, fourteen chapters ago, as we set off to investigate why good games make us better, and how they can help us change the world. Along the way, we’ve gleaned industry secrets—more than thirty years’ worth—from some of the most successful computer and video game developers in the world. We’ve compared these secrets alongside the most important scientific findings of the past decade, from the field of positive-psychology research. We’ve identified key innovations in the emerging landscape of alternate reality design. And we’ve tracked how game design is creating new ways for us to work together at extreme scales, and to solve bigger real-world problems.
Locn. 7182-83 visit the website for this book, www.realityisbroken.org.
Locn. 7186-87 world—join the social network Gameful, at www.gameful.org.
Sunday, 22 May 2011
Simply Effective: How to Cut Through Complexity in Your Organization and Get Things Done (Ron Ashkenas)
I was recommended this book by a colleague in a work book club and could really see why. I particularly liked the point that most of us, as managers, actually create our own waves of complexity through the organisation whilst simultaneously complaining about everyone else's.
On the positive side this means we can all do something about it, whatever our role we can make our lives easier and the same for those around us.
The book looks a four main categories of complexity and suggests ways to attack them (simply)
Locn. 80-81 Despite our recent economic struggles, the global economy is not going to get less complex. If anything, it will grow more difficult to understand. In addition, the pace of technological innovation and breakthrough will continue to increase, which will also add to complexity.
Locn. 137-41 Trying to get things done in organizations today often feels like walking in quicksand. If you are a manager or an executive who is anxious to get results, you know what I mean. There are too many meetings, too many reports, too much information, and too many stakeholders-all of whom have different views on what should be done and how. Processes don't work or take too long. Decisions are delayed or unclear. Presentations go on forever. And the boundaries between home and work, online and offline, have broken down with e-mails and cell phones and 24/7 availability. Complexity is out of control and getting worse-and it compromises our ability to be effective.
Locn. 211-12 to start developing a simplification strategy, you need to understand the four sources of complexity in organizations (figure 1-1): 1. Structural mitosis 2. Product and service proliferation 3. Process evolution 4. Managerial behavior
Locn. 587-89 The origin of the Lindex was an article Calhoun had read about the organization structure of the Canadian civil service.' Calhoun adapted this article's formula for assessing functional health (based on the average length of communication chains from the top to the bottom of a hierarchy) so that his managers could compute their own Lindex scores.
Locn. 666-67 managing your organization's product portfolio entails much the same challenge. It is difficult to be selective and to choose between alternatives that all look good. As a result, many organizations get caught up in the trap of trying to manage far too many products and services.
Locn. 678-81 on the one hand, managers are told to be entrepreneurial and creative and stay close to their markets-in other words, drive growth through constantly coming up with new ways of delighting customers. Many companies in fact have incentives for new product ideas and set goals for deriving a certain amount of revenue from new products. On the other hand, managers are also told to increase the sales volume of existing products and services, leverage the existing product and expense base, and build the brand and image of current offerings. So managers and employees (and customers) naturally develop emotional attachments to current products. With these two sets of messages in mind, most companies avoid making choices.
Locn. 714-16 System complexity is the extent to which your products and services must integrate with those of other suppliers to create value for a customer. Obviously, some products or services are stand-alone and don't need other products to function. But many are components that need to be combined or used with others in some way-and organizations need to pay attention to the complexity that this can create.
Locn. 745-46 He suggests that product simplification is a matter of "more is less"-fewer features, fewer buttons, fewer distractions-so that the customer can get the most out of the product.'
Locn. 886 • Local differences: As organizations evolve, the same processes are often done differently in different places.
Locn. 887-88 • Multiplication of steps and loops: As they encounter unique or recurring problems, processes tend to acquire more steps, more controls, and more people in the pursuit of solutions. Such solutions are rarely abandoned,
Locn. 889-90 • Informality of process: A third source of complexity is lack of rigor about how a process really is supposed to be carried out.
Locn. 891-92 • Lack of cross functional or cross-unit transparency: People naturally tend to focus on their part of the process rather than the whole,
Locn. 939-43 This focus on control is based on the hierarchical notion that all information needs to flow up the chain of command for approval. Often however, the more high-level approvals there are, the further the managers are from the real data and the ability to actually add value. So not only are the reviews and controls not worth much, but they also slow down the process and reduce the empowerment and sense of accountability of the people closer to the decision. In fact, when there are many layers of approval, people on the ground may not give an issue the proper attention, because they assume that someone further up the line will catch anything they miss.
Locn. 1029-31 The main value of process mapping is to allow stakeholders-all of whom see the process from different vantage points-to develop a common view of what's currently being done and what might be done differently.
Locn. 1086-88 The purpose of the rapid-results approach is to use people's natural bias toward action as a catalyst for immediate process simplification. In many situations, analysis and study can become excuses for maintaining the status quo and avoiding real process change: the "we can't do anything until we have all the data"
Locn. 1122-24 The key to using these tools to drive process simplification, however, is to make sure to align the what, why, and how: what processes are being addressed, why they have become overly complex, and how best to tackle them.
Locn. 1183-86 Robert Kaplan and Rob Kaiser, leadership consultants who have studied and worked with thousands of managers, contend that the shortcoming of most managers often is not in what they do-but in what they "over-do." I Managers succeed in their careers by applying certain behaviors and skills that tend to work for them, both in their personal lives and in business. With the reinforcement of success in mind, they continue these behaviors and build on them when moving into new or more responsible positions. Over time, a manager can become reliant on these behaviors as a core skill set
Locn. 1196-99 Consider the following question. Imagine that your CEO asks you to take on a special one-day-a-week assignment working directly with her. It involves interesting travel and some exciting work-but requires you to do the rest of your job in the remaining time. Would you take the assignment? I've asked this question of thousands of managers over the years, and 99 percent of them say they would take the assignment and figure out a way to do their regular jobs more efficiently. And in discussing why, they acknowledge that at least 20 percent of their time is regularly taken up with things that keep them busy and comfortable, but that don't add much value.
Locn. 1207-9 Much of the managerially generated complexity in organizations comes from overdone behaviors-from too much of a good thing and the associated avoidance of its opposite. This dynamic is difficult to see because managers tend to think they are doing the right thing in the right way. But too much of one right thing, coupled with too little of its opposite, is often wrong.
Locn. 1349-50 a RACI chart-which is a simple way of setting out who has responsibility, who has ultimate accountability, who needs to be consulted, and who needs to be informed.
Locn. 1382-84 you can build a request for feedback into the end of your message. With individuals, you can simply ask them to summarize the key points that they heard; in a group, you can ask a few people to do the same; and with a presentation, you can ask for written feedback or have a few volunteers speak out.
Locn. 1389-90 So instead of clear and simple communication, presentations too often become reports masquerading as slides, or cuteness competitions, or ways of preventing instead of facilitating dialogue. To counter this trend, one firm instituted the "one-minute drill" for presentations-forcing people to reduce their message to its essence, in slides that could be presented in only a minute.
Locn. 1393-96 Meetings are not just a fact of life in organizations; they're a way of life. Some managers can spend up to 80 percent of their time in meetings, particularly in organizations that are heavily matrixed, global, and process focused. Unfortunately, as most managers will attest, much of the time spent in meetings is unproductive, frustrating, and wasteful.
Locn. 1412-13 E-mail might seem insignificant or innocuous, but inbox overload is a serious source of organizational complexity.
Locn. 1415-17 For instance, when a manager sends large numbers of people a message on issues that many of them don't need to know about, it just burdens colleagues with low-value information that distracts them from matters more important. A frequent culprit is the "reply all" button, which can create hundreds of e-mails, often about insignificant topics such as meeting schedules.
Locn. 1421-23 If you've read this far-and thoughtfully considered the twenty-two specific behaviors described in this chapter-you now realize that you may be a prime source of complexity in your organization. But if these managerial behaviors and others like them are largely unconscious and driven by psychological factors, how can they be overcome?
Locn. 1440-41 To launch the effort, the managing directors sent a note to all the vice presidents, asking them to identify ways that they could be more effective both individually and collectively.
Locn. 1463-64 Here are a few steps that you can take right now to drive simplicity in your own leadership role: 1. Fill out the questionnaire in table 5-1, and use it to reflect on your own behavior.
Locn. 1465-66 2. Share your questionnaire results and thinking with a few other managers or colleagues who know you well.
Locn. 1468-69 3. From your own reflection and the feedback from colleagues or a coach, select one or two specific ways that you can experiment with making things simpler by changing your own behavior.
Locn. 1469-71 These don't need to be huge changes-start small and gain some confidence. For example, try to change your e-mail patterns or the way that you plan and run meetings. Once you have some success, share what you've done with your colleagues or coach and identify additional simplification opportunities.
Locn. 1471-72 4. If possible, recruit others to go through the same process of reflection, experimentation, and learning-and meet with them as a group to share progress and ideas.
Locn. 1473-74 5. Finally, if you are in a position to drive simplification on a broader basis in your company, you can insist that your management team go through the process of reflection, experimentation, and learning together.
Locn. 1541-45 Lloyd Trotter, a former vice chairman of GE, describes the thought process like this: "We teach managers that they need to start with the `answer,' which is that their business needs double-digit earnings improvement every quarter and every year. They quickly realize that sales growth without leverage won't do it. So they have to figure out how to drive growth while increasing productivity. We don't complicate it: Material comes in the front door and products go out the back door. We have to get rid of any waste in the middle while also figuring out how to have the products or services be more valuable for our customers."
Locn. 1699-1700 It might sound obvious, but simplification won't happen if everyone approaches it differently. You need to create a common framework and language for simplification, and then train everyone on it. This not only gets everyone on the same page, but also creates widespread capacity for action and multiplication of results.
Locn. 1704-5 In addition to being orchestrated from the center, these training efforts had several other features that turn out to be critical for sustaining simplification over time:
• They propelled people into action to produce real results.
• They deliberately aimed at producing measurable change in a few months or less.
• They were rolled out quickly across the whole company and run largely by in-house people.
• They were so interactive as to be mind-bending.
Locn. 1722-24 In reality, however, organizational performance and reward systems are usually not so straightforward; they encompass multiple goals, measures that don't always reflect real behavior, and incentives that are not always directly linked to either the measure or the goals. The result is the confused and counterproductive practice that my colleague Steve Kerr refers to as "rewarding A while asking for B."
Locn. 1771-72 Simplification doesn't have to be complex. It doesn't have to be difficult. You can do a lot today and the next day to make your organization simpler for yourself, your colleagues, and your customers-even
Locn. 1777-80 most managers act as though they live in a box-a box that limits what they can do. Obviously, part of the box is determined by official limits set out in job descriptions, hierarchical arrangements, and formal work rules. But a large part of the box, perhaps even most of it, is self-created and self-imposed. We work within our comfort zones, doing what we think we should do or what we think other people want us to do. But most of the time, we don't question, challenge, or test those limits, which makes them self-perpetuating.
Locn. 1841-43 Most people in organizations want simplicity-it's not a hard sell. If you can help them understand how they can get better results while also making their lives easier, they'll listen. And if you can move them into action, you'll be a hero. The only limitation is you-your own definition of the box around your job. Expand the box. Expand the impact.
Locn. 1863-65 Hold Up a Mirror Much of the complexity in organizations is unconscious and unintentional. We tend to accept it and learn to live with it, and after a while, we don't even see it anymore. That's why a mirror is a powerful tool-it helps people see things about themselves that they can't see on their own. The diagnostic instruments included in this book, particularly the questionnaire in chapter 1, will help
Locn. 1868-70 Present a Business Case While complexity is often annoying and uncomfortable, the real reason for attacking it has to be rooted in business results and outcomes. Otherwise, simplicity will remain a value to aspire to, rather than a real driver of change and improvement.
Locn. 1878-79 Stimulate Fresh Thinking from the Outside In Remember the importance of designing your organization, your products, and your processes with your customers in mind. Simplicity often directly correlates with your ability to align with what your customers want, when they want it, and how they want it.
Locn. 1888-89 Build a Coalition You can certainly have an impact on your organization by modeling simplification in your own area. Other managers will take notice and your innovations may spread organically,
Locn. 1901-4 Demonstrate That Simplicity Makes a Difference Perhaps implicit in the first four tactics is the idea that you actually have to do something. Simplicity is great to talk about. Most people find it cathartic to share their complexity war stories. But nothing builds momentum for simplification as much as real success. If you're looking for one takeaway from this book, this is it: the way to make things simpler in your organization is to start simplifying. Just do it.
Locn. 1910-11 tools and approaches (which were first introduced in chapter 1) are listed here again as a reminder (table 7-1).
Locn. 1912-13 As a way of selecting which tool to use, consider the variables pictured in figure 7-2.1 What is the business result that needs to be achieved?
On the positive side this means we can all do something about it, whatever our role we can make our lives easier and the same for those around us.
The book looks a four main categories of complexity and suggests ways to attack them (simply)
Locn. 80-81 Despite our recent economic struggles, the global economy is not going to get less complex. If anything, it will grow more difficult to understand. In addition, the pace of technological innovation and breakthrough will continue to increase, which will also add to complexity.
Locn. 137-41 Trying to get things done in organizations today often feels like walking in quicksand. If you are a manager or an executive who is anxious to get results, you know what I mean. There are too many meetings, too many reports, too much information, and too many stakeholders-all of whom have different views on what should be done and how. Processes don't work or take too long. Decisions are delayed or unclear. Presentations go on forever. And the boundaries between home and work, online and offline, have broken down with e-mails and cell phones and 24/7 availability. Complexity is out of control and getting worse-and it compromises our ability to be effective.
Locn. 211-12 to start developing a simplification strategy, you need to understand the four sources of complexity in organizations (figure 1-1): 1. Structural mitosis 2. Product and service proliferation 3. Process evolution 4. Managerial behavior
Locn. 587-89 The origin of the Lindex was an article Calhoun had read about the organization structure of the Canadian civil service.' Calhoun adapted this article's formula for assessing functional health (based on the average length of communication chains from the top to the bottom of a hierarchy) so that his managers could compute their own Lindex scores.
Locn. 666-67 managing your organization's product portfolio entails much the same challenge. It is difficult to be selective and to choose between alternatives that all look good. As a result, many organizations get caught up in the trap of trying to manage far too many products and services.
Locn. 678-81 on the one hand, managers are told to be entrepreneurial and creative and stay close to their markets-in other words, drive growth through constantly coming up with new ways of delighting customers. Many companies in fact have incentives for new product ideas and set goals for deriving a certain amount of revenue from new products. On the other hand, managers are also told to increase the sales volume of existing products and services, leverage the existing product and expense base, and build the brand and image of current offerings. So managers and employees (and customers) naturally develop emotional attachments to current products. With these two sets of messages in mind, most companies avoid making choices.
Locn. 714-16 System complexity is the extent to which your products and services must integrate with those of other suppliers to create value for a customer. Obviously, some products or services are stand-alone and don't need other products to function. But many are components that need to be combined or used with others in some way-and organizations need to pay attention to the complexity that this can create.
Locn. 745-46 He suggests that product simplification is a matter of "more is less"-fewer features, fewer buttons, fewer distractions-so that the customer can get the most out of the product.'
Locn. 886 • Local differences: As organizations evolve, the same processes are often done differently in different places.
Locn. 887-88 • Multiplication of steps and loops: As they encounter unique or recurring problems, processes tend to acquire more steps, more controls, and more people in the pursuit of solutions. Such solutions are rarely abandoned,
Locn. 889-90 • Informality of process: A third source of complexity is lack of rigor about how a process really is supposed to be carried out.
Locn. 891-92 • Lack of cross functional or cross-unit transparency: People naturally tend to focus on their part of the process rather than the whole,
Locn. 939-43 This focus on control is based on the hierarchical notion that all information needs to flow up the chain of command for approval. Often however, the more high-level approvals there are, the further the managers are from the real data and the ability to actually add value. So not only are the reviews and controls not worth much, but they also slow down the process and reduce the empowerment and sense of accountability of the people closer to the decision. In fact, when there are many layers of approval, people on the ground may not give an issue the proper attention, because they assume that someone further up the line will catch anything they miss.
Locn. 1029-31 The main value of process mapping is to allow stakeholders-all of whom see the process from different vantage points-to develop a common view of what's currently being done and what might be done differently.
Locn. 1086-88 The purpose of the rapid-results approach is to use people's natural bias toward action as a catalyst for immediate process simplification. In many situations, analysis and study can become excuses for maintaining the status quo and avoiding real process change: the "we can't do anything until we have all the data"
Locn. 1122-24 The key to using these tools to drive process simplification, however, is to make sure to align the what, why, and how: what processes are being addressed, why they have become overly complex, and how best to tackle them.
Locn. 1183-86 Robert Kaplan and Rob Kaiser, leadership consultants who have studied and worked with thousands of managers, contend that the shortcoming of most managers often is not in what they do-but in what they "over-do." I Managers succeed in their careers by applying certain behaviors and skills that tend to work for them, both in their personal lives and in business. With the reinforcement of success in mind, they continue these behaviors and build on them when moving into new or more responsible positions. Over time, a manager can become reliant on these behaviors as a core skill set
Locn. 1196-99 Consider the following question. Imagine that your CEO asks you to take on a special one-day-a-week assignment working directly with her. It involves interesting travel and some exciting work-but requires you to do the rest of your job in the remaining time. Would you take the assignment? I've asked this question of thousands of managers over the years, and 99 percent of them say they would take the assignment and figure out a way to do their regular jobs more efficiently. And in discussing why, they acknowledge that at least 20 percent of their time is regularly taken up with things that keep them busy and comfortable, but that don't add much value.
Locn. 1207-9 Much of the managerially generated complexity in organizations comes from overdone behaviors-from too much of a good thing and the associated avoidance of its opposite. This dynamic is difficult to see because managers tend to think they are doing the right thing in the right way. But too much of one right thing, coupled with too little of its opposite, is often wrong.
Locn. 1349-50 a RACI chart-which is a simple way of setting out who has responsibility, who has ultimate accountability, who needs to be consulted, and who needs to be informed.
Locn. 1382-84 you can build a request for feedback into the end of your message. With individuals, you can simply ask them to summarize the key points that they heard; in a group, you can ask a few people to do the same; and with a presentation, you can ask for written feedback or have a few volunteers speak out.
Locn. 1389-90 So instead of clear and simple communication, presentations too often become reports masquerading as slides, or cuteness competitions, or ways of preventing instead of facilitating dialogue. To counter this trend, one firm instituted the "one-minute drill" for presentations-forcing people to reduce their message to its essence, in slides that could be presented in only a minute.
Locn. 1393-96 Meetings are not just a fact of life in organizations; they're a way of life. Some managers can spend up to 80 percent of their time in meetings, particularly in organizations that are heavily matrixed, global, and process focused. Unfortunately, as most managers will attest, much of the time spent in meetings is unproductive, frustrating, and wasteful.
Locn. 1412-13 E-mail might seem insignificant or innocuous, but inbox overload is a serious source of organizational complexity.
Locn. 1415-17 For instance, when a manager sends large numbers of people a message on issues that many of them don't need to know about, it just burdens colleagues with low-value information that distracts them from matters more important. A frequent culprit is the "reply all" button, which can create hundreds of e-mails, often about insignificant topics such as meeting schedules.
Locn. 1421-23 If you've read this far-and thoughtfully considered the twenty-two specific behaviors described in this chapter-you now realize that you may be a prime source of complexity in your organization. But if these managerial behaviors and others like them are largely unconscious and driven by psychological factors, how can they be overcome?
Locn. 1440-41 To launch the effort, the managing directors sent a note to all the vice presidents, asking them to identify ways that they could be more effective both individually and collectively.
Locn. 1463-64 Here are a few steps that you can take right now to drive simplicity in your own leadership role: 1. Fill out the questionnaire in table 5-1, and use it to reflect on your own behavior.
Locn. 1465-66 2. Share your questionnaire results and thinking with a few other managers or colleagues who know you well.
Locn. 1468-69 3. From your own reflection and the feedback from colleagues or a coach, select one or two specific ways that you can experiment with making things simpler by changing your own behavior.
Locn. 1469-71 These don't need to be huge changes-start small and gain some confidence. For example, try to change your e-mail patterns or the way that you plan and run meetings. Once you have some success, share what you've done with your colleagues or coach and identify additional simplification opportunities.
Locn. 1471-72 4. If possible, recruit others to go through the same process of reflection, experimentation, and learning-and meet with them as a group to share progress and ideas.
Locn. 1473-74 5. Finally, if you are in a position to drive simplification on a broader basis in your company, you can insist that your management team go through the process of reflection, experimentation, and learning together.
Locn. 1541-45 Lloyd Trotter, a former vice chairman of GE, describes the thought process like this: "We teach managers that they need to start with the `answer,' which is that their business needs double-digit earnings improvement every quarter and every year. They quickly realize that sales growth without leverage won't do it. So they have to figure out how to drive growth while increasing productivity. We don't complicate it: Material comes in the front door and products go out the back door. We have to get rid of any waste in the middle while also figuring out how to have the products or services be more valuable for our customers."
Locn. 1699-1700 It might sound obvious, but simplification won't happen if everyone approaches it differently. You need to create a common framework and language for simplification, and then train everyone on it. This not only gets everyone on the same page, but also creates widespread capacity for action and multiplication of results.
Locn. 1704-5 In addition to being orchestrated from the center, these training efforts had several other features that turn out to be critical for sustaining simplification over time:
• They propelled people into action to produce real results.
• They deliberately aimed at producing measurable change in a few months or less.
• They were rolled out quickly across the whole company and run largely by in-house people.
• They were so interactive as to be mind-bending.
Locn. 1722-24 In reality, however, organizational performance and reward systems are usually not so straightforward; they encompass multiple goals, measures that don't always reflect real behavior, and incentives that are not always directly linked to either the measure or the goals. The result is the confused and counterproductive practice that my colleague Steve Kerr refers to as "rewarding A while asking for B."
Locn. 1771-72 Simplification doesn't have to be complex. It doesn't have to be difficult. You can do a lot today and the next day to make your organization simpler for yourself, your colleagues, and your customers-even
Locn. 1777-80 most managers act as though they live in a box-a box that limits what they can do. Obviously, part of the box is determined by official limits set out in job descriptions, hierarchical arrangements, and formal work rules. But a large part of the box, perhaps even most of it, is self-created and self-imposed. We work within our comfort zones, doing what we think we should do or what we think other people want us to do. But most of the time, we don't question, challenge, or test those limits, which makes them self-perpetuating.
Locn. 1841-43 Most people in organizations want simplicity-it's not a hard sell. If you can help them understand how they can get better results while also making their lives easier, they'll listen. And if you can move them into action, you'll be a hero. The only limitation is you-your own definition of the box around your job. Expand the box. Expand the impact.
Locn. 1863-65 Hold Up a Mirror Much of the complexity in organizations is unconscious and unintentional. We tend to accept it and learn to live with it, and after a while, we don't even see it anymore. That's why a mirror is a powerful tool-it helps people see things about themselves that they can't see on their own. The diagnostic instruments included in this book, particularly the questionnaire in chapter 1, will help
Locn. 1868-70 Present a Business Case While complexity is often annoying and uncomfortable, the real reason for attacking it has to be rooted in business results and outcomes. Otherwise, simplicity will remain a value to aspire to, rather than a real driver of change and improvement.
Locn. 1878-79 Stimulate Fresh Thinking from the Outside In Remember the importance of designing your organization, your products, and your processes with your customers in mind. Simplicity often directly correlates with your ability to align with what your customers want, when they want it, and how they want it.
Locn. 1888-89 Build a Coalition You can certainly have an impact on your organization by modeling simplification in your own area. Other managers will take notice and your innovations may spread organically,
Locn. 1901-4 Demonstrate That Simplicity Makes a Difference Perhaps implicit in the first four tactics is the idea that you actually have to do something. Simplicity is great to talk about. Most people find it cathartic to share their complexity war stories. But nothing builds momentum for simplification as much as real success. If you're looking for one takeaway from this book, this is it: the way to make things simpler in your organization is to start simplifying. Just do it.
Locn. 1910-11 tools and approaches (which were first introduced in chapter 1) are listed here again as a reminder (table 7-1).
Locn. 1912-13 As a way of selecting which tool to use, consider the variables pictured in figure 7-2.1 What is the business result that needs to be achieved?
Monday, 16 May 2011
Who: The A Method for Hiring (Randy Street and Geoff Smart)
A thought provoking book on how to populate your team (or company) with top performing talent. Not just about the selection process itself but it also covers techniques for filling the pipeline so you have candidates when you have vacancies to fill.
The basic premise is that as a manager, your role is to select the team (the who) who do the tasks (the what), not to do the tasks yourself.
The book lays out a structure for defining the characteristics of who you want to hire, then a very structured process to screen and interview and background check the candidates.
A definite must read for anyone hiring staff, or who wants to build a top-performing team.
Locn. 20-22 The most important decisions that businesspeople make are not what decisions, but who decisions. —JIM COLLINS, AUTHOR OF GOOD TO GREAT
Locn. 28-30 Who refers to the people you put in place to make the what decisions. Who is running your sales force? Who is assembling your product? Who is occupying the corner office? Who is where the magic begins, or where the problems start.
Locn. 61-62 “Your success as a manager is simply the result of how good you are at hiring the people around you.”
Locn. 67-68 who mistakes are pricey. According to studies we’ve done with our clients, the average hiring mistake costs fifteen times an employee’s base salary in hard costs and productivity loss.
Locn. 107-8 One of the basic failures in the hiring process is this: What is a resume? It is a record of a person’s career with all of the accomplishments embellished and all the failures removed.”
Locn. 170-71 We like to see people as fundamentally truthful. We wish that it were so, but one of the painful truths of hiring is this: it is hard to see people for who they really are.
Locn. 177-78 We define an A Player this way: a candidate who has at least a 90 percent chance of achieving a set of outcomes that only the top 10 percent of possible candidates could achieve.
Locn. 199-201 In business, you are who you hire. Hire C Players, and you will always lose to the competition. Hire B Players, and you might do okay, but you will never break out. Hire A Players, and life gets very interesting no matter what you are pursuing.
Locn. 270-71 The mission is an executive summary of the job’s core purpose. It boils the job down to its essence so everybody understands why you need to hire someone into the slot.
Locn. 323-24 Outcomes, the second part of a scorecard, describe what a person needs to accomplish in a role. Most of the jobs for which we hire have three to eight outcomes, ranked by order of importance.
Locn. 330-33 While typical job descriptions break down because they focus on activities, or a list of things a person will be doing (calling on customers, selling), scorecards succeed because they focus on outcomes, or what a person must get done (grow revenue from $25 million to $50 million by the end of year three). Do you see the distinction?
Locn. 345-46 Competencies define how you expect a new hire to operate in the fulfillment of the job and the achievement of the outcomes.
Locn. 522-31 HOW TO CREATE A SCORECARD 1. MISSION. Develop a short statement of one to five sentences that describes why a role exists. For example, “The mission for the customer service representative is to help customers resolve their questions and complaints with the highest level of courtesy possible.” 2. OUTCOMES. Develop three to eight specific, objective outcomes that a person must accomplish to achieve an A performance. For example, “Improve customer satisfaction on a ten-point scale from 7.1 to 9.0 by December 31.” 3. COMPETENCIES. Identify as many role-based competencies as you think appropriate to describe the behaviors someone must demonstrate to achieve the outcomes. Next, identify five to eight competencies that describe your culture and place those on every scorecard. For example, “Competencies include efficiency, honesty, high standards, and a customer service mentality.” 4. ENSURE ALIGNMENT AND COMMUNICATE. Pressure-test your scorecard by comparing it with the business plan and scorecards of the people who will interface with the role. Ensure that there is consistency and alignment. Then share the scorecard with relevant parties, including peers and recruiters.
Locn. 556-57 The overwhelming evidence from our field interviews is that ads are a good way to generate a tidal wave of resumes, but a lousy way to generate the right flow of candidates.
Locn. 574-77 You can almost certainly identify ten extremely talented people off the top of your head. Calling your list of ten and asking Patrick Ryan’s simple question—“Who are the most talented people you know that I should hire?”—can easily generate another fifty to one hundred names. Keep doing this, and in no time you will have moved into many other networks and enriched your personal talent pool with real ability.
Locn. 608-10 “We told the employees, ‘If you spot somebody like us, at a customer, at a supplier, or at a competitor, we want to hire them.’ That became very successful. People would say there is a great person there; let’s go after them. Employees referred 85 percent of our new hires!”
Locn. 685-87 The final step in the sourcing process, the one that matters more than anything else you can do, is scheduling thirty minutes on your calendar every week to identify and nurture A Players. A standing meeting on Monday or Friday will keep you honest by forcing you to call the top talent on your radar screen.
Locn. 687 plan for how to use the timr to best efffect
Locn. 907-9 Screening interviews separate the wheat from the chaff, but they are not precise enough to ensure a 90 percent or better hiring success rate. To be more confident and accurate in your selection, you will want to conduct a Topgrading Interview.
Locn. 1350-52 Have you heard the riddle about the five frogs on a log? It goes like this: Five frogs are on a log and one decides to jump off. How many are left? If you answered “five,” you are correct. Deciding to do something and actually doing it are two different things.
Locn. 1463-67 George Buckley of 3M grants freedom by building trust with his employees. “A lot of CEOs think the role of the CEO is to be aloof, like a judge in a courtroom,” he told us. “But the role of the CEO is to inspire people, and you cannot inspire people unless you get to know them and them you. Don’t cut corners on that. It takes energy. CEOs are sometimes afraid to be real people. If you want to extract as much value as possible out of somebody in an organization, you have to let them be themselves.
Locn. 1483-85 Freedom matters to today’s workforce, and especially to the most valuable among them. A Players want to operate without micromanagement, develop their own leadership styles, and prove their own worth. Show them that both you personally and your organizational culture will support their need for freedom, and you’ll go a long way toward sealing the deal.
Locn. 1645-47 HOW TO INSTALL THE A METHOD FOR HIRING IN YOUR COMPANY You have to do ten things if you want to install the A Method for Hiring in your business: (you need to get the book to see the list)
Locn. 1817-19 When we met with General Clark, he said, “What got you promoted to one rank won’t necessarily get you promoted to the next rank.” The scorecard changes the higher somebody climbs in an organization, which means how you think about a person’s capabilities must change.
Locn. 1866 Not everybody was good at everything. They just had to be exceptional at one thing.
Locn. 1902-3 Visit www.ghsmart.com to learn more.
The basic premise is that as a manager, your role is to select the team (the who) who do the tasks (the what), not to do the tasks yourself.
The book lays out a structure for defining the characteristics of who you want to hire, then a very structured process to screen and interview and background check the candidates.
A definite must read for anyone hiring staff, or who wants to build a top-performing team.
Locn. 20-22 The most important decisions that businesspeople make are not what decisions, but who decisions. —JIM COLLINS, AUTHOR OF GOOD TO GREAT
Locn. 28-30 Who refers to the people you put in place to make the what decisions. Who is running your sales force? Who is assembling your product? Who is occupying the corner office? Who is where the magic begins, or where the problems start.
Locn. 61-62 “Your success as a manager is simply the result of how good you are at hiring the people around you.”
Locn. 67-68 who mistakes are pricey. According to studies we’ve done with our clients, the average hiring mistake costs fifteen times an employee’s base salary in hard costs and productivity loss.
Locn. 107-8 One of the basic failures in the hiring process is this: What is a resume? It is a record of a person’s career with all of the accomplishments embellished and all the failures removed.”
Locn. 170-71 We like to see people as fundamentally truthful. We wish that it were so, but one of the painful truths of hiring is this: it is hard to see people for who they really are.
Locn. 177-78 We define an A Player this way: a candidate who has at least a 90 percent chance of achieving a set of outcomes that only the top 10 percent of possible candidates could achieve.
Locn. 199-201 In business, you are who you hire. Hire C Players, and you will always lose to the competition. Hire B Players, and you might do okay, but you will never break out. Hire A Players, and life gets very interesting no matter what you are pursuing.
Locn. 270-71 The mission is an executive summary of the job’s core purpose. It boils the job down to its essence so everybody understands why you need to hire someone into the slot.
Locn. 323-24 Outcomes, the second part of a scorecard, describe what a person needs to accomplish in a role. Most of the jobs for which we hire have three to eight outcomes, ranked by order of importance.
Locn. 330-33 While typical job descriptions break down because they focus on activities, or a list of things a person will be doing (calling on customers, selling), scorecards succeed because they focus on outcomes, or what a person must get done (grow revenue from $25 million to $50 million by the end of year three). Do you see the distinction?
Locn. 345-46 Competencies define how you expect a new hire to operate in the fulfillment of the job and the achievement of the outcomes.
Locn. 522-31 HOW TO CREATE A SCORECARD 1. MISSION. Develop a short statement of one to five sentences that describes why a role exists. For example, “The mission for the customer service representative is to help customers resolve their questions and complaints with the highest level of courtesy possible.” 2. OUTCOMES. Develop three to eight specific, objective outcomes that a person must accomplish to achieve an A performance. For example, “Improve customer satisfaction on a ten-point scale from 7.1 to 9.0 by December 31.” 3. COMPETENCIES. Identify as many role-based competencies as you think appropriate to describe the behaviors someone must demonstrate to achieve the outcomes. Next, identify five to eight competencies that describe your culture and place those on every scorecard. For example, “Competencies include efficiency, honesty, high standards, and a customer service mentality.” 4. ENSURE ALIGNMENT AND COMMUNICATE. Pressure-test your scorecard by comparing it with the business plan and scorecards of the people who will interface with the role. Ensure that there is consistency and alignment. Then share the scorecard with relevant parties, including peers and recruiters.
Locn. 556-57 The overwhelming evidence from our field interviews is that ads are a good way to generate a tidal wave of resumes, but a lousy way to generate the right flow of candidates.
Locn. 574-77 You can almost certainly identify ten extremely talented people off the top of your head. Calling your list of ten and asking Patrick Ryan’s simple question—“Who are the most talented people you know that I should hire?”—can easily generate another fifty to one hundred names. Keep doing this, and in no time you will have moved into many other networks and enriched your personal talent pool with real ability.
Locn. 608-10 “We told the employees, ‘If you spot somebody like us, at a customer, at a supplier, or at a competitor, we want to hire them.’ That became very successful. People would say there is a great person there; let’s go after them. Employees referred 85 percent of our new hires!”
Locn. 685-87 The final step in the sourcing process, the one that matters more than anything else you can do, is scheduling thirty minutes on your calendar every week to identify and nurture A Players. A standing meeting on Monday or Friday will keep you honest by forcing you to call the top talent on your radar screen.
Locn. 687 plan for how to use the timr to best efffect
Locn. 907-9 Screening interviews separate the wheat from the chaff, but they are not precise enough to ensure a 90 percent or better hiring success rate. To be more confident and accurate in your selection, you will want to conduct a Topgrading Interview.
Locn. 1350-52 Have you heard the riddle about the five frogs on a log? It goes like this: Five frogs are on a log and one decides to jump off. How many are left? If you answered “five,” you are correct. Deciding to do something and actually doing it are two different things.
Locn. 1463-67 George Buckley of 3M grants freedom by building trust with his employees. “A lot of CEOs think the role of the CEO is to be aloof, like a judge in a courtroom,” he told us. “But the role of the CEO is to inspire people, and you cannot inspire people unless you get to know them and them you. Don’t cut corners on that. It takes energy. CEOs are sometimes afraid to be real people. If you want to extract as much value as possible out of somebody in an organization, you have to let them be themselves.
Locn. 1483-85 Freedom matters to today’s workforce, and especially to the most valuable among them. A Players want to operate without micromanagement, develop their own leadership styles, and prove their own worth. Show them that both you personally and your organizational culture will support their need for freedom, and you’ll go a long way toward sealing the deal.
Locn. 1645-47 HOW TO INSTALL THE A METHOD FOR HIRING IN YOUR COMPANY You have to do ten things if you want to install the A Method for Hiring in your business: (you need to get the book to see the list)
Locn. 1817-19 When we met with General Clark, he said, “What got you promoted to one rank won’t necessarily get you promoted to the next rank.” The scorecard changes the higher somebody climbs in an organization, which means how you think about a person’s capabilities must change.
Locn. 1866 Not everybody was good at everything. They just had to be exceptional at one thing.
Locn. 1902-3 Visit www.ghsmart.com to learn more.
Gamestorming (Dave Gray, Sunni Brown and James Macanufo)
A fantastic book for anyone interested in facilitating sessions on innovation (or in fact facilitating many other types of teambuilding sessions too). The book starts with the theory of how to construct effective sessions, don't be put off by the title it isn't about games - that's just the term the authors use for facilitated sessions.
Then there is a collection of many types of session to run based on the outcomes you want from your session.
Page 7
Loc. 908-9
A fuzzy goal is one that "motivates the general direction of the work, without blinding the team to opportunities along the journey."
Page 8
Loc. 931-34
Innovative teams need to navigate ambiguous, uncertain, and often complex information spaces. What is unknown usually far outweighs what is known. In many ways it's a journey in the fog, where the case studies haven't been written yet, and there are no examples of where it's been done successfully before. Voyages of discovery involve greater risks and more failures along the way than other endeavors. But the rewards are worth it.
Page 11
Loc. 968-69
The opening is not the time for critical thinking or skepticism; it's the time for blue-sky thinking, brainstorming, energy, and optimism. The keyword for opening is "divergent":
Page 14
Loc. 1027-29
You are searching for something that you may not find. You will almost certainly find things you don't expect. You have only a vague idea of what you will encounter along the way, and yet, like a turtle, you must carry everything you need on your back.
Page 17
Loc. 1077-78
The most common and powerful fire-starter is the question. A good question is like an arrow you can aim at any challenge.
Page 17
Loc. 1081-82
Another common fire-starter is called fill-in-the-blank, in which you craft a short phrase or sentence and ask people to fill in the blank like they would on a test.
Page 21
Loc. 1138-44
Affinity mapping is a common method that uses meaningful space to sort a large set of nodes into a few common themes. It is a way to rapidly get a group of people aligned about what they are working on together. First, generate a set of nodes using the Post-Up game or some other node-generation method (see Chapter 4). Next, create a meaningful space by dividing a whiteboard or other visual area into three columns. Ask people to sort the sticky notes into three columns that "feel like they belong together" without trying to name the columns. It's important that they not try to name the columns. Naming the columns too early will force them back into familiar, comfortable patterns.
Page 23
Loc. 1184-90
I cannot forbear to mention...a new device for study...which may seem trivial and almost ludicrous...[but] is extremely useful in arousing the mind...Look at a wall spotted with stains, or with a mixture of stones... you may discover a resemblance to landscapes...battles with figures in action...strange faces and costumes...and an endless variety of objects.... -- Leonardo da Vinci
Page 24
Loc. 1207-9
Improvisation is a way of thinking with your body. In role play, you take on the role of a character, imagine a situation, and act as you think your character would act in that situation. Putting yourself in another person's shoes helps you to empathize with that person's goals and challenges, and can lead to insights and better solutions.
Page 26
Loc. 1257-58
You don't need to know the final destination; only the next step in the journey. Just keep your eye on the fuzzy goal—the mountaintop, the imagined thing over the horizon—and the next step, the next game, that moves you one step in approximately the right direction.
Page 30
Loc. 1330-32
There are two big questions that are worth asking whenever you come across something new. First, what is it? And second, what can I do with it? The first question has to do with examination, while the second deals with experimentation.
Page 29
Loc. 1299
Opening questions are intended to open a portal into the game world.
Page 29
Loc. 1301
The trick of opening is to get people to feel comfortable with the process of working together while generating as many ideas as possible.
Page 29
Loc. 1309-10
The focus of opening questions is to find things you can work with later.
Page 29
Loc. 1316-18
Navigating questions help you assess and adjust your course while the game is underway. For example, summarize key points and confirm that people agree to ensure that you understand and that the group is aligned.
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Is the team fatigued? Are they frustrated or sapped of energy?
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Examining questions narrow your inquiry to focus on details, specifics, and observable characteristics. They make abstract ideas more concrete by quantifying and qualifying them.
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Experimental questions invoke the imagination. They are about possibility. What can we do with it? What opportunities does it create? Experimental questions are concerned with taking you to a higher level of abstraction to find similarities with other things, to make unlikely and unexpected connections.
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Closing questions serve the opposite function from opening questions. When you are opening you want to create as much divergence and variation as possible. When you are closing you want to focus on convergence and selection. Your goal at this stage is to move toward commitment, decisions, and action.
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The Graphic Gameplan uses a precisely designed set of meaningful spaces to organize people's thinking and move from ideas to action. Challenges are represented as a rough landscape, actions as an arrow, success factors as wheels, goals as a target, and so on.
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Most people draw a stick figure by starting with the head and adding the body afterward. This way of drawing a stick figure will almost always result in a big-headed, stiff stick figure. When drawing a person, you will get a much better effect if you start with the center of gravity and work outward. Draw a rectangle to represent the trunk of the body, trying to keep it at approximately the same angle.
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The next most prominent feature is the legs; they connect the person to the ground and have the most impact on the body's position. Draw a line to represent the ground and add lines for the legs and feet to connect the body to the ground.
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The next most important element to conveying attitude is the hands. We use our hands for nearly everything we do. Have you ever heard the advice given to public speakers to use their hands and to gesture to help them reinforce their meaning? The same principle applies to stick figures. Now try drawing the arms in position. A small circle is usually sufficient to represent the hands.
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Now take a look at the angle of the neck and head relative to the rest of the body. Notice that they are at different angles. Unless you are a soldier standing at attention, this is nearly always the case. We are constantly turning our heads to see better, to listen carefully, and so on. See if you can draw the head and attach it to the body with a single line at the right angle.
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Now that we have finished the figure we can think about the face. Think about the various smiley faces and other emoticons you can make on a computer keyboard. Those same combinations will suffice for nearly any facial expression you want. Adding a short line for the nose will help you show which direction the head is pointing.
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This can be especially important when you want to show two people interacting with each other. You can use the same principles you learned earlier to make the mailbox, by combining basic shapes from the visual alphabet. I live in the United States, where our mailboxes look like R2-D2 of Star Wars fame. Depending on where you live, yours may differ. I hope this short demonstration has convinced you that basic sketching skills are not out of your reach. Once you become comfortable with the preceding exercises, you can use them to help others become more comfortable with sketching
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In numerous workshops, I have found that you can get through these exercises with a group in about 10 to 15 minutes. In the time it takes for a brief coffee break you can familiarize a group with these concepts and get them comfortable enough to begin sketching out their ideas.
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The idea of bringing improv into a business context may seem intimidating, but the challenges are mostly in your mind. You're already improvising at work. In GameChangers: Improvisation for Business in the Networked World, improv expert Mike Bonifer reminds us that all of life is improvisation: from a conversation at the dinner table to the way we respond to unexpected situations, improv is natural; we do it all the time.
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If you have ideas, comments, or questions you can join the ongoing conversation at http://www.gogamestorm.com.
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Card sorting is a practice used frequently by information architects and designers to gather and structure inputs for a variety of purposes.
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Empathy Map OBJECT OF PLAY The object of this game is to quickly develop a customer or user profile.
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Ask the group to describe—from this person's point of view—what this person's experience is, moving through the categories from seeing through feeling. The goal of the exercise is to create a degree of empathy for the person with the group. The exercise shouldn't take more than 15 minutes. Ask the group to synthesize: What does this person want? What forces are motivating this person? What can we do for this person?
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Creating a forced ranking may be difficult for participants, as it requires they make clear-cut assessments about a set of items. In many cases, this is not the normal mode of operation for groups, where it is easier to add items to lists to string together agreement and support. Getting people to make these assessments, guided by clear criteria, is the entire point of forced ranking.
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WhoDo OBJECT OF PLAY The objective of this game is to brainstorm, plan, and prioritize actions.
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3-12-3 Brainstorm OBJECT OF PLAY This format for brainstorming compresses the essentials of an ideation session into one short format. The numbers 3-12-3 refer to the amount of time in minutes given to each of three activities: 3 minutes for generating a pool of observations, 12 for combining those observations into rough concepts, and 3 again for presenting the concepts back to a group. Essential to this format is strict time keeping. The "ticking clock" forces spontaneous, quick-fire decisions and doesn't allow for overthinking.
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In a typical group setting, extroverts tend to dominate the verbal contributions. And while their contributions are certainly important, it can be difficult to hear from quieter players who also have something valuable to offer. Let the players know that this play is intentionally silent. It affords the quiet people the opportunity to generate ideas without having to verbalize to the whole group, and it gives you certainty that you'll hear from every player in the room. Brainwriting also allows ideas to emerge before being critiqued and creates a space for them to be co-created, with multiple owners, and therefore a greater chance of follow-through.
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This warm-up does not result in a problem definition that will satisfy an engineer; rather, it engages participants in defining the challenge in a simplified form. It is a first step in bringing a group together under a common purpose, elevating the problem above the noise to become something they care to solve.
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People are well versed in having conversations; what most of us aren't used to is listening, observing, and being accountable for our observations. The Fishbowl game, therefore, is about engaging skills that in many of us have become rusty. So, despite the fact that it may look as though the action happens in the players' conversation, the action in this game happens in the outer circle, with the observers.
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Graphic Jam is an all-purpose visualization game that you can conduct before many other games as a warm-up, but it's also a useful game in itself. Visualizing abstract concepts supports logo development, presentation design, website design, metaphor development for e-learning, and so on. It exercises the visual part of our cortex—which accounts for 75% of our sensory neurons—and turns on parts of our minds that don't get much action in a typical business setting.
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History Map OBJECT OF PLAY Organizations naturally look ahead to anticipate progress. But the past can be as informative as the future. When an organization undergoes systemic or cultural change, documenting its history becomes an important process. By collecting and visualizing the components of history, we necessarily discover, recognize, and appreciate what got us where we are today.
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Mapping a history should be an enjoyable experience for the meeting leader and the participants. It's a time for storytelling, reflection, and appreciation of the life and experience of the organization. While you're helping the group document the history, set a supportive tone and encourage camaraderie, storytelling, and honesty—even about the hard times.
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Low-Tech Social Network OBJECT OF PLAY The object of this game is to introduce event participants to each other by co-creating a mural-sized, visual network of their connections.
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Pecha Kucha/Ignite OBJECT OF PLAY These fast, structured talks enable people to share ideas quickly and with a minimum of distraction. In addition, it puts the pressure on the person conveying the information to do so in a concise and compelling fashion.
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The rule of Pecha Kucha is 20 × 20: Presenters are allowed 20 slides, and they can spend 20 seconds per slide. Images are forwarded automatically—they are not under the control of the speaker.
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The goal of a poster session is to create a set of compelling images that summarize a challenge or topic for further discussion. Creating this set might be an "opening act" which then sets the stage for choosing an idea to pursue, or it might be a way to get indexed on a large topic. The act of creating a poster forces experts and otherwise passionate people to stop and think about the best way to communicate the core concepts of their material, avoiding the popular and default "show up and throw up."
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The participants' task is to create a poster that explains their topic. There are two constraints: It must be self-explanatory. If you gave it to a person without walking her through it, would she understand? It must be visual. Words and labels are good, but text alone will not be enough to get people's attention, or help them
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When creating their poster, participants may be helped by thinking about three kinds of explanation: Before and After: Describe "why" someone should care in terms of drawing the today and tomorrow of the idea. System: Describe the "what" of an idea in terms of its parts and their relationships. Process: Describe the "how" of an idea in terms of a sequence of events. Give participants 20 minutes to create their posters. When they have finished, create a "gallery" of the images by posting them on the wall. Instead of elaborate presentations, ask the group to circulate and walk the gallery. Some posters will attract and capture more attention than others. From here, it may be worthwhile to have participants dot vote (see Dot Voting in Chapter 4) or "vote with their feet" to decide what ideas to pursue further. STRATEGY As a variation, the posters may be created in small groups. In this case, it's important for the group to have decided ahead of time what their topic will be, and to give more time to come to a consensus on what they will draw and how they will draw it. On a smaller scale, a group may do this around a conference table. A small group of experts may create posters to explain their different points of view to each other at the start of a meeting, to make their models of the world, their vocabulary, and their interests clear and explicit. Twenty minutes spent in this way may save the group from endless discussion later in their process. The Poster Session game is based on academic poster sessions, in which authors of papers that are not ready for publication share their ideas in an informal, conversational group. Pre-Mortem OBJECT OF PLAY Often in projects, the learning is all at the wrong end. Usually after things have already gone horribly wrong or off-track, members of the team gather in a "postmortem" to sagely reflect on what bad assumptions and courses of action added up to disaster. What makes this doubly unfortunate is that those same team members, somewhere in their collective experience, may have seen it coming. A pre-mortem is a way to open a space in a project at its inception to directly address its risks. Unlike a more formal risk analysis, the pre-mortem asks team members to directly tap into their experience and intuition, at a time when it is needed most, and is potentially the most useful. NUMBER OF PLAYERS Any, but typically small teams will have the most open dialogue DURATION OF PLAY Depends on the scope of an effort; allow up to five minutes for each participant HOW TO PLAY
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A pre-mortem is best conducted at the project's kickoff, with all key team members present and after the goals and plan have been laid out and understood. The exercise starts with a simple question: "What will go wrong?" though it may be elevated in phrasing to "How will this end in disaster?" This is an opportunity for the team to reflect on their collective experience and directly name risks or elephants lurking in the room. It's a chance to voice concerns that might otherwise go unaddressed until it's too late.
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Conducting a pre-mortem is deceptively simple. At the beginning of a project, the forward momentum and enthusiasm are often at their highest; these conditions do not naturally lend themselves to sharing notions of failure. By conducting a pre-mortem, a group deliberately creates a space to share their past learning, at a time when they can best act on it.
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Show and Tell taps into the power of metaphors to let players share their assumptions and associations around a topic. If you see multiple show pieces that don't exactly represent delight around a topic, that's a signal that the players may have some concerns that need to be addressed. Don't overanalyze the objects; pay more attention to the way the players describe the parallels to the topic. As the team leader, encourage and applaud honesty during the stories, and write down every point that players make that seem important to them. Keep the rest of the players quiet while someone is showing and telling.
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Show Me Your Values OBJECT OF PLAY Employees' perceptions of a company's values, whether they're conscious or not, contributes to their morale and their willingness to go the extra mile to support the mission. To get a sense of how employees perceive the values that drive an organization, an initiative, a system-wide change, or any other topic, play Show Me Your Values.
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Your job is to create a space in which people can say something that may be taboo but that everyone is thinking.
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Along with a RACI matrix and other "people + project" activities, stakeholder analysis is a basic framing tool for any project. For leaders and managers, it clearly scopes out who has what level of input and interest in a project, and can help to align decisions appropriately.
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Many of us make the mistaken assumption that others see what we see and know what we know. No one in the world shares your internal system map of reality. The best way to compare notes, so to speak, is to actually draw an external representation of what you think is happening.
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The mapping of an organization's existing business model, including its strengths and weaknesses, is an essential starting point to improve the current business model and/or develop new future business models. At the very least the game leads to a refined and shared understanding of an organization's business model. At its best it helps players develop strategic directions for the future by outlining new and/or improved business models for the organization.
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Employees spend hours sitting in training sessions, sifting through orientation manuals, and playing corporate e-learning games to learn the know-how for their new positions. But the reality is that the bulk of employee knowledge is gained through storytelling. Employees train each other by sharing their personal and professional experiences. Campfire leverages our natural storytelling tendencies by giving players a format and a space in which to share work stories—of trial and error, failure and success, competition, diplomacy, and teamwork. Campfire is useful not only because it acts as an informal training game, but also because it reveals commonalities in employee perception and experience.
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The goal of this game is to improve a product or strategy by thinking through various scenarios and alternatives. By turning the exercise into a competition as well as a storytelling game, players are more likely to get engaged and immerse themselves in the scenarios. Keeping it lighthearted and fun will increase the energy. It shouldn't feel like work.
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Customer, Employee, Shareholder OBJECT OF PLAY The object of this game is to imagine possible futures from multiple perspectives.
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What has been a time-proven exercise in product development applies equally well in developing any new idea: writing the elevator pitch. When developing and communicating a vision for something,
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To set up the generating phase, write these headers in sequence on flip charts: Who is the target customer? What is the customer need? What is the product name? What is its market category? What is its key benefit? Who or what is the competition? What is the product's unique differentiator?
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Five-Fingered Consensus OBJECT OF PLAY Like Red/Green Cards (discussed later in this chapter), this is a technique for managing the feedback loop between a facilitator and a large group. When working in breakouts or as a large group, it may be necessary to periodically gauge the level of perceived consensus, without spending an unnecessary amount of time talking about it.
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Give-and-Take Matrix OBJECT OF PLAY The goal of this game is to map out the motivations and interactions among actors in a system. The actors in this case may be as small-scale as individuals who need to work together to accomplish a task, or as large-scale as organizations brought together for a long-term purpose. A give-and-take matrix is a useful diagnostic tool, and helps players explore how value flows through the group.
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Help Me Understand is based on the underlying (and accurate) assumption is that employees come to meetings with widely different questions around a topic or a change. It assumes leadership can anticipate some questions and concerns but can't possibly anticipate them all. No one knows the questions employees have better than the employees themselves, so this game gives them a chance to externalize what's on their minds and have leadership be responsive in a setting outside the once-a-year leadership retreat. It also allows the players to discover overlaps with other players' questions and to notice the frequency with which those questions occur—something
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The Make a World game appeals to visual, auditory, and kinesthetic learners because of its layers of interaction. It's useful (and downright fun) because it lets players imagine the future and take action to create a first version of it.
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Open Space technology is a method for hosting large events, such as retreats and conferences, without a prepared agenda. Instead, participants are brought together under a guiding purpose and create the agenda for themselves in a bulletin-board fashion. These items become potential breakout sessions, and participants have the freedom to "vote with their feet" by moving between breakouts.
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Many decisions often boil down to one's basic choices between benefit and harm. By capturing these specifics for a key person, your group may uncover the most relevant points to bring up in presenting or influencing the key person's decision.
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Capture the answers on one side of the person: What does a bad day look like for him? What is he afraid of? What keeps him awake at night? What is he responsible for? What obstacles stand in his way? A persona's gains can be the inversion of the pain situation—or can go beyond. Capture these on the opposite side by asking: What does this person want and aspire to? How does he measure success? Given the subject at hand, how could this person benefit? What can we offer this person?
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Product Pinocchio is a game designed to establish, refine, and evolve the features of a product or service so that it becomes more valuable to the end user. By personifying it, we can better relate to it and better craft it into a "friend" that a consumer might want to take home.
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The object of this game is to quickly diagnose a group's level of understanding of the steps in a process.
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Through this exercise, the group will define an existing process at a high level and uncover areas of confusion or misunderstanding.
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Sometimes responsibilities aren't clear. Nothing erodes morale and performance faster than a difficult problem that belongs to someone else—or to everyone. When these situations raise their head, it may be necessary to call a group together to sort out who does what. By creating a RACI (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed) matrix,
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Feedback is difficult to manage in large group settings. For the presenter and the audience to track with each other, they need a means to communicate their approval, disagreement, or confusion as the event progresses. Red:Green Cards provide a simple means for channeling this feedback.
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Speedboat is a short and sweet way to identify what your employees or clients don't like about your product/service or what's standing in the way of a desired goal. As individuals trying to build forward momentum on products or projects, we sometimes have blind spots regarding what's stopping us. This game lets you get insight from stakeholders about what they think may be an obstacle to progress.
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Talking Chips OBJECT OF PLAY A recurring challenge in group work is managing discussions so that every individual has a chance to contribute, and no individuals dominate the meeting. By using simple "talking chips" as a currency for contribution, a group can self-manage the flow of participation.
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Understanding Chain OBJECT OF PLAY Communicating clearly and effectively is a challenge when there is a lot to say to a lot of people. It can be tempting to try to explain "everything all at once" to an audience and fail in the process. In the Understanding Chain game, a group shifts from a content focus to an audience focus, and draws out a meaningful, linear structure for communication.
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Value Mapping OBJECT OF PLAY The end goal of value mapping is to build a visual matrix that quickly and clearly defines areas of interest for something—it can be a service, a product, a plan, a website. It consists of asking people to choose a limited number of features from a bigger collection and then plotting their choices against a matrix. The result can be presented back in a template that resembles a light box,
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The Virtuous Cycle OBJECT OF PLAY The goal of this game is to discover opportunities to transform an existing, linear process into a more valuable and growing process by taking a different viewpoint. This is useful in examining processes that are deemed "worth repeating," such as the customer experience.
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20/20 Vision is about asking players to thoughtfully evaluate priorities as a group. The first phase of the game—describing and capturing the benefits—is significant because it lays the groundwork for the hard part: determining priorities. It can be challenging to get a group to rank its projects, all of which seem important in some way.
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Employees are human beings, and every human being likes to be acknowledged. To appreciate employee contributions, celebrate their accomplishments, and build camaraderie among team members, a Memory Wall works wonders.
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Plus/Delta
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Make two columns: one for "plus" and one for "delta" (the Greek symbol for change).
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This feedback method can apply to any activity, idea, work product, or action. By focusing on change as opposed to direct negatives, the group will be more likely to share its true assessment
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Prune the Future OBJECT OF PLAY People who work in large organizations know that most change doesn't happen immediately or in broad sweeps. It happens incrementally by taking small, strategic steps. Prune the Future uses a tree as a metaphor to show how the future of anything can be shaped, one leaf at a time.
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On a flip chart or whiteboard, create a matrix that outlines WHO / WHAT / WHEN.
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this approach starts with the "WHO" (the people who will be taking the actions). Put every participant's name into the matrix in this column. Ask each participant what concrete next steps they can commit to. Place this in the WHAT column.
Then there is a collection of many types of session to run based on the outcomes you want from your session.
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A fuzzy goal is one that "motivates the general direction of the work, without blinding the team to opportunities along the journey."
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Innovative teams need to navigate ambiguous, uncertain, and often complex information spaces. What is unknown usually far outweighs what is known. In many ways it's a journey in the fog, where the case studies haven't been written yet, and there are no examples of where it's been done successfully before. Voyages of discovery involve greater risks and more failures along the way than other endeavors. But the rewards are worth it.
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The opening is not the time for critical thinking or skepticism; it's the time for blue-sky thinking, brainstorming, energy, and optimism. The keyword for opening is "divergent":
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You are searching for something that you may not find. You will almost certainly find things you don't expect. You have only a vague idea of what you will encounter along the way, and yet, like a turtle, you must carry everything you need on your back.
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The most common and powerful fire-starter is the question. A good question is like an arrow you can aim at any challenge.
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Another common fire-starter is called fill-in-the-blank, in which you craft a short phrase or sentence and ask people to fill in the blank like they would on a test.
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Affinity mapping is a common method that uses meaningful space to sort a large set of nodes into a few common themes. It is a way to rapidly get a group of people aligned about what they are working on together. First, generate a set of nodes using the Post-Up game or some other node-generation method (see Chapter 4). Next, create a meaningful space by dividing a whiteboard or other visual area into three columns. Ask people to sort the sticky notes into three columns that "feel like they belong together" without trying to name the columns. It's important that they not try to name the columns. Naming the columns too early will force them back into familiar, comfortable patterns.
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I cannot forbear to mention...a new device for study...which may seem trivial and almost ludicrous...[but] is extremely useful in arousing the mind...Look at a wall spotted with stains, or with a mixture of stones... you may discover a resemblance to landscapes...battles with figures in action...strange faces and costumes...and an endless variety of objects.... -- Leonardo da Vinci
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Improvisation is a way of thinking with your body. In role play, you take on the role of a character, imagine a situation, and act as you think your character would act in that situation. Putting yourself in another person's shoes helps you to empathize with that person's goals and challenges, and can lead to insights and better solutions.
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You don't need to know the final destination; only the next step in the journey. Just keep your eye on the fuzzy goal—the mountaintop, the imagined thing over the horizon—and the next step, the next game, that moves you one step in approximately the right direction.
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There are two big questions that are worth asking whenever you come across something new. First, what is it? And second, what can I do with it? The first question has to do with examination, while the second deals with experimentation.
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Opening questions are intended to open a portal into the game world.
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The trick of opening is to get people to feel comfortable with the process of working together while generating as many ideas as possible.
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The focus of opening questions is to find things you can work with later.
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Navigating questions help you assess and adjust your course while the game is underway. For example, summarize key points and confirm that people agree to ensure that you understand and that the group is aligned.
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Is the team fatigued? Are they frustrated or sapped of energy?
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Examining questions narrow your inquiry to focus on details, specifics, and observable characteristics. They make abstract ideas more concrete by quantifying and qualifying them.
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Experimental questions invoke the imagination. They are about possibility. What can we do with it? What opportunities does it create? Experimental questions are concerned with taking you to a higher level of abstraction to find similarities with other things, to make unlikely and unexpected connections.
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Closing questions serve the opposite function from opening questions. When you are opening you want to create as much divergence and variation as possible. When you are closing you want to focus on convergence and selection. Your goal at this stage is to move toward commitment, decisions, and action.
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The Graphic Gameplan uses a precisely designed set of meaningful spaces to organize people's thinking and move from ideas to action. Challenges are represented as a rough landscape, actions as an arrow, success factors as wheels, goals as a target, and so on.
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Loc. 1575-78
Most people draw a stick figure by starting with the head and adding the body afterward. This way of drawing a stick figure will almost always result in a big-headed, stiff stick figure. When drawing a person, you will get a much better effect if you start with the center of gravity and work outward. Draw a rectangle to represent the trunk of the body, trying to keep it at approximately the same angle.
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The next most prominent feature is the legs; they connect the person to the ground and have the most impact on the body's position. Draw a line to represent the ground and add lines for the legs and feet to connect the body to the ground.
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The next most important element to conveying attitude is the hands. We use our hands for nearly everything we do. Have you ever heard the advice given to public speakers to use their hands and to gesture to help them reinforce their meaning? The same principle applies to stick figures. Now try drawing the arms in position. A small circle is usually sufficient to represent the hands.
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Now take a look at the angle of the neck and head relative to the rest of the body. Notice that they are at different angles. Unless you are a soldier standing at attention, this is nearly always the case. We are constantly turning our heads to see better, to listen carefully, and so on. See if you can draw the head and attach it to the body with a single line at the right angle.
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Now that we have finished the figure we can think about the face. Think about the various smiley faces and other emoticons you can make on a computer keyboard. Those same combinations will suffice for nearly any facial expression you want. Adding a short line for the nose will help you show which direction the head is pointing.
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This can be especially important when you want to show two people interacting with each other. You can use the same principles you learned earlier to make the mailbox, by combining basic shapes from the visual alphabet. I live in the United States, where our mailboxes look like R2-D2 of Star Wars fame. Depending on where you live, yours may differ. I hope this short demonstration has convinced you that basic sketching skills are not out of your reach. Once you become comfortable with the preceding exercises, you can use them to help others become more comfortable with sketching
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In numerous workshops, I have found that you can get through these exercises with a group in about 10 to 15 minutes. In the time it takes for a brief coffee break you can familiarize a group with these concepts and get them comfortable enough to begin sketching out their ideas.
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The idea of bringing improv into a business context may seem intimidating, but the challenges are mostly in your mind. You're already improvising at work. In GameChangers: Improvisation for Business in the Networked World, improv expert Mike Bonifer reminds us that all of life is improvisation: from a conversation at the dinner table to the way we respond to unexpected situations, improv is natural; we do it all the time.
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If you have ideas, comments, or questions you can join the ongoing conversation at http://www.gogamestorm.com.
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Card sorting is a practice used frequently by information architects and designers to gather and structure inputs for a variety of purposes.
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Empathy Map OBJECT OF PLAY The object of this game is to quickly develop a customer or user profile.
Page 66
Loc. 1981-84
Ask the group to describe—from this person's point of view—what this person's experience is, moving through the categories from seeing through feeling. The goal of the exercise is to create a degree of empathy for the person with the group. The exercise shouldn't take more than 15 minutes. Ask the group to synthesize: What does this person want? What forces are motivating this person? What can we do for this person?
Page 68
Loc. 2021-24
Creating a forced ranking may be difficult for participants, as it requires they make clear-cut assessments about a set of items. In many cases, this is not the normal mode of operation for groups, where it is easier to add items to lists to string together agreement and support. Getting people to make these assessments, guided by clear criteria, is the entire point of forced ranking.
Page 74
Loc. 2094-97
WhoDo OBJECT OF PLAY The objective of this game is to brainstorm, plan, and prioritize actions.
Page 77
Loc. 2131-39
3-12-3 Brainstorm OBJECT OF PLAY This format for brainstorming compresses the essentials of an ideation session into one short format. The numbers 3-12-3 refer to the amount of time in minutes given to each of three activities: 3 minutes for generating a pool of observations, 12 for combining those observations into rough concepts, and 3 again for presenting the concepts back to a group. Essential to this format is strict time keeping. The "ticking clock" forces spontaneous, quick-fire decisions and doesn't allow for overthinking.
Page 83
Loc. 2252-57
In a typical group setting, extroverts tend to dominate the verbal contributions. And while their contributions are certainly important, it can be difficult to hear from quieter players who also have something valuable to offer. Let the players know that this play is intentionally silent. It affords the quiet people the opportunity to generate ideas without having to verbalize to the whole group, and it gives you certainty that you'll hear from every player in the room. Brainwriting also allows ideas to emerge before being critiqued and creates a space for them to be co-created, with multiple owners, and therefore a greater chance of follow-through.
Page 91
Loc. 2399-2401
This warm-up does not result in a problem definition that will satisfy an engineer; rather, it engages participants in defining the challenge in a simplified form. It is a first step in bringing a group together under a common purpose, elevating the problem above the noise to become something they care to solve.
Page 94
Loc. 2436-39
People are well versed in having conversations; what most of us aren't used to is listening, observing, and being accountable for our observations. The Fishbowl game, therefore, is about engaging skills that in many of us have become rusty. So, despite the fact that it may look as though the action happens in the players' conversation, the action in this game happens in the outer circle, with the observers.
Page 96
Loc. 2481-84
Graphic Jam is an all-purpose visualization game that you can conduct before many other games as a warm-up, but it's also a useful game in itself. Visualizing abstract concepts supports logo development, presentation design, website design, metaphor development for e-learning, and so on. It exercises the visual part of our cortex—which accounts for 75% of our sensory neurons—and turns on parts of our minds that don't get much action in a typical business setting.
Page 100
Loc. 2550-55
History Map OBJECT OF PLAY Organizations naturally look ahead to anticipate progress. But the past can be as informative as the future. When an organization undergoes systemic or cultural change, documenting its history becomes an important process. By collecting and visualizing the components of history, we necessarily discover, recognize, and appreciate what got us where we are today.
Page 102
Loc. 2595-97
Mapping a history should be an enjoyable experience for the meeting leader and the participants. It's a time for storytelling, reflection, and appreciation of the life and experience of the organization. While you're helping the group document the history, set a supportive tone and encourage camaraderie, storytelling, and honesty—even about the hard times.
Page 105
Loc. 2649-53
Low-Tech Social Network OBJECT OF PLAY The object of this game is to introduce event participants to each other by co-creating a mural-sized, visual network of their connections.
Page 111
Loc. 2756-60
Pecha Kucha/Ignite OBJECT OF PLAY These fast, structured talks enable people to share ideas quickly and with a minimum of distraction. In addition, it puts the pressure on the person conveying the information to do so in a concise and compelling fashion.
Page 111
Loc. 2770-71
The rule of Pecha Kucha is 20 × 20: Presenters are allowed 20 slides, and they can spend 20 seconds per slide. Images are forwarded automatically—they are not under the control of the speaker.
Page 114
Loc. 2833-36
The goal of a poster session is to create a set of compelling images that summarize a challenge or topic for further discussion. Creating this set might be an "opening act" which then sets the stage for choosing an idea to pursue, or it might be a way to get indexed on a large topic. The act of creating a poster forces experts and otherwise passionate people to stop and think about the best way to communicate the core concepts of their material, avoiding the popular and default "show up and throw up."
Page 114
Loc. 2841-46
The participants' task is to create a poster that explains their topic. There are two constraints: It must be self-explanatory. If you gave it to a person without walking her through it, would she understand? It must be visual. Words and labels are good, but text alone will not be enough to get people's attention, or help them
Page 114
Loc. 2846-86
When creating their poster, participants may be helped by thinking about three kinds of explanation: Before and After: Describe "why" someone should care in terms of drawing the today and tomorrow of the idea. System: Describe the "what" of an idea in terms of its parts and their relationships. Process: Describe the "how" of an idea in terms of a sequence of events. Give participants 20 minutes to create their posters. When they have finished, create a "gallery" of the images by posting them on the wall. Instead of elaborate presentations, ask the group to circulate and walk the gallery. Some posters will attract and capture more attention than others. From here, it may be worthwhile to have participants dot vote (see Dot Voting in Chapter 4) or "vote with their feet" to decide what ideas to pursue further. STRATEGY As a variation, the posters may be created in small groups. In this case, it's important for the group to have decided ahead of time what their topic will be, and to give more time to come to a consensus on what they will draw and how they will draw it. On a smaller scale, a group may do this around a conference table. A small group of experts may create posters to explain their different points of view to each other at the start of a meeting, to make their models of the world, their vocabulary, and their interests clear and explicit. Twenty minutes spent in this way may save the group from endless discussion later in their process. The Poster Session game is based on academic poster sessions, in which authors of papers that are not ready for publication share their ideas in an informal, conversational group. Pre-Mortem OBJECT OF PLAY Often in projects, the learning is all at the wrong end. Usually after things have already gone horribly wrong or off-track, members of the team gather in a "postmortem" to sagely reflect on what bad assumptions and courses of action added up to disaster. What makes this doubly unfortunate is that those same team members, somewhere in their collective experience, may have seen it coming. A pre-mortem is a way to open a space in a project at its inception to directly address its risks. Unlike a more formal risk analysis, the pre-mortem asks team members to directly tap into their experience and intuition, at a time when it is needed most, and is potentially the most useful. NUMBER OF PLAYERS Any, but typically small teams will have the most open dialogue DURATION OF PLAY Depends on the scope of an effort; allow up to five minutes for each participant HOW TO PLAY
Page 117
Loc. 2887-91
A pre-mortem is best conducted at the project's kickoff, with all key team members present and after the goals and plan have been laid out and understood. The exercise starts with a simple question: "What will go wrong?" though it may be elevated in phrasing to "How will this end in disaster?" This is an opportunity for the team to reflect on their collective experience and directly name risks or elephants lurking in the room. It's a chance to voice concerns that might otherwise go unaddressed until it's too late.
Page 118
Loc. 2898-2900
Conducting a pre-mortem is deceptively simple. At the beginning of a project, the forward momentum and enthusiasm are often at their highest; these conditions do not naturally lend themselves to sharing notions of failure. By conducting a pre-mortem, a group deliberately creates a space to share their past learning, at a time when they can best act on it.
Page 120
Loc. 2933-37
Show and Tell taps into the power of metaphors to let players share their assumptions and associations around a topic. If you see multiple show pieces that don't exactly represent delight around a topic, that's a signal that the players may have some concerns that need to be addressed. Don't overanalyze the objects; pay more attention to the way the players describe the parallels to the topic. As the team leader, encourage and applaud honesty during the stories, and write down every point that players make that seem important to them. Keep the rest of the players quiet while someone is showing and telling.
Page 121
Loc. 2942-48
Show Me Your Values OBJECT OF PLAY Employees' perceptions of a company's values, whether they're conscious or not, contributes to their morale and their willingness to go the extra mile to support the mission. To get a sense of how employees perceive the values that drive an organization, an initiative, a system-wide change, or any other topic, play Show Me Your Values.
Page 123
Loc. 2987-88
Your job is to create a space in which people can say something that may be taboo but that everyone is thinking.
Page 126
Loc. 3042-43
Along with a RACI matrix and other "people + project" activities, stakeholder analysis is a basic framing tool for any project. For leaders and managers, it clearly scopes out who has what level of input and interest in a project, and can help to align decisions appropriately.
Page 134
Loc. 3154-56
Many of us make the mistaken assumption that others see what we see and know what we know. No one in the world shares your internal system map of reality. The best way to compare notes, so to speak, is to actually draw an external representation of what you think is happening.
Page 154
Loc. 3496-99
The mapping of an organization's existing business model, including its strengths and weaknesses, is an essential starting point to improve the current business model and/or develop new future business models. At the very least the game leads to a refined and shared understanding of an organization's business model. At its best it helps players develop strategic directions for the future by outlining new and/or improved business models for the organization.
Page 156
Loc. 3533-38
Employees spend hours sitting in training sessions, sifting through orientation manuals, and playing corporate e-learning games to learn the know-how for their new positions. But the reality is that the bulk of employee knowledge is gained through storytelling. Employees train each other by sharing their personal and professional experiences. Campfire leverages our natural storytelling tendencies by giving players a format and a space in which to share work stories—of trial and error, failure and success, competition, diplomacy, and teamwork. Campfire is useful not only because it acts as an informal training game, but also because it reveals commonalities in employee perception and experience.
Page 158
Loc. 3592-94
The goal of this game is to improve a product or strategy by thinking through various scenarios and alternatives. By turning the exercise into a competition as well as a storytelling game, players are more likely to get engaged and immerse themselves in the scenarios. Keeping it lighthearted and fun will increase the energy. It shouldn't feel like work.
Page 159
Loc. 3597-3601
Customer, Employee, Shareholder OBJECT OF PLAY The object of this game is to imagine possible futures from multiple perspectives.
Page 166
Loc. 3739-40
What has been a time-proven exercise in product development applies equally well in developing any new idea: writing the elevator pitch. When developing and communicating a vision for something,
Page 166
Loc. 3756-59
To set up the generating phase, write these headers in sequence on flip charts: Who is the target customer? What is the customer need? What is the product name? What is its market category? What is its key benefit? Who or what is the competition? What is the product's unique differentiator?
Page 170
Loc. 3812-17
Five-Fingered Consensus OBJECT OF PLAY Like Red/Green Cards (discussed later in this chapter), this is a technique for managing the feedback loop between a facilitator and a large group. When working in breakouts or as a large group, it may be necessary to periodically gauge the level of perceived consensus, without spending an unnecessary amount of time talking about it.
Page 177
Loc. 3934-39
Give-and-Take Matrix OBJECT OF PLAY The goal of this game is to map out the motivations and interactions among actors in a system. The actors in this case may be as small-scale as individuals who need to work together to accomplish a task, or as large-scale as organizations brought together for a long-term purpose. A give-and-take matrix is a useful diagnostic tool, and helps players explore how value flows through the group.
Page 181
Loc. 3997-4002
Help Me Understand is based on the underlying (and accurate) assumption is that employees come to meetings with widely different questions around a topic or a change. It assumes leadership can anticipate some questions and concerns but can't possibly anticipate them all. No one knows the questions employees have better than the employees themselves, so this game gives them a chance to externalize what's on their minds and have leadership be responsive in a setting outside the once-a-year leadership retreat. It also allows the players to discover overlaps with other players' questions and to notice the frequency with which those questions occur—something
Page 184
Loc. 4046-48
The Make a World game appeals to visual, auditory, and kinesthetic learners because of its layers of interaction. It's useful (and downright fun) because it lets players imagine the future and take action to create a first version of it.
Page 188
Loc. 4109-12
Open Space technology is a method for hosting large events, such as retreats and conferences, without a prepared agenda. Instead, participants are brought together under a guiding purpose and create the agenda for themselves in a bulletin-board fashion. These items become potential breakout sessions, and participants have the freedom to "vote with their feet" by moving between breakouts.
Page 190
Loc. 4169-71
Many decisions often boil down to one's basic choices between benefit and harm. By capturing these specifics for a key person, your group may uncover the most relevant points to bring up in presenting or influencing the key person's decision.
Page 190
Loc. 4174-80
Capture the answers on one side of the person: What does a bad day look like for him? What is he afraid of? What keeps him awake at night? What is he responsible for? What obstacles stand in his way? A persona's gains can be the inversion of the pain situation—or can go beyond. Capture these on the opposite side by asking: What does this person want and aspire to? How does he measure success? Given the subject at hand, how could this person benefit? What can we offer this person?
Page 194
Loc. 4229-30
Product Pinocchio is a game designed to establish, refine, and evolve the features of a product or service so that it becomes more valuable to the end user. By personifying it, we can better relate to it and better craft it into a "friend" that a consumer might want to take home.
Page 201
Loc. 4294-95
The object of this game is to quickly diagnose a group's level of understanding of the steps in a process.
Page 201
Loc. 4298-99
Through this exercise, the group will define an existing process at a high level and uncover areas of confusion or misunderstanding.
Page 203
Loc. 4332-34
Sometimes responsibilities aren't clear. Nothing erodes morale and performance faster than a difficult problem that belongs to someone else—or to everyone. When these situations raise their head, it may be necessary to call a group together to sort out who does what. By creating a RACI (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed) matrix,
Page 205
Loc. 4378-80
Feedback is difficult to manage in large group settings. For the presenter and the audience to track with each other, they need a means to communicate their approval, disagreement, or confusion as the event progresses. Red:Green Cards provide a simple means for channeling this feedback.
Page 206
Loc. 4405-8
Speedboat is a short and sweet way to identify what your employees or clients don't like about your product/service or what's standing in the way of a desired goal. As individuals trying to build forward momentum on products or projects, we sometimes have blind spots regarding what's stopping us. This game lets you get insight from stakeholders about what they think may be an obstacle to progress.
Page 217
Loc. 4612-17
Talking Chips OBJECT OF PLAY A recurring challenge in group work is managing discussions so that every individual has a chance to contribute, and no individuals dominate the meeting. By using simple "talking chips" as a currency for contribution, a group can self-manage the flow of participation.
Page 218
Loc. 4629-35
Understanding Chain OBJECT OF PLAY Communicating clearly and effectively is a challenge when there is a lot to say to a lot of people. It can be tempting to try to explain "everything all at once" to an audience and fail in the process. In the Understanding Chain game, a group shifts from a content focus to an audience focus, and draws out a meaningful, linear structure for communication.
Page 221
Loc. 4685-91
Value Mapping OBJECT OF PLAY The end goal of value mapping is to build a visual matrix that quickly and clearly defines areas of interest for something—it can be a service, a product, a plan, a website. It consists of asking people to choose a limited number of features from a bigger collection and then plotting their choices against a matrix. The result can be presented back in a template that resembles a light box,
Page 222
Loc. 4718-23
The Virtuous Cycle OBJECT OF PLAY The goal of this game is to discover opportunities to transform an existing, linear process into a more valuable and growing process by taking a different viewpoint. This is useful in examining processes that are deemed "worth repeating," such as the customer experience.
Page 236
Loc. 4942-44
20/20 Vision is about asking players to thoughtfully evaluate priorities as a group. The first phase of the game—describing and capturing the benefits—is significant because it lays the groundwork for the hard part: determining priorities. It can be challenging to get a group to rank its projects, all of which seem important in some way.
Page 242
Loc. 5064-65
Employees are human beings, and every human being likes to be acknowledged. To appreciate employee contributions, celebrate their accomplishments, and build camaraderie among team members, a Memory Wall works wonders.
Page 246
Loc. 5135
Plus/Delta
Page 246
Loc. 5146
Make two columns: one for "plus" and one for "delta" (the Greek symbol for change).
Page 246
Loc. 5151-53
This feedback method can apply to any activity, idea, work product, or action. By focusing on change as opposed to direct negatives, the group will be more likely to share its true assessment
Page 247
Loc. 5157-62
Prune the Future OBJECT OF PLAY People who work in large organizations know that most change doesn't happen immediately or in broad sweeps. It happens incrementally by taking small, strategic steps. Prune the Future uses a tree as a metaphor to show how the future of anything can be shaped, one leaf at a time.
Page 250
Loc. 5241
On a flip chart or whiteboard, create a matrix that outlines WHO / WHAT / WHEN.
Page 250
Loc. 5242-44
this approach starts with the "WHO" (the people who will be taking the actions). Put every participant's name into the matrix in this column. Ask each participant what concrete next steps they can commit to. Place this in the WHAT column.
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