It's not a bad plan...

I was working with a group recently and I asked why it is that some work or task starts as not being urgent but eventually becomes urgent because it’s left; the answer they gave me, as groups often do, is that bad planning caused it. Now, bad planning can be the cause of many problems in business – and in life generally – but planning is not the panacea it is often thought to be. There is much more to achieving a goal than just having a plan.

Think of a city, separated from lush farmland by a deep chasm. The inhabitants of the city gaze across the chasm and begin to ask themselves what it would be like to be able to use that farmland – to grow more food, perhaps different food. They get excited about the prospect of being able to expand out, even beyond the farmland and so they commission the city’s architect to design a bridge and when the design is complete they task the city’s builder with constructing it. Soon, the bridge is finished and the inhabitants of the city are crossing back and forth, happily using the produce of the new farmland to enhance their lives.

In a nutshell, this story describes the four stages of goal achievement – and the broader process of project management. After all, what is a goal if not a mini project?

Initiate

The first phase is to have the vision of what you want to achieve – in this case, spanning the chasm and using the farmland that’s currently just out of reach. In projects, this is where you get very clear about your end result, about what your stakeholders and key stakeholders want, about your criteria for success.

Plan

Having decided where you want to go, you have to work out how to get there – the architect’s blueprint for the bridge. In projects, this is where you set out clearly and logically how you will get from where you are now to the vision outlined in the Initiate phase. The plan can be for a beautiful and ornate bridge or a strict, utilitarian bridge – whatever your key stakeholders define for you as part of their vision.

Act

However, having a vision and a plan are vital but insufficient. You can have a great plan but it will be worthless if you don’t do anything with it. This stage is where we take action. We execute the plan – either building the bridge or working through our project plan, responding to events, reviewing our progress, adjusting where necessary, sticking with it

Complete

The hallmark of a project is that it must finish; goals are there to be achieved – at some point, you complete the bridge, you reach the end of the plan, the other side of the chasm. Here is where we learn the lessons from our project and assess the benefits of having completed it – did achieving the vision bring us all we hoped it would, what’s our vision for the future, how do we apply the lessons to our next project?

All four parts are essential to make up the project or the goal – failing to carry out any one of them will dramatically lessen your chances of success, now and in the future. Planning is important but it’s not enough: without a vision, a plan is vague and unfocussed; without action, a plan is just a useless piece of paper; without completion, we’re doomed to repeat the mistakes of our previous plans.

Blackberry Grumble

I recently bought a new Blackberry and I love it; I love being able to send and receive emails wherever I am. In fact, I’m in the odd position of wishing I received more emails, so I could use my Blackberry more. Before this starts turning into an advert for Blackberry, I have noticed an interesting side-effect of constantly being in touch. That little device, so shiny and glossy, with its flashing green light (oh, the thrill when it turns red because then I have a message) is a constant reminder that there are other things going on in the world – there is an “out there”, where things are happening and where people may, even now, be preparing to get in touch with me. As much as I love it, this Morrisian device – both beautiful and useful – is, I’ve begun to notice, something of a distraction.

Around forty years ago, researchers first discovered something they called “microexpressions” – tiny, mostly involuntary, and extremely quick expressions, often lasting for as little as one quarter of a second. These microexpressions were difficult to fake and gave real insight into whether the subject was telling the truth. It is possible that these microexpressions combine with the well documented phenomenon of perception without awareness to give us that “sixth sense” feeling we get sometimes, when we suspect that someone isn’t being totally honest or that something isn’t quite right.

Of course, in order to register the fact that something isn’t right, you have to be paying attention – to yourself and how you’re feeling, if nothing else. However, increasingly we seem to be paying less and less attention to what we’re actually doing. I’ve talked about this previously, when I mentioned the perils of multi-tasking and it strikes me that the more connected we are, the harder it is to be fully present in whatever it is we’re doing at any given moment because of that ever present distraction. And the less present we are, the more likely we are to miss things.

If you’re worried that this might be happening to you, try this experiment next time you have a day off. The night before, go round your house and cover up all the clocks. Turn off the computer, turn off the mobile and have a day without any screens or contact with the outside world – no TV, no radio, no internet. Eat when you’re hungry, sleep when you’re tired. Really be present in whatever activity you’re doing and pay attention both to the task and to how you feel. You might be surprised by what you notice and please do let me know how you get on. In the meantime, I need to go – I’ve just noticed that the little red light is flashing...

Man's Search For Lego

One of the joys of being a parent is that you get to re-live your childhood and, in particular, play with a lot of toys. My favourite toy when I was a child – and, fortunately, my son’s favourite toy now – is Lego and I can happily spend hours building the most complex models, scrabbling around on my hands and knees, looking for the one tiny brick which I’ve misplaced and which completes the whole kit.

I was reminded of this when I came across an interesting research paper called “Man’s Search for Meaning: The Case for Legos”. The researchers conducted an experiment where they asked two groups of people to build Lego models. For one group, the completed models were placed on display while for the other group the models were disassembled in front of them and the pieces returned so they could build further models. What they found will probably surprise no one: the latter of those two groups built about 30% fewer models than the former. They felt the work was pointless and, regardless of what they were paid to do it, they didn’t match productivity of the first group, who thought there was some meaning in what they did.

It’s hardly a new finding: the title of the article itself is a play on Victor Frankl’s brilliant autobiography, “Man’s Search For Meaning” in which he outlined his finding that a key driver for mankind is the search for meaning in our lives. You’ve probably heard the old cliché about two builders: they’re both asked what they’re doing and one replies that he’s digging a ditch whilst the other says he’s building a beautiful cathedral. It’s a story echoed by the apocryphal story of Nixon’s visit to NASA, where he is supposed to have encountered a cleaner who described his job as “helping to put a man on the moon.”

A model I use to help managers understand how to work with their teams is one called the 4Cs – Context, Contribution, Coaching and Completion: Context and Completion are concerned with providing some form of meaning and sense of progress in the work that people do. Without this, paraphrasing a quote in the wonderful “Leadership Challenge” by Kouzes and Posner, life becomes “an endless series of Wednesdays”. Work is reduced to the Sisyphean task of endlessly rolling a boulder up a hill but never quite tipping it over the top.

As you go about your business this week, ask yourself what progress you’ve made; if you have made progress, is it progress towards a goal that matters to you? If you’re a manager, have you helped your team feel they’ve made progress towards achieving something important? If the answer to any of those questions is no, you might want to think about the implications for the quality of your/their work and, more importantly, the quality of your/their life.

Employee Engagement

For those of you who have been asking, details of the forthcoming Employee Engagement workshops are now "officially" on the web here. I'm very excited about this project and looking forward to getting them up and running. It's a key value for me to improve the way in which companies work with their employees and this is a big step in the right direction. Please feel free to forward the link on to every employer you know!

Mehrabian Madness and the Lazy Trainer

If I showed you a pie chart with three slices, labelled 55%, 38% and 7%, the chances are you’d tell me it had something to do with communication. If I pushed you a little bit harder, you might (as a group did recently) tell me it means that when we communicate, 55% of our message is transmitted by the way we look, 38% by the way we sound and 7% by the words we use. You may be nodding as you read this, congratulating yourself on knowing that little statistic.

But think about it for a moment: if that was actually true, what would be the point of subtitles in foreign films? You’d be able to get 93% of the movie just by looking and listening. And why would you bother learning another language? You’d be able to get the vast majority of your message across just by looking and sounding right. This interpretation is such staggering nonsense that I’m constantly amazed that intelligent people are prepared to believe it. Not that I blame them, you understand: I blame the lazy trainer that told them in the first place.

The statistic comes from the work of Albert Mehrabian. He found that when talking about attitudes and feelings, the speaker’s body language tended to count for more than the words used when there was incongruence between them (ie, the words said one thing but the body language said something else). The application of the findings to other areas of communication is, to say the least, disputed and even Mehrabian himself doubts that they’re valid when the topic under discussion is anything other than the speaker’s feelings and attitudes.

So why is it that groups are still given a misleading (or, let’s be honest, a downright wrong) interpretation of the research? I’m afraid to say it’s because some trainers just don’t think about what they’re teaching groups and, for me, that’s a cardinal sin. I love my job and I take it seriously; without wanting to be precious about it, it’s a privilege to help people and make a difference in some small way. It frustrates me that some trainers seem to take their job so lightly as to repeat, parrot-fashion, such palpable rubbish – it’s their obligation to ensure that what they teach is correct. It’s vital that trainers engage with the material they teach and think deeply about it, at least as much as the delegates do, if not more. Anything less than that and they shouldn’t be doing the job.