Having pre-meetings is far different from having post-meetings. Post-meetings happen because not everything that needed to be said came out during the actual meeting, due to fear, mainly. Pre-meetings are held to make sure that what needs to happen in the actual meeting actually happens.

What do I mean by the actual meeting (herein referred to as the Meeting)?  The Meeting is where people with crazy schedules (usually in leadership positions) somehow find a way to meet all at the same time. The topic for the Meeting, in whole or in part, is your change initiative.

To make the best use of the team’s time during the Meeting, only do the things in the Meeting that need to be done together as a team.Focus the team on the task at hand, whether it is a discussion about solutions or whether a decision must be made. Everything else should be done beforehand in pre-meetings with individuals or small groups.

Some of the things you can take care of in pre-meetings are:

• Training
• Seeking opinions, to see how each person is leaning
• Answering questions, since some will not ask in front of the rest of the team
• Target key people to speak up during the meeting
• Persuade people who need persuading

Notice that I’m not talking about a pre-meeting e-mail. This is a real sit-down (or phone call if necessary) meeting where you are preparing individuals for the Meeting (and also helping you prepare for the Meeting). If the Meeting and its desired outcome are really important to the success of your change initiative, an e-mail is not going to cut it.

Having pre-meetings may seem like overkill, or even like playing politics. But, if you’ve ever been in a leadership team meeting that has careened out of control or that has become stuck on an irrelevant or minute point, most likely there was not enough preparation of the attendees beforehand.

Take the time to have pre-Meeting meetings so you can focus the Meeting on achieving the desired outcome for your initiative.

(Editor’s note: This post first appeared in the Change Starts Here blog at Enclaria.com)

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One such word I find myself using often in my writings here is deliberate. Both its verb and adjective meanings (which are sometimes pronounced differently) powerfully apply to our interest in strategy, change, and organizational leadership. Let’s take a closer look.

Main Entry: ¹de·lib·er·ate

Pronunciation: \di-ˈli-bə-ˌrāt\

Function: verb

Inflected Form(s): de·lib·er·at·ed; de·lib·er·at·ing

Date: 14th century

intransitive verb : to think about or discuss issues and decisions carefully

transitive verb : to think about deliberately and often with formal discussion before reaching a decision

synonyms see think

In other words, to deliberate, we formally discuss issues carefully before making a decision.

Main Entry: ²de·lib·er·ate

Pronunciation: \di-ˈli-bə-rət, -ˈlib-rət\

Function: adjective

Etymology: Middle English, from Latin deliberatus, past participle of deliberare to consider carefully, perhaps alteration of *delibrare, from de- + libra scale, pound

Date: 15th century

1 : characterized by or resulting from careful and thorough consideration <a deliberate decision>
2 : characterized by awareness of the consequences <deliberate falsehood>
3 : slow, unhurried, and steady as though allowing time for decision on each individual action involved <a deliberate pace>

synonyms see voluntary

In other words, decisions are deliberate when they result from slow, unhurried, steady, careful, and thorough consideration.

When becoming familiar with a new client, I like to find out about recent decisions that have been most influential to the people in the organization, and to its direction as a whole. Capturing and deconstructing the history of key decisions reveals much about the culture and leadership style of the organization. Some leaders exercise power autonomously, and express their own beliefs and judgments through decisions made without apparent deliberation. These leaders may reveal these decisions in the context of discussions intended to give the appearance of deliberation, but participants may describe the decision as having been a “done deal” well before their input was sought. Autocratic leadership has the benefit of efficiency, but amplify the risk of wrong decisions.

By contrast, other organizations are painfully slow at making decisions. Without prompting, one of my clients described her organization as having “analysis paralysis.” After working with another client for several months, I began to describe its decision-making process as “deliberative” – which was a gentle euphemism for excess discussion, and not a compliment. And yet another client prompted me to observe that “at XYZ, ‘yes’ is never yes, ‘no’ is never no, there are only endless degrees of ‘maybe’.” These organizations suffer from their inability to quickly recognize and act upon threat and opportunity.

As we continue to puzzle over the inability of most organizations to reliably execute strategy, it is important to examine how each one makes decisions. There is no one ‘right’ decision style, but it seems to me that the elusive and desirable approach would be one in which decisions are made carefully, as a result of efficient consideration by leaders and expert stakeholders working together, yet quickly enough to enable timely action. Decisions made carefully yet quickly are acted upon tenaciously, yet subject to careful scrutiny and a healthy skepticism that objectively separates the decision from the decision makers. Poor decisions are recognized thoughtfully and early, with timely corrective actions taken. These ideals, to me, are core definition of the deliberate organization.

How has your organization made its important decisions? Were good decisions made quickly and efficiently? Did leaders stand by decisions, or drift in a tide of uncertainty? Were poor decisions recognized and dealt with properly? Were risks understood and accepted? How would you define the deliberate organization?

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Many years ago, there was a bit of a surge in the management buzzword stream of an idea called Management by Walking Around (MBWA). Although the idea is traced to early days at Hewlett Packard, where managers were encouraged to spend their time visiting employees, customers, and suppliers, the idea was popularized in an 1985 book by Tom Peters and Nancy Austin entitled “A Passion for Excellence.” Don’t feel bad if you haven’t heard of the book or MBWA; my sense is that the idea has been out of the mainstream for a while. Perhaps the walking around concept became obsolete around the time that telecommuting became possible and popular.

I think that walking around can be effectively applied in the arena of strategic management. Few executives that I’ve interviewed in the course of developing organizational strategy have disagreed with the prediction that I’d get many different answers if I were to separately ask managers and employees to describe their organization’s strategy. So walking around and asking the strategy question is a useful diagnostic; a way of creating a sense of urgency around formulating and communicating strategy across the enterprise.

Wise executives can take the walking around idea a step further. By asking managers, supervisors, and employees to describe the strategy as they see it, and the crucial follow-up question: “How has your understanding of the strategy changed the way you work?”, it seems that executives can gain valuable insight about the practicality of the strategic intent. If rank-and-file and middle managers in the organization are unable to articulate how to make strategy happen, it is pretty safe to conclude that any success in strategic change will happen by accident, or in spite of employee intent. If, on the other hand, folks are able to describe the strategy and their individual roles, executives will be better equipped to make the right decisions, allocate resources, and remove the roadblocks to strategy execution.

I’ve put a great deal of emphasis on the idea of formal communication of strategy, and my passion for this idea is undiminished. But I also believe that executives maintain too much distance between themselves and the day-to-day work of running and changing the organization. When was the last time you were part of a substantive two-way discussion between senior management and employees about the job of strategy? Maybe it’s time to start walking around.

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U.S. President Barack Obama delivers his speech on healthcare. REUTERS/Jason Reed

U.S. President Barack Obama gave his highly-anticipated speech on health care reform to a joint session of the U.S. Congress and a national TV audience yesterday evening. For those outside of the U.S., speeches to both houses of Congress are relatively rare (except for an annual ‘state of the union’ address), and this speech marked a crucial point in the intense health care reform debate that has been raging here for the past several months. I am sure that several other bloggers have already or will shortly provide their take on the speech itself, so I will spare you my own interpretation. But Obama used the ‘best practice’ term to describe a couple of U.S. regions in which per-capita health care costs are both significantly lower than average, while quality of care and outcomes are better than average (a theme in a New Yorker article I reviewed over the summer), in his desire to improve the cost and quality of health care across the country.

It was interesting to hear Obama cite the concept of ‘best practices’ that is often used in business settings, but rarely presented to the public at large. The idea of capturing and sharing of best practices across an industry or an organization is both pervasive and elusive. I’ve yet to see or hear of an organization that claims to have a best practice for capturing and sharing best practices, and as such, I am a bit skeptical of the term in general.

My reflexive check of the Wikipedia entry on best practices yielded the following tasty morsel:

“As the term (best practices) has become more popular, some organizations have begun using the term “best practices” to refer to what are in fact merely ‘rules’, causing a linguistic drift in which a new term such as “good ideas” is needed to refer to what would previously have been called “best practices.”

Amen to that. I think that comment captures much of my skepticism. It seems to me that implicit in the idea of best practices is that an organization has evolved to a point where it is doing the same thing in more than one way, and that it can be objectively determined that one way is better than the other. Best practice sharing sounds good when discussed in an executive setting, but reconciling different approaches to an esoteric task requires the participation of the very people who are using the different approaches. While sometimes it may be obvious that one practice needs to be abandoned, it is far more likely that no clear winner will be determined.

Anyone who has ever gotten or renewed a drivers’ license at their state’s motor vehicle division (DMV) knows that the process can be slow and bureaucratic. I’ve often imagined how useful it would be for an independent organization to benchmark the efficiency, effectiveness, and consumer satisfaction of each of the 50 DMVs across the U.S. and to use the results to identify and ultimately implement best practices across all of them (some overseas readers of the Tenacious Blog may wonder why the U.S. doesn’t simply have one national process – that would be a whole other topic). But it is easy to see the flaw in my idea. Each of the 50 bureaucracies would incur a high risk of having its flaws objectively quantified and compared, while the chance of being found to have a best practice would be quite low. Even if politicians agreed to the benchmark, they’d encounter considerable resistance to actually implementing any changes to the status quo.

Such is also the case in organizations. The challenge of best practices lies not in the identification of the candidate practices, but with the choice and implementation of a particular practice. Risks are high, benefits are low, subversion of the concept is easily and often accomplished.

Or perhaps I am too cynical. Does anyone reading this want to offer a description of a best practice in best practice sharing? Please comment below.

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I started to wonder what it would take to make a car like that road-ready based on today’s standards. How much of the car was original, and how much was reconstructed using today’s technology and materials? Had there been any upgrades to the engine or exhaust, and did it have any hidden but modern features such as air conditioning or a CD player? Did it even have seat belts or any other more modern safety features?

When building an existing organization for the future, we can ask ourselves similar questions.

• What features of the improved organization should be recognizable as the same organization?
• Which aspects do we need to retain to stay true to our purpose and values?
• What parts can we rebuild with new technology and new ideas?
• How do we remain flexible with an eye toward the future?
• What should be overhauled, replaced or augmented based on what we now know works?
• What is required based on new or foreseen standards?
• Do you need to do maintenance, or restoration?

The 76-year-old car I saw was well-kept and shiny. When the owner arrived, it started right up and he drove away.

How might you make your organization road-ready for the future?

Here’s another exercise, because metaphors are incredibly useful for thinking about your organization (or anything else) in new ways, and discovering ideas and insights that might otherwise be left undiscovered.

Take a look at the picture of the antique car and ascribe parts of the car to features of your organization, department, process, etc. Then use that association to consider the questions above. Take the headlamps as an example:

• What do the headlamps represent? Our strategic planning process.
• What is required based on new or foreseen standards? The lights need to be brighter than before. So we can see the road clearly, plus what is not on the road but headed straight for us.
• What parts can we rebuild with new technology and new ideas? The amount of information available to us is increasing. We need a better way to process it all and make sense of it.

You get the idea.

(Editor’s note: This post first appeared in the Change Starts Here blog at Enclaria.com)

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Netflix prize web page

The Tortoise’s fascination with Netflix was enhanced with the news yesterday that Netflix’s public competition to improve the effectiveness of its recommendation system has drawn to a close with two teams essentially tied for the prize. But each of the two teams are actually consortia; teams comprised of other teams. Netflix has harnessed the power of competition and collaboration to solve a challenging business problem.

Subscribers to Netflix are asked to rate (on a scale from one to five stars) each movie they’ve rented, and are even able to rate movies seen in theatres or elsewhere. The data base of millions of individual ratings are used to predict and recommend movies to individual subscribers. The system works pretty well; around two thirds of all rental decisions made by Netflix subscribers are the result of a computer-generated recommendation.

But Netflix wanted the system to work even better. Instead of turning to their own staff, in 2006 they captured the attention of computer scientists, mathematicians, psychologists, and other professionals from around the world with a contest to “help improve our ability to connect people to the movies they love.” They offered a $1 million prize to the first team to improve the performance of the system by 10%. Here’s a video of some of the contestants.

Thousands have entered. With standings and results visible on a public Leaderboard, it became clear that competitive advantage would come from collaboration, and the two teams who’ve exceeded the prize threshold (The Ensemble and BellKor’s Pragmatic Chaos) are themselves comprised of other teams.

What a brilliant strategy. Not only does Netflix have access to some of the world’s sharpest minds, it has done so at a tiny fraction of the cost of actually paying everyone engaged in the effort. A great solution, low cost, and incredible free publicity as the competition itself has become a news story.

Of course, not every challenge faced by an organization can be solved in a public competition, but there are some valuable lessons to be learned. First, the ability to objectively compare competing ideas will likely result in a better solution than one without competition. Second, the ability to test hypotheses, and measure and quantify performance precisely enables those objective comparisons. Third, the most valuable resources to an organization do not necessarily lie within that organization.

We’ve come from a world in which organizations make decisions and solve problems by assembling their own resources and relying on them to excel. Relying on teams of expert staff members sounds like a good idea, but is it? The expected value of a solution is judged on the basis of who the people offering the solution are rather than the quality of the solution itself. This approach naturally excludes input from those not seen as experts, and alternative solutions are simply not examined.

The higher up one goes in an organization, the fewer people are seen as qualified to propose solutions and to make decisions. Collaborative problem solving happens less at the top than at the middle and foundation of an organization. It seems to me that the high failure rate of strategy execution can be traced in part to an absence of collaboration and competition in developing strategic hypotheses. While it may be impractical to make every decision in this way, Netflix’s radical approach to the challenge of improving a key business system is causing at least this strategist to question the status quo approach to decision making and problem solving.

Does your organization use collaboration and competition to make key decisions? Please share your experience with using these techniques to improve outcomes.

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The consequences of our leaders’ mistakes are usually greater than the mistakes of those led; through their decisions and actions, leaders cause many others to do things. This is the definition of leadership. In meritocracies, individuals rise to leadership roles because they are viewed as capable and skillful, and are therefore expected to make good decisions for the organizations they lead. But we also say that ‘mistakes will happen.’

About a week ago, U.S. President Barack Obama made a comment at a press conference (about the racially-charged arrest of a noted college professor) that exploded into a firestorm of popular and media criticism. In an unscheduled press appearance a few days later, he somewhat clumsily acknowledged his error, and has since arranged to sit down for a beer with the professor and police officer involved. His admission was kind of a refreshing moment. In his remarks, Obama said that he hoped the episode would become a ‘teachable moment,’ presumably on the topic of race at the center of the incident. Perhaps it can be a teachable moment here, as well.

We properly hold our leaders to a higher standard when it comes to their errors; we want errors to happen infrequently, we want leaders to be motivated to avoid errors, we want errors to be quickly rectified. We want confidence that our leaders’ directions will lead to good outcomes for ourselves. Leaders with too many errors don’t always get to keep their jobs, especially when financial performance and stock price reflect the consequences of those errors.

Leaders face a dilemma when they err – to avoid the appearance of fallibility so as to sustain a perception of error-free performance, or to acknowledge their error and risk losing the support and trust of those they lead. All too often, leaders find it more attractive to try to be seen as error-free.

Many of the organizations I’ve worked with have become dysfunctional over time because of this approach to error. Their leaders are willing (sometimes even relieved) to unburden themselves of their misdeeds behind closed doors, but are simply unable to do so in a public setting. The members of these organizations are aware of the mistakes, but fear retribution from raising any public discussion of the errors. Thus, leaders and the led enable each other to sustain a fictional parallel universe in which everything is (and will continue to be) hunky-dory. It is unsurprising when these leaders finally do go away, and only a short time before a new parallel universe is constructed around the next regime.

But other organizations have a healthier culture in which errors are expected and handled as part of normal routine. Leaders freely admit their mistakes and are open to criticism. Willingness to quickly identify problems and to focus on corrective action rather than blame means that the impact of errors is lessened. Contrary to intuition, employees trust and are loyal to their fallible leaders more than those who attempt to appear infallible.

Strategy is about setting a direction for an uncertain future. Errors will be made. Hypotheses will be more quickly proven or disproven when leaders expect to be wrong, and course corrections can easily be made. But how often have you heard your leader say, “I made a mistake, and I was wrong. Let’s move on.” ? Have there been teachable moments in your organization? Please share your comments below.

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You’ve got to hand it to musician Dave Carroll. When United Airlines admitted that they broke Carroll’s $3,500 Taylor guitar, but refused to compensate him for the damage, he know how to respond. In Carroll’s words (emphasis added):

In the spring of 2008, Sons of Maxwell were traveling to Nebraska for a one-week tour and my Taylor guitar was witnessed being thrown by United Airlines baggage handlers in Chicago. I discovered later that the $3,500 guitar was severely damaged. They didn’t deny the experience occurred but for nine months the various people I communicated with put the responsibility for dealing with the damage on everyone other than themselves and finally said they would do nothing to compensate me for my loss. So I promised the last person to finally say “no” to compensation (Ms. Irlweg) that I would write and produce three songs about my experience with United Airlines and make videos for each to be viewed online by anyone in the world.

Well, Carroll has made good on his promise. Enjoy the result below. As of this writing, his first video has been viewed over 1.6 million (update: nearly 3 million, as of 15 July) times on YouTube.

As a frequent flier on United from my home base in Chicago, I can only cringe with sympathy for Carroll’s experience. While the overwhelming majority of my million plus miles on United have been flown without incident, the few bad and occasionally awful experiences have been far more memorablethan my countless experiences of United’s courtesy and professionalism. Of course, United has responded. Carroll has since recorded a video statement, in which he acknowledges United’s tardy offer of ”some compensation” and asks that United donate it to a charity.

The culture of an organization drives the behavior of its people as much as or even more than its policies. In this era of Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, texting, and blogs, your customer’s bad experience becomes your public relations nightmare in no time at all. Is your organization ready for your customer’s viral video?

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