Thinking Faster

Accountable for production not attendance

Craig Klein, the driving force behind Sales Nexus, wrote a comment about working virtually that I felt ought to be explored.  You can see the original comment and read my post Virtually There by clicking this link.

What Craig said was that we should hold virtual worker accountable for their production, not their attendance.  And so I thought, if we can hold virtual workers to that standard, why can't we hold most other white collar workers to the same standard.  Clearly, some individuals are locked down to work in specific timeframes (bank tellers, cashiers, health care workers) but many people don't have "office hours" and don't interact with customers on a daily basis.  So, now that the engine of productivity isn't a factory line, a machine or a business process, but is driven by ingenuity and good thinking, why do we still maintain the 8 to 5 fiction?

In the not so distant days of time clocks, most people worked in shifts, adding value to products that were built using expensive capital equipment.  That equipment was expensive and had to be kept occupied to recoup an investment, so in many cases firms worked two or three shifts.  The significant expense was in capital, and scheduling labor was important.  Now, most of your company's assets walk out the door every day in the heads of your employees.  Most of them are not tied to a business process or an expensive piece of machinery.  WHEN they work and WHERE they work is less important than the RESULTS of what they do.  In fact, most firms today spend very little time on telling people HOW to do their work, since creativity, innovation and a more open expansive culture has diminished the ability of the management team to dictate process and tasks.

With all that said, however, we've still got to feed the bulldog, so work must be accomplished on a regular basis with high quality, on time and on budget.  Our metrics and measurements must shift to examine the quality of the work and its timeliness and value, rather than examine how often or when a person shows up for work or the number of hours they work in any specific day.  What this also means is that managers are now responsible for dictating the expected quantity AND quality of the work, and being very specific about when that work product is due.  For individuals who have proven that they can self-manage, the office and the "cube" may become a distant memory.  For those individuals who cannot effectively manage themselves, their time and their work, the 8 to 5 workshift will remain a constant.

Write Stuff Down

Well, it will be no surprise to those of you who are GTD fans that I am a firm believer in writing things down.  For me, the real purpose is less to "get stuff out of my mind" and more to help retain and recall things I want or need.

At a recent conference I heard a speaker reference Confucius saying that "The strongest mind is no comparison to the weakest ink".  In other words, memory is faulty and short term, the written record has longevity and can be recalled and accessed by other people.  I used to rely on my memory for many important things, but as David and others have demonstrated, that simply clouds up an instrument that was built for rapid processing, not long term storage and recall.

So, how do I recommend you capture and recall stuff that you record?  Use all the tools at your disposal.

First, when I hear about a book or record that I think might be interesting, I add it to a wish list on Amazon.  It's not that I necessary will purchase the book or recording through Amazon, just that it is an easily accessible list that I can "carry" with me anywhere.

Important meetings, dates and other information goes on a virtual calendar, whether that's Google Calendar or an Outlook Calendar.  These calendars are consistently synched to the spouse's off-line calendar on the refrigerator at home.

Topics I'd like to write about or explore in more depth go into Blogger or Typepad as draft posts.  I usually keep three or four ideas percolating in both Blogger and Typepad before publishing them, to see if there's more to write and to offer.  I find it helpful to return to these ideas several times, and the fact that they are on the web makes them easily accessible.

Email - I'm now one of those guys who is squirreled away in the corner using the latest device to receive and respond to email.  In one regard, having mobile email at my fingertips makes it easy to assign a quick "to do" or even record ideas or suggestions.  I am learning to channel or ignore the inbound stuff and consider it during certain periods of the day. 

Project work - I've found the thumb drive to be one of my new best friends.  A thumb drive is exceptionally helpful when working with clients when I cannot attach to their network.  We can easily share documents and I can carry that document with me in my backpack or pocket, so there are now times I travel without a PC.

To Do lists.  I am locked into the habit of creating to do lists, and I still prefer pen and paper to do this.  There's something about putting the pen to paper that allows time to think and reflect on the day ahead.  I capture my to do lists and carry actions forward that I don't complete.  As may of my co-workers could tell you, I have a stack of these old to do lists that I can refer to when I need to look backwards at the work I've completed or issues I've encountered in the past.

Clearly, there exist a number of tools that enable us to write things down, and a reasonable filing system will make it easy to find and sort these ideas and concepts.  However, there is still a broad distribution of these things we write - spread out in mobile email, thumb drives, blog sites and so forth.  I'm still waiting for a virtual content manager that understands I want to create "content" and then determine how or where to deploy that content - as a word document, email, to do list or blog post. 

Why ask Why?

I'm feeling a little zen-like lately, so I thought another venture into understanding a problem or circumstance might be in order.  Personal and team productivity comes from mastering a particular skill or having a deep understanding of the problem.  Often, we are faced with situations where we must make decisions or take action with little information.  To compound the problem, we may have little mastery of the challenge. After all, we can't all be experts in everything.  In these cases, it's a good idea to get a deeper understanding of the problem before moving forward. 

One of the best ways I've found to gain a deeper understanding of a problem or challenge is to simply start asking the question "Why?".  Why is this a problem?  Why has it become a problem?  Why has it been allowed to become a problem?  Why hasn't this been addressed before?  All of these questions begin to dance around the periphery of the underlying root causes.  However, a truly thoughtful individual will begin to deconstruct the challenge or problem in an even more systematic approach.

A Japanese quality engineer named Ishikawa invented an approach called the cause and effect diagram (also known as the fishbone diagram and/or the Ishikawa diagram).  In it the main problem to be evaluated is documented, and then procedurally deconstructed by asking why.  Each "bone" or branch in the diagram evolves and leads to another "why" question until one arrives at the root problem.  You can read about the Ishikawa diagram and asking "why" on several websites - here's one I thought was useful, but there are plenty of others.

I'm advocating the "ask why three times" approach as a method to gain deeper understanding of problems or challenges before you start working.  As you confront a challenge or a problem in which you lack expertise, gain understanding by a systematic evaluation and deconstruction of the challenge, the root causes and potential solutions.  By gaining a deeper understanding of the symptoms and the root causes, your approach will become signifcantly clearer and you will be able to move more decisively and productively to address the challenge.

Asking why may seem insignificant, almost child-like in a way, because it bucks all convention.  We are educated, experienced people and are expected to know what to do.  Asking questions often looks like a sign of weakness.  Done correctly, it is a sign of strength, admitting that you may not have the answers but are smart enough to gain more insight before plowing ahead.

When expertise is lacking, gain insight before action.  Thus ends the lesson, grasshopper.

Practice, Practice

Experts are people who know their subjects in great detail.  Experts get more done in less time in their particular area of expertise because their experience, their knowledge and their intuition lets them make decisions and take the most appropriate action at just the right time.

Often, these experts can't even explain why they make the decisions that they do - it has become almost innate - a second nature.  They "know" the right answer, the next move, the right action long before the rest of us do.  Of course if you take an expert in say gum disease and ask him or her to make quick, snap decisions about polo for example, you'll find that expertise in one field doesn't carry over to another field, necessarily.

To be more productive in what we do at work, at home or elsewhere, try to become an expert.  This does not mean you have to have a PhD or completed some advanced course of study of the areas you are trying to improve - it just means you need to practice and get more experience.  If you want to be a better public speaker, work out in front of a mirror, then practice your speeches and listen to them or tape yourself and watch yourself presenting.  Offer to open any meeting the team or company will hold.  Experts get to their level by consistent practice, repetition and hard work.  A person does not become an expert project manager, team leader or even programmer simply by wishing it was so. 

Most people complain about meetings.  I think everyone believes that meetings are poorly managed.  Become the person who others turn to to run their meetings.  Build meeting management expertise.  Or, focus on a particular process.  How do checks get cut in your organization?  What are the underlying business rules?  Where can things go wrong in the process?  If you know that process inside and out, you're the expert. 

A benefit that you'll get from becoming more "expert" at the things you do is that you will become more adept at them, sort of like learning the piano or another musical instrument.  At first the notes did not come out just right, but with practice they got better and better.  We practice and participate in so many fields - sports, hobbies,dating, etc that most people are probably experts in several different fields.  Yet do you ever take the time to "work out" on the areas of your job that may not be as strong as you'd like them to be?  Do you practice to get better at the things you do?  Do you take additional courses or avail yourself of opportunities to stretch your skills?

In the long run, becoming an expert at something will mean you've mastered it, and people in the company you work for will turn to you as the expert.  This adds credibility for you and opens doors to tackle new opportunities.  However, just because you've become supremely expert in one field, that doesn't mean you should stop learning and mastering other processes or bits of knowledge that will make you, and your team, more productive.

A pattern or a rut?

I'm very interested in the processes and systems that help people work together more efficiently and effectively.  In a very interconnected world, very few of us identify and begin working on a task or a project without interaction from others - inside our organization and outside as well.  There are very few people who do not need to interact with others to complete their work.  What tools and systems do we put in place to help make these interactions more effective?

Something that most of us do to great effect is to establish how we'll work together.  For example, a account manager may agree with her customer to call twice a week to understand how the firm is providing the products or services promised and what issues or concerns the customer has.  Defining expectations and living up to those expectations are very important.  Expectation management is probably one of the most important tools you have to work with when interacting with or managing other people.  Establishing a pattern of work is important as well.  Should the customer expect you to call every other day?  What should happen in the call?  Who initiates the call?  We are creatures that need and crave patterns and regular, scheduled interaction.

What happens, though, when a pattern becomes a rut?  How do you continue to build and grow a working relationship - whether its with a customer, a business partner or a fellow employee - without upsetting the established relationships and patterns that each of you have grown to understand and expect?  It is possible I guess that some relationships or interactions don't need to change or grow, but it seems to me that most interactions can become something even more or they will become so repetitive and monotonous that they lose their impact.  How do you differentiate between a pattern and being stuck in a rut?

It seems to me that one party or the other needs to introduce some "stretching" exercises into the relationship.  That may mean offering a new service or capability, adding new products or services into the discussion, discussing different payment terms if appropriate.  These suggestions are not meant to upset the apple cart of the established relationship, but to make sure that 1) we get everything we can possibly get out of an interaction or relationship and 2) there's enough change that relationship or interactions don't just go stale.  These exercises may be as simple as the introduction of a new method of working together.  We are starting to use WiKis with all of our consulting customers to improve our documentation, communication and priority setting.  This introduced a change but I think one we and our customers can agree is for the better.

A great example of the relationship gone stale comes to us from the "Love Boat".  Remember the Love Boat?  Doc, Gopher and Captain Stubing?  It's OK to admit you watched the show.  The main premise on most of the episodes was generally that married couples were taking a cruise to revive their relationships.  Inevitably one member of a couple would be attracted to someone on the crew or another passenger, only to realize that he or she still loved his or her spouse, it's just that the relationship had gone stale.  New insights were obtained, new vistas of the relationship established, and Isaac the bartender provided some pithy insight and cold drinks.  All in 60 minutes - 45 if you count commercials.

Are you getting everything out of your interactions and relationships at work?  What expectations do you have about the people you work with and how you interact with them?  Are you in a good pattern or stuck in a rut?  How would you know the difference?

The 80% solution

I'm always interested (since I want to be a Slacker Manager too) in what constitutes a "complete" job or project.  What I mean is - when is "done" done enough?

The best example I can give of this is an old sales mantra which instructs sales people to do just enough to win and no more.  Any more work or effort beyond what it takes to win is lost and cannot be recovered.  I look at this as a corollary to Pareto's rule.  His rule of course has usually been stated that 20% of the people do 80% of the work.  What I want to know is - how often does 80% of the work constitute enough of a solution to declare a project or effort complete?

This should be of great interest to people who have a passion for productivity, and for those who want to extend the minimum amount of effort to be successful in any endeavor.  I have a collaborator who can quite honestly take over an hour to write a 20 line email.  Now, that email is a humdinger of an email, but it leaves me wondering if that email couldn't have been written in 10 minutes, and my colleague have moved on to other work.  Was the additional 50 minutes of editing and re-arranging words really that valuable?

Don't get me wrong - I am not advocating cutting corners or doing less than a complete job on any piece of work - from an email to a major project.  But I am suggesting that we often lard up an effort with unnecessary and extraneous steps and meetings and documents that don't add much to the final product.  Part of this, I am sure, comes from the fact that too often we can't define with much certainty what the end goal or the deliverable should look like, so we are forced to toss in some other stuff just in case.  Additionally, I think many people believe they should be rewarded for giving 110% percent and demonstrating that by additional frills in a project. Finally, there's a real difference of opinion between the 80 percenters (like me) and the 110 percenters about what constitutes a completed assignment.

When people work for me, I encourage them to do the absolute minimum to achieve the best deliverable they can as quickly as possible, and no more.  I'd much rather have a good, quick, clean deliverable in a short time frame than a perfect one that never gets delivered.

What do you think?  I'd like to hear from the perfectionists who may disagree with this assessment.  Working with people who have a different take on this issue is probably one of the most challenging interpersonal issues in my workplace.  When can we declare a project "complete enough"?  What is gained by going further than necessary?  What's the best way to work with and manage a perfectionist?

The Availability Conundrum

If you are like me, you are a better decision maker and more productive as the number of tasks assigned to you increase.  There's something about a full to do list that sharpens the mind and clarifies the senses.

I wonder if this is true for you, fellow reader, but it's definitely true for me.  As my tasks and responsibilities increase, my productivity and desire to be productive increases.  As the amount of work increases, I enforce a more rigorous and conscious discipline about what I do with my time, where I spend it, and what things I delegate to another person or delegate to another time.  My decision making is more focused and it seems my filters and the thinking process I use to make decisions is sharper.

Conversely, when I don't have as much to do, I am not nearly as focused and my decision making takes longer and is frankly not as crisp.  When I have more free time and more available time on my calendar, my work suffers because its more difficult to get to that next quantum level of excitement and energy.  I guess there's a mental investment required to get to a certain level of productivity - and if the benefits in terms of the work finished don't seem to justify the mental investment, it's harder to be productive.

I'd like to call this the Availability Conundrum.  It's another one of those factoids that may be apparent only to me, but the basic premise is - the more time available and the fewer the deadlines, the less investment I have in my work, and my productivity suffers.  Conversely, I find that as my workload increases my energy and effectiveness increase correspondingly.  If these observations are true, they also give the lie to "I'll get to it when I have more time" because when I have "more time" I don't have the enthusiasm or energy to do those things.

Here's what I've done to combat this and try to stay more focused and disciplined.  First, recognize that some days you simply need a mental holiday.  I use these days to file, draw pictures of new systems or ideas that I'd like to pursue, recap or close out any left over work from old projects and so forth.  Second, take on things that will add real value, so all the work I do (as much of the time as possible) has a very high value add to the company.  This keeps my energy level up.  Third, work on as wide a variety of things as possible within my responsibilities.  This also keeps me interested, learning and engaged.  Fourth, stay as "busy" as possible with tasks but lock in time for reading and learning, and spending time meeting and talking with the people I work with and report to.  Never become too busy to spend time talking to and listening to the people around you.  Finally, make a choice about your work and it's importance in your life.  If you are as productive as you can be at work, then you can leave each day knowing you accomplished a lot, and spend some great time outside of the work environment recharging the batteries for the next day. 

The Five Minute Rule

To make my life simpler, over time I have created a number of tools and rules of thumb to help me make decisions faster or move on in my work.  One of these tools I use frequently is what I call the five minute rule.

A firm I worked for in the late 90s grew very fast.  Over a three year period I probably interviewed over 300 people.  I gained a lot of experience interviewing people and seeing the people I recommended for a job in action.  After a few years of interviewing people I created the five minute rule.  Basically it's this:  While interviewing someone I try to decide in five minutes if I want to extend an offer to that person.  If my answer is yes, then I spend a good portion of the rest of my interview trying to understand what it will take to bring the person on board.  If my answer is no, I try to allow the candidate to redeem themselves and give them questions that can help me decide to change my mind.  This method has worked well for me, not withstanding a few hiring errors here and there.

What I did not understand until last night was that I had established in my own mind the amount of information I needed to begin making a decision.  I went with some friends to see Malcolm Gladwell, who wrote The Tipping Point and Blink.  In Blink, his latest book, Gladwell evaluates how people make quick decisions based on less than complete evidence, and the risks and opportunities that present themselves in making decisions like that.  What I took away from his talk were two things:  first, people do make good decisions with over a short period of time with little information if they have a lot of experience in the topic, and two, most of us have biases that color our decision making that we may not even be aware of.

What I like about this is to a certain extent it validates "gut" instinct and quick decision making if you have deep experience about the decision you are making.  I have often argued that continually collecting more and more information about a decision rarely makes a decision any better, it often just delays the decision we would have made hours or days ago.  I think its important to get all the information you NEED in order to make a decision, and when you've reached that point, to make the decision and move on.  The problem is the amount of information needed for a decision to be made is different for different people.  A person brand new at their job or unfamiliar with the circumstances will need more information to feel comfortable with a decision, while a long time expert can make a very quick judgement.

What this says is that when we are working with others we need to know the absolute minimum amount of information that is required for the group to decide if the decision must be made by a team or group.  If the team is composed of people who have not worked together before and who are only somewhat familiar with the information and objectives, the team will need a lot of information to make a decision, much to the despair of the "expert" on the team.  If an expert is called in to make the decision, often he or she will find the information necessary has been in the team's hands all along, but none of them had enough experience to know it.

My personal tool is the five minute rule.  I'm interested to see if others of you have similar tools or have other tools, tricks or rules of thumb you use when determining you have enough information to make a decision.  If you are a reader and you have a method, a rule of thumb or some other method to determine when you've got "enough" information, please send it along to me, either in the comments or via email.  My email is posted on the home page of the blog.  Thanks.

PS - in case you are wondering and have read this far, I think The Tipping Point is probably a better book.

Roadblocks to Productivity

Over the last few days I have become much more aware of all the things that can get in the way of personal productivity - and by implication workgroup productivity.  You see, I've had something akin to the flu.

Nothing makes you appreciate how productive you can be when you are well as coming down with the flu.  For three days I did not feel like talking to anyone, or thinking, or even reading a book.  That started me thinking about how many obstacles there are to being truly productive.  If you think about an average person, you realize how many factors there are that can distract or pull on someone's time.  In my case, personal illness wiped out two or three days worth of work.  I cancelled several meetings and had to postpone a business trip.  In other cases, illness in the family, death of a loved one, a crisis in the family or so many other distractions keep people from focusing their attention on their jobs and processes.

What's more, things at work get in the way.  Culture can become an impediment.  Feeling slighted over someone's promotion.  Corporate bureacracies and red tape.  Politics and favoritism can all become distractions and limit our productivity.  What's more, since we are all linked together in business processes, if one person in the process is distracted or limited, then the process and the people associated with that process suffer.

We as business owners and managers cannot remove all the factors that get in the way, but we can extend to our employees and workers the knowledge that while the business is in business to make a profit, everyone should work to live, not live to work.  No one will ever say on their deathbed that they wished they'd spent more time at work.  We as business owners and managers need to help people sort out their priorities and understand what's important.  It's no good to us if people show up to work who are too ill or too distracted to function appropriately.  Likewise, we need to have the courage to remove those individuals who cannot function appropriately or adequately.

When you get right down to it, there's a lot of stuff that stands in the way of productivity.  We can't remove all of the roadblocks, but we can recognize that they exist and help people overcome them or at least put them in perspective.

Planning for Success

If you've decided to take action and make some changes in your personal work habits or in your work team to improve productivity, start with the end in mind.  That's straight from Covey I know, but it's the right message.  What is the desired end state, and how do we get there?

Americans, and business executives especially, are Now-Now people.  What I mean by that is that they want action now, and want the results of that action now.  While I am all for doing something, our first steps should be to consider what our end goals are and to develop a plan of action for what it will take to achieve our goals.  Most people I work with understand planning to be the act of writing down a few actions on paper, so that they can get approval to move ahead.  Usually, they have no interest in the plan and built it only to get approval for the funding or the OK to move ahead. 

Sometimes we need to slow down to speed up.  A good, well thought out plan will do more than simply provide a road map.  A good plan will anticipate pitfalls and roadblocks and setbacks.  These challenges will present themselves as you begin to implement the plan.  A good plan will provide for alternatives courses of action as these challenges are met.  A good plan will identify other resources to use or to leverage as our existing resources leave to take another job or prove uninterested in change.  I guess what I am trying to say is that a plan considers more than just what we should do if everything works perfectly to our advantage over the life of the project.  Our planning often takes on a "perfect world" feeling in which nothing ever goes wrong and no alternatives need to be considered.

As an example, I worked with some software developers located in Israel.  We had a significant software release due in the late fall, and the Jewish faith celebrates a number of major holidays in the early fall.  When the initial plan was built to determine when the product development would be complete, the software team lead (an Israeli) did not factor in any vacation time over a period which would be akin to Christmas in the US.  Furthermore, in his plan, he made no allowance for regular vacation time or for anyone getting sick and needing time off.  While we were able to modify the schedule somewhat, his assumption of a "perfect world" when planning left us almost six weeks behind on our delivery of the software.  His expectations and his planning missed the fact that people and circumstances change, and we need to account for that possibility and consider the consequences in our planning.

What do your plans look like?  Are they based on a "perfect world" scenario or do they consider the challenges and problems that are likely to arise?  Do you use planning to simply move along to the next step, or to fully consider all the opportunities and challenges that will arise during the project?  Take the time to do the right planning now, or pay the consequences down the road.