Philosophy of PLAY at Work.

Over the years I have come across lots of advice or inspiration around the concept of 'Fun' or play at work. These messages have been delivered through many forms. Everything from fellow bloggers, articles from Harvard Business Review, management training and Most recently a TED talk.

This particular ted talk was by Tim Brown CEO of IDEO. IDEO are exponents of the concept "Serious Play". I've included it here for your reference. The talk runs for approximately 27 Minutes.


This idea of PLAY has always appealed to me. An interesting perspective I have is that when I have actually achieved this it has not really been done with the concept of 'fun' at the forefront of my mind. This has been a By-product of the activity/task at hand. With that in mind here are three examples and a simple suggestion to get you started down this path.

NOTE - Fun at work should be the default state.

Stories at work

A lot of the teams I manage are involved with the process of making things work or happen. That is Service or Project management. When I first get involved I often find the groups are challenged by issues of ambiguity. Ambiguity in their roles, ambiguous actions that they take relative to others, ambiguity around their right to make decisions etc.

It is because of this environment that the group is often struggling to be objective. The concept of 'Accountability' and interdependence often alludes them. I have found on two occasions that I have a great method for addressing this particular challenge. In short I take them out of their comfort zone and tell them the 'Story' of My life as a submariner.


The benefit of this is that it is a fully immersive story (literally). Taking a team through this environment and being able to provide stories of first hand experience, I am able to articulate the concept of clarity in an environment where ambiguity can get you killed. It allows me to provide examples of clear process, clear communications, and team work.

Although a relatively extreme example of Story telling it has proven to be very effective.

Games at work

Games are a particularly under-utilised tool. I have used games on a number of occasions to great affect. One particular game that comes to mind is that of the Simpson's Game (Pictured) that I had created a few years ago, and have used with a number of teams since.

Last Import

The beauty of this particular game is that it provided benefit from inception through to execution. I had inherited a demoralised disempowered team, which needed to be reinvigorated on all fronts (people, process and technology). I could not afford the $30k plus price tag to educate the team in ITIL concepts so we did this ourselves.

From the word Go we started to make an difference. Locking one or two creatives away in a room, having them carry big pieces of cardboard in with great fanfare, colouring pencils, colored cardboard etc. was a master stroke - the anticipation this generated was impressive. The team was learning to appreciate the adage 'Under new Management'.

Second to this letting the team come up with the 'Theme' proved to be invaluable. Out of this the Simpson's game was born. We then had team members buying Simpson's characters from their local supermarkets through to bidding for Simpson's cars on eBay. The creation of the game rules themselves provided a challenge for a different part of the team.

By the time we actually got together to play the game the team was keene to see what they had created, and the fundamentals we were trying to learn were easily understood. Three years later this particular game is still in use - although looking a little tired.

Play at work

The idea of banter and fun at work is often a challenge, especially if you're running a lead team of senior managers who spend 99% of their time on task, that is focusing on managing teams and activities to achieve outcomes, dealing with exceptions etc. Often a leadership team will find that they do not get enough time together to make sure things are running smoothly.

Traditionally this predicament is either addressed by extending the existing formal meeting by an hour, or simply having two of them. Interestingly this particular format is not overly conducive to addressing the actual need. Traditionally meetings can only handle 2 - 3 topics in a given hour, doubling the meeting time does not necessarily mean doubling the output.

My most recent team recognised this particular issue, and we started to try and work out how we can address the problem. In reality the team wanted more time together, whilst I really wanted a team - one that works well together. Enter the concept of the Mop-up.

This particular approach was influenced by the TMZ.COM team (tongue-in-cheek), agile methodologies, in particular scrum. We threw in some wine, cheese, crackers and an electronic egg timer.

As the mop-up matured we found ourselves having quite a good laugh whilst being able to discuss and address a number of issues/opportunities within the team, ranging from making sure each other understood our interdependencies through to discussing team members performance, as well as identifying actions to be taken in the coming week.

This particular approach really turned the group into a an efficient team. The philosophy here is that teams are not built on away days or off-site events, they evolve on a daily/weekly basis. The mop-up provided and enjoyable bookend to the week and allowed the leadership team to check-in on how things were going.

Give it a crack

The above examples are simply some of the games and stories I have used in the workplace over the last couple of years. They are not overly complex, and as you can see by the quality of the game and video above it can result in considerable discretionary effort from your team. Something all managers should aspire to.

One last example and a take-away that you could apply immediately is the ide of the Photo collage. Have you team members bring a photo of themselves, a landscape from their travels or their hobby. Stick them on the wall and have the team guess what picture belongs to which team member. A simple idea, that can generate a lot of interest and good will within your team.

Have a play - you could only improve your environment.

cheers

Andrew

CowBoy's and Zealots

Sometime ago I wrote two posts for the Alinement Network. As I mentioned in one of my recent posts titled 'Alinement Network - Missing in action' these guys were hacked last month. Louis has recently e-mailed me letting me know the two articles are up and running again. So with that in mind I thought I would provide you with a link to the two articles.

The first of the two articles 'Zealots and Cowboys' endeavours to explain two common blunders made by people trying to implement a program of change that revolves around a best practice such as ITIL or Six Sigma.

The second article 'Pragmatic Management' builds upon the story of the zealots and cowboys by providing you some pragmatic advice on how to avoid these common mistakes.

Hope you find them interesting

Cheers

Andrew

Elephant Spotting - How to know about the proverbial Elephants in your team

I stumbled across this idea by accident earlier this year. It was the eve of my inaugural presentation to the group that I had just commenced managing. I'd been observing/learning the lay of the land for approximately six weeks and now had to explain myself to 60+ people.

By explain, I basically had to let them know who I was, why I could lead them, what my lead team and I had decided to do and how we were going to do it. Really quite a bit of content to deliver. To add to the fun the I.T. group within the company I work for was also going through a major restructure announcement.

So here we were, myself and a communications consultant working through the CCD approach for the up coming presentation. When the consultant started discussing feedback channels. It is at this time that we came up with the idea of the 'Elephant'. How? Why? What? You may ask.

The inspiration was a draft presentation I was working on called 'Drawing the Elephant'. It was this pre-occupation with the proverb of the 'Elephant in the room' that caused me to suggest. "Why don't we simply tell the group that if they want to get in touch with me directly to send me an e-mail with 'Elephant' in the subject line."

On the day we did embellish this a little, firstly we added in a Service Level/Guarantee. I committed to the group that I would respond personally within 24 hours. We re-iterated this message a number of times throughout the presentation as well as ensured it was the full stop to all group meetings into the future.

Honestly this is one of the best ideas/initiatives we put in place over this last assignment. Risky as it may sound I have received numerous 'Elephants' all of them very valid concerns or comments from the team. Please note they have not been complaints, or condemnations. The majority have respected the idea by being both objective and constructive when articulating the elephant.

As recently as today I have received two 'Elephants' both of which are to be addressed tomorrow morning. Addressing the elephants is not simply a reply to an e-mail, although an e-mail acknowledgement is a must you should not restrict yourself to this when you actually address the elephant in question.

Methods of addressing the elephant include:
1. Escalation of issues to senior or peer managers
2. Engagement and delegation to direct reports and the individuals line manager
3. Meetings to further understand or address the issue
4. Public acknowledgement and discussion (Without disclosing the elephants instigator)

So if you want to go elephant spotting - why don't you simply follow these three simple steps:
1. Identify a term or saying your group can associate with (use 'Elephant' if you like)
2. Set a response time guarantee that you can achieve, and commit to it.
3. Get stuck in and make this part of your groups practices.

Note this is a bit of a derivative of an earlier post I wrote '5 Questions in 30 Minutes'. The challenge on this occasion though is that 5Q approach would not work on a team of this scale.

I'd love to hear what you think of this idea, especially if you implement it.

cheers

Andrew

5 Websites/Blogs that provide interesting perspectives for (IT) Managers

I've bought '31 Days to build a better blog' from Darren Rowse of Problogger fame and am slowly working my way through this. I'm not quite following the 31 day principle but am somewhat along the way.

That is I am up to day 5 in the program, and this post is actually representative of the day 2 task 'Write a list post'. On this occasion I have opted to provide you with 5 Blogs/websites I have found to be quite useful in my day job as an IT Manager.

1. http://www.presentationzen.com/ - Garr Reynolds has a very good site on an approach to presentations, he has also written a really good book called Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery. Well worth the read, Garr regularly provides great advice, tips and examples.

2. http://www.manager-tools.com/ - I take this particular website so seriously I am actually a paid subscriber. The site provides a weekly podcast focused on helping you become a more effective leader. Paying actually gives you show notes, templates and presentations that accompany the podcasts

3. http://www.43folders.com/ - This is Merlin Mann's site dedicated to helping people find the time to get things done. Merlin is a little out there at times, the site does have some great content on creativity and productivity. Note it is a little neglected at this time as Merlin is concentrating on writing a book.

4. http://www.joelonsoftware.com/ - Joel Spolsky is one of the cofounders of Fog Creek Software, he writes on a range of topics from software development through to business and management articles. He does provide some interesting perspectives for the development managers amongst us.

5. http://sethgodin.typepad.com/ - Marketing guru of sorts who has written numerous books, two of which I've actually bought 'All Marketers Are Liars: The Power of Telling Authentic Stories in a Low-Trust World' and 'Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us'. He provides all sorts of perspectives that provides interesting input to different management approaches and ideas.

So, thats my first list post. Now to move onto Day 5.

Cheers

Andrew

A Fortuitous Lesson

The group I work within is on the eve of a restructure. Tomorrow we commence the 'Transformation' of the application development group. For me personally this is a significant change. My immediate group is disbanded and I will move onto my next management opportunity.

Some may perceive this to be bad news. It is not, it is in fact a great time to slow down and reflect on successes and lessons learnt over the last year, and this is what I am doing. It is during this time of reflection that I quite fortuitously stumbled across the below TED talk by Philip Zimbardo.

Philip Zimbardo is the professor infamous for the Stanford Prison experiment. Since that time in 1971 he has written numerous books and contributed to documentaries etc. On this particular occasion at TED he provides an interesting perspective on time.



Would you have gotten 1 or 2 marshmallows?

A personal insight for myself is that I am future oriented. This means that I've made a few mistakes when it comes to paying attention to Family, Friends, Fun as well as sacrificing sleep and my general health. Basically a little too focused on work in the last 8 months.

My trick now is to work out how I can use this particular knowledge to avoid making some of the same workaholic mistakes into the future. I am resisting the temptation to buy his book - The Time Paradox: The New Psychology of Time That Will Change Your Life. I should finish reading my current backlog.

I've posted this as I thought others may benefit from Zimbardo's perspective on time.

Cheers

Andrew

Too Many Meetings!

I ran a GBU (Good, Bad & Ugly) session with my broader group recently. This was actually an interesting exercise from two perspectives. Firstly facilitating a GBU across 50-60 people, and secondly some of the insights it provided myself and my leadership team.

One particular 'Ugly' that jumped off the page at me was the sentiment 'Too Many Meetings!!'. I can associate with this from one perspective - i.e. my record is 14 meetings in one day. This point aside though it did get me thinking, is it that there are too many meetings or that meetings are poorly run? Or even worse people do not know their role in making them effective.

Obviously meetings do serve a purpose, many in fact. They allow for collaboration, inspiration, innovation, direction setting, delegations, escalations, relationship building, communication etc.

So if they are so useful, why are they so painful? In short, because people are not disciplined, nor do they recognise the role they play in driving effectiveness out of meetings.

There really are only two roles in a meeting, the 'Chair' and the 'Attendees'. Many may challenge me on this with more formal roles such as Secretary, time-keeper, evaluator's etc. For me though, in addressing the 'Too Many Meetings!' sentiment there really are two roles we need to talk about.

The First role - The Chair. If you are the person calling the meeting you carry considerable accountability. You need to ensure a number of things occur, in particular the topic, format, and attendance. Failing to take these considerations into account is a definite indicator that your meeting is in a bad way before it even occurs.

I could in fact write paragraph's on setting up meetings, agenda's, pre-reading, advanced distribution, roles and responsibilities etc. On this occasion I won't, I will simply refer you to the team at Manager-Tools and a series of podcasts they have produced on 'Effective Meetings'.

The Second role - The Attendee (Even as the chair you are really one of these). So what can you as an attendee do to improve the quality of the meetings you attend. The following points are a short list of some principles I apply in my day job:

1. Don't Blindly Accept - Make a judgement call if you should attend, delegate or decline.

Recently I messed up on a meeting invite, instead of simply inviting the sender of an e-mail I managed to invite all of the addressees for a 'Coffee Catch-up'. What was amazing was the number of people who accepted and the buzz I caused in the office. What was this coffee catch-up about, why did he invite so many people, is he going to pay. Yes I was a dill and had to retract - but when you see the people who responded my misdemeanour fades by comparison.

2. If there is no agenda - Restrict the meeting to 30 minutes.

One hour meetings without an agenda are a chat fest. They definitely do have their place when building relationships such as catching up with associates, creating a new business relationship, or meeting with friends/family during the work day, what they don't do though is promote focus, drive and actions.

Therefore if someone approaches you for a 1 hour business meeting that provides no information relating to purpose or scope they should only be graced with 30 minutes unless they can produce the relevant materials.

3. State the purpose and approach upfront

It is not uncommon to arrive at a meeting with little more information than the location, a name and a one liner describing the topic to be discussed. More so if you take into account Principle 2 above.

A way around these scenario's is to simply ask/state the purpose of the meeting up front and ensure agreement amongst the attendee's, this will keep you focused, and allow clear closure to the discussion.

If this happens to be a one hour meeting without an agenda and supporting material. I would encourage you to not only discuss the purpose upfront but to discuss the approach or set the agenda (write it on the whiteboard). This way you can agree the topics to be covered in the time that you have and again check-off and close the discussion effectively.

4. If the delegate is not taking notes their not going to take action.

If you are sitting in a meeting and the attendees are not taking notes throughout, especially if they are clearly being assigned actions/tasks, I would be worried. Subtly encourage them by restating the task, and asking them if they have any questions or concerns about the task they have just picked up, even be so bold to suggest they write it down. If you're not comfortable doing this, provide feedback at your first opportunity.

Keep in mind though, this applies to you as well, note the actions/tasks you receive/agree to do. Following up on actions can only make you look good.

5. Remember your toolbox

A tried and true way to make sure you look good as the chair of a meeting is to build your meeting templates and approaches. We've all come across agenda templates we like, so clear out the detail from the best one you've seen and save it in your toolbox. This way you can always refer to it.

Other examples of this approach include a Standardised 1:1 template, 5 Questions in 30 minutes and even the good old Create and Communicate Direction (CCD) template discussed in one of my earlier posts.

6. Sit-up Straight

I'm a sloucher, I am seriously atrocious. Recognising this in myself I headed off to do some learning. Yet again, I'll suggest a Manager-Tools Podcast. I found their guidance Sit Up, Seat Up, Square Up, Hands up invaluable.

So that is it, a few of the principles I attempt to abide by when it comes to meetings. I am in no way a gun chair of meetings, and I do still slouch when I am an attendee. In any one week I compromise one if not all 6 of the above principles.

All that aside though If you are in a state where you spend your life in meetings, or even worse a company that thrives on them. It will be up to you to make them an experience worth having.

Cheers

Andrew

Alinement.net - Missing In Action

It appears Louis Taborda's Alinement.net is MIA. I wrote two articles for this site in the past. Louis tells me he was recently hacked and is madly recovering this weekend.

When he is up and running again - I'll post the links to 'Zealots and Cowboys'

Cheers

Andrew

The GOOD, the BAD and the UGLY

Here is an idea that I have used a few times. It originated from a peer at a management forum a few years ago.

Quite simply this brave soul had asked a number of her direct reports to get into a room with three pieces of butchers paper. One titled ‘The Good’, another ‘The Bad’ and finally ‘The Ugly’.

She then asked her team to provide her with some written feedback. At the end of this session the nominated lead of the group rolled the papers up and returned them to the manager.

Our intrepid manager admitted she took these pages home, sat down with her preferred vice (good glass of red wine from memory) to absorb the answers and advice she had been given.

This I thought was a brilliant idea, I’ve tried it a couple of times since and have found it of considerable value each time. Trying this approach again recently I thought it would only be fair to let you know of the idea, as yet again I definitely got some value from it.

In reality it doesn’t get any more complex than what was described above, you could do this with a team, or with an individual (my recent one was). Simply providing the following description for each of the components:

• The Good – Tell me what I do really well and what I should do more of?
• The Bad – Let me know things that I do that need to be done yet could be done better if I am a little more conscious of this shortfall.
• The Ugly – STOP DOING IT!! i.e. what should I outright stop doing, never to be seen again.

Obviously these can be quite confronting, especially if you’ve just run a hard exercise, made some hard call’s or really just been hard nosed. This process does normally (can’t guarantee) you’ll get something on the other two pages. It is human nature to be task driven, and a blank page under any title will leave them feeling the task is incomplete.

Here are a couple of cardinal rules for this process:
1. Leave the room – you’ll get more honest answers doing this.
2. Read the results at YOUR leisure.
3. Ask (don’t assume) if you can re-visit your feedback with the team/individual at a later date.
4. Ask for at-least one item under each title

That is really as complex as the whole scenario gets. I have received some very valid feedback using this approach, and when you are a mid level to senior manager this sort of feedback is uncommon. So give it a bash - open yourself up to some good healthy feedback.

Cheers

Andrew

The First Strategic Principle

Amazing, I don't know why I have not posted about this before, especially when I'm looking for things to post about.

This principle relates to the below diagram, and really revolves around the simple idea that as an entrepreneur, business owner, manager, consultant and even in career planning you cannot think or plan strategically if you do not create a gap from day to day operational activities.


The arrow on the right with the black ‘X’ is what I often refer to as the 'Gravity of Operations'. If you operate your group, career or life in this way you will only ever focus on day to day issues, crisis or catastrophe.

Where as, if you structure your group, or even your week to allow you to think in the Strategic-Tactical space (ST) or the Tactical-Operational (TO) space you will have considerably more success.

I observe people operating to the right of this model on a daily basis; in fact it is a conscious effort to keep your-self out of it. I am guilty of operating this way myself. Some immediate examples that come to mind are:

1. A friend running his own business gets tied up in cutting code and forgets to thing about where his business is going?
2. An Operations centre attempting to build enterprise solutions
3. An executive manager attending operational meetings yet failing to manage his calendar (tactics)
4. Managing my own career, I think my output will speak for itself, therefore I do forward think enough, subsequently getting frustrated when my career fills halted.

Gravity of operations is not the only consideration - I have seen groups focus on strategy to the exclusion of operations, which subsequently resulted in a lot of operational gravitas that eradicated any hope of Strategic thinking.

All these examples aside, the key message for a manager of any sort is every group you manage needs to work out how to manage the three strategic horizons. The time span of these horizons are Operational now, Tactical later (anything from the next week, month or quarter) and Strategic six months plus.

The practical application of the STO model (this is how I refer to it, improvement suggestions are welcome) will have the manager focusing on Strategic and tactical needs of the group. Working with their direct reports to develop the tactical plans, with which they will drive the operational considerations of the group.

People will argue that this is not achievable, or pragmatic for all sorts of reasons. That's OK. Let’s say you are a one man band or even planning your career. This is cool, just don't forget to get out of operations occasionally to think strategically and progress your tactical plans.

Please be aware, as a manager, just following this principle will not be enough, management skills such as delegation, 1 to 1's, feedback and coaching will be critical. (Manager Tools covers this in 'the management trinity' podcasts)

As stated at the start of this post, this model can be used in many contexts ranging from your personal management practices, consulting, problem remediation and even organisational design. I have not described the application to this scenario’s here. I’d encourage you to give it a go sometime, it’s simple to draw and can open up a log jammed conversation in an instance.

Hope you find this of interest, let me know in e-mail or comments if you do.

Cheers

Andrew

Imagine presenting this

This is the winner of the 2009 Best Presentation hosted on Slideshare - I found this presentation and the runner's up quite interesting, and am hoping to take some inspiration from this approach for my upcoming 'Drawing the Elephant' presentation in at the PacRim Conference later this year.

Cheers

Andrew

THIRST

View more presentations from Jeff Brenman. (tags: design crisis)