(p. 5-6) “Because the nervous system is so constructed that it can only process a small amount of information at any given moment, most of what we can experience must be experienced serially, one thing after another … We can only swallow one bite, hear only one song, read one paper, have one conversation at a time. Thus the limitations on attention, which determines the amount of psychic energy we have for experiencing the world, provide an inflexible script for us to live by.”

(pp. 127-130) “Time stress has become one of the most popular complaints of the day. But more often than not, it is an excuse for not taking control of our lives. How many of the things we do are really necessary? How many of the demands could be reduced if we put some energy into prioritizing, organizing, and streamlining the routines that now fritter away our attention? It is true that if we let time run through our fingers we will soon have none left. One must learn to husband it carefully, not so much in order to achieve wealth and security in some distant future, but in order to enjoy life in the here and now.

Time is what one must find in order to develop interest and curiosity to enjoy life for its own sake. The other equally important resource is the ability to control psychic energy. Instead of waiting for an external stimulus or challenge to grab our attention, we must learn to concentrate it more or less at will. This ability is related to interest by a feedback loop of mutual causation and reinforcement. If you are interested in something you will focus on it, and if you focus attention on anything, it is likely that you will become interested in it.

Many of the things we find interesting are not so by nature, but because we took the trouble of paying attention to them. Until one starts to collect them, insects and minerals are not very appealing. Nor are most people until we find out about their lives and thoughts. Running marathons or climbing mountains … are rather boring except to those who have invested enough attention to realize their intricate complexity. As one focuses on any segment of reality, a potentially infinite range of opportunities for action – physical, mental, or emotional – is revealed for our skills to engage with. There is never a good excuse for being bored.

To control attention means to control experience, and therefore the quality of life. Information reaches consciousness only when we attend to it. Attention acts as a filter between outside events and our experience of them. How much stress we experience depends more on how well we control attention, then on what happens to us. The effect of physical pain, of a momentary loss, of a social snub depends on how much attention we pay to it, how much room we allow for it in consciousness. The more psychic energy we invest in a painful event, the more real it becomes, and the more entropy it introduces in consciousness. To deny, repress, or misinterpret such events is no solution either, because the information will keep smoldering in the recesses of the mind, draining away psychic energy to keep it from spreading. It is better to look suffering straight in the eye, acknowledge and respect its presence, and then get busy as soon as possible on things we choose to focus on.

In a study of people who became severely handicapped by disease or by accidents – blind or paraplegic – Professor Fausto Massimini and his team found that several had adapted remarkably to their tragedy, and claimed that their lives had become better as a result of their handicap. What distinguished such individuals is that they decided to master their limitation through an unprecedented discipline of their psychic energy. [..]

The same ability to transform a tragic situation into at least a tolerable one is shown by [people] who survive solitary confinement or prisoners in concentration camps. In such conditions, the outside, “real” environment is so barren and dehumanizing as to induce despair in most people. Those who survive are able to ignore selectively the external conditions, and redirect their attention to an inner life that is real only to themselves. [..]

These examples suggest what one needs to learn to control attention. In principle any skill or discipline one can master on one’s own will serve: meditation and prayer if one is so inclined; exercise, aerobics, martial arts for those who prefer concentrating on physical skills. Any specialization or expertise that one finds enjoyable and where one can improve one’s knowledge over time. The important thing, however, is the attitude towards these disciplines. If one prays in order to be holy, or exercises to develop strong pectoral muscles, or learns to be knowledgeable, then a great deal of the benefit is lost. The important thing is to enjoy the activity for its own sake, and to know that what matters is not the result, but the control one is requiring over one’s attention.

Normally, attention is directed by genetic instructions, social conventions, and habits we learned as children. Therefore it is not we who decide what to become aware of, what information will reach consciousness.  As a result, our lives are not ours in any meaningful sense; most of what we experience will have been programmed for us. We learn what is supposed to be worth seeing, what is not; what to remember and what to forget; what to feel when we see a bat, a flag, or a person who worships God by different rites; we learn what is supposed to be worth living and dying for. Through the years, our experience will follow the script written by biology and culture. The only way to take over the ownership of life is by learning to direct psychic energy in line with our own intentions.”

I asked Peter Senge to describe what he does when he creates. “To create music, you have to have violins. You have to have instruments, okay? But the music doesn’t come from the violin. The violin is an instrument. For me, at an experiential level, giving a talk or working with a group in a workshop can be the same. I create that reality in my own consciousness, and then I play the instruments. I just really, really enjoy myself; I kind of fall into my love of the people. And I know, at some level, when I’m doing those programs and things begin to operate this way, nothing can go wrong. No matter what happens, it’s exactly what needs to happen right then. [..]
That doesn’t mean it’s always happy. Sometimes it’s very intense, but you literally have the experience that absolutely nothing could possibly go wrong. That doesn’t mean it turns out according to your plan. It means that whatever turns out is exactly what is right in that moment, and that is the music.”

(p. 88-89) “Much has been written about what makes families work. The consensus is that families that support the emotional well-being and growth of their members combine two almost opposite traits. They combine discipline with sponteneity, rules with freedom, high expectations with unstinting love. An optimal family system is complex in that it encourages the unique individual development of its members while uniting them in a web of affective ties.Rules and discipline are needed to avoid excessive waste of psychic energy in the negotiation of what can or cannot be done [..]. Then the psychic energy from bickering and arguing can be invested in the pursuit of each member’s goals. At the same time, each person knows that he or she can draw on the collective psychic energy of the family if needed.  [..] In a complex family, [we] have a chance to develop skills and recognize challenges, and are thus more prepared to experience life as flow.”

(p. 89) “When we talk to another person, even about the most trivial subjects such as the weather or last night’s ball game, the conversation introduces a shared reality into our consciousness. Even a greeting such as “Have a nice day” reassures us that we exist because other people notice us, and are concerned about our welfare. Thus the fundamental function of even the most routine encounters is reality maintenance, which is indispensable, lest consciousness disintegrate into chaos.”

(p. 110-112) “A group of people is kept together by two kinds of energy: material energy [e.g. money, defined responsibilities]; and the psychic energy of people investing attention in each other’s goals. Unless [we] share ideas, emotions, activities, memories, and dreams, a relationship will survive only because it satisfies material needs. As a psychic entity, it will exist only at the most primitive level.

To experience the simple pleasures of [shared flow], one has to pay attention, to know what [a person] is “proud of,” what she is “into”; then one has to devote more attention to share those activities with her. Only when there is harmony between the goals of the participants, when everyone is investing psychic energy into a joint goal, does being together become enjoyable.

The same holds true for any type of interaction. When there is reason to think that we are appreciated, job satisfaction is usually high; whereas the greatest source of stress in the workplace is the feeling that no one is interested in supporting our goals. Infighting among coworkers, inability to communicate with superiors and subordinates are the bane of most jobs. The roots of interpersonal conflict are often an excessive concern for oneself, and an inability to pay attention to the needs of others. It is sad to see how often people ruin a relationship because they refuse to recognize that they could serve their own interests best by helping others achieve theirs.”

Simply stated, if an individual cannot recognize their personal vision within the scope of a team or organizational vision, that individual will not be able to be a full participant in — let alone take responsibility for — the instantiation of that shared vision. It’s why I believe that the work of crafting shared objectives and a developing a collaborative understanding of the mission at hand is so essential. In fact, I don’t believe that success is possible without it.

That said, the challenge really begins before we ever sit down for that “integrating” conversation. Specifically, I know of two critical steps that have to happen if our full transformational potential is to be unleashed.

First, I can’t bring my personal vision to the table if I don’t know what my personal vision is.  Let’s be clear: I’m not talking about micro-level visions, e.g., what I’d like to accomplish in the few weeks or months. Personal visioning work involves asking yourself very hard and often disorienting questions. For example:

• “Why was I born?”
• “What is worth living (and working) for?”
• “What do I want to look back on and be proud of when I am 80 years old?”

Answers to these kinds of questions are rarely readily available off the cuff. (Think about it: how much support and guidance in developing our thinking on these issues is provided during our education and in the early years of our working lives?) So chances are good that most of us are, at any given point in our lives, somewhere on the spectrum between “no vision” and “totally integrated vision.”

The other prerequisite to working with others to develop a shared vision is the capability of expanding our consciousness to include the well-being, personal growth, and economic opportunity experienced or not experienced by others. One way to test this is to ask yourself: In whose personal journeys am I a co-investor? On whose behalf would I spend personal resources — including time, attention, money — if it meant sacrificing some of my short-term comfort, security, or well-being?

I have observed that we, as humans, tend to create concentric circles of consciousness and responsibility. Generally, at least in the West, the individual is at the center. The next circle usually includes some level of blood or partnership relations. Close friends might come next. Then maybe close colleagues in the workplace. And so on.

From my viewpoint, it doesn’t actually matter *whom*, specifically, we place in any given ring. The more relevant variable is how far out (i.e., across how many rings) our consciousness and sense of economic responsibility extends. Do I feel responsible for the well-being of each member of my team at work? Each customer of my product? Each person who touches my company’s supply chain?

To expand our consciousness into another ring is to make a big step outside of our comfort zone, to face the feelings of inadequacy and irrelevance (“how could I even hope to make a difference?), to allow for the possibility that when these new people are hurting or struggling (and there may be quite a lot of them), I am likely to experience a kind of co-suffering. It requires a major leap of faith.

All this can seem a bit discouraging. But the reason believe it’s worth doing this work is that it has the potential to unleash an astonishing economic impact. Developing one’s personal vision and expanding one’s scope of consciousness are the most powerful tools I know to affect positive change and improve the likelihood of success, both in terms of individual businesses and across regional economies.

To illustrate this, I’ve created the following thought experiment, expressed as a mathematical function.

where:

• “x” is the notional level of personal vision we’ve worked to develop, expressed as a decimal between 0 and 1.0.
• “y” is the number of rings (aka zones) outside of the realm of the individual into which we’ve expanded our sense of personal and economic responsibility
• The output of the function is expressed in notional units showing the scale of economic impact

Let’s plug in some numbers to see how it works:

So, what is a unit of economic impact? I would argue it that it doesn’t really matter. The point is that neither characteristic  is sufficient on its own, but together they can create incredible leverage.

Inspired by this idea, I put together a simple diagram that shows how Gryffindor, Hufflepuff, Ravenclaw and Slytherin might fall in the context of some popular 4-quadrant models.  Enjoy!

http://hanzatsu.files.wordpress.com/2010/11/hogwarts-houses-vs-4-quadrant-models.pdf

I found the last of these to be especially thought-provoking.  In particular, I feel that it provides some clues  about the kind of contributions that may be needed from the Agile and Lean communities.

Global exchange, global learning

The report predicts that job growth, when it comes, will be driven by India, China, and Latin America. Some excerpts:

“Forty percent of CHROs told us they anticipate headcount growth in China and 29 percent in India. Other regions [..] include Latin America (26 percent) [..] But this is not just a one-way migration. [..] Companies in emerging markets will continue aggressively moving beyond their own borders and become fierce competitors on the world stage.

[.. In]  India, 45 percent of respondents indicated they plan to increase headcount in North America and 44 percent in Western Europe. In China, 33 percent of CHROs we interviewed said they plan to increase headcount in North America and 14 percent in Western Europe. This worldwide focus on growth will require companies to fundamentally rethink how they manage the workforce and overcome borders.”

It seems to me that in the Lean and Agile communities (at least in the U.S./Europe/Australia), we have not even begun to explore the question of how to collaborate and problem-solve across cultural boundaries. I’m also not sure we understand which principles, practices, and mental models are useful in particular cultural contexts, and which are not.

Where today’s enterprises are weak

The researchers also asked executives about a number of different enterprise-level competencies related to “workforce performance.” In particular, they asked execs to rate each competency based on (a) how important it was to future success, and (b) how effectively their organization was operating in that domain right now.  Here are the results:

What is going on here?

On a global scale, corporate executives are beginning to understand that future market dominance will accrue to companies who are able to make above-average gains in:

• accelerating learning
• developing a (genuine!) culture of collaboration
• creating a generation of leaders, rather than a generation of managers

Even more surprisingly, these same execs are admitting that they ways they know how to pursue those gains are not working.

Let’s take a look at a few more excerpts from the report:

“The ability to identify, develop and empower effective, agile leaders is a critical imperative for CHROs over the next three years. ‘We have strong managers, not leaders — and we need strong leaders to achieve our strategic objectives,’ said a U.K. HR director.

To instill the dexterity and flexibility necessary to seize elusive opportunity, companies must move beyond traditional leadership development methods and find ways to inject within their leadership candidates not only the empirical skills necessary for effective management, but also the cognitive skills to drive creative solutions. The learning initiatives that enable this objective must be at least as creative as the leaders they seek to foster.

And:

“Building an organization with flexibility and dexterity requires leadership with the creativity to adapt to a constantly changing environment. These leaders must be able to negotiate through a maze of differing cultures, complex inter-generational dynamics and varied communication styles. Creative leadership, in fact, was identified in our most recent Global CEO Study as the top organizational need over the next five years.

Yet, companies struggle to both find and nurture effective future leaders. Less than one in three executives we interviewed rated their companies as adept at leadership development — a surprisingly low number given its relative importance.”

And:

“Tomorrow’s leaders must be cultivated to think in terms of a virtually unrestricted global environment. They must create within their organizations integrated, cross-functional capabilities and tear down the institutional silos that inhibit creativity and speed.

A senior vice president of HR in the United States said, ‘We have hired and trained people to work in silos. We need to identify future leaders who can operate in a globally integrated company and train them to think and work globally.’”

Implications for the lean-agile community

As Lean thinkers and/or agilists, we need to be really clear with ourselves about what this means. There is enormous demand in the global business community for tools that can help large numbers of people cross the chasm of learning, creativity, collaboration, and leadership. I don’t there’s any real limitation on what these tools can look like — e.g., extremely concrete, extremely abstract, etc. — as long as they work at scale.

Now, there’s certainly the possibility that large corporate structures cannot, because of their DNA, truly promote the things that HR execs say that they want to promote. I have taken this position myself on a number of occasions.

But lately I’ve started to wonder whether maybe large corporate structures are a function of the desire for reliable results, and not vice versa. Dan Pink has been talking about how top-down management is a technology designed to generate compliance. That’s a normative view — one I don’t disagree with — but we could also take a more historical perspective.

20th century management practices and large corporate structures are interlocking technologies designed to generate reliable results. These were very useful technologies as long as they delivered what they promised. Now they don’t deliver anymore.

Because human beings are curious and inventive, we can anticipate that some number of alternative technologies will emerge. This will produce moments of strong conflict for many thousands of organizations: hold onto familiar structures and tolerate spotty performance, or let go of those structures and try something that promises higher reliability and better results. Personally, I expect that over the medium term, any technology that can deliver reliable results will win out.

As a community, then, I would suggest that we need to ask ourselves two questions.  First, do we believe that agile and lean thinking contains within it the seeds of an alternative technology for organizing collaborative knowledge work that can deliver reliable results at scale?  If it does, we might want to prioritize (and fund?!) the R&D work for this technology sooner rather than later.

Second, I think it’s important to recognize that whether or not we get involved in developing a scalable alternative to corporate structures and management practices, lots of other folks around the world will. Based on what we know about the history of technology, it is very likely that a number of possible replacements will emerge at around the same time. (Calculus, anyone?) Eventually, after a period of confusion and struggle, one or two technologies will become dominant for a while.

From this viewpoint, we need to ask ourselves: how important is it that at least one of the top competitors for that dominant spot be based on the values that underlie lean-agile thought?  Personally, I would hope that any technology we would develop would be strongly rooted in principles of sustainability and respect for the working individual. Let us not kid ourselves that all the competing technologies that have yet to emerge will be based on similar values.

1. BrainStore, pioneers of industrial idea generation.  Their idea factory process model is visualized here.
2. Eric Ries has formulated a very simple, striking model. See this slide.
3. I have written about an expanded innovation loop model here.  It’s a bit more granular/technical and geared towards business strategy thinking.

That said, when working with leadership teams, I find that a key first step is to get the team members to disclose where they think the most serious problems, challenges, unresolved issues, and opportunities for non-linear performance growth actually are.

As a result, I’ve found it useful at times to work with self-assessment instruments. The idea is simple and widely employed: bring people into a room, get them to answer survey questions (in writing!) that will reveal organizational weaknesses, collect and display those answers (often without attribution), and use that data as the basis for discussion.

This week, I had the chance to design a self-assessment instrument from a lean-agile perspective. A reader will instantly recognize many familiar concepts, but I tried to avoid jargon as the team in question may not be at all familiar with lean-agile vocabulary. There are 50 questions, but since only numeric responses are required, I believe it should take less than 5 minutes to complete the survey.

If this material is useful to you, you are welcome to use it under the CC-attribution license. A ready-to-use, graphically enhanced version is available via slideshare or in PDF form.

Part I: Overall evaluation
Please indicate the following using a 0-10 scale.

1. How would you rate the performance of our organization as a whole?

Part II: Patterns + tendencies
Please indicate where your organization falls on the spectrum shown. (-5 to +5 scale)

2. Do we tend to focus more on short-term goals or more on long-term goals?
3. Are our work identities more strongly linked to our professional roles or more strongly linked to a particular project or mission?
4. Do we tend to have more of an inward focus (e.g., processes) or more of an outward focus (e.g., customer relationships)?
5. Do we tend to prioritize based on opportunities for value creation or tend to prioritize based on the desire to manage risk?
6. In our organization, is work mostly assigned by supervisors or mostly distributed via self-organization?
7. Do we work more often on a 9-to-5 schedule or more often on a highly variable schedule?
8. Does knowledge tend to be concentrated in pockets or diffused widely throughout our organization?
9. In our organization, which is more significant in determining a person’s level of influence: subject matter expertise or personal energy & charisma?
10. Is our workforce characterized more strongly by frequent turnover or more strongly by long tenure?
11. Do we do most of our work in a highly ordered environment or most of our work in a chaotic environment?

Part III: Strengths + capabilities
Please rate the accuracy of these statements relative to your organization. (0-10 scale)

12. “We get things done at an extremely high speed.”
13. “When circumstances change, we can pivot immediately.”
14. “We share an extremely strong sense of urgency.”
15. “We have an extremely collaborative culture.”
16. “We operate at an extremely high level of transparency.”
17. “We strongly encourage disagreement and dissenting views.”
18. “We are extremely flexible and creative in our thinking.”
19. “We are exceptionally good at embracing change.”
20. “At any given moment, we are totally focused on whatever is the top priority.”
21. “Most of our internal processes are extremely simple and straightforward.”
22. “We are extremely resourceful in situations where time and money are limited.”
23. “We are totally comfortable with uncertainty.”
24. “We have an extremely strong sense of shared purpose.”
25. “Every staff member feels responsible for our collective success.”
26. “We are relentless in our pursuit of quality.”
27. “We expect excellence from one another.”
28. “Our customers/stakeholders see us as being highly reliable.”
29. “We are extremely responsive to customer/stakeholder needs.”
30. “We are in constant dialog with the end-users of our products/services.”
31. “We constantly surprise and delight our end-users.”
32. “We make decisions in an extremely systematic and consistent way.”
33. “Every staff member in our organization is empowered to make decisions that matter.”
34. “Everyone in the organization is aware of our strategic priorities.”
35. “Staff members hardly ever feel that our time is being wasted.”
36. “We are extremely honest in admitting our own mistakes and weaknesses.”
37. “We strongly encourage experimentation and have the courage to fail.”
38. “In our organization, ideas and initiatives flow constantly across functional boundaries.”
39. “In our organization, communication flows constantly between hierarchical levels.”
40. “People love to come to work here.”

Part IV: Personal views
Please indicate how much you agree with the following statements. (0-10 scale)

41. “I trust every person on my team at the highest level.”
42. “I am constantly amazed by the incredible performance of the individuals around me.”
43. “I get a constant flow of feedback about my performance.”
44. “I am never made to wait for delayed decisions or deliverables.”
45. “I am constantly learning new things.”
46. “The majority of decision choices that I observe make sense to me.”
47. “I am getting exactly what I need from the organization so that I can perform at the highest level.”
48. “I feel able to fully disclose my ideas and opinions in any conversation.”
49. “I believe we have exactly the right people on board the organization.”
50. “I believe we have exactly the right mindset and culture overall.”