What is business?

Business is not war,
not a machine, not a game.
It is connection.

Embracing Change: Thriving in a Dynamic Business Environment

Change is constant and inevitable. In business, embracing change is essential for survival and growth. Change leadership is more about mindset than job titles. Here’s how to thrive amidst change:

Understand Change

• Constant: Businesses that don’t adapt risk obsolescence.
• Multidimensional: Impacts all levels—organizational, team, individual.
• Driven by Multiple Factors: External (market trends, tech) and internal (culture, leadership).

Strategies for Success

1. Foster Continuous Learning: Promote upskilling and reskilling. Encourage lifelong learning.
2. Embrace Technology: Use digital tools to enhance productivity and customer experience.
3. Promote Agility: Adopt flexible methodologies. Respond quickly to changes.
4. Empower Leadership: Encourage initiative at all levels. Foster a culture of ownership.
5. Communicate Effectively: Maintain transparency. Address concerns promptly.

Conclusion

Change brings opportunities for growth and innovation. By understanding and embracing it, businesses can not only survive but thrive. Prepare, adapt, and leverage change for success.

Leadership That Gets Results

Successful leaders can and do adapt their leadership style to the situation and have strengths in self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy, and social skills.

 

Leadership Styles:

• Coercive
• Effective in emergencies and turnaround situations
• Inhibits flexibility and dampens morale
• Authoritative
• Freedom to choose approach to meet a common goal
• Does not work well with a team of experts
• Affiliative
• People first - increases morale and harmony
• Too much praise, poor performance isn't addressed
• Democratic
• Flexibility, responsibility, and fresh ideas
• Feeling leaderless and confused
• Pacesetting
• High standards, self-motivated and competent perform well
• Overwhelms the less competent, seen as taking over
• Coaching
• Personal development, helping people improve
• Doesn't help those who are resistant to change

 

In order to be a successful coach, address the advice monster that tries to control other people. Stay curious longer by helping them find the real issue.  Drill down to find out what else might be causing an issue. And then ask again what the real challenge is. And finally what do you want?

 

 

Cooperative Performance

I enjoy watching sporting events. When it comes to the major leagues, I prefer watching in person over the TV. The Super Bowl is about the only exception to that. Not that it wouldn't be fun to go to the Super Bowl in person, but that isn't likely to happen. That said, I prefer watching NCAA sports, because while they are often very, very good at what they do, there is a higher chance of something unexpected happening. You see more trick plays, fumbled balls, standout individuals, etc. I also enjoy watching my kids play on rec, competitive, and high school teams.

The competition drives higher and higher levels of performance for those who stick with it, while driving those out of the sport if they can't perform at the needed level. This is one of the negative aspects. What happens to those who enjoy playing for fun and fitness but don't like the extreme competitiveness?

I've been thinking a little about this recently and how music and art performances differ or are sometimes similar from a competition perspective. There are plenty of music competitions on TV - American Idol, The Voice, etc. And any tryout for a leading role in a musical or the solo at a concert is going to result in someone winning the exclusive part, leaving others to be an understudy, lower profile named part, or ensemble. The big difference, however, comes down to competition at performance time.

In sports, there is competition at tryout time and during performances. At each event, there is a winner and a loser; sometimes there is a ranked list of how well each person competed. In marathons and triathlons, even though there is a ranked list of times published afterwards, there is usually a good camaraderie among competitors, with positive words when crossing paths, which I have appreciated. Yet so often, the negative attitude towards competitors is part of the environment as an attempt to intimidate and break the concentration and confidence of the opponent.

While concerts and musicals do have to have tryouts, because we can't all be the lead, I appreciate how they become a community effort. Different theater companies share props, scenery pieces, and costumes and attend each other's performances. Individuals often perform with different companies. Everyone involved wants to perform at the highest level possible, but there are no losers. Even the actor portraying the villain gets an especially hardy applause if they did an excellent job making you hate them over the course of the show. Multiple bands can get together and have a combined concert.

In the gaming world, there are cooperative games, such as Pandemic, where the players work together to beat the board game. You win together or lose together, but there is no person or team on the other side. The better you work together, the better you perform.

I wish we had something like this for sports. Maybe that's what is missing currently from the sports world - a way to perform in a way that drives higher levels of performance without anyone having to lose in order to make that happen. That's the big question - how do we drive cooperative performance over competitive performance and still maintain the things that are good about sports?

Dual Specialties

Or is it duelling specialties?

Growth is good. Being stretched and challenged is good. But sometimes we can be pushed into something that is actually more of a shift than growth.

If someone is an excellent server at a restaurant - they make good money from tips, their customers are happy and ask for them by name, and the restaurant makes more money due to their upselling skills. So what's the best course of action? Promote them to managing the servers or to managing the entire restaurant? When do those skills translate to management and when are we taking someone out of a win-win-win situation and changing it to one where everyone loses?

If someone is a good programmer, does that automatically mean we should promote them to be a project manager or product manager as a reward? What if they don't like the new job, or worse yet, what if they are bad at it?

Is the best cellist in the orchestra a perfect fit to replace the conductor when they retire? Or did we just lose the best cellist in the orchestra and gain a mediocre conductor?

Is a faculty member who is a good researcher by default also a good teacher? Should we promote the best teacher to department head or dean in the name of personal growth?

Managing people, operations, and projects well is a skill. It is its own specialty. You don't have to be a good programmer to specialize in managing programmers or a good cellist to be able to conduct cellists. A project manager may focus on a certain industry, but at the end of the day a good PM should be able to manage any project.

The biggest issue it seems with most "good" managers is that when they see people under them who are good at what they do, they want to promote them to be a manager just like them. It's time to flip the conventional wisdom on its head and start rewarding people for being good at what they do and helping them achieve true growth in their lane rather than convincing them that it is a reward to shift into a completely different lane.

FLL Competition

Last month we had the final competition for the Lego Robotics team. I say final, because it was the last one for us, although it was actually the qualifier for the state competition. Spoiler alert: we didn't qualify for state. And that's okay.

The competition was on a Saturday (back in January). It was cold and early, but it wasn't very far from our house, which I appreciated. There were 11 teams, including two from our school. I think there was supposed to be 10 teams, but due to some lack of communication all around, our team got registered late, and they were kind enough to let us still register. Poor communication was something I fought with the entire season.

We showed up early and set up on our table. Each team had a table about two and a half feet by two and a half feet in the hallway to set up our things on. We didn't have a poster like many other teams did. We had a laptop with a PPT presentation for our research problem, so we fired that up and would run through it with those who stopped to take a look.

There were several tables set up in an open area right next to us, which we could practice the missions on. We found that on one of our missions the robot was running short for some reason. I don't know how that happened, but it did, and the kids fixed it.

There are four main aspects to the judging. The first is the most obvious - points scored in actual competition. We ran three times and took our highest score. The second is the robot design discussion, where the team meets with some judges and talks to them about how they designed the robot, both physically and the programming behind it. The third is a research problem related to the theme for the year (this year was space - last year was water). The fourth is team dynamics - how well everyone gets along and works together.

We had four missions we attempted. There are some others we could have done if the team had more focus. Two missions we pretty much had solid. One was so-so, and the other one we pretty much knew it wasn't going to work. In all three runs, the robot got stuck at some point and had to be rescued, which is a small penalty. Only having to grab it once each was pretty good, I thought. After the first run, the kids thought of a way to add some rubber pieces to add more grip to the robot arm to help it accomplish the task they were struggling with. After the second run, they decided to bag the mission that they knew wasn't going to work and just focus on the one they had a chance with. In the third run, they were able to get the third mission completed by running the mission several times, utilizing the extra time they saved by not attempting the one they knew wasn't going to work. I was so proud of them. They were as focused as they had ever been and worked well as a team. The were troubleshooting and adjusting and improving each time.

In the robot design portion, they did okay. We had a large team, and the judges noted that with so many team members, we should have been able to accomplish more missions. That said, at the coaches meeting in the morning, other team coaches were surprised that both teams from our school were the max size (10). I think the coaches recognized something that the judges didn't, which was that more people on the team doesn't mean more work gets done. The phenomenon is clearly addressed in one of my favorite books, The Mythical Man Month (Brooks). The three second version is that just adding more people to your project doesn't mean you're going to get more work done in less time. I can see how having a team of 3 or 4 would be much more effective and efficient than dealing with 10 (we actually had 12, which was over the official limit).

In the research project portion, they had talked about a variety of space-related problems, such as getting attacked by aliens and how to sleep without floating around the space station. They ended up going with scratching your nose with a space suit on. I had turned the kids over to another volunteer to work on deciding what problem to go with, and that's what they came up with. They did really well with it. They started by showing the below video, stepped through several possible ideas they came up with (the best was a trained pet squirrel that could move around in the suit and scratch where you needed), and then showed why their solution was the best choice to provide relief safely, while keeping the hands free to work on the space walk. The judges appreciated both the video to show that it was a real problem and the prototypes they made and brought.


The part that we prepared for the least and that they performed the worst on was the core values (or team building) portion. I hadn't spent much time looking into what that part of the competition would look like, so we kind of winged it going into it. Each team member had one core value that they provided a brief description of. After discussing each of the values, the judges had the team solve a problem together. They had some sand in a little foil tray and a pile of straws and rubber bands and popsicle sticks and had to build a Mars lander that could sit on the surface and not get blown away by the fierce Martian wind. I'll just say they provided good counterexamples to most of the values they had so aptly described moments earlier. The highest score they got on the rubric was related to the team working on their own without interference from the coach, since I pretty much turned around and looked out the window as I couldn't watch. That said, I honestly think it was a fair approximation of how we worked together throughout the season. They did work well in most of the competition other than this component, but our twice-weekly meetings were very chaotic.

I really was proud of them, and so was our principal who attended the competition. A few weeks later in February, we had a STEM night at the school and met one more time just before that event to talk about what we would do for a demonstration. The team was all wondering why we weren't still meeting and wanted to continue working on things even though the competition was over. I appreciated that and gave them one of the secret mission challenges to work on. It was fun to work on it, but it reinforced to me that it was time to be done meeting. Having the competition to work towards was one of the few things keeping them mildly focused.

Based on how things went last year and this year, I think the thing to do is to have a couple levels of teams. I think having an introductory team that meets in the second half of the year to learn basic skills and then from that group have tryouts for next year's competition teams would help. The competition teams need to be 5 or fewer team members, made up of only those with enough technical skills and maturity/focus. We had something like 50 or 60 students sign up wanting to do the team, so we maxed out our teams to get as many involved as we could, while still not being able to include everyone. The competition team needs to be chosen before the year even starts, so that in August, they can set up the missions and immediately begin working. Both this year and last year, we lost a lot of time due to the mission field not being set up. We had a variety of skill levels on the team, with some members very advanced and able to perform complex tasks, and others that just wanted to build random things out of Legos and couldn't write a program to make a robot drive in a straight line. Having an introductory team to draw from based on observing their work would make the competition team much stronger, as well as allowing more time to teach some of the basic skills to those that were brand new to robotics.

No, really

I thought we were ready to start our season earlier than we did last year. I guess we will be starting about the same time. We have an official competition in 3 months, so we have a more firm deadline than we had last year.

We have a good mix of those who have experience from last year and new team members. We also have a mix of boys and girls, which I think will be good. We had a lot of bouncing off the walls on last year's team.

I think we are setting a good foundation for the next couple years with several younger students. Our first meeting is next week, so here we go! No, really this time.

Organization

For meeting 13, we had an interesting idea from our assistant coach. Basically, we have been having problem with focus and getting the team to stick to the various assignments they had. He mentioned that he's surprised adults are able to get as much development done as they do, as they often run into similar issues. But even more for the elementary school kids, who don't have experience.

The suggestion, which we jumped on and had the team do is organize themselves into several small teams and then write down those assignments. It's not that we hadn't tried that previous, since we had, but actually writing it down and making sure everyone was happy with their assignment seemed like a good idea. For the rest of the meeting, as I saw someone wandering around or off task, I'd just ask them what their task was and if they were working on it. More often than not, they'd get back on track.

We had a couple of the teams either be able to accomplish their task or at least get close to it, which is encouraging. Others are still trying to do things that are probably more complicated than they need to be.

Nine Lives

Our Robotic Dudes last week was fairly uneventful from a productivity standpoint. It was our ninth meeting, and honestly I don't that we got much done. The challenge kit and table are fully assembled and in the room where we can actually work on them, since they wrapped that up in preparation for STEM Night. We started by talking about how STEM Night went and what goals people had for moving forward. We also talked through a few of the challenge options and broke into some teams based on which challenges people wanted to work on. But about half the group just ran around out of control, not paying attention to what we were doing. Does that mean we're in the Storming phase of team development or have we regressed to Forming? The ideal is that moving forward we'll have some additional adult supervision to help out.

Success!

This past week we had our fifth meeting. The challenge that I had given them the week before was met! Time to start working on the next one.

We had one of the more boisterous boys come back, who had been missing the week before, but he was much more mellow. He was much more on task himself, plus helped get some of the other boys focused when they were not. I don't know what happened exactly, but I'll take it. :)

At the end of last week, each boy had their own computer and were individually working on trying to solve the problem of picking up the pipe and driving it over and dropping it on the other notebook and they got close. This week we started that way, but about half of them just sort of naturally grouped together and were working on the problem together, which was great to see. They had a couple of computers but were mostly just working on the one program that was the closest and trying it repeatedly until they could get it to work consistently. Part of their problem was not having the spots marked on the floor where the robot and the notebooks were sitting, so they would get bumped around and not end up back exactly where they were previously.

The other half of the boys were just kind of over there messing around on the computers. I honestly don't really know what they were doing. I've gotten to where if they are running around too much, I just sit there and wait quietly for them to be ready, as I can't compete with that many of them if they want to be out of control. One of them will see it quickly and tell the others to calm down so we can get back to work. Since we had about half of them focused, I spent time with that half and let the other half do whatever they were doing.

This is really the norming phase moving in. There is still some storming. They will fight and yell and poke each other in the eye as they are 9 and 10 year old boys after all. But those who want to do something are actually trying and accomplishing what they want to do.

I think the next step is to work on loops and sensors. Right now they have to tell the robot to drive a certain distance, but by using a sensor in a loop, you can tell it to start driving and just keep on driving until a certain condition is met by the sensor, such as seeing a certain color or bumping the touch sensor. That way, we could put the notebooks a differing distance apart, and as long as it is going in a straight line between them, as soon as it sees a certain color, it knows it is on the notebook and can drop the piece and back away. Part of that is also navigating around the table. There are lines in certain parts of the table which can be followed to make sure it ends up in the right place. The basic algorithm is that as the robot drives forward, if it sees black it turns slightly one way or if it sees white it turns slightly the other way. By checking the line regularly and only moving a little at a time, it will end up driving pretty smoothly.

Making progress.

I'm Bored

Yesterday was our fourth meeting of the Robotic Dudes.

We jumped right into trying to perform a basic task. Part of the challenge is to pick up a piece with a ring-shaped handle and bring it back to the home base. In order to keep it simple but get them programming, I gave them a modified challenge using that Lego piece from the challenge kit. I put two notebooks on the ground about 4 feet apart. They had to make the robot pick up the piece off the one notebook, turn around, and drop it on the other one.

There are enough laptops in the STEM Lab, which which is the room where we meet, for everyone to work on their own. I just explained their task, pointed each one of them toward a computer, and I went over and sat in the corner to watch. Their first task was to modify our existing robot to give it something it could pick up the piece with. It already had an arm, but it was more for dragging something on the ground than for picking something up off the ground. They modified the arm to put a small hook on it. Then they had to start working on the programming. I had to kick them out of the box of Lego parts, as they kept wanting to mess around and build things that had nothing to do with the robot.

They eventually all started working on the computers, although a couple of them were just going through all the different built in sounds the robot can make instead of actually working on the task at hand. One of those included one of our robotic experts, who does have experience both in Legos and in other programming environments. His favorite line so far is, "I'm bored." The first couple weeks were painful for him, I think, as we were getting to know each other, setting up some rules, talking about what we would be doing, and learning how the programming environment works. He just wanted to get in and start programming. I don't know that we're looking at an Asperger's diagnosis, but he's definitely more interested in interacting with technology than with other people. Of course a lot of kids these days match that description. Part of First Lego League is teamwork, though, so we have to spend some time on it.

Most of the boys had a laptop to work with, although a few were working together on one or goofing around. They were fighting over who got to connect their Bluetooth to the robot and try out their program, which is a good thing. We had several who tried to drive way too far and just kept going after hitting the piece they were supposed to pick up. We had one who picked up the piece but ended up flinging it up in the air since they raised the arm too fast. One actually picked it up and drove off with it, but went off at a weird angle and didn't end up dropping it on the other notebook. They were getting closer each time as they took turns running their programs and then tweaking them. This might have been the first meeting where I wasn't ready to kick them all out when time was up. We could have stayed another hour to tweak programs and keep trying to accomplish the task.

Something that will make this easier in the future will be when we start using loops and sensors to move around instead of just trying to guess how far to make it drive. Plus, I think building a different kind of arm to pick up the piece will work better.

I really tried to stay mostly hands off and let them try things. I would give them some ideas or hints to help them figure out what they did wrong. At one point when some of the boys were messing around building things that had nothing to do with our robot, before I took away the box of extra parts, one of the boys asked if he could just watch a video (unrelated to robotics) since no one was doing anything. I took away the spare parts, but I also challenged him to step up and be a leader and get his team focused on the task at hand. The only way for me to stay sane and for them to really come together as a team is for me to give them something to do and then back off and let them organize and make it happen.

At one point, someone that looked like a college student came into the STEM Lab and sat down to watch. She took some notes for maybe 10 minutes and then left, without saying anything. There are a lot of college kids that work in the after school club, so I don't know if she was part of that (or if she thought we were part of that). When she was there, we were testing out our programs and learning some things together about how to fix the mistakes they had made in their programs, so much better than some times she could have shown up in previous sessions when they were jumping off tables (both literally and figuratively).

We have a ways to go, but I can see the light at the end of the tunnel.

First Meeting for the First Lego League

About two months ago, my kids' elementary school was holding a meeting for parents interested in help out with Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) initiatives at the school. The principal's vision is to earn a STEM designation for the school, which opens up opportunities for a variety of grants and programs. I couldn't make it to the meeting but told them I was willing to help however I could.

About a month ago, I had a meeting with the principal, where we talked about some of the things they need help with, such as the science fair, Odyssey of the Mind, a STEM night for families and students at the school, and a STEM committee that would be in charge of paperwork regarding the STEM designation. Some of those things needed more help than others, but the one we ended up really chasing down was the idea of a First Lego League robotics team. The school also has some VEX robots from a robotics club that was running a couple years ago, but we decided to start with Lego.

This seemed like a great idea, so the principal sent out a request to see what students would be interested in participating, as well as if there were other parents who would be willing to help coach. There was enough interest to create three teams! Another dad and I are two of the coaches, plus they made a team of students in the After School Club (ASC), which is run by college students, so one of those students will be their coach.

We had a parents night last week, where we talked about the program, answered questions, and I did a quick demo of a robot I built to show the kinds of things they can do. The principal split up the team assignments, and we are ready to go.

So yesterday after school was our first session. I brought my robot that I built, which at some point will be disassembled, because the kids have to do all the work, plus I don't know what our robot will need to look like yet to perform the various tasks in the challenge. But it's good to have something basic to show off how it works. The ASC team is assembling the challenge kit, since they're there every day anyway. The other teams are only there once a week.

I figured we would start with a little Forming, so prepared a few activities designed to get to know everyone - start learning names and personalities. I brought the robot but didn't do much more than show the basic demo of it driving and moving a block around ... and put it away several times as every time I turned around, someone would get it out again. They're excited, which is good.

The first thing I had them do was write their names on the white board and draw a picture of something that represented them, then get up and explain to us what they drew and why. One kid would only write his name really small down in the corner and another wouldn't draw a picture for some reason, but overall that worked well. I drew a mountain bike for my picture.

Then we tried doing the human knot. Did I mention these are nine and ten year old boys? Let's just say it didn't work. There was pushing and pulling and trampling and crying. You know the drill. So we sat back at our conference table and started talking about rules. I had three that I had come up with and asked for their feedback on mine and if they had some they wanted to add:

• Be positive
• Everything is a learning experience
• Everyone has something to offer

They came up with a variety of rules, such as no throwing people out the window and no creating a robot atomic bomb. I pointed out that those probably fit within the existing rules, since if someone was tossed out the window, they wouldn't be able to share what they had to offer, and an atomic bomb isn't positive. We talked a little about what we could learn from the failed human knot. The boys came up with an additional rule that seemed simple but will take some work:

• Focus

 I'll try to refine those a little more so there's a short/catchy version of each rule with maybe an interesting acronym (better than BEEF), plus a more full, descriptive version of each. But I want to keep it simple.

The last thing we did was an activity to start thinking about programming logic. I put some chairs in one corner of the room, making a basket to try to drop a basketball into. One of the boys was the robot, blindfolded at the opposite corner of the room, with several table and chairs to work around. Three of the boys were designated as the programmers, who were to give instructions to the robot. Three of the boys were designated as programmer judges. Their job was to rate how good of a job the programmers did at giving clear directions. The other three were designated as robot judges. Their job was to rate how well the robot did at following directions.

There was a clear lane around the outside of the room, but the programmers decided to send him through the minefield in the middle of the room, including having him climb over a table at one point. When it was time to put the ball in the basket, rather than having him place or drop it in, they had him throw it. The robot missed.

We talked about some situations where they gave unclear or incorrect directions, like telling the robot to turn 15 degrees, without saying in which direction and which should have actually been 90 degrees. They told him to walk forward a certain number of steps instead of just saying to walk forward until he bumped into something. When the programmers told him to climb over the table, he was blindfolded so didn't know where the table was. It took three minutes, and the ball didn't go where it was supposed to. But we learned some things.

We wrapped up talking about how it was probably difficult to remember everything they observed while the activity was happening in order to talk about it later, so they needed notebooks to write down what was happening along the way. Their homework is to get a notebook to bring next time so they can keep notes on what they do and how well it works. The other assignment is to bring a couple of ideas for a team name. I told them that while they got to make the suggestions and vote on what they liked, I reserved the right to veto any name I didn't like, so it needed to be an awesome name. "Wait, so we can't name ourselves Team Underpants?" If you have to ask, it's probably not going to happen.

How Long Have You Been Up Here?

There is a great mountain bike trail near my house. Actually there are quite a few nearby that really are great rides. Some run parallel to a river, some include several stream fords, and others are steep climbs that lead to awesome views. This one is a nice 3-5 mile ride, depending on where you start and stop, mostly a gradual uphill, which then leads back to a fun 3-5 mile downhill back to the car. There is a dirt road that is groomed in the winter as a cross country ski trail and which a lot of people drive up and camp along in the summer.

What makes the ride more fun than most dirt roads is that there is a single track that crisscrosses the road the whole way. Probably less than 10% of the time are you on the dirt road. The rest of the time is on twisty single track with rocks to jump off and branches to duck and banked turns. Lots of fun.

The thing is, as a multi-use canyon with dogs, bikers, horses, hikers, kids, cars, and all kinds of traffic on both the road and the single track, since it is so close to where so many people live, it's important to watch out to avoid accidents. Because I (and a former riding buddy) never cared too much about the uphill, thinking of it as the slog you have to go through to then enjoy the smooth ride down, I just ride up the dirt road, which helps avoid having to pass people going opposite directions on a tight single track. A lot of other people take the single track up and then back down again. It doesn't matter too much how you get up, but if you want to do some twists and turns up, that is great.

In the fall, the trail starts turning a bit muddy, with the upper sections in the last mile or two usually much wetter than the bottom section. Sometimes the last mile can be so muddy on the single track that you just have to stay on the road, and even the road will have huge puddles on it but they are usually more easily avoided. I was up there around deer hunting season in October, and that was the general condition of the trail. The road wasn't bad, but the upper sections of single track were a mess. I slogged up the road as usual and didn't pay attention to the single track until I got to the turnaround spot. I headed down the single track and found it pretty messy, but I go through okay. Upon descent, each section where it crosses the road is usually a little drier than the previous.

After crossing the road a couple times, I came to a crossing about halfway down the canyon where several bikers were stopped. I wondered what that section of the single track looked like since the upper sections were a bit of a mess, and I was considering just sticking to the road if the single track was a mess. Naturally, I asked the bikers who were headed up hill what the condition of the trail ahead of me and behind them down the canyon looked like. His surprised question in response to my question has stuck with me.

How long have you been up here?

It must have made no sense to him that if I was coming down the canyon that I wouldn't already have seen the condition of the single track probably within the last hour. The only possible explanation in his mind is that I must have been camping out or something to keep myself busy for a few days to not have been through recently and thus need a trail report. This was in spite of the fact that I had no significant gear, just a jacket and a small hydration pack. I told him that I had just come up the road, not the trail, and you could practically see the light bulb turn on. I had come up only within the past hour but on the road, not the single track.

Why was that not the obvious explanation that popped into his head? Because he always rides up the single track. That's just what you do if you're on a bike. Or that's what he does. And what a lot of other people do. But not what everyone does, especially those who don't want to be constantly pulling out of the way of other bikes on the trail headed in the opposite direction.

How often is that our first thought when someone says something or does something that is different than the way we say or do things? The cognitive dissonance can be blinding as we try to process some convoluted explanation for a strange event or behavior, when in fact the other person just chooses to do something that is simply different than how we do them.

How important Covey's recommendation that we seek first to understand, then to be understood. More often than not what we may blow out of proportion and make into something huge is really not what was intended. We would all be better off if there is a possible occasion for offense if we would stop and think about what the other person likely intended and if there isn't a simpler explanation than the knee-jerk story we made up in our mind. No one was offended on the mountain bike trails that day, but there was still a misunderstanding based on two people having different preferences.

By searching for the parsimonious explanation - the simplest explanation, with the least assumptions, that still gets a reasonable result - instead of doing mental gymnastics to make sense of the cognitive dissonance, one's own assumptions may be challenged. And not everyone is ready for that.

Parking Lot

I'm not one for having meetings just because there's supposed to be a meeting. There should be a purpose.

Now, that doesn't mean you want to overly plan every meeting. Sometimes you just need to get together as a group to talk, and you may not need an ultra-detailed agenda, because the point is to have some time to just see how everyone is doing.

But there are times where it's important to stick to working through specific problems and close out lingering issues. How do we know what type of meeting we're headed into? Well, we have an agenda.

Ideally, the agenda is sent out in advance, so everyone can prepare for it. This is important for the introverts, so they can think of what to say in advance and for the extroverts to have a chance to get past their knee-jerk reactions and filter themselves a little to what is most relevant to the discussion. Otherwise, the extroverts process out loud, while the introverts process silently, and by the time the introverts have decided what to say, the discussion has already taken place and we're on to the next topic.

In addition to publishing the agenda in advance, an important tool for facilitating discussion is called the parking lot. For those who have coworkers who like to hijack the agenda and take the meeting in a direction other than what we planned, the parking lot allows the meeting facilitator to acknowledge that there is further discussion that may need to happen on a different topic, while still keeping us on the published agenda topic.

The idea is that discussion circles around a given agenda item, and when someone mentions something that is off topic, no matter how important it may or may not be, the facilitator acknowledges the comment, thanks the commenter for it, and then either asks permission to place the comment/topic in the parking lot or just simply states that they are going to put it in the parking lot. Then, the important part, is that with a bit of a flourish, the facilitator writes it down. This can be on a white board up in front of the room or just on a piece of paper on the conference table or even a note window in a virtual meeting.

By acknowledging the off topic comment both verbally and in writing, there are two results. The first is that it is made clear that the agenda will not be hijacked and that particular line of conversation is over for the moment. The second is that it is made clear that you care about everyone's needs. Maybe that item will be on the agenda for next week's meeting. Maybe it will be taken care of in a one on one with just that person later. Maybe there will be a few minutes at the end of the planned discussion to circle back to it. Because it is written down, it won't be forgotten.

Information Systems Success Models - An Annotated Bibliography

DeLone,W.H. & McLean, E.R. (1992). Information systems success: The quest for the dependent variable. Information Systems Research, 3(1).

IS success is multidimensional and interdependent, so interactions between success dimensions need to be isolated. Success dimensions should be based on goals of the research as well as proven measures where available. The number of factors should be minimized. The key factors included in the model include system quality, information quality, system use, user satisfaction, individual impacts, and organizational impact.

Rai, A., Lang, S.S., & Welker, R.B. (2002). Assessing the validity of IS success models: An empirical test and theoretical analysis. Information Systems Research, 13(1).

IS success models are compared. One major factor that differs among models is the category of IS Use. Some models include Use as a process since it is a prerequisite to other factors, others an indicator of success since people won’t use a system if they haven’t determined it will be useful to them, and of course perceived usefulness vs. measured use. The Technology Acceptance Model suggests that perceived usefulness and ease of use directly impact user behavior and system use.

Seddon, P.B. (1997). A respecification and extension of DeLone and McLean’s model of IS success. Information Systems Research, 8(September).

Standard variance models assert that variance in independent variables predicts variance in dependent variables. Process models, on the other hand, posit that not only are the occurrence of events necessary but that it is a particular sequence of events that leads to a change in the dependent variable. The presented IS success model removes the process component of the DeLone and McLean’s model. The problematic model contained three meanings of information system use. One meaning is that use provides some benefit to the user. A second, invalid, meaning presented use as a dependent variable of future use (i.e., if the user believes the system will be useful in the future, they will use it now). The third, also invalid, is that use is an event in the process that leads to individual or organizational impact. The proposed model links measures of system and information quality to perceived usefulness and user satisfaction, which in turn leads to expectations of future system usefulness and then use. Observing benefits to other individuals, organizations, and society also impact perceived usefulness and user satisfaction regardless of system or information quality.

Velasquez, N.F., Sabherwal, R., & Durcikova, A. (2011). Adoption of an electronic knowledge repository: A feature-based approach. Presented at 44th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, 4-7 January 2011, Kauai, HI.

This article discusses the types of use for knowledge base users. It utilized a cluster analysis to come up with three types of users. This included Enthusiastic Knowledge Seekers, Thoughtful Knowledge Providers, and Reluctant Non-adopters. Enthusiastic Knowledge Seekers made up the largest group at 70%. They had less knowledge and experience and shared little if anything of their own but considered the knowledgebase articles to be of high quality and very useful. The thoughtful knowledge providers, 19% of the users, submitted quality articles to the knowledgebase, enjoy sharing their knowledge with others, had moderate experience, and were intrinsically motivated. The smallest group, Reluctant Non-adopters at 11%, were experts who were highly experienced and adept at knowledge sharing but lacked the time or intrinsic motivation to do contribute meaningfully. They considered the knowledgebase to be low quality and did not consider it worth their time to work on improving it.

Leadership

Just some leadership videos I wanted to have somewhere I could get to easily. The last one is just funny more than anything, but the first three have some important principles behind them, although it's far from a comprehensive list.









What are your favorite video clips for teaching leadership?

Expectations of Quality

Behold the smartness of Logan City road crews:

zoom in if you don't see it
We all make mistakes, and some like the one above are more easily corrected than others.

It makes me wonder what kind of expectations of quality the road crews have of themselves. We would all do well to think about the expectations we have of our employees, coworkers, and bosses, not to mention the expectations they have of us. If everyone does not set the bar at the same level, the tension can build quickly. Having a work environment where it's safe to fail, balanced with high expectations of each other, will lead to learning experiences. Ultimately the learning experiences will lead to higher quality outcomes if the team can stay in sync. Set the bar too low or get out of sync of the expectations of others, and you end up with the stereotypical "government job" and results like the above.

Play Games

Here's a couple similar articles on how parents playing video games with their daughters can have positive impacts on their daughters and that both boys and girls can learn life skills from their parents while gaming.

The second article more directly points out that kids directly benefit from the game playing, while in the first it's less clear whether there is causation or simply correlation. It's like the Freakonomics guys pointing out that kids who grow up in a home with a lot of books do better in school, but it's not the presence of books that necessarily causes them to do better as much as it is that having books around the home is a signal that the parents are the kind of people who care about what their kids are learning.

Part of why I like Scouting so much is that I like playing the games; it's a way of never having to grow up. On a recent trip, one person we visited talked about not knowing much about the games their kids were playing after asking the kids to pause or turn off their game to do some chores; I pointed out that there was only about 30 seconds left of that level, so maybe the kid should just finish. I knew it, because it's a game I play. With my kids. And my kids play it with each other. Even the ones who don't normally get along that well. Whether it's canoe races, Mario Kart, or Scrabble, it's spending time together to build memories and common bonds that is important.

Negative Space

In art, negative space is an important yet occasionally overlooked concept. There are a couple different types of negative space. If you google the term, the results are mostly all types of silhouettes, where an object doesn't actually appear in the image at all. What is missing is what you're supposed to actually see. An example of this is the arrow in the FedEx logo. What arrow, you ask? Well, go look real quick, and then come back. ... Pretty cool, eh? The silhouette walking across the street here is another more obvious example.

The other type of negative space is a type of balance or contrast to the focus of the piece, also apparent in the photo of the sign pictured above (which iboy_daniel was so gracious to share with an open license). The same picture taken head on would simply not be as interesting. Negative space used this way adds a level of depth that is missing otherwise. The divine proportion and rule of thirds are related to the concept of negative space.

In images with a lot going on, photographers will often use a large aperture, resulting in a shallow depth of field, meaning that only a small range of the picture is in focus. This artistic blurring of the foreground and background is negative space that makes the pieces that are in focus almost pop out at the viewer. The out of focus elements are important because of the context they provide to the in focus elements.

In a recent conversation with a former employee of mine, we got to talking about the importance of negative space in the workplace, although we didn't call it that at the time. It's the idea that time spent sitting around talking, grabbing a cup of coffee, running to the break room to play ping pong, going to lunch together, or otherwise spending time together not immediately engaged in "work" is an important aspect of the workplace.

An article in the paper about a team running the Ragnar Wasatch Back Relay, which happens to have started today, points out this same concept. A business sponsored a team a few years ago for the 200 mile 12 person relay race through the mountains and found clear benefits in the way of increased collaboration and connections among employees back at the office long after the race ended, so they've continued doing it.

Being able to step away momentarily from the task at hand to do something that doesn't really matter helps increase focus on important issues upon returning to work. These important issues are often lost if taken on too directly with nowhere to allow the eyes or mind to rest. Of course unrealistic deadlines, high travel costs, juggling multiple projects, and other factors can make such downtime seemingly difficult to fit in. It doesn't have to be huge, though, and probably shouldn't be. Care does need to be taken to ensure the focus isn't moved off what is important and onto elements that should be in the background.

In virtual teams, instant messaging can provide some of the same downtime to a limited extent, but getting together in the same physical location occasionally can do wonders to reinvigorate a project or team that is suffering from lack of contact. Whether or not the in-person time is "productive", it can help remind everyone of the importance of their piece in relation to the big goal and that there are real people receiving their submissions on the other end of the line.

I often practice a negative space technique when working on a paper or presentation. A month or two out I'll review the requirements and read some related articles or books but not write anything. A week or two goes by, and I'll put together a basic outline of what I'm going to write or talk about. I'll sit on it for another week, while in the back of my mind I'm thinking of stories, articles, events, theories, videos, and all sorts of related issues. This cycle progresses until it's relatively close to the time of submission/presentation, depending on its size and importance. When I do sit down to knock it out, the whole thing flows from my fingertips in a way that was not possible the month or two prior, because of the downtime I'd had to process it.

I always did like it at the moving company I used to work for when the person over our crew on any given day was a smoker; it meant we would get a 10 minute break every hour instead of one 15 minute break every four hours. The focus there was always on when the next break was coming. Everyone filed out of the warehouse like kids following an ice cream truck when the snack truck would pull into the parking lot every morning and save us all if he was ever late. At a physically demanding job, that negative space is closely guarded and for good reason, but at white collar jobs it can be easy to forget or to spend your downtime alone.

So be positive. But don't forget about the negative.

A Whole New World

Last month, I mentioned how sometimes people will fight against something and by so doing cause what they were trying to avoid in the first place. Here is a similar example, this time of people arguing against something and thus making the point they were arguing against.



At East High School in Salt Lake City (yes, THE East High School), they are putting on a bilingual production of Aladdin. I think it's a great idea. Basically, half the school is Caucasian, one quarter Hispanic, and the rest other minorities. The problem is that only the white kids try out for the theater, until now.

They are coming together. They are all happy to have met people they didn't know before. They're helping each other with their languages. What a great story, too. Aladdin is all about not trying to be something you're not but loving others for what they are. Maybe next year they'll do a bilingual Romeo and Juliet.

The point I made in the first paragraph comes from the comments on the story. The more people complain about this production, the more their own xenophobia is apparent, thus reinforcing the need for such a production. Most of the first comments were people saying this was a bad thing, though it is balancing out with supporting comments as the day goes on. Some commenters claim this is a ploy to encourage acceptance of illegal aliens. One asks that we stop catering to minorities and accept each other without bringing race and culture into the conversation. Another asserts that a bilingual production won't help the Hispanic kids learn English, which is the global language of business and science. Two commenters unfold the logical fallacy that if we do things in Spanish, we'll have to start doing things in many other languages as well.

First, who knows if the Hispanic kids are illegal or not? Second, who cares? They may very well have been born here, and whether they were or were not, they likely have little choice but to live where their parents are. These are children we're talking about. How messed up is the request that we accept each other without talking about our races and cultures? If the acceptance only goes one way, from minority to majority, that is actually a request that minorities reject their own race and culture with an out where the majority doesn't have to accept anyone that's different.

When it comes to learning languages, I don't think we need to worry about whether or not the Hispanic kids are learning English. They've grown up here; they know the language. They weren't ignoring the theater because they don't know the language but because there was simply a cultural barrier that needed to be broken. It has now been broken.

It's the white kids who are less likely to know another language, like the joke (not actually a joke) that if you know two languages you're bilingual, three languages you're trilingual, and one language you're American. Learning a second (or third) language helps one understand his or own language better. And talk about the language of science being English, except that many of the terms we use come from Latin, upon which Spanish is based. A firm grasp of a Romance language makes Latin a lot easier.

I think it would be great if the slippery slope argument came true when it was put forward that if we allow Spanish, we'd have to do things in countless other languages. Okay, let's do it then. Let's mix in Arabic, Hindi, Mandarin, and Russian. We're still arguing about Spanish, when there are all these other languages that millions (even billions) of other people are speaking. We're not at risk of having the issues that China and India have with hundreds of languages swirled all over the place causing communication issues. English is already common, in spite of how poor of a language it is; we just need to add on a few more to spice things up.

The bigger question is one of culture, not language. Language happens to often be the piece that starts someone off into a better understanding of other cultures. Is there a better way to build cultural understanding than our children sharing language and song in a production about not trying to change yourself to impress others?