Tag: Complexity

Categories
Behavior Complexity Leadership

Under the surface: Meetings and Complexity

A Google search of ‘how to run an effective meeting’ returns 555M entries in about 0.64 seconds. Hopefully that is sufficient to persuade you that there isn’t a shortage of instruction on how to lead a productive meeting. There are reportedly about 11M meetings a day in the US yet Harvard Business Review in their “Stop the Meeting Madness” article said that 71% of executives interviewed said meetings are unproductive.

It was hardly a surprise therefore that during our research on the topic of Complexity versus Simplicity a consistent theme from every single one of our interviewees was related to “too many meetings” and “unproductive meetings”.

Why then, with so much instruction available and a clear understanding of what good looks like are we still creating interactions that are unproductive?

To be fair, most people don’t attend meetings with the intention of making them unproductive. We approach them optimistically, forgetting quickly about the last time we met and hoping that we will do better this time. Good intentions apparently aren’t sufficient.

What meetings say about your organization

Poor meeting outcomes are signs of three underlying issues:

  1. Lack of engagement – whether this is “it’s not my job to prepare the agenda” or “hey, they’re paying me to sit here” most staff are disengaged during a meeting and most likely before and after as well.
  2. Lack of leadership – leaders need to insist on the appropriate process: objectives, agenda, actions, etc. This of course means that when leaders hold meetings that they lead with the appropriate process too.
  3. Lack of accountability – if it’s OK to go from meeting to meeting with no real process or outcomes then there is clearly an accountability problem. If it’s culturally acceptable to have unproductive interactions quite often this is demonstrated in other parts of the organization.

The opposite of these signals is also true, in that where you have productive interactions, it is normally an indication of a positive culture with an engaged workforce, competent leaders, and acountability. Certainly, given the behavioral components of an effective meeting it isn’t unusual to find pockets of an organization where engagement, leadership, and accountability thrive. A lot comes down to the leadership style of an individual, department, or group.

Meetings continue to be an important way in which we collaborate, share ideas, and gain alignment. Moreover, they provide a human connection, a social connection and a place to further business and personal relationships. When conducted properly they are energizing. When we fail to bring the discipline, structure, and process to the interaction the result is fodder for the next Dilbert cartoon.

Categories
Behavior Complexity Simplicity

Five Ways to Recognize Complexity

Complexity is not particularly difficult to recognize. Most of us know it when we see it. The hard part is putting it into words and being able to discuss it in a way that is productive. The lack of a widely used framework prevents us from really tackling complexity head on.

Our recent research on recognizing, unraveling, and replacing complexity has begun to shine a light on how leaders think about complexity and how they recognize complexity in their organizations. 

During our research we specifically asked executives how they recognize complexity in their organization. At a high level, they all made reference to the lack of speed in decision making and desired outcomes as being evidence of complexity. The analysis of their answers created five indicators that led executives to their conclusion.

  1. Business performance – the ability to achieve results is a signal of a high performing organization. Of course, meeting your objectives does not necessarily mean that the business is not complex. On the other hand, continuously missing deadlines, key performance metrics, or even just your commitments are a signal that complexity is working its way through the organization. 
  2. Ambiguity – The lack of clarity slows down decision making and increases the number of interactions between people and departments. It opens up the opportunity for misunderstanding, interpretation, and misalignment. Creating clarity and building alignment was seen as key to success to many of our interviewees.
  3. Employee engagement – Complexity creates a degree of frustration for employees. When complexity gets in the way employees find it difficult to understand why the organization doesn’t resolve the complexity and how the organization wants them to move forward. Complexity undermines individual employees in terms of understanding, empowerment, and learning.
  4. Meetings – The issue of meetings was raised by almost all of our interviewees. Too many meetings, meetings to prep for meetings, and too many people are involved are felt to be indicative of complexity. Many of us have been in back to back meetings and wondered when am I supposed to get any real work done? In addition, the number of organizational layers in a meeting was called out as creating complexity along with poor meeting discipline, as this creates ambiguity and reduces clarity.
  5. Accountability – The lack of accountability in organizations whether created by roles, organizational structure, or individual behavior adds to complexity. Siloed functions, combined with risk aversion, the fear of being wrong, and knowledge in the hands of the few are all indicators of complexity.

None of these indicators are evidence of complexity when experienced individually. It is when we notice multiple indicators that it becomes more of a signal than just a noise. Even then, the lack of a framework to discuss complexity makes it difficult for people to raise it as an issue, difficult for executives to take action, and difficult for the organization to adopt new ways of working together.

If you notice any of these indicators in your organization, or you have experienced them first-hand, please join the conversation and share your perspective.

Final Thought

As we discussed on LinkedIn recently, complexity is best evidenced by three things: how long it takes to get stuff done, how hard it is to do stuff, and how frustrating it is to be part of the process.

We’d love to hear from you.

Categories
Complexity Governance Leadership

Governance & Decision Making in a Complex World

Most organizations go through a formal decision-making process when they allocate resources to a particular initiative or when they develop an annual capital plan. Whenever we chose to allocate money or people to something, organizations typically follow a familiar three step process.

Learn

During the learn phase we are gathering data, building knowledge, and curating information on both the problem at hand and potential solutions. Our goal is to articulate the problem, offer a series of potential solutions and maybe articulate a recommendation or a preferred option.

To achieve this, first we spend time to learn about the presenting issue. We conduct extensive research, do analysis, run focus groups and interviews to make sure we fully understand the issues and problems that need to be solved. In a nutshell, the goal is to figure out who our customer is, what needs they have, and how best can we serve them.

Second, once we have identified the issues, we can begin to look at alternative solutions. We analyze the various merits of each solution and develop a cost benefit analysis of each option so we can think about how to best make a recommendation. If our solution includes a third party, for example a piece of technology or software, we will likely do additional diligence to measure things like functionality, integration, and relationships. We’d be inclusive of different stakeholder groups so that we had the opportunity to obtain a broad set of inputs on the final set of answers.

Finally, we prepare our presentation with our findings and recommendation.

Decide

Decision rights for capital spending typically sit with an executive team or a subset thereof. The team doing the “learning” will make their presentation to the executive team and make their recommendation. Usually there is some back and forth discussion, maybe the team has to go away and answer some additional questions but eventually the decision is made to either support or not support the capital allocation.

Act

Once approval has been obtained the team can then move onto the implementation of the solution. The work to solve the problem can now begin.

The Problem

As you can imagine this governance and decision-making process takes a significant amount of time. There are four distinct problems with this approach.

First, with a fast-paced business environment and innovation driving new ways of working, new technologies, and new possibilities it’s more than possible to create capabilities that don’t meet future needs. 

Second, the learn phase never quite achieves what you intend it to. There always seems to be a series of “gotchas’ during the act phase. These lead to budget overages, time delays, and the reduction of scope. This is because we don’t know what we don’t know and only through experience can we solve this paradox.

Third, the learn phase doesn’t typically consider the difficulty in driving adoption of a new capability. Skills may need to be developed, behaviors changed, and reliance on old operating procedures need to be undone. 

Finally, according to the National Training Laboratory, action-based learning results in three times the retention and understanding as passive based learning, Acting therefore contributes more to learning than simply reading or researching.

An Alternative

One of our principles is to move into action sooner rather than later. We encourage clients to learn by doing so they can better understand the presented issues, potential solutions, and behaviors that will need to be changed to drive adoption of the new capability. 

Another principle we live by is to break down a problem into more manageable chunks and work to solve each of them over time. This is grounded in the fact that you want to avoid any kind of “Big Bang” implementation. Better to implement a series of smaller changes rather than one large one.

We prefer a series of small success rather than a death march that results in mediocrity.

Our suggestion therefore is to change the governance and decision-making process to help improve adoption, reduce risk, and create momentum

With the overall goal in mind, work towards taking smaller steps, learn as you go, and then decide which appropriate steps to take next. This iterative approach allows you to uncover and resolve what you don’t know about what you don’t know.

Categories
Behavior Complexity People Simplicity

How complexity gets in the way of leadership, culture and wellness.

Photo by Andreas Klassen

Modern management theory teaches us to create leadership positions with accountability for a broad scope of operations.  Basically, a hierarchy shaped like a pyramid with defined spans of control. “Successful” leaders are generally found to grow their scope of authority through internal and external advancement, growth of their business enterprise, both organic and through M&A. During this time their day to day becomes more complex. They have more touch points with subordinates, peers, senior leaders and external stakeholders. There are more moving pieces to manage, more issues to resolve, and more solutions to implement. Change is inevitable: market changes, customer needs change, and employee needs change. In addition, special projects, industry events, networking, and planning & reporting activities all draw on a leaders ability to be successful. 

Soon enough many reach burnout and stay in a position where they are ineffective. This has, since 1968, been referred to as “The Peter Principle”, an observation made by the Canadian educational scholar and sociologist, Dr. Laurence J. Peter, whereby employees are often promoted to their level of incompetency.

Complexity places pressure on three critical resources; time, energy, and capability. Time is finite for all of us and however much we attempt to do more with less there are only 24 hours in a day! Energy and capability differ from individual to individual but eventually it all catches up to us. 

What complexity does is prevent you from doing what good leaders should be doing. Leading through influence and trust, mentoring and developing teams and planning for the future both from a business and talent perspective. Good leaders don’t just get results, they develop the next generation of leadership. 

Complexity and leadership is partially what drives culture and behavior in your organization. Your words, actions, and behaviors show people what it’s really like to work at your organization. They show people who you really are, how to interact with you, and they mimic your behaviors.

The other impact is on the overall wellness of the leader, their direct reports, and their personal life. Complexity in the work place, being present with family, having ‘me’ time all draw down on the time, energy, and capability. This often leads to inner feelings of not being good enough, imposter syndrome, and lower self worth. Subordinates and family can become resentful, mistrusting, and resigned to your way of being. Resignations of staff, divorce, and estrangement are not uncommon and can often be attributed to an over aggressive work ethic caused by complexity.

For sure, there are hundreds of great leaders business across the globe, but there are thousands of mediocre ones and millions of future leaders.

Take a moment to think about the level of complexity that you deal with on a day to day basis and the impact it has on your being. In fact, I encourage you to take 30 minutes after reading this to ask yourself the following questions:

  • How many meetings do you attend a day?
  • Which of those meetings are really effective?
  • How much time do you spend informing others on status?
  • How would you describe your listening style, how would others describe it?
  • How much time did you spend yesterday on developing others?
  • When did you last spend time thinking and reflecting on your day?
  • How much time do you spend thinking about the future of the business?
  • Do you know who is looking for a job in your span of control?
  • How do you personally define success?
  • Where are you in that journey towards success?
  • What of all of your daily actions make you feel energized and fulfilled versus drained and discouraged?

Be honest with yourself. Write down your first thought, don’t over think it. When you look at your answers some things will become clear to you. Reflect on all your answers but pay particular attention to those answers which might require more consideration.

We’d love to hear from you. How much complexity is there in your organization and how does it impact you as a leader or as a future leader? For the courageous, send us the answers to your questions and we would be more than happy to be a sounding board for your reflections.