Improve Something Today (Page 11)

Facilitation

Open space technology, principle 1: “Whoever comes is the right people”

What's the use of a crowd?

"Whoever comes is the right people."

I love the slight awkwardness of this sentence as it describes what happens when people (plural) become a people (singular). A people as a process, not as a shuffling, muttering crowd of individuals.

I can think of only two contexts where I’ve experienced this “peopleing”—

Open space technology. This is a lightly facilitated, carefully organized format for a gathering. Open space is convened on a challenge so puzzling that people are compelled to show up to work and listen. It is the most direct, accessible format for group self-organization I’ve ever encountered: both a chapel and a chainsaw.
The Buddhist sangha, in its various permutations. I keep a mailing list of 75 of us who sat weekly for some years in a frigid room before COVID sent everybody home. Over time, I learned some incidental details (occupation, class, family composition, neighborhood, etc.) about maybe 1 out of 8 of those people. But in terms of the topic at hand—styles of meditation, preferred traditions, favorite teachers, etc.—I still recall where each person was and where they were headed, even though we haven’t met since early 2020. Similarly, I sat on a week-length retreat with 50 people and felt like I came to know them so deeply, and shared something so precious, even though what we shared together was silence. These groups—this sangha—is vital, even though it is transient or ‘incomplete’ in a conventional sense.

We’d all benefit from more spaces where two people, or two hundred, could gather and say—“I don’t know anything about you, and you don’t know anything about me, but we have what we need to get this sorted.”

It is an antidote to the social atomization inhibiting our lives under capital.

And until we get there, it’s a hell of a way to organize a meeting.

Open space technology series:

“Whoever comes is the right people.” → now reading
“Whatever happens is the only thing that could have.”
“Whenever it starts is the right time.”
“When it is over, it is over.” (forthcoming)

August 30, 2024: Edited for length.

Continuous improvement

A lousy time to be a good idea

In which “we send our hypotheses ahead, an expendable army, and watch them fall.”

In 1992, Oxford English prof Andrew Nuttall wrote the following:

The human capacity to think provisionally, to do thought experiments, to form hypotheses, to imagine what may happen before it happens, is fundamental to our nature and to our spectacular biological success ... The cleverest thing Sir Karl Popper ever said was his remark that our hypotheses ‘die in our stead’. The human race has found a way, if not to abolish, then to defer and diminish the Darwinian treadmill of death. We send our hypotheses ahead, an expendable army, and watch them fall.

That’s the tidiest explanation I’ve seen of our infinite appetites for catastrophe in media and in the imagination.

There’s much to gain from the activity of worrying about responses to some imagined, awful event. Mental rehearsal prepares us. We imagine. We plan. We ruminate. And as the expendable armies fall, over and over, the mind is cluttered. All this automatically, unwillingly, exhaustively.

We might also stop and turn the armies back and inhabit the silence.

(But that’s for another day.)

This is hard

We’re born experts at doing thought experiments automatically, intuitively, and individually.
But we’re terrible at doing thought experiments deliberately, or being able to speak or write about them.
Even worse, we believe we’re equally great at both kinds of thinking.

The bad news

Think of the containers we’re meant to pour our great ideas into:

Suggestion boxes where ideas go not merely to die but to be forgotten “even by God.”
Big-design-up-front schemes that admit only a single hypothesis. Hope you picked the right idea at the outset of that multiyear effort.
Asinine standards for projects like 6x return on investment, which serve only preclude experimentation and prohibit critical thinking.
Initiatives where everyone is discouraged by an early failure and gives up, with the cry of: “we tried that and it didn’t work!”

These containers are bad, and you can find them everywhere.

The good news

The good news is: there are better ways of working and deciding, together.

Instead of suggestion boxes, create listening systems.
Do set-based design and allow for new trade-offs and discoveries without blowing the budget.
Validate ideas through rigorous PDSA, with small, reversible changes.
Celebrate failure as the thing one can learn from.

All those continuous improvement methods, all the great facilitation approaches, the techniques for self-organization? That’s what they’re for. They’re here, they’re tested, and they’re effective—and they are not easy.

From where I sit, this is the job. Let’s get to it.

October 7, 2024: Edited for length.

Continuous improvement

How I learned to speak about changes when 19 out of 20 people would rather I shut the hell up

Nobody wants to hear it from the consultant.

Imagine this. A big, important change is happening: reorg, strategic shift, start or stoppage of significant work.

How do folks across the organization want to learn about these changes? Here’s the breakdown from the change management boffins at Prosci:

73% of people surveyed want to hear about the scope and importance of big changes from their executive leadership.
67% want to hear about the impact of changes from their direct supervisor.
And only 4% want to hear ANYTHING from the change management team (hey, that’s me!).

When I first saw this data, my reaction to that 4% figure was a big old “eep” as I thought back to the times I’d communicated change messages myself. Although it wasn’t something I did often, it was clearly something I should do… never.

Instead, it was time to get good at creating space for the right people to send the right messages. To learn how they talk and give them their talking points. To schedule the sessions, invite the people, buy the food, and get the heck out of the way. This is where I learned the importance of visible, participatory, energetic sponsorship for change efforts. Sponsors need to show up, over and over, and speak to the change and why it’s happening now.

This is one of a million (approx) things I’ve learned from Prosci, the outfit behind the figures I mentioned above. Prosci researches change management, then pours what they learn directly into a container of excellent, thoughtful change management tools + methods.

I now believe that, in the same way that every project can be a lean project, every project can be a change management project. None too big, none too small. Maybe the strategy is simple, but it’s still worth thinking it through.

And if you ever find a project where the sponsor won’t speak up, RUN! Life’s too short to try to talk one’s way out of that dismal 4% figure.

TL;DR:

Communications about big changes should come from the right people:
Those in exec/leadership roles…
…And the managers of everybody affected by the change.
Prosci has super great methods to help.
Don’t waste time on projects without active sponsorship.

Learning

3-step method for learning anything

“See one, do one, teach one.” ← That’s the method.

First: See one

Watch how the task is done. Have somebody who knows what they’re doing show you how. Take notes. Ask questions. Notice the materials, tools, techniques used.

Second: Do one

Get some first-hand experience. Bring your expert along. They’ll speak up with encouragement or suggestions. Take your time and do it right. Figure out what makes it complicated—there’s always some damn thing.

Third: Teach one

Show somebody else how to do the task. You know how, and you know all the little things they’ll need to know or have on hand to get the job done. They’ll learn just by seeing you work.

You’re done!

This learning model originated 130 years ago, usually attributed to William Stewart Halsted’s surgery dept. at Johns Hopkins University. ‘See one, do one, teach one’ is still used in medical training. It works. In more recent decades, because we can’t have med students slinging a knife and ‘doing one’ on patients anymore, the model has been updated a bit. What happens in medicine today is more like ‘see many, do many with supervision, teach many.’ In other words, they’ve slowed the learning method down for patient safety, but not changed the progression in any basic way.

For knowledge work

Guess what? ‘See one, do one, teach one’ is a great fit for knowledge and service work, because there is so much tacit knowledge embedded within… all that little, vitally important stuff like (these are real examples):

It won’t let you pull the report unless you sort data by these headings, for some reason.

Even though form A is first, it’s easier to start with form C since that asks the same questions in a better order.

The Spanish language brochures are out of date, make sure you update this part first if you hand them out.

The position of the ‘save’ and ‘cancel’ buttons are reversed on this screen.

Try ‘see one, do one, teach one’ sometime. It’s so much better than sending everyone to training (boring) or throwing a grossly outdated playbook at new hires (inhumane, although you should still write a playbook and update it).

Apprenticeship is the method, and one’s peers are the experts. The trainer’s role then becomes that of matchmaker—finding a person ready to teach for each person ready to learn—and of opening a little space and time for learning to arise.

TL;DR:

See one, do one, teach one is a method to teach and learn complicated tasks.
It matches how people learn (by doing)…
…and transmits what’s important for doing the work (tacit knowledge).
You don’t need an elaborate training function to do it.

January 28, 2026: updated formatting & photo.

Continuous improvement

Dust off those awful process maps. Add these 3 things to them to get people thinking

Get those process maps off the shelf & turn them into something useful.

Process maps are the worst. I hate getting paid to make something that immediately goes onto the shelf, never to be looked at again.

And you know what every organization’s shelf is full of? PROCESS MAPS.

People love to make these damn things, or hire consultants to make them, and then bask in the sensation of accomplishment. Of having “documented”—or even worse, “understood”—the current state. What a waste of everybody's attention!

Next time somebody gives you a process map and shrugs, saying, “well here it is, although it’s a little out of date,” here are three things you can quickly add to it.

One: Clearly identified wiggle room

Even in the most dialed-in, locked-down business process there is some wiggle room. Find it. Circle it. Shade it in on the diagram. If 90% of the process is utterly inflexible due to agreements, requirements, contracts, deals, budgets, SLAs, suppliers, etc., there are still some things that can be changed. Find that 10% and make sure everybody else can see it too.

Two: Controls and why they’re there

Controls exist to mitigate risks. Identify the controls built in to this process, and draw them into the process map if they’re not already there. For each control, write down how often it happens, whether it’s automated or manual, what risk it’s there to guard against.

Sometimes processes have too many controls built in. Sometimes, not enough. How are you going to tell unless you map them out?

Three: Process behavior stats

For each step in the process, get some baselines. It’s OK to guess. Build a wee little table with these elements: How often does this happen? How long does this step take? What’s the percentage of time work enters into this process step 100% complete and accurate (%C/A)?

Now you know where the constraints or bottlenecks are. And you know where things break down. Remove constraints as best you can, build in quality where it’s needed. (Easier to not make mistakes in the first place than to have to sort them out later.)

TL;DR:

Process maps gather dust since they don't explain much on their own. Improve them by...

Identifying wiggle room or degrees of freedom, so people can see opportunities.
Listing controls, so people can argue about risks and mitigation.
Measuring process behavior, so people can see where work breaks down.

Facilitation

Credit for success belongs to my clients. Blame failures on me

A warm blue body of water, with gentle waves catching the sunlight. — Photo by Brian Kerr.

What I've learned in 15 years of consulting: ‘Remain unmoved by praise or blame.’

Doesn’t it feel great to take credit for a job well done? Consulting is a job where that never happens. An effective consultant:

helps a client identify problems in their business,
helps a client remove or route around those problems, and
(the important part) helps a client take credit for any/all success.

3 ways to produce conditions for success

Use this perspective to inspire bravery, saying to a client: “Let’s try this together. If it works, you get the credit. If it doesn’t work, I’ll take the blame.”
Or you might keep this to yourself, and be the one unworried person in the room. A common cause of project failure is that everyone is fixated on whether or not it will succeed.
Often in a consulting arrangement, I have budget to try several approaches with a client—and those will fail. Great! If I’ve done my job, the client will have the next couple approaches lined up, along with the skills to give them a try without me around. They’ll succeed after the I’m gone.

Remaining unmoved

This is not new a new perspective. It’s not specific to consulting.

Instead, it comes from being the kind of person who is attentive to the situation and the people in it, rather than being the kind of person who’s worried about the past (with stories of how things got broken in the first place) or the future (and terrors or failures it may entail). By being—and here’s the cliche, but this is what cliches are for—being in the moment.

I give you Upaya Zen Center’s samu gatha. It is a brief chant shared before starting work practice. You’ll find me reciting it before joining your meeting, and, when I have the presence of mind, before washing the dishes:

May this work be done in a spirit of generosity,
Not driven by ego, greed, or delusion.
May kindness sustain us and prevail in conflict.
And compassion guide us and lead us to understanding.
May we rejoice in the successes of others.
And remain unmoved by praise or blame.

TL;DR:

Always take the blame, share the credit.
This spares you from worry about outcomes or future activities…
…Which helps you pay attention to what's happening today.
“Remain unmoved by praise or blame.”

April 16, 2024: edited for length.

Improve Something Today

Posts on page 11

This is hard

The bad news

The good news

TL;DR:

First: See one

Second: Do one

Third: Teach one

You’re done!

For knowledge work

TL;DR:

One: Clearly identified wiggle room

Two: Controls and why they’re there

Three: Process behavior stats

TL;DR:

3 ways to produce conditions for success

Remaining unmoved

TL;DR: