Tolerance Atrophes

My good friend called me a few weeks ago.  He had just watched many people come together to grieve with a family who just lost the man who was friend, father, son, and husband.  Grateful as he was that our community responds well, he missed the fact that the community knew little of his own pain. Specifically, he mentioned to me the ways I had missed an opportunity to enter into his pain with him... ways I could have cared for him and didn't.

He was not complaining.  He was just sharing with me his ache.  It was an ache I suspected, even asked about, but really never really shared with him.  Yeah, I did the drive-by How are you, friend?  I even managed the occasional Really, brother, how are you.  I accepted the strong and predictable response from a male friend, and didn't press further.  And he still ached.

In an unrelated turn of events, I happen to have good friends whose marriage is in a tough place.  I have entered in to their pain, but not with any real competence.  Good will?  You bet.  Good skill?  No.

I've started to ponder how I got to this place where I have good will without good skill when it comes to caring for people I love.  These are people whose best interests I want to promote.  These are people with whom I have lived a long time and I sort of have the insight and the right to be involved when it matters.  I don't think I'm unusual.

Here's another observation:  In both of the tough situations I've mentioned, those I care for have not been really good at receiving care either.

Why is this?

Here's my hypothesis:  I suspect that as our society elevates privacy and tolerance to the position of ultimate values, we put up barriers to caring.  We are at a point of where the cultural norm is to stay out until invited in.  Caring is a muscle that has atrophied for lack of exercise.

We have locked the doors on the exercise room of care.  Here are a two examples:  In the surgical waiting room, my daughter is a number on an electronic board because HIPAA rules are protecting her privacy.  My good friend cannot just drop by to care for us as a result.  When a colleague is dismissed at work we replace clarity with "Pursuing opportunities outside of the business."  We are left with nothing to explain the absence.  Rumors fill the void.

I suppose we use the euphemisms as a way to protect the honor of the injured, but I wonder if we're really protecting much.  And if we're not protecting much, have we erected an un-needed barrier to care?  Have we essentially put a cast on our caring muscles so long that they've atrophied?

Abuse of Power

A coworker stood in the doorway of my office musing about a wide variety of things.  She mentioned her interest in reading on the topic of the use and abuse of power in the workplace.  I was in the midst of exercising my power (not over her) as the manager of my group.  The question caused me to stop and think.

It strikes me that there are two ways to abuse power:  The stereotype is the capricious, ego-centric, unreasonable, fist-pounding leader who exercises power like a sit-com manager.  The other abuse of power is the failure to use legitimate authority when it is needed.  If child neglect is child abuse, then leadership neglect is power abuse.

The former is obvious and stereotypical.  So for the moment, let's consider why we may fail to exercise legitimate authority:

1. We don't know what to do.
2. We are afraid of the conflict
3. We want to protect the vulnerable (a variant of #2)

Option 1 seems easy enough to fix... go get help or advice or, in the case of the truly unsolvable problem, at least take first steps to understand what you're facing.

But for Options 2 and 3, the question seems to bring up moral dilemmas... Do I fire this person for non-performance even though she's the sole wage earner in her family?  Do I redefine this person's assignment to align to the business needs even though this puts him outside of his circle of expertise?  

But we need to see that the failure to address legitimate leadership needs with clarity, though apparently kind or considerate nearly always ends with delayed and amplified anger, frustration, or misunderstanding.  I am learning that clear conversations, even if they're difficult to have, are always better to have early and often.  The anticipation of the difficulty of a conversation seems always ti be greater than the actual difficulty.

Clarity does not require unkindess, but leadership fuzziness is always unkind.

Creation Posture

A fully footnoted version of this essay can be found here.

Creation Posture A call to the Church to get itself into position for Kingdom impact.

November 2014

Table of Contents

The core idea.

Posture

Posture puts you in position to respond

Posture communicates

Posture and safety

Created to be Creative.

Create

Value

Creation and Posture

Playing Out of Position

Ignorance:

Lack of Practice and Bad Practice

Practicing Our Preferences

Fear

Permission

Transition

God & Company

Building the Company

The Finders – Community Connectors

The Minders – Coaches for the People of Your Church

The Grinders – Consultants Deployed for the Kingdom

The Company

Scope of Engagements

Getting Started

Other Options

Concluding Thoughts

The freedom of creative constraints

The Freedom of Constraints.

On the face of it, one would not think that constraints are liberating.  Handcuffs do not set you free.  But in leadership, they can be.   Here are a few examples

Time:  When a meeting is limited to 15 minutes, we seem to get it all done and the normal 1-hour time slot is liberated to do other things that matter.  There is something magic about saying, let’s be direct enough to accomplish this fully in constrained time. 

Cost:  When we ask our development team to build a new system for 10% less cost, they work on it.  But if we ask for 50% cost out, they completely rethink what they have to do and new opportunities in design emerge.  What is exciting is how many new ideas beyond the cost out have emerged as a part of the experience.

Manual:  In a recent meeting, I asked our team to think about what we’d have to do to make our next system user manual only 50 pages (the current one is 1400).  The ideas that emerged about user interaction and context-sensitive help are stunning.

Service: We have been working on how to reduce our variable costs by making the devices easier to serve.  But when we set the constraint such that the end-user with no tools and no special training had to be able to service the system, the whole design got simpler in almost every dimension.

10 words: The marketing guys are tired of my insistence that we rephrase key benefits in 10 words.  But the magic of this marketing haiku is that it drives clarity of thought and helps us to focus on what is truly important.  We are now much more clear because – in part – we are constrained to a short expression of the idea.

I am not the first to think about this.  Barry Schwartz has written about the paralysis of choice (link here).  His thesis is that when we have too many choices we are more paralyzed, less happy, and less satisfied.  If you read the commentary on the web site, you will see lots of debate about Schwartz’s approach.  Most of the comments focus on what makes a good constraint and who gets to choose.  Since I’m the leader, I get to choose, but I have noticed that some constraints are helpful and some are just painful.  I have been trying to sort out what the difference between good and bad constraints might be. 

Though this is still an emerging set of ideas, here is a set of guidelines I’m finding to be helpful:

Helpful, liberating constraints vs Unhelpful dominating constraints:

·      Helpful constraints are purpose-driven,
Unhelpful constraints are fear-driven

·      Helpful constraints are about what,
Unhelpful constraints are about how

·      Helpful constraints encourage complete rethinking,
Unhelpful constraints are incremental.

·      Helpful constraints are derived from possibility or opportunity,
Unhelpful constraints are derived from compliance or obligation

·      Helpful constraints require domain experience,
Unhelpful constraints are arbitrary or out of context

·      Helpful constraints are expressed as “What would we have to do in order to…?” 
Unhelpful constraints are expressed as “We need to…”

These all have one thing in common:  They give our teams permission to explore without the precondition that they commit.  The phrasing of the last item in the chart above states this most clearly.  “What would it take,” releases the team from the anxiety of their history and experience.  Instead of discounting potential solutions based on the last attempt or tribal wisdom, it allows them to explore what could be.  It turns cautious managers into possibility thinkers.

“What would it take to reduce approval time for a major program from five weeks to five days?”  I asked that question recently and I learned that we had to settle a few key vision questions, get a global team in the same place to debate remaining issues, and ensure some facilitation.  Then it was my choice about whether to allocate the resources.   We did it.  We unlocked the “it takes five weeks” mentality by setting a creative constraint of five days.  As the team explored what it would take, they were not committing to five days, but they provided the solution nevertheless.

 

Not a magic wand:  This concept of constraints is not a magic wand.  My team is currently struggling with a battery quality and supply chain issue.  I cannot just ask, “What would it take to solve this problem in 3 days?”  Though I have to admit that it is tempting!  Some problems take real technical expertise in the traditional sense.

I have also found that this is not a “just do it” magic wand.  The problem with just do it is that it forces a commitment more than it opens the opportunity to explore.  Recently we had a small team struggling between two Product Management options we really didn’t like.  In one case we would have a better long-term solution and in the other we would meet a short-term market need, but the two options were mutually exclusive.  In this case, the magic words were “We need another idea, let’s take the weekend to think about it.”  Sure enough, this opened up the freedom to rephrase the problem outside of the pressure of a just-do-it meeting.   This is an example of removing a constraint rather than imposing one.

So far, this is still more art than science, but I’m finding that there is great freedom in carefully crafted constraints.