No problem is perfect.

Even in the worse circumstances there are always examples of exceptions that are performing better. Finding and understanding these positive deviants is an effective way of improving when facing the most difficult, persistent problems.

References:

• Solution-focused brief therapy
• Positive deviance

Human working memory is limited.

There are two main ways to deal with limited working memory:

1. Chunk. Group concepts together to reduce the number of things to remember;
2. Externalise. Record it, write it down, etc.

Of the two, externalising is more scalable.

Examples:

• During meetings, instead of just talking, take live notes;
• Card (externalised reminder), conversation (externalised thinking), confirmation (externalised agreement). (See Card Conversation Confirmation)

Experts don’t solve problems using “if A then B”.

Experts solve problems by balancing competing forces. Experts differ from novices because they have better awareness of and/or are better at balancing these competing forces. We call the recurring solutions that experts apply to recurring problems, “patterns”.

When the context changes, the competing forces change, therefore one would expect the pattern that should be applied would change.

Patterns don’t make any sense outside of the idea of balancing contextual forces.

Studying patterns is both about understanding contextual forces as well as understanding responses to those forces.

Progress in patterns is about discovering better answers for balancing competing forces.

The Fundamental Attribution Error refers to the tendency for people to overemphasise dispositional and personality explanations for behaviour and underemphasise situational explanations.

To address this, I like using the Six Sources of Influence model from VitalSmarts.

• Personal Motivation: what the individual wants
• Personal Ability: what the individual knows how to do
• Social Motivation: what friends, family, colleagues want the individual to do
• Social Ability: what friends, family, colleagues can help the individual do
• Structural Motivation: what incentives exist in the environment
• Structural Ability: what is easy or not easy to do in the environment

Instead of just considering motivation, we…

Because org structure change can get messy, there’s a tendency to have structure drive strategy

Changing org structure can be messy

There are several reasons why org structure changes can get messy:

• Changing org structure can mean changing managers. Given “people leave managers, not companies”, the org structure change can trigger problems including departures;
• Changing org structure typically means responsibilities are re-allocated. People are no longer responsible for work they used to be responsible for and/or they are now responsible for work that they might not want to do. This can lead to disengagement or even departures;
• From the manager side, changing org structure can mean more or less direct reports. This can mean overwork with too many reports and contexts…

Let’s pretend a miracle happened and all our problems are solved. Everything is perfect. Don’t worry about how it happened, it was a miracle. How could you tell? What’s different now after the miracle?

The Miracle Question comes from Solution-Focused Brief Therapy. There are similar techniques from other sources: Remember the Future, Idealized Design, The Spice Girls Question.

The basic ideas are the same:

• Create clarity about what you really want over clarity about what you don’t want;
• Don’t limit want you want based on what is currently happening or whether you know how to get it;
• Anchor off of perfect, not off of “good enough”.

I’ve found the Miracle Question encourages hope, progress, and creativity.

I typically use the Miracle Question when the answer to “How are things going? How might things be better?” is something like “It’s fine”.

Address both the symptoms and the causes

We want to address current symptoms BUT we also want to remember to explore and address underlying causes.

The Toyota/Lean community describes these activities as “containment” vs “countermeasures”.

I see it as acknowledging the importance of timing when responding to problems.

Contain the symptoms to buy time

I’ve noticed that consulting companies, at least the best ones, seem to be typically faster than even leading tech companies in building high-performing teams.

Why is this?

When revenue is based on billable hours AND the typical client doesn’t like paying for setup time, you learn how to get fast at building teams.

The 3 things that matter when building high-performing teams fast:

• Same training, same assumptions;
• Focus on the craft, not on the mission;
• Practice teaming and re-teaming.

Same training, same assumptions