Over the last few years I’ve read three books that capture three highly valuable decision making models. In my opinion, these books offer a new way to think about how we weigh up choices and make decisions.

The books are Blink, Checklist Manifesto and Simple Rules. 

Each of these book writes about a very challenging idea. The idea that, in some circumstances, decision making can be made more effective using streamlined techniques. 

So streamlined and simple that our rational brain may have a hard time accepting that these techniques can produce effective results when compared with more traditional models. 

Examples of more traditional models are those described in Peter Drucker’s well known article on effective decisions or Dartmouth’s 7 step decision-making process. 

Blink, Checklist Manifesto, and Simple Rules suggest decision making: 

• using a streamlined process for decisions and actions that is exponentially faster to other more time intensive approaches, while being equally as effective. 
• relying on simple principles that have, already built within them, logic that distill wider lessons, insights and data. 
• a connection with deeper knowledge that is either known by you already (through your experiences) or based on knowledge from the applied practice of other experts. 
• by using a framework that is specific to the context and set of circumstances it is intended for (eg. pilots using checklists specific to take off protocols). 

Each of these books suggest there are ways to operate faster, with equal to or less risk than alternative decision making processes, in repeatable ways, often with greater flexibility.

Let’s take a look at the high level lessons from each book.

Thin-Slicing for Decision Making

In Blink, Malcolm Gladwell suggests that“there can be as much value in the blink of an eye as in months of rational analysis.” 

Gladwell refers to the concept of “thin-slicing,” where we take our observations in a given moment, apply our learnings from experience and intuition, and make rapid decisions. 

In some circumstances, these snap decisions can be as or more effective than those that take months to deliberate. 

The distinction here is on how you can train your intuition.

Untrained intuition that is not based on experience and learning, can lead to bad decisions, with even worse outcomes. In contrast, trained intuition based on experience can provide unparalleled speed and results. 

What is fascinating about Blink is the idea that our experience leads to expertise and this expertise can be drawn upon in a split second for effective decision making.

In Blink, Gladwell gives many examples of where thin-slicing has proved accurate. Included amongst these is the acquisition of a sculpture by the J. Paul Getty Museum. 

Upon acquiring the sculpture, a number of resident experts had a “gut feeling” that something was “off” with the work. Some time later, the sculpture was found to be inauthentic. 

There are two lessons for us in this. The first is to revisit those instincts and gut feelings we may all have, but don’t pay attention to. The second is to think more broadly about the model proposed by Blink; that based on your own area of expertise, you will have developed lessons and intuitions, honed through hundreds (if not thousands) of hours of practice. 

Reforge, a San Francisco startup, recently raised Series B funding on the concept that Product Managers have periods of intense learning in their careers where they acquire valuable expertise. 

These periods have ‘inflection points’, where this expertise can be strengthened to equip them for their next challenge. Reforge aims to capture these lessons and share them with wider communities and thereby challenge traditional models of skill creation.

Though this is seperate from Blink, both Reforge and Blink tug at the same thread – that experience leads to expertise and knowledge which can be applied to respond to a parallel situation (eg. a new product launch program) in a new context (a different company) to provide a better outcome.

How To Use

Consider the timeline of your career:

• What are the experiences that shaped your career to who you are today?nbsp;
• When have these experiences resulted in new knowledge for you that, consciously or unconsciously, you have embedded into how you operate?nbsp;
• Have these experiences changed how you use instinct and gut feeling to approach decisions? Do you listen to or ignore those instincts?nbsp;
• When you have used your instincts for decision making, have these decisions proved effective in the medium term?nbsp;

I’m not suggesting to use gut feeling and instinct as the sole principle to make decisions. 

However, as leaders and managers, listening to what our expertise and intuition may tell us, can improve our own self awareness and make us better leaders.

We can make this more robust by identifying when our instinct kicks in, and testing these decisions with deeper analysis, to see if our instinct is consistent with what wider data validates over the medium term.

Checklists For Decision Making

According to Atul Gawande, author of The Checklist Manifesto, though we have amassed incredible “know-how” in the 21st century, “avoidable failures are common and persistent, not to mention demoralising and frustrating.” We need a new strategy for overcoming the burdens of too much data and failure, a strategy that “takes advantage of the knowledge of people but somehow also makes up for our inevitable human inadequacy” (p13).

Based on his research, Gawande suggests that this new strategy is the Checklist. 

Gawande documents how a simple checklist was rolled out to a group of hospitals in both developed and underdeveloped nations, to curb the rising tide of millions of surgical complications that occur worldwide.

While the checklist was important, the way it was executed was equally so, often involving a simple principle that upturned the contemporary practice of many hospitals – if the pre-surgery checklist had not been satisfied, the nurse in charge could prevent the surgeon from proceeding with the operation.

The Checklist does not replace human knowledge and decision making. Rather, it is a tool that streamlines what is required to maximise the opportunity for success, based on what has been learnt from processes that have been rolled out thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of times. 

Pilots use checklists methodologically in pre-flight routines. Product Management teams use checklists to ensure that software has passed key gates (eg. user acceptance testing, integration testing, etc) before it is released. Australian companies, like Safety Culture and Culture Amp, provide products inspired by the checklist. 

Checklists can take the form of read-do lists (ie. a recipe is a simple read-do checklist) or do-confirm lists (ie. confirm something is done before moving to the next step). 

Checklists are a powerful instrument because they support decisions (eg. if we have confirmed the patient’s name matches the surgery required, we decide to move to the next step) as well as diffuse who has the authority to make the decision (ie. if the correct step has not been followed, any person in the operating theatre can stop the process, not just the surgeon). 

Checklists improve decision making by automating simple and repeatable processes that have been proven to work. 

People involved in these processes can rely on the checklist for those processes that are known, and focus their energy on elements of the process that are ambiguous or require further thought.

How To Use

• In your own work, are there specific and repeatable processes where decision making is required, that could be partially automated by a checklist?nbsp;
• If so, are there examples from both your company and the best practices of other companies, that could form the basis of a checklist?nbsp;
• Once you create a draft checklist, confirm it with all members of the team involved in the process. Is it simple enough to be followed and also detailed enough to be useful? The checklist should contain the most important steps of a process, not all steps. 
• Where and how would you implement this checklist? Who within the team would have the authority to stop a process if the checklist was not met?nbsp;

Simple Rules For Decision Making

Kathleen Eisenhardt and Donald Sull are the authors of Simple Rules. 

Through their research, they’ve analysed how companies apply no more than a few rules to focus their decisions and ensure ongoing success.

From Nike to Yahoo, simple rules provide structure for such decisions as which markets to expand into, how to grow new products, and when to exit a business or product line to minimize losses.

According to their model, simple rules can be broken down into the following categories:

• Boundary rules: which opportunities to select? 
• Prioritizing rules: how to filter amongst many options? 
• Stopping rules: when to quit or exit? 
• How-to rule: how to move forward? 
• Coordination rules: how to work with each other and collaborate?
• Timing rules: when to act? 

Simple rules act as a bridge between strategy and practice, connecting day-to-day decisions and actions with broader plans. They can help teams perform at their best by removing the paralysis that comes with evaluating too many alternatives.

Like checklists and thin-slicing, simple rules give another alternative to streamline decision making. Equally, to be effective, these rules must be based upon exisiting knowledge of what works, focused on a specific problem, and connected to a learning loop that refines the practice of these rules overtime. 

How To Use

The book’s authors have written a useful article on how to apply simple rules, which is broken down into these steps.

• Identify the bottleneck. This is where demand exceeds resources, and thus the organization is stopped from achieving its goals.
• Listen to data, over opinion.
• Allow people who will have to follow the rules, create them.
• Follow the rules.
• Evolve the rules based on what works.

Now, I’m not saying these models (thin slicing, checklists and simple rules) are perfect. Or that they should replace alternative, more detailed, decision making. 

I am suggesting that for leaders and managers, they are a great first place to look, because they are very effective. If we can leverage these methods, they also offer high benefits in speed and efficacy. 

The post 3 Deceptively Simple Decision Making Models You May Not Know About appeared first on Alessio Bresciani.

Companies are very good at organizing for vertical objectives, but not always as good at managing horizontal patterns of work.

This is where boundary spanning is important.

“Boundary spanning” is the process of designing activities and skills that connect and support cross-functional activities to improve communication and facilitate better alignment toward goals.

When reviewing success across marketing, sales, business and IT programs, HBR says, “In the successes we have seen, in almost every case, there is a very special profile of the person leading the effort. This Most Valuable Player of technology implementations is a boundary spanner.”

One of best ways to think more about this process is to first consider vertical vs horizontal objectives.

Today’s Companies Need To Support Both Vertical & Horizontal Objectives

Vertical Objectives

Vertical objectives are those of a specific organizing unit, such as a department, program, or team. These objectives are those where the outcomes of the work are largely within the remit of the team that is managing them.

Horizontal Objectives

Horizontal activities are those that span multiple areas. These horizontal activities call for different programs and teams to collaborate, even though these areas may be organized into vertical structures.

Horizontal activities are essential to today’s business because:

• work is increasingly complex, requiring all elements of a company to work together, in order to realize the company’s vision.
• customer experiences, which have become a differentiator in today’s experience-driven economy often rely on joining together end-to-end processes.
• modern teams (think agile teams, hybrid teams, etc.) are made up of people from many departments. These teams are ‘horizontal’ by nature, but if they embody a ‘vertical’ mindset, they will not perform at their best.
• many businesses and products operate on a global basis, which requires teams to bridge geographies, processes, systems, and departments.

Kitty Wooley, who worked at the US Department of Education for many years and has researched this area says, “At this point in history… all of the problems, any big problem, any hairy wicked problem, is bigger than any one agency or any corporation. So, people have to work together to solve it.”

Why Isn’t Boundary Spanning Always Supported?

While horizontal activities are more common in workplaces today, they don’t always receive formal and explicit support. Why does this happen?

This can be from a combination of reasons, such as:

• People may lack the skills and experience supporting horizontal activities and navigating the challenges that come with these patterns of work (for example, “how do we collaborate to reach a decision when I’m used to making the decision on X”).
• Company objectives and KPIs may be focused largely on vertical activities (often this is the result of how legacy KPIs have been set, flagging that the organization has not yet changed to also support a horizontal pattern of work).
• Leaders and managers (at various levels) may not set an example for their teams that encourages horizontal collaboration.

The Cost of Not Supporting Boundary Spanning Work

You may have been part of companies that haven’t supported horizontal work.

If so, you likely will have seen firsthand some of the consequences of this, which include:

• When people reach out for support from other departments, they may have difficulty finding an audience.
• Seeking collaboration from other business units requires heavy influencing (rather than collaboration being a ‘default behavior’).
• Language used amongst people—an often classic symptom of cultures unsupportive of boundary spanning work—is characterized by ‘us and them’.
• In these environments, it’s not unusual for people to feel challenged, anxious, and unsettled when engaged in those activities that are beyond their direct team.

These symptoms block the organization from doing more complex tasks efficiently and effectively.

And it’s a double-edged sword.

On the surface, vertically-driven teams produce very strong results in the short and medium term. These are usually directly tied to the vertical objectives they support. However, the more complex and important work to an organization’s longer-term goals, which can only be done by teams collaborating horizontally across the organization, is sidestepped or deferred to the future.

Beyond company effectiveness, there can also be a high human cost. People in these challenging environments can feel unfulfilled in their roles, that it’s difficult to sustain energy in the role over extended periods, and may leave the company in search of a better environment.

How to Actively Support Boundary Spanning in Your Company

With this said, how can we be better at supporting horizontal work?

In order to know how you support these practices, it’s useful to think about the levels where you can target your support:

• Individual: Encourage and support the person who naturally connects dots within the organization. Create time for them and ask how you can assist their efforts.
• Team: Many companies have teams that, by their nature, span boundaries. Strategy teams or cross-departmental program teams often work horizontally to do their work. When you build connections with these teams and help their work, you support boundary spanning.
• Organizational: Boundary spanning is a competence and skill set. Like Design Thinking or Project Management. By training your people how to collaborate and manage cross-functional work, you are helping your company build strengths in boundary spanning practices.

If you are leading a team, department, or company, you will have a role in supporting boundary spanning.

In addition to thinking about boundary spanning at these three levels, these simple activities can create a culture that fosters horizontal collaboration:

1. Creating common language – Often teams use different language to describe similar things. By creating a common language across teams, we improve the opportunity for common communication.
2. Elevate toward larger goals – When conflict arises between teams, elevate the conversation to a larger opportunity, so that teams can align on the bigger picture. For example, I once saw two departments arguing about their different objectives. When we “levelled up” and focused on the company objective that their separate initiatives were connected to, they found common ground about how each team played a role in the company’s success.
3. Orient toward customers – Everyone in a business has a stake in helping customers. By focusing on a company’s customers, and how Product X makes customers’ lives better, we provide a source of inspiration for teams working across horizontal activities.
4. Listen with empathy – When we listen to people with empathy, we seek to understand their perspective and give them space to contribute their view. This creates a context for boundary spanning conversations.
5. Unblock what’s not working – Strong managers and leaders look to identify where things are not working and take positive steps to help make their teams’ lives easier. Rather than put up with things when they’re not working, look to how you can actively shape an alternate, positive approach.
6. Encourage diverse views – There is a reason companies like IDEO favor multi-disciplined teams for innovation processes. Because diversity of viewpoints and styles exist in these teams, they are more accepting and embracing of alternate views, which encourages boundary spanning conversations. When you’re setting up new teams, ensure they have diverse members and perspectives, so differences and alternate experiences are welcomed.
7. Build in-person experiences for remote team – Even completely remote teams need time to come together and build face-to-face connections. Research suggests that in-person time getting to know each other is very important for reinforcing relationships, even if this time together is only once every 6 – 12 months). Wildbit, a completely remote company, organizes yearly retreats to get its remote teams together and says these are especially important because these retreats create “little moments of connection, the shared energy, and the sense of belonging that happen when we just sit around chairs and talk, get to know each other, and support each other both personally and at work.”

These easy practices can help you crack the code of building more effective teams that focus on both vertical and horizontal objectives.

The post How Boundary Spanning Supports Great Teams appeared first on Alessio Bresciani.

This is because questions in the operational zone are often different from those you’ll find in the strategic zone.

The more your career progresses, the larger these challenges become.

The Operational Zone

The operational zone is where the urgency of the day-to-day is managed.

This zone is incredibly important. It is what keeps customers happy, a business running and ultimately makes or breaks the success of a team.

In the operational zone are:

• calls/emails from customers
• new orders from customers
• errors/problems
• workarounds and bandaids for known issues
• general budget management
• some meetings
• check-ins with direct reports
• team and workflow management
• communications (all types, from emails to project updates)
• the need to reinforce and reference priorities
• setting an example through day-to-day habits

The operational zone is where stuff gets done, today. Not yesterday. Not tomorrow. It is the here and now.

The Strategic Zone

The strategic zone is where the future happens.

It is where you get above the clouds and see the entire shape of things beneath you (I refer to this as the ‘context of the whole’).

This is where you map the journey ahead.

The strategic zone is where you foresee a way to make everything better beyond today – improvements to products that will make customers happier, investments in new capabilities to help your business, everything associated with being a more successful person and business.

In a survey of 10,000 senior leaders, 97% of them said that being strategic was the most important leadership behaviour important to the organization’s success.

In the strategic zone you will find:

• next year’s plan
• next year’s budget cycle
• the roadmap for your team
• new product development
• market development
• future targets
• deeper analysis of performance patterns
• analysis of competition and competitive strategy
• trends, opportunities, emerging issues
• wild cards and “black swans” (unlikely, but high impact events)
• people and talent development
• culture development
• large investments and business cases
• hard questions and wicked problems that require more time than is available in the operational zone

Like the operational zone, the strategic zone is also incredibly important.

Without thought to the strategic zone, businesses fail to plan for what’s just round the corner.

How Operational and Strategic Zones Change As Your Career Progresses

Now that we’ve looked at these two areas, let’s look at how the demands placed on you to spend time in each will change as your career progresses.

First, you’ll be expected to spend more time in the strategic zone. This is because more senior roles in companies often have larger ‘spans of time’ in terms of responsibility. Forbes notes this as a shift in focus from the short to long term.

For example, a Product Manager may operate on priorities with a 1 to 3 year timeframe. In contrast, a CEO is expected to think about the health of the organisation not just this year, but over the next 10 years.

Second, you will still have to manage the demands of the operational zone. I know many Product Managers who start their day looking at the daily measures and key statistics for their product.

These dual demands increase the higher you go.

This is the conundrum.

Many people I know feel that, as they spend more time on strategic issues, they spend less on operational ones. But it doesn’t always happen that way.

Your peers, your bosses, the board of directors….they still expect operational issues to be dealt with…and dealt with well.

And when we don’t keep an eye on those issues, we risk dropping the ball.

As a result, the operational zone can often feel more important than the strategic zone.

Say you face this dilemma.

You block out the entire afternoon in your calendar to spend time with your team, so you can analyze the design for next year’s product launch. In the morning you get a call from a major customer who is threatening to pull their business if you don’t resolve their issue today.

What do you do?

This dilemma is common for us all; it’s a face-off between an issue in the operational zone that requires time that otherwise would be spent in a strategic zone workshop.

In this dilemma the scales are often skewed because the operational issue feels more important than the strategic one.

It is hard to not see an upset and important customer as the more important issue, ins’t it?

Beware The Bias of The Present

In most situations, the operational zone issue will feel 10 times more real and threatening then the strategic zone issue.

Because the strategic zone issue is in the future, it will seem distant and less tangible.

The future is unconsciously more abstract to us than, say, an upset customer today.

Yet, both decisions carry consequences.

In the example above, the decision we could make about the future design of a new product could easily make the company more successful than responding to a single customer.

The greatest single challenge we face in leadership is to recognise that both operational and strategic zone issues are equally important.

This requires a mindset shift.

We have to manage how we perceive strategic issues, so that we view them with the same urgency as those in the operational zone.

How The Majority of People Deal With This Situation

Let’s think back to our example of the angry customer. How do most people deal with this situation?

8 times out of 10 the person in this scenario will postpone the planning session with their team and deal with the customer.

1 time in 10 they will put off the customer and go ahead with the planning session (this is not ideal, nor the best answer, because in no circumstance do we want to lose business).

It feels like its ‘lose – lose’ no matter which option is taken.

However, there is one other option.

It is hardly ever taken, yet can provide the best path. In this option, you manage both operational and strategic zone issues without compromise.

What 1 in 10 Leaders Do To Balance Operational And Strategic Demands

Great leaders do three things that allow them to respond to this issue unlike 90% of managers.

1. First, they ask what is most important;
2. Second, they have learnt to manage their capacity, not their time;
3. Third, they manage the potential for operational issues as a strategic zone question (the most important action of all three of these points!).

1. Ask what’s most important

The first thing to ask is what truly needs our time and what does not.

At first, it’s natural for us to think we are needed to solve everything. Aren’t we important?

It was empowering to learn I wasn’t as important as I thought. I realised I had so many incredible and talented people around me who could help with all sorts of challenges.

If you’re struggling with this, try an exercise.

Think of the CEOs you’ve most admired. What were the activities you saw them do that you felt were most important?

Maybe it was a time when they addressed the entire company or gave an overview of priorities for the year. Maybe you saw them give an investor announcement. Perhaps you heard the CEO taking with people, taking time to greet them and listen, so the CEO understood their people at all levels.

You likely did not see the CEO doing every day things, every day. In fact, according to FastCompany, most CEO’s only spend 11% of their time on routine activities, like attending meetings.

CEOs constantly challenge themselves by asking ‘what are the most important things to spend time on?’.

Now imagine you’re the CEO of your team. From your team’s perspective:

• where do you think they need you most?
• what would be the ways you could be most impactful to them?
• what will make a difference to how they see you, the job your team is there to do, and the company?

When we do this exercise, it can tell us some ‘home truths’. It helps us quickly see where we can spend our time for greatest impact.

2. Manage Capacity, Not Time

Sometimes it feels like the only way to solve issues is to throw more of our time at the problem.

But the answer isn’t more time. The answer is more capacity.

Time and capacity are different responses to the same issue. And they produce very different outcomes.

Time is a limited resource for us. You only have so many hours available to you in a day. Capacity is not limited in the same way.

We can expand our capacity by increasing our personal resourcefulness and the resources that we have access to.

Here are just some the methods to increase your capacity:

1. Do what you do well, the most.
   A task becomes easy when you’re doing something you’re naturally skilled at. Often this happens when you’re in flow. You can likely do more of these tasks, more quickly than other people you know. By doing things that you do well, more often, you will increase the volume of work you’re able to get done.
2. Do what you do less well, less.
   Activities you’re not naturally skilled at or have low interest in are often time consuming. By refocusing where we spend our time, and doing less of these tasks, we increase our capacity.
3. Delegate
   For those activities that are not important for you to do , consider which of these can be delegated to others. The act of ‘delegating’ is a skill in itself.
4. Oversee, don’t manage
   I know many managers who are involved in the detail of activities other people are leading. This takes loads of their time. By trusting others to do great work, and being involved at the right time, overseeing but not managing work, we dramatically increase our capacity.
5. Train your people to problem solve.
   Sure, we could jump in and likely solve many problems for others. But every time we do this, we rob our people of an opportunity to learn. By training our teams to solve problems, we develop others and, in doing so, make teams more effective and give a chance for problems to be solved before they reach us.
6. Encourage people to come to you with escalations, not the problem.
   Problem solving takes patience and often multiple attempts. When we encourage our teams to stick with a problem, raising issues with us when they cannot be solved or when they’re becoming increasingly severe, we help people strengthen their problem solving skills.
7. Ask for help.
   We often think asking for help is a sign of weakness. In fact, it’s a sign of humility, openness and strength. I ask for help often, especially on complex activities. I view it as a way of accessing expertise I do not have. It’s also one of the best ways I know to build trusted working relationships.
8. Manage to a buffer, not to your limit.
   Most people I know manage their time to 100% of their capacity. Then, when a new priority emerges, they find themselves stretched to fit it in. I recommend to keep a little in reserve (5-10% available time) so that if something urgent arises, you have the resourcefulness to give it attention without burning out.
9. Seek more resources
   If you are stretched and doing important work, it is always an option to ask for more resources. From my experience, if there is a strong justification for the work (whether that is in the form of business benefits or reduced risk), companies act reasonably to these requests.

These are some simple but effective strategies to increase the capacity available to you to manage operational issues, so you can spend more time in the strategic zone.

3. Manage the potential for operational issues as a strategic zone question

This final action is perhaps the most powerful of all three actions that leaders take, but is also the least used.

Great leaders treat the potential for future operational issues as strategic zone questions. They devote time to planning ahead to solve issues before they arise.

Let’s look at an example. In the case of the upset customer, strategic zone questions could be:

• how can we setup our business so that if a customer is upset, we have a process to resolve their issue quickly; or
• how can we improve the design of product X so that the issue we’ve heard from three customers does not happen again; or
• how can we test a prototype of a product before it’s released to customers, to spot and solve issues, before they ever reach a single customer

Each of these questions asks us to solve a challenge before it becomes a problem in the future, by asking a strategic question today.

Strong leaders are constantly scanning their business for signals that indicate future operational issues. Then, they proactively work with their teams to setup preventative measures and systems that will solve for those issues in the strategic zone, before they become crises.

I hope these suggestions are useful to you, whether you are just starting with your first role or already have an established career. Please consider sharing your feedback by leaving a comment below.

The post How To Manage Operational and Strategic Goals In Your Career appeared first on Alessio Bresciani.

As a generalist, I look to lessons across a broad range of disciplines. This led me to this book.

I’m glad it did, because in one sentence the author reminded me of one of the most important lessons in leadership.

“A leader’s relationship with their people should be transformational, not transactional.”

John McMahon

It’s a deceptively simple sentence. This one line captures so much about what leadership is.

It also captures a lot about the leaders I’ve most admired.

We may not relate to the word ‘transformational’.

The focus here is on leadership having a larger impact in the lives of the people we work with – whether that’s by creating meaning, helping people develop, or motivating teams to do their best work.

What Great Leaders Do

Great leaders are present, listen and inspire.

They are present in that they show up and give others the respect of being there, without distractions. They listen, giving balance in conversation to those they’re with, to understand the full context of what is being said. They inspire by first identifying the circumstances, values, goals and motivations of their team and connecting these motivations with organisational objectives.

We know when we’re in the presence of great leaders, for all of the reasons above.

When you think about the leaders you most respect, have they shown these qualities?

Were the interactions you had with them motivating or transactional?

How Leaders Fail

When leaders are distracted and not present, do not listen with intention, and know little about what truly motivates and moves their team, leadership fails.

Interactions become transactional. An appreciation of the relationship falls away.

When we operate like this, we manage the outputs of the work only, and not the people who are responsible for producing those outputs.

This approach may yield short term wins (maybe that’s why it’s a tempting pattern), but ultimately leaves people feeling flat, anxious and unsatisfied. It is also the deflating territory of micro-management.

I wish it were simple.

Wouldn’t it be nice if we could just chose to be the leaders we want to be?

I used to think being a leader was like graduating. Once we got there, we’d know, and there’d be no going back.

But leadership takes effort and awareness.

In any given day we can switch between transformational and transactional leadership. Even the best leaders have moments where they exit a meeting, feel flustered and think they could have handled the situation better.

I realise now that great leadership is about knowing we cannot always get it right.

We’re human. We’re bound to slip occasionally.

What Separates Truly Great Leaders

What separates great leaders from others is their willingness to continually check themselves for how they are in any moment. The very best leaders constantly assess whether they’re being all they need to be, and quickly adjust when there’s a disconnect.

They do this because they know if they don’t, their people will not get the best version of themselves.

If you are ever feeling as though you’re slipping into a transactional pattern, there are steps you can take.

• Manage anxiety
  Often we become transactional because we’re anxious about something. We might be worried about a deadline or the next budget. HBR has a very useful summary of of articles and podcasts on the subject of ‘leading through anxiety.’
• Manage energy and resourcefulness
  The question of whether we are resourceful (a transformational state) or reactive (a transactional state) is also a question of how much energy we have to respond to any situation. We can manage ourselves and our levels of resilience to be better leaders, by using simple practices like getting regular exercise and downtime.
• Assess against the ideal team dynamic
  A useful test of our leadership is to assess ourselves against the question “right now are we supporting the principles of high performing teams#8221; Perhaps the most important principle is to support psychological safety for our team members, which becomes more difficult when we’re operating in a transactional pattern of leadership.

If you use or have seen other specific strategies to supporting strong leadership, consider sharing your view with others by leaving a comment below.

The post The One Thing Great Leaders Do appeared first on Alessio Bresciani.

While these terms are often use interchangeably, they can mean very different things. They also are supported by different actions and behaviours.

In your own career you may have observed this too. You may have also thought about taking on one of these roles yourself, so that you could share your skills and expertise with others.

A Short Summary Of The Difference Between a Mentor, Advisor and Coach

In thinking about these roles, I thought carefully about how I interpreted the differences between these roles.

Often a mentor or advisor is assumed to have personally succeeded in a discipline related to the area they are mentoring or advising on.

For example, a successful entrepreneur could mentor or advise other aspiring entrepreneurs.

A mentor provides a psychological commitment over an enduring period to help an individual on a chosen path.

An advisor provides value by giving targeted and potentially infrequent advice. Often, there is an expectation that an advisor will be more directive than the other roles. Mentors and coaches may lead by asking questions and giving open space for the person they’re guiding to discover their own answers.

A coach is there to assist an individual, team or business to reach their full potential.

While mentors and advisors are often expected to have expertise and personal experience in the area they provide guidance on, the same is not always true for a coach. For example, a coach may have a successful career coaching professional soccer teams, but not have been a player themselves.

A More Detailed Summary Of These Differences

In thinking about these differences, I also thought about some of the approaches each role could take.

If you are looking for a more detailed explanation of the differences, this table gives a more detailed breakdown of the outcomes of a mentor, advisor and a coach.

If you are planning to take on one of these roles, I would encourage you to consider if you agree with the distinctions in the table above.

What would you change? What do you agree with? Just doing this will give you further clarity on how you will take on any of these roles.

While definitions vary, I would caution against the way ‘mentors’ are used in many business settings. Often I will hear people say “maybe you should get a mentor for an hour a month to help you with your development plan?”

This is a useful action but also a somewhat narrow view of mentorship.

True mentorship is gained through meaningful connection, shared time, and both philosophical and practical teaching. Often a mentorship used in business settings is actually more like an advisor relationship. It may also be worthwhile considering the qualities of a great mentor.

Any of these three roles can provide an incredible opportunity for you to connect with others. In doing this, you may discover a broader appreciation for both the skills you possess and how your skills can help others.

If you have views on this article or would like to share your experiences of being or working with a mentor, advisor or coach, consider leaving a comment below.

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Overnight the release went live on the app store. We were all incredibly excited!

The next day I passed our CEO in the corridor. 

“Did you see the release went out?” I asked. “Now the app does A, B and C!” 

“Yes, I saw it,” she didn’t look all that impressed. “I thought it was going to do X and Y. When’s that coming?”

In what should have been a high moment, I felt as though I’d completely missed something. I really felt as though I had let the team down, because I hadn’t done what would allow our CEO to celebrate the release with us.

I learnt a valuable lesson that day. This and other lessons have stuck with me over the years as I’ve worked in various digital product and strategy roles. 

In this post, I share some of these lessons, and how they’ve shaped my approach today.

The moment I just shared with you shaped lesson 1.

#1. I overlooked the value of over-communicating

Communication only costs us time, but when it’s not done well, it can be far more costly.

By the time I saw our CEO in the corridor all those years ago, she should have already known about our release and what it delivered to marker. She should have known not only what was in the release, but what was coming next. 

Key Lessons

• As a Product Manager, if you have a roadmap, share it. Many Product Managers I know are cautious about sharing features and releases before they’re locked in. But there’s nothing wrong sharing both what is confirmed as well as what is ‘pencilled in’ for a future release.
• We can use many different ways to communicate what is being worked on. Whether that’s via showcases, sprint plans, key results….whatever the tools are at your disposal, think about how and where they’ll be used best. 
• People are busy. Hearing something once might not be enough for the information to sink in. So don’t be afraid of over communicating. 
  

#2. I was not able to take on multiple perspectives

Being a Product Manager or a Strategist requires us to take on multiple perspectives.

We need to understand what our designers and developers want. We have to see what’s important to culture to make a team succeed. We must uncover what will drive value for our customers through our products. We can also benefit from becoming more comfortable thinking like a strategist.

Initially, I wasn’t able to grasp multiple perspectives. Then, I thought I had to take on other perspectives, rather than just ask others to share their views.

A fifteen minute conversation with a developer, a designer or a customer, to ask for their feedback on a topic, is the most direct way to gain rapid insights. We don’t have to create these insights ourselves. Asking for the help of others is far more effective and fast.

Key Lessons

• Be aware of the incredible value of taking on multiple perspectives. Creating great products and strategy requires us to become systems thinkers and to look at problems and opportunities through interconnected viewpoints.
• Ask for advice and feedback. There is no better way to understand a perspective, than to ask for direct feedback from the person/stakeholder/group who represents it.
  

#3. I did not understand the value of diverse benefits

A lot of what I did early in my career is what I would call ‘busy work’.

I thought the work was valuable, but how could I have known, because I never made any attempt to connect the work with a benefit driver.

So much of what product managers and strategists do can be connected to a measurable result. 

A new feature in a product can make it faster to improve operational processes, increase customer usage of a platform and, most importantly, solve a customer problem or pain point in a fundamental way.

All of these changes in behaviour can be measured. In fact, absolutely anything we work on can be connected to a benefit. On this topic, one of my favorite books is How To Measure Anything by Douglass Hubbard. 

Benefits can be quantitative (ie. will increase revenue by X%) or qualitative (ie. increase customer satisfaction with a feature). Benefits can also be incredibly diverse, whether it’s improving brand perception or the time taken to load a page. 

Some benefits will be more impactful than others. It is this impact that can also be used to assess the true and relative value of our work.

Key Lessons

• Anything we work on can be connected to benefit drivers. 
• While it takes effort, connecting what we work on to benefit is one of the ways we can measure the value and impact of our work.
• When we connect features with benefits in a transparent and logical way, decisions also become far simpler for us and our teams.
  

#4. I failed to understand the first problem, may not be the real problem

In any given day, we are given many problems to solve. These might come in the form of a question from a department, a consistent theme in customer feedback, or from our manager. 

Initially, when provided with problems to solve, I took these at face value and started the work. I didn’t understand the value of problem framing!

Problem framing is the art of assessing whether the first problem raised is the right problem to solve. Many methods look at how we can deepen our awareness of problems and opportunities, in order to understand what is the true driving force of an issue or opportunity.

The Five Whys method is an example. Amanda Rosenburg, Staff UX Researcher at Google, suggests another framework. Rosenburg shared a ‘tip of the day’ on Linked In proposing that researchers write down stakeholder questions on Post It notes, then use these notes to order and prioritise which questions can be solved by research.

I came to realise if I didn’t start with the right problem, I would not get the right answer. What’s more, I would waste a great amount of time in the process!

Key Lessons

• Making sure we start with the right problem is key to optimizing our time and the overall value of our work.
• Being able to bring problem framing skills to stakeholder meetings is a way we further add value for our teams, by sharpening focus. 
• Problem framing is an important activity, and any method designed to deepen our understanding of the problem or opportunity, will help us as Product Managers and Strategists.
  

#5. I focused on the release and not the long game

Releases are exciting! The idea of a team pulling together to ship something new for customers can be a real rush. 

Early on I spent most of my time focused on the release I was working on. I would enjoy the high of putting something to market, only to find myself exhausted at the end of it. Then I had to pick myself up to work on what came next.

I didn’t realise that true value comes from incremental and continuous change, delivered in an aligned way, over sustained periods of time. 

To do this, we have to do three things: 1) allow focus for the current release, 2) devote attention to fostering releases that will be coming in the future, and 3) ensure we manage ourselves so that we sustain high energy over the course of the year (in other words, replenishing our energy and avoiding burnout).

In the early years, I was so focused on the first of these (giving focus only to a single release), that I completely neglected the other two areas.

Key Lessons

• True value is derived from incremental and continuous change. 
• As Product Managers and Strategists we need to do three things: focus on the current release, foster future releases, manage ourselves and our energy.
• Our role is a critical input to how all releases occur, so if we do not manage ourselves and our energy, the overall system weakens.
  

#6. I tried to do everything, without prioritizing anything

Fantastic Product Managers and Strategists help their teams by bringing a clarity of focus and decision making that allows better work to get done, faster.

We see everything as a question of priority. What will we work on today? What feature is most important to deliver next month? How will we outshine the competition by delivering great work?

Early on I was not aware how important prioritisation is. Or, that one of my most important roles as a Product Manager and Strategist, was to bring priority to my own time as well as help others prioritize their work, by leveraging frameworks and methods to do so.

Here are three simple priority frameworks I’ve found invaluable:

Key Lessons

• Being able to prioritize is a fundamental skill of Product Managers and Strategists.
• We should think about prioritization not just for the teams we work with or features for our products, but also for ourselves and our own time.
• Leveraging various methods to bring clarity to prioritization efforts is incredibly helpful for this task.

I hope these lessons give you ideas to improve your own day-to-day work.

If you have your own lessons that have boosted your effectiveness, I’d love to hear them; you can leave a comment below or get in touch directly.

The post The Mistakes I Made Starting Out As Product Manager / Strategist appeared first on Alessio Bresciani.

Pixar’s many movie successes are connected with one of the essential questions of leadership. How do we make something go from good to great?

Inside One Of The World’s Most Creative Companies

The magic way Pixar solves this question is through the Brainstrust.

The Brainstrust is a collection of people who get together and critique a film as it moves through the creative process. They do this in order to make the film better. Just how they do this is what makes it so interesting.²⁾

Pixar’s Brainstrust is different from most feedback mechanisms that exist in many companies in two ways. First, Brainstrust meetings prize feedback that comes from those people who have lived through similar creative processes. In other words, hands-on experience, the kind that grows from living and breathing all aspects of storytelling, is held in high regard. Second, there is no authority or hierarchy in a Brainstrust meeting.

These two conditions upturn a dynamic that exists in many companies; where hierarchy and authority often prevail and, in so doing, bias a conversation.

In a Brainstrust meeting, ideas grounded in experience, with the most dramatic value to a film’s storyline, have the greatest opportunity not only to be said, but also heard. Not because of who says them but because they’re great ideas.

There’s an ingredient of Brainstrust meetings which is essential to their success.  This ingredient is candor. Candor, by definition, is the quality of ‘being open and honest’.

How Candor Helps Product Design

Candor does not come easy. It is not transparency, direct feedback or talking straight. Candor is more than these things. This is perhaps why it is so hard to create.

In the Pixar setting, candor implies feedback that is given without contemplation of hierarchy, in a way that genuinely has a common interest, which is the success of a film. Feedback is not there to serve the individual; it is there to create a better product. To allow candor to flourish, people must literally check their ego at the door.

As the success of Pixar has grown, so too has the Brainstrust. Pixar has paid particular care to protect the ethos of this group in spite of the company’s growth.

While the Brainstrust started out as only a handful of people, its “ranks have grown to include…directors, writers, and heads of story – whose only requirement is that they display a knack for storytelling. The one thing that has never changed is the demand for candor.”³⁾

Preserving this important group is not that different from what startups go through as they scale.

Most startups begin with a story of how a single or multiple founders have a vision to create something different. The challenge many startups face is how to maintain the consistency of this original vision or purpose as the company undergoes rapid growth.

When we look at the Brainstrust, we see some of the principles that make it successful can be found in other successful companies and their teams.

Where Else We See Candor In Great Design

Sir Jonathan Ive is the Chief Designer at Apple. He’s also about to leave the company. After nearly 30 years, he’s had an enormous impact on how Apple designs its products.

Ive led the Industrial Design Group (IDG), a team of around 20 people responsible for shaping new products. This small, secretive group, created many of Apple’s most successful designs and achieved what it has taken other companies thousands of designers to do. While many publications have hypothesized about the inner workings of this team, my favorite account is told by Leander Kahney.

According to Kahney, before the IDG moved to electronic processes for designs, the team would gather around a table to critique work for the latest product. To do this they would use Cachet notebooks from Daler Rowney to sketch and brainstorm together.

The sketchbooks gave the designers a vehicle to express and capture their ideas, so these could be easily shared amongst the group. ⁴⁾As Kahney tells it:

“A lot of sketching happens in these sessions. At the end of the brainstorm, Ive will sometimes instruct everyone around the table to copy their sketchbooks and give the pages to the lead designer on the project under discussion. Afterward, Ive will sit with the lead designer and carefully go through all the pages.”⁵⁾

When we imagine what it might have been like to be at these sessions, sitting with the designers, sketching and working toward the single-minded pursuit of a new device, we’re quickly reminded of Pixar’s Brainstrust. We can imagine the lead designers scanning through the sketchbooks of their teams. This, in itself, is a way to promote candor and remove hierarchy, where the sketches themselves act as the voice of ideas.

Like with Pixar’s Braintrust which focuses on creating the highest quality story, the IDG focuses on creating the very best products.

Amidst all other possible distractions, Ive appears to have had this as an enduring goal through his career. He has said often “our goal and what gets us excited is to try to make great products.” ⁶⁾

Many companies set goals. What is different about Ive’s approach is to instill a greater purpose within his team that reflects a sense of care, focus and respect for people, achieved through great design.

This is the equivalent of Pixar’s Brainstrust carefully contemplating how a storyline will be interpreted and celebrated by their audiences.

The outcome of this might be a financial success for the companies the Brainstrust and the IDG represent. But this is not the primary goal. The first intent is to create a great product that serves people, which in turn is financially successful.

When speaking at London’s Design Museum, Ive told the audience, “If you expect me to buy something where all I can sense is carelessness, actually I think that is personally offensive…It’s offensive culturally, because it shows a disregard for our fellow human.”⁷⁾

How We Can Apply These Principles

We can learn from the Brainstrust and IDG in our own work and life. Here are some guiding principles we can apply today.

1. Create feedback and critiquing sessions to review initiatives and product creation processes.
2. Ensure these sessions are attended by those people who are involved in product creation (this is not necessarily the most senior, but rather those people who have experience at all levels of creation).
3. Create an environment during critique sessions that removes hierarchy and promotes openness. Remember, the only way to do this is to create a setting where people have the space to express their opinions, without fear of consequence.
4. Focus the team on the single goal of making the product or process better. Pixar focuses on making the film better. The IDG focuses on creating great products. What is the enduring purpose your team is looking to fulfill?
5. Concentrate critiquing sessions on improving the product that is being created. It is easy to fall into the trap of improving the peeves of the day. Pixar’s Brainstrust is so successful because sessions are focused on improving the film under discussion.
6. Repeat this regularly. People may not engage in the process until the third or fourth attempt. They want to see the process is there to stay before they’ll trust it. This is the challenge, to commit consistently to this practice, so everyone trusts the process and invests in it to create better products.

What do you think? Please consider sharing your thoughts using the comments area below.

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Google’s targeted these questions in a special research study, called Project Aristotle. Though the study finished several years ago, the findings are still relevant to top companies today.

Google’s Project Aristotle: Uncovering The Secrets Of Highly Effective Teams

Google studied teams along a spectrum of performance – some were high performers, some low performers.

The goal of the research – uncover what makes a highly effective team.

The research group at the helm of this study looked at 180 teams, conducted interviews wth individuals, ran statistical models and reviewed hundreds of surveys.

They discovered a surprising result.

Team performance was less about who was in the team and and more about how the team worked together.¹⁾

Project Aristotle identified five factors that drive high performing teams:

1. Psychological Safety: does the team provide a safe environment in which team members can take risks, ask questions and try new ideas?
2. Dependability: do team members reliably complete their work and can they be depended on?
3. Structure and clarity: do team members understand expectations for their role and how is team performance managed?
4. Meaning: does the team’s work contribute a deeper sense of meaning to the team members within it?
5. Impact: do team members have a clear connection with how their effort translates to outcomes in the work they do?

How Teams (Not Times) Have Changed

While the findings show five factors that make teams effective, it’s also worth exploring why these factors are important.

The reality is the nature of work has changed since the turn of this century.

People are moving between jobs more than ever. In some developed countries, the average tenure for a role is 4.2 years ²⁾ and even baby boomers will experience 11.9 jobs in a lifetime.³⁾

Technological change has resulted in many companies becoming more specialized. In turn, companies often seek higher levels of specialization in the people they hire. Millennials in particular are also reshaping the workplace and work habits.

Collaboration has also become a significant working style. As noted by HBR,“according to data we have collected over the past two decades, the time spent by managers and employees in collaborative activities has ballooned by 50% or more.”⁴⁾

These drivers have led to work that is more fluid. The previous structures that stabilized teams (long term tenure, clear job descriptions, even where we sat in an office before they became open-plan), are less relevant in the modern work style.

Many of the previous structures were very tangible. While these have eroded, the five factors mentioned in Project Aristotle are less tangible (eg. we cannot point to psychological safety, but we can say what it means for us and when it is present), and yet still provide a mental support for people in a shifting environment.

There are also conventional ways we can support these factors. Having a clear mission or vision statement and being able to connect such a statement with the team’s work is a way to provide the team with meaning and clarity. If you are looking to refine the purpose for your company or team, mission statement examples provide a reference point.

The Intangibles Are Now The Great Supports For Teams

Project Aristotle highlights factors not often written down.

These factors are often about what is not spoken – a team’s unwritten norms, customs, and the way members behave and feel they’re part of something. ⁵⁾

Six years before Google published the results of Project Aristotle, another study looked at a subject that would prove influential to Google’s research. This study looked at a concept known as ‘collective intelligence’.

The theory of collective intelligence is that a type of intelligence exists among people operating as a team, that plays a similar role to the general intelligence possessed by an individual, only that it operates at a group level.

Five scientists across three universities led research that looked at how 699 people worked in teams.

In this research they asked questions like ‘does collective intelligence exist’? And if it exists, what causes it?

They found not only that it exists, but that it contributes to a team’s overall success.

They also identified three conditions that give rise to collective intelligence…

Let’s think about this for a moment.

Often when we’re building a team, we think about the unique skills, talents and specializations of individuals within the team. And yet the theory of collective intelligence would suggest beyond these credentials, we ought to consider other factors. These might include whether individuals in the team are socially sensitive…even whether the team make-up will promote balanced contribution to conversation?

In fact, these aspects may be far more important to the team’s performance, than any individual’s performance within the team.

Today, Teams Make More Decisions Than Ever

So why is this important? In our hyper-connected and hyper-collaborative world, teams are making more of the decisions than ever.

Teams are equally responsible for the well-being of an organization (its strategies, its products and its performance) as individuals.

As published in the New York Times, “nowadays, though we may still idolize the charismatic leader or creative genius, almost every decision of consequence is made by a group.” From Facebook through to the storytellers at Pixar, group-work is not just important, but can make or break a company.⁷⁾

Over and above other elements – the IQ of individual team members, the balance of extraverts or introverts – the smartest teams are those that show three characteristics; do team members contribute equally to team discussions, can team members read the emotional states of their peers and, finally, do teams have more women than men.

The Implication for Leaders

As leaders, we need to be conscious of this shift and adapt to it.

Let’s start by setting up working environments in ways that promote the five factors outlined by Project Aristotle. Teams focused on technology or digital product development need this, because by their nature they’re highly cross-functional. But this also applies to any team in an organization and especially those companies undergoing significant change.

Beyond this, we need to adapt our focus as leaders (if we haven’t done so already) to include the concept of collective intelligence. Individual coaching is still important, and now coaching teams according to Project Aristotle’s findings requires an expanded leadership vocabulary.

This involves looking beyond the tangible elements of a team (who’s in it, what skills do they bring) to perceive the nuances of how a team is working together. We might ask questions like: is psychological safety present in this team, do we understand how team members take meaning from their work, and so on?

We also need to seek out ways to actively support the principles

Finally, when we are leading teams ourselves or seeking people to lead teams for us, we can audit whether the skill-set in the leader is up to task.  Are the requisite talents in place to promote highly effective teams? Do we understand that teams may approach high performance with very different patterns, and still achieve incredible results?

I see little downside in upskilling ourselves to accomodate the changing nature of teams, but there is a lot to lose if we don’t.

I’d love to hear what you think about teams, what works and what doesn’t. Please consider sharing your thoughts with others by adding a comment below.

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It is idea generation, innovation and, most of all, hard work.

Many entrepreneurs I know – whether they’re self-employed or hired in specific innovation roles for leading companies – find the toughest and most rewarding part, execution.

Here are three pieces of advice to help you overcome challenges and fast-track your ideas to execution.

1. Entrepreneurship, Mindset & ‘The Learning Loop’

Execution is where we face our biggest fears – will the idea work, will customers like it, what if it doesn’t succeed?

It’s important we recognise that this is a natural part of the process. If we don’t go through this, we cannot learn.

This is why the best entrepreneurs I know treat execution very differently.

They switch their mindset. They take on the perspective that every time an idea doesn’t work, it isn’t ‘failure’, it’s ‘learning’. And we must go through learning in order to make our ideas stand out in the world.

This learning loop is the secret of success for some of the world’s business leaders.

Ray Dalio, leader of one of the most successful financial institutions in the world,Bridgewater, went through many obstacles and major challenges to become successful and at every step of his journey, leveraged this learning loop.[1]

2. Understand The Creative Cycle of Innovation

In 1926 Graham Wallas, a social psychologist and co-founder of the London School of Economics, shared a model on creativity that explains how ideas move through different stages toward execution.[2]

The model outlines four stages of the creative process.

• Preparation: when we’re working on an idea, this requires us to gather and sift through information, as part of our preparation activities.
• Incubation: as the name of this stage suggests, this is where our conscious and unconscious sorts through information in order to weaken lose threads, strengthen ties of our central ideas, and identify innovative concepts.
• Illumination: in this stage we become aware of the connections of our ideas. What seemed disconnected, starts to form an order that makes sense to us.
• Verification: verification is the stage where, having realized and given shape to an idea, we communicate it to others to validate it.

This model has largely held up until this day, though subsequent studies have elaborated upon each of its phases.

The first two stages are where ideas come easy. It’s not unusual to wind up with hundreds of ideas. Our minds are alight with possibility and it’s an incredibly exciting process.

When we shift to illumination and verification, this is when we start to get into the execution of ideas.

At these stages, we have to treat ideas differently, because suddenly they will require many more processes if we’re to illuminate and verify them – concepting, prototyping, testing with customers, and investing in their development.

Because of all this effort, it’s not possible to work with all the ideas we held at the previous stages of preparation and incubation.

We need to filter and prioritize our ideas, so that we take only a handful through to the next stages, so they have the best access to our resources. If we take too many ideas through to the final stages, we split our focus, and it becomes harder to thoroughly test ideas.

James Dyson is renowned for taking 15 years and 5,127 prototypes before he launched the first cyclone technology design. While he worked on many prototypes, he never lost sight of the one central idea that drove his entire process – the bagless vacuum cleaner.

Entrepreneurs who take too many ideas through to verification may often find themselves overwhelmed by the competing demands of testing many ideas or in a constant state of juggling resources. Prioritizing which ideas will go through to verification and commence their execution journey is a good way to overcome this.

3. Prioritize & Filter What We Take To Execution

When we’re dealing with hundreds of ideas, we need a way to filter and prioritize what we’ll take through to execution.

Many companies have different methods to do this, including:

• Rank & Rate: Some put all ideas into a spreadsheet and rank ideas according to different lenses. For example, having a lens of ‘market growth potential’ and ranking the idea from 1 to 10. Usually, teams doing this work target five to seven lenses and no more (or the system becomes too complex).  Only the ideas with the highest scores go through to subsequent stages.
• Expert Panel: Other companies might use a panel of experts, and use this panel to rank and rate ideas, before they go through to execution. The panel of experts acts like a ‘shark tank’ for new ideas. But with this, even experts cannot always spot what will be a success.
• Lite Market Testing: Some teams use a ‘lite’ method to rapidly market-test ideas as part of their prioritization process. Without going to a full prototype, for example, they might use online surveys to test initial concepts, as a way to filter out weaker ideas.
• Forced Constraints: Another method is  to apply a ‘forced constraint’ to make sure that resources aren’t over-expended on too many ideas. This constraint might involve “only allowing three ideas to be tested at one time”. Until an idea exits the verification process, the team simply does not look at any other idea.
• Internal Critiques: every company has access to their own in-house expertise. We can tap into this experience, by running internal critique sessions to examine, refine and eject ideas, before they go to execution. Apple’s Industrial Design Group for some time has used a pattern of workshopping and critiquing ideas amongst the sixteen or so designers that form part of this group.[3]

Whichever the method, the most important thing is to ‘narrow the field’ of ideas that will proceed through to execution. The goal is to avoid over-stretching ourselves by having too many ideas to execute (or illuminate and verify) and the best way to do this is to only allow a handful to go through to execution.

What are the methods your team uses to work through entrepreneurial ideas?  You might consider leaving a comment below so others can learn from your perspective.

—

References

1. Principles, Ray Dalio
2. The Art of Thought (1926), Graham Wallas.
3. Chapter 7, Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple’s Greatest Products, Leander Kahney

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I’m sure you have asked yourself the question many times ‘what do I think is great leadership’?  There are so many examples of great leaders, but it’s sometimes harder to pick out the strong leadership principles we can adopt into our own life.

In this post, I share three personal perspectives on leadership principles that shifted the way I think, and may be helpful to you too.

Leadership As Consistent Practice

In a recent interview Simon Sinek, author of Start With Why, spoke about how leadership is often observed over the long term, not the short term. He uses analogies to illustrate his point.

“When did you first know you loved your wife#8221;. The chances are it wasn’t at a specific moment, but instead it was felt overtime. Similarly, if we went to the gym and expect to see results instantly, we’d likely never go back.  Instead, physical fitness is seen over time, after a regular practice of attending.

In Sinek’s view, leadership is the same, “there’s nothing I can tell you, you have to do, so that people will trust you…it’s an accumulation of lots and lots of little things that any one by themselves is innocuous and useless….if you do it consistently and do it in combination with lots of other little things, like saying good morning to someone…..it’s those things that you do over and over and over; people will say ‘I love my job’.”

In this, Sinek suggests we challenge our assumptions about leadership.

Leadership is not something that is observable only in the moment, but rather can also be seen overtime, in the hundreds of small things that have occurred over an extended period. If we act in this way, leadership is not only about the highly visible and infrequent moment, it is about every moment, practiced on a consistent basis. It involves us assuming a perspective of continuous improvement and action.

Leadership As Interdependence & Cooperation

In his book the Culture Code, Daniel Coyle argues that the very best leaders are those who are comfortable questioning themselves and allowing others within their teams to do the same.

In so doing, leaders are able to better tap into the collective wisdom of teams, troubleshoot issues that they themselves do not see, and take advantage of emerging opportunities.

This shift involves establishing the right conditions where teams move away from an authority bias toward greater interdependence and cooperation. As leaders we cannot simply tell our teams to function like this, we have to provide them with the signals and environment that indicate it’s okay to do so.

Coyle provides plenty examples of this, from SEAL teams operating in high pressure situations, through to airline pilots who wrestle with highly unlikely and potentially catastrophic events, sharing split-second information and to avoid disaster.

In companies, we sometimes confuse the terms consensus with cooperation, where consensus is occasionally labelled as group thinking or agreement for the sake of it. What Coyle talks about is very different, where cooperation and interdependence is actually about people having the courage to say when something is wrong, based on their expertise and previous experiences. Creating bravery within our teams for people to speak their mind so we can pursue common goals is fundamentally what leadership is about, isn’t it?

This requires building leadership at all levels of a company, and starts with the leader establishing the conditions where this can occur and having the strength to be open to ideas. The impact of these subtle redefinitions and adjustments in leadership cannot be underestimated.

Leadership As Repeatable Rituals For Best Success

In The Checklist Manifesto, Atul Gawande documents how a simple checklist was rolled out to a pilot group of hospitals in both developed and underdeveloped nations, to curb the rising tide of millions of surgical complications that occur worldwide.

While the checklist was important, the way it was executed was equally so, often involving a simple principle that upturned the contemporary practice of many hospitals – if the pre-surgery checklist had not been satisfied, the nurse in charge could prevent the surgeon from proceeding with the operation.

This change inverts the unspoken hierarchy, allowing the person whose responsibility it is to sequence the checklist, to put patient-care above all else.  But beyond being a formulaic, process-driven step, it also reminds all people in the specific surgery that they are part of a team where each person is accountable, and that it is not their role to simply ‘follow the leader’.

The way the checklist is implemented creates a continuous practice of leadership as Simon Sinek suggests, and also fosters the interdependence and cooperation that Coyle observed in high performing teams.  Gawande’s checklist does many others things to reinforce these principles, such as also asking each person in the surgical team to introduce themselves to one another at the start of the case.

In this way the checklist is a guide for everyone, no matter what their role, to adhere to a regular pattern of what works and provides the very best outcomes. It brings together the collective intelligence of both experts and the data of thousands of earlier cases to deliver a repeatable pattern that increases the likelihood for success and reduces unnecessary risks.  The checklist also asks experts to pause their spontaneous perspective of what may be right, and to consider a tool that has been proven to work.

As a result of the checklist, in several years major complications in eight hospitals fell by 36 percent, infections halved and death from surgery fell by 47 percent.  Improvements weren’t just observed in developing nations, but also in some of the best hospitals in the world.

According to Gawande, “we have an opportunity, not just in medicine but in virtually any endeavour. Even amongst the most expert among us can gain from searching out the patterns of mistakes and failures and putting a few checks in place.”

Continuously Refining Our View Of Leadership

These examples remind us that great leadership requires us to continually refine our pre-conceptions about what leadership is and what it isn’t.

They serve as a call to take a broader and longer term view of leadership, that could include everything from how leaders work with teams through to ensuring a strong diversity of leadership styles in teams.

Elsewhere I’ve looked at wider concepts, such as resilience in leadership, how leaders can mentor others, questions leaders may ask of new staff, and also how mission and vision statements can help leaders define the purpose of companies; but these are just some directions, and I’m sure you will have many of your own.

As individuals you and I can also take simple steps to affect change in our own lives, by:

• reviewing our assumptions about what great leadership represents
• continually building upon our view of leadership through reflection and taking note of the times we have been in the presence of great leadership or exhibited strong leadership ourselves
• fostering diverse leadership styles within the organisations where we work, so that these may become exemplars, in which emerging talent may see themselves and plan for their future
• seek the views of others and create an environment where others can contribute their expertise without caution or fear

If you found this article useful or would like to share your view on leadership, please considering leaving a comment below.

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