Competition.

The ABC programme Landline had a story on Chinese investment in the Ord River region of Western Australia on the Northern Territory border. 

A local sugar farmer said something that was a rare and refreshing example of an ability to think beyond a simplistic and impulsive response to the government supporting the entry of a huge competitor. One would think that he would be wary and resistant to a large foreign company competing with his livelihood.

Yet here's what he said: 

'I think it would radically change it in a positive way, and I think often, we all oppose change. It's a scary thing. It can be very hurtful and difficult, but it's a positive thing. It brings out the best in people. We're a very open community, we embrace new people. I'm really looking forward to having some new farmers come in and show us up a bit, you know, 'cause hopefully they're better than us.' 

SPEAR.

She summarised it all. 

Cadets. Law School. Officers Training School. Basic Staff Course. Masters of Defence Studies. Consulting. Workshops. Seminars. Books. Lots of books. All the PowerPoints, training films, lectures, military exercises, manuals, exams, yelling, drill, marching, chains of command, legislation, tutorials, performance reviews and on the job experience.

She was 12 years old. 

I had finished teaching spear throwing to a group of Year 7s who were at New Norcia on a Leadership Camp. They were sitting cross-legged in the shade of the trees at the end of the oval and I was trying to draw leadership lessons from the last hour of throwing Gidgies - the Aboriginal spear - using the Miro. It was impromptu. I was making it up as I went along. I had an inbox full of emails back in my office.

'Did you learn anything today about being Leaders?' I asked them. 

A hand went up. 

 'You're the New Norcia Town Manager and you led the activity today?' the boy said with a child's typical upward inflection.

 'Well, yes. And was there anything that I did that you thought was what leaders do?'

A different hand went up. 

'You drew a line in the dirt and told us that we weren't to go over the line unless you said that we could?' 

'Was that because I was bossy?' 

'No. You didn't want one of us to accidentally get speared.' 

'That's right. So I explained the boundaries of our activity. Good. Anything else?' 

Hand up. 

'You put that cardboard box full of straw in front of us and told us it was a pretend kangaroo and that was our target that we had to spear?' 

'Good. I gave you something to aim for. Anything else that I did that you think a leader might do?' 

'You gave us each a Gidgie and Miro and taught us how to use them?' 

'Yes. Anything else?' I reckoned I'd exhausted all the lessons. One last opportunity to squeeze thoughts out of their capped heads. 

Hand up. I'm surprised.  I nod towards the boy squinting up at me.

 'After each throw you told us what we did right and what we did wrong? We kept missing the box - er - kangaroo but we got closer each time?'

I was impressed. 'Good. So I was giving you feedback. Yes. Leaders give feedback in a way that encourages or affirms.' 

I reckoned that was about it. I was feeling quite chuffed about how much we'd extracted given I'd done no planning. Most had lost eye contact with me and were tugging at the tufts of dead grass. I glanced at my watch. Five minutes left.

'So does anyone have anything else to add? Any questions about our activity?' 

Silence. Then her hand slowly rose from the middle of the group. 

'Yes?' 

'You got out of the way?' she said. A few giggles. 

I started to smile. But didn't. I wondered. 

'What do you mean?' I'm wondering if... 

'Well, the last thing that you did was that you moved to the side and just let us throw the spears. You waited for us all to finish and didn't say anything. You just watched us. And then you came over and let us know how we'd gone so that we could do it better next time.' 

I felt a tingle.

'That's right. I got out of the way. There was nothing more for me to do.' I paused to remember the list of things that they'd told me I'd done. 'I'd shown you the area or space that you had to do the activity in. I shown you what the purpose was - to spear the kangaroo. I gave you all the equipment and taught you how to use it.  I gave you feedback after each throw so that you learned how to do it better. And then - I got out of your way and let you get on with it.'

Wow. 

I scanned their bored faces. They didn't share my excitement at the significance of that exchange. They were thinking about afternoon tea and then Aboriginal tool making with Lester. But my mind was humming.

And then this. 

The same girl's hand rises. 'Yes?' 

'Is that why they say that leaders are brave?'  

My tingles tingled. 

'What do you mean?' 

She blinked. Cocked her head slightly. Waved away a fly.

'Well...it must be really hard for a leader to just stand back and let people do their jobs and not keep yelling at them or taking over and doing it themselves. To know that some people might do it wrong and it's the leader who gets blamed. I think it must take lots of bravery to be a leader.' 

Then off they trotted up the hill behind their teachers to their biscuits and cordial and more lessons about Leadership.

Space.

Purpose. 

Equip.

Affirm.

Retreat. 

Copyright.

It's rare for decision makers to let us in on their decision making.

The fortunate exceptions are courts and the government. We can walk into almost any court and hear the judge explain how she reached her judgment. We can sit in the public gallery in parliament and listen to debate over legislation. 

It's risky for decision makers to explain their reasoning because it may make their decisions look like the product of a methodical process of inquiry rather than the result of charisma or instinct or divine revelation. So we usually don't get invited to meetings or sent the minutes.

If decision makers publish the blueprint of how they do things they fear making themselves redundant. It means that anyone with the same information and process of reasoning could do what they do. Earn what they earn. Wield their power.

A Leader falls over herself to make her decision-making transparent. Her processes are open source. That's how she became a Leader. She's a teacher. She wants to show her working out for others to copy and follow. Leaders become Leaders because people are confident enough in their decision making to choose to follow them. 

A Leader isn't worried about becoming redundant by showing her working out for three reasons:

One: It's who she is. 

Two: While everyone is busy poring over her blueprints to discover and copy the trick, the Leader has long moved on to explore and fail and learn and make decisions and publish their working out for others to copy or follow if they so choose. In other words - Leading. 

Three: Leaders are brave. 

Managed.

'No-one likes to be managed.' 

This is what Dr Tim McDonald said at his inaugural address to staff after being appointed as Director of Catholic Education.

He's right.

Bosses should be teachers, not managers.

We promote people to be bosses and expect them to manage other people - who in turn learn how to be managed.

We regress to our twelve year Masters of Being Agreeable: school and the teacher-student dynamic.

(Ironic given my bosses-as-teachers analogy.) 

The result is bosses who have nothing to teach but compliance to workers who are being measured on their willingness to comply.

A good boss teaches. Educates. Educare. To draw out. 

A good boss helps us to become who we are. 

Information

Imagine if everyone went to the Executive team meetings. 

Or received a copy of the Minutes. 

Or at least got an email saying:

'The Executive team met today and here are the things that we discussed and the decisions that we made and why we made them.

We will begin to execute those decisions in 48 hours. If you have any suggestion as to how we could improve any of them, please let us know.

If you have any questions about anything that the Executive does, please also ask us. Thank you'.

How much of the power held in organisations is the result of being at a meeting and having more information than someone who wasn't? 

If an organisation is truly Widget focussed ('Alignment' I think is the fancy term);

If an organisation is truly desperate for everyone to be continuously learning so that it can remain innovative ('The Learning Organisation' is what we consultants cleverly call it);

If it wants people who make decisions that others choose to follow ('Leaders' is what I call people who do that);

Then why wouldn't a leader in a learning organisation who's widget focussed want to throw open the floodgates of information and works-in-progress for everyone to see and contribute towards and learn from as openly as technology allows? 

My best answer so far (I'm still thinking about this) is that it's because people with the power to do this are the ones who go to executive meetings and they have egos.

They are putting their Weekend Widget ahead of their Weekday Widget.

Information is power. 

Google it. 

Hardy.

Andrew Zolli, the Author of 'Resilience: Why Things Bounce Back" was interviewed recently about his book. He said the following (with my bits added in brackets) that affirmed the value of the Widget: 

'People who are psychologically hardy believe very prevalently in some things about the world. If you believe that the world is a meaningful place [Personal Widget]. If you see yourself as having agency within that world [Good Decision Making]. And if you see success and failures as being placed in your path to teach you things [Decisions Measured Against Widget], you are more likely to be psychologically hardy and therefore more resilient in the face of trauma [Life]. 

Faithful.

The author and teacher Parker Palmer recently wrote that measuring our effectiveness in our work by our results or outcomes risks leading us to only take on tasks that we know we can achieve.

Our decisions become smaller.

He proposed a new measure of effectiveness:

'Am I being faithful to the gifts I possess, the strengths and abilities that I have?'

His proposition helps us to better understand the importance and relevance of our Weekend Widget to our Weekday Widget.  

If our Weekend Widget is a product of our gifts, strengths and abilities, then making sure that we are producing our Weekday Widget will serve our Weekend Widget - and vice versa. We will be more likely to make decisions that are expressions of our authentic selves, which can only be a good thing.

Bosses take note. You need to be discerning enough to recruit and retain people who want to express (or at least explore) their authentic selves through their work with you.

You need to be brave enough to allow them to make decisions that risk failure, yet teach.   

You also need to be honest enough to suggest to them that if they want to be true to themselves, they may need to work elsewhere. (You can only get away with this if you've built enough credibility to avoid it sounding like you're gently sacking them.)

And if you expect all of that from them - you need to expect it from yourself. (It's called Leadership.)

Know your Weekend Widget.

Know your Weekday Widget. 

Measure your effectiveness by how faithful you are to both.   And be prepared to fail a lot.

If you and those who work for you are measuring yourselves on the 'Faithfulness Test' - Wow.

Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp,

Or what's a heaven for?

- Robert Browning 

Creativity.

Many creative people who value their freedom might be discouraged from adopting a good decision making model based upon a five step process. Advocating x steps to anything immediately smacks of a process-driven, creativity-barren, bureaucratic black hole for individuality.

Quite the contrary.

Ben Goldacre is a doctor, academic and science writer who advocates evidence-based medical practice in particular, and who has extended the virtues of this approach to areas such as education.  In a paper titled Building Evidence into Education Dr Goldacre said (my emphases):

'The opportunity to make informed decisions about what works best, using good quality evidence, represents a truer form of professional independence than any senior figure barking out their opinions. A coherent set of systems for evidence based practice listens to people on the front line, to find out where the uncertainties are, and decide which ideas are worth testing. Lastly, crucially, individual judgement isn’t undermined by evidence: if anything, informed judgement is back in the foreground, and hugely improved.’

Creativity, innovation, and professional freedom and the professional and personal learning and growth that follow are all products of a good decision-making process that relies on evidence rather than intuition or positional power. 

Map.

There were no doubt many reasons that the United States under the leadership and decision making of President Kennedy was able to avoid nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis.  There is evidence in the transcripts of the meetings Kennedy had with his advisers of clear, cool and lucid logic, based upon intelligent analysis of the facts.  

However, there may have been many reasons why the Soviet Union’s Premier Khrushchev didn’t respond to the American actions with escalated force that led to catastrophe for the world.  It may have had nothing to do with the decision making prowess of Kennedy.

The problem is that, unlike the record left by President Kennedy and his advisers that allows us to analyse and learn from his decision making, there is little evidence of Khrushchev’s thought processes.  We don’t really know why he did certain things and historians can only speculate.  He was described as an ‘insecure and impulsive risk taker’.  Maybe it was because of this recklessness that he didn’t pull the nuclear trigger and had he been as logical, well-advised and cool as Kennedy, he would have been the one to stare down the Americans.  No-one, least of all his senior officials, could know.

So it should never be assumed that good decision making will always trump confused, emotional chance-taking in terms of outcomes.  There are too many other variables in play to draw simplistic conclusions such as that the better decision-maker won.  

The point is that at least a good decision maker makes their work visible. They show their working out so that others can point out any errors.  They leave a clear map for their followers and for the rest of us to follow - or not - to measure ourselves against and to learn from and to become better at our own decision making.  

Thanks to the transcripts of his meetings, we have a fairly good idea of why President Kennedy behaved the way that he did, and the consequences of it.  As the authors of The Kennedy Tapes: Inside the White House during the Cuban Missile Crisis point out in their Conclusion:

‘These tapes and transcripts form an almost inexhaustible resource for analyzing not only the mechanics but also the psychology of decision-making.’

Pause.

My friend Dan is a very experienced Air Traffic Controller. He teaches other Air Traffic Controllers how to safely separate airliners with hundreds of lives on board moving with closing speeds of up to half a kilometre a second tens of thousands of metres above the ground. (Dan has done this for years in the RAAF and Reserve as well - where closing speeds can be closer to a kilometre a second.) Constant decision-making in seconds with high consequences for failure is the nature of Dan's workplace.

Yet Dan nodded when I first told him about the first step towards a good decision being for the decision maker to step back. 

He explained how he teaches his trainees to do the same.

'They need to have a rote understanding of what to do in any situation,' Dan said. 'The novice Air Trafficker knows that if X happens they do Y. It's automatic and requires very little thought process.' 

'We want them to develop beyond that reactive drill. We want them to feel confident to explore and consider other options to situation X.  They can only evolve to this ability if they have the discipline of automatic response Y. If they instinctively know that Y is available to them, then they gain themselves time to be more creative in finding alternatives to Y. It might only be an extra few seconds, but that's often sufficient time for them to think of a better decision for an aircraft. It may save an airline thousands of dollars in fuel by flying a more direct route. If a controller can't find a better decision than Y, then they just default to Y.'

Dan's explanation is an excellent example of how rules and procedures in workplaces actually encourage creativity. They eliminate variables and force us to focus on what is available to us. They allow us to assume the ordinary so that we can explore the extraordinary - knowing that we have our boss's permission.  

At the very least, boundaries that define our scope of decision making force us to decide whether we want to find or create our own decision-making space with another employer or on our own. (Instead, some people choose to pound their fists against their organisation's boundaries demanding that they shift. Dan's Air Traffickers don't have that option.)

If Dan can routinely step back in his decisions that are measured in seconds with catastrophic consequences from error, then it should be easy for workplaces where results are usually measured in months and mistakes don't risk hundreds of lives.  

Dan has a simple way of seeing whether his trainees are applying the Step Back approach to decision making. 

'I walk behind them as they're sitting at their screens. If I see someone leaning forward, I gently pull their shoulders back into the chair.' 

My friend Liz told me about similar advice that she gives the Alternative Dispute Resolution practitioners that she trains and mentors. 'It's important that they don't get drawn too much into the details of the dispute between the two parties at the table,' she said.

'So I say to them: 'Make sure that you can always feel the back of your seat.' 

Emotion.

In the Conclusion of ‘The Kennedy Tapes: Inside the White House During the Cuban Missile Crisis’, the authors assess the decision-making of the Soviet and American leadership that is revealed almost word-for-word in the nearly seven hundred pages of taped crisis meetings in the book.

Khrushchev made his decisions alone and without seeking advice or analysis.  He ‘acted more from instinct than from calculation’, was an ‘impulsive risk taker’ and was described by aides as ‘reckless’.  Khrushchev had little experience or knowledge of foreign affairs and his understanding of the world was framed in simplistic Marxism-Leninism.  He made assumptions about Kennedy based purely on the President’s youth and family wealth, and saw his ‘flexibility’ as a weakness.  Khrushchev also suffered from an inflated sense of his influence on world affairs as a result of his mis-reading of the motivations for America’s responses to his previous decisions.  

In short, Khrushchev’s decision-making was driven by emotion more than reason.  If this made it difficult for the Americans to read and anticipate his actions, it must have been equally so for his generals and ministers.

In comparison, President Kennedy ‘did not make any impulsive decisions during the crisis’.  He ‘opened up much of his reasoning….and likely consequences of his choices before he made them.  He explained his thinking to a range of analyses and critiques from formal and informal advisers and even representatives of the British government.’  He also allows his advisers to ‘reason through the problems’.  

At the height of the crisis, the authors argue that Kennedy ‘seems more alive to the possibilities and consequences of each new development than anyone else’, remaining calm and lucid, and clear about his objectives. 

While Kennedy kept himself open to the advice of others, and had obviously nurtured a working relationship that meant his advisers felt confident enough to disagree with him, he was firm when he needed to be.  He overrode the generals’ planned air strike in retaliation for the shooting down of an American U2 aircraft, even though that was the response that he had initially agreed upon.

The ability to remain uninfluenced by bias is one of the most important qualities of a good decision maker.  It makes her thinking visible, her actions predictable and teachable and gives confidence to her team who may have to execute their own decisions that flow from hers. 

Kennedy used many tools to keep him focussed on the facts.  He verbalised his logic, exposing his thinking even to those outside his circle to avoid ‘groupthink’.  He had private venting conversations with his brother, the Attorney-General Robert Kennedy.  Most importantly, Kennedy did not surround himself with ‘Yes Men’.  

President Kennedy’s willingness to be transparent in his decision making and open in his uncertainties showed courage and were evidence of great leadership.

Donuts

I always ask for written feedback after a presentation. 

'Give the presentation a mark out of 10. 

If you didn't think that it was worth a 10, please tell me what I needed to have done differently for you to have given it a 10.' 

Feedback from 25 Squadron members after my Military Law presentation to them at RAAF Base Pearce yesterday. 

But

During a recent workshop I was explaining about a simple tip that my friend Liz used to remind me about that can help avoid or defuse conflict. Simply using the word 'And' instead of 'But'. It can make a huge difference to how another person hears what you say to them. 

'For example,' I explained,  'You will try to give helpful feedback to someone by saying something like 'I really think that you did an excellent job, but you need to try to finish on time'.  Yet the other person will most likely only hear everything after the 'But' and the compliment will be lost on them.

'Now hear how differently this sounds: 'I really think that you did an excellent job and you should also try to finish on time.'

'And' not 'But'.

I scanned the audience to check their understanding and everyone was nodding and smiling. Except for one very attentive elderly woman. Her face was blank and she looked confused.  So I repeated my explanation, finishing with 'So remember, it's 'And' not 'But''. She still looked worried. So I repeated it again, this time looking directly at her. 'You should try not to use the word 'But', and use 'And' instead. Her face suddenly relaxed and she nodded.

'Oh,' the very prim and proper woman said. 'You're saying 'And' not 'But'. 

'I thought that you were saying 'Hand on Butt'.

Learning

John Worsfold, the former coach of the West Coast Eagles AFL team said recently: 

"We want to learn about each other in every game we play." 

What a refreshing insight. It suggests that the people who we work with aren't just a means to an end. They aren't just 'team members' who contribute to some work goal. 

They are our our teachers. 

They teach us about ourselves. 

If we play to learn.