On the Importance of Questions

do we stop proactively learning?

I recently observed to a colleague that it seems like the process of proactive learning slows or even stops at some point in our careers.  After twenty years of formal education, we seem to stop the learning process.  But why do we stop seeking knowledge and how can we continue it in our professional lives?

In making the statement, I was thinking about the myriad reasons we use for not being proactive learners: too many tasks to complete, no time to learn something new, lack of immediate availability, general fatigue with education...  But when I contrast those statements with my own experiences in learning facilitation: active learner engagement with the material, thoughtful follow-up questions, gratitude for the opportunity, I'm struck by the disconnect.  Given an opportunity to interact with new concepts, engagement seems to be high.

So how do we perpetuate such engagement and move more towards a Learning Organization?  Maybe it's my background in consulting - where navigating unfamiliar territory is the norm - but I've always relied on asking questions.

 

Just ask

It's a simple idea: determine what you want to know and start asking questions until you get an answer or uncover something that needs to be answered.  It's Appreciative Inquiry applied.  It sparks debate, uncovers new concepts and thoughts, and even identifies things that are already known.

But I think it's that last idea - inquiring about the "known" - that actually prevents us from asking more questions in the first place.  Nobody wants to be seen as "the one who doesn't know."

 

A Personal Story

During my time as an analyst at a large financial services firm, one story stands out.  Upon reopening the bank after 9/11, the CEO of this storied institution personally greeted employees at the door to welcome them back.  One analyst, fresh out of orientation training where "there is no dumb question" and "you should never be afraid to ask," didn't recognize the CEO.  So he promptly introduced himself as a new analyst and asked what the man did at the firm.  As you might imagine, the story quickly found its way into the annals of analyst history.  The ribbing was merciless.

But what did he do wrong?  He didn't know something, wanted more information, was genuine, outgoing, and personable about it, and asked a question.  Do you think he'll ever feel as comfortable asking a question again?  Did we lose a potential learner that day?

 

making the change

Admittedly, I have an affinity for listing open-ended questions as a way of sparking dialogue.  I believe that asking questions - and seeking answers - should be our MO as proactive learners.  It should be OK to ask the question that anyone can answer.   How else do we ensure alignment towards performance?  Being afraid to ask the easy questions all but guarantees an unwillingness to ask the harder ones.  That benefits nobody.

On Kipling and Change

Oh, East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,
Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God's great Judgment Seat;
But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth,
When two strong men stand face to face, though they come from the ends of the earth!

The Ballad of East and West by Rudyard Kipling

A tension exists in the world of change practitioners, an interchangeability that ruffles the feathers.  Those who would practice Organization Change often bristle at the term Change Management.  The distinction is necessary.  The tension is not.

Yes.  They're Different.

Organization Change and Change Management are different sides of the same coin. When using organizational development as a tool for effecting change, we consider three pieces: strategy, operations, and organization (what, how, who). Conveniently, our change tension aligns well to this way of thinking.

Organization Change = what and who.  Change Management = how.

• Does this change affect what we do as an organization?
• Are we impacting who we are and how we define ourselves?
• Does this affect why we exist as an organization?
• Will this change how we describe our organization to clients, partners, recruits?
• Does this change how we operate, the things we do on a daily basis?

Change Management is linear.  Organization Change is not.

• Can we lay out a detailed project plan for how to accomplish this change?
• Can we definitively state when this change effort will be completed?
• Can we quantitatively measure success?

Organization Change is a model.  Change Management is a process.

• Do we look at this change effort and ask…where do we start?
• Are there multiple places where we could start?
• Are the process steps prescribed?

Enter Mr. Kipling

So is this just an exercise in nuanced vocabulary?  Or is there meaningful crossover between these ideas? Rather than draw a distinction between the two concepts and - to borrow from Kipling - ensure that "never the twain shall meet," we should acknowledge the power of the distinction AND the reliance of one upon the other.

Organization Change is an amorphous concept framed in the context of who we are as an organization and what we exist to accomplish.  As such, we use models to frame the view.  From Burke-Litwin to the McKinsey 7S, we find ways to make sense of a non-linear effort.  Change Management discipline helps make the amorphous tangible.  Processes like Prosci, Kotter, and Plan-Do-Act-Check help us effect the results we seek.

In the Shadow of Westminster

Years ago, on my first trip to London, I climbed the dome of St. Paul's Cathedral.  From 250 feet up, the view of the city is commanding (and includes Kipling's resting place at Westminster Abbey).  As I wandered the city over the next few days, my mind would recall that view whenever I felt lost.  As anyone who has spent time there knows, street signs only take you so far.  Eventually, you need to get the bigger picture.

Such is the case with our change tension.  In the words of Kurt Lewin, there's nothing so practical as a good theory.  Having a model upon which to base our Organizational Change helps to define the Change Management process steps to come.  

If we're doing our jobs right, the twain SHOULD meet.

On Organizational Development

The concept of Organizational Development is often used as a catch-all for a variety of activities.  From training classes to change management, organization change to profits and losses, we muddy the waters with too many concepts and not enough structure.  So what does it actually mean to develop an organization?  How should we as practitioners view our role?  What are the factors involved and how does an organizational development leader prioritize and address those factors?

Defining the Concept

Organizational Development is often defined as the concerted effort to develop people to achieve change and realize performance (Penn).  Let's unpack that a little bit.

Organizations change for a variety of reasons: from the external (economic, strategic pressures) to the internal (political).  More important is how that change is accomplished.  In the past, we've discussed the importance of explaining "why" when engaging in organization change initiatives.  The ability of the organization to learn plays a large role in realizing successful change.

But what about organization performance?  How do we directly link the abilities of our people with the goals and output of the organization?  What are the factors involved?

Asking the Right Questions

Simple though it sounds, most organizations can be understood through a series of basic questions:

• Who are we?
• What do we do?
• How do we do it?

Consider any organization at its core.  It produces goods and services in a unique way.  That performance: the "what" and "how" is why the organization exists.  But in addition, the organization itself - the "who" - needs to be clearly identified and differentiated.

Who Are We: The Organization

The "organization" encapsulates so many of the intangibles: mission, vision, leadership, management.  These are the people skills and knowledge necessary to realize both change and performance.  We ask:

• What do we seek to accomplish?  How will we make a difference in the world?
• What does it mean to be a leader in our organization?
• How do we manage people?  What does it mean to be a good manager in our organization?
• How do we define our organization's culture?  What makes us unique?
• What is the organization's climate and how do we harness that energy?
• How do we engage employees to ensure retention and performance?

What Do We Do: The Strategy

Too often, we allow the strategy to exist elsewhere, to be managed and deployed by other groups.  But if high performance is our goal, organizational developers have to be intimately familiar with the organization strategy, it's place in the industry, and the current state of the economy.  We ask:

• What economic needs does our organization address?
• What do we provide to the marketplace?
• Who is our customer?  Who do we exist to serve?
• What do we do with profit?  How do we use it and why?

How Do We Do It: The Operations

Finally, performance depends on doing things right: operational elements like financial acumen, marketing, sales, innovation, product development, and the systems and processes that support them.  We ask:

• What roles exist to serve our mission?
• What are the core skills necessary to bring our product or service to market?
• What kind of expertise exists in our organization?  Why and how was it developed?
• Where do we have skill gaps?
• Where are we wasting skills, time, and resources?

Considering All Factors

As organizational development professionals, we would do well to incorporate all elements of development, from strategy and operations to the organization itself, as we attempt to create a more nimble and performance-driven organization.

On Business, Education, and Head Fakes

I was speaking with a colleague the other day, discussing some of the ways we could work together to bring learning and education to a technology company.  In going through the various options, it became clear that this company's needs were for specific skill development: the how-to learning so prevalent in the world of "corporate training."  And it got me thinking, what does it mean to bridge the gap between business and education?  Why is it so important - and powerful - to marry these concepts?  And what, ultimately, is it good for?

 

What it means

Often times, when we talk about bringing education into the business world, we picture the rumpled corporate trainer reading verbatim from slides that haven't been updated in the last election cycle, to say nothing of the latest PowerPoint version.  Participants engage periodically - in between glances at the email inbox - and a couple attendees walk away with a few new ideas of how to do their job.  It checks the box.

But really, the best learning experiences, the ones that make you sit up and listen, think critically, and participate are much more powerful than we even give them credit for.  Clients and colleagues will know my affinity for Randy Pausch's last lecture presentation to Carnegie Mellon in 2007.  Without giving anything away, I'll remind the reader of his reliance on "head fakes" - the learning technique that captures our attention in one direction and uses it to open our eyes to the possibilities extant in so many other areas.  It's the perfect analogy for what good education can do for business.  My clients don't walk into a meeting with me expecting to find relevance for themselves in the subprime mortgage market…but find it they do.  It just takes a bit of a head fake.

 

A case study

I recently had the good fortune of working with a senior leadership team on some group dynamics issues.  The problem, I was told, was a lack of trust among team members.  Seems like an easy treatment, right?  Open the lines of communication, create dialogue with the organization, and capitalize on the successes that result.  Kotter would be proud.

Instead, we put all that aside and talked about the Global Financial Crisis of 2007-2008.  That's right.  We discussed commercial and investment banks, Glass-Steagall, collateralized debt obligations, and credit default swaps.  Riveting stuff, I know!  Why did we do all this?  Head fakes.

While they were busy analyzing the nuances of corporate finance and the poor decisions made in the wake of the Lehman Brothers collapse, I was busy building the case for how they weren't listening to each other, how they were over-complicating simple problems, and how ultimately, they weren't willing to trust one another.  From there, we spent the time to get to know each other, identify the root causes for a perceived lack of trust, and address them directly as a high-functioning team.  But it all started with an educational head fake.

 

Why bother?

A far smarter man than me once said that "the function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically."  (It was MLK.)  Skill-development has its place.  A worksheet, template, or model can be transferred from the classroom to the desktop quickly.  It gives the sense of having learned something.  But education…critical thinking skills applied to the topic or task at hand…is something else.  It's not the "how to."  It's the WHY.

With the WHY, we can start to make actual changes: in ourselves, our group, or even the broader organization.  With the WHY, we can engage in open, honest dialogue about the future.  With the WHY, we have a litmus test for replicating past successes (and avoiding past failures).  With the WHY, we leave the room different than the people that entered. 

We got head faked into solving a completely unrelated problem, only to realize that the solution is just as transferable as that skill-development worksheet.  We just have to think a little more critically about the WHY.  Pausch would be proud.