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Posts Tagged ‘design’

Reflecting on crony capitalism

August 29, 2010 Leave a comment

http://theburningplatform.com/blog/2010/08/29/the-age-of-mammon-featured-article/

a very important read about crony capitalism by an acquaintance; i think the co-opting of politicians by business interests is a stain on our former republic.  Finance has joined what was once an exclusive club of the military indutrial complex, which was joined by energy consortiums, exemplified by halliburton which was a combination of the 2.

Financiers have always been part of the mix, but at least in the era of JP Morgan had the decency to be reasonable in their appetites and one can point to their productive impact on industry and society. The naked greed and lack of respect for decency lately is sinful.

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how OD interventions need to be adapted to fit different cultural contexts.

June 11, 2010 2 comments

Cummings and Worley acknowledge the importance of appreciating, if not understanding, the cultural context when considering an OD interventions. This includes culture on a national, regional, tribal, religious and ethnic dimension as well as the traditional social norms. They remind us that interventions appropriate in one area may not fit separate culture. This cultural context must be considered for the intervention from day one in terms of defining appropriate roles for the OD consultants, whether internal or external; the processes used to diagnose, analyze, design and implement strategies; the degree to which the culture requires or permits partnership status for stakeholders; the political culture and its accommodation for power and authority; the value system by which interventions will be judged as failure or success and the timeframe within which interventions can expect to operate. Culture will help influence the capacity for change as well as the degree of possible change in the narratives by which success and failure will be defined and propagated throughout the organization.

Because culture takes so long to change and is driven by factors beyond our control in many cases, while OD interventions particularly in business must happen in a much shorter timeframe, culture, in my opinion, can at best be appreciated and accounted for rather than changed in your intervention strategy. Positive results from the change you create well over the long run influence the culture, if you’re change in results are persistent, but I have seen an awful lot of energy spent on changing a culture come to naught, both in the Army and in my private business practice.

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Reflecting on surveys for organizational feedback

May 15, 2010 5 comments

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Discuss the usefulness and limitations of survey feedback. What are the key issues/problems the OD practitioner has to be aware of while feeding back data?

Usefulness of survey feedback (when it is effective) (Cummings & Worley, 2009, pp141-2):

  • Motivation to work with the data: organization members have to believe in the purpose and efficacy of the feedback system, We are finding it extremely important for the surveyed population to get feedback on HOW the data is being used
  • Structure for the meeting: Because of the challenges and possibilities of interpreting data and connecting it to action plans, there needs to be a thoughtful and satisfying means of examining discussing, interpreting and then acting on the data, in a process that satisfied all the tiers in the organization
  • Appropriate attendance : people affected by the interpretation of the data should be represented in the meeting: This can validate the assessment of the data and the legitimacy of the action steps decided upon
  • Appropriate power: feedback process must have the authority to get the data needed for action, but also the authority to act as suggested by a fair reading of the data
  • Process help: Because the sense-making of the feedback process stakeholders is a political process with connections to the deepest values of the organization, it is necessary that the process be above board and managed/led properly.  Social & political justice is an important part of legitimizing the decisions that come out of the feedback process. We don’t have to agree with every decision but we must be satisfied by the process that got us to the decision.

These elements are timely as we are conducting a process action team project for the college’s feedback system this month.

Limitations of survey feedback (Cummings & Worley, 2009, pp 147).

  • Ambiguity of purpose: If the purpose of the feedback process is not clear, then it stands to reason that the design of the experiment, the survey questions, the interpretation and the focus of action steps. Having an explicit plan that is clearly understood upfront seems non-negotiable before we proceed any further along the feedback path.
  • Distrust: it seems to me that distrust could come from either purposeful or accidental  circumstances. We might distrust the leaders’  true purpose or the skill of the practitioner in achieving the technical standards of designing and administering the survey properly. Either source of the distrust will clearly sabotage the ultimate actions that derive from the feedback.
  • Unacceptable topics: Culture, tradition, values, leadership-imposed constraints, or perhaps even an agreement among stakeholders to hold certain areas off limits may give us only par5tial insights. These off limits areas may not be critical to the system, but in complex social organizations it may prevent us from achieving a holistic and satisfying understanding. My experience has been that the off-limits areas really degrade the usefulness of the survey.
  • Organizational disturbance: we know from science that the act of measuring alters the system in some way so we must take into account how, so we must make trade-off decisions about how much to measure and how often, and in a manner that minimizes the cost of querying.

Key Issues/problems: It seems to me that whether your survey data and feedback processes are useful or problematic depends on how your system  “scores” on the 9 qualities of the survey data identified in Cummings & Worley,( 2009, pp139-141). I think that the organizational members perceptions of these  are as important as the technical merits of the survey/experimental design.

  • Relevant: do the data connect with the area under study?
  • Understandable :  are the stakeholders satisfied with the clarity?
  • Descriptive : do the data give us meaningful and identifiable characteristics
  • Verifiable: are the data reliable and repeatable?
  • Timely: can we get the data quickly and within a timeframe that they remain valid?
  • Limited: is the scope is narrow enough to allow focus and analysis?
  • Significant: are we working on important issues concerning core processes and values?
  • Comparative: do the data allow us to make meaningful distinctions? And infer cause and effect so that we can take actions?
  • Unfinalized : do the data lead us towards significant action? Or dlo they leave us at a dead end?

(Cummings & Worley, 2009).

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10 sigma in the news again

May 8, 2010 3 comments

Galton Box (demonstrates normal distribution)
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Risks are magnified after a historically volatile event like Thursday. The 11.3% intraday move was a 10 sigma event (if you treat the daily range of SPY as a normal Gaussian distribution).

Per the excellent blog at http://www.aleph.se/andart/archives/2009/09/ten_sigma_numerics_and_finance.html, a 10 sigma event can be expected to occur  in 1x 10^23 days or approximately never.

And yet it did.

So it should be a foregone conclusion that the market is not a Gaussian normal distribution, and statistical models built in that assumption are flawed.

Because the markets have very fat tails (unusual events are not so unusual after all), it is wise to not push the limits suggested by ANY theoretical model, since the probability that the model is wrong will be far greater than the low probability event that they discount.

These are the ideas behind the risk management rule in the Smart Steps model .

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Complexity in process consulting: a good thing?

April 22, 2010 4 comments

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A colleague used the word “simplistic” in describing the 10 principles of process consulting offered by Ed Schein.

I interpreted his use of the word simplistic in describing shines 10 principles as a negative thing. There’s a part of me that remembers the 10 Commandments are simplistic too.

In my studies of complexity and chaos theory there is a belief among practitioners that to successfully adapt to or manage complexity requires an equivalent degree of complexity in the manager or leader or organization’s processes themselves. There is rarely if ever evidence offered to support this contention, but it seems to be intuitive. It is the very intuitive attractiveness of that idea that causes me to be skeptical and wonder what the evidence really shows about the need to be complex in order to manage complexity.

The other side of the argument is that a combination of very simple rules in a dynamic environment can cause very complex results, and so I’m not sure that complexity needs complexity to be managed.

If you believe the 10 principles are overly simplistic where would you add some additional nuance to his general advice?

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Learning from the process consultant

April 22, 2010 3 comments

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Think about the last time you worked with a consultant in your organization: looking back at what the consultant did and said, were there any specific behaviors that surprised you? Did she do something that you and the faculty were not already capable of doing?

If they did something new, is the new behavior something you think your staff can now perform on their own war will it be necessary to continue to have a consultant to achieve the freedom to state the insights?

If they didn’t do anything new, what did the presence of the consultant really contribute to the process? Did they help create a safe space for discussion and reflection? Did they encourage fresh thinking that you couldn’t get to in the normal conduct of meetings with the staff?

Did you find yourself nodding as he or she spoke and saying “of course! I knew that all along!”

did the consultant offers specific opinions or insights or were they like a lawyer asking leading questions or Socrates guiding the team indirectly to the truth? Or did they simply put the question out there and let the answer go where it may?

Did they do anything that you now think “I have to add that to my skill set!”

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Planning considerations for “insider” consultants

April 22, 2010 4 comments

Francis Bacon, From a Painting
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as an inside consultant with considerable knowledge of the status quo, what kinds of procedures or checklists or attitudes do you think are necessary to ensure that we are taking a fresh look at a well-known situation to find root causes?

How dangerous is it for the organization to have OD consultants as insiders? What’s the risk to the purity of the process and how can we mitigate that risk without sacrificing the obvious advantages of having people on staff who already have a deep understanding of the organization’s culture and context?

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Information technology: integrating IT into Strategic planning

April 11, 2010 2 comments

Is There Group Wisdom for Strategic Planning?
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Your information technology department MUST be part of your strategic planning process for our value can be created and multiplied2 reasons:

1. they have possibilities and enablers that may suggest new ways that your value can be created,d explanded, multplied, leveraged

2. if they don’t know where you are going and why, and how you are evolving, they will always be trying to integrate a static model of the organizations processes. In other ways you will be integrating where you were, not where you are going; IT will then be an anchor and not an accelerator

You need IT

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A reflection on educating Army officers in force management

March 26, 2010 7 comments

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The college  in-briefed the new Commander yesterday; From the dialogue emerged his 4 priorities

1.  Leader Development (sub-bullets below are not all-inclusive)
- Develop and implement ILE 2010
- Identify ILE and captains career course backlog issues related to ARFORGEN

2.  Mission Command Center of Excellence
(We emphasized LD&E’s contribution of manpower toward this effort: two colonels to lead along with a force management SME.)

3.  Training
(The DC showed BCTP support as LD&E’s main effort ISO this priority.)

4.  Doctrine
(Weshowed our support to writing teams for FM 3-0 and FM 5-0, doctrinal reviews, and curriculum updates IAW doctrinal changes as LD&E’s main efforts ISO this priority.)

From our departmental discussion emerging the following insight, to which I respond below

Colleagues,
Seems to me the leader development sub-bullets include the three principal prongs (these are the main efforts right out of the ALDS [ ed.:  Army Leader Development Strategy], Nov 09):
The effect of complexity and time.
The effect of decentralization.
The need to frame ill‐structured problems.

If we begin to reorient our approach to curriculum design and delivery (particularly for F100), these desires have somewhat radical implications.  I would argue we do not model these (at least in our approach to the core course).  If we were to juxtapose these with “opposing poles” I would argue we tend to be focused on the wrong end (left side):Would like to engage in counterpoints/other arguments–in other words what are your thoughts?

simplicity <———complicatedness———–> complexity
centralization<——-matrixed———->decentralization
well-structured problems (tame or tamed)<——–craftwork———>ill-structured (wicked) (the need for DESIGN)

“Houston, we have a problem!”

I think there’d be a good article and an F100 reading in treating the 3 prongs as lines of operation intersecting the “tenets of force management” as centers of gravity (using the metaphor of the construct for stability operations)

It’s abundantly clear that the “world of threats” as we have chosen to define the characteristics of the threat, and the chosen roles & missions of the Army, have created a dynamic where the threat is inside our OODA loop of adaptability. When you read Boyd’s description of what happens to the enemy when we are inside his OODA loop, you will recognize the symptoms immediately as a good description of our operating force and the processes being used to generate and sustain it.

The “routine processes” of force mgt: the technocratic emphasis on planning, control, budgeting and precise forecasting (ie PPBE), are dis-integrating and causing the dis-integration of the force to the point where, last week, at the FORSCOM quarterly Reset Synch, at the council of colonels, after 3 days of intense efforts to synchronize the next batch of BCTs in the cycle (they have given up right now on trying to centrally synchronize anything lower than a BCT), the O6s around the table looked at each other and could only ask: what are we trying to do here?, to what standard? for what purpose? and how could we (not even “should we”) define success. The meeting ended with more loose ends in the tapestry than it began, but there was a hint of growing appreciation for design thinking.

I made the same points in that session that Chris makes below: and that is that FM is a wicked problem, and that they were colonels and organizations trying to perform design, and they didn’t know it; they were locked into a planning paradigm that sought a near-perfect solution to the de-synch problem of force generation; that tentative solutions come from both above and below; that information needs to flow in all directions, to be used as evidence to support inquiry, and not stove-piped; that the “common operating picture” is not very common, and is not very operational.

There is an implication of incompleteness as a necessary part of any Design, which respects the dynamism of the world and which commits us to an ongoing process of inquiry, to develop a tentative appreciation for the situation and its context, leading perhaps towards understanding, and an intellectual humility.

I invite the F100 team (and interested others) to identify the overarching “tenets of force mgt” so that we can get a fresh top down look at how the the 3 lines of intellectual operation below intersect, in order to see what emerges that’s applicable to

One example: An FM system should carefully manage money as a resource, in order to be good stewards. This leads, under a technocratic control mindset, to completely plan and program every dollar based on a centralized, far-sighted forecast where precision is the goal. In a dynamic world with an adaptive enemy, we are constantly having to find the least painful bucket of money to “re-program” against the newest high priority, unforecasted threat. The magnitude of this problem can be measured on a time series chart of ONS submitted from the theater for urgent requirements that are not available in the Army inventory. The re-programming induces turbulence in existing programs, and is the most costly way to fund immediate solutions to new requirements using the “Pick 2: Cheap, Fast, Good” model. So, the current model and mindset can be shown to be self-inflicted foot-shooting system

The 3 prong analysis:
1. The effect of complexity & time?: destabilizes the current “machine”, making it produce things that aren’t: cheap, fast, good. It produces things slowly, that are costly, and not very good. (I accept your criticism that says our equipment is better than “not very good”)

2. The effect of decentralization?: requires a reversal of the trend to centralizing to DA which is shown to be unsustainable (the downsizing of Corps, and installation and MACOM staff as intermediate management HQs; the implementation of CENDOC; centralization of budget mgt…etc). The Army’s response: Lean Six Sigma and the “Core Enterprise” approach can be seen as a way to do even MORE centralization, yet there is an acknowledgement growing for the need to move more routine mgt functions of Force Generation (ARFORGEN) to the MACOMS (HRC, FORSCOM, AMC, TRADOC, IMCOM). This has 4 star attention and is a high priority at DA and MACOM staff levels. The FORSCOM quarterly Training Synchronization Resource Conference (TSRC) and the Reset Synchronization Resource Conference (RSRC) are part of this effort to “de-centralize”

3. The need to frame ill-structured problems?: the emergence of Design thinking in our capstone manuals, and the draft AR 525 (ARFORGEN) now in the comment phase of staffing of the initial draft, and the corresponding development of a FORSCOM pub 525 to formalize synch processes in the generating force, and the development of the ARFORGEN Synchronization Tool (AST) (a web based COP for REST coming to a computer near you this summer) are all evidence of efforts to move the force generation wicked problem towards “semi-structure”

As an educating group, we are presented with a continuing design challenge in F100 (and beyond!) to satisfy these competing questions for our constituents:
1. How is the Army SUPPOSED run?
2. How DOES it run?
3. How is it’s running process EVOLVING?
4. How COULD it run better?
5. How SHOULD it run?

These are related, yet not identical: I suggest that we are engaged in a continuous design process to get the mix right in studying these questions.

One of the principles of design thinking, and of inquiry, is to make sure you are studying the very best set of questions; even more important than the provisional conclusions you discover along the way

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Reflecting on self-directed leadership in a military college environment (an action research approach)

March 20, 2010 24 comments

schematic view of Curriculum in/out of school,...
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The purpose of this assignment is reflect upon my learning through this course and to describe what I am doing to provide for the development of leadership capabilities in those who look to me for direction and guidance. My professional work centers on preparing Army organizational leaders for a world of complexity and uncertainty, and specifically in designing a teachable curriculum that satisfies both the accreditation system and the needs of individual students and faculty. As a result of many cycles of action research involving a variety of stakeholders, I have been designing curriculum that seeks to maximize the opportunities for student and faculty Voice in all phases of the classroom experience, including: design, preparation, delivery, assessment and follow-through. Because the strategy represents a significant shift from the traditional methodology, I am finding many leadership challenges and opportunities throughout the program. I will explore a number of important themes and strategies in this paper.

Chaos and complexity theory point towards a need for multiple points of view and an accommodating culture and practice in order to account for uncertainty in the world. Leaders set the stage for an organization that seeks to thrive under these conditions and therefore become primary leverage points in setting the conditions for success. Because our students are not objects at a distance,  not third-party objects of study but rather thinking, feeling human beings with insights and experiences and discretion, we have shifted our design team composition to include routinely groups of students in the form of focus groups and co-researchers in the action research tradition. Incorporating students in the design of lessons that will be taught that academic year represents a paradigm shift.

I am shifting our feedback system to incorporate more qualitative assessments from both faculty and students. This is a departure from our standard practice of relying exclusively on quantitative instruments. Our new feedback system for programmatic assessment is much more from the mixed methods tradition, which seems to me to be central in going forward in our efforts to understand and appreciate complexity. My intent is that the mixed methods approaches in the classroom will expose students and faculty to this methodology as a way to prepare them with a useful tool beyond the boundaries of the college environment.

I am systematically pursuing outreach and connections with faculty and curriculum designers from other teaching departments  in order to establish a network-centric approach to integrated curriculum design. This is taking the form of a leaderless, self-directed workgroup, with group norms and processes emerging to take the place of formal assigned individual hierarchical leadership. This self-directed work group presents recommendations of consensus to the traditional leadership of the College and is proving to be more and more influential with each successful project.

Because collaborative and adaptive leadership represents a shift in the cultural and operational perspective of the college, students and faculty, it is necessary to build up a resource and reference base that can be used to justify and support our inquiries. We are building a set of wiki’s and blogs that are interactive in order to prepare for our new lineup of lessons, to support collaborative learning inside the lessons dynamically, to document the results of our in class inquiry and to expand the knowledge base both for future lessons and for the field force in general. There is evidence to show that our students and faculty are getting the hang of this technique. This is reshaping the way we approach lesson preparation and our resource base and it is carrying over into our distance learning and remote site teaching strategy. Remote site teachers now have access to our growing experience base on the wiki and blog and can use that in their classroom for air where they do not possess personal experience and expertise.

Finally, I am working with interested others in formalizing our new approaches into college policy and SOP in order to lock in our games in the college’s infrastructure. Without these changes, initiatives are only as enduring as the energy of the interested parties. By incorporating them into our explicit rules and policies, we can institutionalize changes and ratchet our way towards success.

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