Category: Uncategorized

Whenever groups are at loggerheads over a decision, it makes me think that a system is involved.

 

Whether it’s a question of public policy or a strategy for a complex project, when I notice entrenched opposing views, I sense that we haven’t gotten to the underlying issue.

 

Take work like software development or a lawyer who reviews contracts. One leader, Rachel, might want to create a team to handle the work in-house, while her colleague Susan feels equally strongly that it should be outsourced.

 

Each can, of course, muster arguments to support their decision.

 

Rachel: “Handling it in-house will be higher quality!”

 

Susan: “It will be far cheaper if we outsource it!”

 

This is clearly a straw man dialogue, but it highlights something that many discussions of this type have in common: Rachel and Susan aren’t even talking to each other about the same aspect of the work. One is focused on quality, the other on cost.

 

Often, these kinds of discussions are resolved with a “HPPO” approach to decision-making; we fall back on the Highest Paid Person’s Opinion.

 

A great decision, however, draws on a deep understanding of the underlying system that highlights the real compromises — and the pseudo compromises that are actually opportunities for innovation.

 

So, what’s the secret to understanding a system?

 

It’s the superpower of curiosity. We have to prioritize being curious over being right.

 

That’s hard! Here are three ways to make it easier.

 

1. Listen deeply.

 

I wrote last week about the gift of listening and resting in uncertainty. This often isn’t the right strategy with a peer, but it can drive insight with your customers (who may be end users or colleagues from a different division that your solution will ultimately serve). Listening deeply can help you tease out the underlying factors that are important.

 

2. Combine advocacy with inquiry.

 

With peers, we already have a starting point for our views or experience that we can draw from. In these cases, we can combine advocacy with inquiry.

 

One of my favorite tools for this is Chris Argyris’s ladder of inference. Chris was a Harvard Business School professor for many years.

 

3. Add structure.

 

As you know, I’m a fan of structure. To unpack seemingly dichotomous choices, I like the structure that my friends Roger Martin and Jennifer Riel developed in their book Creating Great Choices.

 

The CGC framework helps teams flesh out the benefits of extreme positions (outsource everything vs. bring all work in-house, for instance) to see the underlying benefit of each option.

 

In articulating the underlying jobs that the models do, we can see if there are ways of combining them into a third, integrated solution. It might be that we triage our contract work to outsource most contracts, but send important ones to an in-house specialist. In a software context, we might use outsourced developers, but integrate them into our sprint process as if they were in-house.

 

Roger and Jennifer’s framework is particularly useful for articulating bigger strategy decisions. It’s on my mind right now because I’m using it with a group who’s trying to decide what parts of their service should be centrally controlled vs. delegated to business units within their large organization.

 

That’s three approaches to understanding a system — but there are many more. What are the skills you use to deepen your understanding?

 

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Some notes on feeling our way forward.

 

Normally, I take the space here to think and write about something related to business, systems, or what’s happening in the world at large.

 

But, right now, that doesn’t seem appropriate.

 

There are things to say. About, for example, how citizen complaints against officers might be used by police departments in the same way that aviation and chemical industries improve by observing everyday near misses. About how policy choices implicitly (and explicitly) strengthen the systems that unequally distribute power in our society.

 

But this isn’t the time to break these things down on an intellectual level. The raw emotion in the world right now overwhelms me and lots of others.

 

It’s not time for the thinking mind to work alone.

 

Instead, I want to write something about listening deeply.

 

Deep listening is the process of suspending our stories while we attend to others.

 

Rather than listening to confirm our worldview, extract facts, or prepare our case, we listen to see and understand the person we’re talking with.

 

We listen without thinking ahead to our own counterarguments. We listen without judging the experience of others. We listen to witness our fellow humans.

 

On the wider stage, this gets harder. Political leaders have messages behind their messages. Online discussions tend toward the extreme, too. They’re often not speaking to communicate, but to win. In these settings, we should be skeptical.

 

But in small groups, in person (or on Zoom), we can listen deeply. We can connect with our friends, family, and colleagues and give them the gift of assuming positive intent—that we are all showing up to do our best with the tools we have.

 

At work, it shows up when we recognize that our colleagues also want to solve problems worth solving. At home, it shows up when our kids scream at us—and we can step back and realize that they just need a snack.

 

One of the guiding principles I have rested on in the last couple of years is negative capability.

 

It’s a term coined by the poet John Keats. He used it to describe the ability to sit in confusion and uncertainty in pursuit of what he called beauty; I think of it as the ability to keep our need for a tidy answer at bay. It’s an incredibly difficult practice, something that a lot of entrepreneurs and business owners I know use because they sit in uncertainty every day.

 

To see and witness, to move forward without knowing where we’re going. To sit with a problem without trying to make it right—not because it doesn’t deserve to be solved, but because our efforts would be as a drowning person tiring themself out in the waves.

 

It’s the ability to listen and respond to the world as it is, rather than as we think it should be.

 

It’s a muscle that we need to use a lot more of these days.

 

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Hi — just a note as a short preamble. I wrote this piece before the death of George Floyd and the widespread response that followed, including destruction and protests not far from where I live in Seattle.

There’s a lot to absorb and reflect on. My focus, particularly as a privileged white American man, is on listening.

I’ll still be writing things and having a dialogue with you, dear reader, but for now, I’m going to hold off on the next pieces of the intuition mini-series that this piece is a part of.

---

 

One of the challenges of making decisions in this complex world is that we might not even know that our decisions are bad.

 

The human brain is so good at filtering out data that undermines our conclusions that we may never recognize that we could have taken a better path.

 

Fortunately, there’s a solution to this challenge: structure.

 

One broad class of strategies is to create feedback loops. We can break down a problem into more manageable bits that we can test, looking for validation of an idea and capturing feedback.

 

The best teams create feedback loops around their own work, reflecting on how they’re performing — and changing what they do as a result.

 

Reflection helps us get better over time (as do some of the strategies I wrote about here), but there’s another class of problems that they don’t work well on: when we have to make a single decision at a point in time.

 

Decisions like buying a house, hiring someone, or choosing a project.

 

Or, as it turns out, whether a patient should get an X-ray to see if a hurt ankle is sprained or broken.

 

For a long time, physicians diagnosing a hurt ankle were misled by symptoms that didn’t actually matter, like swelling. On the whole, they ordered many more X-rays than they needed to, using them as a sort of diagnostic safety net.

 

But those X-rays cost money — a lot of money when added up across everyone with an injured ankle — and exposed patients to unnecessary radiation. Doctors also missed severe fractures, skipping X-rays even when they were needed. They relied on their gut instincts, but they never got enough feedback to improve those instincts.

 

In the early 1990s, a team of Canadian physicians set out to change things. They ran a study to identify the factors that really mattered. The data showed that, by using only four criteria, doctors could cut the number of X-rays by a third but still catch every severe fracture.

 

Four simple questions turned every doctor into an expert diagnostician. They asked about pain, age, weight-bearing, and bone tenderness.

 

Simple and predetermined, these criteria did much better than doctors’ intuition.

 

The physicians had the benefit of a rigorous study, but using criteria can be powerful even without a big dataset.

 

Think about how we typically pick who should run an important, high-risk project. We might consider a pool of potential project managers, intuitively compare them, and then make a choice. But that would be letting our gut feelings lead us astray.

 

Instead, we should develop criteria based on the project. First, we determine the essential skills that the project manager will need to be successful, and what it would look like to be great, OK, or poor at those skills. Then, as we compare potential candidates, we rate them with a 1, 0, or −1 for each of those criteria.

 

If we’re working with a group to make the hiring decision, we can independently score each person and then average the results. This gives us a numerical representation of the overall strength of each candidate. Something like this:

I use it in my personal and professional life all the time; when writing Meltdown, in fact, my co-author András and I used it to evaluate different failures we wanted to write about.

 

I’ve also used it in coaching to help clients make decisions; I worked with one couple to help them choose a school for their daughter.

 

What big decisions are you working with? Would establishing a simple set of criteria help you move forward more confidently?

 

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Parts of this post were drawn from my book Meltdown, written with András Tilcsik. Used with the permission of the publisher, Penguin Press. Copyright © 2018 by Chris Clearfield and András Tilcsik.

What calling the cops (twice!) taught me about organizational change

 

I recently had two encounters with local law enforcement that got me thinking about systems and organizational change.

 

I want to start by acknowledging that my experiences with law enforcement are rooted in a position of privilege. I’m a wealthy white man in the U.S. and, in both of these stories, I was the person who called the cops to help.

 

I have a lot of thoughts about policing-as-a-system, but this won’t be where I share those, in part because I don’t yet feel fully capable of exploring my own blind spots.

 

But my own recent stories highlight what’s behind the way that law enforcement responds, the way that the systems we’ve invested in show what we prioritize as a society.

The first story, about a month ago, unfolded after I invited a schizophrenic felon into my house late one night.

 

At that moment, I didn’t know that those labels applied to him; I just knew that he was scared and needed help. I had heard a shout a minute or so before and, when Richard rounded the corner as I walked my dog, I asked him if he needed help.

 

Richard asked me to call 911: someone who had a beef with him threatened him on the bus and was chasing him, he said. But as his story unfolded, it became more and more clear that his experience diverged from any kind of probable reality. What was clear was that he was afraid.

 

The Seattle Police Department (SPD) responded quickly, and other facts emerged. Richard had been released that day from jail. He had nowhere to stay. He was a diagnosed schizophrenic with no medication and practically no support network.

 

The officers walked Richard through the situation. COVID-19 had closed most of Seattle’s already overtaxed homeless shelters. Other than staying on the street, his only option was to voluntarily admit himself to a local hospital where, after a psych workup, he would almost certainly be released back onto the street.

 

After some back and forth, Richard decided to go to the hospital. An ambulance picked him up; I’m not sure what happened next.

Just this week I called 911 again.

 

I was driving in the left-most lane of I-5 when a pickup crashed into the median in front of me and came to a stop at a 45-degree angle, blocking the lane. I swerved to avoid him and impacted the concrete median myself. Once I drove the car across the highway to the shoulder, I called 911. The Washington State Patrol and local fire and rescue responded. My kiddos and I were all OK, but pretty shaken up.

 

SPD’s response was professional and compassionate. So were the State Patrol’s and fire and rescue’s. Though the underlying challenges were different, in both cases law enforcement responded courteously and competently to my unexpected situations. And I’m really grateful.

 

But there was one difference that struck me. After my car crash, there was a whole system to support what came next. Tow trucks. Insurance. Police reports. Collision shops. My personal support network, too: my co-parent and my girlfriend, both helping in that moment of crisis.

 

But behind the SPD’s response to Richard, there was no system to back it up. No set of activities to move him forward and bring the issue to a close.

 

Let’s consider, for a moment, these two systems without making normative judgements about them, without thinking about the desirability of a specific outcome. What we see is that each system represents a commitment to its ultimate result.

 

That’s true in the world more broadly: no matter what our initial response to an event looks like, the underlying nature of the system tells us what our real commitment to an outcome is.

 

Let’s say that a leader wants to create a more collaborative company culture. They may bring a bunch of employees together to announce the change (and maybe to run some breakout sessions on working more collaboratively). Even with the buy-in of senior leaders, if there’s no change in the way work gets done, there won’t be a shift in the underlying system, and the organizational change won’t stick.

 

Successful change efforts, on the other hand, focus not just on the stated goal (“We’ll be more collaborative”) but on the shift required in the way work itself is done. You can’t espouse collaboration as a value, for example, but stick to meetings organized around one-way conversations centered around PowerPoint decks.

 

The same is true in our personal lives. When I’m working with a coaching client, for example, we often look toward the underlying system that’s supporting (or undermining) their goals, whether that’s to write a book or step into their power as a CEO.

 

And what about Richard? If the police had a way to connect him with a set of sustained actions — around mental health and housing — he may have a chance of escaping the world he’s in. As it is, I’m afraid that he’ll be stuck in a system that, despite its stated desire to “end homelessness,” has an underlying commitment to business as usual.

 

Many of us are fortunate to have people and systems in place that support our goals. What are yours?

 

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Three simple questions to ask your team right now

 

The stories of business resilience from this time are extraordinary.

 

I talked with one manager whose team chartered planes to move critical medical supplies around the world.

 

I talked with another manager whose people were stopped by building security as they moved critical computers to their homes before their offices were locked down. (They eventually sorted it out).

 

And my friend David Sax recently shared the story of a travel entrepreneur who changed directions entirely and now plants and tends urban vegetable gardens in Toronto.

 

Not to mention all the personal stories of sacrifice and resilience from the front lines — from nurses and doctors to janitors and grocery store workers.

 

Even as local governments around the world inch toward reopening, one overwhelming thing has become clear to me:

It’s a marathon, not a sprint.

 

We can’t “push through” until things are back to normal. Normal is gone. We’ve got to drop our tools and innovate within the constraints of our reality.

 

I recently wrote about how the best teams manage the unexpected by coming up for air and reflecting, in real time, on whether the actions they’re taking are having the effect that they expect. They iterate by diagnosing a problem, doing something to try and fix it, and monitoring the results.

 

That sounds simple, but it turns out that it’s hard to do in practice. Even great teams can get lost in the day-to-day work, trying to finish a seemingly endless stream of tasks. But without coming up for air, it’s easy to work really hard on the wrong things.

 

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been helping groups carve out space to reflect.

 

Sometimes, it’s very practical: I just spoke with managers at a global logistics company about how they can turn the lessons learned from the past few months into a strategy to shift their infrastructure over the next few years.

 

But sometimes these sessions are more reflective. I got some powerful feedback from a big bank after a session with senior HR leaders. We discussed three questions:

 

1. What’s been unexpectedly hard — in your work, with your teams, or in your home life?

 

2. What’s a source of resiliency you’ve drawn on?

 

3. What’s something you’re grateful for?

 

They are short, simple questions. But the secret is in the interactions that arise. When you ask important questions and put people into small groups, barriers break down. It’s both grounding and energizing, a way to reflect on what’s passed and prepare for what’s to come.

 

And the learning, of course, doesn’t stop there. It starts conversations and triggers knock-on effects that can change things for the better.

 

Are you coming up for air? If you need pause, take a moment to reflect on what hasn’t changed for you. Maybe your values are still the same. Maybe it’s your connection to your team, or the purpose that drove you to your work in the first place.

 

And if you’d like to know more about how I facilitate these kinds of conversations, see more here.

 

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Note: Based on feedback from readers, this is part two of a mini-series on intuition. Though these posts will generally stand alone, you may want to check out the first post in the series for some context.

 

I wrote last week about Gary Klein’s research on expertise and how without repeatedly seeing the outcome of our decisions, expertise doesn’t develop; what seems like intuition can actually be overconfidence.

 

Lack of feedback about our decisions typifies what psychologists call “wicked environments.” As I wrote Meltdown and dug into this research, it became clear that complexity and wickedness have a lot in common.

 

In complex environments, it’s hard to find simple cause and effect relationships. Non-linear effects can dominate how the system behaves (think of a ball at the top of a hill — a small difference in initial position will have a big effect on where the ball ends up). And complex systems often behave well until a fluke combination of inputs causes them to break down.

 

And complexity is on the rise.

 

So, as one reader asked, what can we do? Are there ways that we can carve out “kind environments,” ones that hone intuition, amidst our complex world?

 

Yes!

 

It’s a big part of what I do when I’m consulting with a business or coaching a leader — ask questions to clarify the things that actually matter and the leading indicators that can tell us that we’re on the right track.

 

Here are three approaches that I find useful.

1. Iterate

 

For Meltdown, my co-author András and I found some interesting research on how the best teams manage crises. A study of trauma response teams stands out. Researchers put actual teams of experts (nurses, doctors, respiratory therapists) in a simulation involving a kid with distressed breathing. There was a catch, though — a piece of crucial equipment, the bag mask, was broken.

 

Many teams missed this because they became hyper-focused on the tasks they were performing. They failed to notice when things weren’t working.

 

The best teams, on the other hand, cycled between a hypothesis, a task, and monitoring to see what the results were. It was a dynamic environment, so the cycle was never perfect, but the ability to rapidly iterate characterized the best teams.

 

We can all do this outside of an emergency room. Running a weekly meeting with your team? Starting a new business? Working on a project? Even if it’s only you, periodically ask what’s working, what’s not, and what you want to try differently.

2. Measure

 

Whether we are trying to get in the best shape of our lives or running a business, we need both goals and metrics associated with our goals.

 

There are lots of different ways to do this. I’m a fan of the Objectives and Key Results (OKR) approach. The OKR process helps set ambitious goals with measurable outcomes. If done right, it also injects transparency into a company and helps harmonize expectations and work across teams.

 

For smaller businesses, paying attention to your finances is important. That may sound obvious, but many small and medium-sized businesses started because their owners loved the product or service they were providing, not because they loved accounting.

 

But the numbers give you valuable feedback; they let you know how much profit you’re making, whether your business is getting stronger over time, and what your cash flow situation looks like. You can then use these metrics to tune your operations.

3. Break down the problem

 

When facing a question in a wicked environment, try and break it down into a bunch of smaller questions. I’ll write more about this later (there’s so many good approaches here), but today I’ll touch on an approach that Noah Kagan outlined years ago in the context of starting a new business: look for early validation.

 

Before you build your platform and launch your product, run some tests. Let’s say that you want to manufacture shoes for dogs (IDK, I just needed an example…).

 

See how specific you can get (maybe, running shoes for Golden-doodles).

 

Estimate the market size.

 

Then buy some ads that point to a landing page where people can sign up to be notified when the shoes are ready.

 

If you get 0 signups… the shoe doesn’t fit!

 

If you get 1,500, you’re off and running (pun, in all honesty, not intended)!

 

Voila! You’ve gone from a question posed into the vacuum of a wicked environment (“Will people buy shoes for dogs?”) to some very specific feedback.

 

What are some ways that you hone your intuition by gathering data from your environment?

 

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August 5th, 1949. Dry, windy Montana backcountry. Temperature of 97°.

 

At 4:10 PM, thirteen smokejumpers parachuted from a repurposed World War II C-47 to fight a small fire. The consensus was that the blaze was a so-called 10:00 fire: one that would be under control by ten o’clock the next morning.

 

By 5:56 PM, a time memorialized by the melted hands of a watch, most of the crew was dead.

 

They had been on the ground for just under two hours. In that time, they had gathered their gear and started to hike, fire at their backs, down the steep slope to the Mann Gulch. They were making their way toward the nearby Missouri River, in search of distance from the flames and a better position from which to contain the blaze.

 

But turbulent winds pushed the fire ahead of the smokejumpers. As they marched through the yard-high grass toward the river, the foreman leading the crew, Wagner Dodge, spotted flames rushing toward them from the direction of the river. He turned and ran back toward his crew, shouting at them to drop their tools and follow him.

 

What we know about this story comes from writer Norman Maclean’s Young Men and Fire and a famous (well, in academic circles) paper by sociologist Karl Weick called “The Collapse of Sensemaking in Organizations: The Mann Gulch Disaster.” Weick’s paper builds on Maclean’s account to better understand how a group of firefighters were overwhelmed by rapidly changing circumstances.

 

Rather than just looking at the individuals, Weick analyzed the firefighters as an organizational unit. His analysis suggested that the deaths weren’t due to the fire alone, but to the inability of the crew to make sense of what was happening, as what had seemed like a manageable event — a 10:00 fire — quickly changed in character.

 

In Weick’s analysis, the fire jumping ahead was a sudden disruption of the firefighters’ understanding of reality. It did more than cut them off from the river, it also rocked their model of how the world worked, rocking what they thought had been a “rational, orderly system.”

 

When Dodge saw fire, he faced reality. He lit an escape fire in front of him to consume fuel — an improvisation in the moment. He laid down in the ashes left by his escape fire and shouted for his men to join him.

 

Overwhelmed, confused, and with no model of what was happening, they ignored him. Of the fifteen who kept running, only two survived.

 

Dodge’s escape followed Forest Service dictum: “Don’t allow the fire to pick the spot where it hits you.”

 

Pick your spot

 

If the world of January 2020 was a rational, orderly system, COVID-19 changed that for many of us.

 

It would be easy to get overwhelmed, as the firefighters did, by the change. But the key, I think, is to recognize the profound shift that has been made, even though it’s hard to do.

 

I recently heard the story of a startup CEO who lost millions of dollars of promised funding just as $50,000 of monthly revenue dried up. “If we can just get that revenue back,” she told an advisor, “we’ll be able to move forward.”

 

That’s a statement grounded in the belief that the world hasn’t changed. But if a business model needs $50,000 per month to be successful and customers aren’t buying because of COVID-19, it’s the business model that doesn’t work anymore.

 

Facing reality can lead to innovation, ignoring it to disaster and suffering.

 

Amidst our current uncertainty, don’t run. Acknowledge reality and pick the spot where you are going to meet things. It may not be the strategy that you planned for, but creativity under constraints can create chances to innovate.

 

For more, see Weick’s paper “The Collapse of Sensemaking in Organizations: The Mann Gulch Disaster.”

 

*Writing about disasters, particularly those where people have lost lives, can be challenging. My intent is never to assign blame or fault with the benefit of hindsight. The men who died that day were doing the best they could with the tools that they had. My hope is that we can learn something about what happened.

 

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Hint: It doesn’t have anything to do with you.

 

I’m fascinated by the psychologist Gary Klein, who studies “naturalistic decision making” — a fancy term for intuition.

 

Fans of Klein might remember that Malcolm Gladwell wrote about his research in Blink, with the story of the firefighter who relied on his “sixth sense” to pull his team out of a house moments before the floor collapsed. The firefighter noticed something that didn’t match the pattern of a normal fire. And though he couldn’t figure out exactly what was off, he acted quickly and saved lives.

 

Klein, who is kind of a badass, set out to study things differently than the typical psychology researcher. He and his team hung around with experts: cops, nurses, soldiers, and even wildfire crews. The researchers asked the experts to talk about how they resolved unusual situations they encountered at work.

 

In one striking story, an experienced nurse monitoring a premature infant in a busy ICU realizes that the baby has an infection. She gives him medication and saves his life. The nurse hadn’t made a formal assessment. Instead, she had noticed his changing skin color and glassy eyes, a subtle combination of cues that gave her the sense that there was a problem. She couldn’t explain exactly what she saw; she just knew.

 

We can all develop this kind of intuition and access the “gut feeling” that it provides (I’ll touch on how in a future newsletter). But first, it’s important to understand that intuition doesn’t work in all situations. In fact, its evil twin, cognitive bias, sits ready to trick us.

 

Intuition develops when we repeatedly experience situations and get feedback on what happened.

 

The firefighters and ICU nurses that Klein studied, for example, were constantly making decisions and seeing the results. They operated in environments where there were both a lot of decisions and a lot of feedback. In the literature, these are called “kind environments.”

 

Some business environments are like that. Salespeople can learn what tactics move a sale forward and adjust their approach accordingly. Over time, they can hone their intuition — but only if they actually talk with enough people and know which deals close.

 

But other situations, like acquiring a company or launching a novel product, don’t happen often enough or are too complex to provide useful feedback. In these so-called “wicked environments,” we’re more likely to create self-consistent narratives that validate our beliefs. And even when we do get data after the fact, these situations are so complex it’s easy to rationalize away anything that didn’t meet our expectations.

 

Even hiring is in a wicked environment. We inevitably exclude qualified candidates (and never get any data on how well they would have done). And, in typical companies, we hire people and don’t track how well our interview assessments correlate with their performance (which is, indeed, also very hard to measure).

 

It’s hard to learn in wicked environments. But it turns out that it’s worse than that. We think we’re getting better over time when, in fact, we’re just getting more confident.

 

In wicked environments, cognitive biases masquerade as intuition. So instead of trusting our gut, we need to break decisions down into simpler parts and use tools to structure our thinking — like establishing criteria for success ahead of time and scoring options against those criteria.

 

Digging into this research was one of my favorite parts of writing Meltdown; we have a whole chapter on intuition, wicked environments, and tools to structure our thinking. If you want to know more, check out the book (Chapter 5) or this great paper written by Daniel Kahneman and Gary Klein himself.

 

Which parts of your work are in kind environments? Wicked ones? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

 

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How one wheel sparked a cultural change

 

I was running through Whittier Heights, my old neighborhood in North Seattle, the other day and I noticed a strange sight. There were small groups of kiddos (sibling groups, I guessed, each valiantly trying to maintain social distance) flocking around the quiet street together… on unicycles.

 

“Unicycles. Huh?”

 

Yes, indeed. Huh?

 

I happen to know exactly why they were on their one-wheeled contraptions. In fact, I know that they represent a mere fraction of the unicycle-riding population in the neighborhood.

 

So, why?! From where do these the unicenti emerge?

 

Dear reader, it’s a fun story from which we can draw a couple of lessons.

 

First let’s talk about things that don’t cause uni-monomania:

• Families don’t self-select into this neighborhood because of their love of unicycles.

• There’s no screening process that requires unicycle skills to live there.

• There’s no nearby circus or professional reason that would prompt unicycle-oriented parents to live in this neighborhood.

 

The real explanation is, at once, simple and nuanced: Mr. Pule, the physical education teacher at Whittier Elementary School, runs a unicycle program.

 

According to the school website, “Whittier has a strong unicycle tradition, with Mr. Pule and experienced riders bringing new riders into the fold all year long…. In the 2018-19 school year, Whittier has 135 riders with 178 being our record. Level One riders earn our unicycle shirt: One Wheel To Rule Them All.”

 

OK, so that’s the simple explanation. But when we dig deeper, it gets more interesting on a couple of different levels.

 

One is the path dependency. It would be hard to start, de novo, a robust unicycle program. Whittier, though, has an august history of unicycling, so a new student entering the school will automatically be exposed to peers unicycling.

 

Not only do those peers provide technical assistance (“Don’t fall off,” “Here’s how you get on,” etc.), the very presence of other unicyclists normalizes the activity. One mental model of humans is that we each have an internal threshold we use to decide whether to participate in an activity. At Whittier, the population of unicyclers exceeds that internal threshold for a given new kid to try the activity. With the arrival of a new kid, the pool of unicyclists is expanded, which clears the internal bar for yet another kid to try, creating an upward spiral of adoption.

 

The other aspect of adoption is the systems and technologies that are in place to support it. At Whittier, unicycling is an easy default option. If the school suddenly lost its supply of unicycles, however, the program would be dead after only a short time. Even if the school introduced slightly more resistance (say, kids had to walk to a nearby building to check out a unicycle), then that friction would make adoption much harder.

 

I’ve been thinking about these ideas because of the cultural change and innovation efforts I’m supporting with the thoughtful Modern Legal group at Microsoft. But they apply really broadly. Here’re a few takeaways:

 

It’s about the people: Creating a culture (of unicyclists or innovators) is about the people.

 

If you’re already embedded in the culture you want, you can think about how to optimize around the margins. But if you’re working on cultural change, don’t try and do everything at once. Choose people who are likely to be early adopters (something you can identify through their social networks and by how they use existing tools) and create champions out of them.

 

Tell stories and normalize failure: Shepherding adoption is not just about the numbers. Sharing stories of successes (and the inevitable failures along the way) will create a safe space and facilitate experimentation.

 

In the next iteration, use the stories of early adopters to engage people with a slightly higher internal threshold. Soon (a relative term — it could take years!), you’ll reach people who want to adopt because they fear being left behind.

 

Change agents model change: As someone seeking change, you’ll be asking people to do things differently. It can be helpful to remember that you’re embedded in the organization: if you approach the work in a way that feels comfortable, you’ll get the same results.

 

So invite yourself to try new things and to take risks. Not only will this yield different outcomes, but you’ll also model the very experimentation you’re trying to facilitate.

 

Create systems: Without unicycles, you can have no unicyclists. Make the tools and resources needed to support your culture easy to find and simple to use. If you’re using technology to innovate, for example, it should be accessible. Meet your people where they are; don’t make them walk to you.

 

Are there change efforts that you’ve been a part of? Is there a part of your culture that you’re working to change right now?

 

Join the conversation here and let me know…

The faster you go, the more resistance you encounter.

 

When it comes to growth, most of us will look for improvements that will increase revenue, get more customers, and achieve goals.

 

When I’m consulting with business owners or working with coaching clients—and when I’m thinking about my own life and business, too—I’ve found that it’s often more helpful to uncover the blocks to progress. In systems-speak, we often call these “balancing loops.” They’re sources of resistance that increase in strength as the thing we’re trying to improve starts to happen.

 

Let’s say you run a small software-as-a-service business and want more customers. You advertise, you speak at conferences, you start a referral program—whatever is appropriate for your business. Those customers, you hope, will bring others to your product. You’re spinning up your flywheel – the loop that will propel your growth.

 

It works! People sign up, some are even paying customers. You start to fantasize about meeting your monthly recurring revenue goals and hockey-stick growth! It’s awesome.

 

But that very success strengthens a balancing flywheel. More customers mean more customer service issues. If you don’t anticipate the influx of customers, the balancing flywheel will push against your growth. More resources are needed to handle the issues that come naturally with more customers. If you don’t proactively recruit customer service reps, you might rely more on your product and engineering team to solve problems, slowing down their ability to innovate. Unhandled complaints will turn customers off. All of this will slow your flywheel.

 

These sources of resistance aren’t always the result of complicated dynamics, either.

 

Sometimes we don’t have the right systems in place.

 

The Laundry Basket Tax

 

Take laundry. My laundry basket is full of clean, unfolded laundry right now, a jumble of my and my kids’ clothes. That means that every morning, I have to go on a scavenger hunt. Find socks, pants, underwear, and shirts for all of us. Yes, it only takes a few minutes, but those minutes can be costly. It slows our momentum and makes it harder to get moving for the day.

 

It’s a tax on my resources.

 

Fortunately, the solution is obvious. A small, up-front investment: fold the laundry and put it away!

 

But if it’s so obvious, why haven’t I done it? The answer, I think, is that I need a system. On a personal level, there’s a couple of ways that I could do this:

 

• I could link it to something I’m naturally doing anyway, such as tackling the laundry every Sunday after I tuck my kiddos into bed.

• I could make it part of a temptation bundle. I’ll only watch Bojack Horseman while I fold laundry, for example.

• I could delegate it, paying for wash and fold at a laundromat or for someone else to do it.

• I could automate it. Well, not for this problem, but automation can help… though you need to be careful not to create more problems with it.

 

It’s a silly example, but it shows how resistance can make things harder. Even before we consider the dynamics of our balancing loops, we can think about how we do, delegate, or automate trivial tasks. This will allow us to reclaim our bandwidth for what matters.

 

OK, I’m gonna go scrounge around for a pair of matching socks.

 

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