Category: Uncategorized

Jim Riley had what seemed like an impossible problem.

 

How could he and his team of dynamic and creative teachers keep their focus on the University Cooperative School’s core mission: to help its pre-K through fifth-grade students learn without giving up the wonder of childhood.

 

The crux of the challenge, of course, was the global pandemic.

 

While online school ticked a lot of boxes, it also created massive gaps. There’s not much “wonderful” about being stuck inside a Zoom box, as I’m sure many of you have experienced.

 

But, more importantly, Jim and his colleagues observed that kids weren’t getting the kind of social-emotional development that was at the core of the school’s mission.

 

What was he supposed to do?

 

Jim faced the kinds of problems that many leaders I work with face: lots of moving pieces. There were numerous constraints that he needed to satisfy. The stakes were high. And there wasn’t a clear path forward.

 

Even as the school installed more sinks and new air filtration systems, Jim and his fellow teachers discussed how to move forward. In one of those discussions, a good idea bubbled up: starting out the fall with outdoor education.

 

But an idea is far from a solution.

 

One thing that became clear as I spoke with Jim for my podcast was how much he engaged with other stakeholders about the issue.

 

Complex, consequential problems require novel solutions. But novel solutions can’t be imposed. If they are, people resist—and they won’t be convinced by data.

 

So, Jim and his colleagues engaged. They sought out the advice of a group of physician parents who created a detailed plan for wellness-screening to help keep everyone safe from the coronavirus. Teachers packed wagons to haul their supplies around. Kids donned muddy buddies to keep them dry and insulated from the elements. And parents hacked together outdoor toilets (“fun buckets”) in portable pop-up tents that could be set up and taken down in Seattle’s public parks. (When a parent initially proposed this idea, people thought it was a joke).

 

Pivoting is not something that you do for fun or on a whim. It is leveraging your core skills and experience to make a shift.

 

To pivot successfully, you need to embrace an attitude of learning. You need to be willing to try things, experiment, and be comfortable not knowing how something will work.

 

That’s ultimately what Jim, his colleagues, and the entire school community embodied as they took on the challenge of outdoor learning.

 

I work with many leaders in big companies who face the same challenge: they have to solve a big problem with an as-yet-unknown answer.

 

The ones that succeed look a lot like Jim: they willingly acknowledge that, even though they don’t have the answers, they’re excited to be on their journey.

 

It took me years to realize that the value I provide as a consultant isn’t knowing the answers (I don’t!). The value I provide comes from my presence, from being a part of a leader’s journey as they walk their own path.

 

What about you? What’s an impossible problem that you’re working on?

 

* * *

 

Want to get these articles in your inbox? Subscribe here to join the conversation and download a sample from Meltdown.

As I prepared for my recent interview with journalist Tim Harford, I was struck by the diversity of the output he produces—from books to a weekly Financial Times column to his Cautionary Tales podcast (it’s fantastic, check it out) and BBC radio series(es).

 

Beyond being an interesting and broad set of activities, there’s something about this pattern of activity that is self-supporting. Like Bach’s Goldberg Variations, there’s a core theme layered with deviation, a center to return to while playing around the edges.

 

My theory is that working across a lot of media is a way of both being focused and producing high-quality, diverse work.

 

As we discussed on my podcast, the theme underlying Tim’s work is an understanding of economics and social systems, plus the ability to tell a story. And the variation—consistently applying this core skill set to different media—elevates the work by creating many opportunities to get feedback and improve.

 

In many ways, as I’ve shared before, being prolific is the antidote to mediocrity.

 

I see this show up in my work. As I work with more and more organizations, I learn more about the underlying challenges my clients face. I learn more about the ways that I can be helpful, which sharpens my focus and simultaneously lets me experiment to find the right skills needed for a given situation. I learn a lot about myself and the work along the way.

 

Choosing diverse ways to work on a common focus is something that we all learn from.

 

Let’s say, for example, that you are managing a team of engineers tasked with process innovation in a large company. You’re undertaking a big, complex project with lots of moving pieces: a training/upskilling component, a component around how you work with data, and a component around implementing a new system to track work-in-progress (WIP), so managers get better visibility into what they’re doing.

 

You might create a plan for the year and break it into quarters, tackling a little bit of each aspect of the project as you go. That can work.

 

But consider an alternative: prioritizing your work around an area of focus so you start to get feedback early and build your capabilities as you go. Working on training and data during the first quarter, for example, might better prepare line managers to use your new WIP system.

 

As an example, as my team makes The Breakdown™ podcast, we’ve searched for aspects of our work that would complement the progress we’re making and the skills we’re getting, like making and editing videos.

 

Being prolific is something that I see some of my most successful clients doing, as well. They’re not afraid to try and combine different aspects of their work.

 

Consider a law firm that I work with. My client there, a litigator, recently came across a group of clients whose cases required arbitration instead of traditional litigation.

 

He realized that, thanks to the systems that he spent years building to make his practice more efficient, he could take on the arbitration cases (and likely succeed). Yes, the application was different, but he saw the power in being able to apply the same system that he had spent years building to a slightly different kind of problem.

 

What about you? What’s a variation to your core strategy that you might try?

 

* * *

 

Want to get these articles in your inbox? Subscribe here to join the conversation and download a sample from Meltdown.

You know that feeling when you find a kindred spirit? For me, that feeling is excitement, and it happens when I connect with someone who shares a similar (but distinct) worldview and we immediately begin a rapid-fire brain download.

 

That’s the feeling I had when I interviewed Michael Bungay Stanier for my podcast.

 

It turns out that Michael and I both share a belief in the transformational power of curiosity. That belief is something that underlies our solutions in Meltdown and ties together Michael’s excellent book, The Advice Trap.

 

It also shows up in the work I do helping leaders use curiosity to solve big problems.

 

That might sound simple, but it’s not. Curiosity isn’t only about asking more questions. It’s about becoming more comfortable not knowing the answers.

 

But that’s hard!

 

Senior leaders are folks who have steadily risen through the ranks by knowing answers. Presented with a problem, they solve it. They get stuff done.

 

But as their responsibility increases, leaders start to work on problems where there’s no defined answer. And those problems take a different approach to solve.

 

Take my work with a group at Microsoft who were tasked with catalyzing legal innovation at the company. When we started out, we didn’t know the structure our work would take. We didn’t know what, exactly, we’d be rolling out, and we didn’t know how it would be received.

 

So, bit by bit, we tried things. We experimented with different ways of working with existing teams and engaged people with curiosity and openness.

 

Not everything we tried worked. But everything we did was a learning experience. We learned what worked and what didn’t, and we started learning more about the problem.

 

These days, by the time you write down your strategy, the world has changed.

 

As a result, leaders have to move from operating in the warm comfort of certainty to acknowledging the volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous world that they now operate in. Implementation is not a straightforward, linear process. In anything but the most trivial cases, you don’t know how something will turn out when you start to work on it.

 

The answer isn’t more control or knowledge. It’s learning. It’s digging into things that don’t make sense and increasing your understanding of a problem.

 

And, as you get more comfortable prioritizing learning over control, you can start moving away from “the way things have always been done” and start responding to the data as they are right now.

 

By doing that, you’ll be able to use curiosity as a way to drive experimentation. You can move from top-down plans to statements like “I don’t know—but I wonder what we could try.”

 

Michael and I discuss these ideas and more in the podcast. Curious? Go and listen to Episode 12.

 

* * *

 

Want to get these articles in your inbox? Subscribe here to join the conversation and download a sample from Meltdown.

As I try to do at the end of every year, I’m taking some time to reflect this week.

 

There’s a lot to reflect on.

 

Whatever you thought you would be working on in 2020, the universe had a different path charted. In addition to the economic and physical suffering caused by the coronavirus, this year has been an example of large-scale systems breakdowns, and one of the things I’m interested in is the particular ways in which people have adapted to them.

 

One of the most powerful ways to adapt to changing conditions is by setting goals.

 

If you listened to the podcast this week, you heard me talk about how to balance focus with the desire to set ambitious goals.

 

I work with a number of clients (both individuals and teams) on this. I teach that there are three pillars of goal setting: feelings, focus and control, and reflection.

 

Have a listen to the episode for more details, but, in the meantime, I wanted to share a little more about the power of reflection, the third pillar of goal setting.

 

I don’t see goals as static. Things change—in the external environment, in what I’m working on, and in the market. (The goals I started 2020 with stopped being relevant pretty quickly.) As things change, you can change your goals.

 

Beyond updating the content of your goals, you can also look at your process, examining what’s working (and what’s not).

 

For my team and me, one thing that wasn’t working this year was the breadth of the goals we were going after.

One of my superpowers is that I’m voracious. I move fast, and my brain often arrives at fully formed ideas—for things like marketing plans and products.

 

But my voraciousness can also limit me. It’s hard to do everything at once. What I realized is that my set of ambitious “everything” goals ended up distracting my team and slowing us down. So, I’m making changes to keep the superpower while mitigating the challenges it causes.

 

Everyone’s challenges are unique. But when you reflect on what went well and what you want to try, you can improve your process, an effort whose benefits will compound.

 

Thanks for being part of 2020 with me.

 

P.S. I’ve put together some resources around goal setting that are specific to attorneys.

 

If you’re an attorney—or if you know one that might be interested—head over here for my free workbook on why understanding your feelings can help you achieve ambitious goals.

 

* * *

 

Want to get these articles in your inbox? Subscribe here to join the conversation and download a sample from Meltdown.

Warm refreshments, winter fun, and social media.

 

What could capture the holidays better?

 

One of my favorite stories from Meltdown is about a Starbucks social media disaster that arrived just in time for the holidays. We’re providing an excerpt here to get you in the holiday spirit.

 

In the winter of 2012, Starbucks launched a social media campaign to get coffee lovers in the holiday spirit. It asked its customers to post festive messages on Twitter using the hashtag #SpreadTheCheer. The company also sponsored an ice rink at the Natural History Museum in London, which featured a giant screen to display all the tweets that included the hashtag.

 

It was a smart marketing idea. Customers would generate free content for Starbucks and flood the internet with warm and fuzzy messages about the upcoming holidays and their favorite Starbucks drinks. The messages wouldn’t just appear online but also on a big screen visible to many ice skaters, coffee drinkers at the ice rink café, museumgoers, and passersby. And inappropriate messages would be weeded out by a moderation filter, so the holiday spirit—and its association with warm Starbucks drinks—would prevail.

 

It was a Saturday evening in mid-December, and everything at the ice rink was going well—for a while. Then, unbeknownst to Starbucks, the content filter broke, and messages like these began to appear on the giant screen:

The messages were referring to a recent controversy that involved the use of legal tax-avoidance tactics by Starbucks.

 

Kate Talbot, a community organizer in her early twenties, took a photo of the screen with her phone and tweeted it with these words: “Oh dear, Starbucks have a screen showing their #spreadthecheer tweets at the National History Museum.” Soon enough Talbot’s own tweet showed up on the screen. So she sent another one: “Omg now they are showing my tweet! Someone PR should be on this . . . #spreadthecheer #Starbucks #payyourtaxes.”News of the ongoing fiasco spread quickly over Twitter and encouraged even more people to get involved. “Turns out a Starbucks in London is displaying on a screen any tweet with the #spreadthecheer hashtag,” one man tweeted. “Oh this will be fun.”

The avalanche of tweets was unstoppable.Starbucks found itself in Chick Perrow’s world.

Social media is a complex system. It’s made up of countless people with many different views and motives. It’s hard to know who they are and what they will make of a particular campaign. And it’s hard to predict how they might react to a mistake like the glitch of Starbucks’ moderation filter. Kate Talbot responded by taking a photo of the screen and sharing it. Others then reacted to the news that any tweet using the right hashtag would be displayed at a prominent location. And then traditional media outlets reacted to the blizzard of tweets. They published reports of how the PR stunt backfired, so the botched campaign became mainstream news and reached even more people. These were unintended interactions between the glitch in the content filter, Talbot’s photo, other Twitter users’ reactions, and the resulting media coverage.

 

When the content filter broke, it increased tight coupling because the screen now pulled in any tweet automatically. And the news that Starbucks had a PR disaster in the making spread rapidly on Twitter—a tightly coupled system by design. At first, just a few people shared the information, then some of their followers shared it, too, and then the followers of those followers, and so on. Even after the moderation filter was fixed, the slew of negative tweets continued. And there was nothing Starbucks could do to stop them.

 

From Meltdown by Chris Clearfield and András Tilcsik. Used with the permission of the publisher, Penguin Press. Copyright © 2018 by Chris Clearfield and András Tilcsik.

 

*If you’re looking for the perfect gift for your friends and family, why not buy them a copy of Meltdown? It’s the perfect book to cozy up with as we bring 2020, a banner year for catastrophe, to a close.

 

Want to get these articles in your inbox? Subscribe here to join the conversation and download a sample from Meltdown.

 

What’s your niche?

 

My friend Oscar Velasco-Schmitz owns and runs Dockside Cannabis, a retail cannabis establishment. We had a fascinating conversation on my podcast.

 

Though Dockside is licensed and legal in Seattle, Oscar and his partners run a business that is, from a federal perspective, engaged in “an industrial act of civil disobedience.”

 

Despite that, they still have to think about all the things that normal businesses think about: branding, supply chain, health and safety, salaries, store design, and one of the most important considerations for any business: niche.

 

Dockside’s mission is to provide a delightful cannabis retail experience for the NPR listener.

 

Understanding that niche helps Dockside make decisions that cascade through their business. Their stores are rustic and airy. Their staff mirror their diverse customer demographic. And, by concentrating on a niche, Dockside continually expands their understanding of what their customers want.

 

The power of a niche shouldn’t be understated—but many firm owners (myself included!) struggle to embrace one. It feels downright scary to decline work. After all, doesn’t it make sense to keep our options open?

 

In short: no.

 

Consider a family law practitioner that I work with. She runs a thriving practice that focuses on collaborative divorce. Focus like that allows her to put all of her energies into understanding and serving her ideal customer. She still receives inquiries from clients who want litigated divorces, but she knows that saying yes to litigated cases drains her energy and moves her away from a process that she embraces and believes in.

 

For years, I struggled to articulate my niche. “I work with curious people?” “I help leaders build the capacity to manage complexity?”

 

That still describes what I do, but now I do it in a specific context: I help law firms and legal departments embrace uncertainty to change for the better.

 

For me, that doesn’t mean that I won’t do other kinds of work. Meltdown resonates with a lot of folks with engineering brains, so I still get really exciting opportunities to work with engineering and technology leaders.

 

But it does mean that I invest my efforts in understanding and connecting with my ideal customer—from solo law offices to Fortune 100 firms. I generate content specifically for these practitioners (on organizational change and goal setting, for example). And I grow my skills in ways that solve the kinds of problems that attorneys and innovators in this space have.

 

In many ways, it’s been scary for me to niche down. Curiosity is one of my superpowers—but it also dilutes my focus. I’ve had anxiety around closing doors. Will I, for example, still have “standing” (whatever that means) to write another book that appeals to a larger audience?

 

But my experience (and those of many professionals that I’ve worked with) is just the opposite. Niching down provides focus and the ability to grow faster because I’m encountering more of clients’ real problems (and getting more concentrated experience solving them).

 

Finally, I think that finding a niche is something that applies to professionals who work for someone else, too. Committing to sharpening a valuable skill set (whether that’s data science or management) will give you the ability to work on problems of increasing import. And, in many ways, the corporate world offers more flexibility to apply those skills to different kinds of problems. But the deep expertise is portable.

 

So… what’s your niche?

Subscribe here to join the conversation and to get a free sample from my book, Meltdown.

What do you get when you think in systems?

 

I recently interviewed my friend and mentor Roger Martin for my podcast. One of the things that we talked about—and a subject at the heart of Meltdown—was how thinking in systems can benefit anyone managing a complex problem.

 

Or, as MIT’s John Sterman puts it, “there are no side-effects—just effects.” Everything we do has consequences. It’s up to us to understand what those consequences are.

 

Much of Roger’s writing is about how businesses (and, with his latest book, society writ large) think too narrowly about their actions.

 

We see this in science a lot. Take kudzu. Introduced to stop erosion, it ended up outcompeting other ground cover plants with its stronger root systems, worsening the problem. Or how the use of antibiotics—practically a modern miracle—creates resistant bacteria.

 

By thinking in systems—and recognizing that many “side” effects are delayed—we can gain the ability to better understand what may come.

 

Take a professional services firm that I worked with recently. Wanting to increase revenue, they bolstered their sales team with a set of capable, lateral hires designed to surface more high-value opportunities for the firm.

 

Their strategy worked… sort of. The additional sales capabilities generated more highly qualified leads. But the firm hadn’t invested in the business development group that structured and priced engagements. As a result, that team was backlogged, overworked, and on the road to burnout.

 

If you can think in systems, you can avoid these kinds of mistakes. You can figure out how your changes will cascade through your system, so that you anticipate future consequences like bottlenecks.

 

As a result, you’ll be able to better capitalize on opportunities.

 

What’s an unexpected effect that you’ve seen unfold in your work?

 

Subscribe here to join the conversation and to get a free sample from my book, Meltdown.

One of the things I’ve had to learn as a consultant and a coach is that my clients mostly want results.

 

They have a problem that they want to solve: how to create a culture of innovation, say, or how to make their law firm run more smoothly.

 

My mental model is that they don’t really care how it gets solved (as long as it’s within the bounds of integrity).

 

In general, they’re not so interested in the fact that my approach is grounded in Gestalt, or machine learning, or whatever. As long as the solution is credible, I could give them a button to push to solve the problem and they’d generally be happy. What they care about is getting the problem solved.

 

That’s important because it helps me focus on the fantastic results my clients will get (and they do!) rather than on the process.

 

I think that Amazon’s obsession with their customer is a fantastic example of this at work. That obsession, which isn’t usually noticeable because it manifests itself as a total absence of friction in transactions with Amazon, springs into relief when I have to deal with a business that doesn’t think about its customers.

 

I buy a lot of things off of Amazon and the experience is generally incredible. Even when something doesn’t work, it’s usually no hassle to return things.

 

But, very occasionally, I buy things in the real world. And, very often, I regret that decision.

 

A little over a year ago, I bought an Instant Pot at QFC, a local supermarket chain. I got it home and, lo and behold, I realized it was way too small. So, I boxed it up with the receipt and put it in my car for the next time I was close to a QFC.

 

About a week later, I went into another QFC location I happened to be near to return the Instant Pot. I waited in line at customer service, receipt in hand. Here’s what happened:

 

Clerk: Hmm… I don’t think you can return that here.

 

Me: …?

 

Clerk: We don’t sell those at this location.

 

Me: …?

 

Clerk: If you returned it here, we’d have no way of getting it to another store.

 

Me: …?

 

Clerk: We couldn’t do the accounting properly. There’s no way to move the credit from our store to the store where you bought this.

 

Now, this clerk was just doing his job. I harbor him no ill will.

 

But I’ve been trained by Amazon to expect awesome customer service. I don’t really care how the grocery store’s internal accounting system works. I don’t care how their internal supply chain works.

 

I just wanted to return the Instant Pot.

 

This is an important lesson for business of all kinds. What problem is your client trying to solve? And what’s the best way you can help them solve that problem?

 

Thinking in terms of solutions can help shake some fundamental assumptions about your business.

 

Let’s say you run a law firm. Do your clients really want to deal with hourly billing? Or is that a convenience for you that shifts the risk on to them? Would they (and possibly you) be better off if you had fixed fees for well-scoped services?

 

Back to my grocery example: I eventually drove across town to return the Instant Pot to the original store. And I haven’t bought anything there since.

 

What about you? What things are you doing in your business that may not actually solve your clients’ problems?

 

Subscribe here to join the conversation and to get a free sample from my book, Meltdown.

This past week revealed that our democracy works—but barely.

 

Regular readers know that I spend a lot of time thinking about systems — technology, teams, and organizations.

 

This week has got me thinking about the American political system writ large.

 

In 1997, Donella Meadows published an essay called “Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System.” Though the piece doesn’t focus on politics, it’s a remarkable guide to the current state of our modern political situation.

 

In it, Meadows, a biophysicist with a PhD from Harvard, lays out the ways that we can influence the systems around us. Our American democracy, it turns out, is a quintessential example of a complex system.

 

The core of Meadows’s argument is that changing parameters—essentially the strength of different connections—has the least impact on our systems. Yet parameters are the focus of the majority of our discussions about our democracy. We focus on ideas like voter turnout and suppression, campaign finance reform, the role of lobbyists, and how we draw voting districts.

 

These sound like huge issues, but in the context of democracy as a system, they’re small potatoes. That’s because in a complex system, as Meadows argues, we have the most impact when we think about the rules and dynamics of the system itself.

 

In other words, the effect of changing voter turnout pales in comparison to the ability to change how the different parts of our system interact.

 

The good news is that, in recent years, a discussion is emerging with an explicit focus on democracy as a system. John Dickerson’s Atlantic piece (“The Hardest Job in the World”) and his subsequent book argue that the fundamental structure of our national elections selects for presidents ill-suited to govern. And, in 2018, The Economist published an insightful analysis of how population migration and the electoral college bias elections in favor of Republican candidates. And my friend (and upcoming podcast guest) Roger Martin argues that part of the issue is America’s unbalanced obsession with growth and efficiency.

 

It would be a mistake to think of this as a partisan issue. Before the 2016 election, for example, a Gallup poll showed that only 18% of people approved of the job Congress was doing. Yet, for the House of Representatives, 97% of incumbents won reelection. In the Senate, the number was 93%. This inertia comes from systemic factors—our primary process, winner-take-all voting, and the import of fundraising—that arise from the organization of the political system itself. And it’s only by understanding these factors that we can start the critical conversation about the structure and outcomes that we want from our modern democracy.

 

One of the insights of behavioral economics is the importance of choice architecture: the context of a choice can matter more than the content of the choice.

 

The classic example of this is making employees opt out of 401(k) plans rather than having them opt in. By defaulting employees to participants, savings rates (and retirement preparedness) increase dramatically.

 

In the US, we haven’t had enough conversations about the choice architecture of our democracy. We take the two-party system, the primary process, and the electoral college as givens.

 

But they’re not. They’re features of the system chosen by people. Features, I would argue, that impose far more costs than they provide benefits.

 

The current incarnation of our system pushes us into increasingly polarized camps. The electoral college creates opportunities for contests to be decided by incredibly small margins—even in the face of large margins in the popular vote. The two-party system and winner-take-all voting doesn’t serve our citizenry; it serves those who already hold political power.

 

The content matters: people have different beliefs and that should be reflected in their electoral choices. But the context matters even more.

 

Context shapes the conversation. It restricts our choices without our noticing. And it creates far too many opportunities for small differences to have massive effects.

 

America needs democratic progress—but that progress won’t come from new party platforms or business as usual. Talking about context is the first step toward a more civil and unified country.

 

What about you — what parts of your work (or life!) have you been thinking about in terms of parameters? And how could you shift to thinking about the structure of the system instead?

 

Subscribe here to join the conversation and to get a free sample from my book, Meltdown.

Holy cow.

 

Doesn’t April 21st, 2020 seem like a decade ago?

 

It does to me. That’s the day that Harvard Business Review published the article I wrote with two Seattle-based physicians on managing the COVID-19 crisis.

 

The article was about how one hospital system built a sustainable response to a dynamic and evolving crisis.

 

I had the opportunity to reread the article recently and reconnect with its universal message: whether it’s managing hybrid schooling or helping teams shift their approaches on the fly, things are changing so fast that we need to learn and adapt as quickly as we can.

 

Even though the article is about a hospital, there’s an aspect to it that applies to life more broadly right now:

 

“We’re learning from the initial stages of our Covid-19 response and focusing on creating sustainable practices. Unlike the response to an earthquake or a plane crash, we need to be able to undertake months of response activity. ”

 

Living during COVID-19 is a marathon and not a sprint. We need to work in a way that is realistic and sustainable; otherwise, it’s all too easy to feel overwhelmed.

 

So, do what you need to do to take a break, when and where you can.

 

It may involve backing off goals and realizing that you can’t move quite as fast as you’d like.

 

It may involve blocking off 30 minutes to sip tea.

 

Or, *gasp*, it may involve calling into your Zoom meeting, so you can take a walk.

 

Let me know what you’re doing to take care of yourself right now.

Subscribe here to get these articles in your inbox (and to get a free sample from my book, Meltdown).