On Leading Well

Category: Productivity

  • My Team Just Died

    Groupthink can be a killer.

    At a conference I’m attending we had a group synergy exercise. The facilitator broke us into groups of 6-10 people, then read us this scenario:

    You are the only survivors of a plane crash. It’s January and you are somewhere in the Canadian Rockies. Daytime temps are 25 below zero; nighttime temps are 40 below zero. You are all dressed in business attire. Here is a list of 12 items you were able to salvage from the wreckage. Rank the items as needed, 1 to 12. Your survival depends on it!

    We had a few minutes to rank the items personally, in silence. Then we were given 15 minutes to come together as a group, determine our survival strategy, and rank the items as a group.

    My team’s strategy was to try to make it to the nearest town, about 30 km away. We prioritized our items.

    After time was up, the first question the facilitator asked was how many of our teams would try to make it to the town, or would send one or two people to the town? Our team raised our hands. “You’re all dead.”

    At the end of the time, the facilitator compared our personal rankings, group rankings and survival expert ratings. Apparently 26% of individuals score better than their teams, and 50% of teams score better than their smartest individual. Not so in our case. Several of my teammates (including me) scored better as individuals. We all would have survived if we hadn’t gotten sucked into groupthink under pressure.

    In real life, we know teams tend to work well. I’m a strong believer in teamwork. However, there are times when It might be wise to give individuals a little bit of time and space to come up with great ideas on their own before forging a wonderfully mediocre, if not deadly, plan.

    How might your team be getting sucked in to groupthink?

     

     

  • Strategic Personal Intent

    Dear new global leader,

    Welcome to our final morning together. You’ve heard a lot this week about loving God, loving people, and learning how to embrace a scope of responsibility for our mission that extends to 10 or 20 nations. The challenge you face is daunting. Yet God has called you and he goes before you.

    strategic-intent

    You need to know that your success will be proportional to your willingness to undergo profound personal change — deep change, as Robert Quinn calls it. What I have learned from my own experience and from observing other leaders who have borne much fruit is somewhat counterintuitive: the greater the scope, the more focus is required. In the military, once all the battle scenarios are laid out and plans made, the field commander issues what is referred to as the “strategic intent” of the mission. In the likely case that everything on the battlefield doesn’t go according to plan, strategic intent ensures that every soldier understands the one key objective that this engagement must accomplish.

    It was written of Jesus that “he set his face toward Jerusalem.” Large adoring crowds and stubborn religious leaders could not deter him from his mission. Paul, the apostle who traversed thousands of miles and crossed multiple cultures, wrote “this one thing I do.”

    What is your “one thing?” What has God laid on your heart that you must accomplish during this next season of your leadership? If you have three to five years, what is the most important result or cluster of results that you will aim at each day when you rise from your bed?

    May I suggest that you open a fresh page in your journal and write that one thing down. Write it in big capital letters in the middle of the page. Everything else is peripheral. Sure, there are a lot of other things going on. Meetings. Travel. Email. Presentations. Reports. Partners. Donors. Conferences. Leader transitions. Good news. Bad news. Crises. More meetings. More transitions.

    So what?

    You’re focused. You know your strategic intent. You can see the target and at times, you are so close you can smell it and taste it. Keep at it. Share it with others. Invite them to come along with you. Prune out as much as possible that doesn’t help you move in that direction.

    This pruning begins with your own time and your emotional energy. Those two assets are not limitless. We can dream as much as we want, but ultimately you have only so much of you to go around. Prune. Focus. Prioritize. Sequence. Execute. Be ruthless on self-evaluation of how you expend those two precious resources and gracious on how you evaluate others’ use of their time and energy.

    Our mission is at stake.

    What is your strategic personal intent?

  • Innovate or Die Trying: 3 Links

    “You win by trying. And failing. Test, try, fail, measure, evolve, repeat, persist, …”
    – Seth Godin, American author and Marketing Expert

    What does it mean to innovate? My Mac dictionary defines “innovate” this way:

    innovate |ˈinəˌvāt| verb

    1. make changes in something established, esp. by introducing new methods, ideas, or products: the company’s failure to diversify and innovate competitively.

    2. introduce (something new, esp. a product): innovating new products, developing existing ones.

    Innovation is making changes or making something new. We hear a lot about innovation today. I am surprised by the number of people, blogs, and leaders urging me to innovate! Innovate!! INNOVATE!!! without giving me some clear sense of why or how to proceed.

    Here are three really good links on innovation that came through my RSS feed this week. They address both the whys and hows of innovation.

    Why Newspapers Were Doomed All Along – HBR

    Big idea: Birmingham and New Orleans will become the first significant U.S. cities (each has a metropolitan-area population of a bit more than a million) without daily newspapers — another landmark in the sickeningly fast and sure-to-continue collapse of the once money-gushing U.S. regional newspaper industry.

    Key quote: “The Internet has unbundled the various businesses that made up a metro daily newspaper, and there’s no putting them back together again.”

    The Social Network Gospel – Christianity Today

    Big idea: How interconnectivity helps us better engage the Bible.

    Key quote: “Think big, start small, fail fast; learn rapidly.” To try repeatedly is vital in engaging people with Scripture online. The digital environment welcomes raw attempts and quickly forgives trial-and-error efforts that are promptly corrected and adapted with improvements.”

    Start-ups, Skunkworks, and Your Next Big Product  – HBR

    Big idea: For large companies to create new growth opportunities they will need to redefine what innovation means within their walls. Over the last ten years, as businesses have tried to understand and pursue innovation, their organizations have been left confused of its purpose and its benefit. Much of this confusion stems from applying one term to too many contexts. Most businesses are actually pursuing two types of innovation; product innovation and process innovation.

    Key quote: “Allow small teams to iterate their ideas, to gather data and develop performance metrics, and to quickly discard less promising in favor of stronger ones. These organizations create strong networks, provide guidance, and help fledgling companies succeed where large companies currently fail; their single goal for existing is to bring ideas to the market.” 

    Why and how are you innovating?