Category Archives: Myths

The A-B-C of motivation

September 7, 2015 Simon Black 3 Comments

Interestingly, research suggests that in terms of guiding behaviour and performance, people tend to prefer feedback (i.e. a consequence of what they have done) rather than guidance (an antecedent). Time spent highlighting rules and having team meetings to brief people on work or remind them of key issues (like health and safety) is less effective in shaping the desired behaviour required at work. This is important in deciding where interventions are needed to enable people to become more productive (not much productivity is achieved by attending a meeting!).

Remember the ABC of motivation: Consequences drive Behaviour more than Antecedents. However, this does NOT mean we should manage people by ‘punishment and reward’! Punishment and reward conditions people into behaviours, stifles creativity, reduces feedback and suggestions and encourages people to hide mistakes or problems, even to cheat the figures (otherwise they get punished). Punishment and reward is a very blunt and undiscriminating instrument – it can easily punish good behaviour and reward bad behaviour (think bankers bonuses here!).

Consequences must be carefully design: do people know the purpose of what they are doing, be committed to it, be able to monitor their work to achieve it and be able to adapt and improve things intelligently to achieve the desired outcomes?

Herzberg’s Dog – ‘Movement’ v ‘Motivation’

July 12, 2015 Simon Black 1 Comment

Herzberg’s famous article ‘One more time: how do you motivate employees?’ has been reprinted by the Harvard Business Review at least five times since the 1968 original. Presumably this is, as suggested by John Seddon, because people continue not to get the message.

Seddon’s point is fair because Herzberg’s core message contravenes virtually every manager’s intuition about motivation and messes with the head of even the most sincere and enthusiastic leader.

Herzberg’s message? You cannot motivate people.

What Herzberg advocates is for leaders to find ways to enable people to draw on their own (intrinsic) motivation to do work well. This means creating the environment where people can explore their creativity and abilities and thereby contribute more.

This is different to providing a ‘carrot’ or ‘stick’. External incentives effectively shape the rules of work – they do not draw from the resources within the person. This means that as people interpret the rules, there may be unintended consequences – manipulation, cheating, internal competition (or hiding good ideas). If punishment is visible it creates fear, reticence to suggest anything new, and of course has a negative impact on morale.

Don’t let sight of knowledge be blinded by emotions

November 10, 2014 Simon Black 1 Comment

There are often occasions when we are presented with information or a situation which gets our hackles rising. A picky complaint, a misplaced rumour, an assumption, a one-off gaffe. We know that the situation does not reflect the general reality (our team doesn’t usually screw things up) but we still get annoyed.

Think about it – we get wound up, we try and button the emotion, perhaps it will annoy us for the next hour, the day, the whole week even. It really defeats us one way or another – and it might only be a trivial thing (although sometimes it can be more than trivial – for example if a senior colleague complains).

What can we do? Chew on it all (and get ourselves down or our blood boiling), stand up for it (and risk being seen to be defensive), roll over and take the negativity (and appear passive and weak)?

At the 2014 football World Cup we saw the first use of goal line technology – aimed to remove the subjective decision of a referee on whether a ball had crossed the line to indicate a goal. The goal camera’s analytical video was shown on the stadium screens. In the match between France and Honduras a shot by a French player hit the goal post ran back across the goal, rebounded into the goalkeeper and headed towards the goal. Had it crossed the line? The referee indicated goal, then the video replay showed the movement of the ball onto the post and the indication ‘no goal’.

Honduras player react to the ‘injustice’, but their outrage was based on imperfect knowledge

The Honduran players were apoplectic – it was no goal surely! But wait, what had really happened? The video instantly replayed the next sequence – the ball travelling across the goal, hitting the goalkeeper and crossing the line – and the video indicated for this second sequence ‘GOAL’. The referee’s decision was correct (he gets automatic signals only for GOAL).

Honduras ball line 2 — …the ball instantly bounces back to the keeper who pushes it over the line, this time the cameras show GOAL. Simples.

Honduras ball line 1 — The ball initially hits the post, the cameras are triggered, and identify that the ball does not cross the line…NO GOAL…but…

This is not about goal-line technology.

This issue is that the Honduran team not only had an unjustified emotional reaction, but also their reaction distracted them from their work (football) -they lost 3-0. If they had been rational about it they would have waited for the verdict on the goalkeepers ‘save’ on the goal-line.

The problem we have as human beings is that the emotional centres in our brains operate much more quickly than our rational centres, so we are triggered into an emotional response when a rational response would be better (Peters 2012).

What could be the solution to this? I suggest one. When you are confronted with a difficult situation that you are included to react towards emotionally – seek knowledge (Deming 1982). What do we know, does this always happen, why did they ask this, why did the incident occur, what does data tell us, is it a one off or a repeating occurrence?

Don’t focus on the people, but examine the situation first.

Reading:

Deming W.E. (1982) Out of the Crisis, MIT CAES, Cambridge MA.

Peters S. (2012) The Chimp Paradox: The Mind Management Programme to Help You Achieve Success, Confidence and Happiness. Vermillion, London.

Links:

BBC Sport (2014) World Cup 2014: Goallien technology TV process Reviewed. http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/football/27864393

Change Principles, Myths

Focusing arguments upon sound knowledge: common fallacies of logic and rhetoric

September 8, 2014 Simon Black Leave a comment

Dealing with change usually involves debate: what to change, why, where, when, how and who?

There is often the danger that skeptical inquiry can creep towards defensiveness and cynicism. Here are some things to challenge when these attributes appear in negative arguments presented by others (adapted from Paine 2013):

POOR responses in discussions include:

Attacking the person not the argument, or stereotyping a position to make attacks easier.
Relying on ‘authority’. Hierarchy should make no difference, one person’s opinion should be no weightier than another’s (both are, after all, just opinions) – what are the facts?
Observational selection (counting positives and forgetting the negatives, or vice versa).
● Statistics of small numbers
(such as drawing conclusions from inadequate sample sizes)
● the ‘sample of one’: using a single case which could be an extreme outlier rather than the norm
‘conveniently’ considering only two extremes to make the opposing view look worse:
● Excluding the middle options in a range of possibilities
● Short-term v long-term: “why pursue research when we have so huge a budget deficit?”.
● Slippery slope – unwarranted extrapolation “give an inch and they will take a mile” – would they…always?
Misunderstanding the nature of statistics
Confuse correlation & causation (cause & effect):
‘it happened after so it was caused by’ – is this really justified?
Appeal to ignorance
(but – absence of evidence is not evidence of absence).

To address these arguments ask: what is the purpose of the discussion? what do we know? what are the facts? what are we assuming? what knowledge can we reasonably base our decision making upon? how can we examine, predict and monitor outcomes?

As Deming says, most of what is important is unknown or unknowable, but we don’t assume that it doesn’t exist.

Bring the skeptics into the argument, involve their questions in the testing and development of ideas. Make resistance useful.

Further reading:

Deming W.E. (1982) Out of the Crisis, MIT CAES, Cambridge MA.

Deming W.E. (1993) The New Economics, MIT CAES, Cambridge MA.

Herrero, L. (2006) Viral Change, meetingminds, UK.

Paine M. (2013) Baloney Detection Kit prepared excerpt from The Planetary Society Australian Volunteer Coordinators http://www.carlsagan.com/index_ideascontent.htm#baloney

Change Principles, Myths

360◦ feedback – when it might not be very helpful

August 29, 2014 Simon Black Leave a comment

360◦ feedback is an often cited ‘best practice’ model for enabling people to understand how well they perform, what they need to do more of and what they need to improve. Like any method, it needs to be checked to see whether it will work (i.e deliver its intended purpose) and whether it is the best way of achieving that purpose (e.g. are there any unwanted side-effects?). In the case of 360◦ feedback these questions are rarely asked- the first concerns are usually practical (who can give the feedback, how do we collate it) – 360◦ feedback is de facto a ‘good thing’, isn’t it?

Nevertheless it is worth stepping back and considering whether the 360◦ approach is:

(i) helpful and (ii) effective…?

One issue with 360◦ – which you will never find on a 360◦ website (for obvious reasons) is that it is based on judgement and opinion. There is the old adage that “opinion+opinion+opinion=opinions”, in other words any combination of opinions will not necessarily be the truth. This is of course also the case whether you get friend or foe to give you the feedback! For this reason, a lot of people would say ‘don’t bother’.

In fact there is a strong case for the ‘don’t bother to give feedback at all’ viewpoint. It is a question of measurement and assign-ability. What is the feedback measuring? In a stable system 90-95% of performance is due to the system, in other words is not assignable to the individual (Deming 1993). This means that feedback given to the individual will be at best only scratching 5% of what people do. In essence “faults, weaknesses and dereliction of individuals is not the primary door for improvement” – its more effective to work on improving processes and systems (Coens and Jenkins 2000).

(Note: in an unstable system all the feedback should be directed at the boss anyway, not the worker – that is worth a separate blog in itself).

Timeliness of feedback is important: it should relate to specific behaviours for which impact is known and to which the receiver of the feedback can choose to respond to get a different effect. (Coens and Jenkins 2000). Good feedback needs to be delivered in a personal and interactive manner and from a person who is seen as credible. People naturally tend to rationalise feedback from other human beings (Coens and Jenkins 2000, Jacobs 2009), so anonymous feedback can be easily rejected or seen as invalid.

There is a strong argument that where a person is not prepared to/cannot give the feedback face-to-face, then they shouldn’t bother. If they CAN give the feedback face-to-face, they should take responsibility for it but also be prepared for it to be ignored or contested (and take responsibility for the other person’s reaction – anger, tears, hurt, laughter, responsiveness). The best teams are those where this type of discussion is normal, expected and conducted in a good spirit of trust and collegiality.

There is another clue in the usefulness of any method: what ‘checks and balances’ do people have to put on the system to ensure that it is fair on people? If you need to place a ‘system to police the system’ (i.e. who gives the feedback) then , inevitably you will need to have a system to police the police who are policing the system and so on…If any answer is forthcoming that suggests that the method is not impartial, robust or trustworthy – and generates too much work!

It is better to keep feedback down to face-to-face discussion, you simplify it because people take responsibility for the whole. Make sure people know how to give and receive feedback; what, how, when, where, why. Ensure a culture where informal conversations about the work and how it can be improved become the norm. Increase the value of dialogue and discussion on how to improve things within meetings (and move beyond discussion of reporting and giving feedback).

Reading:

Coens and Jenkins (2000) Abolishing Performance Appraisals: why they backfire and what to do instead, Berrett-Koehler, San Francisco, CA.

Deming W.E. (1993) The New Economics, MIT CAES, Cambridge MA.

Jacobs, C.J. (2009) Management Rewired: Why Feedback Doesn’t Work and Other Surprising Lessons from the Latest Brain Science. Penguin Group Portfolio, NY

Myths

Hard work: only a small part of productivity

August 17, 2014 Simon Black Leave a comment

“Hard work is only a small part of productivity” says Richard Farson in his short book ‘Management of the Absurd’. But this can’t be true can it? What about work ethic, effort and all those other good things? Farson’s argument is that we should distinguish between what it is that makes people work hard and what accounts for productivity. Our work organisations. Now, not wanting to just re-regurgitate Farson’s already well considered arguments, it is worth adding a fresh angle to emphasise what he has observed.

Deming has very strong views on this: “Hard work and best efforts will not by themselves dig us out of the pit” – working hard may get you no-where fast (and you will be none the wiser until it is too late).

Work has to be purposeful and that purpose needs to be relevant. To enable this we must be able to ask the right questions, to seek the right knowledge to inform us in what we do, how and why it matters.

Why diversity is important – it’s the system

April 28, 2014 Simon Black Leave a comment

something — Does this image (above) depict the ‘brute force’ associated with British football?… …and do the scenes (below) at a Brazilian match really represent Brazil’s ‘beautiful game’?

Responding to variety is one thing; but a variety of perspectives is quite another challenge, for both practical reasons and ethical reasons (Rogers & Williams, 2010).

Let’s think practically first – our understanding of many things will be flawed if we only consider one point of view: a football match ending in a riot cannot be explained if you only view it as a game of skill between two teams.

Perspectives are closely associated with what you value. The value of a football match will be judged differently if it the sport is seen as a game of skill or a means of entertainment. A game played by incompetents could be judged hugely entertaining, whereas a skilfully played game (e.g. Spanish-style tiki-taka football) could be judged very dull. My wife’s perspective on the value of our son’s local village match in contrast to a premier league game on TV would be quite different from that of a football expert (although my wife played the game at university and has coached a few junior teams in her time). Perceptions of value have implications for service users and service quality – do we judge our service or work outputs by our own perspectives of quality, convenience, purpose or timeliness – or do we work to the expectations, needs and priorities of the people using those services?

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There are also serious ethical implications in considering a diversity of perspectives. A person or a certain group of people could get harmed if you don’t see things through an alternative perspective. That topic is worth a separate blog in its own right.

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Aside from that, our effectiveness as people is influenced by our understanding of alternative perspectives. A wider perspective allows us to consider interrelationships better: how does my work affect yours, who else might be impacted, what are their priorities? Any changes we make in a system of work are not simply a matter of cause and effect – not as straightforward as ‘I do this, then they will do that‘. It is not just about A+B =C. There may be unforeseen consequences: more of C may impact on D, E, or F. Using up B might cause problems for X and Y and so on.

Of course there are practical limits to what we can consider – we need to put boundaries around our thinking. Where we set those boundaries will depend on our perspective, or ideally the various perspectives that we are prepared to consider. Every world-view is restricted and limited in some way, so remain conscious that:

a good first step to seeing the wider ‘system’ is to see the world through the eyes of another,
any judgement of activity sets up a boundary of ‘worthwhile’ and ‘not important’,
we should carefully consider the implications of any boundary which we set

Reading:

Churchman, C.W. (1968) The Systems Approach. Delta, NY

Jacobs, C.J. (2009) Management Rewired: Why Feedback Doesn’t Work and Other Surprising Lessons from the Latest Brain Science. Penguin Group Portfolio, NY

Rogers, P. and Williams, R. (2010) Using Systems Concepts in Evaluation, in Beyond Logframe: Using Systems Concepts in Evaluation, N. Fujita (Editor). Foundation for Advanced Studies on International Development, Tokyo.

Change Principles, Myths

“all models are wrong…some are useful”

March 28, 2014 Simon Black 1 Comment

This day one year ago (March 28th 2013) saw the death of one the country’s most quietly influential exports, Professor George Box. Born just after the first world war in Gravesend, Kent and attending University in London for both his batchelor’s degree and his PhD, he ended up spending most of his life in the USA.

This modest and witty Kentish man, who stumbled into the world of statistical analysis is now considered amongst the top ten statisticians of all time.

I recall seeing a George Box presentation at the 1995 First World Congress on Total Quality Management in Sheffield; he described how industrial progress has been based on increasing knowledge and systematic design (he used a schematic of historic developments in shipbuilding to which I have often referred people to illustrate this point).

As a statistician made famous for the development of models to better describe phenomena, Box’s most memorable quote was:

“essentially, all models are wrong, but some are useful”

If you come across a model, remember it is just that – something to map onto your mind to help make sense of things. If the model helps, make it something useful to you – by using it. But don’t waste time picking small holes in things – ‘worry selectively’ as Box would say. There is no ‘best way’ to see anything, but if there are fundamental flaws in a model, or it is useless, then drop it. As much as not worrying about everything, there is also little time to keep flogging dead horses!

Reading:

Box G.E.P. (1976) Science and Statistics. Journal of the American Statistical Association, 71 (356): 791-799

Box G.E.P. (2013) An Accidental Statistician, Wiley-Blackwell

Jones B. (2013) George Box: a remembrance. http://blogs.sas.com/content/jmp/2013/03/29/george-box-a-remembrance/

Change Principles, Myths

Culture “Change”: a new frontier or more disruption and waste?

March 10, 2014 Simon Black Leave a comment

The idea of ‘culture change’ has been around at least since the 1970s.

Company culture was flagged as the new route to progress and competitiveness. A good company culture was seen as the antidote to inefficiency, obsolescence and lethargy. The old ways were habits to throw away, to be ashamed of, to turn our back on. People who don’t adapt are seen as dinosaurs or stuck in the dark ages.

This trend in thinking gave rise to a plethora of ‘culture change’ programmes, usually involving energetic efforts to describe company values, visions, extended programmes of training, sometimes introspection (on the part of managers), browbeating and exhortation (of employees), ‘communication cascades’, ‘town-hall meeting’ and suchlike. To support this, various four-box models, multi-ring schematics, life-cycles and illustrations sprung into life to describe this intangible ‘thing’ of culture. But is ‘culture’ a cause or an effect of what happens in organisations?

Peter Drucker stated: “company cultures are like country cultures. Never try to change one. Try instead to work with what you’ve got.” This is pragmatic thinking – and in many senses he is right – but not wholly so. A different perspective is needed, since sometimes the pervading culture can be damaging, counterproductive or simply unfair or unethical.

The culture in a company, or department, or team, or any type of organisation CAN actually be changed, but it is not achieved by trying to change the culture itself. Seddon suggests that we should never make efforts to change a culture by ‘doing it to them’ (Seddon 2005). People will resent it – and also people tend to detect any manipulation or ‘brainwashing’ a mile off. This increases resistance, undermines trust, garners cynicism and is generally unhelpful – the opposite of what you intend.

Don’t try to change people by attempting to change people, instead influence them to change themselves. The same is true of organisations. We can avoid a great waste of time, energy and resources if we skip this approach and instead work on things which really matter to people – and matter to our organisation. Just like forcefield analysis, it is better to identify and remove the forces that are driving the negative culture, rather than push at the positives.

The most effective approach is to intervene at the point of work. Deal with the issues which people already find difficult or frustrating. Remove the conditions which impose upon them the negative behaviours which we want to eliminate. Give them a sense of purpose to fix their ideas upon – how things could change for the better and what THEY can do about it.

Reading:

Drucker PF ( 1993) Managing for the Future: the 1990s and beyond New York: NY, Dutton.

Jacobs, C.J. (2009) Management Rewired: Why Feedback Doesn’t Work and Other Surprising Lessons from the Latest Brain Science, Penguin Group Portfolio, NY

Seddon, J. (2005) Freedom from Command and Control, Vanguard Press, Buckingham, UK.

Excellence, Myths, Service

Absorb variety and increase excellence

February 12, 2014 Simon Black 1 Comment

Trying to address the demands of variety is a perennial problem. Customers wanting different features in a product, a different colour, a different size, a specific delivery slot, a student wanting specific feedback on their essay. In times gone by, the craftsman would make things according to what the customer wanted. Take the blacksmith – he would manufacture a horseshoe (or shoes) specific to the horse that was presented to him by his customer. A unique shoe every time, or at least finished from a blank to fit the foot perfectly. If you didn’t make your own clothes, you would buy from someone who did, and the clothes were produced in the same way – fitted and finished in the cloth of your choice.

Increasing numbers of customers (and therefore volumes of production) gradually made the provision this type of offer through ‘cottage industries’ more difficult. Bakers had almost always produced batches of loaves for a range of customers, for example, whilst drapers, haberdashers, corwainers and milliners largely did the same. By the 1900s Henry Ford had taken things to the extreme when he produced the Model T Ford, stating memorably in 1909 that any customer “can have a car painted any colour that he wants so long as it is black”.

Today we are used to buying off-the-shelf or off-the-peg products and services, from fruit to footwear, from breakfasts to banking. Standard products are so familiar that off-the-shelf is seen as inferior and run-of-the-mill. Of course commercially this has become a NEW point of competition and differentiation. Marketeers have identified ways in which we can customise the products to suit our needs. Why?

The reason for wanting to differentiate is, at a superficial level, because we like it. The reason we like it, however, is because we have different needs and at a fundamental level we want a product or service that meets our needs.

So what is there to do about this if we are offering services, whether financial, commercial, educational or other?

Somehow we have to design our services to allow people to request variety, so that a variety of requests from many different customers can be absorbed by the system. Does this sound like some kind of menu system (akin to the dreaded telephone services; press 1 for …). No! Because if we do that we are just providing off-the-shelf all over again: simply reproducing options based on what we already produce in the workshop (or back-office), we build up a set of stock answers that potentially meet no-one’s needs.

Instead we have to do quite the opposite. We need to design processes to be flexible to meet the needs of users/customers at the point of demand. If we do that then our services will respond to them at the point of need and will deliver against their requirements. Services will then be perceived as excellent by the individuals who matter – the people that use them!

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