Posts Tagged ‘leadership’
A Playful Attitude Makes Life Easier
News flash: life ain’t easy. I used to hear that being an adult wasn’t easy, but with the piles of homework and outside activities heaped on kids these days it’s fair to apply the statement to everyone. George Carlin opined that every kid’s daily schedule should include a couple of hours staring out the window — I think that’s a terrific idea.
Having time to yourself gives you the freedom to think about whatever comes to mind and combine ideas in new ways. In other words, to play. This attitude can become a habit, letting you see the unconventional and humorous sides of issues even though you take them seriously.
I discovered a terrific example of this approach in the description of the Wharton School of Economics’s course An Introduction to Operations Management on Coursera.org. The FAQ list contains this bit of whimsy:
What is the coolest thing I’ll learn if I take this class?
You will look at the world with different eyes – you will start to detect bottlenecks, identify productivity wastes, and come up with ideas to improve business processes. A known side effect of these skills is that you might drive friends, family, or co-workers crazy when you point to their improvement opportunities…
The descriptions for the other three Wharton classes contain similar humorous elements. This approach should appeal to casual learners the Wharton School wants to engage with (it certainly caught my attention) and makes the prospect of taking a MOOC offered by a prestigious MBA program a little less imposing. I like their thinking and can’t wait to get started.
Improv, Business, and Emergent Behavior
One of the joys of improv is not knowing exactly what will happen, but improv isn’t unique in that respect. I didn’t get a script when I woke up this morning and I’m guessing you didn’t, either.
What I did have in place when I woke up was a context. I’m in a society with rules, both internally and externally imposed, that guide my behavior. I also interact with other individuals. Mathematicians and computer scientists study simple versions of these interactions using models such as John Conway’s Game of Life. The Game of Life is a model based on a grid of cells. Some of the cells are turned on and others are turned off. At the beginning of a turn, each cell compares its state to its neighbors’ states and turns on, turns off, or remains the same based on a set of rules all cells have in common.
If you follow the earlier link to the Game of Life Wikipedia page, you’ll see that interesting behaviors emerge from various Game of Life starting configurations. The phenomena are interesting enough for researchers to create a new field of inquiry, complex systems science. According to Dr. Melanie Mitchell of Portland State University and the Santa Fe Institute, complex systems is:
…an interdisciplinary field of research that seeks to explain how large numbers of relatively simple entities organize themselves, without the benefit of any central controller, into a collective whole that creates patterns, uses information, and, in some cases, evolves and learns.
— Melanie Mitchell, Complexity: A Guided Tour
Complex systems is new and, while it’s provided some interesting insights into some systemic behaviors, it hasn’t resulted in models that predict how consumers or businesses will interact in an environment (e.g., the internet) or with a product. The good news is that you can do field experiments and see what behaviors emerge. Some marketers use the “cool kids” strategy, where they make a few dozen units of a new product and give it to the cool kids in a high school to see what they do with it. As William Gibson noted in “Burning Chrome”, a short story first published in the 1982 collection Hackers, “the street finds its own uses for things”.
A similar rule applies to existing products. If your bosses panic when customers use a product in unintended ways, call a meeting, brew some herbal tea, and figure out how to take advantage of the gift you’ve received. You’re not wrong or stupid for not having foreseen every possible way your products could be used, but you are both of those things if you let your ego get in the way of capitalizing on what your customers tell you they want.
Always Be Ready
Performers should always be ready to go. If another group doesn’t show up or someone gets sick, you can step in.
I did the regular show with the ComedySportz Portland group last night, during which our referee hyped an after hours show by another group. Unfortunately, that group had cancelled their show, but the message didn’t get to anyone in the show that night. We had a significant portion of the regular crowd stay for the after hours show, but there was no one there to do it.
Most of the players in the ComedySportz show had had long days, but they were willing to hang around and do a show for the folks who stayed. I always carry the materials I need to do Magic of the Mind (and my wife’s out of town visiting family), so I volunteered to do the after hours. Part of the team stayed to do a quick Q&A session with the fans while I set up, but after those five minutes it was business as usual. Well, as usual as it can be when you’re doing a show in a t-shirt and cargo shorts.
As an aside, I actually have two emergency Magic of the Mind kits: one in my ComedySportz bag and another, more complete set in the trunk of my car.
If you’re a speaker, you should always have a digital copy of your slide deck with you in case a scheduled speaker isn’t able to go on. I recommend preparing three versions of your talk: 50-minute, 25-minute, and 5-minute. The long version works for conference presentations, the middle for a half-slot, and the short version as program filler or for a quick presentation during a break. You can use the Ignite conference series model to create your 5-minute piece. Ignite presentations consist of 20 slides displayed for 15 seconds each. The slides are on auto-advance, so the presentation lasts exactly five minutes. The format requires some extra rehearsal, but it’s great for boiling your presentation down to its essential elements.
If you have a few minutes of down time in an airport, on a plane, or in your hotel room, take a few minutes to flip through your slides and notes to review your talking points. Stepping up to help a meeting organizer and delivering a polished, professional presentation is good for everyone and can lead to future speaking opportunities.
You Might Not Have a Book in You…Yet
A book with your name on the cover is a badge of honor. Many individuals find writing anything longer than an e-mail too painful to contemplate, with good reason: writing your first book-length manuscript is hard.
I’m preparing for some upcoming speaking engagements, so I took the time to re-read Million Dollar Speaking by Alan Weiss. Weiss has made a very (very, very) good living as a speaker and trainer and came highly recommended from a friend who makes a very (very) good living as an entertainer on the college and corporate circuits. In his book, Weiss explodes the myth that says “if you have a speech, you have a book”:
This should be restated as follows: if you have a speech, you have an excruciatingly tiny book. Speaking and writing are discrete skills, sometimes synergistic but not at all equal. Don’t give the published work short shrift: books require extensive research; tight, Jesuit-like logic; brilliant metaphors; and immaculate construction. If that sounds like it doesn’t resemble a lot of books out there, that’s because most books are not very good.
Improspectives runs 126 small-format pages and, according to the word count feature in Microsoft Word, contains 28,807 words. Most business books are 250 pages in length; at 350 words per page, you’re looking at 87,500 words. That’s a lot of information. Consider this: if you speak for an hour at a rate of 150 words per minute, you will have spoken 9,000 words. The spoken word and, by extension, video, are low bandwidth when you’re not presenting graphical content. it’s easier for you to talk for an hour than to write 9,000 words and, yes, video can be more fun to watch (though Weiss gives the example of a speaker whose video showed him writing on an easel pad), but you’re trading your convenience for the amount of information you deliver to your audience.
I dislike giving bad reviews to books, but I did want to give a real-life example of how having a speech or, in this case, a workshop doesn’t mean you have a book. Red Thread Thinking, by Debra Kaye (with Karen Kelly) describes Kaye’s “red thread” approach to finding connections between ideas for profitable innovation. I’ve been in and led enough corporate training sessions to see the value in her approach and believe her workshops would be valuable to many businesses. Unfortunately, so much of the good that comes out a workshop is unspoken and difficult to quantify. Many workshop leaders walk into the room with at most five or six pieces of paper with their outline and rely on the participants to provide the fuel for the day. Even success stories, if you can share them because of confidentiality concerns, can get repetitive when they rely on the same methods.
That’s where Karen Kelly comes in. I don’t know for sure, but I would guess the main author, Debra Kaye, had difficulty generating a manuscript that met the 250-page ideal for business books. The “with” credit on a book indicates the secondary author took on a significant role, which in this case meant lengthening the book by pumping the main author for more talking points, stories, and supporting research. Using that additional input, the professional book doctor can remix material, restating it in slightly different ways to change the emphasis and illustrating the points with new examples. If you add in a prologue and appendices and trim the target page count a bit, you reduce your writing burden from 87,500 words to around 70,000.
Once the first draft is in place, the developmental editor flags obvious repetitions and incongruent material so the “with” author can adjust the manuscript as needed. As an experienced author, I can see where Karen Kelly helped the Red Thread Thinking manuscript along. I think she did a great job, both due to her professional skills and because Debra Kaye’s basic ideas are sound.
My advice to anyone who wants to create intellectual property to support your work and sell in the back of the room? Don’t be afraid to write a series of short pieces at first. A 10-page white paper or 30-minute podcast is far better than a book that’s 90% fluff. Build your material gradually and, when you have enough of it for the type of book you want, bring it together into a coherent whole.
Gamification: Ethics, Disney, and Playbor
It’s always seemed somewhat ironic that discussions of most systems, from gamification to genetic modification, always leave the issue of ethics until near the end. Of course, you can’t discuss the ethics of something until you have a clear idea of what it is you’re examining, so it might be a necessary evil.
In For the Win, Wharton business school professors Kevin Werbach and Dan Hunter (and Werbach in his Gamification course on Coursera) examine the ethics of gamification. The childhood saying is that anything’s fun until someone loses an eye, but gamification can have a manipulative side. Werbach and Hunter refer to the practice of using gamification to amplify work effort as playbor, a terrific term that captures the essence of their critique.
One example Werbach mentions in both the book and the course is Disney’s use of a leaderboard to display performance statistics for workers in their laundry facilities. One of the basic tenets of business is that “if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it”, but there’s a real question as to when you cross the line from performance measurement to manipulation. When I had a summer job with a telemarketing firm back in the 1980s, did my target call, contact, and sale numbers amount to manipulation? How about sales quotas for bonuses? Or entering in at least a certain number of books per hour when I took a temp job helping a large independent bookstore digitize their inventory? In neither case was I compared directly to other employees (I was the only salesperson at a very small company), so it probably wasn’t an example of gamification, though I was aware of my performance in relation to my targets.
Ethics is always a tricky subject. In many cases, workplace treatment comes down to what can be negotiated between workers and management, either through union representatives or by workers voting with their feet. In a down economy, many workers are willing to accept conditions they wouldn’t consider in better times. There have been several articles on conditions in Amazon warehouses as well as a recent report on what might be an Amazon warehouse, that remind us how circumstances can give employers leverage over their employees.
Gamification: Devising Activity Cycles
My previous set of posts described elements of gamification (such as meaningful choices and conflict) and how to incorporate them into business and improv. Kevin Werbach and his coauthor Dan Hunter also identify six steps to gamification (For the Win, p. 86), which I think provide an excellent framework for business and theatrical endeavors. I just examined how you can describe your players using personas. In this post, I’ll talk about devising activity cycles.
As a quick review, the authors’ six D’s are:
- Define business objectives
- Delineate target behaviors
- Describe your players
- Devise activity cycles
- Don’t forget the fun!
- Deploy the appropriate tools
In a gamification context, activity cycles are the actions you want your players (teammates, customers, co-workers, etc.) to take. You can think of activity cycles as patterns of interaction with your site that represent a task or series of tasks taken to completion. As an example, consider how you check in at sites on FourSquare. Your activity cycle involves pulling up the app on your phone, having it sense your location, and giving it permission to check you in at that location. You can also earn badges, receive special offers, and be named Mayor of a location by checking in there more than everyone else.
Some sites have longer activity cycles. TeamSnap offers a website where you can track your sports teams’ rosters, schedule practices, track attendance, and record game results. You can even assign team members (or their parents) tasks such as bringing snacks to the game. TeamSnap’s also useful for improv groups who want to track practices, send messages, and schedule shows. (Full disclosure: I’m good friends with several TeamSnap executives and my main improv group, ComedySportz Portland, uses their site to track our activities.)
Businesses have activity cycles in all aspects of their operations. Client generation, sales tracking, and customer service all lend themselves to gamification. In some sense, businesses that track sales performance and use other measures to rank their employees already use elements of gamification, but many times those scenarios take on the tenor of the “motivational speech” Alec Baldwin’s character Blake delivers at the start of a monthly sales contest in the film version of Glengarry Glen Ross. In that contest, first place is a Cadillac El Dorado, second place is a set of steak knives, and third place is “You’re fired.”
Some bosses thrive on intimidation and insult, but that approach goes against the spirit of gamification. If you want to gamify successfully, you can’t forget the fun.
Improspectives 
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