Posts Tagged ‘Problem Solving’

The Cliche of ‘Yesterday’

Thursday, January 12th, 2012

Not long ago, I observed a scene in a retail store where a manager requested something from a busy employee. This request was obviously unexpected. An ambush of sorts. The employee was doing something else at the time. We have all been part of a scene like this, in one role or the other.

“And when do you need this done?” sighed the already-dubious employee.

“Yesterday!” said the manager, pivoting abruptly and walking away.

The employee shook her head almost imperceptibly and said to no one in particular, “What am I supposed to do with that?”

Exactly.

‘Yesterday’ is not an answer. It’s an attitude.  And a cliche on top of it. The ‘I need it yesterday’ attitude says to the employee:

“You are now guaranteed to fail. I’m going to be unhappy with you no matter what. You should have thought of this yourself. Do I have to think of everything?” That’s  lot of attitude for one word.

And like the employee said, what is a person supposed to do with it?

Give the people in your scenes information they can put to use! Information that will shed light and bring clarity to the problem at hand. Don’t muck up the scene with your imperious attitude and your unrealistic expectations.

Richard Saul Wurman holds court at USC school of Architecture, 01.10.12

Richard Saul Wurman holds court at USC school of Architecture, 01.10.12

On Tuesday, I went to see Richard Saul Wurman speak to an audience of architecture students and faculty at USC. Afterward he held court outside the classroom for half a dozen students who stayed around and asked him questions. One student asked, “What do you think of urban planning?”

Wurman sized up the student for half a beat then shook his head. “That’s a terrible question,” he scolded. (He pulls no punches.) “It’s too general, too broad. How can I even begin to answer it? It’s like asking a doctor what he or she thinks of medicine, or asking an oceanographer what he or she thinks of water!”

See, there’s learning in the ‘Yesterday’ scene for both players. The employee had an attitude, too. “When do you need this done?” made scheduling the task the manager’s problem. It was therefore not a very useful response to the manager’s request.

Instead of a question that made scheduling the task the manager’s problem (and setting herself up to be a victim) a question or statement that engaged the manager in the scheduling process would have been better:

“I’ve got five to-do’s on my list ahead of your request. Help me prioritize.”

“I can have it done in 48 hours.”

“Rate the urgency from 1 to 5, with 5 being an emergency where I have to drop everything and do it now.”

Whatever you do, whatever role you’re playing, give your scene partners information they can act on, not an attitude that makes it more difficult or even impossible for them to solve the problem of the scene.

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Posted in Additions and Edits, Agreement Principle, Communication, Dialogue, Leadership, Problem Solving, Roles, Scenes | No Comments »

The Brown M&Ms Game

Saturday, July 30th, 2011

EddieVanHalenM&M1Van Halen famously had an item in their concert contracts that required brown M&Ms removed from the rest of the M&Ms in their dressing room and backstage.  “No brown M&Ms’ has been often re-interpreted by pop psychology as narcissistic indulgence or obsessive control. It is remembered as a demand associated with rockstar vanity.

In reality, it was no such thing.

In reality, as David Lee Roth describes in his 1998 autobiography Crazy from the Heat (first edition paperback selling  for $123.41 on Amazon?!), and Ira Glass documented in a story that first aired July 24, 2009, on This American Life, the fine print about the M&Ms was a game designed by Van Halen  to make sure every part of its contract was read and observed by the local promoter and crew, especially the details of stage and stadium safety. Early in the stadium concert era of the 1970s, there was a lot of variance in stadium electrical systems and construction, and the supergroup, who traveled with 9 semi-trailers of equipment, wanted to make certain their concerns about safety were addressed with the same focus and attention to detail that goes into separating the brown M&Ms from the rest.

In the words of Jeff Bartsch on Editmentor.com:

“If the band rolled up to the next venue and found brown M&Ms in the backstage candy bowl, they immediately demanded a full line-item review of the entire rider contract.  Eddie Van Halen specifically buried the M&M Clause, because concert promoters who don’t pay attention to one part of a contract usually don’t pay attention to the rest of it, and resulting technical issues could be disastrous, even deadly.”

In a 2010 Fast Company article, the Heath Bros. describe the brown M&Ms as a ‘canary in a coal mine.’ They interpret it as a kind of red flag used by David Lee Roth to catch careless oversights of details in their contract.

We see it as a game.

The brown M&Ms were the anomaly that defined a game, a game whose objective was to eliminate brown M&Ms, and whose result was safety.

Note that there’s a big difference between the objective of a game and the results achieved by playing it! For example, the objective of chess is to checkmate the opponent’s king. The results of playing it are strategies and counter-strategies, study, focus and the testing and extension of one’s abilities.

A canary in a coal mine doesn’t really define a game, because the results are, for the most part, binary. The canary lives, or the canary dies. The canary in the coal mine tests only one thing—the presence of lethal gas. No fresh dialogue results from it, no unexpected discoveries, the processes following either outcome have already been scripted. The Heaths’ analogy is weak, because a productive game like ‘Brown M&Ms’ has a nearly infinite number of possible outcomes.

Variations of this game can work for any team involved in QA, Safety, Compliance, Supply Chain, Facilities Management, Engineering, etc., where there’s little or no tolerance for error. It’s not a game you can play too often. Played too often, your ‘brown M&Ms’ will no longer be an anomaly, and the game will lose its bite.

The advantage of playing a game like this is that it brings every imaginable detail into play, not just those you and your legal team can stipulate in a contract or manual. When you call attention to the ‘brown M&Ms,’ you initiate a dialogue about the details of your working relationship that holds far more possibilities for problem-solving in real time than the necessary, but inevitably frozen-in-time terms of a contract.

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Posted in Dialogue, Focus, Games, Initiations, Objectives, Problem Solving, Relationships | 1 Comment »

Complex vs. Simple, Cont’d

Tuesday, June 28th, 2011

Riffing on yesterday’s theme of ‘Complex vs. Simple Process,’ take a look at the COIN (Counter-Insurgency) Plan drawn up by the U.S. Military command for its Afghanistan campaign…266458_10150253355164025_717704024_7179935_4628835_o

Looks like the narrative for Prince Harry’s outfit at the Royal Wedding, doesn’t it?

Now take a look at the plan Herb Kelleher, the founder of Southwest Airlines, drew up for how Southwest was going to enter the airline business 40 years ago, in 1971…SouthwestNapkin1Looks like the design for Pippa Middleton’s outfit at the Royal Wedding. Simple. Elegant. Easy to understand. Ultimately, appreciated by all. Beneath this design, of course, was a lot of complexity–but the business problem, as Herb Kelleher saw it, was as simple as how to build a triangle.

Kelleher continued this tradition of drawing up Southwest’s year-to-year strategies on a napkin over a lunch with his key executives. This structure allowed the company’s employees to improvise solutions to every problem they encountered.

The U.S. Military command, by comparison, finds itself in the business of trying to tie a bow–or create any recognizable design for that matter–out of all those threads.

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Posted in Communication, Issues, Leadership, Narrative, Problem Solving | No Comments »

Poor Game, Rich Game

Thursday, June 23rd, 2011

WeMakePlay1This morning at breakfast, Barb Groth, founder of the ultra-good experiential design company, Big Buddha Baba, told me a story: A few years ago, a client of hers called a meeting, the purpose of which was to cut twenty thousand dollars out of a budget for a project that was nearing completion, when resources were tight. Barb got to the meeting, looked at the eight or so executives in the room and said, “Let’s end the meeting now. That’ll save, what?, ten or fifteen thousand dollars?  Then cancel the next meeting. There, we saved twenty thousand dollars.”

I love this story because it shows how what stifles our ability to solve a problem is less often about the nature or scope of the problem than it is about the quality of the problem-solving process.

Too often, we invest in poor communication practices and processes, characterized by unproductive games like ‘Eight Axes, One Budget,’ that no one enjoys playing, never mind that they are not designed to solve our particular problem in the first place. I call these poor games. ‘Poor’ because they don’t have much ‘play’ in them, either in the sense that they are a happy experience, or that they are flexible. No, they’re grim and rigid, like the dead. Their ROI is poor because the probability of getting to a solution quickly is low. Because they frequently lack focus and energy, they waste time.

GC_Objective1There are thousands of characteristics of poor games, and thousands of poor games played in business every second of every working day. ‘Reading Your PowerPoint Deck to Your Audience’ is a poor game. ‘Kissing Ass’ is almost always a poor game. The ‘Eight Axes, One Budget’ game Barb Groth walked into was a poor game. She saw it, and suggested an adjustment. That’s what gamechangers do.

All it took for her to transform the game was changing its objective–from ‘Cut $20K’ to ‘Save $20K.’ One word. A tiny shift in perspective on the problem. Suddenly, the opinionating, negotiating, status-seeking, bragging, positioning, arguing, joking, backstabbing, politicking, gossiping and justifying that plague poor games, were not getting in the way of solving the problem. The new game got played, the problem solved, in the time it takes to Rochambeau.

Barb’s gamechange freed time that could be better invested in activities with more business upside, or in personal time. Any game that lets you swap an hour of arguing about whose budget gets cut for an hour playing with your kids or helping them with their homework?  That’s a rich game.

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Posted in Communication, Creativity, Focus, Games, Leadership, Objectives, Problem Solving | No Comments »

Kroyering

Tuesday, November 30th, 2010

Our friend, @InvisibleWork a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy and UC-Irvine’s MBA school, tweeted last week to ask my definition of creativity.  I responded:  “the systematic elimination of everything not conducive to creativity.”

She tweeted back: “<= like this; like going through the process from the other end.”

Bill Kroyer

Bill Kroyer

The animation director Bill Kroyer taught me this game, which I call Kroyering.  It goes like this: To solve a problem look 180 degrees away from the problem. If you can define the problem’s opposite, you will have targeted the problem with just as much accuracy as if you were confronting it head-on.  This ‘exploration of opposites’ makes Kroyering a useful process, especially when you need to come up with an original solution, a creative breakthrough.  Why is this a cool tool?  Three reasons:

First, it gets out of creativity’s way. Like everything that’s natural in the world, creativity wants to happen.  Left to its own devices, it will happen.  If we clear out what gets in its way, creativity will express itself like a plant will find the sun. As Viola Spolin said, “Act on environment, and environment will act on you.”

Second, because a breakthrough is, by definition, something that didn’t exist before, it is not really possible to say what creativity is, or what form it will take, until it actually happens.  It is often more efficient to target what creativity is not.  For this reason, Kroyering offers a disciplined and cost-effective path to innovation.

Third, Kroyering makes institutional memory a positive force instead of an impediment, as it often is (At Disney, where I worked for many years,  the best way to stop any idea dead in its tracks was to say anything that began with, “Well, what Walt would have done…”  It’s why John Lasseter left Disney and ended up with Pixar.  Too many people at the time were telling him what Walt would (or wouldn’t) have done.)  A study by Dusya Vera and Mary Crossan (Organization Science, Vol. 16, May-June 2005, pp. 203-224) reveals that the best problem-solvers in an organization are those with the longest institutional memories, because they are more likely to disregard or subvert institutional memory to solve a problem. In other words, people with long institutional memories are in the best position to see and understand that a system that created a problem cannot be the same one that solves it.  Kroyering helps you identify what you can do differently by getting you out of the attic of your company’s history and into emptier space, where there’s room to expand your vision.

Here are a few qualities that, in my experience, are not conducive to creativity and can be eliminated from your working environment with help from the Kroyering Game:

Randomness; free association; outside-the-box thinking. Creativity craves intent, specificity and structure. Don’t try to get outside the box. Quantum physics tells us that there’s unlimited energy stored inside whatever box we’re in. Or…get yourself inside a different box!

Rigidity, dogma. Whatever creativity is, it’s the opposite of frozen, stuck in place, or with one unyielding position.

Aggression, destruction, violence. The harder you look for it, the harder it is to find.  The next new thing has to be teased and seduced from wherever it’s hiding.  Creativity does not send out invitations, but if we throw a party, Creativity is almost sure to come.  Creativity can’t resist a good party.  Just know that when the fighting starts, and well before the cops arrive, Creativity will be outta there.

Divergence. It is not the separating but the joining of ideas and people that results in innovation.

Dignity, manners. Creativity is impudent. It can be wildly messy. It’s like the weather that way.  Dress appropriately.

Hollowness, heartlessness, lifelessness, cold bloodedness. Sssss.

Eliminating these and other ‘non-conducive’ elements from your environment will help your creativity flow.  When you’re stuck for an idea, your process bogs down, or you can’t seem to get to the heart of a problem, try Kroyering.

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Posted in Character, Creativity, Environment, Focus, Games, Innovation | No Comments »

To Find Solutions, Expand Environment

Tuesday, March 16th, 2010

W.E O'NeilMy longtime friend, Gary Stratman, an engineer for W. E. O’Neil Construction, and I got together in Chicago on Saturday for a beer at a bar near Soldier Field.  Rich Erickson, the President of W. E. O’Neil, was there, too, and joined our conversation, and at a certain point, Rich and I found ourselves explaining to Gary the value of improvisation in solving technical problems.  Rich came up with this excellent example of how improvisation solved a construction problem:

Several years ago, O’Neil had a job demolishing and re-constructing the interior of a large building outside Chicago.  While doing the demolition work, they discovered that ground under the building was contaminated.  Before they could re-build, they’d have to de-contaminate the soil.  This would result in a delay of 3 months, pushing the work into the winter, and a budget overage of $150,000.  The client balked.  The $150K was not in its budget for the demolish/re-build.  O’Neil and the client were at odds, facing what seemed guaranteed to become a no-win scenario, until Rich posed this question:  “If the soil hadn’t been contaminated and the job were to be completed on the original estimated date, what would your winter heating bill for the building have been for the three months we’re going to be delayed?”

The answer to the question?  $150,000.   When the environment in which the problem took place was expanded to include not just the foundation but the entire building, and was not fixed in time but spanning a three-month period in the life of the building, the money was suddenly available.  The client with no qualms, paid the overage out of its building maintenance budget.

Myopia is the enemy.   To shed new light on a problem, expand the environment in which you’re looking at it.  Remember that the problem isn’t the broken wing, the problem is that the bird cannot fly.BirdSky1

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Posted in Agreement Principle, Problem Solving | No Comments »

Power and Powerlessness

Friday, March 5th, 2010

TheNewHow1This is from a blog post by our friend, Nilofer Merchant, author of the new book The New How: Creating Business Solutions Through Collaborative Strategy:

The challenge with people feeling powerless is this: we don’t see how we can contribute to solve problems. We believe it is “someone else’s” to own rather than something any of us can contribute to. Powerlessness leads to apathy on global issues and disdain on local issues.

Now check out this from Mick Napier’s classic book, Improvise:  Scene from the Inside Out:

Two people…staring at each other and wondering who’s going to make the first move.  Two people being nice to each other and allowing the other to start doing something.  In that short amount of time, two humans have created themselves as powerless…Who has time?  The audience is waiting.  They don’t care about your support.  They care about what you do.  What you do now.

These two statements, made miles and years apart, reflect the timelessness of the concept:  Do something!  Participate!  Add to the conversation!  When you’re just getting started don’t worry about what the solution will be, or where the scene will take you.  No one knows, and your audience doesn’t care.  The most important thing is to bring to the scene whatever you’ve got.

The saying in improvisation is ‘take care of yourself first.’  This is not the same as being selfish.  It is, rather, the recognition that making the first move, even if we are not always the one to make it, is always our responsibility.

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Posted in Agreement Principle, Communication, Dialogue, Entrepreneurship, Initiations, Innovation, Leadership, Relationships | 1 Comment »

Over Under Sideways Down

Tuesday, February 23rd, 2010

One of the characteristics of networks is their flexibility. What our communication channels looked like yesterday may not be what they look like today. This, of course, can be an asset or a liability. The net that allows us to build new relationships, discover markets and expand our potential for taking productive action is the same one that swallows channels and markets like a singularity sucking down solar systems in nanoseconds.  The global financial system, guaranteed, is right now teetering on the edge of such a debt-and-greed-spun vortex.  Call it The Bank Hole.

TheBankHole1In our crazy race to escape these kinds of vortexes, we can turn direction-blind.  We pick a course of action, or someone picks a course for us, and in our all-out effort to escape a certain fate, we go heads down as hard as we can for as long as we can in that direction, like barn-sour horses galloping toward a distant barn.  A strategy, as Umair Haque points out in his latest HBR post, can be just as bad as a locked-in direction, because it can confine or limit one’s options instead of liberating them.

What Haque advocates, and what we could not agree with more, is adopting a set of behaviors (he calls these behaviors ‘Wisdom’) that foster liberation of the ideas and the ethical actions that can deliver us from the Goldman-Sachs Singularity, and whatever else sucks.  These behaviors have no time frame, because they are timeless.  They cannot be quantified, because they are potentially limitless in number.

One of these behaviors (me, adding to Haque’s list) is to Envision.   And by that I don’t mean Ayn Rand’s old Burt Lancaster-as-One-Of-A-Kind-Genius concept of vision but what I call ‘Viola Vision’, which consists of ’seeing and sharing what we see.’  This kind of envisioning expands our horizons, and gives us infinitely more options for escaping what sucks.  So in your quest for solutions, don’t forget to:

Look over. It’s how you get perspective on a problem.

Look under. Play with the dynamic of concealment and revelation.  Respect roots.  Dig deep.

Look sideways. My friend, the animation director John Musker, talks about stories as ‘taking an unexpected left turn.’  A sideways move can shake up your narrative in a way that keeps you on your toes and your audience engaged.

Look down. Who needs a helping hand?  Some days, this the only question worth answering.

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Posted in Communication, Entrepreneurship, Environment, Fundamentals, Games, Innovation, Issues, Leadership, Movement, Narrative, Networked World, Relationships, Scenes | 2 Comments »

The Buck Starts Here

Thursday, October 8th, 2009

The energy generated by the Creativity in Business Conference in Washington D.C. on Oct. 4 was, and continues to be, exhilarating. The conference was populated by people who are inquisitive, open to learning, and restless about solving problems of all kinds.  It almost doesn’t matter what the problem is, if there’s a problem, these folks are interested in contributing to its solution.

CIBC_MichelleJames1I got to the location of the conference, Boston University’s Center for Digital Imaging Arts in Georgetown, at about 10:30 Sunday morning, in time to sit in on the last third of Paul Scheele’s session. When I got there, five participants were on stage wearing masks and funny hats and were juxtaposed with one another in interesting ways. I had fun playing catch-up, and trying to figure out what the scene was about. (It was about tapping into the unconscious mind for creative inspiration–and how to hold onto that, both individually and organizationally.)

I attended Dr. Win Wenger’s session on creative problem solving. He gave us a problem-solving exercise my friend Rasul Sha’ir and I did together. What the exercise revealed to Rasul and me is that there is a transition that takes place in your process if you ‘peel open’ a problem via relentless answering of a simple question like “How can I build strategic partnerships for my brand? ” In Dr. Wenger’s exercise, we spent 11 minutes answering the same question non-stop. It works! Rasul and I both experienced a transition in the way we were answering our questions.  Our answers went from obvious and surfacey to unexpected and insightful.   This occurred, for both of us, between 6 and 7 minutes into the exercise. We went from addressing what was outside of us, what we had little control over, for example the root causes of the problem, to answers that were more about what was within us, what we personally could do to help solve the problem.  The problem is without. The solution is within.

Before the plenary session I visited briefly with Dr. Wenger.   His name tag said “Win Win Win”. It was like getting to sit down with one of Disney’s Nine Old Men of animation, because the dude is a classic. He is so insightful, and has such a strong desire to be of service by helping people solve problems, particularly in the realm of sustainability, it was palpable, and I hope some of it rubbed off on me.

The event’s organizer, Michelle James of the Center for Creative Emergence, and I co-hosted the plenary session, which was attended by a majority of the 150 people at the Conference.  I talked a lot. Maybe I shouldn’t have, but I was feeling it, and I expressed some things pretty well, I think. I reminded the audience that for many people in business, creativity is the enemy. I spoke about what we can do to help make creativity more accessible to individuals and teams who spend most of their time in their left brains.  For one thing, we can point out how a creative move can always be a very short step from the status quo.  It does not have to be a quantum leap or a masterstroke or a gamechanger.

MichaelMargolis1

Those attributes can only be ascribed after the fact, anyway.  Creativity does not have to be outside any box.  It does not have to go barefoot or bring its dog to work or inhabit a workstation lined with toy robots .  Creativity is always present and accessible, and always right next to our self-conscious selves.  As musicians say, there’s always a good note right next to a bad one.

I attended Michael Margolis’ session on authentic storytelling. This is a subject of which I never tire, and it is inspiring to be in a workshop with someone like Michael, who brings a sense of excitement and discovery to the subject. In one of the exercises, Frank Gruber and Jen Consalvo, who have a start-up called ThankfulFor, and I brainstormed ideas for their brand narrative. Not only did we come up with some fresh takes, Jen and I discovered we have a mutual friend in Jim Crosby.  I texted Mr. Jim to that effect, and have since heard that he and Jen reconnected after a couple years of not being in touch.   I’m ThankfulFor that.

Then came the GameChangers Workshop. Here’s what one of the attendees, Jennifer Lee, founder of Artizen Coaching in San Francisco, said about it:

Mike gave some great examples of companies who use improvisation principles to enhance their business success and facilitated exercises to help us embody the learning:

* Companies tend to focus on the successful outcome. They try to re-create the next innovative product/outcome but fail because they really should’ve tried to institutionalize the successful process. The game is the process.
* Mike defines games as engines for exploring the theme of your narrative. They help create focus and discipline and they energize and invite team members to perform. Good games attract the good players.
* He had us play with the improvisation principles directly by inviting us to co-create a message around a random thing. It was amazing to see what our group came up with to market cookware. It was even more fun to get up in front of the room and “perform” it!
* Improvisation asks us to be very present with each other and to look for what we can build on. What a great way to leverage creativity in the workplace.

Thanks, Jenn, thanks Michelle and everyone at the Conference. Even if we didn’t get a chance to meet personally, we are now only a degree away.

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Posted in Coaching, Creativity, Education, Entrepreneurship, Games, Issues, Narrative, Uncategorized | 3 Comments »

What Viola Said

Friday, May 16th, 2008

Spolin2Viola Spolin is the godmother of modern improv. Her landmark development — with her mentor, Neva Boyd — of ‘theater games’ during the height of the Great Depression in the 1930s laid the foundation for everything that has happened with improvisation in the 80+ years since, including the theories and practices of GameChangers.

It’s by a quirk of genetics that we have come to associate improv so strongly with comedy. Spolin’s son, Paul Sills, introduced her techniques to Second City, which he co-founded with Bernie Sahlins in 1957. At its roots, however, improvisation is still about what Spolin created — a technique for building environments that foster learning and communication, that hold the potential for what she called ’spontaneous explosions’ of creativity. (more…)

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Posted in Fundamentals | 1 Comment »