Machines & Architecture

Let’s start with a historical narrative about a cartoonist names Rube Goldberg. Mr. Goldberg popularized an entertaining way to exhibit overly complex contraptions designed to perform simple tasks in very convoluted and indirect ways. He was inclined to make satirical commentary on modern technology.

Most of us have seen versions and examples of “Rube Goldberg Machines” online, or in less common instances, in person. I recently stood in the baggage claim area of an airport that had an 8-foot-high and 4-foot-wide enclosed rectangular glass box standing up on end, containing a Rube Goldberg Machine. It was fascinating to watch.

These contraptions can seem chaotic and random but also rhythmic and entrancing at the same time. These “machines” generally operate on a series of trigged chain reactions making use of basic machine operations such as levers, pulley, inclined panes, wheels an axels, wedges, and screws. Each operation transferring energy to complete a goal of some kind. Usually mechanical, such as delivering a series of colored balls through a sequence of movements that can go in any direction, up, down, or sideways.

There are three core characteristics of a Rube Goldberg Machine:

1.    Simple tasks completed through a complicated sequence of events or actions.

2.    Every action triggers the next action like dominos falling in interconnected fashion until the end of the simple task.

3.    Built for amusement, highlighting the art and beauty of ingenuity and the absurdity of unnecessary complexity.

The construction of a Rube Goldberg machine requires you start with the desired end or outcome that you want to achieve and work backwards through all the steps that are required actions. When set in motion at the beginning, each action will trigger one after the other in reverse order. Often made of a variety of materials, a series of chain reactions are built. Adjustments are often required, and it takes trial and error to configure accurately and fine tune the process from beginning to end.

Here comes the application segment of this conversation. If you are standing outside the glass box of your organization, staring at the “machinery” inside, what do you see? What sequence of events have been designed and put in place using the basics of organizational machinery? Where does it start, end, and what outcomes does it generate? Unlike levers and pulleys that will perform the same exact actions millions of times in the exact same way, people machinery in organizations is much more variable, or I’d say, almost always variable. This becomes a challenge when we place a layer of mechanical and repeatable factory thinking over human behaviors. It makes for a fascinating space to study and lead but be prepared for some disappointment and confusion when our trust in templates, SOP’s, and control mechanisms like “management” and “accountability” fail to deliver the expected outcomes.

Organizations are fundamentally a grouping of people gathered around a vision, mission, and a product of some kind. The way in which those attributes are activated will be highly varied. If you open three different chocolate chip cookie companies in three different cities, they would all take on vastly different ways of working, communicating, and functioning. They all make cookies but that might be the extent of common ground. Many different parts are connected to serve a singular value, benefit, or outcome via varied types of functions and mechanisms. It’s common that individual mechanisms take on a centralist view, meaning that each part sees itself as the most important part or central piece of value but fails to properly perceive the interdependencies on the mechanisms that come before or after it.

Understanding how to orchestrate the diversity and variance of people inside organizations requires an architecture to move from unmanageably complex to effectively simple. The standard form of mechanisms like templates, processes, and standard are tools to help bring order like the physics of levers, pulleys, and wheels but the presence of humans in the equation requires something opposite of a Rube Goldberg Machine. Where the Rube Goldberg Machine takes something simple and make it complex, people architecture serves to take the complexity of people and orchestrate it to simplicity. Without people architecture, your organization can look like a Rube Goldberg Machine that keeps looping through activities repeatedly without much forward movement or the right outcomes.

The nature of machines is to repeat actions to the same outcomes, and they are static by design. In organizations, we want repeat actions but there is always a need for dynamic change to satisfy always moving outcome targets and orchestrate diversity and variation. If you are trying to grow, transform, or create meaningful change, as rewarding as a Rube Goldberg Machine can be to watch, that approach will keep your organization in a box of repeating actions but won’t be the impact and value to others you need it to be. Is their satirical humor in most organizations today? Absolutely! It’s only human, but people architecture can give you that ability organizationally to move beyond the glass box and create your own symphony of actions that move you to the future you really want and need.

Practice, Rehearsal, and “The Show”

If you have participated in any kind of team sport, drama production, music concert, or just about any social activity, you are likely familiar with some core concepts.  The first is “practicing” which is typically a solo or individual effort to put in the reps for exercising your individual part or role in a larger group event. Afte that it progresses to bringing that solo work and effort to join forces with a larger incorporated practice or rehearsal where you run all the parts together to become performant as a larger unit consisting of many parts. Once that activity is smoothed out you are ready for the final step of performing in whatever final “show” the desired format is in, whether a game, a play production, playing or singing in a concert or coordinating for pulling together the neighborhood block party.

Having a checklist of catering items to pick up does not get the block party started any more than throwing pitches in your backyard gets you into the game. It’s easy to want development and performance be some version of “just add water” like we are making instant soup in a single simple step. Information broadcast is the main course in most trainings and workshops, or worse, online content bundles of PDF’s or pre-recorded videos with the “secret sauce” to whatever you are perusing. These things just create a starting point. It is enough to get you to practicing something, but it will not move you through rehearsal and not to “The Show”. Actual growth and development requires more. It takes more than an information vending machine where you put in the money and pull the right know or push the corresponding button.

No one has success when they sign up for a class, grab the syllabus, and ahead directly to the final exam, skipping the classes, the discussion, the labs, and the time put into working through and exercising content. It’s interesting that organization often approach talent development in such a manner. Organizations genuinely want development for their people for retention and for valuable contribution to the company, but incentives are often not aligned to time investment but instead to activity completion on a project timeline. Professional development works differently because it’s not a factory, it’s more like putting a plant in good soil, maintaining water and sunlight, to someday down the road have a bloom or a harvestable byproduct appear to then benefit from. Organizations struggle to design and build organizations for people development that is often intangible and requires a different set of tools and a new mindset to measure.

To get to “The Show” you have to make it to rehearsal first.

The Speed of People

Training is usually an event, something like a half-day seminar or a two-hour class. Some training can be a series of events strung together over a defined timeframe, like spring training for Major League Baseball. In an educational sense, training is about information acquisition and possibly with experiential components mixed in. These kinds of opportunities can be entertaining, practical, thought provoking, and effective for networking as a side benefit.  In a practice sense, training can be about repetition and coaching for skill development or rehearsals for entertainment productions. These are short-term focused activity-based experiences with targeted duration and anticipated outputs or benefits.

Development, on the other hand, is a different animal. Less an event and more a journey, development experiences are a form of travel over a longer period. Development experiences are about patience for long term investment instead of quick returns. Unlike training events that have crisp start and stop times with explicit outcomes, development experiences have more variables and participants have less certainty of course and outcomes. This is harder to package, and it creates a fuzzier return on investment for participants paying for a development program and organizations paying into it as an investment.  

As an example, a company sends a software engineer to a three-day training on a tool to help them gain specific skills to use on a project. That software engineer will come back from that training with a solid head start and be somewhat established in their proficiency and ability to use that new tool. If that same software engineer is on a path to be a software architect they will be on a developmental journey for years. Those years will hold a combination of experiences that twill take them through multiple projects, exposure to many tools, hundreds of technical challenges and problems to solve, exercising communication and collaboration skills they never dreamed would be required. They will find themselves standing in a very different perspective on people, work, technologies, and processes than from where they started. That is what developmental experiences do.

You might go to Disney World to “experience” the latest new park adventure and that is an event where you, the person, experience “it”, that specific experience.  A developmental journey is a different experience in that it is inherently a varied assortment of experiences in aggregate that slowly shape you and grow you in certain ways. A Disney World event is something you consume, where years of exposure, learning, success, failure, and finding your way making sense of things one experience at a time is something, a group of “somethings” you carry with you.

Many companies have invested in “Training and Development” departments with teams supporting advancing talent development. A challenge often faced is a lack of impact where more dramatic impact is expected. Sometimes this is because there is a misunderstanding about the distinction between those two terms. When “development” means you have run a sequence of trainings in the short term, the expectation is that people should be growing, advancing, becoming better in their skills and capabilities in an immediate cause and effect manner. There is frequently disappointment and disillusionment about investment when longer term expectations are unsatisfied by short term mental maps or programming around growth that are aligned to training, but not true development.

Whether or not organizations have the patience, incentives, or business models to passionately support true people development over time is an open question. People development takes an intentional architected frame facilitating internalized growth over time. It can be challenging for fast moving companies, in fast moving markets, encapsulated in fast moving technologies, to create a space for actual developmental mindsets and approaches that operate on a longer runway at the speed of people, not the speed of a software upgrade.

Growth Means Getting Personal

Here are some key undeniable and research proven things we know about being human.

1. People are not objective, people are subjective.

2. People are emotional.

3. People can't separate themselves from their worldviews and their own personal experiences and narratives.

What do these things have to do with personal or professional growth and development efforts? Everything!

Growth and development programs traditionally lean away from all these human characteristics by approaching people and content as if it's all logical, cognitive, subjective and avoid emotional or personal story connections. It's as sterile as an operating room in some training environments. It’s mostly instruction, information, and linear action plans.

Why is this the case? It often feels safer because the more academic the higher the sense of control. The opposite can feel uncomfortable and really freak people out. And to be honest, it takes certain proficient skills to manage experiential environments well.

This high-control, low-impact approach severely limits effectiveness and the desired impact of trainings, workshops, classes, and courses. If personal growth and professional development embraced the subjective, emotional, and personal human traits and behaviors, developmental investments would be 10x more impactful for participants, relationships, and employees and the organization.

Leaders must embrace the art form inherent in working with people. It will have a degree of uncertainty to it for sure, but that is where the payoff lives and breathes. It takes courage to head down that path but you are human too so I know you can do it.

Pausing For Advantage

Some things in life and work can be done in two steps, instruction and execution. If you have ever tried meals kits like Hello Fresh, you follow the instructions to unpack, mix, cook and assemble a meal. Hello Fresh has created the recipe, determined all ingredients and nutrition, and pre-packed it all together with an instruction card. It’s not quite a “just add water” level of simplicity but it certainly does not require much thinking, learning, or discussion.

What about more nuanced or complex situations where jumping from instruction to action does not quite allow for the deeper and well-designed response needed. Some circumstances require a pause. Not a pause to do nothing, but a pause to prevent jumping right into taking actions in reaction to a problem, need or even an opportunity. A pause that allows you to assess, look at the situation from various perspectives, collect a set of viable paths, and form the right solutions or response.  It’s easy to feel the drop in anxiety by taking action and doing something immediately, yet often we fumble around with missteps and misfires and choose poor solution paths or even extend or amplify the situation we are working to address.

As an example, one day I walk into the kitchen, and I put something away in a cabinet to later go looking for it, but I don’t recall where exactly. Option one is to start flinging doors open, rummaging around frantically, and simply resort to a search and destroy approach. In about 2.5 minutes I have found what I was looking for, but the collateral damage is 360 degrees with a side of elevated frustration. Option two is when I step into the kitchen to locate my item, but I pause, I take a moment to think through where I might have logically placed it or think back to where I remember being in the kitchen, or what I saw in the cabinet when I opened it to place my item. In this second approach I might find my item in less than half the time and likely locate it behind the first door or two, without the dramatic commotion of urgency without a useful purpose.

It takes some intention and restraint to resist our action bias and not jump first and think later. Choosing a pause is its own productivity hack with better results, most of the time. In organizations if you come across a problem the next step is a solution to work it. If you run into a risk the expectation is to immediately de-risk by taking some kind of action. We lean into thinking that speed and velocity is life or death sometimes when it’s not. It is usually a factor but usually not valuable when at the expense of chasing conclusion or outcome in an urgent rush. Even in a mass casualty event, the entire protocol around triage is about taking a pause or a moment to organize the chaos to maximize success in saving lives.

In business it is necessasry to consider that idea that taking a pause can save a project, retain a great employee, or serve a customer beyond their expectations.  Often our urgency with a pause does the opposite. A pause has a purpose. A pause is not paralysis. A pause is creating a space for identifying the right actions and setup success for taking those actions. Sometimes the pause affords us something else we need for success, the facilitation of pondering, thinking, walking through, or discussing things to some conclusion of an approach to a situation. It enables an intentional, measured, and considered formulation leading into eventual action.

Think of the classic “crossing guard” scenario. Their entire job is to create pause to facilitate children walking to school safely when crossing the street. They stand, the blow a whistle, they raise a hand to communicate and que drivers in cars what is happening next. Its codified behavior built on a pause. Can you imagine if a crossing guard took a no-pause approach? You would see the crossing guard randomly grabbing kids by the arm and dragging them and weaving through traffic while blowing their whistle. It would look like playing the classic Frogger arcade game to get to the other side. That kind of crossing guard would not be employed long, and the degree of chaos and risk would be off the charts.

Do yourself and those you lead a favor and give a nod to the pause. It’s a tool to leverage for not only better outcomes but it also keeps your projects and your people out of moving traffic. Though very underestimated, pausing is one of your best behavior-driven advantages. Taking time to pause and consider is the advantage not a liability. Teach it, model it, do it.

Counting Things vs. Things That Count

The measurements of value in any organization can lean heavily into counting things. Maybe it’s the number of products coming off the production line in the factory, the number of customers acquired each month, or counting the dollars reflecting the cost of operating a business and comparing it to the money received over a given time period. When we can’t count explicit physical objects or the dollar count in the bank account, we can also look at measures related to percentage of increases or decreases in any target of interest. These are based on numbers as well, but are more of an indirect indicator of value. These variations are valid measures. They help create location signals that indicate where you have been on the “map” and partially indicate next steps towards an objective, but are largely trailing indicators.

When it comes to counting, we learn the value of counting at a very early age.  We could easter eggs found after an easter egg hunt as kids. We count gifts received on birthdays and other holidays. We count how many minutes before we need to go to sleep. We value counting! Usually, the bigger the number the better, unless playing golf or paying taxes, but even then, it’s a “counters” game.

For example, a hamburger joint will produce a given number of burgers a day. McDonalds makes over 6.5 million burgers a day while In-N-Out burger makes around 475,000 a day with a small local shop producing 100 to 200 burgers a day. All scenarios are “countable” but also have attributed meaning based on their given context which informs expectations. Meaning, a McDonalds producing In-N-Out numbers would be business devastation. Numbers are indicators, not intrinsically good or bad as a set of numeric values but context provides the interpretation backdrop. What about the things that you can’t count, at least not in that direct cause and effect kind of way?

Think of the functional areas of any organization and the definition of success for their operation. A sales organization is counting sales targets and related metrics. Production and execution teams count completion of tasks, deliverables, budgets, timelines, and completed milestones. We assign “leaders” to groups like this and essentially set the expectation that their job is to “lead” people to the desired results that are being counted. In addition, compensation and promotional incentive are usually based on these numbers. So leaders are dispatched and inserted in organizations to make these things happen, get it done, and “achieve”. This is valid to a point but frequently left out of the equation are a few characteristics that are hard to equate because they are not numbers. I am referencing the “other” parts of leading that can be easily neglected, poorly understood, and difficult to identify and quantify.

Leading can be a function in service to things you don’t count. These seemingly opposing expectations to count or to not count are problematic. It may be that the most impactful attribute of performant leadership is one we are least aware of and least equipped to exercise. A leader should not only be able to set a tactical performance target, like a sales number, but beyond that, a leader should be able to set the more significant destination down the line. Ticking off near term milestones while forgoing the primary direction you need to be heading to achieve the larger goal, can leave teams and organizations careening off course in dramatic fashion or more subtlety one degree at a time.

Setting the larger vision and strategically aligning and sequencing the milestones to get to the destination, is the compass. Leaders, above all else, are the compass bearer. How is your compass working? Leaders determine the destination for the future, they communicate the direction to take to get to that destination, and they map and guide the path to get there. This is not as counting-centric in practice as tactical measurements. The job of moving groups of people who are diverse at every level in how they see, hear, and interpret communications and behaviors, adds up to being a significantly non-numeric exercise that becomes an art form of interpersonal interactions. The skills and abilities of a leader are primarily to generate clarity, guide, and enable adaptability for managing ongoing change. These characteristics of leadership are not things you can count, yet they are the key qualities that organizations absolutely must count on for performance and success.

Up and Out

It is fairly standard that professionals in any field understand the nature of promotion. You fulfill a role successfully for a period and you are rewarded with a new role. The new role is typically “up a level” in terms of responsibilities, compensation, status, and presumably positive impact. Professionals make the climb incrementally over years, often switching organizations to keep the movement and momentum going. This narrative is what most understand as upward mobility, career progression, success, and vertical progress. As the life and work of professionals continue to evolve in a growing high-change and high-velocity world, the way in which people can learn, grow, and fill out the required competency and proficiency demands are having to evolve.

A new kind of “vertical” progression is beginning to make its way into organizations and the professional development models used by leaders. In contrast to what is known as “horizontal development”, which entails consuming standard training, stacking up certifications, and explicit skill building, “vertical development” has arrived. Vertical development has a focus on thinking, mindset, navigating complexity and ambiguity with its attention on cognitive and emotional integration to enhance agility, sustainability, performance and resilience. In short, mental maturity.

After a long and useful discussion with a friend and colleague a few days ago about how, over years of careers, we have seen the people we have worked with authentically develop and grow, a few concepts crystalize for me. Vertical development enables positive impact. Here are some of the concepts that spawned from that dialogue.

Showing Up – It enables you to show up for things you might not have otherwise been able to contribute to. It increases the number of contribution targets available to you. It also changes how you show up, giving you opportunity for deeper and wider EQ and IQ which can be integrated to amplify performance, creating and increasing your “Performance Quotient” … “PQ”.

Future Change – It equips you to lead the change needed for the future and necessary transformation and arrive in the future better enabled.

Guide – It allows you to become a guide for other participants and member on the journey. Guiding in direction, clarity, trust, learning, identity, and moving from point A to point B with more meaning and impact.

Artist – It makes you a transformation artist, craftsman/craftswoman, and practitioner. You become a guide in organizations where there is a high degree of confusion, lack of clarity or paralyzing inertia.

There has always been “vertical” in a conventional sense, and some of it will and should remain. Moving forward, the new vertical is not just about up but more about up and out. Vertical development means something different, and it will at some level, go against the long prevailing current of factory models rooted in the industrial age but still ever present in today’s professional work landscape. Preparing for future needs in organizations and professional careers needs to happen now, not later. It can be a tough commitment to make as it breaks away from well-established thinking and incentives. As the cheese moves and you find you can’t get to it from here, there will be vast opportunity to jump the barriers and realize new paths. Everyone will need a good guide.

New Things

Here are some following thoughts that occurred to me after the previous post.

When establishing any form of a “new thing”, it may be helpful to recognize what might be going on at a deeper level. Change is most frequently addressed through communication or process changes. We “tell” others we are not doing Red-Blue-Green any longer but will doing a new and better thing moving to Blue-Yellow-Green-Red. Often new directions are given with the expectation of “telling” and then “doing” is to follow. We have all seen “change” where we created a plan, communicated the change plan, and then expect new things to begin happening only to discover inaction, confusion, paralysis, or the outright appearance resistance. A commonly used developmental learning model is “Tell-Show-Do”. This model is simple and somewhat self-explanatory but can often be missed as an effective tool in organizations. “TSD” is very effective because it accommodates learning styles, different levels of understanding and provided strong feedback and reinforcement loops.

Simply outlined, here are the three core stages of TSD:

“Tell”

Knowledge: Provide a clear explanation of a concept, process, or skill. This is the knowledge component with a focus at providing the needed information and key context.

“Show”

Demonstration: Exercise the process or skill with examples, often visually, related to what is expected and how something should work or operate. This should make use of supporting artifacts, tools, props, or models to support the learner in acquiring deep familiarity and understanding.  

“Do”

Practice: Active repetitions by the learner with developmental feedback along the way to strengthen understand, confidence, and competency. This impact will be progressive over time and practice cycles.

A couple observations over years of talent development and coaching that highlight risks that can develop gaps in the developmental success of organizations.  The first observation is that much instruction and training in organization can heavily miss the mark on the “show” stage. Sometimes this is because it can be easy to mistake “tell” activities as “show” activities. Sometimes investments are too light in providing deeper “show” lift due to lack of trainers and coaches or allowable time for meaningful repetitions. This can happen when orientation, training, onboarding, and professional development rely too heavily on self-serve or DIY developmental resources and models.

The second observation is a frequently forgotten fourth stage to accomplishing the developmental performance cycle organizations are looking for and needing. This stage is sometimes called “apply” or “perform”. The reality is that tell-show-do mostly gets your through pre-game but live execution of newly acquired competency is something the transitions from practice to warm-up to game time. This means it becomes an active and steady part of how you do what you do in role work execution. It’s important to not skip over “show” and important to realize that getting to a final action, desired outcome, and performance is progressive. Jumping over the “developmental middle” or rushing to outcomes without the practice time will make flipping form an old pattern to a new one very high risk in terms of success.

Going way beyond broadcasting information and taking action with an expectation of moving from point A to point B in one step, doing new things means becoming a practitioner of something new. This requires a mature and complete approach for developing any competency. Two short stories to really beat this up before we wrap this up.

Story 1 – What A Grind

After college I had a job working for a custom cabinet and countertop maker. He was a true craftsman with over 40 years of hard-earned experience. On day one of my new summer job I was told to pick up a belt sander and take down some high spots on a large one-piece countertop made from a special composite. I was way less than a novice on day one, but I did recall some beginner guidance from my eighth-grade shop teacher.  With some experimentation, being accomplished with a belt sander takes practice, practice, practice. You must get a feel for it, develop some nuanced sense of control and cooperation with a motor grinding belted sandpaper at thousands of surface feet per minute. I paused and looked at my new master craftsman employer and suggested, “I don’t think you want me to do that.” He insisted and the result was as expected. He responded with over half a dozen harshly marked penciled circles all over the countertop and very poignantly telling my where I pretty much scarred the surface. I’m not sure but I suspect I had just increased the project time in a few short moments. The only thought in my head, which I did not say out loud was, “I tried to warn you.” But when you are the new guy on the job on day one, you are never as right as the boss. This experience is representative of what we get if we skip the “show” followed by appropriate practice to arrive at “do”.

Story 2 – Practice Saves Lives

I once watched a documentary on the Navy’s Blue Angels. I have also seen them in real life, and they are very impressive. The Blue Angels are an extreme example of the tell-show-do-perform approach. Every season begins with a mix of veteran pilots and new pilots. Keep in mind that even the new pilots have thousands of hours of experienced flight time before being invited for an opportunity to join the Blue Angles. Regardless of the decades of experience flying the F/A 18 Super Hornet fighter jet, every performance season for the Blue Angels begins in the classroom. Weeks of instruction, questions, and conversation directed at creating familiarity, visualization, communication, trust, and confidence before setting foot on the flight apron. Even once they are in the air, the practices start in a slow, controlled, and widened stance. Only as the repetitions increase and confidence and competence increase do they tighten up formations from feet to inches of separation. If they went from “tell” to “do”, the consequences would be catastrophic.

If you are facing a “change rut” or stuck in some limbo trying to escape the gravitation pull of point A and not achieving escape velocity to propel you  to point B, consider this simple model and worse case “dial a friend”. Or in today’s reality, drop me an email.