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StepsAndMissteps

I returned to the corporate world as an employee late this summer. This has become my own stress module in which I am struggling to learn about myself. I am a different person from the one that quit being a corporate employee seven years ago. During those seven years, I worked on myself, learning some really important things that make living with myself easier. And I watched and helped others work through some of their important things. Through this, I have gained an appreciation that this is almost always profound and useful.

Stepping into the corporate world again with this appreciation has been difficult. Now, I guess I am able to see hurt people, maybe like the boy in The Sixth Sense. And I want to help them and sometimes it seems that they want my help. A misstep I take is letting my desire to help cloud my judgment. I am too active in my help; don't get me wrong, I am not doing anything close to therapy, but I am interested in helping people by helping them see themselves more clearly. So, when people come to me for help, sometimes the help they get is different from what they expect - sometimes they are appreciative; sometimes not.

Anyway, this is a continuing issue for me - how to use new tools, skills and outlooks that I acquire appropriately.

What steps or missteps have you made applying new tools, skills or outlooks? BobKing 2002.26.12

Jerry calls it "solution probleming." I tend to use a variation on an old aphorism: When the student is ready, the student appears. There are lots of folks who with their shiny new insight, seem to believe that they also got a license to inflict it on people.

It's easier when you wait for someone to ask. They you can offer what you've got, which they may find useful or not. Demanding that someone find useful what you've decided they need is not such a good game.

Unfortunately, I get spoiled a bit. So "integrating" shows up at least three ways for me:

• Using an insight or tool that I've learned isn't so hard. Sometimes people get a little surprised when I do something differently. But not often. It seems I'm consistently different enough that both "different" and "change" are expected.
• Teaching or showing is a bit harder. Once asked, it takes additional skills to make some insight or tool available to others. For tools that are "big magic" I am also concerned to make them available in ways that sort of limit the potential harm. That's a hard problem.
• Patience with foolish behavior. Along with many insights and tools comes additional awareness of time wasted, or even more gross misbehaviors. When I've been around a bunch of nice, humane people for a while it's a bit of an adjustment.

The third one's the hardest for me.

- JimBullock, 2002.12.26

Couldn't agree more about inflicting help and it is not always that black and white. People ask for help in differing ways and trying to figure out when they are can be difficult. Perhaps my error now is that I have had a filter on that accentuated those behaviors that I perceive to be ones related to asking for help - in a sense, looking for an opening to inflict help.

Of your list, the third one resonated for me. It is foolish behavior as I judge it. I concentrate on believing that everyone is doing their best to alleviate that. Otherwise, I might see foolish behavior as a request for help. As I write this, I discover that I have somehow created an obligation for myself to help people see their own foolish behavior. Hmmmm, something for me to work on...

- BobKing 2002.12.27

I find the challenge of foolish behavior interesting. I'm not sure what you mean by "foolish". I'm going to assume that it relates to "irrelevant" in the Satir coping skills.

Ages ago during my tenure as an undergrad English major, I wrote a paper on King Lear where my thesis was the Fool as Wise man. A jester is supposed to be foolish and maybe even "irrelevant". In King Lear the Fool comments on what no one else can, but it is accepted because of his postion. The effect is subtle. Consultants usually have this advantage and don't have to contend with the trappings of "Fool". Shakespeare loved to engage readers with contradictions and puzzles. Does the oxymoron of foolish wisdom apply to "real life"? I think so.

Roger von Oech is a creativity consultant. His book A Whack on the Side of the Head lists 10 (if I recall the number correctly) creativity blocks. One of them is "Playing the Fool". What if we asked ridiculous questions about our systems? What if something seemingly impossible was proposed? Why create a diversion? If we recast foolishness as "serious", other possibilities come to mind. Bob thought he might see foolish behavior as a request for help . Does this relate to an individual or "the system"? How might this tell us something?

When you go through von Oech's ten challenges you discover which blocks you need to work on. Foolishness was not one of mine. Perhaps this is type (MBTI) dependent? Don't know.

My challenge is Doing Nothing - a zen position. I suspect this is why my father was a great fisherman and I lasted only one lesson. As you both have noted, you must wait for the fish to come to you. This leads to timing. When should we take action? Sometimes I get this right and sometimes I don't. When I don't, it is because the fish hasn't taken the hook, which essentially cultural knowledge.

Timing. I look to lessons from "jesters" ?Elike Jack Benny, Charlie Chaplin, Steven Wright and others. Comedy is situational. You need be sure the information has been absorbed and relates otherwise your delivery won't work. A funny line in one culture could be a flop elsewhere.

I guess timing and cultural sensitivity end up being my clues to how and when to offer help to others.

- BeckyWinant 2002.12.27

Forgive yourself your own foolish moments when trying to help didn't do so well, but keep track if they become excessive. (Don't ask me what excessive means.) And remember, you're also helping people when you leave them alone at certain times. Helping is not the same as intervening.

Look for teachable moments, when the person has made their own mistake and is ready, not for a lecture, but for a suggestion that they reflect on the learnings they've just purchased, but may not have noticed. - JerryWeinberg 2002.12.30

Jerry, that last sentence is wonderful. You did it again.

Re: "foolish" = "irrelevant"

That's not what I meant, but the implied question forced me to figure out what I meant by "foolish." It came down to: Wasting my time with behaviors, tools or techniques (or lack of same) when there's a better option available.

Skilled people of good intention are a joy to work with. Things just happen, and the problems and challenges are the actual intrinsic problems and challenges in what you're trying to do, not extra unnecessary stuff. Much of my time is spent in work that feels like pushing on a rope. Uphill. The contrast is a bit of a shock sometimes.

In the sense of my "foolish" definition, the Tarot fool or the various other "foolish" behaviors discussed are not foolish at all.

- JimBullock 2003.1.3

The key here is to know that even the best hitters are quite happy if they get a hit one time out of three. So, even though you strike out a lot, you have to keep swinging the bat.

And, of course, if you don't stop after 100 consecutive strikeouts, than that's really stupid, not foolish. Or is it 200? - JerryWeinberg 2003.1.3

P.S. AYE is a good place to meet a lot of fools.

Wasting time is annoying.

Sometimes I work with people who will take the long way 'round to get to what they want or need. Maybe they don't really know or maybe they don't feel comfortable saying. That can feel like time wasting. Long ago a colleague told me, "Becky, if they were a healthy organization, they wouldn't need us." I often find myself with people who have time-wasting behaviors, poor tools (or tools chosen for poor reasons) and ineffective techniques. I thought that was part of the gig. I'm surprised to think that maybe it isn't.

BeckyWinant 2003.01.05

Hi Becky,

I was complaining about overhead one Thursday afternoon when a wise man told me: "That is the job."

Stopped me in my tracks. And I took from that moment an operational definition for "leadership" of myself and others that's been very, very useful. "Leadership is getting all this other stuff taken care of (not necessarily by you and not necessarily 'done'. Immunity is good enough.) so you can do the job at hand."

I've learned to pay attention to how much of the job is overhead and how much content. Content is what other people depend on us for. It's the stuff that when asked why you're there they say: S/he does this for us. Overhead is everything else we have to do to get the content done.

There was a time when I'd let them load up a job with as much overhead as they wanted. That's not consequence free, nor necessarily a fair deal for me:

• It's all overhead and nothing is getting done?
• So much overhead that the performance standard isn't being met?
• Is it harder than what they're paying me?
• Or maybe they've upped the overhead and the pay, but that's not a deal I want?

Enlightened management can understand when overhead is the gig. My epiphany above came at GE, where my boss kept me around because I could find a way to get any impossible thing to happen. Larry was also a bit surprised when after two impossible adventures he - er - offered me the CM / Build tools to fix and run. Late already and with a hard deadline, of course. They had been "under development" by 12 people for over 2 years. "So we get the team?" "No." "Is it working as in finished?" "No." "So who gets to say when it's done and what it's supposed to do?" "Same folks who aren't building it any more." "Are we done running the stuff we're currently supporting?" "No." "So, how do I do this?" "Blah, blah blah . . . " That's pretty clear invitation to produce some real output with a whole lot of overhead. I stunned him when I said "No way."

Another example is doing software process change things working for a boss who can't spell development. When this guy's an administrator who thinks you are processing helpdesk tickets, that's worse. Now add that the team you're inheriting cratered from 5 to 1 about 18 months ago. Oh yeah, there's an inventory of existing mission critical tools to support - boss doesn't know about them. Let's add a re-org between accepting the job and arriving? Followed by a layoff & hiring freeze?

One strategy in this situation is to work the meta-boss, since the boss is responding only to small, task level direction, only from the meta-boss, and understands none of it. At the same time you have to get some resources - hard with the freeze. Harder still when the meta-boss over hires by 28% into his other teams during the freeze. Once you've got some resources - not before - you can find the unseen cabal that makes priorities, and route what you ought to be doing from them, through the meta-boss, to the boss. Seems that the while the boss is motivated only by the last taskette from the meta-boss, the meta-boss is motivated by looking good in the Cabal. Then package the work in terms of HelpDesk trouble tickets for communicating with the boss, and he can feel all administrative-y and in-charge.

Working that way is a whole lot of overhead. Took me 9 months to find and build access to the Cabal. Meta-boss didn't understand why I needed that - he just made pronouncements and people scurried. The ones in eyeshot anyway. Of course, he was CTO, hand picked as the "visionary" by CIO and CEO. He never did understand why I couldn't just think things up, flit about making pronouncements, and they'd just happen. I had more overhead to getting people's cooperation than he did. This second description is as real as the first - I was there. So maybe I've reframed I thought that was part of the gig. a bit, to be a bit less inevitable:

• There's overhead that I'll accept for any given job, and not.
• There's the amount of overhead I'm being paid to deal with.
• There's the overhead to content ratio my boss thinks I'm dealing with.
• There's overhead that is more or less inevitable in any given job - unavoidable. I'm easier with that.
• There's overhead that's unnecessary. That's harder for me. How about we work to get rid of some of this?

And of course, the biggest requirement I have now:

• I want my boss to have some understanding - I'll accept if s/he's trainable at all - of the overhead I'm dealing with.

After a week or more at AYE with people who you can have acutal conversation with, who also have domain expertise, and all seem to be just plain interesting decent people, reentry has some culture shock to it. And I would rather have less overhead the rest of the time. I think that's reasonable.

-- JimBullock, 2003.1.5

I like the reframe. Somewhere a long while back I recall a 15 frames or so Groening cartoon entitled: How Much Stress is Too Much Stress. Each frame progresses from mild to medium and so forth until ... to much.

Perhaps How Much Overehad is Too Much Overhead is a variant ? I wonder what people's boundaries are for tolerating overhead. I think this might be part of Jerry"s when to Say NO lessons.

- BeckyWinant 2003.01.06

Hi Becky,

I didn't know of those cartoons. Now I'll have to find them. Thanks.

Um, yeah it is part of Jerry's "when to say 'No' thing." The complementary thing to notice is when to say 'Yes' - how much overhead to suck up.

I've sucked up a lot of overhead over the years. I don't think these were necessarily mistakes, if the option you take is the best available option you've got, for you, and in your own terms. In each of my two "excessive overhead" examples above, there was a payoff that seemed reasonable at the time. GE got me some recognized tech skills, some demonstrated big successes, a bit of personal branding ("Hired into GE Ocean Systems during an indusry contraction, and in the middle of a series of layoffs.") The second example got me relocated to Seattle, and some other personal branding.

Each got me a whack of money. The first changed my compensation from about 2/3 the going rate for the job all the way up to the middle of the band for the job. From a personal point of view, that was enough to buy books, pay down and off my college loans, and pick where I lived on something other than price, exclusively. The second whack had a similar effect. The way compensation (for employees, especially) works, each had a step change effect on my future revenue. So, seems like a good bet each time.

This kind of tactic does risk the "Frog in the hot water problem." You don't notice as it gets worse a little at a time. So there's at least three choices:

• Never get into the hot water.
• Deliberately reach into the hot water, to get the magic at the bottom of the well.
• Dive into the par-boiling pot because you don't know any better.

The tactic I've used for the second case is to schedule decision checks. Plan on getting out of the situation completely (takes me about a day and a half), then evaluating what's going on very analytically. I trigger these rethinks on time (typically 6 months) or events, like a re-org. Saves endlessly rehashing decisions when there's no additional information available as well.

- JimBullock, 2003.1.6

Very good set of "rules" for changing organizations....

http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?ChangeYourOrganizationRules

KeithRay 2003.02.14

That's great stuff. I'd add a meta-rule something like this:

"Be careful if you're an identified change agent, that the folks who have designated you understand at least some of these rules."

JimBullock, 2003.02.14

BobLee 2003.02.14