Genuine Buy-In – the power of CAPI

Prefer to watch on video rather than read?  Click here, it’s 4 mins, with captions.

My work with organisations often involves getting groups together so they can see their work situation, make decisions on what needs to change and put these into action.    Which means at some point in the preparation, we are going to be asking “right, so who do we need to have in the room”?

That’s where I lean one of the brilliant concepts of Dr. Ichak Adizes, called CAPI.

The Beach Ball – The brilliantly simple metaphor for getting reality on the table

Prefer to watch on video?  Just click here (3 mins with captions)

Philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein questioned whether there is such a thing as private language.  Can something that can only be understood by one person be considered to be real?

Beach Balls

Well…good news…we don’t need to figure that out. Instead, we can use the brilliant metaphor of the beach ball from Susan Scott, author of Fierce Conversations.

It goes like this – if I hold up this ball – what colour is it?  Blue and white.

Weekly team meetings taking away your lifeforce? Just try this.

Is this the scene at your work when another meeting is called?

Just because team meetings can be a soulless drain of vital lifeforce doesn’t mean they are not important.

For many people, the conditions for work being a satisfying experience is that we are ‘alone together’.  Oxymoron fans are digging it the most, but what I’m getting at is that most of us like some sort of autonomy/authority/control over what we do and how we do it, and at the same time, most of us need some sort of connection to other people to feel OK.

Work lets us do both.

And in most organisations, meetings are the primary forum in which we have the chance to form a connection as a group, meaning the chance to satisfy one of the fundamental conditions for work being OK.  Or better.

Which is why they are important.   And why it’s worth trying something new if your meetings are driving you into the gutter of existential despair.

So try lean coffee!

Lean coffee (which is a trademarked thing) is a ‘structured, but agenda-less meeting‘ in the words you’ll find on the website itself:  http://leancoffee.org/ .  Better yet, check out co-originator Jim Benson (he of personal kanban fame) talking about it for 3:37 on YouTube right here. Read more…

Eliminate change management

We all know the usual routine – management identifies the need for more productivity and/or quality or a new strategy, the necessary actions are identified (internally, externally or a combination of both), this necessitates change, so now we ‘change manage’.

And it works……at best…..sometimes.

What we’re really doing here is coercing people to like the change we’ve decided on.  We’re doing change to them.

What if instead we did change with them?

As Peter Block says,

when someone states ‘we need to get everyone on board‘, the answer is ‘what makes you think you’re in the boat?‘

Imagine if, instead of management calling in the external experts, it went the other way around and the frontline team approached management and said

‘We’re out of ideas.  But if you can find $50k for those improvement consultants we were speaking to last week, we reckon we can work with them and find about $200k per year savings back to the business‘.

Would this require ‘change management’? Read more…

Self-organising doesn’t mean self-directed

“The thing about Scrum” I was saying to Melinda, one of my ex-colleagues and also one of the kindest and nicest people I’d ever worked with….”is that nearly all of it makes sense in a way that’s totally requisite.”

“Scrum?” she asked.

“Sorry, what I mean by Scrum is the software development method that’s based on principles of Agile.  The Agile stuff is about frequent checking in with the customer, that developers can sort themselves out, a whole approach that makes sure a team’s collective capability is used well.  What Scrum does is nicely define roles within a team under the Agile philosophy so that everyone knows what they’re doing.  That’s my potted overview anyway.”

“Isn’t that the stuff you teach with requisite?  That by clearly defining the role relationships in terms of who can ask who to start or stop things, people can be freed up from one of most common sources of conflict?”

“Yep, all the role relationships in a Scrum Team are a version of natural requisite role relationships.  No issue there.”

“So what’s the problem?” Read more…