Beating complexity with a disciplined, collaborative process of a diverse, aware group

Whatever business we’re in, we face more disruptive technologies, more regulations, and more competition. No one person can keep on top of all that. People are anxious, curious, distracted, overconfident. Given the speed of change and the complexity of our environment, there are more ideas, possibilities, initiatives, and challenges coming at us all the time. Some people are better than others at keeping focus. We need to open up our thinking to a broader awareness. But we need to do so in a simple, disciplined way, so that the focus is on the substance and not the process.

Change isn’t a new phenomenon. It’s always been with us. The telling points now are the speed and novelty of the changes, and the uncertainty of whether and how they will happen: we just don’t know what will happen because we’ve never had these technologies before.

To perform well in a complex environment—that is, to solve problems, make decisions, plan, execute, and learn—you need the disciplined, collaborative process of a diverse, aware group.

Let’s take a look at those elements.

A diverse, aware group

To take on complexity, one person is rarely enough. Edgar Schein, the father of organizational culture from MIT, states: in a complex environment ‘managers as individuals no longer know enough to make decisions and get things done.’ They need a team, and for the team to do their job well.

There are too many traps for an individual to fall into, in both planning and performing. These are the cognitive errors that we mere mortals keep making day after day. We are optimistic by nature and, research suggests, systematically overconfident. Can we build it? Yes we can, no matter what the facts say. If we’ve already invested time and effort, then we’ll spend even more to get our job done, ignoring advice to cut our losses.

What evidence do we hold onto to support these decisions? That’s when we toss objectivity aside. We reach for data that supports our hunches, and downplay the rest. We hold up our personal experience as indubitable proof, far more powerful than what thousands of others may have seen or done. And data from yesterday has to be more relevant than data from last year, right?

The fact is we regularly rely on a number of biases to make poor decisions in the face of contrary evidence. So it makes sense for a team to get together to work out how best to pull off an important mission. What then if everyone in the team had the same background and skills, and thought the same? We’re a bit nervous when it comes to talking about diversity. There is no doubting that fighter pilots are not the most diverse group of people on earth, and equally that our training draws our thinking and actions even more tightly together. Within the bounds of our fighter pilot circles, we do push to call on as diverse a group as possible for our ground and air missions, and include people who are ‘outlier’ personalities within the force.

Diversity can offer any number of perspectives, across gender, age, technical expertise, education, personality type, ethnicity, social interests—anything that can offer your team an alternative view of similar facts. If you want to perform well through complexity, you want diversity on your team.

Creativity through a disciplined process

With all that diversity, you can expect differing opinions on how to act, and how to begin that action. That’s where a disciplined process comes in. A disciplined process (like Flawless Execution or “Flex” for example) brings diverse ideas to a common objective focus. At each stage of the process, there are clear questions being asked, and clear answers being sought. The source of those answers doesn’t matter, objectivity does. It’s like making a strong cable out of thin wires. The process laces the diverse strands of facts and opinion together into one strong plan of action.

It’s hard to overstate the power of a disciplined process. Studies have shown that the process used to make decisions (and empower decision making) can have over six times the impact than the analysis it’s based on. This really rams home the point that teams and companies often overplay data analysis. It explains why we often suffer from ‘analysis paralysis’, spending more time than we should on analysis, and delaying the decisions we need to make. Perhaps it’s because analysis is the easiest thing to do, and the one thing that business analysts are trained to do well. Getting accurate data is hard. Making good decisions is harder.

Making good decisions consistently is harder still. We’re as much of a fan of Jim Collins as anyone. In Great by Choice, Collins writes that ‘the signature of mediocrity is not an unwillingness to change: the signature of mediocrity is chronic inconsistency’. That’s again where a reliable process comes in—to drive consistent quality in your decisions and actions.

People sometimes misunderstand processes, and give them a bad rap. The objections are that they’re a straitjacket, that they stifle creativity, that they take the fun out of work. Bad processes can do that. Good processes don’t. As Jim Collins calls it: ‘The great task, rarely achieved, is to blend creative intensity with relentless discipline so as to amplify the creativity rather than destroy it.’

Are pilots concerned about creativity? Not so much. Are we concerned about the creativity of our clients? Very much so. We know creativity is a necessary ingredient of their success.

But we are more concerned about our clients’ productivity and working culture. A good process (such as Flex) does one big thing to help enormously: it reduces friction. In every meeting, people know what they’re aiming to do, and how they will do it. It saves a heck of a lot of time, a heck of a lot of argument, and a great many working relationships.

Untimely, people may have different personalities and different world views. They may not even like each other. But give them a clear, disciplined, collaborative process to be guided by, and they will beat complexity each and every time.

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How to create a High Performance Team

Almost any group of people can become a high performing team. How? By adopting a process that ensures you create a common purpose, create desire and confidence, create trust. It’s about your role in that team—be it as a clear team leader or as an essential follower—in creating a team that performs its mission, consistently and reliably, every time.

That’s a challenge. There are many components to a team, and many things that can go wrong. We’ve cut the idea of a high performing team a million times over from every which way we can, and it boils down to these three things: the team’s mindset, its skillset, and the processes that bring those two together. When you define these three things, you define your team.

Your hand-picked team

Startup companies are in many respects the new classic team. Small, nimble, focused—and hand-picked by the company’s founders. They have to succeed to get paid, and can’t rely on a corporate machine to generate bonuses. Technology startups can amaze with the speed with which they take hold of an idea, and spread it through our digital lives. Equally impressive are new companies that take on the traditional market for physical goods.

How do they do this? From the outset, the leader uses the three things that mark out a team: mindset, skills, and process. Like all good teams successful start-ups have a clear mindset of identity and purpose. For the team’s skillset, the Navy SEAL rule for team recruiting is highly effective. In SEAL platoons, at least two men can do any task, and each man has to have at least two specialties. ‘One is none, and two is one,’ is a spec ops saying. The first team of any startup should have diverse but overlapping skills. They should be able to cover for each other, and test out their ideas. People should have accountability, as well as support. And to keep the team’s mindset responsive and its skillset sharp, test and reset plans. It’s the only way to stay on top of the dynamic marketplace of today’s business world.

The team you’ve just got to work with

That’s all very well when you’re able to pick your own team—pick who has the skills, who’ll get along, who loves the mission. But it’s a different story when the team is already picked, and the mission is upon you.

What do you do if the team has established skills, their own versions of culture, and their own idea of process? Good operators they may. Teams they are not.

In this scenario, the lever to work with is process. Introduce a solid and unified process – a framework for action and a way of thinking – that encourages robust planning and uses the disciplines of briefing (effective communication) and debriefing (a unique form of objective review) to form individuals into solid, effective teams.

An effective planning framework and clear communication of the plan will ensure collaboration and accountability within the team, and alignment. By debriefing, teams can identify new steps to improve their performance and operations. And those steps can became new standards. Slowly, as the teams’ shared processes take shape, the teams’ shared culture will too. The learning will be clear to those involved: use debriefing as the process to meld both the processes and culture.

The respectful truth of a high performance team

It’s not easy to create such teams. Not because the processes or principles are hard to understand, but because we find them hard to commit to and stand by. A high performing team cares for and respects each other, starting with the leader’s care for the rest. For their professional time and goals, team members share a common culture and purpose. The phrase that rings throughout their experience is ‘Respectful truth over artificial harmony’. High performing teams do not gloss over the difficult, just to be polite or avoid conflict. But they manage these situations with respect, because they have a clear framework and established standards to deal with them, and an ability to learn to do so.

The team-based approach that gives fighter squadrons their agility, security and performance can achieve the same results in any organization. They out-think, out-plan and out-maneuver the opposition. They have everyone involved to the fullest possible extent. They achieve a competitive advantage because everyone is helping to achieve it.

Early in my military career, I learned the value and necessity of strong leadership and commitment, and the value of using teams to build the people within them. To lead a team is not just to decide the right things to do, but to creating the dynamics in which people commit themselves, energetically and enthusiastically to bring those things about.

Do you have the right processes and culture in place to create high performing teams inside your business or organization?

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source https://www.afterburner.com.au/create-high-performance-team/

Go All In: How to Create and Nail Your Goals Like a Fighter Pilot

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source https://www.afterburner.com.au/podcast-go-all-in-how-to-create-and-nail-your-goals-like-a-fighter-pilot/

BEHIND EVERY GREAT LEADER IS A HIGH PERFORMING TEAM

It’s hard to imagine a serious endeavor that is not taken on by a team. Every person that does something special and ‘solo’ is the first to recognize the team behind them.

The entrepreneurial celebrities of our times—Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Oprah, Richard Branson, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Lucy Peng, John Mackey, Anita Roddick, Herb Kelleher, Diane von Furstenberg, Muhammad Yunus, Howard Schultz, Arianna Huffington, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Fred Smith—all acknowledge their greatest achievement as being the team they put in place to realize their dreams.

Good teams don’t happen by accident. There are a series of decisions to be made, on the team’s makeup, it’s culture, and the way it makes decisions and gets things done. High performing teams have to have a good leader, but equally they have to have good followers, sharing the same purpose and vision, and able to step into the leader’s shoes at any point, which at some point they will.

What’s in a team?

Teams are those groups of around five to twelve people who share a common mission. They are big enough to have the skills and diversity the mission needs, and small enough for each team member to know and rely on each other, and to care about each other. Selection, training, and shared experience allow team members to appreciate the culture, standards, and processes that enable the team to work. They are different people, with different personalities, perspectives, and life values, but what they do share is a common purpose, a desire to achieve that purpose, and mutual trust.

What’s important for now is that almost any group of people can become a high performing team—with the right tools, techniques and commitment.

It’s about creating a common purpose, about creating desire and confidence, about creating trust. It’s about your role in that team—be it as a clear team leader or as an essential follower—in creating a team that performs its mission, consistently and reliably, every time.

That’s a challenge. There are many components to a team, and many things that can go wrong. We’ve cut the idea of a high performing team a million times over from every which way we can, and it boils down to these three things: the team’s mindset, its skillset, and the processes that bring those two together. When you define these three things, you define your team.

The Fighter Pilot Factor

Fighter pilots are some of the most efficient operators on Earth, and all operate in teams. However, what’s interesting is that the majority of fighter pilots are average individuals. Very rarely will you find elite athletes, academic genius or groundbreaking theorists amongst trainee fighter pilots. However something very special happens once these average Joes walk through the door to pilot training. From day 1, they are taught a unique operating system that transforms groups of everyday people into elite and high performing teams. This system is what we call the Flex Methodology – a simple, repeatable and effective tool that delivers some extremely useful outcomes.

The good news is: this process has a universal application which means it can be used by anyone, and applied to any group of people.

My team and I understand the processes that build high-performing teams. And we have built one of the most impactful, engaging, and memorable team transformation programs in the world using the inspiration and experience of elite military teams. Contact us today to discuss taking your team to the next level!

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We Can’t All Fly Jets, But We Can All Put Ourselves in That Frame of Mind

How to Put Yourself Into the Fighter Pilot Frame of Mind

When you look at a jet, three things stand out: the cockpit, the fuselage that houses the engine, and the wings. The smooth things off to the side that stay quiet and hardly get a mention, want to try flying without them?  Not only do wings keep us airborne, they keep us steady at speed and through turbulence. As basic as they seem, we don’t get far without our wings so we invest to make them strong. Strong wings are essential. Apart from keeping you in the air, which is nice, they keep you steady when there’s turbulence. They also set boundaries for what you try out in the cockpit: you can’t do anything that the wings can’t handle. The whole machine may fall apart.

The wings of a jet are like the standards we set in business for our processes and culture, the training we gone to meet these standards, and the systems we use to access them.  A high performance way of thinking allows you to rely on your wings, the simple certainty of your standards, so you can take on complex uncertainties. Keep your mind free for the hard stuff. Albert Einstein was famous for saying,‘Never memorize something that you can look up,’ when he couldn’t tell a colleague his own phone number. That was sound advice when you were living in the 1920’s, tackling the hardest problem known to mankind, working by yourself, surrounded by the few reference books you need, with all the time in the world.

Whether or not we’re in a jet fighter, our reality today is a little different. We work in teams, under time pressure, with infinite data available. If we stopped to look everything up, we would slow down the team, and most likely embarrass ourselves.

The layers of standards and learning

To understand how a company can best build and use standards, we need to make a few distinctions:

• There are organizational standards that have to be memorized, and training is essential to help them sink in. Training equals habits and new habits equal new behaviours. Essential for the continuous change we see in the world today.
• There are organizational standards and knowledge that you can look up, as long as there’s some way to look them up in a hurry. This includes all the

lessons learned and situational awareness that your company can draw on.

• There are personal standards—habits and techniques—that we rely on individually,but that can’t interfere with the organizational standards.
• There is personal initiative and creativity, all that goes on in the cockpit, which is what everything else is there to support.

That’s how high performance is built. We layer one set of abilities on top of the other, and keep learning.

Why have standards?

Standards ensure that each person on the team knows the process, and relies on the others to also know the process. They cut about two-thirds of the time needed for any discussion, and two-thirds of the risks from any mission.

Working to standards gives a team enormous confidence in facing new situations. When those standards are known and trained across an organization, they are powerful. They don’t have to be complicated: their power comes from being able to rely on them, absolutely, any time. As fighter pilots, our common standards allow us to work with pilots from other squadrons, bases, and air forces, if need be at a moment’s notice. We can trust the other pilots with our lives, because they know the standards.

This commitment to standards is generally not as common in business as it is in the military,but that only makes it more powerful when it’s used. It is a competitive advantage that can be used everyday, in every business.

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source https://www.afterburner.com.au/fighter-pilot-frame-of-mind/

What’s in your high-definition future picture?

What’s in your high-definition future picture? Defining your purpose, setting your mission and guiding your actions

It’s not easy to paint a vision of something as complex as an organization, with all the uncertainty of the future, and all the possibilities available. What would you include, and what would you leave out?

Your organization’s vision, or what we call the ‘High Definition Destination’ (“HDD”), is your mountain. It answers your purpose, explains your mission, and guides what you should be doing now. It defines fundamental goals that together make certain what you’re offering to what market, how you’ll be perceived, who works for you and how they’ll do it well, how you’re structured,and what your financial performance will be. It’s not so detailed that it limits people’s creativity; nor is it so fuzzy that it allows creativity to prejudice performance. Just right, so that a team leader on a mission can make a judgment call that their mission may no longer be heading for the HDD.

The HDD: Elements

There are certain elements and considerations that will help define an organization’s HDD.  Here are the five elements, and their component dimensions, that can be used to guide us through what may be important to an organization. It may not be the only way of looking at things,and your own organization may have more or less elements, or express them differently. But I offer them to you as a strong place to start:

1.   Competitive position. The markets we’re in (businesses and geographies) notionally multiplied by our profile in them (our business model, competitive advantage, brand).
2.     Productivity. The skills our people have (their lived experience,and inherent and learned abilities) notionally multiplied by their will in using it (the culture, engagement, and benefits we can offer).
3.     Entrepreneurship. Our capacity for innovation (culture,autonomy, R&D) notionally multiplied by our appetite for risk(controls, standards, processes, ratios).
4.     Capital productivity. The financial capital we invest (debt,equity, reinvested revenue) multiplied by the return on that investment (ROIC, margin).
5.     Asset ownership. Our legal structures (legal entity, employee shares, mergers and acquisitions growth) for the assets we own(businesses, property, infrastructure, intellectual property).

Elements such as these define an organization and can guide focused planning and action. A traditional, broader vision complements the HDD well: you do not have to replace what is treasured. But you will find it extremely hard to execute your strategy unless you have an HDD in place. You can use a performance framework like Flex to develop an HDD, or you can test the vision you have and fill in the gaps. Either way there’s work, very achievable work, to be done.

The elements: Clear, measurable and achievable

Just as a mission or project objective needs to be clear, measurable, and achievable, so too do the elements of the HDD. That’s the surest way to prepare for the mission objectives to be aligned with the HDD, which is the whole point of the mission. For example, take entrepreneurship. The HDD might call for your company to be known for creating ‘next generation’ products. What Measure might indicate that you’re on track? You might hold that 20 percent of each year’s revenue flows from products launched in that year. You might suggest a number of patents to be filed each year, or propose that you receive for requests from third parties to license your technology each year.

As with mission objectives, the components of each HDD element should be absolute, not relative to a market or an economy. Make them about your sales, not your rank in the market. Markets are not zero sum games: company performance is in part dependent on industry performance, and both you and your competition may do extremely well in a year that’s good for your industry. Put a stake in the ground with specific numbers, rather than calling for ‘more than last year’, and adjust those numbers with each year’s strategy cycle as you need to.

You can see how similar the dimensions of an HDD are to mission objectives. They are the very peak of the mission objectives, the targets and destinations to which all the other objectives are aimed. But just like mission objectives, there is nothing in them about how those dimensions will be pursued or met. That’s for the teams at the highest level of the organization to decide, with their decisions cascading down through the teams at every level.

As we’ve seen, the discrete elements of the HDD each contain a small selection of measurable objectives. So in a sense, setting a company’s HDD is remarkably similar to mission planning. In my next post I’ll share with you my top tips for setting and testing a clear, measurable and achievable HDD to ensure each teams’ every mission and action is aligned to the organization’s future picture.

 

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source https://www.afterburner.com.au/whats-high-definition-future-picture/

Setting a clear vision for your organisation

What’s your mountain? Setting a clear, high-definition picture for your future destination

Some companies have great visions. Amazon’s vision is ‘to be earth’s most customer-centric company; to build a place where people can come to find and discover anything they might want to buy online.’ We Now know what that vision looks like—like Amazon.com. But before it was built? Could the leaders at Amazon tell you exactly what they were building?

Every mission that takes place in an organization must have in its line of sight the ultimate high-definition vision of the organization’s destination – it’s strategy if you will, or what we like to call the High Definition Destination (or HDD for short).

Your Mountain

The HDD is your mountain. It answers your purpose, explains your mission, and guides what you should be doing now. It defines fundamental goals that together make certain what you’re offering to what market, how you’ll be perceived, who works for you and how they’ll do it well, how you’re structured, and what your financial performance will be. It’s not so detailed that it limits people’s creativity; nor is it so fuzzy that it allows creativity to prejudice performance. Just right, so that a team leader on a mission can make a judgment call that their mission may no longer be heading for the HDD.

The Balancing Act

The HDD is a sense of purpose that compels us rationally and practically, as well as emotionally and inspirationally. It’s a vision of the future that all who choose to work with us can get behind. Such a vision helps to ‘direct, align and inspire actions on the part of large numbers of people,’ says John Kotter, and that’s exactly what we want. Achieving such a HDD is a fine balance. General, inspirational visions can set the purpose of a company or community, but they’re not enough. Here is an example of great vision that would both inspire us,and be a standard against which we can test everything we do.

‘At the Coca-Cola Company we strive to refresh the world, inspire moments of optimism and happiness, create value and make a difference.’

This vision gives us identity and purpose, and is invaluable both for the people pursuing it and for the communities it serves. It goes beyond ‘being the best at what we do’, and state that ‘what we do matters’. A telco might say ‘we have the best mobile network in the land’, or it might say ‘we connect people’.

Yet pure as this vision is in purpose, would it be enough to guide decision- making on all matters and at all levels of your company or community? We need a little more context and detail, but not too much.We need the vision to be clear, so that it is not confusing or difficult to implement. And we want it to be expressed in simple terms so that anyone in the organization can describe it.

Set a clear HDD, and people will rally round to make it real. Leave it vague and people may draw their own conclusions. As fighter pilots, if we knew exactly what our leaders wanted on the  battlefield, then they could rest easy at night knowing it would get done. If we didn’t have that clearly in mind, then they may wake up to the news that the wrong target had been hit.

Getting Started

It is not easy to paint a vision of something as complex as an organization, with all the uncertainty of the future, and all the possibilities available. What would you include, and what would you leave out?

Regardless of the process or framework you use, there are certain elements and considerations that will help define an organization and guide focused planning and action. A traditional, broader vision can complement a more detailed strategy, so you do not have to replace what is treasured. But you will find it extremely hard to execute your strategy unless you have a HDD in place. This can be achieved by developing a HDD, or testing the vision you have and filling in the gaps. Either way there’s work, very achievable work, to be done.

In my next post we’ll identify 5 key elements anyone can use to define a HDD and guide focused planning and action.

 

The post Setting a clear vision for your organisation appeared first on Afterburner Australia.

source https://www.afterburner.com.au/setting-high-definition-vision/