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.

The post Beating complexity with a disciplined, collaborative process of a diverse, aware group appeared first on Afterburner Australia.

source https://www.afterburner.com.au/diverse-aware-group-beating-complexity/

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?

The post How to create a High Performance Team appeared first on Afterburner Australia.

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