COVID19

Planning in a Wicked World

May 26, 2020 by Bill Welter Leave a Comment

No, this is not a commentary on morality. It’s the beginning of a weekly series on structure and decision making in a world without precedent. If you want to receive the series via email please go to www.mindprep.com and signup for our newsletter.

First, some simple explanations.

“Kind” environments have repeating patterns and feedback is accurate and rapid. Therefore, decision making can often improve with added experience. You can learn “the rules of the game” and become an expert by developing expert intuition. Examples of people in this environment range from chess masters to golf professionals to fighting suburban house fires to business strategists in 2019.
“Wicked” environments exist where the rules of the game are often unclear, feedback is spotty at best, and patterns are lacking or not obvious. Expertise-based thinking may be helpful or, more likely, will lead you astray because it is based on a past that no longer exists (and will likely not return). Planning and decision making in this environment is anything but routine and intuition must be challenged. This is the environment we are living in right now with the pandemic. The “new normal” is and will be very wicked.

Wicked! Now what?

So, what do we know for sure about operating in a wicked environment? Here are a few thoughts.

Looking at this from a military perspective, it’s analogous to being caught in an ambush. Standing still is not an option. You must move, but your boss is not in any position to tell you if that move is left, right, forward, or back. The managers, those closest to the action, will be expected to act.
How can we reopen business? Well, since your experience is based on past patterns, you will have to think outside your experience. You will have to consider more points of view or, better yet, find a cross-function group of like souls to help you. Think for a moment about the government’s problem of opening the economy. We need doctors, epidemiologists, business leaders, legislators, social scientists, and others to come together and think outside of their expertise to create a reasonable plan.
We have to think critically about the future and be prepared to decide and act. This means that we must sense the signals of tomorrow, make sense of these signals, decide on a course of action, and then act on these decisions faster than ever before. We refer to these four responsibilities as the Sense-Response Cycle™.
All of us will make mistakes because none of us have been through this before. All of us are learning and we will have to run the Sense-Response Cycle faster than we want. The key is to develop the will and methods to learn from our mistakes and move forward quickly.

What’s next?

As mentioned above, this is the beginning of a weekly series focused on planning and decision making, given the reality of living in a wicked world.

We’re just trying to help you think through this mess. Please help us by engaging us with your comments and questions.

A Dozen Realities – Updated

May 8, 2020 by mindprep Leave a Comment

When Oliver Cummings and I created the Making Strategy Real workshop for MindPrep Resource Center (www.mindprep.com) we used a dozen “known truth” to guide our design. Now the question is whether these pre-pandemic truths will hold up in a post-pandemic world. Here are some initial thoughts:

2019	2021
The business environment is always evolving.	Wow! The pandemic changed evolution into creative destruction in a few weeks.
Respond fast enough — or become irrelevant.	Some companies will not survive, the ones that do will have to change fast.
You may not set strategy, but you have to influence it.	Middle managers will be more involved than ever in the creation of functional and company strategy.
You can’t implement fluff.	Leaders will have to stress clarity in their messages about strategy. The managers won’t have the time to “figure it out.”
Change always ripples.	True more so than ever. Many things will be changing at once and interrelationships will determine success.
CEOs don’t run projects – you do.	Managers will continue to “make it happen.”
Resources are limited and trade-offs always exist.	Most organizations will be severely resource-constrained and will have to practice strategic-triage.
Strategy is just ideas until middle managers make it happen.	It seems to us that this is a timeless truth.
Project make strategy happen.	Great project leadership skills will be needed more than ever.
Intention and execution need to balance.	Great plans without the ability to execute effectively will doom many struggling companies.
Stuff happens!	We were not ready for COVID-19. What makes us think that there won’t be more surprises?
Use the A-Team ….. or else ….	Always true and even more so as we come out of the crisis.

A Dozen Realities

What would you add to our list? What would you change? Your thought and comments are appreciated.

12 Things for Middle Managers to Think About in Relation to the Pandemic

May 1, 2020 by Oliver Cummings 2 Comments

By Oliver W. Cummings

1 May 2020

Fundamentally, the act of being a leader involves followers and knowing what to do is not sufficient to inspire followers’ trust; knowing how to go about what you do is what makes for real leadership. And, the “how” is very much tied up in facilitative relationship building. This is true in the best of times, but if everything is going along pretty much as usual, our attention to the relationship building can become routine, or even a little lax.

But, when a crisis hits, those relationships are brought to the forefront and when the crisis is a big, for-real deal, – rather than a normal crisis, like the disruptive entrance of a threatening new business model, as Amazon has been to many retail business establishments – I mean a for-real big deal like the Covid19 producing pandemic, then the metal of every unit leader is tested.

For those faced with job losses, including their own, it is a big deal – how to handle the situation that you may never have faced before, like going from a bread-winner to standing in a bread line for hours just to feed your family.

For those faced with continuing to do business as usual, the challenges are real and a big deal – a firefighter is still expected to respond to a fire alarm, rescue people, infected or not, if need be, and put out the fire.

And, for those whose unit demands continue but under very different constraints and challenges can be horrendous. Think about the doctors and nurses taking care of Covid19 patients at their own personal risk, unable to go home to their own family after work for fear of infecting them, unable to provide for a family visit – or even to show a reassuring smile behind their PPE – to a patient in distress, and dealing with a disease for which there is no known cure.

In each of these three circumstances the beyond-normal manager competencies of facilitative behaviors become hyper-important:

Believe in what can be done by a committed group of people and that, even when they are not able to achieve what they set out to do, they are positively motivated.
Understand and feel, empathically, what others are going through so that you do not tread on their feelings unknowingly.
Genuinely care about others; and, when what you have to do is detrimental to them in some way, be sure that you do it respectfully and compassionately.
Build on the trust you’ve managed to earn and keep true to your trustworthiness.
Above all, maintain your integrity through the whole process.

Trust and integrity go hand-in-hand. Interpersonal trust is a two-way process and is tied to common experiences. In a time of crisis people look to their respected managers for a steady hand.

Done with honesty and commitment to doing what is right based on a solid understanding of right from wrong (aka, done with integrity), these things will help bolster your trust relationships with your employees:

Be predictable. A key to cultivating trust is consistency of behavior.
Handle the pressure. Be where you need to be, doing what is most important for you to do – and be sure your folks know where you are and why – in this way stay “visible.”
Tell the truth and keep your promises. Getting caught in a lie or breaking a promise will do immediate and usually long-lasting damage to your trustworthiness.
Show concern for employee’s and other units’ rights and issues. Such concern provides a sense of security that you will not take unfair advantage.
Be accurate and forthright in communications. To the extent you ethically can, you should provide adequate explanations of decisions and actions.
Share some control, but make decisions decisively, timely, and with the information available. Smart delegation and participation at a decision-making level with employees is effective.
Demonstrate your competence and resolve to deal with the complexities of the circumstance. For others to trust you they must first believe you are competent (to do the job, to make the decision, to exercise sound judgment), and that you intend to win.

A Facilitative Manager and Covid19

April 29, 2020 by Oliver Cummings Leave a Comment

By Oliver W. Cummings

29/04/2020

Bill asked a question in the previous post on the facilitative manager and trust. In essence the question was, “In relation to the pandemic, is trust ‘flipped’ in that we need the workers to trust us more than we need to trust them?” It is an important question.

In the first of this series on the facilitative manager I introduced the manager’s relationship hierarchy. It looks like this:

Starting at the bottom of the hierarchy, employees acknowledge that you (the manager) have positional authority, for example, to make an assignment.

As you demonstrate competence (for example, in technical, business and interpersonal skills), the relationship moves up the hierarchy to recognition and acceptance. A more solid relationship in getting the job done.

Trust, is a complex and critical pivot-point in building the relationship; it is based on the perception of your integrity. Competence is a prerequisite, but integrity allows others to believe that you will act consistently and fairly in any situation.

Confidence, results from your fair use and exercise of power and judgment. An employee may trust you personally, but not have confidence in your ability to employ power and judgment in your job. You may be perceived to be trustworthy, but ineffective on behalf of the employee in a given circumstance, like, for example, when the business is adversely affected in a pandemic.

At the highest level of the pyramid, mutual commitment, you and your employee have shared goals that address both business and individual needs. Each of you, in a sense, has the other’s back.

A circumstance like the closing of businesses and resulting dramatic changes to business models that may result from the effects of Covid19, can damage or destroy interpersonal relationships that have been developed to the confidence or mutual commitment levels.

If the circumstances allow the managers to handle the situation well, by keeping some level of stability for the employees and making sure that the phrases, “We’re all in this together,” and “We’ll get through this together,” have genuine and transparent meaning, such relationships may survive at the trust level and that makes for a foundation to build on when the business returns to whatever its new normal will be.

Handled poorly, however, (for example, by ignoring reasonable safety practices in the management decisions surrounding doing business during the disruptions caused by the pandemic or in the restart of operations as restrictions are lifted), trust will be perceived to have been betrayed, and at a minimum, recognition of mangers’ competence will be damaged. Such management missteps, even in (maybe especially in) dire circumstances, make it necessary for managers at all levels to restart their relationship building almost from the bottom up with their former or existing employees, as well as with potential new hires.

Bill’s question was, “Is trust ‘flipped’ in that we need the workers to trust us more than we need to trust them?” I go back to my basic premise that personal trust is a two-way street, grown out of shared experiences. The circumstances of the experiences certainly modify the way trust is developed and maintained. And, yes, managers need to be trust worthy in their exercise of management decisions in the emergency.

For trust to be preserved in the manager—employee relationship, however, the manager must also understand and accept the employee’s perception of what is a fair in the circumstance. So, even if the manager is unable to act in accord with the employee’s definition of fair, s/he must accept that it is the employee’s perception, and trust that it is genuinely motivated.

COVID19

Wicked! Now what?

What’s next?

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