Leadership

Question 2 of 12 — What’s the problem context?

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All business problems evolve in the context of their external and internal environments. Department problems lie within the business and business problems lie within the industry. And, surprise, internal stakeholders are NOT aligned. Goo problem definition requires that you look out into the larger environment and pay attention to what’s happening on the inside.

We are offering a free 60-minute webinar addressing a dozen questions you must answer if you are going to resolve your complex business problems. Since this is a webinar and not our full workshop, the session is high-level, but valuable.

Also, it is not an infomercial!  

The webinar will provide an overview of the 12 questions and the knowledge and skills you need to answer them. You can learn more and enroll HERE.

Thanks for reading. It’s lonely out here in the blogosphere. (Wow, it that an old-timer word.)

Complex Business Problem? Answer 12 questions or prepare to fail

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Complex business problems are increasing and middle managers are at the front line of the battle. Our position is that the work of resolving complex problems starts with asking important questions about the problems and then structuring your resolution efforts around the answers to these questions.

We are offering a free 60-minute webinar addressing the questions you must answer if you are going to resolve your complex business problems. Here are the first five questions and some of the suggestions leading to answers. We will “fill the blanks” during the webinar. Since this is a webinar and not our full workshop, the session is high-level, but valuable. It is not an infomercial!  

The webinar will provide an overview of the questions and needed skills. You can learn more and enroll HERE.

If you don’t have time for the webinar, feel free to drop me a line and I’ll send the full list of questions.

A Leader?

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A Chief Who Asks the Warriors to Do What They Will Not Do Is No Longer Chief

Amazonian Xingu Tribal Leader

By Oliver Cummings

The story

I am not certain that this story happened just the way it was told; but I am sure it makes an important point for anticipating, planning, and acting with the future in mind.

It was a crappy day in 1943 in the foothills of the Apennines near Florence. There was a house up on a high hill about a mile away from where the company was bivouacked and recon had informed the officers that it was full of enemy soldiers.

The recently installed Second Lieutenant, a replacement for one that was killed some days earlier, called upon Dad, a platoon sergeant, to assemble his squad and “take that house up the hill.” Dad surveyed the situation and concluded quickly that the mission would be disastrous. There was no real cover going up the hill and the location of the house gave its occupants a wide, clear field of fire. Certainly the Americans were being observed now and just as certainly if they maneuvered to move up the hill they would be seen early in the process, with no place to go if they came under fire.

This new shave-tail Lieutenant had postured as a hardass, something that didn’t impress my years-older and battle-hardened father. He saluted. “Yes, Sir.” And he turned smartly and marched off toward where his platoon was in repose.

He called his squad together and had them fall in with their gear, in formation, in the open field in front of the bivouac area. When the twelve men in his squad had assembled, Dad called them to attention facing the direction of the house on the hill, had them dress the formation and called, “About face.” Then he started calling cadence as he marched the men directly away from the objective.

Seeing the odd sight of men marching as if on a parade field here in the middle of a real shooting war, the Lieutenant ran out and fell in step with Dad. As they marched along, the Lieutenant said, “What the hell are you doing, Sergeant?”

“I’m going to take that house back there?” Dad said with a jerk of his thumb over his left shoulder.

“Just how the hell do you think you’re going to do that?”

“I’m going around the world to get there.”

With that the apoplectic Lieutenant halted the squad, dismissed them and took Dad up to the command post where the Company Commander, a respected Major, stripped him of his stripes for insubordination. The busting back to PFC stuck, but the squad did not have to pursue taking the house and later that morning an air force support sortie bombed the house and cleared the way for the Company to take the hill without much of a fight.

The Point of the Story.

Think about the foolish things a leader can do when they are faced with a crisis:

  • Miss that the crisis is imminent (not looking at their environment)
  • Just keep doing what they’ve “always” done in the way they’ve “always” done it (being stuck in the past)
  • Let the boss worry about it (failing to take ownership for their unit)
  • Assume it’s not going to affect us (failing to recognize how things are related to their business)
  • So busy they ignore it until its too late to adapt (being stuck in today)

And, there are more.

So, what is a manager to do?

  • SCAN for signals of change. These signals may or may not be expected. If unexpected, they need to trigger careful consideration.
  • CONSIDER the implications of the signals.
  • PLAN by considering alternatives in light of some of these signals. Approach the signals as a mandate to think wider and differently.
  • DECIDE how to react in the near term.
  • EXECUTE the “do now” plans and gather the resources that will be needed if contingency plans have to be used.

Are you in the midst of change, need to take ownership in a more structured way? Consider these possibilities from MindPrep.com:

MindPrep will soon be piloting a new futures-oriented hybrid course. If you need to up your game to respond to changing times and shifting strategies, consider participating in this relevant, futures-oriented, convenient, cohort-based, hybrid course. Remember, as Yogi Berra once said, “The future ain’t what it used to be.” Together we can learn to deal with this bit of wisdom. For more information contact bill.welter@mindprep.com.

Are you in an organization going through significant strategy shifts? Get pragmatic, structured ways to help you respond from MindPrep Resource Center on Amazon.com.

Unit Leadership: Planning for Strategic Success introduces you to an approach to thinking through your unit’s service business model.

How to Manage Your Unit to Make Strategy Real is an eleven-point guidebook to help you analyze your situation and plan your responses to company strategy shifts.

WHAT WE KNOW FOR SURE – Part 5 -PROBLEMs

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We posted COVID, STRATEGY, AND WHAT WE KNOW FOR SURE a few weeks ago. Here are some further comments and observations about the fourth “known” — the proliferation of complex problems.

MindPrep Resource Center

Gee, about a year ago, things were simple. Put together a good strategy and ride it into the future. Sweet!

BAM! COVID-19! >>>>> Complex problems on the rise.

Pre-Covid problem resolution

In the “good ole days” (2019) most of our problems could be address singly. Expertise and experience could be applied because, as the T-shirt says, we’ve “been there and done that.”

  • PROBLEM? Know that a problem exists. Although problems should be “obvious,” that’s not always the case.
  • PROBLEM! Define the problem. Problems are often obscured by their symptoms. You need to look beyond the symptoms to find their cause. That’s where you’ll find the real problem.
  • P.R.O.B.L.E.M. Describe the problem with respect to its urgency, importance, clarity, complexity, and ownership.
  • STRATEGIES? Develop strategies to solve the problem. Except for the simplest of problems there are usually more than one way to resolve them.
  • STRATEGY! Select the best strategy. Use known and accepted criteria to evaluate all of the strategies and pick the best.
  • IMPLEMENT! Implement the strategy. What did your assessment tell you about your chances of success?
  • REVIEW! Review the results and improve your skills. Learning and improvement takes place using a rigorous after-action review process.

Post-Covid problem resolution complications

  • The “new normal” is slowly evolving. Do you describe the problem in the context of your old business or should you define the problem in the context of your reinvented business?
  • How urgent and important is the problem in a pandemic world. Can you even triage your suite of problems until a vaccine is on the horizon?
  • How many options are really available given the level of uncertainty? Will everything be built on a foundation of tentative assumptions?
  • Is there a “best” strategy to resolve the problem(s) or should you satisfice for the time being?

Advice while you wait for the new normal

Spend some quality “think time” focused on your business model and how you think it might evolve. Solve all big problems in the context of your evolving business model. Build a few scenarios and track them. For example, how does the problem look in a “shrink then grow” scenario? What about a “get acquired” scenario?

Assess every assumption you’ve made about business survival and success. What problem resolutions impact, or are impacted by, these assumptions. For example, what assumptions are you making about your workforce? About your customers?

Similar to using a Project Management Office to coordinate projects in your company, you might want to institute a Problem Resolution Team to integrate the efforts to resolve the big problems facing your company. Complex problems have dynamic interrelationships and few of your problems will stand alone. Take a systems approach.

We are in the process of revising our existing offering for Solving Complex Business Problems . That in itself is a complex problem. Wish is luck.

WHAT WE KNOW FOR SURE – Part 4 – the need for speed

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We posted COVID, STRATEGY, AND WHAT WE KNOW FOR SURE a couple of weeks ago. Here are some further comments and observations about the third “known.”

MindPrep Resource Center

Gee, about a year ago, things were simple. Put together a good strategy and ride it into the future. Sweet!

BAM! COVID-19! >>>>> Move fast enough or become irrelevant.

What do you do when caught in an ambush? You move! And “which way” is a matter of judgment and luck. You can’t take the time to run a detailed analysis of options — you don’t have any time to spare.

What don’t you do when caught in an ambush? Stand still. If you do you’ll be dead.

You may not like the options for change open to you but you’ve been caught in the Covid ambush and have to act accordingly. You do know that something has to change. Or, more likely, many things have to change simultaneously.

Maybe you can fall back on your experience; but unless you’re a crisis expert you don’t have much relevant experience. Maybe you can convene a group of experts; but that takes time you don’t have.

What to do? Well, let me suggest something scary and radical. Describe the situation to your managers and let them tell you what to change. They have their “boots on the ground” so they see the real world. And, they are usually smarter than you think. They likely see options you don’t see and will know how to implement them without calling the consultants.

Will they (and you) make mistakes? Heck yes. But, if you are also agile you’ll recover from those mistakes and keep moving.

Remember, standing still (like waiting for a bailout) is NOT AN OPTION.

Want the truth? Think like …

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Source: VisualHunt

False news! Fake news! Opinion! Celebrity as expert! Forget science! Here’s the latest conspiracy news! Journalists lie! Politicians lie! “I read it on the internet!” “That’s just spin!” China (or Russia) (or Iran) is hacking our news and …….

Yowzah! Finding the truth used to be easy.

“Back in the day” we had Walter Cronkite, the “most trusted man in America.”  Later, we thought the internet would make it easy to find the truth because so many people could “fact check.” Wow were we wrong! Seeking truth is harder than ever before because so many people / organizations / governments want to mislead us.

So, for the sake of public welfare I’d like to offer some suggestions to make your work easier. Or, if not easier, maybe a bit more organized.

Maybe you should think like …

Let’s get out of the world of brainiacs and into the world of real people doing practical things to find “the truth.” I suggest that we can learn truth-seeking from some of the following people.

You might want to think like …..

  • A research librarian and find primary sources. Retweets and opinion pieces are always filtered news. Believe them at your peril. If you want the truth you will have to work and dig deeper. Otherwise, you will find yourself living in an echo chamber. Think of how you developed your personal stance on global warming. Do you know the facts or are your repeating someone’s filtered view?
  • A criminal detective and look for the motive behind what has been presented. A given set of facts will certainly be spun differently by Fox News and CNN. Who has the truth? Probably neither because they have worked to make facts fit their agenda. You need multiple points of view before you can be sure of the real story. Are tariffs good or bad? The answer is “it depends.” The truth is not simple.
  • An historian and consider the context within which the “news” is happening. If you don’t consider the larger context you will be subject to your own biases (and all of us have biases). Sorry, but social media almost never provide the big picture. You have to find it yourself. We’ve had troops in Afghanistan for a long time and we won’t know the real impact for decades to come. The history is ongoing.
  • A medical diagnostician and prepare a differential diagnosis to consider how facts fit within different potential causes. Few things are as simple as they seem. To quote a phrase from decades ago “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.” You will find truth in the causes triggering the events. White nationalism is abhorrent, so why is it on the rise (or is it)? 
  • An art detective and look for the “style and brushstrokes” of the facts being presented and decide if you are dealing with the truth or not.  (This is actually pretty hard because you have to have a level of expertise to even know what to look for.) For example, what do you really know about socialism in the United States in the 21st century? It’s an emotional-laden word. Can you explain it to a ten-year old?

OK, your turn

I’d appreciate your input on how you go about finding the truth in today’s confusing and misleading world. Responses are needed. Thanks.

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