Lindsey Coen-Fernandez of Advantage Performance Group Shares Some Wisdom

We just caught up with Lindsey Coen-Fernandez of Advantage Performance Group.  Lindsey is an inspiring entrepreneur and leader in the area of organization development.  I went to one of Lindsey's workshops just before Christmas and had a great time.  Here's our follow up items based on the call with her:

Lindsey has an upcoming workshop she'll be putting on around the May time frame and stay tuned for that.  She believes the will likely be "The Neuroscience Behind Decision Making".  I had never heard of an "analytic network coach" and that's her specialty.  Sounds good.  I can see how helping people with decision making is a very key skill for facilitators.  I typically list options with pros and cons and a recommendation or argument, for example.  David Slight's BDN model and our causality conversation topics for this year sound similar as well.

Lindsey's target market is $100M to $500M businesses: not yet enterprises but rather well established.  She is seeking more business in the NW and has traveled extensively, globally for years.  She also produces webinars.

I plan to connect her with my friends John and Toni from the US Forest Service who run the National Facilitator Cadre when I worked with them back in 2012.  Also, I will connect her with the new Environmental subgroup that formed out of Indivisible Eastside.  Check out IE!  

Lindsey recommended a meetup to me (I shared my involvement in the Corruption subgroup for IE) called "Let's Talk About Race" from DNDA.  I commented to her how Race and Security topics coincide a great deal.  I have a list of local Security experts that I maintain it would be fun to get them together and involved.

Lindsey also recommend Andy Storch who has a podcast called Entrepreneur Hot Seat and a company called "The Hustle", which produces a daily newsletter about the latest tech and business info for millennials and are making good money with their business model.

Thanks to Lindsey to all of her great wisdom.  Check her out! 

About Vision & Strategy - How to develop it, other challenges and considerations

We had a motley crew of awesome people show up to the AppsJack Share gathering last in Kirkland to talk about Vision & Strategy. I got a lot of great input (see everything below) that will help me better direct the January version of the podcast.

Key Takeaways:

1. Strategy and approach (what to do) depends on the stage and situation of the business
2. Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) a good way to break down complex projects
3. Internal and external lenses/views/perspectives key to understanding and thinking about strategy
4. Personal and corporate authenticity key to successful implementation
5. Aligning an essential skill
6. Nuance and readiness for seeing, understanding, integrating and working with outliers and anomalies is another key
7. Timeframe matters for strategic thinking
8. Context matters (and therefore controlling/limiting scope and having focus)
9. There is a general prerence toward rapid tests of assumptions (failing fast) rather than long and protracted 'strategic' actions but there are times when the latter tactics (strategic actions) matter
10. We couldn't determine whether or not models mattered. Models are meant to be broken, so why manage to them or even think about them?
11. The mitigation and reduction of risk is key to successful strategy
12. Design thinking is a key and related skill
13. Strategy isn't and shouldn't be thought of as linear

We wondered at the very beginning if we should start by discussing vision or strategy and the answer, perhaps not surprisingly, was 'it depends'.  Chris brought up a good point that it very much depends on the stage, phase or status of the organization.  Assessment and triage (qualification) is first needed.  Steve raised challenges he has about breaking down a compelling vision into the component parts.  To me, these are the skills of project managers and other leaders who make complex and challenging things easier, that can be communicated to the necessary suppliers.  Work breakdown structure is a common method.  Mike Pritchard shared that he thinks there is an internal and external vision.  Joe Okonek refers to the vision, values and valued behaviors as things that can / should be externally communicated and publicly shared.  Missions, for example, can be internal documents and communications that help internal relationships focus on comm and strategic goal.  Public/open and private/closed is another dimension on which to explore strategy.

Good parts / what attendees liked: mentions of sex, swearing, arguments, passionate discussion, British accents, food, beer.  Authenticity was brought up as a key factor in this area.  Without true authenticity (and value, quality) your audience will see you as a fake and disengage (won't authorize).  Berry talked about the importance of alignment.  For example, aligning yourself and your company with the market and environment and their vision, values, purposes, needs, interests, ideas, etc.  Dominic talked about the difference between power (which can be personal and thought of as influence) and force, which can be applied from the tops down if someone has a lot of money or ability to coerce.  10 types of power are discussed in this article.  David brought up the point that strategy usually requires a longer and more futuristic timeline.  For example, he said that it's hard to be strategic for two minutes.  

Dominic led us in a discussion of the definition of a strategy and there were many different thoughts and opinions.  Someone defined a strategy as choosing an approach or an approach chosen ie a decision and commitment was necessarily made. I brought up the notion that it is hard to create a perfect product but many people disagreed: that within a domain, there can be a perfect product.  But there is a context, and knowing this context well is critical for product success.  Dominic wanted us to separate 'strategy' generically with 'strategy with a purpose' (a clear why). I brought up an issue I was having at work making a decision to build a feature for a big customer or not.  I am in the process of determining whether their request is qualified or not.  There is much skill required in qualification of certain issues.  Many at the table believed that 'if you are going to fail, fail fast' and people didn't like the idea of dragging on some elaborate process but others believed that caution and due diligence, not just action, were required in certain ambiguous political situations.  There are also scenarios where people cannot afford to fail fast, especially when there is not yet a powerful coalition, agreement and a clearly articulated and communicated vision.  

Richard wanted to know, "How do you know you have strategy?"  It's a good question.  We agreed that force, power, belief, authenticity, conviction and in many ways consistency were required for strategy.  But flexibility and other leadership qualities are also required.  We talked for some time about whether models were important or not.  David did not believe they were beneficial.  I gave the example of NoSQL database strategies where the data gets stored independent of a rigid table schema.  Many new data storage strategies do not rely on a centralized schema.  Differences between abstractions and concrete proof, evidence or data were interesting.  "Insight" or mental models are interesting when derived from data or science.  Steve talked about millennials and their needs.  He says that they share a desire for a better world and have this impediment of the rest of the world who is still alive, their elders.  

Someone pointed out that it is important to seek out anomalies in your data and to test assumptions.  Andy Scott made the point about the import of assumption testing on Episode 2 of the podcast.  Assumptions are a category or area of risk.  Steve shared the saying, "The presumptuous assume, the sumptuous consume."  People do need to build and test (at least mental) models.  Jean brought up the saying to test early and test often.  I shared about test-driven development (TDD), which is about only writing enough code (doing enough) to pass the next test.  It is a Lean approach.  Richard talked about the Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) role at Netflix and how they have build their strategy and plan around mitigating risk.  Managing and reducing risk is a key element of good strategy.  We talked a lot about design, design thinking and its import and spent quite a bit of time talking about Steve Jobs as a visionary and who else he surrounded himself with that helped make him successful.  It was suggested that Jonathan Ive at Apple was very critical to Steve's success and controlled and manipulated him in many ways.  He did of course have many failures as well.  Someone shared the idea of designing for failure, not success.  

Dominic wanted to make it clear that strategy was not linear and that it runs off of principles related to non-linear dynamics and non-linear systems.  Berry shared that it is our intention as managers to create systems that control and constrain--and this is necessary--but does indeed rub up against the truly dynamic nature of people and systems; feedback loops and quality systems that continuously transform and improve systems are indeed required.  We talked about automation and its important and how design decisions like 'who does what' plays big-time into strategy.  In my opinion, users should be the preferred and default / de facto actor and some (many?) of them should have the option to do a task themselves (value add) or delegate a task to a computer or someone else.  We started talking about the podcast toward the end of the event and Bruce recommended The Boss Show, which is a Seattle-area recording about bosses.

Berry posed the question, "How do you know that your vision is not a unicorn?" which is basically to say that you are not living a delusion or tilting at windmills.  The book Black Swan was recommended.  Richard talked a lot about the many types of currencies which relates to the idea of non-monetary economies.  I wondered out loud and Steve agreed that there is some sort of harmonic mathematical equation that describes a leader's oscillation between hypothesis tests and failures.  Bruce brought up 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Steven Covey and I mentioned that The 8th Habit is about "finding your true voice and helping others find theirs".  The book also talks a lot about connecting strategies of the head with those of the heart which is probably truly about authenticity, believe and conviction.

Questions and topics for further consideration:

• A Strategy (noun) vs. Strategy (verb) - What are the differences?
• The skill of qualification; how to qualify, what to qualify, what to ignore?
• Modern automation thoughts - who does what and what to do with the displaced workers?
• Why do the ideas of internal/private/closed and external/public/open help us in thinking about strategy?
• How do you know you have strategy?  (What is strategy?)
• What are the differences between real-world models and mental models and/or thought processes?  
• Test-driven design in management?
• The applications of flexibility and rigidity in strategy development

Which topics, ideas and points would like to see covered on the podcast about Vision & Strategy?

Top 4 Parameters for Thinking about and Planning Your PMO

Thoughts on building a structure and plan to manage organizational resources and work at the aggregate.

I attended a great talk last night from Puget Sound Project Management Institute (PMI) called the PMO Roundtable and I'd like to share some of the insights with you.  At the talk, people agreed that PMOs are hard to create, many people struggle with the same basic organizational and cultural tensions, and that there are some basic and shared parameters of planning, resources, and work that can help us think about solving these challenges as we apply them to our own business domain or work problem.

There are five main parameters that I've identified that can help our thinking of PMOs:

Parameter #1 - Resources are of discrete types and have statuses
 Although it all boils down to "they're humans" we can simplify the problem by thinking of the people as: utilized, available, expert, etc. to help  us sort out how to fit people into slots.  Availability is another property of the resource that can of course help us with planning.  Of course the time dimension of WHEN people are of a specific type is critical to us as well.  Time is a constant dimension in systems like this that must be considered throughout the planning process.

Parameter #2 - Resources are consumed or utilized in discrete ways, some more effective than others
Resources, like their name applies are value to us if utilized properly.  There's good ways to use resources (putting them on the right tasks, treating them well) and there are poor ways to use resources (being abusive, overusing them, being mean, forceful, coercive, etc.)  We want to respect our resources but they're here for some kind of compensation and we need to get value out of them in exchange.  The matrix of resource type to preferred and dis-preferred utilization types is interesting for our planning purposes.

Parameter #3 - We can think of the work separately from the resources but need to put them together and manage the connections to add value to the system
It's nice to be able to separate the work and project plan from the actual resources.  Some people in the roundtable were talking about finding your "critical resource" (a concept borrowed from Critical Chain and Theory of Constraints) and then planning the project around them.  I feel like this method, however, is problematic and puts too much pressure on "hero individuals" rather than the team or collective.  I prefer approaches that get the team, collectively, to estimate their work and have leaders such as that critical resource work on making the others faster or more confident and build skills.

Parameter #4 - Systems, portfolios, programs, projects, and resources have slack and utilization properties; unplanned or unused slack is waste and cost
Someone in the talk last night said that you WANT slack in your project.  I couldn't understand this.  I can see how it is nice to have people free to apply to the project and critical tasks but at the aggregate slack is waste if not applied to the project.  Managing the slack is a key issue in planning one or more projects.

What do you think about these parameters?  Do they make sense?  Are there others?  Please discuss below!