The Little Rules of Action

from zen habits by Leo

“The shortest answer is doing.” - Lord Herbert

Too often we get stuck in inaction — the quagmire of doubt and perfectionism and distractions and planning that stops us from moving forward.

And while I’m no proponent of a whirling buzz of activity, I also believe people get lost in the distractions of the world and lose sight of what’s important, and how to actually accomplish their Something Amazing.

And so today I’d like to humbly present a few little rules of action — just some small reminders, things I’ve found useful but by no means invented, common-sense stuff that is often not common enough.

1. Don’t overthink. Too much thinking often results in getting stuck, in going in circles. Some thinking is good — it’s good to have a clear picture of where you’re going or why you’re doing this — but don’t get stuck thinking. Just do.
2. Just start. All the planning in the world will get you nowhere. You need to take that first step, no matter how small or how shaky. My rule for motivating myself to run is: Just lace up your shoes and get out the door. The rest takes care of itself.
3. Forget perfection. Perfectionism is the enemy of action. Kill it, immediately. You can’t let perfect stop you from doing. You can turn a bad draft into a good one, but you can’t turn no draft into a good draft. So get going.
4. Don’t mistake motion for action. A common mistake. A fury of activity doesn’t mean you’re doing anything. When you find yourself moving too quickly, doing too many things at once, this is a good reminder to stop. Slow down. Focus.
5. Focus on the important actions. Clear the distractions. Pick the one most important thing you must do today, and focus on that. Exclusively. When you’re done with that, repeat the process.
6. Move slowly, consciously. Be deliberate. Action doesn’t need to be done fast. In fact, that often leads to mistakes, and while perfection isn’t at all necessary, neither is making a ridiculous amount of mistakes that could be avoided with a bit of consciousness.
7. Take small steps. Biting off more than you can chew will kill the action. Maybe because of choking, I dunno. But small steps always works. Little tiny blows that will eventually break down that mountain. And each step is a victory, that will compel you to further victories.
8. Negative thinking gets you nowhere. Seriously, stop doing that. Self doubt? The urge to quit? Telling yourself that it’s OK to be distracted and that you can always get to it later? Squash those thoughts. Well, OK, you can be distracted for a little bit, but you get the idea. Positive thinking, as corny as it sounds, really works. It’s self-talk, and what we tell ourselves has a funny habit of turning into reality.
9. Meetings aren’t action. This is a common mistake in management. They hold meetings to get things done. Meetings, unfortunately, almost always get in the way of actual doing. Stop holding those meetings!
10. Talking (usually) isn’t action. Well, unless the action you need to take is a presentation or speech or something. Or you’re a television broadcaster. But usually, talking is just talking. Communication is necessary, but don’t mistake it for actual action.
11. Planning isn’t action. Sure, you need to plan. Do it, so you’re clear about what you’re doing. Just do it quickly, and get to the actual action as quickly as you can.
12. Reading about it isn’t action. You’re reading an article about action. Ironic, I know. But let this be the last one. Now get to work!
13. Sometimes, inaction is better. This might be the most ironic thing on the list, but really, if you find yourself spinning your wheels, or you find you’re doing more harm than good, rethink whether the action is even necessary. Or better yet, do this from the beginning — is it necessary? Only do the action if it is.

“Talk doesn’t cook rice.” - Chinese Proverb

Helping Teams Advance One Gemba at a Time

from DailyKaizen by Lee Fried

Most frontline teams in my organization are not used to being asked to improve their own process.  Like most organization in transition most improvement that has taken place in the organization in the past was management driven and usually owned and executed by outside experts like consultants and project managers.  As we transition into a system where teams are asked to be responsible for improving their processes every single day one of the most powerful tools management has is the gemba walk.   There are many reasons why the gemba walk is not only an important tool, but an essential tool in a Lean transformation.  Here are just a few:

• Gemba walks are one of the most important methods for teaching management Lean.  It takes Lean out of the conceptual world and forces management to learn by doing. 
• Gemba walks demonstrate a behavior change from management.  It shows that management is curious about the work and interested in seeing the real problems.   Early on they also demonstrate to the teams that everyone is in the change together.  Management is learning alongside the teams they are coaching.
•  Gemba walks allow management to begin to understand the problems that they create and forces them to begin to take responsibility for solving the gaps in their management system.  They see firsthand the challenges created by unclear or too many priorities, silo thinking, narrow job classifications, etc.    
• Gemba walks teach leaders how to set clear expectations and have the discipline to follow-up to see progress.  In order to do this effectively the manager must understand the content of the work; know how to see problems, and to know how far a team can improve over a set increment of time. 

In several post in the past I have talked about some of the advice I give leaders as the learn how to effectively lead gemba walks.  As my own experience has grown some of my thinking has advanced.  Here are a couple of tips that I hope help:

• Gemba walks can only be effective if leaders are disciplined, consistent and organized.  This is why having management standard work is so important.  In our organization we create visual systems (Kamishibai boards) that track adherence to management system work to help reinforce this discipline.   These boards track the frequency, sequence and content of what should be checked during each gemba walk and clearly make visible that the walks are happening as scheduled.  As managers build these boards they need to determine how often they will visit each team (less frequently the higher you are in the organization), and then the board makes it transparent to the teams how often they can expect a visit thus reinforcing the management responsibility.
• Early on it is important to have some coaching help during gemba walks.  It is nice to have a Sensei to go with you, but it is also effective to walk with a leader that has more experience then you do if a Sensei in not available.
• During each walk a leader should ask the team a series of open ended questions to assess the current situation, challenge the current thinking and prepare the team for taking the next step.  If you are just getting starting it is very helpful to have a set of standard questions you always ask the team as well as a system to track notes from past gemba walks.  The leader should take the time to review their notes and prepare their questions so that they respect the time of the team.
• Gemba walks and visual management go hand and hand.  Without visual systems gemba walks often end up being disorganized, not focused on data and worst of all they turn into PR visits or complaining sessions.  Gemba walks are probably the most important tool in helping set and maintain the expectation that teams make their processes visible.
• Finally, at the end of each gemba walk the leader should summarize what they and the team has learned and then clearly define the follow-up items that the team and the leader need to resolve.  Often the due date will be during the next gemba.  This is the most powerful part of the gemba, because when done effectively it helps move the team to the next level of improvement and at the same time gives leadership credibility as the leaders solve some of the systems problems that get in the teams way.   In order to do this well a leader needs to have a system to track on follow up items.  If they ask a team to try x by y date the leader better show up to check or they will lose credibility quickly.  When they do show up to check on the follow up just like they said they would teams start to see that management is serious and they will invest the appropriate time in the improvement activities moving forward.  Something very important as teams begin to learn how to improve their own processes.

Eblin’s 5 questions for struggling leaders

Question 1: 
What am I trying to do that extends beyond the actual time available to me to personally do it?

Question 2: 
What am I trying to accomplish by doing that?

Question 3: 
Given the role that I’m in, what should I be trying to accomplish instead?

Question 4: 
What resources (people, systems, processes) do I need to acquire or develop to cover whatever still seems worthwhile in my answer to Question 2?

Question 5: 
What opportunities do I have to shift from retail leadership (being personally present or involved in everything) to wholesale leadership (leveraging and involving others to act on the overall plan)?

What are you noticing about limits lately? What are you doing to adjust?  I’d love to hear your thoughts and stories about changes you’re making to deal with the limits leaders face.

What Baseball Can Teach Us About Innovation

from HarvardBusiness.org by Scott Anthony

In a chat last week, Boston Red Sox General Manager Theo Epstein explained why he wasn’t bothered by J.D. Drew’s relatively low number of runs batted in (quotes from Joe Posnanski’s blog):

“When you’re putting together a winning team, that honestly doesn’t matter. When you have a player who takes a ton of walks, who doesn’t put the ball in play at an above average rate, and is a certain type of hitter, he’s not going to drive in a lot of runs. Runs scored, you couldn’t be more wrong. If you look at a rate basis, J.D. scores a ton of runs.

And the reason he scores a ton of runs is because he does the single most important thing you can do in baseball as an offensive player. And that’s NOT MAKE OUTS … Look at his runs scored on a rate basis with the Red Sox or throughout his career. It’s outstanding.

You guys can talk about RBIs if you want … we ignore them in the front office … and I think we’ve built some pretty good offensive clubs.”

Business managers can learn a lot from how baseball general managers build and manage their talent portfolio by drawing on the findings of baseball’s Sabermetrics revolution. And the same is true for business managers trying to balance their innovation portfolios: how can they focus on the metrics that really matter?

According to the old-fashioned metrics, the run-batted in is a vital statistic. But smart general managers like Epstein recognize that the RBI is not a valuable measure of performance (it actually correlates with the on-base percentage of the hitters earlier in the lineup).

Innovation managers, too, need to look beyond “obvious” but potentially misleading statistics like first-year revenue, first-mover advantage, and leveraging core competency to hidden drivers of success, such as targeting non-consumption and minimizing first year losses.

A key enabler of the statistical revolution in baseball was not just better statistics, but the widespread availability of those statistics. Even before the internet made possible utterly fantastic websites such as Baseball-Reference, Fangraphs, and Baseball Prospectus (which is also an annual book), the bible for statistics was Macmillan’s Baseball Encyclopedia, introduced to widespread acclaim in 1969. (Alan Schwarz, in The Numbers Game: Baseball’s Lifelong Fascination with Statistics, quotes from Christopher Lehmann-Haupt’s review in the New York Times: “I got lost in it for nearly two days…. It’s still the book I’d take with me to prison.”)

Companies should create an internal encyclopedia in which they highlight the year they started work on each innovation, what type it was, how projections about its market potential changed through time, its key characteristics, and its ultimate performance. The encyclopedia would facilitate statistical analysis to help the company increase its success rate.

Even better would be a cross-industry research effort to develop a deeper and broader reference work. A researcher who painstakingly created a like-for-like database of efforts across multiple companies (made anonymous, of course) would do the innovation movement a great service.

Key to the effort would need to be a robust categorization scheme for classifying the type of innovation (incremental line extension, disruptive, and so forth), the target customer (high-end, mainstream, low-end, nonconsumer) and the market circumstances (nascent, rapidly growing, mature, declining).

Better metrics give Theo Epstein a competitive advantage over his rivals. And better metrics can give you an advantage over yours — and create better innovations that benefit all of us. What else do you think would be in an ideal innovation encyclopedia? Is there an open source way to create a “good enough” starting point?

For a more in-depth argument about what you can learn from baseball about building and managing your talent portfolio, see my article in this month’s Harvard Business Review.

The Cult of Done Manifesto

1. There are three states of being. Not knowing, action and completion.
2. Accept that everything is a draft. It helps to get it done.
3. There is no editing stage.
4. Pretending you know what you’re doing is almost the same as knowing what you are doing, so just accept that you know what you’re doing even if you don’t and do it.
5. Banish procrastination. If you wait more than a week to get an idea done, abandon it.
6. The point of being done is not to finish but to get other things done.
7. Once you’re done you can throw it away.
8. Laugh at perfection. It’s boring and keeps you from being done.
9. People without dirty hands are wrong. Doing something makes you right.
10. Failure counts as done. So do mistakes.
11. Destruction is a variant of done.
12. If you have an idea and publish it on the internet, that counts as a ghost of done.
13. Done is the engine of more.

Need more time

First rule of decision making: More time does not create better decisions.

In fact, it usually decreases the quality of the decision.

More information may help. More time without more information just creates anxiety, not insight.

Deciding now frees up your most valuable asset, time, so you can go work on something else. What happens if, starting today, you make every decision as soon as you have a reasonable amount of data?

20 Great Coaching Questions that can Catalyze Breakthroughs

20 Great Coaching Questions that can Catalyze Breakthroughs: ”

Try them out on YOUR goal this week. And then share them with your team when the opportunity presents itself. Create your own list of 20 killer questions.

• What will things look like in a year if everything goes as planned?

• What are the consequences of not changing?

• Why is this change important?

• What do you already know about this approach?

• How does this change affect the other aspects of the organization?

• What other assumptions could also be valid?

• What generalizations have you made?

• Why is this situation occurring?

• What are the pros and cons of your approach?

• How is this similar to or different from the way you have approached this in the past?

• Are you seeing the goal as would your peers, employees, customers and managers?

• What would you do if time was not an issue?

• What if you cleared your calendar today?

• What if you are talking to the wrong people?

• What if you partnered with someone? Who would he or she be?

• What if you need to create a support structure, how might you do this?

• What if you asked for exactly what you want?

• What if you are barking up the wrong tree?

• What if the answer is right in front of you?

• What can you do to expand your thinking?

• Bonus: What would your alter-ego do if she had no fears or apprehensions?

Great coaching is more about questions than answers (that would be advice)

Leadership Framework

Leadership Framework: ”

The Deputy Secretary of Defense Gordan England has a simple foundation for how to “make” a leader:

• Treat every person with dignity and respect – nobody is more important than anyone else
• Be forthright, honest and direct with every person and in every circumstance
• Improve effectiveness to gain efficiency
• Cherish your time and the time of others – it is not renewable
• Identify the critical problems that need solution for the organization to succeed
• Describe complex issues and problems simply so every person can understand
• Never stop learning – depth and breadth of knowledge are equally important
• Encourage constructive criticism
• Surround yourself with great people and delegate to them full authority and responsibility
• Make ethical standards more important than legal requirements
• Strive for team-based wins, not individual
• Emphasize capability – not organization
• Incorporate measures and metrics everywhere
• Concentrate on core functions and outsource all other

Ask how these can be applied to project work?

Why leaders should practice benign neglect

Things
(and people) almost always work better when you stop messing with them.
All that probing and peering, opening things up and fiddling to try to
improve how they work, checking and supervising, absorb time and effort
that would be better spent on doing the job itself. If you want
results, focus on that and leave the rest alone.

My father was an expert gardener. His garden was the envy of the
neighbors, and the food he grew kept our family supplied with fruit and
vegetables year-round. People used to ask him if he spent all his time
in the garden. Of course, the answer was no. It wasn’t his actual
job, just a hobby. It wasn’t even his only hobby.

The secret of his success with plants was simple. He made sure the
soil was in good condition, he planted at the right time, he kept the
weeds and pests in check, and then he left the plants alone to get on
with growing, flowering, and producing crops.

“Neglect them a bit,” he used to tell me.
“Don’t be fussing around them all the time. Plants thrive
on benign neglect.”

A necessary lesson for today

Most organizations could learn something from my father. Instead of
fussing and fiddling with organizational structure, so-called
management techniques, and all manner of supposed incentives, they
could save themselves a good deal of time, money, and wasted effort if
they did just four simple things:

• Provided civilized working conditions that gave people stability, a
  living wage, and the benefits needed to be able to concentrate on doing
  their jobs.
• Made sure that everyone is given work appropriate to the current
  level of ability and experience; neither over-stretched nor kept in
  boring jobs that don’t challenge their capacity.
• Acted to curb anything that interferes with time spent doing the
  job they are paid for. That includes needless meetings, today’s
  fetish of staying in contact 24/7, and demands to provide pointless
  information for people in the home office with nothing to do beyond
  compile statistics.
• Let people get on with doing their work, making supervision minimal and limiting reporting to the essentials.

Good leaders practice benign neglect. It’s the idiots that
cause the problems, always fussing around their staff, probing and
peering and generally interfering with them doing their jobs.
They’re like children who plant a few seeds and want to dig them
up the next day to see if they’re growing. You can forgive
children, but adults should know better.

How to neglect people to best effect

Here are three simple ways for any leader to help people find success and develop themselves:

• Make sure they have the right conditions — the authority, the
  resources, the training and clear direction, and the time needed
  — and then ignore them as much as possible while they get
  on with their work. It’s their job, not yours. If they’re
  busy, you don’t need to be. Neglect them a little. Do your own
  work and stop messing with theirs.
• A major part of any leader’s work should be keeping down the
  weeds. Keep others away from interfering with your people’s work.
  Cut out unnecessary demands. Pull up useless meetings and slice off
  pointless reports. Weeds like that can choke any hope of good results.
  Be ruthless. Clear a space for your team to thrive and grow.
• Give them the time and space to do their job and develop as they
  should — plus the knowledge that the organization will let them
  get on with it, unless they call for help.

Benign neglect works with people because it shows that you trust
them. It shows you believe in their commitment and ability. It proves
that you believe in their ability to deliver what’s needed
without being watched all the time and treated like small children.

Plants thrive on a bit of neglect. So do people. Try it.

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How to order yourself around

So how do you make your to-do’s
doable? When it’s time to add something to your list, stop and think it
through, using the following guidelines.

• Break it down. The best way to make yourself avoid a task like the plague is to make it a vague monstrosity. The Getting Things Done
  productivity system defines projects differently from tasks: projects
  have multiple sub-actions. That’s an important distinction -
  internalize it, because your to-do list is not your project list. Don’t
  add multi-action tasks to it, like “Clean out the office.” Break it
  down to smaller, easier-to-tackle subtasks like “Purge filing cabinet,”
  “Shred old paperwork” or “Box up unneeded books for library drive.”
  Because Assistant you is going to run for the hills when Boss you says
  “Clean out the office.”

• Work through projects using next actions.
  If you’ve got a multi-action task – that is, a project – only keep its
  next sequential action on your to-do list. When the task is complete,
  refer back to your project list (again, separate from to-do’s) and add
  its next action to your to-do list. At any given moment, your to-do
  list should only contain the next logical action for all your working
  projects. That’s it – just one bite-sized step in each undertaking.

• Use specific, active verbs.
  When you’re telling yourself to do something, make it an order. An item
  like “Acme account checkup” doesn’t tell you what has to be done. Make
  your to-do’s specific actions, like “Phone Rob at Acme re: Q2 sales.”
  Notice I didn’t use the word “Contact,” I said “Phone.” Contact could
  mean phone, email, or IM, but if you’re taking out all the thinking and
  leaving in only action, your verbs will be as specific as possible.
  Literally imagine yourself instructing a personal assistant on her
  first day on the job what you need done.

• Keep your list short.
  Just like no one wants to look at an email inbox with 2,386 messages in
  it, no one wants to have an endless to-do list. It’s overwhelming and
  depressing, like there’s no light at the end of the tunnel. I keep my
  to-do list under 20 items. (This morning it’s only 17 tasks long, and
  I’d call myself a busy person.) Does that sound like too little?
  Remember, your to-do list isn’t a dumping ground for project details,
  or “Someday I’d like to” items. These are tasks you’re committed to
  getting done in the very near future – like the next 2 weeks. Keep your
  projects and someday/maybe items elsewhere. Your to-do list should be
  short, to the point commitments which involve no more deciding whether
  or not you’re really serious about doing it.

• Keep it moving.
  While my to-do list is only 20 items or so, it’s 20 items that change
  every single day. Every day 2-5 tasks get checked off, and 2-5 tasks
  get added. Remember, your to-do list is a working document, not some
  showy “look how organized I am!” thing that quietly gathers dust
  because you’re off doing real work which isn’t written down anywhere.

• Prioritize.
  While your to-do list might have 20 items on it, the reality is you’re
  only going to get a couple done per day (assuming you’re not writing
  down things like “get up, shower, make coffee, go to work…”). So make
  sure those tasks are at the very top of your list. How you do this will
  depend on what tool or software you use to track your to-do’s, but do
  make sure you can see what you need to get done next at a glance.

• Purge.
  Just like you should be able to see what tasks are top priority on your
  to-do list, you should be able to see what items have been on your list
  the longest as well. Chances are you’ve got some mental
  blockage around the tasks that have been sitting around forever, and
  they’ve got to be re-worded or broken down further. Or perhaps they
  don’t need to get done after all. Deleting an item from your to-do list
  is even better than checking it off, because you’ve saved yourself the
  effort.

• Log your done items. Like any good assistant,
  you want to show the Boss exactly much you’ve gotten done. Make sure
  you stow your done items somewhere so you can revel in your own
  productivity. Also, your “done” list is a great indicator of whether or
  not your to-do list is working: if more than 2 days goes by without a
  new done item? It’s time to revamp your to-do list and get back to best
  practices.