Proceed Until Apprehended

I’m preparing a presentation for a School Community Council conference I’m speaking at in a couple weeks to a bunch of councils throughout the city of Regina. I’m working on memorizing this and I’ll do it with a powerpoint that is primarily images or bullet points of lists. This is just draft, but I thought you might be interested to see it. Any feedback you want to provide is greatly appreciated.

Thankyou.

I appreciate being able to come and speak with you today.

I am chair of the Dr. Perry SCC (school community council). This is my second year as a member of our SCC.

My daughter, Annika, is in the first grade this year.  My son Joshua will be starting kindergarten this coming fall.

The province-wide movement from Parent Teacher Associations to SCCs came with some pretty audacious objectives. SCCs are envisioned to be at the centre of the community and to drive a lot of value and services. There’s a lot of responsibility to shoulder being on one of these councils. We really are in a pretty influential position to do things not only for our school, but for our neighbours as well. I want to congratulate you and thank you for making this commitment and putting in effort for a greater good.

I’d like to establish a couple ground rules for my presentation.  First, ask me questions anytime you want.  This becomes a lot more interesting if it’s a conversation. Please, fire away. Second, please don’t take notes. Everything I’m saying and everything I’m showing is available for download on my website, which I’ll share at the end.

I hope to save lots of time at the end for more questions and discussion, too.

I’ve been invited to speak to you because the Perry SCC is taking some steps you might find interesting. Before we get to that though, I want to tell you a little bit about myself.

I’m passionate about improving the quality of life in my community.  I believe we’ve lost our sense of relationship at the local level. There’s too much of an “every person for themself” kind of vibe to the world. I’d like to help change that. I don’t think all the advances and technical innovations happening in the world have to come at the expense of knowing your neighbour.

This is easier said than done, though. I’m just one person and the trend towards anonymity is obvious.

Nevertheless, I want to help people and make a difference in my community.

Here’s the real problem, though. I’m not very good at the traditional things that would help people, like baking cookies, compassionate hugs or chaperoning a school dance.  I’m trying to play to my strengths, which are things like strategic planning, conceptual diagrams and theoretical models.

So while I want to help people, I’ve realized what I really need to do is help people help other people.

I think this actually works out do be pretty helpful.  When I’m working with SCCs or other public-serving organizations, it’s pretty clear that there’s a need for some assistance at the organizational level. This also allows me to maximize my reach. If I can help a community group get better that serves 300 people, I feel like I’m doing some pretty positive stuff.

This is all to say that the thoughts and ideas I share with you today come from an intention to make the world a better place. I worry sometimes I sound a bit too objective and unfeeling, but perhaps that’s just me trying to help get results in my own way.

I’ve got a fairly practical objective here today. Very specifically, I want to help you see how important it is to step back and evaluate why you’re doing what you’re doing. I want you to examine WHY your SCC exists.

This is the same exercise the Perry SCC has gone though. Our council isn’t done. We’re still figuring it out and growing our capacity, but I think we’re on the right track.

As a starting point for a discussion about building focus in an SCC, I want to share my take on what SCCs typically are like right now.

They’re often stressful situations. There’s too much to do and there’s not enough time or people to do it.  There are lots of expectations, needs and challenges. Quite often, things don’t get dealt with until they’re an emergency. There’s not much planning involved. It’s pretty reactive.

Your own experience went something like this. Your kid started school. You thoughtfully determined that the quality of your child’s education and the formative years of grade school were important enough for you to get engaged. You showed up for that first meeting full of vim and vigour, eyes aglow with possibilities for the things you could do for the school… and they said, “Thank goodness you’re here. Jim just quit the fundraising committee and we need a new chair.”

You didn’t say no. You couldn’t say no. These people were pouring their hearts and souls into serving the school and you couldn’t bear to see them suffer. 1, 3, 8 years later, and now you’re completely invested in the projects you didn’t care about when you started.

I’d like to make a broad, general distinction between two different roles that come up in SCCs. There are individuals who are focused on Program Delivery and there are individuals that focus on Solution Development.

Both of these roles are necessary to make an SCC work, to make any non-profit work. If you have just one or just the other, you’re going to be out of balance. If you have all people that are focusing on Developing Solutions for the future, you have a lot of theory and ideas and no-one to do the work. If you have all people that are focusing on Delivering Programs, you have a bunch of people doing hard work, but we don’t know if it’s actually the right or best thing for the school.

My experience with SCCs is that they tend to err on the side of Program Delivery. Most people feel most comfortable if they’ve got a job and they’re working hard to get it done. Asking whether it’s the right job at the right time for the right people falls to the wayside.

When this is the predominant practice in an SCC, we often forget to ask why we are here. We get laden with tasks and responsibilities and don’t make time to ask if we’re pursuing the right goal. This is an activity trap. We get caught comforting ourselves that we’re creating value while we may just be making a flurry of activity. In short, the environment changes, but we sometimes don’t.

When I’ve spoken with SCC members, I see some recurring themes that happen. When we just keep doing, and we don’t ask why, that’s when we get in trouble. When we’re not asking WHY, here’s what happens:

We get too narrow in our focus and just do a few things for the school.

The SCC becomes a pretty small group that works hard but also burns out.

The SCC makes lots of assumptions about roles and responsibilities. We decide we’re supposed to do X and not Y, but we don’t really consider what’s needed or correct.

There can also be a lot of back-seat driving and micro-management.  Even if it’s not their responsibility, members start focusing and digging on some pretty narrow details of programs.

I want to stress a key point here. It’s not that this stuff isn’t important. It is important. There’s lots of other things that are important, too. The opportunity is for you and your SCC to decide, of all the imporant things, which one or ones should be our priority?

The Dr. Perry SCC went through an exercise to examine what our purpose is in meeting every month. Asking and answering WHY was powerful.

Let me tell you how we did it.

First, we acknowledge that we weren’t working to a plan. We were just doing stuff.

Second, we deliberately made space to ask ourselves a “Why are we here?” type question.

I used a facilitation method that worked really well for this, and I want to come do it for your school. We’ll talk more about that in a bit.

Third, we have been working hard to make sure we don’t fall back into habits of just “doing.” We’re keeping the plan alive.

Here’s what we came up with:

1 Enabling Parental Involvement

2 Sharing Spirit through Partnership

3 Acknowledging Student’s Value and Worth

4 Diversifying the Learning Experience

5 Growing Citizenship

I won’t get into too much detail about what each of these means to us. If you want descriptions, again, I’ve got them up on my website at nevindanielson.com. The point I’m trying to make here is that the exercise of stepping back and determining our purpose was essential and gave us real energy.

I will say, though, if you go through an exercise like this, it’s pretty easy to fall into the trap of defining yourself by your past practices. I’d encourge you to shake those conventions and ask yourself anew, “Why are we here?”

Here’s some assumptions you may have to get past:

• We’re here to raise money and buy stuff
• We’re here to make sure parents have a voice at school
• This one’s related, but it deserves it’s own statement: Our job is to assess school policy
• If it weren’t for us exceptional people, no parents would be involved
• We’re great at delegating

I can simplify the process we went through for your SCC to get on the right track:

one, take an hour to have a conversation about “Why are we here?”

two, commit to the results and change what you’re working on

I want to see your SCC get stronger.  If it’s of any help, please invite me in to do the same facilitated session we did at our SCC. I would discuss the key focus question that we’re going to answer. It might be as simple as “Why are we here?”, then we would go through an exercise to answer it. It’s called a Group Concensus Workshop.

As I said, today’s presentation is available for download from my website, nevindanielson.com. I’ve got contact info there if you want to find me. I’ve also got a link to an online forum I created for SCCRegina. To respect everyone’s privacy, it’s by invitation only. It’s a place for you to raise concerns and interests with fellow SCC members from across the city. Come find me at my website and ask me for an invitation. Everyone here is eligible to be a member.

Thanks very much.

I played rugby for a couple years in university. It was a great experience and I look back on the friendships and the competition with great fondness.

The social aspects of rugby can really suck a university-age guy in, but I also fell in love with the sport. It looks like a battle of brutish violence, but there’s much more to it. There’s a lot of nuance and complexity to the game. There’s strategies and techniques that compel entire nations to be gripped by the sport.

One of the things I really like about it is how it requires so many different skills and strengths. Young or old, fast or slow, slight or stocky, there’s a role for you.

As a rugby newbie, I think my path was pretty typical. All of the complexity escaped me. I couldn’t read plays, I wasn’t in position and I exerted tons of energy. In that moment, I was giving it my all. In retrospect, I was sure working hard, but I wasn’t being very effective. As time wore on and I gained experience and started to see the patterns of the game. I transitioned from blind exertion to a more targeted effort that created greater results.

It’s a pretty good analogy for choices we get to make in life, of course. We can blindly exert our energy or we can play with our heads up.

In rugby and in life, it’s easy to attain the feeling that you’re making tremendous strides. I mean, you’re sweating so much, right? It’s maybe a little easier in rugby, though, to see what actually puts points on the board.

Peter Drucker famously, brilliantly said “Management is doing things right; Leadership is doing the right things.”

We get immersed worrying about being productive and efficient, but rarely do we acknowledge if we’re doing the right task to meet our purpose. It’s safe to just focus on your task. It’s scary to say that things need to change.

This video reminded me of the lesson. Here’s someone who has become as efficient as possible on a particular task. She’s doing things right. In fact, I’m pretty sure she’s the world’s fastest.

The question, then, is it the right thing?

There is someone that can get through this book even faster. It’s the person that realizes it’s not about fast hands. It’s about process. It doesn’t matter how fast you can stamp when someone realizes you can change the policy to make the stamp unnecessary.

Perhaps we can say, “Management is stamping as fast as humanly possible; Leadership is asking why we need to stamp.” Which one are you doing?

First, let’s accept that risk is required. It’s required to cross the street, make a phone call, buy a product, sell a product, start a program, end a program, quit a job, start a job, continue in the job the same way you did yesterday… the list goes on. I think you get the picture. Any one of those things could have negative implications.

Each one of these examples also has a Worst Case Scenario that we could have all sorts of fun with. For example, as you cross the street, the city’s electrical system goes haywire and the intersection’s light changes color. A businessperson that’s on their cell phone at the light, complaining about the $1,000,000 they just lost that morning goes from seeing red to seeing green. In an instinctual response, they step on the gas a little too aggressively just as you put your right foot (the better of your two feet, in your opinion) in the path of their SUV. Squish, snap, hospital.

Is that an acceptable risk? Was it really worth getting to the other side? Let me assure you, you’ll forever regret choosing that particular restaurant for lunch.

The reason we choose to accept that risk, however, is that there’s a big difference between the magnitude of the implications and the probability of it happening. We choose to cross the street because the benefit significantly outweighs the real risk.

In reality, we don’t work with possible risk. We work with probable.

At work, however, our judgement changes. Why, all of a sudden, is the 1% probability up for discussion? It’s actually even more than just a discussion. That improbable event weighs heavier in the deliberation than realistic issues. We invest in low percentage concerns at too high a rate. Everything I’ve been reading lately says, “Start, then steer to correct.” Most days, I’m invited to “Steer, steer, steer, correct, steer, then maybe, just maybe, start.”

It’s a simple solution, I suppose, and one that starts with you and me. If we want to absolve ourselves of the risk, we identify the improbable to our boss or coworker. That makes them responsible. Instead, as an experiment, choose to accept some improbable risk and skip that step. Just proceed. What do you think will happen?

Here’s a hint:  The magic of Proceed Until Apprehended is that the Apprehended part rarely happens.

If you’re trying to memorize lines for a stage production called Catch Me if You Can by Weinstock and Gilbert (not the movie), boy, have you come to the right place. For everyone else, there’s nothing to see here. Mosey along now.

I’ve posted three powerpoint slides of all of the lines of Daniel Corban in the play, alternated with the “lead-in line” that prompts your line. If you view these in slideshow mode, they’re all animated. You can rehearse your line, click next and see if you got it right. For longer pieces, they’re broken into chunks so you can’t cheat. I found it to be a very easy way to memorize the lines… after I typed them all in. Here they are (right click to download): Act 1, Act 2 and Act 3. I hope this helps with your memorization.

If you’re playing Inspector Levine, Elizabeth Corban, Father Kelleher or one of the other characters, it’s still probably worth a look. Your lines are partially in here.

Hey, wait a minute. YOU aren’t playing Daniel Corban. You’ve never even heard of the play. What are you doing reading this? Oh. You just can’t believe I typed in all these lines. Fair enough.

Some other things, while we’re on the topic:

• I’m surprised how focused and obsessive I can get when I’m in a community theatre play. It’s a ton of effort, but I get more energy from doing it than it takes from me. It offers the most consistent feeling of being in “the zone” as anything I’ve ever done.
• The creation of these slides took a while, but even typing them helped me memorize. This character has the most lines in the play. Despite that, I had mine down pat well before many of my cast members. When it comes down to it though, I don’t know whether to credit the tool or a mild form of OCD.
• I’m curious to see if providing something extremely obscure but valuable will find a user. This is The Long Tail in action.

These powerpoints are free for you to use, modify, share… whatever you want. I only ask one thing. If you do actually use them, please let me know, for my own curiosity.

If you’ve created similar slides for a play you were in and would like to make them available, I’d be happy to post them.

I recommend you watch The Matrix again. I just watched it for the first time in years, and I CAN’T BELIEVE how simply and accurately The Matrix serves as a metaphor for the world we live in, the conventions we ascribe to and the blissful ignorance we live with each day… except for when it’s not blissful. If it wasn’t for the Hollywood-style violence, I’d say this movie is as important to school curriculum as the classics of English class. It probably is anyway.

I went and found a good description of the metaphor between the Matrix and our life. As the article suggests, The Matrix offers us the ability to examine our world with exceptional clarity.

This got me thinking, though. I saw all of this ten years ago. I think I “got it” then. At that time, why did I go back to my job on Monday and keep working in my own Matrix? Or, the real mind-bender, how different is it this time?

Before Neo becomes Neo, he’s Thomas Anderson. Don’t you think Thomas Anderson got to go to a movie on a Friday night and watch something like The Matrix? Did he step out into the cool evening air and realize he was inside an artificial construct? Apparently not. The human mind doesn’t seem to have that kind of sudden-insight capacity. It wasn’t until he took a red pill from Morpheus and physically got some distance that he understood the limitations of what he was thinking and seeing.

So, as I see this movie for the second time, I think I have some physical distance from my artificial construct, and I’m trying to get more. The first time I saw this movie, it was sort of a description of what was going on, while I was in it. I was like an early Neo, hearing the whisper of “Matrix” in the corners of a dark room. There was a more fulsome theory of what was real and what was artificial that needed to be poked and prodded, but I couldn’t see it. As Morpheus says, “Unfortunatley, no one can be told what the Matrix is. You have to see it for yourself.”

Fast forward ten years, I’ve made some pretty significant leaps outside the conventional lines of my Matrix. I’ve chosen in places not to follow the rules of social expectation. I’ve shed some of the consumer/recipient role. I’m no longer a dispassionate observer saying, “wow, what if that were real?” I’m a participant, receiving motivation and inspiration that I’m not alone in believing our current world isn’t the way it’s supposed to be, or has to be.

If my quasi-rambling post isn’t making sense, let me put something on the record. I don’t think machines are putting artificial constructs in my mind. I think the systems and conventions we’ve built up over generations are.

The movie also reminds me that I chose the red pill. I have an obligation to do something with what I’ve seen and learned.

Morpheus: “Neo, sooner or later you’re going to realize, just as I did, that there’s a difference between knowing the path and walking the path.”

I just listened to Seth Godin speaking with Nora Young on the CBC radio program Spark.

Best. Interview. Ever.

I think what happened is Seth dialed down his usual brilliance for his audience, just a little bit. I’ve never heard him so accessible. He used language that explains a new internet economy to people that haven’t really gotten the bug. He also demonstrated a focus I haven’t heard from him, one that’s about bridging the growing divide between people and organizations that are running away with the new economy and people and organizations that aren’t even participating.

My favourite bits from Seth:

“…I’m seeing more and more is this growing divide. And the people who are on the losing side don’t understand what happened. It’s one thing to play a game and lose. It’s another thing to lose without realizing that you’re playing a game. And I want to call that out…”

“we were brainwashed through 10 or 20 years of school to do what we’re told, to fit in instead of stand out, to have a resume that looks like everybody else’s resume, to get a job like everybody else’s job, and to put in our time and then we’ll get rewarded. And the sad truth is, the reward isn’t coming.”

“… people who work with ideas and with people, also have the ability to do something scarce, if we choose to. But a lot of us got lazy and said, “OK, we’ll take the high pay, we’ll take the nice working conditions, but no, I don’t want to put myself on the line.” And for a long time there was enough productivity out there that we could pull that off.

But now that’s going away, and so when the boss is trimming the number of people who work there, or when they’re deciding who to hire, guess who gets to keep the job? It’s the person who did the hard work, which was scarce, not the person who merely followed the manual, which wasn’t.”

“It turns out that the knee jerk answer, which is, “My boss needs to fix this,” isn’t going to happen. Because the minute you say, “I want to do something creative but my boss won’t let me,” what you’re really saying is, “I want my boss to take responsibility if I fail, but I want to get the credit if I succeed.”

Do you think there’s a business model that allows me to post Seth Godin quotes all day?

By the way, he’s on the circuit promoting a new, free e-book that you should check out, What Matters Now.

I’ve found it quite frustrating to see up close some organizational attempts at improving culture. We seem to make piecemeal attempts. At one moment, senior leadership may set out a new vision or a new set of expectations but there’s no resources for follow-up. At another time, there may be a change in processes or compensation that is intended to influence the culture of the organization, but they compete against incentives supporting stasis. Next, an initiative is unveiled that promises you autonomy and the ability to make decisions… but no-one tells your boss. It’s unfortunate, but it’s a pretty rare circumstance where we see an all-hands-on-deck effort to address organizational culture. When an organization does, they’re an anomaly, they’re newsworthy and they might just get bought out for $847 million.

Culture, it seems to me, is a pretty static, identifiable thing. If only someone had studied the essential elements of culture… which brings me to my post title. Isn’t anthropology ALL ABOUT understanding culture? Well, not quite. Google tells me there’s more to it than that: define: anthropology – the social science that studies the origins and social relationships of human beings

On Wikipedia, I learned that E.B. Tylor is one of the grandfathers of anthropology. He described culture as “that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.”

There’s a start! If we’re trying to address culture, this definition provides some assistance. First, we can acknowledge that culture is “complex.” Perhaps with that knowledge we can forever disavow the use of uni-dimensional solutions that barely scrape the surface of addressing culture. Second, what a helpful list: knowledge, belief, art, morals, laws and customs. Maybe this needs a little tinkering for the contemporary organization, but we see all of these in the workplace:

• knowledge in, well, knowledge, and how we transfer it, share it and use it
• belief in our paradigms, like “senior staff always knows best” and “mistakes are bad”
• art – well, this one’s a stretch. There’s not much expression at work. Our lack of expression – the corporate language and the way we communicate is our “art,” I think, and it is significant in defining our culture.
• morals like putting in lots of hours, being available 24/7, producing just what the boss asked for… you know, the required societal behaviours to earn promotion
• custom – customs are things we just do because everyone else does, right? Like taking our shoes off at the door, shaking hands when we meet and defending our program even though the critic has a point.

This isn’t just a fun comparison, though. We could use this list. If we really want to address culture, this list is a great place to start. Tom, you create some solutions to improve how we write our documents. Sally, please put together a team to identify and question the customs we’re just doing.

I’d be pretty excited to work in an organization that said, “Culture is necessary for our success. Let’s put our energy into getting it right for the long haul.”

Erring on the side of caution is really bad advice.

Erring on the side of caution is a vote for the status quo. It says, “Let’s keep this really simple and round the corners off of it. That way, the potential failure will be minimized.”

Everyone sleeps well the night before the launch. After, I can envision smug and knowing smiles as “disaster” is averted. Nothing really changes and no-one looks bad… unless you step back. From there, you can see that avoiding failure cost you the opportunity to make something valuable happen.

An example:

There’s a theory that goes something like this:

• employees have great ideas
• our system doesn’t allow them to invest in or launch those ideas
• if our employees had resources and corporate support, these ideas would flourish
• we need some sort of “outside of the system” system that TOTALLY supports our employees
• some of the ideas will be stinkers, so we’ll need a way to identify the good ones before we take them too far. We don’t want to waste money/look bad/prove the naysayers right/give our bosses a reason to say no.

Do you see a flaw? The “safe” resolution to our innovation need is to keep the paradigm but change the forms. We’ve decided to institute a new and improved Bureau of Idea Approval. We’re exchanging one form of vetting for another.

Well, here’s some surprising news. We have enough vetting in our organizations to kill excellent projects already. It’s layered so thick, you could take out every official “sign off” process in your organization and you STILL wouldn’t get ideas. There’s a culture of safety and maintenance that goes well past the policy and procedures manual.

Building a process that remotely acknowledges that there might be bad ideas is a mistake. Trust me, stuff that won’t work will get caught. You don’t have to design more roadblocks.

Don’t believe me? Here’s a test: If your boss announced a prize for the biggest mistake, would you still be cautious?

When we get a huge stinker out of the gates, that’s when we’ll know we’ve had some success.

This has been a year of tremendous personal growth for me.  A real highlight was my discovery that I had things I wanted to say and a desire to be a part of a conversation about what’s next. Not just part of the conversation, actually, but I realized I wanted to be a participant in making the future.

This may not seem like much, especially with the ubiquity of blogging and other social media tools. Everybody has a voice and can use it. I had to make my own personal journey to determine that I was going to step beyond “lurking.” To my great surprise, you and other readers have been willing to bless me with your attention, your insight and your passion.

Wow. Just wow.

I hope you enjoy the holiday season. I can’t wait to do more of this.