Week 4 Tip: 5 Questions to Travel With
January 25th, 2010
How well are you travelling? That’s a question I love to ask teams when starting to work with them, as it is the beginnings of getting them thinking about their agility as an organization. I usually get answers somewhere in the mix of “not too bad”. Then I ask them, “how do you know?” to which I get answers about metrics and surveys and similar things.
Of course, that’s not my point. My point is, “how do you really know how well you are traveling?” It’s really hard to know anything for sure any more. How do you know you aren’t already in an imperceptible descent (i.e. imperceptible means you are unaware of it) with an Eastern Airlines scenario in your future (read the Eastern Airlines story in Divergence and Convergence) . Maybe in your near-term future!
You can’t ever really know anymore. So I suggest you travel with the following 5 questions, asking them on a recurring basis as you go along, to do everything you can to know:
1. What are we not thinking about? As the saying goes, “it’s the thought that counts” (or lack of it). Be thinking about:
· Perilous downside risks, vulnerabilities or flawed assumptions
· Promising upside opportunities, rewards and potential
2. What options are we foregoing? (Options, Futures & Degrees of Freedom) Options are valuable because they create degrees-of-freedom to navigate the perilous down-side risks and the promising upside opportunities in front of us. Be thinking about:
· Options we have which we aren’t protecting and are giving up
· Options we could have which we aren’t nurturing and shaping up
3. What seems impossible which, if it became possible, would radically transform our future? Beyond the realms of what we currently hold as possible lurk seeming impossibilities which we are not developing options for. Be thinking about:
· Impossibilities which would radically transform our future for the better and what options can we nurture to maximize this possibility
· Impossibilities which would radically transform our future for the worse and what options can we nurture to mitigate this possibility
4. What learning are we leaving to hindsight which we could more proactively be learning learn from insight and foresight? While some degree of learning from hindsight (what just happened) is inevitable, it can be painful and expensive, so we should be learning everything we can from insight (what’s happening now) and foresight (what’s likely to happen next). Be thinking about:
· Our pattern of learning from hindsight – what kinds of recurring, non-recurring and novel things tend to fly beneath our radar and take us by surprise as hindsight when it’s too late?
· Our proactive mechanisms (or lack of them) which would help things pop up on our radar scope earlier so we have more chance to do more about them before it’s too late.
5. How could we be better triaging our management bandwidth, attention span and resources? This is the most precious resource we have and traditional approaches to time and priority management are insufficient these days in managing our attention span, which has become much more like an ongoing dynamic process of triage (Triage - an ongoing, dynamic process of managing attention span). Be thinking about:
· The recurring, rigorous processes (or lack of them) we use to be triaging (and re-triaging) with our team on a sufficiently frequent basis
· The additional mechanisms we use to be sustaining fast-cycle communication, collaboration and coordination with our team.
How many stories, in business and life, can we think of where anybody could have asked these questions but nobody did (Anybody, Anybody?) with tragic consequences (read the Eastern Airlines story in Divergence and Convergence).
I urge you to never, ever stop asking these questions and never, ever believe that the answer is the same as last time, by default, and nothing has changed. Never, ever allow yourself to be lulled into a false sense of security. Be productively paranoid (Being Productively Paranoid – can you trust your system?). Don’t allow yourselves to fall asleep at the wheel. Do that and these questions will help you travel well. Bon voyage.
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