Coligação of the BNCs

Brazil’s BNCs held their big meeting, their Coligação, at the Casa Thomas Jefferson in Brasilia.  Ambassador Shannon gave his speech at the evening opening program. I got to give mine the next day at the opening of the working sessions.  The evening program included the round of speeches plus a chorus that sang the American & Brazilian national anthems and some selections from Andrew Lloyd Weber hits.  

We stayed for the morning of the working sessions.  My colleagues and I presented the types of programs that could help BNCs.  I announced our new program to help the BNCs develop a program of intensive English training plus cultural aspects for U.S. universities in support of the Ciência sem Fronteiras program and during a brainstorming session we talked about how this might work. Coligação members took into account our ideas and will develop a working plan.  

We took the occasion of the Coligação to bring together our PAOs and some leading local employees to talk about our own plans and aspirations.  Such face-to-face meetings are important to build common visions and align our own understanding of the situations we face. 

Our biggest problem is that we have too many opportunities. This really is a problem.  It is hard to prioritize among the many excellent opportunities. You always regret the road not travelled, the choice not taken.  But it is a better problem to have than the opposite. 

Of course, we have too much office work to do too. I am trying to cut that and streamline processes, so that there are fewer places where thing get stuck and fewer approvals, so that we can get away from our desks.  Our people are smart and well trained to make decisions and we need to trust their judgement and commitment.  I don’t want work, in the sense of the stuff we do in the office, to get in the way of accomplishments we can make only when we are out of the office with our Brazilian partners and contacts.

Office work, like all bureaucratic tasks, accretes.  A little at a time, the rules designed to address particular problems build, like sediment at the bottom of a lake. We can always think of extra steps and necessary precautions.  One of my jobs is to keep on digging away at the accretions.  It is a job that never ends and if you ever stop working the accumulated accretions can paralyze real effort, all the while making everybody work harder.  When you see a really busy office, with everybody constantly doing the urgent tasks, this is what you are often really seeing.

I, the boss, can be among the biggest sources of needless work and I take seriously my duty to be careful.  I like to have more reports, so I know exactly what is going on.   It makes me feel secure to have control over what my colleagues are doing.  In general, however, I can trade control for innovation, but I really cannot have lots of both at the same time.

Our job is to interact with, engage and influence Brazilians.  This is what is important. All the other things we do just support these goals and are not ends in themselves.  I try to keep this foremost in my thoughts and actions, but it is not easy to resist the gravity of the office.

Teach a Man to Fish & Increase the Fish Supply

The difference between philanthropy and charity is in that old saying about teaching a man to fish versus just giving him a fish. But you can apply even more leverage if you can increase the capacity of the trainers or augment the general effectiveness of sustainable fishing. Doing lasting good requires a systemic approach to problems.

When I talked to people at  Parceiros Voluntários, I recognized that they were thinking systemically and I was not really surprised when the organization’s president, Maria Elena Pereira Johannpeter brought up Peter Senge.  We had a common connection.

I read Senge’s book, The Fifth Discipline, back in the 1990s. It was a book that changed my outlook on work; it was one of those books that tells you things you think your already knew, but in a better form. The idea I took from the book was that organizations work as a set of interconnected sub-systems, so decisions made in one place have implications for the other parts. It sounds simple and ecological; a forestry guy like me likes these kinds of ideas, but it is hard to apply in practice, hard to consider the whole system. I still use often a formulation from the book, “sometimes thing go wrong not in spite of but because of our best efforts.” Working harder can be ineffective and sometimes make you lose ground. It is usually better to remove or smooth obstacles than to just push harder against them and it is best to figure out the path that avoids most obstacles in the first place. Simple wisdom that is hard to implement and it is impossible even to attempt w/o looking at the whole system and understanding its complex interactions. I used to think a lot about these things.

Parceiros Voluntários works on a systemic basis. Their goal to apply their effort at the points of maximum leverage, to work bottom up to encourage citizens to volunteer (something not common until recently in Brazil’s often top-down society) & then to help train and deploy those volunteers so that they can be effective – creating capacities and then enhancing them.

Part of their philosophy would be familiar to Alexis de Tocqueville. They favor individuals and groups acting voluntarily within their own communities, solving problems with their own means in their own sphere of action, managing their own development w/o regard to bureaucracies or higher authorities except where absolutely necessary.

I don’t believe it is mere coincidence that an organization like this took root first in Rio Grande do Sul. This state has a tradition of self-reliance and the inhabitants – the Gauchos – emphasize their independence.  But Parceiros Voluntários is expanding beyond RGS and setting up cooperative operations in the states of Amazonas, Mato Grosso, Bahia and Rio de Janeiro.   

Decentralized, voluntary organizations are a more flexible response to complex challenges we face. They can adapt much more readily and w/o the power of coercion, they can disappear when their time is past w/o a great disruption. America has lots of experience with such organizations.  It is one of the things that has made our society great.  It is great that Brazil develops them too. 

BTW – that teach a man to fish has a different ending.  Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and he will sit on the lake and drink beer all day. 

The top picture shows some port facilities on the Guaíba River from the offices of Parceiros Voluntários. The name Porto Alegre implies a port and there is one, but not a seaport. Porto Alegre is far from the sea, but ships can reach the sea via Lagoa dos Patos, a vast, shallow flowage. The port used to be a bigger deal in the old days than it is today. The port of Rio Grande, which is actually one the ocean, makes a better outlet for agricultural products of the region. The picture below is a green roof on the restaurant at the Theatro Sao Pedro.

More Thoughts on Telework

I used to manage a professional staff of around forty-five, most of whom telecommuted twice a week. Telecommuting is not appropriate for all jobs, but in the jobs where it is possible workers can be more productive away from the office. We have to get used to it, anyway, since President Obama signed into law the Telework Enhancement Act.

I wrote a lot about this on other occasions, in response to an an NPR story on Results Only Work Environments and when we was all kept at home by snow storms.

The bottom line for me is that telecommuting is a good thing that can improve morale and productivity. Take a look at the linked article and the links in it for the pluses But there are caveats & I believe that my experience managing telecommuting as well as telecommuting myself, sometimes between continents, give me some insights, which I can share.

One non-obvious thing that is necessary for telecommuting is a degree of arbitrariness.Some people can handle telecommuting; others cannot. The manager of telecommuters has an additional responsibility to use judgment to make reasonable distinctions among employees. This is very difficult to do. You will often be accused of being arbitrary or unfair.

Those that abuse telecommuting usually can come up with good excuses for why they couldn’t complete their work on time. A good manager cannot let them get away with it. It is unfair to the good workers. What I have seen too often, unfortunately, is an abdication of responsibility in the name of “fairness”. Managers either ignore the transgressions or they punish the innocent and guilty alike with onerous rules and restrictions.

Managers also have to get used to looking for results instead of “face time”. Most managers claim they are interested in results, but they reward presence. Beyond that, although few will admit it, many managers like to have people around that they can boss. We also have to admit that a properly designed telecommuting program may mean that we need fewer middle managers. The organization afforded by technologies can to some extent replace the organization provided by middle management.

Still thinking of this from the manager’s point of view, we have to learn not to ask too much from our good teleworkers. Flexibility is one of the advantages to telecommuting, but some managers think that flexibility means stretching work hours to … forever.

I learned this myself by my own mistakes. I work odd hours and my work and my leisure overlap, i.e. I actually enjoy many of the parts of my work, so I do them in my free time too. I used to check my email when I woke up in the morning and before going to bed at night. When I saw something that needed to be done, I would often make my comments and send it off to whoever was going to have to handle it the next day. What I quickly learned is that my best colleagues also checked their work early and late. They also sometimes took my comments as commands to get the work done right away.

People follow the lead of the boss. The boss often enjoys his work and doesn’t mind – even likes – long hours. More importantly, the boss is in control. He/she doesn’t feel the same stress that the subordinate does. When I sent along a comment, all I meant was that it would be a good idea to work on this tomorrow morning, or maybe just think about. When my colleagues got my midnight message, they thought it was an urgent command. It is a smaller version of the Henry II “command” about Thomas a-Becket.

I finally had to make a rule that nobody was supposed to touch their office work between 8pm and 7am. I know that people looked at the work. I did. But I didn’t send or respond to any emails.

This brings me to my last caveat. Telecommuting is part of the whole technology-social media world. It brings with it the same danger of magnifying the trivial, flattening priorities and destroying the whole idea of actual deliberation. The instant nature of communications creates the illusion of knowledge. It is tempting to act before you have all the information you need for smart decisions. We are tempted to see trends where none exist.

We used to have a saying that you should “sleep on” any hard decision. This gives you time to put things in perspective and it remains a good idea in many cases, but it is much harder to do and much harder to separate the important from the merely urgent when you are awash with information.

Teleworking is more than just letting people work at home or cutting the commuting time. It is not just something that can be tacked onto a workweek, like pinning a tail on the donkey. It requires a system wide adjustment. Some people will thrive in a telework environment; others not so much. It is a bigger change than most people think and a bigger opportunity.

Focus on What You Do & Tell us How you Did it

More from my promotion boards experience.

It is very important to describe positions well.  Generics just don’t do it. Never accept the same description as your predecessor or the same one that “like” officers have.  For example, saying that your PRT is one of 31 PRTs in Iraq w/o saying much (or anything) about the particulars is unhelpful and, IMO, indicates a certain intellectual flabbiness.  Also be very clear about who you manage, how many and what they do. Recognize that quality and diversity count.  Managing 100 low level employees who all do well established and similar things may not take as much leadership as running an operation with ten colleagues doing a variety of changing duties.

Experience counts in similar ways. It is possible – and I have seen – people get twenty years worth of experience in five years. It is also possible to get five (or less) years of experience in twenty years. Some people just repeat the same sorts of things. I suppose they are getting better at doing them, but it doesn’t add much to experience. It reminds me of watching CNN and hearing them claim that they have 24 hours of news each day. No.  What they often have is a half hour of news 48 times a day. Watching an endlessly repeating loop of the same event doesn’t add much to understanding. Experience can be that way too.

Of course, there is a caveat. There is always a caveat. You need to develop expertise and some specialties. Beyond that, simple variety also does not produce useful experience.  Focus is important. Ideally, experience should build on previous experience creating a capacity to do and understand more. Change for the sake of change makes no more sense that the opposite. 

Experience teaches, but learning is not automatic. If things just happen to you and you don’t think about them it may be useless energy spent. I was impressed when I could see how people learned from experience and applied it in analogous situations. This demonstrated not only that the experience was good, but also that the individual had the ability to reason by analogy and make reasonable distinctions among situations.

Finally, I am reminded of what Mark Twain said about not learning more lessons from an experience than it has to teach. The cat that sits on a hot stove will never sit on a hot stove again; of course he will not sit on a cool one either. 

Getting Good from the Group while Avoiding Groupthink

The panel works a lot like a jury is supposed to work; it aggregates the experience of a reasonably well informed group, sometimes tapping into expertise that single individuals could not use.  Our group had five senior FSOs from various cones and with various career paths, alone with one member of the public for proper leavening. We made special efforts NOT to fall into either groupthink, where we have too much early consensus, or chaos, where we don’t achieve consensus at all. This meant initially ranking files w/o deliberation and then voting on those we thought were high, low or middle. 

I was surprised how often we came independently to similar conclusions. There were often overwhelming majorities on one side or the other. We discussed some of them briefly as a form of quality control. Perhaps more interesting than the near unanimity of the results was the fact that often the reasons for the decisions were very different. This made me more confident of the decision, since each person bringing his/her experience to bear on the aspect of the decision they knew the best had led to this aggregated decision. 

Of course, there were some close votes and those required more deliberation. Nobody tried to dominate the group, but each member came to be recognized as having particular expertise in some things.  I, for example, had more experience in public diplomacy and in running PRTs and that experience helped me understand if particular claims or achievements were really significant or just things that would have happened anyway. I could also point to instances where officers had tried very hard to achieve a very difficult goal and even in failure had demonstrated the characteristics we are looking for in our senior leadership. We tried not to penalize innovators, even if their reach sometimes exceeded their grasp, but of course you have to draw distinctions between innovation and recklessness. This is not always as clearly evident as we might like. I was glad to contribute my own expertise and grateful that my fellow board members also brought a lot to the table.

I believe we made good decisions and that our group decision was better than any one of us could have done alone.

Secrets of Success

I wrote these notes for these posts during my time on promotion boards, but held off posting them until the work was done.  

After many years of trying to figure out the tricks of getting promoted, I finally got it.  It is an epiphany. After now reading  the files of 100s of my very competent colleagues, I found that the secret of success is to be good at what you do. Of course, the write up is important. If a tree falls in the woods and nobody hears it, it doesn’t make a sound for any practical purpose. But you have to have something to write about.  A week of energetic writing and spinning won’t make up for a year of lethargy on the job. You just cannot sell Edsels.  On the other hand, people stand in line to get the good products they want.

I like the fact that people write their own first pages on their assessments. It gives a better look at what they can do and what they think is important.  Some people “get it” more than others. In their own write-ups they emphasize the right things first and they make logical and meaningful connections among the things they accomplished.  

There is focus.  In the good EERs, I notice a “purposes principle” at work. They explain the “so what?” and list the results and outcomes of what they have accomplished.  I also get the impression that they frequently ask the purpose question.  When someone gives you a task, it is not impertinent to ask, “what do you plan to use it for?” This will often make the person focus more, give you a better idea of what is necessary and maybe make it more of a partnership.  The person getting the task might know, for example, that there is a better way to achieve the goal.   Of course, you have to ask the question in the right way, but a good leader should be glad to have subordinates who try to improve on what they are given.

Nobody is perfect and I like it when I can find areas of actual conflict or mistakes that provided learning opportunities. This is perhaps the hardest part to get right. Nobody likes to be criticized and it is always a risk to have any criticism prominently mentioned. However, it may be a acceptable risk that sets you apart. Nobody has a good year every year. It is unlikely that someone goes from one success to another w/o any setbacks.  I was reminded of the juvenile lovers who ask their partners whether they love them more today than yesterday. Despite what we hear in song and story, the inevitable true answer eventually must be “no”. It doesn’t mean that careers, or love, do not or cannot grow over a long period, but it will never be a straight and clear path in either case.  

That said, it makes no sense to dwell on failure. One of the things I dislike most is when people seem to revel in the hard times they have suffered. Difficult conditions are a mitigating factor, but the fact is that there are two sorts of criteria. You either did something or you didn’t.  Almost fought the great chicken of Bristol just doesn’t compare to actual achievement.  Ideally, you should mention the problem immediately followed by how you moved on from it.  And remember that most FS careers have had some hardships. I served a year in the Western Desert of Iraq, with dust in the air and bad guys behind the rocks; many of our colleagues have had worse. The bad plumbing or poor phone service at someone’s post just doesn’t sound very impressive.

Overall, some files just seem to sing beautifully, others are a little off key and a few are bad. Sometimes one person manages to be/do all three.  That is why I like to see the person in more than one type of job or place.  Some people can do well one time and in one place. That is admirable but doesn’t mean they should be promoted to more responsibility. It is not the one home run that counts but the day-to-day success that adds up over a long period.

Appropriate Levels of Leadership

I make distinctions among the terms leadership, management and administration, but when I wrote to a respected colleague that government should lead but not manage, I couldn’t make explain it well enough to make the distinction clear to him. The distinctions are subtle and not universally accepted, but I think we have to make them and much unpleasantness results when we mixed them up. Lots of books and seminar graduate seminars have addressed this question, so I am not going to say that mine is the final word or that the concept is settled. One of the many websites I found had a good and simple explanation that leaders lead people and managers manage tasks. Let me add that administrators administrate the rules. I think another good distinction is that leaders tell you why, mangers tell you how and administrators implement it.

Of course there is significant overlap, but there are also decided tendencies among people. My track record, which now goes back more than a quarter century, shows that I am a better leader than I am a manager and I am a downright poor administrator because I tend not to follow rules carefully enough. (Administration means following rules, while leadership often means changing them) I learned this the hard way, but I did learn. I few years back I turned down a position that would have led to promotion because the job consisted largely of administering rules. I told my incredulous bosses that if they put me in that job, sooner or later I would screw it up with some sort of unwarranted “innovation.” You have to know your limitations. It is simply not true that everybody can learn to do everything and it is important to know what you can do … and what you can’t.

If you look at successful leaders, you often find that you are really dealing with a team. You have a leader who makes broad plans and statements and has valuable insights. And then you have a good manger working nearby who makes these things work. A good leader should never hire a deputy who is like him/her. They need to have complementary skills and temperament. Harmony comes from the differences. There is often a crisis of leadership if the manger moves into the leadership position. Excellent mangers may ostensibly have the skills and qualifications to be excellent leaders but lack the temperament or the vision. On the other hand, leaders w/o good management skills or backup can drift aimlessly from one big, good but unimplemented idea to another. Deploying a great talent in the wrong time or place is the stuff or tragedies, all the more poignant when it brings down someone who has been wildly successful before.

Different situations call for different types of leadership, management or administration combinations. Leadership is usually most necessary when there is difficult to predict change. The cliché phrase used to be “paradigm shift.” Somebody needs to lead the way out of the old way or into the new one. In the case of significant discontinuous change, there is no reliable experiential road map to go by. Somebody needs to make a new path. This is very exciting and often very creative but also dangerous and destructive. Leadership must be flexible and arrangements are ad-hoc. Most of us do not like to live in such interesting times, although we do like to read about them, watch them on TV and imagine how we would have done better than those who actually called the shots.

If conditions are stable and predictable, leadership is less important. In fact, you can often get by with administrators and bureaucracies. The word bureaucracy is often used pejoratively, but bureaucracies can be phenomenally robust and efficient. Bureaucracy is based on rules and if the situation is well known, stable and predictable, you can make rules that actually work. The working of a computer is like a bureaucracy. It makes a series of if-then decisions and quickly comes up with reasonable results. But one reason it works so well in the cyber context is that computers don’t have personalities and they don’t get bored. People tend not to like bureaucracies because they limit or eliminate creativity. You simply are not allowed to deviate from form AB5055 or make up your own unique interpretation. If you do, it can have repercussions throughout the system.

Most organizations have mixtures of types, with some core functions administered in bureaucratic ways, some discretion among mangers and some leadership that responds to changes and takes risks. Success depends on deploying each appropriately.

So what about government and society?

I am not being facetious when I say that I love government and think that it is so precious that it should be used sparingly. Stable government is the prerequisite of civilization and a reasonably efficient and honest (or at least transparently corrupt) government, one that can and does protect property rights, is the prerequisite for a market economy. That is why true market economies did not develop until the around 300 years ago, along with the democratic revolutions, and why there are still some places they don’t work. But as with medicine, hearty food or fine whiskey, some is good but too much is unhealthy or even poisonous.

The old, “A man’s gotta know his own limitations” saying goes for big organizations too.

Lots of people have tried to explain the failure of government planning or socialism by referencing its lack of congruence with human behavior (i.e. people are greedy; they like to keep what they earn etc). Those things are important, but I don’t think this is the big flaw. Until the democratic revolutions of a couple centuries ago, all societies were top down (the king, pope or emperor told you what to do and when to do it, even if poor communications allowed people to avoid them day-to-day) and all complex societies relied heavily on government rules. Most pre-modern governments tried to establish “fair” prices and many societies even enforced specific rules for how people of various classes and groups were allowed to dress. It is indeed the case that power tends to corrupt people who have it and that somebody always takes advantage of opportunities provided by big government, but EVEN IF everybody was honest, unselfish and smart, it still wouldn’t work.

The problem for planners has to do with change and information flows. You can manage risk, but uncertainty creates real challenges. Effective planning requires a reasonable ability to predict future developments.To do this, you need to have a fair idea of what is happening right now and the relationships among the parts of the system. Even with the help of super computers, it has been impossible for central planners to aggregate and understand even a day’s worth of economic or social data. We (humans) do not do complexity well. So if you want to system to work, you have do it with a division of labor and you have to allow significant autonomy of decision making to smaller and dispersed units and individual. These people have the information about their limited spheres. They also have the incentive to use it well. Their millions of decisions are aggregated through the market mechanism. This is a positive good thing anyway. It is called freedom, but let’s just stick to pragmatism for now. It works better than the alternatives in the long run.

Now how about a paradox? We often hear criticism that we don’t have a plan for how to deal with big things like global warming, natural disasters, economic change etc. When people say this, what they mean is that we don’t have a centralized government blessed plan. But that doesn’t mean we have no plan. Actually, what we have is a process of distributed decision making. I have a plan for those things that are important to me. I seek information about these things to improve my chances of being right. Everybody has a plan and the total planning is greater and better than if some really smart officials did one big plan for us all. Beyond that, the distributed decision making is more robust. It may never be 100% right, but it can quickly respond to changes. It doesn’t work all the time; It just works better most of the time.

Having a process to make decision is more important than having a specific plan. The example I used to use was kayaking down a rapidly flowing river. I cannot tell you exactly what I will do when I come to a particular patch of white water or rocks because I am not sure of the conditions. But I am reasonably certain that I will know what to do because I have a process to make those sorts of decisions.

To sum up, as I have said on other occasion, government has a crucial role in providing the legal and often the physical infrastructure that allows people to plan for their own lives and prosper. In times of crisis, government may grow and take on role that the people would generally do by themselves. But when the crisis is over, it should again shrink down to its appropriate tasks and size. This is what happened after World War II, when the enormous U.S. war machine, which had of necessity regimented the country to fight totalitarian dictatorships, reverted to peaceful and usually private leadership, management and administration.

Those totalitarians had detailed plans. We have a decision making process in the interaction between smaller government, individuals and organizations knit together with the mechanism of aggregated choice. I like our system better. IMO, this is the more natural system. In a working ecology, various forces work themselves out in relation to each other w/o a plan, but with a process. You can see how it works in the picture above. Nobody planted any of those things, but they are sort of spaced out right anyway.

Work-Life Balance

Balancing work and the rest of your life is never easy. An NPR story on results-only work environments reminded of that.  I once ran a unit with around forty-five professionals, most of whom telecommuted a couple days a week and since my current staff and I enjoy flexible work arrangements, I think I can add something to the debate.  

Telecommuting and flexible hours can work well and increase productivity and morale at the same time, always a plus, but whether or not you can have flexible hours or work at home first of all depends on what you do.  Of course, if you work in a factory or a construction site, if you are a farmer or a fireman, you have to go to a specific work site.  We are mainly talking about jobs connected using Internet. 

One of my challenges in managing ROWE (I will call it by NPR’s term, which is better and more inclusive) was perceived fairness.  Jobs where people can work by themselves or collaborate online are easy candidates for ROWE.  But some jobs require actual physical presence.  In most offices, those jobs tend to fall near the top and the bottom of the organizational chart.  Let’s start near the top.

A big part of management and leadership is just being there and being seen.  Another is making personal connections, sometimes through the simple serendipity of being there. The now classic business book, “In Search of Excellence,” talked about management by walking around.   All great leaders know this intuitively and most good managers want to do it. Leaders also know that if they are not seen, they may not be heard from again. But sometimes when you promote an excellent worker to a management position he/she thinks it is unfair to ask him/her give up the ROWE.  Actually, leaders are always living in a ROWE and their results generally are produced in person. On the other end, you have people who must do actually physical work.  Most obvious are people who clean things or set things up.  In my case, I had people who had to physically assemble outreach packets etc.  They complained that they could not telecommute, mentioning the injustice of it all.  You can see the problem from their point of view.  They are often paid less than average and have difficult time juggling work and family responsibilities. But there is nothing you can do for them except encourage them to try to get one of the jobs that has ROWE.   I found, however, that some don’t want those jobs either, because of the added responsibility, which leads me to the next aspect – responsibly.

ROWE requires greater self discipline on the part of the worker.  There are some people who just cannot handle it and I had to suspend some privileges.  But perhaps the trickier problem comes from those who work TOO hard.  They never really clock off.  For a while, I used to check my blackberry before bed and send off a few messages.  I was often surprised to get immediate responses from people still working.  Maybe they were just doing what I was doing, but I suspect not, since my inquiries were unusually one line reminders, while the responses I got for them took real work.  I used to have to tell them to stop working to avoid burn out.  AND I had to stop sending messages after 7pm or before 7am and tell others to do the same.  If people think the boss is working, some of them will work too, no matter what you tell them. 

The irony is that you have to lead by lazy example.  I “work” around ten hours a day, but in the middle of that day, I usually find time to run or take a walk. I find that it actually increases my effectiveness and not only because it makes me feel better. So much of our work is now online collaboration. It makes sense to send something out and then get lost so that others can do their parts in peace.  You often don’t add value by hanging around and can actually subtract some. ROWE has some interesting social and organizational implications. I am not sure if it strengthens or weakens the power of the employee or the power of the organization. A bad boss can become a tyrant by demanding 24/7 responses. On the other hand, employees can more easily ignore him. I suppose a lot depends on the relative power of each going in. 

It will save companies some money. I thought of using “hotelling” where ROWE employees share office space on the assumption that everybody won’t be there at any one time. I didn’t get very far with this and had to back off.  But it will come. It doesn’t make sense to have a whole suite of empty offices. Future office buildings will feature more open and common space to handle the surges, but less daily personal space. I believe in ROWE for myself and others.   

But not all mangers like ROWE.  Some personality types just like to have people around to boss. I have to admit that I sometimes feel a little lonely when I walk past empty offices, but it is the way more and more firms will be organized in future.

People will do things in a decentralized way.  In fact, we have already outsourced many of our routine tasks, such as most copying and compiling.  FedEx, UPS or the Post Office can now do most of your logistics. Cloud computing will take care of your data processing and there are firms that will handle all your HR functions.  Maybe we will all become firms of one or two people, teaming up with others on an ad-hoc basis and cooperating and connecting via communications technologies.

I remember more than twenty-five years ago I heard a motivational speaker say that everybody was in business for himself.   He explained that nobody takes care of you as well as you take care of yourself.  You had the responsibility to keep yourself current and trained by seeking education.  You had to make sure your skills were up to date and that you have access to everything you need.  You couldn’t count on your employer to do that, he said.  We were effectively our own company that sold our serviced to our employer(s).  I thought he meant it metaphorically, but he was right in very concrete ways.  We should all think of ourselves as a company that we own and manage and ask whether we would buy stock in ourselves and whether our work-life balance makes it the kind of place we want to live and work. 

If not, maybe a little R&D is in order.

BTW – the picture on top shows the first magnolias blooming near the Red Cross. 

Telecommuting and Snow Days

I gave my staff the option to telework today, anticipating the dreadful white monster said to be slouching toward us and expected to blanket Washington with 16-24 inches of wet snow by tomorrow morning. (The record snowfall in Washington is 28 inches, set in 1922.  If you want to follow the storm’s progress the hashtag is #snowpocalypse.) I did that yesterday morning. Soon after, we got a notice telling us that telecommuting should be encouraged.  Good.  Now we got a further notice telling us that the government employees will get four hours early dismissal and this goes for teleworkers too. Not good. I know this is done in the spirit of fairness and of course we will comply with the directive.  I know that I will sound like a scrooge, but it really doesn’t make sense.

Presumably we are giving people four hours off so that they can flee the confines of Washington before they are frozen in place by the fierce winter storm. This is smart, especially around here where we are dependent on transportation systems that seem especially sensitive to weather.  But our telecommuting decision has already addressed that problem for those working from home.  They are already safely hunkered down in their warm cocoons and don’t need those four hours to come safely home.  If it were up to me, I would just let them work the full day.

I have long been a supporter of telecommuting and encourage it to the greatest extent possible. I fought to protect and extend telecommuting when I ran the IIP-Speaker office and have written in support. It is good for morale, the environment and productivity where appropriately employed. But telecommuting is one of those things precariously balanced on a slippery steep slope and it starts the downward slide to perdition when it transitions from being a mutually beneficial working arrangement to a type of defined right for an employee.

Social pressures weaken when employees are away from their bosses and colleagues. Working alone requires a lot more self-discipline than working where everybody can see you. There is significant temptation to use telecommuting as a type of semi-vacation day. That is why telecommuting is not for everybody and why it can never become a right.  A few people will abuse it and – sorry for the cliché – ruin it for everybody. Managers have to maintain an arbitrary power over telecommuting, i.e. we have to have the authority to call telecommuters at a moment’s notice and change or assign different work.  It is also important to specify that if telecommuters cannot do the work from home, they must make other arrangements.  In other words, you cannot claim equipment failure as an excuse. The telecommuter has MORE responsibility at home than he/she has at work.  Responsibility is a price of the freedom and flexibility of telework. 

I have a simple kind of karma rule for life. If things are not too big a difference, I call them equal.  My analogy is the vending machine. If I put my money in and the machine rips me off, I don’t complain.  On the other hand, if it gives me too much change, I don’t try to give it back.   It is just too much effort to care very much and if you care only in one direction, you are being dishonest.

Work and trust are similar two-way propositions. I don’t complain when co-workers take a little extra time at lunch and don’t expect complaints when people have to stay a little longer to finish work.  As a worker, I am actually in favor of leaving a little more on the table, i.e. I try to put a little more effort in than I think I “need” to. Since I assume that I overestimate my contribution (as we all do) this probably makes it objectively about fair. Most people are okay with that, but there are always a few bad apples who try to take as much as they can and give back little or nothing.

I learned these things from hard experience, BTW.  I will give one example. A few years ago, I couldn’t get in touch with one of my telecommuters for a couple of days. When I finally found him, he told me that his phone and computer had gone down and thought that was a good excuse.   When I asked him what he had done during those two days, he just repeated that he had been unable to work.   I think he was lying about the phone and computer, but that didn’t matter as much as the demonstrable result that he didn’t work for two days.  I made him take those two days as annual leave and took away his telecommuting privileges until he could guarantee that his equipment would work. There was much gnashing of teeth and some people thought that I was unfair and arbitrary. I would say it was indeed arbitrary, but it was very fair. I further believe that if managers ever lose the power to be arbitrary in this manner, that telecommuting is doomed to become something like those jobs in the old Chicago political machine, where people showed up for their city jobs only to collect their paychecks.

Returning to my original thought, there is no reason to give telecommuters four hours off. This would be an excellent opportunity to demonstrate why telecommuting is such a good thing. As I wrote in the original linked posting  telecommuting makes our organization more robust and less susceptible to the caprices of nature. We should revel in that, savor the success, not throw it away in a misguided show of magnanimity. It violates the social contract and just doesn’t make sense.   

The Fault Lies Not in our Stars, but in Ourselves

I have been talking to leaders of technology firms in Brazil and it has been very interesting.  While it is not appropriate to post details, some of the general thoughts are applicable across a wide spectrum of endeavors and I will share them here.

One of the problems I have wrestled with has to do with the nature of knowledge and how to pass it within groups and organizations.   I find that this is a common problem and nobody seems to have developed a really robust solution.   I don’t think there is one; at least we cannot create a system that will take care of it.   Knowledge cannot be separated from its human carriers.  We like to use the term “viral” and it really fits here.  Passing knowledge just takes commitment and work by smart people.  Too often, organizations try to outsource their brains by giving the job of thinking and analyzing to consultants or computers.  Well, the buck stops with the decision maker.  He/she certainly doesn’t need to be an expert on all things.  Those consultants and computers can help inform decisions, but they cannot make them.   I was thinking about these things during our discussions.

Let me start by making a distinction between information and knowledge.  The two are synonyms and often used interchangeable, but in the deeper meaning information is the raw material that becomes knowledge when it is when it is understood and integrated into thinking.

Many management challenges are common to both public and private business and one of the most persistent is the difficulty of passing reliable knowledge and experience within an organization.  One of the most confusing circumstances is when information passes w/o the knowledge to make it meaningful or put it in proper context.   It is confusing because the recipients of the information may not perceive the problem.   They may feel satisfied that they are “informed” but remain misled. 

This is an age old problem.  As any organization grows beyond the size where frequent face-to-face contacts are common and easy, information sharing and knowledge production become an acute challenge.  It is especially true today in the fast changing and multifaceted environment created by the new media.  Information is held by specific individuals who may have very deep knowledge in a particular specialty, but not know how it fits into the bigger picture and may be unaware of the significance of what they know in other contexts.   In an information rich environment, the problem is how to arrange it to make it useful and how to tap into tacit knowledge that people may possess but be unable to properly express.  A learning organization is one where the total knowledge and expertise available to the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.   This condition is easier to aspire than achieve. 

Technology provides some help.  One way to address the challenge is through a wiki where everyone can contribute as well as see, consider and enhance what others have contributed.   In theory, a wiki can tap into the wisdom of the group.   It can be made available only to particular groups, to the entire organization or even to a more general public.   A larger group will create greater management problems, but will likely tap into a more diverse set of talent and knowledge.   Remember that no matter how good you and your colleagues are, the smartest people on any particular subject probably don’t work for you.  Your decisions will be better if you can think of a way to bring them in.

The amount of openness is a management decision.   However management cannot really decide if individuals in the organization will enthusiastically contribute.   Enthusiasm cannot be mandated, but it can be incentivized and those incentives must come from a true commitment at the top.   Good contributions must be recognized and the inevitable good-faith errors must be corrected but not punished.  

The new media allows and requires many choices.  The mix of tools changes depending on the situation and they change over time.  Yesterday’s solution is often today’s problem, but that does not necessarily imply that any mistakes were made.   Employees have to be confident that their good solutions that solve today’s problems will not be held against them when the situation changes tomorrow.  It takes a long time to build the kind of trust that lets people stick their necks out and months or years of work can be dissipated by one serious breach.  Leadership cannot indulge its emotions or look for people to blame when sound decisions are overtaken by events.  These are pernicious breaches of trust.

Another important aspect of knowledge sharing is to have the knowledge available to share in the first place.  Diverse and dispersed world-wide organizations tend to have information but it is often not translated into useful knowledge.  One tech fix is to make everything is available online in “the cloud.”  Groups working on particular tasks may not be near each other geographically or even in the same time zones, but they can be virtually side by side.  We have talked about this for many years, but technology has only recently made it practical, since real collaboration requires good connections and a lot of bandwidth.  

We have a great opportunity.  There is a lot of low hanging fruit and that we should take advantage of new technologies and interested participants right away.   Opportunities are out there.  It is there for us.  The most important obstacle is our own inability to take them and make them work.  We have to work to create learning organizations.  It is a steep hill to climb, but not beyond our ability.

Evaluate AND Take Action

They also emphasized the need to evaluate AND prune dead wood.  Sections are evaluated every six months to see what is working and what is not.   An organization in this competitive world cannot allow itself to hold on to programs and platforms that are not performing, no matter how many people work there or love them.   The less performing sections are cannibalized to support the ones that are doing better.  This creative destruction is a challenge in government.   Private firms are not really better at anticipating the future than we are, but they are a lot more effective at getting rid of things that are not performing.   They just cannot afford to keep or pour more resources into the programs that are losing money.

The title of this post is a paraphrase of a line from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar.   Let me end with another one that applies.   “There is a tide in the affairs of men which taken at the flood leads to fortune.”