What Successful Work and Life Integration Looks Like

by Stew Friedman  |   8:00 AM October 7, 2014

Too many people believe that to achieve great things we must make brutal sacrifices, that to succeed in work we must focus single-mindedly, at the expense of everything else in life. Even those who reject the idea of a zero-sum game fall prey to a kind of binary thinking revealed by the term we use to describe the ideal lifestyle: “work/life balance.” The idea that “work” competes with “life” ignores that “life” is actually the intersection and interaction of four major domains: work, home, community, and the private self.

From years of studying people in many different settings, I have found that the most successful people are those who can harness the passions and powers of the various parts of their lives, bringing them together to achieve what I call “four-way wins” — actions that result in life being better in all four domains. My research has shown that there are ways for everyone — from the managers of sales teams, to executives in government agencies, to computer engineers, to florists, to coaches — to achieve professional success without always having to sacrifice the things that matter in their personal lives.

And yet as someone known as “the work/life balance guy,” I get pushback just about everywhere I go, especially from high achievers. “Stew, it’s nice to try to balance it all,” they say to me, “but in the real world, c’mon: How can you have a substantial impact without making major sacrifices in your personal and family life?”

So in writing my new book, I set out to find well-known people who have practiced, wittingly or unwittingly, the skills for integrating work and the rest of life and who could not only show that it can be done, but help teach us all how to do it. In the end, I settled on six people. I’d argue that these six people are successful at their work not despite having full lives outside of it, but precisely becausethey do:

• Tom Tierney is the cofounder of Bridgespan, the best-known advisory firm for nonprofits. Throughout his career, he has sought creative ways of fitting the different domains of his life together, including learning from his children about what really matters. He has built organizations that encourage personal growth by rewarding results — not “face time” — and by motivating people with a vision of contributing to a greater good.
• As COO of Facebook, Sheryl Sandberg has been redefining what it means to be a leader. Her candor about the challenges she faces in resolving conflicts among different parts of her life — as an executive, a catalyst for social change, a friend, a wife, a sister, and a mother — and about the non-traditional means she employs for doing so, has made her a persuasive role model and an outspoken voice on women and leadership.
• Eric Greitens, humanitarian, author, and non-profit founder, attended Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar and completed his doctorate before becoming a Navy SEAL. For his service in Iraq he was awarded a Purple Heart and went on — after a difficult search for a meaningful next step to take in his life — to found The Mission Continues, an organization that helps heal wounded war veterans by guiding them to be of service in their communities.
• Michelle Obama, the 44^th First Lady of the United States, explains that she considers her daughters to be her first priority, even if this stance rankles those who would have her do more in seeking broader political and cultural change. In making sure her own children were receiving the most nutritious food possible, she began to advocate for better nutrition through the national initiative Let’s Move!. Her policies have won national acclaim.
• Julie Foudy is a soccer champion who, in 1991 as a member of the U.S. national team, won the first Women’s World Cup. She was also part of the iconic U.S. soccer team that garnered Olympic gold in 1996 and again in 2004. She has since led an array of organizations that promote athletics for young people, empower young women, and advocate for social causes. Foudy’s success is an outgrowth of her ability to fuse all the important parts of her life — her soccer teams, her family, and her advocacy for worthy causes.
• While it may seem counterintuitive to think of a rock and roll hero as an exemplary leader,Bruce Springsteen has said that he creates music “to make people happy, feel less lonely, but also [to be] a conduit for a dialogue about the events of the day, the issues that impact people’s lives, personal and social and political and religious.” With his hard-won clarity of purpose, derived from years of painful self-scrutiny, it follows naturally that he makes clear what he expects from the people around him, whether they’re members of his band or members of his family — he’s called “The Boss” for a reason.

Lest you think that their success derives just from great luck, think again. Not one of them was born into a life of high privilege. They have strived to achieve their own kind of greatness and, one way or another, to make themselves into who they are now. Each has suffered disappointment (half of them are on second marriages), frustration, doubt, and loss.

But in each of their stories I found naturally occurring illustrations of people who did great things by discovering — usually through trial and error — ways to integrate the different parts of their lives to reinforce and enhance each other. They show how accomplishment in a career is achievable not at the expense of the rest of your life, but because of commitments at home, in the community, and to your interior life.

Each has identified a life’s work that is important to them, and each both draws on and gives back to their families and communities in order to make that life’s work succeed. They exemplify how one can cultivate a life in which values, actions, social contribution, and personal growth exist in harmony. It’s a life in which disparate pieces fall into place, not every single day — that’s the impossible myth of “work/life balance” — but over the course of a lifetime.

Yes, these six people are extraordinary – but they use skills that all of us can use to make ourselves a bit more extraordinary, too.

Start by considering three principles: be real, be whole, and be innovative. To be real is to act with authenticity by clarifying what’s important to you. To be whole is to act with integrity by recognizing how the different parts of your life (work, home, community, self) affect one another. All this examination allows you to be innovative. You act with creativity by experimenting with how things get done in ways that are good for you and for the people around you.

Doing this means thinking and talking about what truly inspires you, whatever that might be. It requires figuring out how to take incremental steps that are under your control and that move you in the direction you want to go, while bringing others along with you. It’s not easy (and I never said it was). But like these six people, you can attain significant achievement in a way that fits who you are. As these leaders show, your own way is the only way that will work for you.

More blog posts by Stew Friedman

More on: Career planning, Work life balance

STEW FRIEDMAN

Stewart D. Friedman is the Practice Professor of Management at the Wharton School. The former head of Ford Motor's Leadership Development Center, he is the author of Leading the Life You Want: Skills for Integrating Work and Life, Baby Bust: New Choices for Men and Women in Work and Family, and Total Leadership: Be a Better Leader, Have a Richer Life. Find him on Twitter @StewFriedman.

Inclusiveness Means Giving Every Employee Personal Attention

by Susan David  |   9:00 AM June 10, 2014

Several years ago, a large, global company asked me to help improve their employee engagement. I suggested a strengths-based approach to the problem: a search for “hot spots” in the organization where people were highly engaged and performing well. By understanding what was working, we could harness and replicate these factors across the greater organization.

We surveyed thousands of employees from all over the world. Our findings were fascinating, but one key factor emerged: from the Netherlands to India to the United States, those who were most engaged had bosses who gave them personalized attention.

 I’ll never forget the story we heard from one very junior employee. An assertive, high-ranking (and potentially intimidating) leader of the business unit in which she worked sat with her and asked her to walk him through her perspective on an issue. Think about the kind of impact that interaction must have had on the young woman. A senior executive was genuinely curious about her point of view and her opinions. This strategy was integral to the way he led his team, and, as a result, the group was performing exceptionally well.

This is what “inclusive leadership” really looks like.  Too often the term is used as a buzzword, read through the lens of demographics. When someone says a leader is inclusive, we might assume that he’s a supporter of women and minorities. But inclusiveness is about more than gender, racial or cultural diversity. What matters most is a fundamental mindset that embraces every person as an individual and helps them bring who they are – both their backgrounds and their opinions – into the workplace.

To increase inclusiveness into your organization, encourage the following practices:

Be aware of biases. Social psychologists have found that even people who do not intend to discriminate are likely to hold implicit biases against certain people, perhaps those who are new or less senior, or who represent a certain function. Inclusive leaders actively fight against these tendencies. Make note of potential blind spots:  unconscious favoritism, conformity, or silence in certain situations. Proactively address those problems and be receptive to feedback from every employee.

Create a shared identity. Inclusive leaders also create a sense of shared identity and purpose within their teams. This doesn’t mean groupthink. Instead, our research found that the most effective leaders had frequent conversations with team members – both one-on-one and in group settings – about what was important to them. This practice advanced an explicitly held set of values and enabled people to learn about and connect with one another. It is in this context that inclusive behaviors emerge.

Be attentive to emotions. Inclusive leadership also requires an emotional skill-set:  the ability to recognize emotion, to understand what’s being felt and why, and to use emotion effectively. For example, a leader who can’t spot the emotional angst on an excluded employee’s face will not be able to change her behavior to make him feel more included.

Organizations that want to boost employee engagement should start by cultivating more inclusive leaders. These executives will need to spend time looking not only at demographic breakdowns but also at the people in front them. Interest and attention help employees thrive.

More blog posts by Susan David

More on: Communication, Employee retention, Leadership, Leading teams, Managing yourself

SUSAN DAVID

Susan David is a founder of the Harvard/McLean Institute of Coaching and is on faculty at Harvard. Her HBR article Emotional Agility was listed in their Management Ideas of the Year. She edited the Oxford Handbook of Happiness (OUP, 2013) and directs Evidence Based Psychology, a management consultancy. Connect with her on twitter@SusanDavid_PhD 

Bring Courtesy Back to the Workplace

by Ron Ashkenas  |   7:00 AM September 11, 2012

Respect towards others should be standard behavior in the workplace, regardless of role, rank, or reputation. But as companies have become more virtual, global, and stressed out, this assumption can break down unless we focus on it more explicitly. Let me explain.

In the not-too-distant past, the majority of work was conducted either face-to-face or through real-time conversations in the office, factory, at meetings, or through customer visits. These personal interactions allowed people to get to know each other and create human connections. They also fostered a basic degree of courtesy since it’s awkward to have continuing contact with someone who is rude, obnoxious, or unpleasant to be around.

But for many people today, the majority of communication is neither face-to-face nor real time. In addition to the prevalence of email and voicemail, teleconferences and videoconferences have replaced other opportunities for in-person get-togethers. In addition, managers are traveling more than ever to keep in touch with global contacts, which has further reduced regular collegial contact (and made many offices look like ghost towns). The net result of this shift is that much more of our work today is conducted impersonally, which may mean that there may be less pressure to observe social niceties.

A couple of recent studies support this possibility. One, from the University of Michigan, found that today’s college students are less empathetic than those of past generations. The researchers speculate that this is because they have grown up with more reliance on digital communication. Separately, a study at Duke found that Americans had one-third fewer friends and confidants than they had two decades earlier, possibly because digital interactions were replacing personal connections.

In the absence of high-touch, personal connections many managers are reporting breakdowns in courtesy and respect, many of which are amplified by the stresses of the workplace. Some common examples I’ve heard recently include a last-minute request for “urgent” information without regard for what it will take to get it done; a manager ignoring emails and voice mails which delayed resolution of a customer problem; a team that worked all night to meet a budget deadline and then received neither feedback nor thanks for their work; and a manager in Asia who was required to attend regular teleconferences with a North American team that kept her up through the middle of the night, with no acknowledgement of what was involved.

And these examples may be only the tip of the iceberg. What’s worse is that the continuation of these behaviors will eventually create a toxic environment that will reduce employee engagement and management motivation, which is something we’re already seeing in some companies.

To prevent a further breakdown in courtesy and respect, let me make two simple (but not easy) suggestions:

First, convene a meeting with your team, including virtual members, and talk openly about the kind of workplace behaviors you expect from each other. What does it mean to act courteously and respectfully? Have there been incidences where that didn’t happen? Assuming that people aren’t intentionally trying to be difficult, what provokes these kinds of unproductive behaviors, and what are their consequences? Having an open dialogue on this subject can powerfully re-orient your team, making them more aware of workplace courtesy and when it’s lacking.

Second, encourage your team and your colleagues to (courteously) push back on bad behaviors when they occur. The reality is that most people don’t plan to be mean or insensitive; it just happens in the heat of the moment without them realizing the impact on others. So if you can find the right ways of calling out these behaviors, it may be possible to reduce their impact and prevent them in the future.

Most of us want to work with colleagues who treat us with respect and courtesy. These days, however, we might have to put in some extra effort to make that happen.

More blog posts by Ron Ashkenas

More on: Communication, Leadership, Organizational culture

RON ASHKENAS

Ron Ashkenas is a managing partner of Schaffer Consulting. He is a co-author of The GE Work-Out and The Boundaryless Organization. His latest book is Simply Effective.

The Secret Phrase Top Innovators Use

by Warren Berger  |   10:00 AM September 17, 2012

How do Google, Facebook and IDEO jumpstart the process that leads to innovation? Often by using the same three words: How Might We. Some of the most successful companies in business today are known for tackling difficult creative challenges by first asking, How might we improve X … or completely re-imagine Y… or find a new way to accomplish Z?

It’s not complicated: The “how might we” approach to innovation ensures that would-be innovators are asking the right questions and using the best wording. Proponents of this increasingly popular practice say it’s surprisingly effective — and that it can be seen as a testament to the power of language in helping to spark creative thinking and freewheeling collaboration.

When people within companies try to innovate, they often talk about the challenges they’re facing by using language that can inhibit creativity instead of encouraging it, says the business consultant Min Basadur, who has taught the How Might We (HMW) form of questioning to companies over the past four decades. “People may start out asking, ‘How can we do this,’ or ‘How should we do that?,'” Basadur explained to me. “But as soon as you start using words like can and should, you’re implying judgment: Can we really do it? And should we?” By substituting the word might, he says, “you’re able to defer judgment, which helps people to create options more freely, and opens up more possibilities.”

Tim Brown, the CEO of the innovation and design firm IDEO, says that when his company takes on a design challenge of almost any type — and IDEO does everything from designing new products to envisioning new ways to deliver healthcare — it invariably starts by asking How Might We. Brown observes that within the phrase, each of those three words plays a role in spurring creative problem solving. “The ‘how’ part assumes there are solutions out there — it provides creative confidence,” Brown said to me “‘Might’ says we can put ideas out there that might work or might not — either way, it’s OK. And the ‘we’ part says we’re going to do it together and build on each other’s ideas.”

Although the HMW process has been used at IDEO for a number of years, its origins can be traced back to Basadur and his early days as a creative manager at Procter & Gamble. In the early-1970s, the company’s marketers were working themselves into a lather as they tried to compete with Colgate-Palmolive’s popular new soap product, Irish Spring, which featured a green stripe and an appealing “refreshment” promise.

By the time Basadur was asked to help out on the project, P&G had already tested a half-dozen of its own copycat green-stripe bars, though none could best Irish Spring. Basadur figured the P&G team was asking the wrong question (“How can we make a better green-stripe bar?”) and soon had them asking a series of more ambitious HMW questions, culminating with: “How might we create a more refreshing soap of our own?”

That opened the creative floodgates and, over the next few hours, Basadur says, there were hundreds of ideas generated for possible refreshment bars — with the team eventually converging around a theme of finding refreshment at the seacoast. And out of that came a coastal-blue and white striped bar named (what else?) Coast, which became a highly successful brand in its own right.

As the Coast story suggests, there’s more to HMW methodology than just using those three words. Basadur employed a larger process to guide people toward asking the right HMW questions. This involved posing a number of “why” questions, as in, Why are we trying so hard to make another green-striped soap?. He also urged the P&G team to step back from their obsession with a competitor’s product and try to look at the situation from a consumer perspective: For the customer, in the end, it wasn’t about green stripes, it was about feeling refreshed.

Gradually, Basadur took the HMW approach beyond P&G to other companies, including the tech firm Scient. One of his converts at Scient, the designer Charles Warren, then proceeded to take the methodology with him as he moved to IDEO. Tim Brown confesses that, when first introduced to the phrase, “I was skeptical at first; it sounds a bit Californian.” But before long, Warren told me, IDEO was conducting company-wide sessions “with 700 people doing HMW together.”

As Warren then moved from IDEO to Google, the infectious HMW approach found a new host. More recently, HMW was carried from Google to Facebook by Paul Adams, who worked with Warren on Google+.

And there’s evidence, too, that it may be spreading to the nonprofit sector. When one of IDEO’s co-founders, the late Bill Moggridge, was named director of the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museumin 2010, he brought HMW questioning with him. Soon after he started at the museum, Moggridgeposed for a group photo with museum staff members — and everyone wore T-shirts bearing the words “How Might We…”

Min Basadur maintains that it’s common for companies to expend efforts asking the wrong questions and trying to solve the wrong problems. “Most business people have limited skills when it comes to ‘problem-finding’ or problem definition,” he says. “It’s not taught in MBA programs.” To fill that void, Basadur opened a consultancy, Basadur Applied Creativity, which developed its own “Simplex” process of creative problem-solving for business — with HMW questioning at the core of it.

HMW proponents say this form of questioning can be applied to almost any challenge — though it works best with ones that are ambitious, yet also achievable. Brown says it doesn’t work as well with problems that are too broad (“How might we solve world hunger?”) or too narrow (“How might we increase profits by 5 percent next quarter?”). Figuring out the right HMW questions to ask is a process, Brown says: “You need to find the sweet spot.”

More blog posts by Warren Berger

More on: Consumer goods, Innovation

WARREN BERGER

Warren Berger (@GlimmerGuy) is author of the new book A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas (Bloomsbury).

To Succeed, Forget Self-Esteem

by Heidi Grant Halvorson  |   10:00 AM September 20, 2012

If you look under the Self-Help heading on Amazon, you’ll find roughly 5,000 books listed under the subhead Self-Esteem. The vast majority of these books aim to not only tell you why your self-esteem might be low, but to show you how to get your hands on some more of it. It’s a thriving business because self-esteem is, at least in Western cultures, considered the bedrock of individual success. You can’t possibly get ahead in life, the logic goes, unless you believe you are perfectly awesome.

And of course you must be perfectly awesome in order to keep believing that you are — so you live in quiet terror of making mistakes, and feel devastated when you do. Your only defense is to refocus your attention on all the things you do well, mentally stroking your own ego until it has forgotten this horrible episode of unawesomeness and moved on to something more satisfying.

When you think about it, this doesn’t exactly sound like a recipe for success, does it? Indeed, recent reviews of the research on high self-esteem have come to the troubling conclusion that it’s not all it’s cracked up to be. High self-esteem does not predict better performance or greater success. And though people with high self-esteem do think they’re more successful, objectively, they are not. High self-esteem does not make you a more effective leader, a more appealing lover, more likely to lead a healthy lifestyle, or more attractive and compelling in an interview. But if Stuart Smalley is wrong, and high self-esteem (along with daily affirmations of your own terrificness) is not the answer to all your problems, then what is?

A growing body of research, including new studies by Berkeley’s Juliana Breines and Serena Chen, suggest that self-compassion, rather than self-esteem, may be the key to unlocking your true potential for greatness.

Now, I know that some of you are already skeptical about a term like “self-compassion.” But this is a scientific, data-driven argument — not feel-good pop psychology. So hang in there and keep an open mind.

Self-compassion is a willingness to look at your own mistakes and shortcomings with kindness and understanding — it’s embracing the fact that to err is indeed human. When you are self-compassionate in the face of difficulty, you neither judge yourself harshly, nor feel the need to defensively focus on all your awesome qualities to protect your ego. It’s not surprising that self-compassion leads, as many studies show, to higher levels of personal well-being, optimism and happiness, and to less anxiety and depression.

But what about performance? Self-compassion may feel good, but aren’t the people who are harder on themselves, who are driven to always be the best, the ones who are ultimately more likely to succeed?

To answer that, it’s important to understand what self-compassion is not. While the spirit of self-compassion is to some degree captured in expressions like give yourself a break and cut yourself some slack, it is decidedly not the same thing as taking yourself off the hook or lowering the bar. You can be self-compassionate while still accepting responsibility for your performance. And you can be self-compassionate while striving for the most challenging goals — the difference lies not in where you want to end up, but in how you think about the ups and downs of your journey. As a matter of fact, if you are self-compassionate, new research suggests you are more likely to actually arrive at your destination.

In their studies, Brienes and Chen asked participants to take either a self-compassionate or self-esteem enhancing view of a setback or failure. For example, when asked to reflect on a personal weakness, some were asked to “imagine that you are talking to yourself about this weakness from a compassionate and understanding perspective. What would you say?”

Others were asked to instead focus on boosting their self-esteem: “Imagine that you are talking to yourself about this weakness from a perspective of validating your positive qualities. What would you say?”

People who experienced self-compassion were more likely to see their weaknesses as changeable. Self-compassion — far from taking them off the hook — actually increased their motivation to improve and avoid the same mistake again in the future.

This increased motivation lead to demonstrably superior performance. For instance, in one study, participants who failed an initial test were given a second chance to improve their scores. Those who took a self-compassionate view of their earlier failure studied 25 percent longer, and scored higher on a second test, than participants who focused on bolstering their self-esteem.

Why is self-compassion so powerful? In large part, because it is non-evaluative — in other words, your ego is effectively out of the picture — you can confront your flaws and foibles head on. You can get a realistic sense of your abilities and your actions, and figure out what needs to be done differently next time.

When your focus is instead on protecting your self-esteem, you can’t afford to really look at yourself honestly. You can’t acknowledge the need for improvement, because it means acknowledging weaknesses and shortcomings — threats to self-esteem that create feelings of anxiety and depression. How can you learn how to do things right when it’s killing you to admit — even to yourself — that you’ve done them wrong?

Here’s an unavoidable truth: You are going to screw up. Everyone — including very successful people — makes boatloads of mistakes. The key to success is, as everyone knows, to learn from those mistakes and keep moving forward. But not everyone knows how. Self-compassion is the how you’ve been looking for. So please, give yourself a break.

More blog posts by Heidi Grant Halvorson

More on: Failure, Managing yourself, Personal effectiveness

HEIDI GRANT HALVORSON

Heidi Grant Halvorson, Ph.D. is associate director for the Motivation Science Center at the Columbia University Business School and author of Nine Things Successful People Do Differently and Focus: Use Different Ways of Seeing the World to Power Influence and Success. Dr. Halvorson is available for speaking and training. She’s on Twitter@hghalvorson.

Ten Ways to Get People to Change

by Morten T. Hansen  |   8:00 AM September 21, 2012

How do you get leaders, employees, customers — and even yourself — to change behaviors? Executives can change strategy, products and processes until they’re blue in the face, but real change doesn’t take hold until people actually change what they do.

I spent the summer reviewing research on this topic. Here is my list of 10 approaches that seem to work.

1. Embrace the power of one. One company I worked with posted 8 values and 12 competencies they wanted employees to practice. The result: Nothing changed. When you have 20 priorities, you have none. Research on multi-tasking reveals that we’re not good at it. Focus on one behavior to change at a time. Sequence the change of more than one behavior.

2. Make it sticky. Goal theory has taught us that for goals to be effective, they need to be concrete and measurable. So with behaviors. “Listen actively” is vague and not measurable. “Paraphrase what others said and check for accuracy” is concrete and measurable.

3. Paint a vivid picture. When celebrity chef Jamie Oliver wanted to change the eating habits of kids at a U.S. school, he got their attention with a single, disgusting image: A truckload of pure animal fat (see photo). When Oliver taught an obese kid to cook, he showed how cooking can be “cool” — walking with head up, shoulders back, and a swagger while preparing food. This gave the boy a positive image he could relate to. As Herminia Ibarra outlines in her book Working Identity, imagining new selves can be a powerful force for change. Use stories, metaphors, pictures, and physical objects to paint an ugly image of “where we are now” and a better vision of a glorious new state. This taps into people’s emotions, a forceful lever for (or against) change.

4. Activate peer pressure. As social comparison theory shows, we look to others in our immediate circle for guidance for what are acceptable behaviors. Peers can set expectations, shame us or provide role models. When a banker was told by his boss that he needed to show more “we” and less “me” behaviors, team members observed and called out missteps, such as inappropriate “I” statements. The peer pressure worked. This is also the case for online groups. Ask peers to set expectations and put pressure on one another. Sign up friends on facebook to check in on your behaviors (or use a company network tool).

5. Mobilize the crowd. In this video, would you be the second, the middle or the last person to join the dance? Most people would join somewhere in the middle, at the tipping point. Embracing a new behavior typically follows a diffusion curve — early adopters, safe followers, late-comers. Diffusion theory holds, however, that this is not a random process: Key influencers make it tip. They are often not managers with senior titles but those with the most informal connections and those to whom others look for directions (see ch. 6 in my book Collaboration for these “bridges” in a company network). Get a few early adopters to adopt a behavior, then find and convince the influencers, and then sit back and watch as it goes viral (hopefully).

6. Tweak the situation. How do you get employees to eat healthier food in the company cafeteria? You could educate them about healthy food. Or you could alter the physical flow. Google did just that. Using the cue that people tend to grab what they see first, they stationed the salad bar in front of the room. This and similar techniques are based on the red hot area of behavioral decision theory, which holds that behavioral change can come about by tweaking the situation around the person. You nudge people, not by telling them directly (eat salad!), but indirectly, by shaping their choices. Use different default settings, frame things as losses (not gains), commit in advance and so on.

7. Subtract, not just add. In The Power of Habits, Charles Duhigg tells a great story about a U.S. Army Major stationed in a small town in Iraq. Every so often crowds would gather in the plaza and by the evening rioting would ensue. What to do? Add more troops when the crowd swells? No. Next time the Major had the food stalls removed. When the crowd grew hungry in the evening, there was nothing to eat and the crowd dispersed before a riot could take hold. Change behaviors by removing enablers, triggers and barriers. Managers are so obsessed with what new things to add that they forget the obvious: Subtracting.

8. Dare to link to carrots and sticks (and follow through). This list would not be complete without the traditional HR lever, incentives, in the form of pay, bonus and promotion. In a famous HBS case, a banker at Morgan Stanley is up for promotion. His numbers are great, but he comes up short on the 360-degree review that assessed his behaviors. Tie incentives to both performance and desired behaviors. But, as Dan Pink highlights in Drive, such extrinsic rewards and punishments only work for non-creative behaviors and much less for, say, “innovate outside the box” (see his TED videohere).

9. Teach and coach well. Many behaviors have a skill dimension: I may not know how to prioritize work, even though I am motivated to do so. Be a good teacher or coach (or, be a good learner if you’re trying to change your own behaviors). This involves practicing the behavior, like a muscle, which is difficult especially for behaviors with a high tacit component (e.g., how to listen well).

10. Hire and fire based on behaviors. The list so far is about changing the person. But there is also selection: Change the composition of the team. Get people who embody the desired behaviors and get rid of those that clearly do not. This is based on theories of role fit: Match strengths (including your current behaviors) to what the job requires. This also goes for you: Fire yourself and find a better job if need be.

These ten principles for changing behaviors are rooted in different theories that are rarely put together: Sharpen the destination (1-3), activate social processes (4 and 5), tweak the situation (6 and 7), and revamp traditional HR levers (8-10).

Why don’t we see more successful change in organizations? Because managers use only a few of these levers. Use them all.

More blog posts by Morten T. Hansen

More on: Change management, Leadership, Managing people

MORTEN T. HANSEN

Morten T. Hansen is a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and at INSEAD. He is the author of Collaboration and co-author of Great by Choice. In 2013, he was named one of the top management thinkers in the world by the Thinkers50. He is @GreatbyChoiceMH on Twitter.

The Power of Defining the Problem

by Dwayne Spradlin  |   7:00 AM September 25, 2012

Well-defined problems lead to breakthrough solutions. When developing new products, processes, or even businesses, most companies aren’t sufficiently rigorous in defining the problems they’re attempting to solve and articulating why those issues are important. Without that rigor, organizations miss opportunities, waste resources, and end up pursuing innovation initiatives that aren’t aligned with their strategies. How many times have you seen a project go down one path only to realize in hindsight that it should have gone down another? How many times have you seen an innovation program deliver a seemingly breakthrough result only to find that it can’t be implemented or it addresses the wrong problem? Many organizations need to become better at asking the right questions so that they tackle the right problems.

Here are three stories of organizations in very different fields that did a spectacular job of defining the problem. This in turn attracted the right kind of innovators and led to breakthrough solutions.

The Subarctic Oil Problem
More than 20 years after the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill, cleanup teams operating in subarctic waters still struggled because oil became so viscous at low temperatures that it was difficult to pump from barges to onshore collection stations.

How the Problem Was Defined. In its search for a solution, the Oil Spill Recovery Institute framed the problem as one of “materials viscosity” rather than “oil cleanup” and used language that was not specific to the petroleum industry. The goal was to attract novel suggestions from many fields.

The Breakthrough. A chemist in the cement industry was awarded $20,000 for proposing a modification of commercially available construction equipment that would vibrate the frozen oil, keeping it fluid.

The ALS Research Problem
By the late 2000s, researchers trying to develop a cure or treatment for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s disease) had not made much progress. One major obstacle was the inability to detect and track the progression of the disease accurately and quickly. Because researchers could not know precisely what stage ALS sufferers had reached, they greatly increased the pool of participants in clinical trials and lengthened their studies, which drove up costs so much that few treatments were developed and evaluated.

How the Problem Was Defined. Instead of framing its initiative as a search for a cure, Prize4Life, a nonprofit organization, focused on making ALS research feasible and effective. The solution it sought was a biomarker that would enable faster and more-accurate detection and measurement of the progression of the disease.

The Breakthrough. In 2011, a researcher from Beth Israel Hospital in Boston was paid $1 million for a noninvasive, painless, and low-cost approach, which detects ALS and assesses its progression by measuring changes in an electrical current traveling through muscle. This biomarker lowers the cost of ALS research by providing accurate and timely data that allow researchers to conduct shorter studies with fewer patients.

The Solar Flare Problem
In 2009 NASA decided it needed a better way to forecast solar flares in order to protect astronauts and satellites in space and power grids on Earth. The model it had been using for the past 30 years predicted whether radiation from a solar flare would reach Earth with only a four-hour lead time and no more than 50% accuracy.

How the Problem Was Defined. NASA did not ask potential solvers simply to find a better way to predict solar flares; instead, it pitched the problem as a data challenge, calling on experts with analytic backgrounds to use one of the agency’s greatest assets — 30 years of space weather data — to develop a forecasting model. This data-driven approach not only invited solvers from various fields but also enabled NASA to provide instant feedback, using its archived data, on the accuracy of proposed models.

The Breakthrough. A semiretired radio-frequency engineer living in rural New Hampshire used data analysis and original predictive algorithms to develop a forecasting model that provided an eight-hour lead time and 85% accuracy. He was awarded $30,000 for this solution.

Critically analyzing and clearly articulating a problem can yield highly innovative solutions. As these stories illustrate, organizations that ask better questions and define their problems with more rigor can create strategic advantage and unlock truly groundbreaking innovation. Asking better questions delivers better results.

This blog post was excerpted from the Spradlin’s article “Are You Solving the Right Problem?” in theSeptember issue of the magazine.

More blog posts by Dwayne Spradlin

More on: Innovation, Product development

DWAYNE SPRADLIN

Dwayne Spradlin is the president and CEO of InnoCentive, an online marketplace that connects organizations with freelance problem solvers in a multitude of fields. He is a coauthor, with Alpheus Bingham, of The Open Innovation Marketplace: Creating Value in the Challenge Driven Enterprise (FT Press, 2011).

Want to Build Resilience? Kill the Complexity

by Andrew Zolli  |   8:00 AM September 26, 2012

This July, aviation officials released their final report on one of the most puzzling and grim episodesin French aviation history: the 2009 crash of Air France Flight 447, en route from Rio de Janeiro to Paris. The plane had mysteriously plummeted from an altitude of thirty-five thousand feet for three and a half minutes, before colliding explosively with the vast, two-mile-deep waters of the south Atlantic. Two hundred and twenty eight people lost their lives; it took almost two years, and the help of robotic probes from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute to even find the wreckage. The sea had swallowed them whole.

What — or who — was to blame? French investigators identified many factors, but singled out one all-too-common culprit: human error. Their report found that the pilots, although well-trained, had fatally misdiagnosed the reasons that the plane had gone into a stall, and that their subsequent errors, based on this initial mistake, led directly to the catastrophe.

Yet it was complexity, as much as any factor, which doomed Flight 447. Prior the crash, the plane had flown through a series of storms, causing a buildup of ice that disabled several of its airspeed sensors — a moderate, but not catastrophic failure. As a safety precaution, the autopilot automatically disengaged, returning control to the human pilots, while flashing them a cryptic “invalid data” alert that revealed little about the underlying problem. Confronting this ambiguity, the pilots appear to have reverted to rote training procedures that likely made the situation worse: they banked into a climb designed to avoid further danger, which also slowed the plane’s airspeed and sent it into a stall.

Confusingly, at the height of the danger, a blaring alarm in the cockpit indicating the stall went silent — suggesting exactly the opposite of what was actually happening. The plane’s cockpit voice recorder captured the pilots’ last, bewildered exchange:

(Pilot 1) Damn it, we’re going to crash… This can’t be happening!
(Pilot 2) But what’s happening?

Less than two seconds later, they were dead.

Researchers find echoes of this story in other contexts all the time — circumstances where adding safety-enhancements to systems actually makes crisis situations more dangerous, not less so. The reasons are rooted partly in the pernicious nature of complexity, and partly in the way that human beings psychologically respond to risk.

We rightfully add safety systems to things like planes and oil rigs, and hedge the bets of major banks, in an effort to encourage them to run safely yet ever-more efficiently. Each of these safety features, however, also increases the complexity of the whole. Add enough of them, and soon these otherwise beneficial features become potential sources of risk themselves, as the number of possible interactions — both anticipated and unanticipated — between various components becomes incomprehensibly large.

This, in turn, amplifies uncertainty when things go wrong, making crises harder to correct: Is that flashing alert signaling a genuine emergency? Is it a false alarm? Or is it the result of some complex interaction nobody has ever seen before? Imagine facing a dozen such alerts simultaneously, and having to decide what’s true and false about all of them at the same time. Imagine further that, if you choose incorrectly, you will push the system into an unrecoverable catastrophe. Now, give yourself just a few seconds to make the right choice. How much should you be blamed if you make the wrong one?

CalTech system scientist John Doyle has coined a term for such systems: he calls them Robust-Yet-Fragile — and one of their hallmark features is that they are good at dealing with anticipated threats, but terrible at dealing with unanticipated ones. As the complexity of these systems grow, both the sources and severity of possible disruptions increases, even as the size required for potential ‘triggering events’ decreases — it can take only a tiny event, at the wrong place or at the wrong time, to spark a calamity.

Variations of such “complexity risk” contributed to JP Morgan’s recent multibillion-dollar hedging fiasco, as well as to the challenge of rebooting the US economy in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. (Some of the derivatives contracts that banks had previously signed with each other were up to a million pages long, rendering them incomprehensible. Untangling the resulting counterparty risk — determining who was on the hook to whom — was rendered all but impossible. This in turn made hoarding money, not lending it, the sanest thing for the banks to do after the crash.)

Complexity is a clear and present danger to both firms and the global financial system: it makes both much harder to manage, govern, audit, regulate and support effectively in times of crisis. Without taming complexity, greater transparency and fuller disclosures don’t necessarily help, and might actually hurt: making lots of raw data available just makes a bigger pile of hay in which to try and find the needle.

Unfortunately, human beings’ psychological responses to risk often makes the situation worse, through twin phenomena called risk compensation and risk homeostasis. Counter-intuitively, as we add safety features to a system, people will often change their behavior to act in a riskier way, betting (often subconsciously) that the system will be able to save them. People wearing seatbelts in cars with airbags and antilock brakes drive faster than those who don’t, because they feel more protected — all while eating and texting and God-knows-what-else. And we don’t just adjust perceptions of our own safety, but of others’ as well: for example, motorists have been found to pass more closely to bicyclists wearing helmets than those that don’t, betting (incorrectly) that helmets make cyclists safer than they actually do.

A related concept, risk homeostasis, suggests that, much like a thermostat, we each have an internal, preferred level of risk tolerance — if one path for expressing one’s innate appetite for risk is blocked, we will find another. In skydiving, this phenomenon gave rise, famously, to Booth’s Rule #2, which states that “The safer skydiving gear becomes, the more chances skydivers will take, in order to keep the fatality rate constant.”

Organizations also have a measure of risk homeostasis, expressed through their culture.
People who are naturally more risk-averse or more risk tolerant than the culture of their organizations find themselves pressured, often covertly, to “get in line” or “get packing.”
This was well in evidence at BP, for example, long before their devastating spill in the Gulf — the company actually had a major accident somewhere in the world roughly every other year for a decade prior to the Deep Water Horizon catastrophe. During that period, fines and admonitions from governments came to be seen by BP’s executive management as the cost of growth in the high-stakes world of energy extraction — and this acceptance sent a powerful signal through the rank-and-file. According to former employees at the company, BP’s lower-level managers would instead focus excessively on things like the dangers of not having a lid on a cup of coffee, rather than the risk and expense of capping a well with inferior material.

Combine complex, Robust-Yet-Fragile systems, risk-compensating human psyches, and risk-homeostatic organizational cultures, and you inevitably get catastrophes of all kinds: meltdowns, economic crises, and the like. That observation is driving increasing interest in the new field of resilience — how to build systems that can better accommodate disruptions when they inevitably occur. And, just as vulnerabilities originate in the interplay of complexity, psychology and organizational culture, keys to greater resilience reside there as well.

Consider the problem of complexity and financial regulation. The elements of Dodd-Frank that have been written so far have drawn scorn in some quarters for doing little about the problem of too-big-to-fail banks; but they’ve done even less about the more serious problem of too-complex-to-manage institutions, not to mention the complexity of the system as a whole.

Banks’ advocates are quick to point out that many of the new regulations are contradictory, confusing and actually make things worse, and they have a point: adding too-complex regulation on top of a too-complex financial system could put us all, in the next crisis, in the cockpit of a doomed plane.

But there is an obvious, grand bargain to be explored here: to encourage the reduction in the complexity of both firms and the financial system as a whole, in exchange for reducing the number and complexity of regulations with which the banks have to comply. In other words, a more vanilla, but less over-regulated system, which would be more in line with its original purpose. Such a system would be easier to police and tougher to game.

Efforts at simplification also have to deal urgently with the problem of dense overconnection — the growing, too-tight “coupling” between firms, and between international financial hubs and centers. In 2006, the Federal Reserve invited a group of researchers to study the connections between banks by analyzing data from the Fedwire system, which the banks use to back one another up. What they discovered was shocking: Just sixty-six banks — out of thousands — accounted for 75 percent of all the transfers. And twenty five of these were completely interconnected to one another, including a firm you may have heard of called Lehman Brothers.

Little has been done about this dense structural overconnection since the crash, and what’s true within the core of the financial sector is also true internationally. Over the past two decades, the links between financial hubs like London, New York and Hong Kong have grown at least sixfold. By reintroducing simplicity and modularity back into the system, a crisis somewhere doesn’t always have to become a crisis everywhere.

Yet, no matter the context, taking steps to tame complexity of a system are meaningless without also addressing incentives and culture, since people will inevitably drive a safer car more dangerously. To tackle this, organizations must learn to improve the “cognitive diversity” of their people and teams — getting people to think more broadly and diversely about the systems they inhabit. One of the pioneers in this effort is, counterintuitively, the U.S. Army.

Today’s armed forces confront circumstances of enormous ambiguity — theatres of operation with many different kinds of actors — NGOs, civilians, partners, media organizations, civilian leaders, refugees, and insurgents alike are mixed together, without a “front line.” In such an environment, the cultural nuances of every interaction matter, and the opportunities for misunderstanding signals is extremely high. In the face of such complexity, it can be powerfully tempting for tight-knit groups of soldiers to fall back on rote training, which can mean blowing things up and killing people. Making one kind of mistake might get you killed, making another might prolong a war.

To combat this, retired army colonel Greg Fontenot and his colleagues at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, started the University of Foreign Military and Cultural Studies, more commonly known by its nickname, Red Team University. The school is the hub of an effort to train professional military “devil’s advocates” — field operatives who bring critical thinking to the battlefield and help commanding officers avoid the perils of overconfidence, strategic brittleness, and groupthink. The goal is to respectfully help leaders in complex situations unearth untested assumptions, consider alternative interpretations and “think like the other” without sapping unit cohesion or morale, and while retaining their values.

More than 300 of these professional skeptics have since graduated from the program, and have fanned out through the Army’s ranks. Their effects have been transformational — not only shaping a broad array of decisions and tactics, but also spreading a form of cultural change appropriate for both the institution and the complex times in which it now both fights and keeps the peace.

Structural simplification and cultural change efforts like these will never eliminate every surprise, of course, but undertaken together they just might ensure greater resilience — for everyone — in their aftermath.

Otherwise, like the pilots of Flight 447, we’re just flying blind.

More blog posts by Andrew Zolli

More on: Decision making, Risk management

ANDREW ZOLLI

Andrew Zolli is the Executive Director of the global innovation network PopTech, and the co-author of Resilience: Why Things Bounce Back, published by Free Press.