Creative Option C

Social Sector Greatness

2010-09-30T12:35:00.002-04:00

Sometimes I like to argue with authors, often scribbling “yeah, but…” comments across the margins of their books. Other authors make such tight, well-researched cases for the points they make, they are hard to argue with. Jim Collins is in this last category. A business professor, Collins’ books are reports on in-depth university studies about his subjects. Built to Last and Good to Great have become essential business reading.

(I did a two-page synopsis of Good to Great a few months ago. You can find that at the Creative Option C E-Store.)

Collins has convinced me that there are identifiable characteristics separating businesses that have sustained greatness from those that have not. He believes his theory is applicable to all kinds of organizations, including social sector entities like schools, hospitals, non-profit organizations, etc. He doesn’t really flesh out that idea in Good to Great, but fortunately for all of us, Collins wrote a follow-on article called “Good to Great and the Social Sectors.” Here is the first paragraph:

"We must reject the idea – well-intentioned, but dead wrong – that the primary path to greatness in the social sectors is to be ‘more like a business.’ Most businesses – like everything else in life – fall somewhere between mediocre and good. Few are great… So, then, why would we want to import the practices of mediocrity into the social sectors?”

Good question, Professor. Why would we do that?

Greatness is a product of certain dynamics that have been researched and described. Import those to your social sector organization, Collins teaches us, and make them relevant to your organization.

Here are a few keys of the Good to Great framework, with the updates relevant to the social sectors. I’ll be using these with government and non-profit clients from now on:

1) Defining and Measuring “Great”: In business, the primary measure of greatness is profits. Not so in the social sectors where money is rarely an output of the organization. Mission-based outcomes can be more difficult to quantify and measure, but it is nonetheless important to do so effectively. Performance against clearly identified mission-based goals must be meticulously monitored and continuously improved.

2) “Level 5” Leadership: Leaders who possess all the usual leadership skills are Level 4 leaders. To be a Level 5 leader, one must be focused on the organization, rather than on oneself, and be working to groom the next generation of leaders. Social services organizations tend to not have the top-down chains of power and control more prevalent in the business sector, so leaders must be facilitative and possess the ability to build consensus.

3) First Who – Get the Right People on the Bus: Without the right people, no organization can hope to survive, let alone thrive. Good people who are mission-focused and present for all the right reasons don’t need “motivation” or “alignment” or spectacular compensation packages. Getting the wrong people off the bus is complicated in the social sectors by tenure and a high degree of volunteerism. But – an organization can’t be great if the people in it are not internally motivated to make it so.

4) Confront the Brutal Facts without Losing your Vision: Greatness requires managers who resist any temptation to stick their heads in the sand or gloss over the hardest-to-deal-with aspects of their reality. At the same time, that clear-eyed focus can’t come at the expense of hope or willingness to dream up a better reality. Take a good look at where you really are, be clear about where you want to go, and move forward with purpose.

I love Collins’ concluding sentence as much as I love the opening one: “Greatness is not a function of circumstance. Greatness, it turns out, is largely a matter of conscious choice, and discipline.” The 30 pages in between are pretty good, too. As someone who believes passionately in planning for success, I highly recommend the studies Jim Collins and his colleagues have made of the attributes of greatness. If it is true that you can’t learn about the light by studying the darkness (and I believe it is) then here is a study of the light. Good luck!

Missions and Visions

2010-07-21T11:39:00.001-04:00

I’ve been thinking about “missions” and “visions” lately. Because I am a facilitator, these words have a great deal of meaning for me… specific meaning, not at all vague or nebulous. But I travel in circles where the words “mission” and “vision” are used imprecisely, often interchangeably, and I always struggle to follow the conversation when that happens. Getting people in alignment and pulling together in the same direction requires dialogue… which means listening to each other. It also means understanding words the same way.

A “mission” is what someone or some organization exists to do. It is the reason for being, the unique calling or purpose. A “mission statement” is an effort to succinctly and clearly express the mission. The function of a mission statement is to develop and grow common purpose among people internally and to clearly communicate who and what you are to an external audience. The best mission statement I ever saw was “We sell boxes.” It is pretty clear what that organization exists to do.

A “vision,” on the other hand, is a picture of how the community will be at some point in the future (five years, ten years) if the person or organization is working diligently to achieve their mission. It expresses a high-level outcome from which long-term or short-term goals can be crafted. First-class vision statements are truly visual, allowing everyone on the team or interested outsiders to see what you intend to create. If your mission is to sell boxes, a good vision statement might be “Everyone in our community who needs a box buys it from us.”

Too often people get involved in an effort to write a mission statement or a vision statement, usually because someone else is enthusiastic about it, and the conversation bogs down in the quicksand of confusion. What are we doing? How can this possibly matter? What’s the difference between mission and vision? When can I get back to work? People suffer their way through such conversations, acquiesce on points that matter to them just to be done already, and sign off on a draft of something they aren’t really crazy about.

This is how missions and visions get a bad rap.

But it is the process that is at fault. Those who suggest that a group should work together on their mission or vision are correct. Such statements add a great deal of value – when they are used as tools for team-building, focusing resources where they are most needed, and communicating to external parties. It’s the “why” part that crosses up a leader who calls a meeting to write a statement. People need to know what the point is. Being clear up front is part of a good process.

Another element of a healthy statement-writing process is separating brainstorming, which is throwing out ideas in a safe, non-judgmental atmosphere, from decision-making, which is when people evaluate each other’s ideas and begin to focus on the ones with the most promise for group agreement. A good facilitator can help the process along by getting all views out on the table and then guiding the group through a series of simple steps designed to drive consensus. The best facilitators are truly neutral. They don’t have a stake in the outcome.

Most statement-writing processes end after an hour when someone offers to “wordsmith” the existing ideas and send a draft around for comment and approval. The seeming-efficiency of this approach is tempting… but in my opinion it is a mistake. The only way to group alignment is through the dialogue… listening to each other and making sure everyone understands each word the same way. That means taking the time to finish the statement while everyone is together and focused on the mission or vision of the organization. Let people go back to their desks, and you’ll lose them, so tell them in advance that the meeting will take two hours and that discussion will be limited to the topic at hand.

Time spent writing an excellent mission or vision statement is a high-yield investment. When the chips are down and hard decisions must be made, there is no substitute for group agreement about what the organization exists to do and what the ultimate outcomes should be. Put the time in, use a proper process, and let magic happen!

Losing Senator Kennedy

2009-08-26T16:19:00.001-04:00

Hello Friends -

This is a sad day for me. As many of you know, I had an opportunity to meet Senator Edward Kennedy two years ago while doing some advocacy work on behalf of people who are siblings of people with developmental disabilities. I got to talk with the Senator as a sister to a brother and it will always be one of the highlights of my life and career.

At left is a picture taken that day. I am holding a picture of Tom and me… and at the moment this picture was snapped I had a Portuguese water dog’s snout up my skirt! My friends in the picture all have brothers and sisters who have disabilities… except for Dr. Tom Fish… who is the father of the Ohio-based sibling movement….

During the meeting, Senator Kennedy looked up at me a couple of times to see that I had a big dopey smile on my face and tears in my eyes. He probably got a lot of that during his 47 years in the Senate. As we rose to depart I pulled out a story book about President Kennedy that my mom had read to me as a child. It had one of those famous Kennedy family portraits in it, and the senator autographed it for me. It is now one of my most prized possessions.

There is much work to be done… to reform health care, to make sure people with disabilities (and their families!) have the help they need, to extend justice and freedom to more Americans. Whatever your personal views, I hope you will all take a moment today to reconfirm your commitment to doing your bit and doing it well.

Best to all,
Cathy

Apollo 13 and MacGyver

2009-04-09T12:01:00.002-04:00

Lately, whenever I hear someone tell me that they "cannot" do something important, or that it is "not possible," I try to imagine what Jim Lovell and the guys would have thought if after they radioed "Houston, we have a problem" the response they heard was "we are very busy and we don't have any money and anyway you knew the risks when you went up there."

Since "failure was not an option" - and they couldn't run out to Walmart for a new air filter - NASA engineers had to rig one up out of the materials on board the damaged spacecraft. They had to decide what to do and how to do it by committee, without procedures, and under the most intense kind of pressure. But they did it. All three men survived to return to their families.

Mission accomplished.

MacGyver himself would have been proud. Remember him? He was the TV character who could stop a charging elephant with just a key chain and a sockful of tissues. Week after week, that guy got himself out of the most serious jams with nothing but ingenuity and determination. He never seemed to have a shotgun with him. Or cash.

OK, MacGyver was a fictional TV character. But he makes an excellent image to hold in our heads whenever we forget that necessity is the mother of invention. Resources are scant these days, but failure is not an option. The time has come to fire up those dormant imaginations. Can't figure out how to fund something that needs to be done? Get creative. Don't know where the staff will find the time to finish the critical tasks already on their lists? Invent your own way.

Here are some tips for doing the "impossible":
1) Focus on what you do have rather than on what you don't have. Think about how you can leverage existing resources to bring in more resources.
2) Remember that there is magic in synergy... three people or six or ten can create more than one person working alone. If you are stuck for anwers, enlist others to engage in brainstorming with you.
3) Pay careful attention to the spontaneous offers of help from people around you. Stop defending your lack and listen. Another person may not do something exactly the way you have in mind... but who cares? Don't let your idea of perfection stand as an obstacle to someone else's good enough.
4) Get a clear picture of the result you want to achieve - and fix your determination to make it happen. The "how" part will take care of itself. It always, always does. (Read #3 again.)
5) Clear your mind of all preconceived ideas about how things should be. Start with where you are, focus on what you want to achieve, and give your imagination free rein to go wherever it wants.
6) Remember that one reaps only what one has sown. The resources we have are not a function of who we are, but are a function of who we were. If you have lack now, you must have been thinking lack six months ago. The question is what abundance will you have six months from now?
7) Let someone else's "I can't" be your inspiration. There's nothing more fun than pulling off the impossible and pissing off the misery addicts in your life.

Creating Option C

2009-03-19T08:59:00.003-04:00

There are different names for the thing I seek everyday: The Win-Win Solution, The Third Way, Synergy.

I call it Creative Option C: the option you have to create when Option A has merits but limitations and Option B has merits but limitations. You have to figure out how to get the best out of both - and delight the proponents of A and the proponents of B at the same time.

Easier said than done, right?

Well, actually, I have found that this way of going about things is easier, uses less resources in terms of both money and people, and has a greater chance of being realized than any other approach to problem solving I have yet discovered. Others have discovered the same thing.

There is more than one method of creating option C or developing the Win - Win. This is not just a high-falutin' theory of being nice and compromising often, there are actual steps to take. Many authors have described them. Here are some of my favorites:

Lawrence Susskind and his colleagues at the Consensus Building Institute have written extensively. They have a terrific website and several easy to read books, including Breaking Robert's Rules of Order: The New Way to Run Your Meeting, Build Consensus and Get Results. This is a step by step guide to bringing all stakeholders together from the beginning of a project through final implemetation.
The Harvard Negotiation Project has been churning out excellent material since 1981 when they published Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement without Giving In. Not everyone was born to be a hard-bitten negotiator. Here's practical advice for those who wish to occupy the world less confrontationally and still achieve great results.
"Integrative Thinking" is the term coined by University of Toronto Professor Roger Martin who chronicles learnings from interviews with successful business leaders who don't panic when confronted with a "hard decision" or a "necessary trade-off" but instead seek to Create Option C. I spotted The Opposable Mind: How Successful Leaders Win Through Integrative Thinking on the bookshelf at Borders the other day, which pleased me, because when I first went looking for it, I had to order it from a bookseller in Canada.
Another Canadian Author, Adam Kahane, has been employing the conflict resolution methods he describes in Solving Tough Problems: An Open Way of Talking, Listening, and Creating New Realities in projects around the world for decades. They didn't end apartheid in South Africa, or stop violence in Northern Ireland by picking between Option A and Option B. And that strategy won't bring peace to the Middle East or get anything built in downtown Port Clinton either.

Where-ever groups of people commit themselves to creating an option that works for everyone, focus on underlying interests rather than on positions, seek to build on commonalities, and above all, listen to each other without prejudice, magic happens. I love this process so much I named my business for it. Creative Option C, the consulting firm, is here to help your group or organization Create Option C, the Win-Win Solution, the Third Alternative.

Ebenezer's Bad Night of Feedback

2009-03-03T14:34:00.003-05:00

Laying in bed recently, listening to a literature professor on TV talking about Dickens, I had an epiphany. A Christmas Carol is the ultimate feedback story.

What a brilliant way to paint the picture of what I try to do for my clients. "It's not easy," I often tell them, "to find out what others really think of us." But we can't get better until we know. We can't correct problems that are holding us back, or improve upon what our customers value most about us, unless we have a clear understanding of how we are perceived. That is why Jacob Marley organized a horrible night of feedback for his old friend Scrooge. He wanted to help him tap his hidden potential and become better.

In our culture people generally avoid confronting each other with the unpleasant side of what they perceive: "If you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all." Some of us may occupy positions where we do hear criticism: but if someone has come to tell us about the mess in Aisle 10, do we know how they feel about the freshness of the produce? We don't know until we ask. And sometimes even then we don't know.

There's a wonderful book about feedback called What Got You Here Won't Get You There by Marshall Goldsmith. (Read a synposis written by me at http://www.creativeoptionc.com/.) He gives ideas for how we can solicit high-quality and actionable feedback from colleagues and others by reflecting a genuine openness to hearing it, not arguing, saying "thank you" and etc. Mostly, though, he advises readers who need truly reliable feedback to use third-party neutrals, consultants like me.

I got into the feedback business as a consultant by working on pre-planning assessments. Before we start a consensus-building process, like strategic planning or a conflict resolution effort, it is usually advisable to conduct a stakeholder assessment, also known as a community assessment, or qualitative interview study. Mostly it involves identifying an organization or agency's customers and other stakeholders, and then going out and asking them - one at a time - to provide information on how the group is doing. "What do you think are XYZ's strengths? Weaknesses? What three things would you like to see XYZ accomplish in the next year?" It is amazing how thoughtful and helpful people can be when they are giving a confidential interview to an outsider. When they know that expressing their opinion won't damage their relationship with someone, they say what they really think.

Recently a client called me on the phone two days after getting my report. I had talked to more than 50 of his associates and close collaborators. "OK," he pleaded, "Tell me again what is good about feedback." As I had predicted, he was focused on the material that was critical rather than on the 90 percent of the material that was supportive. "You already knew you had some relationship issues with certain people," I told him. "Now you know what to address. You can fix this. No more guessing."

Like Scrooge on Christmas morning, my client is now experiencing a much more productive and satisfying work life. He and his teammates know what their customers value most about their services, and they are focusing their resources on those things. They made a priority in their planning of addressing specific communications issues identified in the assessment, and work teams are meeting regularly to iron those out. They were a good organization before, but now they are on their way to great. I couldn't be more proud of their accomplishments.

Feedback can be difficult... but the pain is fleeting and the benefits are lasting. If you don't have a friend like Jacob Marley... hire one!

Social Networking

2009-02-19T13:11:00.002-05:00

My LinkedIn profile is 100% complete.

What a sense of satisfaction I got from seeing that little bar graph make it all the way to 100%. In order to satisfy LinkedIn's sense of completeness, I had fill in a bunch of text boxes with information about myself and my current business. And then I also needed to answer questions about two former positions and solicit three references.

Check.

Check.

Check!

If you had told me last year that I would be spending five minutes, let alone five hours, entering personal information in to a website I would have said you were mistaken. But online social networking has become a must-do for people and businesses sinking or swimming by the number of contacts they make, the number of others who know what they do. It will probably always be necessary to engage in traditional forms of networking - printing business cards, and attending events, and making cold calls. But from now on the asking-your-friends-and-colleagues-to-introduce-you-to-their-friends-and-colleagues part is all done electonically - sitting alone in front of the computer.

My tech-savvy marketing guru tells me I should be on Facebook, so by this time next week I probably will be.

Check.

Books, Books, Books

2009-02-06T16:01:00.002-05:00

I love to read. Some of my earliest memories are bound up with books. I took the story book about John F. Kennendy my mother read to me as a child to Washington DC last year and had Edward M. Kennedy sign it. It's one of my most cherished possessions.

I've been through Little Women more than a dozen times, and I've read Pride and Prejudice four times. I read Roots with a flashlight under the covers after bedtime. Same with Forever Amber.

There's a book on my shelf from my college Russian History days that I would run into a burning building for. It is out of print now, and my copy is full of my notes. For the record it is called What is to be Done? by an author named Nicholas Chernyshevsky. It's the best novel ever written, and I highly recommend it.

These days my reading time is more limited, but not less enjoyable. I read mostly in the early mornings, before work. And there is no place I would rather be in the summertime than on my back patio with a good book. I usually have a half dozen or so going at any one time, and I switch back and forth depending on my mood. Some books are just for reading. Others are for studying. With those, I read with a pen in my hand, underlining and making margin notes. Later, I will type up the notes and keep them in a bound notebook on my desk for later reference. Lately, I have been making two-page synopses from my notes. These I am now slowly getting posted to my website to share with others.

Visitors to my website will see that I read a lot of personal development, how-to-be-a-better leader stuff. Stephen Covey, Marcus Buckingham, and Malcolm Gladwell are my favorite authors in this genre. Keep watching my website and eventually you'll find synopses of all their books there. Some of the others I read might not be as familiar to American readers. In the course of things I've learned about some wonderful Canadian authors like Roger Martin and Adam Kahane. I hope some of you will be inspired to pick up some of their titles as well.

In addition to posting the synopses here, I am also organizing a monthly book discussion group at the Huron Public Library. Anyone who is interested should download the calendar from the homepage on my website. Please come join us.

So, there is my little explanation for why Creative Option C, LLC is so wrapped up in books. They are part of who I am, and a big part of what I bring to my clients. I hope that others who share this passion will feel free to share one of my synopses with your colleagues, or post a note here to let me know what you are reading. Can't ever get enough about books.

Welcome to My Blog

2009-01-27T10:08:00.003-05:00

Dear Friends,

One of the items on my to-do list for January was to redevelop my business website. Another action item was to become better acquainted with technology and its information sharing possibilities. With help from aha creative's very talented Amy Heflinger, today I engage the Brave New World and post my first-ever blog. It is my hope that over the coming weeks and months, I can use this space to share ideas and philosophies about collaborative efforts and consensus-building processes. In this way, colleagues, clients, and prospective clients will have a quick and ready way to learn more about me and how I work. And - because it is interactive -readers will have an opportunity to share their own views or ask questions. I welcome all of it.

Creative Option C, LLC is a consulting firm dedicated to the principle that it is always possible - wherever commitment exists - to invent plans and solutions that are embraced by all parties to a project or problem. When the partisans of Option A and the partisans of Option B commit to inventing a solution together.... and they employ tried and true methods of consensus building.... an Option C will be created that will support everyone's interests. I believe that the days when leaders were required to make tough trade-off decisions, to decide winners and losers, are past. Leadership methods have evolved. I plan to use this space to elaborate more on that idea, and to describe the new models of decision-making.

And so my new technology-driven journey has begun. Please join me.

Best regards,
Cathy