Making your own mission

Anyone who has ever tried to assemble flat pack furniture will know that vague or unclear instructions can be of as little use as no instructions. Yet how many times do we receive requests from higher management to ‘Increase employee engagement’, ‘heighten brand awareness’, ‘Improve office culture’ or ‘Streamline work processes’. Indeed we may be guilty of issuing such directives. Orders such as these that do not have specific measurable outcomes, or direction as to how management wants them to be fulfilled, they are mere vague desires disguised in management jargon.

Negative Outcomes

Unfortunately, it is not often appropriate or good for one’s career to highlight these concerns to those who issued these vague objectives. but leaving them unaddressed leads to negative outcomes such as:

·      Lack of focus and motivation in individuals

·      Deterioration in office culture

·      Low morale

·      Uncoordinated or unproductive actions

·      Teams working for mutually exclusive goals

·      Loss of confidence in leadership

·      Loss of ambitious staff

These effects of unclear goal setting in an office environment can result in lost revenue and employee dissatisfaction.

Case Study

To help us understand the potential consequences of poor mission setting, and to see what a leader who finds himself in this situation can do, let’s examine the actions of Colonel Richard Westley, O.B.E., M.C., who  found himself in exactly this situation in 1995 during the genocidal war in Bosnia.

Just like the now infamous town of Srebrenica, Gorazde is small Muslim Bosniak town in the mainly Christian Serb south of Bosnia. In 1995 British Army sent a small group of troops under United Nations authority to Gorazde. Their orders were twofold:

·      Serve as the eyes and ears of future N.A.T.O./U.N. action

·      To protect the civilian populations of the designated safe areas against armed attacks and other hostile acts, through the presence of its troops and, if necessary, through the application of air power, in accordance with agreed procedure

There were no planned future actions by N.A.T.O. or the U.N. at that point and so no direction as to what information to prioritise gathering. And through the vague terminology ‘serve as the eyes and ears’, no direction as to what kind of intelligence gathering to focus on. It also did not specify what ‘other hostile acts’ included, what the ‘agreed procedure’ was or most importantly give any indication as to how the mere ‘presence’ of several hundred lightly armed peacekeepers will deter several thousand heavily armed and highly motivated Serbs. Especially considering that the ‘application of air power’ turned out to be non-existent.

Defining the Mission

However, he and his immediate superior knew the risks of not having a clear mission and decided on a simple solution; to make their own. This lead Colonel Westley and his immediate superior to devise their own, more specific objectives:

·      To prevent any Serbian encroachments into any part of the U.N. outlined Safe zone of Gorazde, with force if necessary

·      To prevent any Bosniak forays out of the U.N. safe zone of Gorazde

·      To establish a strong psychological presence to both sides by operating on both sides on the exclusion line (i.e. patrolling outside the safe zone and establishing freedom of action, showing they won’t be bullied)

·      To prevent civilian casualties as much as possible

·      To neutrally liaise between the two sides when possible

·      To update U.N. command to any developments in and around the safe zone such as troop build ups, violations of the safe zone or humanitarian emergencies

What this meant in practice was the decision to change from peace keepers to peace enforcers. By redefining their mission in this clearer and more aggressive way, adopting a  stance to actively hold the ring between the two forces come what may, and to protect civilians at any cost, it removed any doubt in the ranks as to why they were being deployed far from home somewhere they had never heard of.  It also allowed the British to establish a stronger defensive position and gave them a stronger negotiating position.

This contrasts with other UN peacekeepers in the area who:

·      Were constrained by U.N. agreed procedure in the threat of force and use of force to counter Serbian violations

·      Suffered a progressive loss of morale caused by an inability to influence events

·      Gave full initiative to the Serbian forces in the region and emboldened them

·      Undermined U.N. military credibility in the region

·      Became overly dependant on negotiation

Opposing Outcomes

Around two months after the British deployment the Serbs attempted to capture Gorazde and then Srebrenica. At Gorazde, they encountered immediate and effective resistance on the ridges around the town at the extreme edge of the exclusion zone from prepared and motivated British troops.  This gave the Bosniak soldiers of Gorazde time to move up to these ridges out of their own exclusion zone, relieve the British peacekeepers and protect the town themselves. It is important to note that Colonel Westley was aware that firstly the small U.N. force would never stop the Serbs on their own and secondly that whoever controlled the ridges around Gorazde, but between the two exclusion zones of both Serbs and Bosniaks, controlled Gorazde.  So, he called on Bosniak forces as soon as fighting began to prevent a massacre, against U.N. procedure.

However, in the proceeding months at Srebrenica, another European force had allowed the Serbs to take 30 of their soldiers hostage to use as human shields against air power, allowed them to seize several observation points around the town without resistance, and, allowed high ranking Serbian officers into the town which spread discord and did not fully enforce the exclusion zone around the town. This meant that when the Serbs chose to seize the town and murder all the males, the peacekeeping force were in no position to resist and had lost the will to do so. As unfortunate or tragic as these actions look in retrospect at each stage the UN soldiers were attempting to follow their vague orders while not overstepping them, and were being constrained by U.N. procedure. Remember they were only to protect the safe area’s ‘through the PRESENCE of its troops’, not explicitly through their actions. 

Redefining over Interpreting the Mission

Colonel Westley pursued a smaller but more defined mission while giving himself more freedom of action and was thus able to focus on and prepare for the worst eventualities. Whereas as the other force dissipated their effort on several contradictory aims meaning they achieved none of them and lost focus on the main goal of preventing ethnic cleansing. Proving that interpreting an instruction is not the same as redefining it. Interpreting a mission in your own way is a refinement of a flawed instruction and will inherit many of those original flaws, redefining a mission is a paradigm shift resulting in a completely new mental framework in which to address the problem.  

This is an extreme example but a common outcome of unclear goal setting and a heroic but simple example of how to avoid that fate. Individuals, teams, departments and companies all work better towards a clear, defined and measurable goal. So, when you receive that next aspirational contradictory pie in the sky instruction from upper management, or indeed if you are in danger of issuing it, don’t ignore it but redefine it.

Redefine in a way that’s

·      Concise,

·      Easy to understand,

·      Measurable and

·      Achievable,

So, doing a few things right is a lot better than doing many things wrong.     

Other Resources

The book itself - Positive Psychology And Change, published by Wiley.

Sarah Lewis is the owner and principal psychologist of Appreciating Change. She is author of ‘Positive Psychology at Work’ and ‘Positive Psychology for Change’ both published by Wiley. She is also the lead author of 'Appreciative Inquiry for Change Management'.

See more, Leadership, Leadership Skills and Though Provoking articles in the Knowledge Warehouse.

APPRECIATING CHANGE CAN HELP

Appreciating Change is skilled and experienced at supporting leaders in working in this challenging, exciting and productive way with their organizations. Find out more by looking at how we help with Leadership, Culture change and with employee Engagement.

For further information on these alternative approaches to change, please contact us or phone 07973 782 715. A selection of strength card packs are available from our online store.

Women Make Groups Cleverer! (Evidence for collective intelligence)

Fascinating research on group performance suggests two key things:

1. That the collective intelligence of a group is more than the sum of its parts
2. That the presence of women in a group is key to high collective intelligence

How do we know this?

Researchers worked with 699 people, divided them into groups of 3-5 people and set them various tasks. The wide range of these tasks was designed to measure all sorts of different aspects of intelligence. These included visual puzzles, brainstorming, making collective moral judgments, and negotiating over limited resources. They also measured the individual intelligence of everyone. They then tried to see how the individual intelligence scores related to the team performance scores. 

When they did a factor analysis of the group performance scores and the intelligence measures, they found one factor that accounted for 43% of the variance and that was not related to either average intelligence of group members nor the maximum intelligence score. It seemed to be something over and above a simple aggregate of intelligence. They consider this factor to represent a measure of the group’s collective intelligence, with collective intelligence defined as ‘the general ability of the group to perform a wide variety of tasks’. The suggestion is that collective intelligence is an emergent group phenomenon that is a product of more than just existing intelligence in the group.

They ran three different studies of this type and compared results. The findings held. On each occasion collective intelligence was found to better account for group performance than measures of individual member intelligence.

So if individual intelligence doesn’t account for group intelligence, what does? The researchers moved on to examine a number of group and individual factors that might be predictors of collective intelligence. Interestingly many of the factors that are thought to be associated with group performance, such as group cohesion, motivation and satisfaction, didn’t predict group performance.

The Findings

Instead they found:

• That there is a group factor of collective intelligence, conceptually similar to the idea of the individual factor of general intelligence, that has a global effect on performance on many different tasks, and accounts for 43% of the variance in performance. It also is strongly predictive of performance.
• That collective intelligence is not strongly correlated with the average or maximum intelligence in the group.
• That collective intelligence is strongly correlated with the average social sensitivity of the group members. This is the strongest predictive factor of group collective intelligence, which, in turn, is a strong predictor of group task performance on a wide range of tasks.
• That collective intelligence is strongly correlated with the equality of distribution of turn taking.
• That collective intelligence is strongly correlated with the proportion of women in the group.
• It is suspected that the last correlation is related to the others e.g. that the presence of women tends to increase the social sensitivity and the equality of turn-taking in the group.

What to do to improve or enhance the collective intelligence of your project or work groups?

• Help the group recognize that collective intelligence in group decision making and performance is an emergent phenomena of group interaction patterns.
• Help the group recognize that the emotional life of the group is as important as its intellectual life.
• Ensure their discussion processes allow all voices to be heard, and that people take turns to talk, and to listen.
• Ensure that the group is mixed by gender.

For further information see Woolley A W Charbis, C F, Pentland A, Hashmi N, Malone T W (2010) Evidence for a collective intelligence factor in the performance of human groups. Science Express. www.scienceexpress.org/30 September 2010

Other Resources

More on using Appreciative Inquiry and other positive psychology techniques at work can be found in Sarah’s book Positive Psychology at Work.

See more Thought Provoking articles in the Knowledge Warehouse.

APPRECIATING CHANGE CAN HELP

Appreciating Change is skilled and experienced at supporting leaders in working in this challenging, exciting and productive way with their organizations. Find out more by looking at how we help with Leadership, Culture change and with employee Engagement.

For further information on these alternative approaches to change, please contact us or phone 07973 782 715

Why We Should Make Decisions In Our Organizations Like Brains Not Computers

Proof that brains are more efficient than computers

Cognitive research illuminates how our brains make decisions, and how they are different from computers. Compared to computers our brains are slow, noisy and imprecise. And, paradoxically perhaps, this makes them much more efficient than computers, but only because brains have one big advantage over computers: they have goals.

 The importance of goals to decision-making

Essentially life consists of billions of choice points. Choice is about value: what do we value over what? Having goals makes choice a lot easier: it makes it possible to assign values to options, as some have more value in terms of our goals than others. If I am trying to get to London, and have come across a signpost labeled Dublin one way and London the other, one sign has much more value to me than the other.  So we make choices based on those values. Goals allow us, in times of uncertainty to act efficiently and not waste energy.

Brains are oddly efficient

Brains possess all the characteristics of highly efficient computational machines. Efficient computational devices, like brains, follow four principles

•  Drain batteries slowly
•  Save space
•  Save bandwidth
•  Have goals

It is the enactment of these principles that make them (relative to fast, quiet, precise yet goalless and energy guzzling, wasteful computers) slow, noisy, imprecise and yet highly efficient.

How do these principles translate into organizations?

 Drain batteries slowly

This means avoid high-energy spikes in decision-making by using slow and soft processes that use minimal energy. The implication for organizational life would be to aim for soft, slow decision-making (a pattern of small groups of people making small decisions frequently) rather than patterns of spiky decision-making (infrequent decisions involving everyone).

Save space

This dictum suggests that our computational device should have as few (message or information carrying) wires as possible, and those should be shorter rather than longer. This suggests understanding organizational communication as network rather than pyramid based. So communication (and decision-making is based on short, local messages rather than lots of long ‘wires’ to get the same message from the top to the bottom of the organization and tight ‘knots’ where decisions get made.

Save bandwidth

The dictums here are: stay off the line, don’t repeat yourself and be as noisy (as in random) as possible! This suggests to me that the centralized bombardment communication process of constant repetition of ‘the message’, broadcast across the organization, offering exact and precise instructions, at regular and predictable intervals, is highly inefficient. Instead information needs to be offered in local contexts in different ways, when appropriate.

Have goals

In efficiency terms this means: having a view of the destination but being imprecise about how to reach it; creating mental models; and making ongoing adjustments. In organizations this could mean creating rich mental models of the goals and using local guidance and expertise to achieve them, making ongoing adjustments. This describes an emergent change approach.

Message for leaders

• Create goals to act as a valuation system for decision-making
• Create rich mental pictures of goals
• Leave goal achievement processes imprecise, work with local knowledge, adjusting plans as options emerge
•  Devolve decision making to the lowest level
• Encourage frequent, small-scale local decision-making and innovation
• Spread the message locally, contextually, and opportunistically; don’t waste energy broadcasting to the nation
•  Use the emergent approach to manage, lead or ride change

Other Resources

More on using Appreciative Inquiry and other positive psychology techniques at work can be found in Sarah’s book Positive Psychology at Work.

See more Thought Provoking articles in the  Knowledge Warehouse.

Appreciating Change Can Help

Appreciating Change is skilled and experienced at supporting leaders in working in this challenging, exciting and productive way with their organizations. Find out more by looking at how we help with Leadership, Culture change and with employee Engagement.

For further information on these alternative approaches to change, please contact us or phone 07973 782 715