ArLyne's Diamonds

A running commentary of ideas

Sunday, May 22, 2011

Simple Health for You - Recordings

Mary Moser and I just spent 4 days together creating a series of recordings (some audio and some video) to increase your well-being, and help your personal, professional and family development. They will be released for sale some time this summer.

Some of what we are producing will be about your image, ideal weight, stress reduction, goal setting, achievement, helping kids learn how to negotiate and resolve conflict, and a host of others.

Your ideas for inclusion in this series will be helpful.

Check out Mary's website: www.Simple Health For You.com

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Saturday, May 14, 2011

From: The Blindmen and the Elephant

The Blind Men and the Elephant
By: John Godfrey Saxe (1816-1887)

It was six men of Indostan
to learning much inclined,
Who went to see the Elephant
(Though all of them were blind),
That each by observation
Might satisfy his mind.
The First approached the Elephant,
And happening to fall
Against his broad and sturdy side,
At once began to bawl:
“God bless me! But the Elephant
Is very like a wall!”
The Second, feeling of the tusk,
Cried, “Ho! What have we here,
So very round and smooth and sharp?
To me ‘tis mighty clear
This wonder of an Elephant
Is very like a spear!”
The Third approached the animal,
And happening to take
The squirming trunk within his hands,
Thus boldly up he spake:
“I see,” quoth he, “the Elephant
Is very like a snake!”
The Fourth reached out an eager hand,
And felt about the knee:
“What most this wondrous beast is like
Is mighty plain,” quoth he;
“’Tis clear enough the Elephant
Is very like a tree!”
The Fifth who chanced to touch the ear,
Said: “E’en the blindest man
Can tell what this resembles most;
Deny the fact who can,
This marvel of an Elephant
Is very like a fan!”
The Sixth no sooner had begun
About the beast to grope,
Than, seizing on the swinging tail
That fell within his scope,
“I see,” quoth he, “the Elephant
Is very like a rope!”
And so these men of Indostan
Disputed loud and long,
Each in his own opinion
Exceeding stiff and strong,
Though each was partly in the right,
And all were in the wrong!
Moral:
So oft in theologic wars,
The disputants, I ween,
Rail on in utter ignorance
Of what each other mean,
And prate an an Elephant
Not one of them has seen!

This poem was quoted by David A. Schmaltz in his book: “The Blind Men and the Elephant” about team work and Project Management. He says of the author (pgs. 11 & 12):
“He chooses six blind men to examine an elephant that none can see. Each discovers something unique. Their discoveries perfectly match the key dilemmas facing all of us who are blindingly pursuing our own meaningful results:
• One blind man interprets the side of the elephant as being between himself and anything meaningful.
• Another blind man interprets the elephant’s tusk as being the spear that a good soldier might feel obligated to carry into battle.
• Yet another blind man interprets the trunk as being the snake that no one should trust.
• Still another blind man interprets the elephant’s leg as being the tree trunk supporting his efforts.
• Another blind man interprets the elephant’s ear as being the fan that he might use to coax an ember into a flame.
• And the last blind man interprets the elephant’s tail as being the rope that can tie together a coherent whole.
Other ideas from David Schmaltz’ book:
• Our methods for making successful projects seem to take the soul out of them. Our insistence on planning straight and narrow pathways into the future frustrates the most expert among us, yet we persist.
• But, project work requires us to integrate our puzzle pieces with the puzzle pieces of others, who are equally confused. Because of this, projects unavoidably transform us into blind men arrayed around an elephant and leave us struggling to comprehend an ungraspable whole.
• John Godfrey Saxe (the author of the poem) reminds u, their projects degrade into the incoherence of “theologic wars”, where each combatant endlessly argues against every other combatant’s religiously held opinion. Such deeply held differences of opinion cannot be logically resolved. These wars are won only by those refusing to engage in battle.
• Leadership in the blind-men-and-elephant world requires integrating disparate perspectives, not enforcing a dominant one.

• Organizations operating under such pressures fragment along predictable lines. Where despotism prevails
o Us and them crowd out we
o Rules disqualify individual judgment
o Public secrets and private subversions proliferate
o The truth becomes unspeakable.
• Without an explicit purpose, project work tends to sift from raging enthusiasm into utter meaningless.
• One of the most powerful roles is the Witness. The Witness observes and shares what she sees…witness meanings, not events.
• Cyberneticist Heinz von Foerster characterized a healthy human system as one that reveres variety over similarity, choice over command. He proposed an ethical imperative, “Act always so as to increase the number of choices.”
• Organizations insisting upon specific implementation alternatives create such inescapable contradictions for both their good and bad soldiers. If that system could have relaxed any one of its many rules, its intent could have been satisfied.
• As I learned when wrestling with the draft boards’ unyielding requirements, holding rigidly to a single implementation alternative effectively prevents anything from being accomplished.
• Their tactical ferocity blinded them to a larger objective: winning the tournament.
• I want you to understand that competition is a neurosis, and if you don’t learn how to get over it, it will kill you, and this firm along with you.
• If I join the competition, we both lose.
• Sometimes we have to rely on the contract to come to closure. Mostly, though, the covenant we forge in the dialogue before we ever draft the contract rules the engagement.
• …project team has to be involved in creating this plan or they’ll never buy into it…if you lose their hearts, their heads will never follow.
• Until a project discovers some central organizing principle, community effort seems unprincipled. … If you are not involved in the organizing, you will never fully comprehend the intended organizing principle.
• The most orderly organizations are more often evidence of a strong hand, if not an iron fist, on the team.
• Teams … rarely redesign their original organization, no matter how poorly suited that order becomes when integrating the new shapes.
• The most poorly adapted final organizations have been the products of teams that tenaciously defended their original organizing principle, no matter what. Said another way, organizing requires unlearning, which first feels disorganizing. Adapting requires letting go.
• How might your project help her (the person you are trying to motivate) achieve what she finds personally attractive?
• Breaking down barriers might remind us why we built the barriers in the first place.
• “If only they would open their eyes to see it from my perspective” these people seem to say. For these groups, the blindness remains localized and is assumed to be fixable. This apparent localization distracts the problem solvers, enticing them to solve the obvious problem, which rarely turns out to be the defining issue at all.
• Beginnings tend toward incoherence; change initiates chaos. With practice, though, coherence can tie together our common experiences, especially those that start messy.
• [Projects succeed when you build community.]
• People create a common rhythm together, not unmanageable chaos. Project an alluring future, and people cohere.

ArLyne Diamond, Ph.D. Speaking Events on You Tube

Monday, May 02, 2011

Sweeping Problems Under The Rug

All too often complaints, concerns, and conflict are ignored by upper management until they escalate into significant trouble. Why? Because in general people in positions of power want to get the job done and not have to deal with what they consider petty squabbles.

Unfortunately, this strategy of ignoring it in the interest of “just moving forward” is a poor strategy.

Elsewhere I’ve written about talking people seriously who are the first to notice something amiss. These people, more sensitive than others, or more in tune, are like “canaries in the coal mine.” They see, sense, feel things before their colleagues do.

Let me tell you about a business association that has had the same Executive Director for about eight years. In the beginning she was administrative support, and overtime her responsibilities grew, because the board members didn’t realize they were actually a working board, not a governing board, and dumped more and more responsibilities onto this woman. I’ll name her Sharon for sake of this article.

As Sharon assumed more responsibility, she also took it upon herself to have the authority to go with that responsibility and over time she was the one making most of the decisions and actually running the organization, with a board that merely acquiesced and rubber-stamped her decisions.

This stopped working well when a group of ambitious women recently released from high-tech companies that were downsized, decided to open retail establishment in this business district. Ambitious, bright and energetic, they secured positions on various committees and some of them actually chaired the committees.

Accustomed to making decisions, they were unhappy with Sharon when she repeatedly took their decisions and re-made them into her own image. In some cases she merely ignored their decisions and in others she actually violated the trust they’d given her.

Several of them went individually to members of the Executive Committee of this Board to express their concerns. They were patted on the head (figuratively) and the senior executives – all men – told themselves and each other “girls will be girls” and considered that their complaints were trivial. One board member actually believed that they like all women were nagging.

Over time the discontent grew and independently of each other ten women who had been active volunteers resigned. Sharon’s response was to tell her board that they were terrible volunteers who said they’d do something and then quit.

When things escalated out of control – I was brought in to “fix the communication problems.”
A new board was voted in this year and a new executive board is in place. Not knowing all we’ve uncovered and worked so hard to resolve, they are saying, “let’s just move forward – let’s not deal with the past.” That is sweeping things under the rug.

What I wrote is just one example of how things escalate until they cause big trouble. Let me give you another example – this from a corporate client.

In a small satellite sales office of one of the largest international semiconductor companies, worked a group of customer service and inside sales women. Their “squabbling” had become so intense that it was disruptive and the salesmen (I don’t mean to be as sexist as this is sounding …. But….) started complaining that their accounts and their needs weren’t being properly serviced. In the beginning, everyone decided to ignore the problems and sanction the women involved, telling them that it was important for them to get along. Their complaints were ignored – and again things were swept under the rug.

Finally, customers started complaining and the Sales Manager knew he had to take these issues seriously.

The Senior Vice-President of Human Resources was brought out to California from the home office in the east. He couldn’t get to the source of the problem and merely told them all to behave themselves.

The situation became more disruptive and I was brought in to find out what was going wrong and to resolve the problems.

It was an interesting experience. I interviewed each of the people in the office individually off-site and was told by each and every one of them that the Office Manager was wonderful and were it not for her, people would truly be at each other’s throats.

Yet, each of the woman who admired the Office Manager complained about each other. This didn’t make sense.

So, I observed. What I observed was that the Office Manager was playing “Queen Bee” and would repeatedly re-affirm her position by telling each of the women to work only through her and to not communicate with their co-workers. She passed on gossip, such as “Don’t talk directly to Sally because she told me she thinks your questions are dumb.” Or, “Do you realize that Mary says you dress much too sexy for work.”

This Office Manager also managed to distribute the work by parceling it out so that each of the women had to come to her for other portions of it, or additional information. Thus again she was making sure she was in control and was needed by one and all.

Finally I noticed that she had assigned cubicles to people so that those needing to work together were far apart from each other, rather than next to each other. This of course gave her the advantage of seeing all movement in her group.

Needless to say, we made changes. We called the home office and received permission to re-arrange the seating assignments. When Office Manager came in on Monday morning and discovered the changes, she knew she’d been found out and resigned.

Listening and observing often lead to understanding – and yes, I am one of those who are the canary in the coal mine.

Two months later, when I followed up, I learned that everything had calmed down and people were now working well together.

A third example comes from the Finance Department of a government agency. The controller, who I will call Sam, was very rigid and overly-cautious. They used a very complicated relational database for their accounting, including for paying frequent bills of $5.00 or less. It took them days to process each request for payment and hundreds of dollars in employee time to process payment. The person in charge of authorizing these tiny payments (Juan) repeatedly requested he be allowed to use a less cumbersome manner of making payments, but Sam refused stating that there needed to be consistency and accountability.

As I was working to resolve other issues for this agency, I learned of this situation and suggested to Sam that she set Juan up with a QuickBooks account and a separate checking account so that he would quickly and immediately make these small payments which were actually from requests for refunds from a ticket machine that malfunctioned. She refused.

I brought the matter to the attention of the CFO and he saw the value in my suggestion and we implemented it, thereby saving the company lots and lots of money and creating customer good-will.

Accountability was not lost, indeed it was enhanced since Juan could immediately see if a machine were malfunctioning, or a particular requester was a repeated requester – thus potentially trying to get money illegally.

Let me tell you another story. I became aware of this while consulting at another high tech company. Three employees, who had been long-time good employees were on the verge of being fired because they were taking too many breaks.

Their complaints that they were feeling uncomfortable in the new space they had been assigned were ignored. The Vice-President of Human Resources was about to terminate their employment when the CEO found out and asked me to intervene and try to find out what was going on.

I did. I discovered that these women had been assigned a windowless room crowded with boxes. They were feeling claustrophobic and thus needed to leave the room frequently to take brief breaks.

We removed the boxes. We purchased large posters for the walls, one a mountain scene with a waterfall and stream and the other an ocean scene. The problem was resolved.

And, yes, sometimes this is truly a man-woman difference. I hate sounding so sexist and stereotypical, but women have far less tolerance for certain things than men. Men are taught to suck-it-up and get the job done. Women need to feel comfortable – especially in relation to other people in the workplace.

Small complaints and concerns are so often ignored. Problems when they are raised are swept under the rug until they escalated into bigger problems that hurt the company and no longer can be ignored.

Instead of patting people on the back and then ignoring their concerns, perhaps upper management ought to consider that there is validity, take the concerns seriously and try to resolve the issues before they get out of control.

On the board level – you are working primarily with volunteers who need to be nurtured and appreciated. On the workplace level – you need to have your employees feel valued and understood because their productivity will decline if they are depressed by “dis-satisfiers” or no longer motivated to do their best.

Finally as I’ve stated elsewhere – it’s not about the money – you can’t just throw money at an uncomfortable situation – you need to fix the problem.

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Behavior at the Board Level
Once again I am preparing to train a non-profit board. This board, like some of the others I’ve trained, is a working board, not a governing one. That means that the members of the board are the hardest working of the volunteers and often make up the composition of the committees, sometimes chairing and sometimes serving under one of the other board members as chair.
This is sometimes a source of conflict. On one level they are all equal as board members. On the other level, they serve different roles in the different committees and sometimes have dispute about responsibilities and levels of authority.



Too, in a working board if there is staff, the staff is limited and all too often board members both defer to staff as the experts (where there expertise is really limited) and dump most of the work on staff members (where their time and resources are limited.)



Finding balance is an interesting challenge.



It’s easy to say, “let’s determine vision and align activities to that vision” but what actually happens day to day in a working board is often at a different level. Committee activities and needs are the day-to-day operations of working boards, and the needs and communication issues within these committees and between them is sometimes a problem needing intervention and resolution.



I’m planning to use exercises from my Board of Directors Training Manual and these will include process as well as content.



Content will include looking at their by-laws, their job descriptions and responsibilities, and in this case, their relationship with funding organizations. They will also have to determine their vision for the next few years.



Process will partially be about how people need to treat each other, how to make decisions for the good of the whole (rather than just friends or a select constituency) and really how to problem-solve and make decisions.



Many people on volunteer boards are lacking in this type of decision-making background, coming from workplaces where their individual roles are to implement decisions made by others.
This is a great group of hard-working people and spending the day ( a very long day is planned) with them at a retreat should be quite enjoyable.

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Behavior at the Board Level
Once again I am preparing to train a non-profit board. This board, like some of the others I’ve trained, is a working board, not a governing one. That means that the members of the board are the hardest working of the volunteers and often make up the composition of the committees, sometimes chairing and sometimes serving under one of the other board members as chair.
This is sometimes a source of conflict. On one level they are all equal as board members. On the other level, they serve different roles in the different committees and sometimes have dispute about responsibilities and levels of authority.

Too, in a working board if there is staff, the staff is limited and all too often board members both defer to staff as the experts (where there expertise is really limited) and dump most of the work on staff members (where their time and resources are limited.)

Finding balance is an interesting challenge.

It’s easy to say, “let’s determine vision and align activities to that vision” but what actually happens day to day in a working board is often at a different level. Committee activities and needs are the day-to-day operations of working boards, and the needs and communication issues within these committees and between them is sometimes a problem needing intervention and resolution.

I’m planning to use exercises from my Board of Directors Training Manual and these will include process as well as content.

Content will include looking at their by-laws, their job descriptions and responsibilities, and in this case, their relationship with funding organizations. They will also have to determine their vision for the next few years.

Process will partially be about how people need to treat each other, how to make decisions for the good of the whole (rather than just friends or a select constituency) and really how to problem-solve and make decisions.

Many people on volunteer boards are lacking in this type of decision-making background, coming from workplaces where their individual roles are to implement decisions made by others.
This is a great group of hard-working people and spending the day ( a very long day is planned) with them at a retreat should be quite enjoyable.

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Coaching Urged for Women

I’m not trying to prove to you that I read the papers, but this too was a headline in the newspaper. The gist of the article was that the McKinsey study revealed that women have been kept back from reaching the top of the corporate pile because of “inadequate career development.”

To quote: “companies need to spend more time coaching women and offering leadership training…” The article continues to say that women should be actively groomed with coaches or mentors who help them develop and promote their careers.

In my experience, those women with whom I’ve worked on leadership training, corporate politics, personal/professional development and both strategy and tactics for problem-solving, have been able to advance up the corporate ladder very quickly.

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Disconnect between CEOs and Top Officers

I saved an article that was in the San Jose Mercury on March 28th, wherein executives complain that their perceptions and decisions are not always consistent across the executive team. Sometimes the CEO has one set of beliefs and his/her executive team doesn’t really execute on them in the way the CEO wants. In other cases, members of the executive team operate independently of shared values and beliefs.

Over the many years I’ve been consulting, I’ve seen this problem over and over. Abstract concepts mean different things to different people. For example: “Constructive criticism” can be helpful or hurtful depending on how it is implemented. “Quality” and “Teamwork” are other abstract concepts often interpreted differently.

Among the areas of disagreement (according to the article) are issues of motivation. CEOs tend to think money is the prime motivator, whereas other executives talk about being part of the decision making process, creativity, work-life balance, and relationships.

My experience is that the Executive Team talks at each other during meetings instead of with each other. They have their staff prepare these glorious power-points and they meet and show off to each other, rather than sitting around the table and sharing information and concerns.
Too, the famous “Tyranny of Pleasantness” operates so that everyone plays nice and no one deals with each other honestly. (My article on this subject is a chapter in my soon to be released book on Conflict Resolution.) Or else, they are so busy jockeying for positions of power that they verbally arm-wrestle with each other.

What’s needed is a CEO who knows how to draw out and integrate her/his executive team so that they trust and help each other. Am I dreaming? No. I’ve seen it happen in really well run organizations.

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Resolving Conflict in the Workplace

Resolving Conflict in the Workplace

I thought I’d finished the book I wrote which my friend Bernie Silver (Former Sr. Editor of Business Journal) edited for me. But no, I decided I wanted to add a chapter on teaching children how to resolve conflict and then I learned about on-line conflict resolution. I need to learn more about it so I can add it too.

I want to finish this and have it published and printed by early June since I will be teaching Conflict Resolution at Stanford Continuing Education this summer.

Anyone with interesting information about on-line conflict resolution - please let me know.

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