The utility of consensus

When teams choose to work together they need to commit to the betterment of the team leading in consequence to a betterment of their individual situations. This commitment towards the best interests of the team is what leads to teamwork and is a key element for achieving consensus.

Earlier I had written about situations where it is futile to seek consensus. When it is necessary to take some quick, hard decisions, a tough leader (think Welch, Jobs etc.) has no business building consensus. But tough times don't last and crisis is not an everyday phenomenon. If it is, then it is better to take a hard close look at your business model and dynamics.

In Business As Usual times it is far more advantageous to actively build consensus as part of your leadership strategy. While in the previous article we saw a study of futility of consensus, let us examine here the utility of consensus.

• Write your own lottery ticket - When your team decides what they want to do, instead of being told what to do, they have a personal stake in the outcome. As a leader your job is to lay out the larger vision, while letting the team carve out the mission for themselves. Writing your own lottery ticket was an experiment performed in studying human behavior.  In this experiment, half the room was given printed lottery tickets while half the room was given blank papers and asked to write their own random six digits to make up a lottery. Before drawing the results, the researchers tried to buy back the lottery tickets by bidding for them. Guess what? The people who had written their own numbers were more reluctant (five times more reluctant as per the research) to part with their tickets, even though they had exactly the same probability of winning the jackpot as those who had been given printed numbers.  
• A convinced team is a committed team - Even where the leaders like Jobs or Welch were seen to be autocratic in their approach, they had a larger than life reputation preceding them, which made teams want to tag along with their decisions. This conviction of the team in your abilities cannot always be presumed by all leaders. A bad year or a failed business decision is likely to erode your dictatorial powers pretty quickly. We had Groupon CEO Andrew Mason stepping down on the back of a ruining financial quarter and plunging share prices. In his open letter to employees he says "... My biggest regrets are the moments that I let a lack of data override my intuition on what’s best for our customers."  That says it all, doesn't it?
• Et tu Brutus! - You may be able to pull rank on your team and get them to agree to certain decisions. You cannot make them deliver the success you envisioned if you had the super human capabilities of carrying out all the actions themselves. An unwilling team led into a battle they are not sure they will win, or even want to win, will either desert the ranks or find ways of sheltering themselves by simply going through the motions. It is far better to have the team solidly behind your ideas by listening to them and adapting the plans to what the team feels is the best way to achieve success. That buy in from the team, while costly in terms of timelines and compromises to the original goal, is what will guarantee a do or die attitude to achieving the goals the team has set for themselves. 

One of the pitfalls to avoid is faux-consensus. This is a false feeling of consensus based on team's sign offs on paper while in reality, doubts still linger. Often leaders will get teams into a room and lay out the 'what' they want to achieve and ask the team to come with 'how' they will achieve it. Larger teams often are broken into cross functional groups and asked to brainstorm on the 'how'. What emerges is a purely academic exercise with no clear ownership or buy in for the action items assigned to this team.

What is necessary is for the team to first deliberate on the 'what' agree on a common imperative they all feel is worth achieving. If this goal can be signed off by the team with commitments of timeline and individual ownership towards goal breakdown items, the 'how' can be left to the teams to work out over time as they proceed working on the goal.

It is to be noted that majority agreement is not consensus. Consensus is when everyone agrees to the common goal. This means arriving at a solution where diverse views and agendas have been addressed everyone feels there is something for him  in the end result. Such a result is indeed likely to be robust and may turn out to be far better than the original idea.

An Agile Journey

I will be speaking at the Scrum Gathering India in Pune this Friday - 26th June 2013, about the components of a successful agile journey based on my experiences in Agile and Scrum. It will be exciting to address this gathering after two years of conducting Agile and Scrum Fundamental classroom training and hope to bring forth a view from the accomplishments of scrum projects executed.

My session is part of the 'Scrum Accomplished - Inspire 3' track from 1230 to 1330.

The discussion will cover Agile Maturity Models assessing readiness of organizations to be agile, the various metrics and more interestingly the non-metrics used to get a view of where we are and where we want to be on the agile journey.

How to select projects for scrum at various stages of the journey and finding the secret sauce for successful scrum forms part of the agenda. This is topped up with a discussion around the Scrum values and how we can relate to them in our quest.

Gamification of the workplace

Social apps and games are today omnipresent and you can see people engaged in one or the other of these activities while traveling, waiting at airports or generally filling up their free time. Some facebook updates even show people climbing various levels or achieving new powers when they are supposed to be at work. :) The levels of engagement that gaming is able to generate got me thinking on how to harness the same levels of energy and engagement and apply it in work scenarios. I pondered on a few attributes which enables the gaming industry to keep people occupied for long hours on end. 

Read more on my linked in blog - https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/gamification-workplace-fakhruddin-bandukwala about how the concepts of the gaming industry can be applied to the workplace.

Introducing these concepts into the workplace would of course have impacts on hierarchies and processes.

Is it possible to apply these principles to lead to a 'gamification' of the workplace leading to an enhanced sense of ownership and higher engagement levels? Would love to hear your feedback.

The New Wave Business Process - Part III : The Elusive Business Process

Wiki defines the term 'business process' as a set of related, structured activities which lead to a service or a product being produced and delivered to customers. What this implies is that if you can define your business goals and list down the activities in various functions needed to achieve these goals, you should then be able to set a sequence to this list, which becomes your business process.

Business is definitely run 100% on process. What matters is what is the maturity level of the business process in your organization. After all even ad-hoc collaboration leads to following a process which delivers products and services. However, ad-hoc process will not be scalable or repeatable. If we want to deliver consistent reliable service to customers, then business process maturity has to be ensured.

In order to take steps forward in the right direction, we need to first realize where we are. In your organisation, if  you see great customer appreciation for individual efforts, personal interactions help save the day, and your team is motivated to ensure no problem is insurmountable in meeting deadlines, then you are in trouble as far as process maturity is concerned. These are all symptoms of an ad-hoc process organization.

What you need to do at this stage is take a hard look at the structures in your organization, study process documentation (in all likelihood - none), and embark on a study of process frameworks best suited to your business environment and industry sector. Such an entity is likely to go through organizational re-structuring, documentation of existing ad-hoc process, adoption of frameworks and trying to super-impose ad-hoc processes to standard frameworks.

In order to reach Managed processes, such an entity would be well advised to set up a central process analysis team comprising of a cross functional selection of senior managers. This forum should be empowered with top management sponsorship and review. Individual heroism should take a second seat to the goal of creating a managed process entity.

This forum should strive to build / modify the organization structure aligned to processes. This will lead to internal service units being created which so far as possible are the owners of specific deliverables within the entire process and which in turn defining TAT and SLA for each other. This would also result in providing role clarity to employees on what exactly they are supposed to deliver to the organization.

The hallmark of a managed process entity would be existence of disciplined organizational units which own and deliver specific tasks with desired quality and within specified timelines. At this stage the organization should see repeatable practices, customer appreciation for consistency and reliability of the organization as opposed to appreciation for individual heroism earlier.

By now the organization would be demonstrating process definition in every work unit. Each work unit is now stabilizing their process. It is possible to get data out of every process step to measure and improve on bottlenecks. The next step would be to standardize the processes across work units and ensure seamless interaction among various functions. Only at this stage would BPR or Six Sigma programs yield benefits for the organization. If such exercises are attempted on an immature organization, the programs will not be well appreciated and by the time we reach this stage a fatigue would have set in amongst the resoruces which will make it all the more difficult to progress beyond this stage.

Thus it is very important to calibrate the process maturity journey of the organization to avoid mis-steps and over-reaching one's goals. While we are moving processes to managed and stabilized stages, it is also important to realize the potential of automation in bringing about productivity gains. Automation will help little in ad-hoc processes and will in fact be counter productive as one goes on spending endlessly on automating new ad hoc processes continuously. Once work units agree upon standardized processes, automation can be brought in to define, perform, monitor, measure and report on processes which can be then taken up for further improvement based on observations.

These further improvements are most likely to come in the form of end to end integration projects being taken up within the organization. By this time, industry best practices would have been instituitionalized and functions will even start improvising on industry best practices. This should neither be surprising or disturbing. After all industry best practice is defined as those practices which work best for us.

Beyond this, each organization will need to find its own unique path to reach repeatable and innovating stages of process maturity. At repeatable stage the aim will be to reduce process output variances, empowered functions will take corrective action or improvement steps on their process area, since they know the larger model and are in sync with the larger picture of the organization. Organizational capability measures will be more in focus rather than function wise capabilities.

For an organization to be recognized as an innovative process organization, there should be demonstrated sponsorship of innovation projects, proactive improvement programs for achieving organizational goals. Often what is seen is that leadership teams attempt to execute projects at innovation maturity levels which may be in keeping with their thought process maturity, but fails to recognise the maturity levels of the organizations that they head. This is a major pitfall to be avoided. Leaders need to ensure that they nurture the maturity level of their organizations, rather than operate at innovating levels and assuming their organization will play catch up.