Decision Making: It’s not what you think by Henry Minztberg | Part 1

Introduction by Phil LeNir:

In 2007, Henry Mintzberg and I started a company called CoachingOurselves. We brought a reflective approach to developing leaders and managers to the enterprise learning space. 

The building blocks of our approach are 90 minute sessions by small groups of managers. Each session is guided by one of our themed discussion topics. Managers work through the topic together; sharing their knowledge, learning from experiences, resolving issues and planning strategy and actions to make change happen.

The 90 minute sessions are the foundation to Leadership Development Programs, HIPO programs, Reflection Cafes, Cultural Change initiatives, and Event Workshops.

The topics can be used standalone, or can be combined with others to build a curriculum focused on specific business objectives; driving change, leadership, developing the organization, engaging people, venturing and innovating.

In this blog I have included the topic titled Decision Making: It’s not what you think. It has been split into 3 parts, with the first part below, and subsequent parts to be released in the coming weeks. To get real value out of this topic gather your management team together for discussion and reflection on your decision making process. Simply begin a discussion by answering the question(s) on each page, and let the discussion go wherever it needs to go.

As opposed to the classical view based on classroom training or e-learning, Henry and I believe managers and leaders learn best through reflection on natural experience in the light of conceptual ideas. This approach has been successfully used by hundreds of organizations around the world to deliver leadership and organizational development programs and initiatives.

If you like this, you may purchase further topics online from our library of over 75.

Following is the first part of the CoachingOurselves topic: Decision Making, It’s not what you think, by Henry Mintzberg:

Crafting Strategy (Mintzberg) and Teaching Smart People to Learn (Argyris)

Two friends of mine publish the J&E Alert, a fantastic newsletter highlighting thought provoking thinking on leadership, management and business. Below we share two snippets of their newsletter.

You can subscribe directly by sending an email to the editors (Mireille Jansma & Jurgen Egges)

Video (2 min) – Crafting Strategy (Henry Mintzberg, video by Bobbie Kite, 11 May 2013)

 Intelligent summary of Professor Mintzberg’s ideas on crafting strategy - a concept which is quite different from the notion of strategic planning, as among others advocated by Professor Michael Porter. If you like the video, in this article Henry Mintzberg explains his thoughts in more depth. And if you want to know more about the different viewpoints of Mintzberg and Porter, here is an article at Forbes by Karl Moore (yet another professor): Porter or Mintzberg: Whose view of strategy is the most relevant today?

Based on his lectures and seminars, Henry Mintzberg created a themed discussion workbook called Crafting Strategy. Hundreds of management teams around the world have used this topic workbook to run a self-directed 90 minute session in which they rethink their strategy process and business unit or organizations strategy.

For more information contact us online or call +1 781 489 3418.

Essay - Teaching smart people how to learn (Chris Argyris)

This essay is as pertinent now as when Chris Argyris wrote it, some 20 years ago.

Argyris: "Any company that aspires to succeed in the tougher business environment of the 1990s must first resolve a basic dilemma: success in the marketplace increasingly depends on learning, yet most people don’t know how to learn. What’s more, those members of the organization that many assume to be the best at learning are, in fact, not very good at it. I am talking about the well-educated, high-powered, high-commitment professionals who occupy key leadership positions in the modern corporation.

Most companies not only have tremendous difficulty addressing this learning dilemma; they aren’t even aware that it exists. The reason: they misunderstand what learning is and how to bring it about. As a result, they tend to make two mistakes in their

efforts to become a learning organization.

First, most people define learning too narrowly as mere 'problem solving', so they focus on identifying and correcting errors in the external environment. Solving problems is important. But if learning is to persist, managers and employees must also look inward.

They need to reflect critically on their own behavior, identify the ways they often inadvertently contribute to the organization’s problems, and then change how they act. In particular, they must learn how the very way they go about defining and solving problems can be a source of problems in its own right."

MarchFifteen and a Culture of Learning

Edyta Pacuk is owner of MarchFifteen Consulting. MarchFifteen is a unique partner to CoachingOurselves, comprised of trained psychologists and certified coaches who assess, develop, and transform leaders and organizations.  A while back I interviewed her on how they are using our themed topic discussion guides in their projects to develop a culture of learning.

What is MarchFifteen Consulting? We are a group of industrial psychologists who focus on helping our clients forward their businesses by getting the best out of their people. Our overarching mission is to connect organizations to a higher purpose.  By anchoring their vision in something larger than life, they are able to attract interesting people, their engagement increases, and profits follow.  This includes a focus on organizations’ moral fabrications and underpinnings. Without being arrogant, we are selective about whom we consider will be good clients for us, or rather, whom we will be good consultants for.  We are good for organizations that really want to make a difference – those that feel HR and OD initiatives are not just a check box and are looking for true change.  In order to have a long term impact, we need to become intimate with clients, partner with them, and understand what they think and what keeps them up at night.  This selective client base helps us give them a return on investment. What type of work does MarchFifteen Consulting do? One of the projects that we’re most proud of is called the Accelerated Leadership Development Process. It creates an environment that challenges participants to do their best possible work. The learnings they harvest throughout are sustained for a longer period than if they were to take a traditional workshop; we believe the learning never stops. In this approach, one of the core elements is creating a community of interest.  This is creating a learning journey for participants, which is largely about them learning from each other and together.  Ongoing conversations around the big issues that are important to participants is paramount to this project’s success. How does CoachingOurselves help? CoachingOurselves is an essential element in facilitating these conversations. The biggest value that we see from the CoachingOurselves sessions is that they give participants the time and space to have unhurried conversations about business, where their role in the organization is less relevant than the current goal or mandate. I am always surprised about the knowledge that exists in a room.  Having come from an adult education background, I was trained to believe that you need a subject matter expert in the room.  I have abandoned that arrogant notion.  If you allow people the time and space for introspection, they have tools inside them, and if not, others in the room do.  The CoachingOurselves methodology is very respectful of the contribution of employees. It facilitates robust conversations that help participants automatically generate ideas to make the organization run and perform better.  But this is also the caveat of CoachingOurselves.  If the client is not ready, with individuals prepared to brainstorm and implement ideas on how to improve the organization, then this is not the right methodology. Closing Thoughts on CoachingOurselves? The reason we are so enthusiastic and excited about using this methodology and why we see it as such an interesting part of our service offering is because it works. We believe that people learn the most from experience – coaching and mentoring is of utmost importance, formal training of least.  CoachingOurselves easily fits into the Center of Creative Leadership’s 70:20:10 model for learning.  This model states that managers learn 70% through on-the-job experiences, 20% through sharing and networking, and only 10% through formal classroom development. CoachingOurselves enhances the 70:20 components by enabling participants to talk about relevant experience. You can almost get a group therapy moment and this is what guarantees the “stick-ability” of the learning and creates enthusiastic and engaging sessions. CoachingOurselves creates a culture of real learning and development in organizations. For more information on MarchFifteen Consulting,click here!

Leadership and Organizational impact in Kenya, with Mintzberg and CoachingOurselves

Our tools have found a powerful niche for organizational development in developing nations. Following is a video put together by the Kenya Red Cross, an absolutely amazing organization that operates in a very difficult environment.

They were introduced to our approach through the IMPM program. IMPM is a masters level degree for working executives which offers CoachingOurselves as a take-home tool through which participants can drive organizational change back home.

Our simple approach, based on the work of Henry Mintzberg, have produced profound results:

We have also been very fortunate to be able to partner with Nadim Matta and the Rapid Results Institute for other initiatives in developing nations.

CoachingOurselves in Australia

Monica Redden owns http://www.monicareddenconsultancy.com.au/ down under in Australia. She specialized in facilitation, organizational development and strategic planning and consultation.

She has been running with our approach in Australia. Below is a wonderful animated video she put together with her perspective our unique approach to learning, development, and organizational change




Monica has had great success using CoachingOurselves in her interventions and projects with a number of organizations.

No money, No time, but we need leadership development that actually works!

I originally put this together for a Moonshot at the Management Innovation Exchange....

Moonshots 

Focus the work of management on a higher purpose

Embed the ethos of community and citizenship

Increase trust, reduce fear

Summary 

Three rounds of layoffs, just off-shored our software dev. to Eastern Europe and got acquired by our competitor. The management team and I figured some sort of management development program might help, but we had no time, no money, and needed immediate and glaringly obvious results from whatever we did. I asked Professor Henry Mintzberg for advice, and this is the story of what happened.  

Context 

I was a Montreal based software engineering director in one division of a medium sized software firm during the tail end of the dot com crash in 2002-2003. As with everyone in the high tech industry at the time, we went through several rounds of layoffs. All of us in R&D were struggling through the fundamental cultural shift that occurs when you go from having nearly unlimited budgets to develop loads of highly innovative software, to being a very expensive cost center that needs to downsize and continuously focus on lowering costs. 

 

We had almost no time and no money, terrible morale, and immense pressure to change quickly.

Triggers 

- No time and no money, which means we had to innovate.

 

- Enormous external and internal pressure to change, which means we had to do something. 

 

- The feeling that it is better to do something rather than just keep my head low and try not to get canned in the next round of layoffs.

 

- A strong bent towards the practical, down to earth, just get on with the job of managing, solving problems and making things happen. We were a team of engineering managers.... we didn't know much about the theories of learning and development but we certainly knew when something was making an immediate difference and helping us do our jobs as managers. And we had a good sense of agile methodology so we knew how to quickly iterate and adapt our way into a solution.

 

- And of course, the opportunity to have long conversations with Professor Henry Mintzberg. 

Key Innovations & Timeline 

I was very lucky to be able to talk to Professor Henry Mintzberg, who has many ideas on management development and about my management challenge: "No time, no money, and I need management development that really works. What can I do?"

He suggested I start by reading his book; Managers not MBAs, which I did. In the book he says "Thoughtful reflection on natural experience, in the light of conceptual ideas, is the most powerful tool we have for management learning.”
I figured that the team and I don't need to be in a classroom to reflect on our own experiences, we can probably do that just fine in my office. We also don't really need a professor to give us a lecture or anything, we just need their "conceptual ideas" in some sort of format that we could use to run our own learning meetings. As managers we had loads of experience with meetings... we run crisis meetings, planning meetings, status meetings... so why not a learning meeting?

And that is exactly what we did. 

I opened up my Microsoft Outlook, found the next available 90 minute time slot and invited my team to a learning meeting. The stated objective was to "learn something new about management to make things better around here". We would do this by "spending some time reflecting on our own experience in light of conceptual ideas". In others words, we would talk about what's going on around here stimulated by the different perspectives, concepts, or frameworks articulated by the professors, and then figure out what little things each of us could do to make things better. And if we thought it was useful then we would do it again in a week or two.

It was completely up to each one of us, individually, to decide if we wanted to follow through on anything or not. I simply said that if you come to these learning meetings, and talk, and talk, and then come up with some simple, practical ideas on how to improve things without doing anything about it, then don't bother showing up next time because you are wasting your time and might as well go to another status meeting or something.

During the weekend prior to each learning meeting, I spent my time madly editing and crafting the stuff Henry and his colleagues provided from their Masters level management courses into a type of workbook we called "the topic". It had the content, agenda and challenging questions and exercises for our learning meetings.

To make a long story short... it worked. This became the space in which our team made many of our most important management decisions. We bonded as a team and began helping one another with loads of pretty personal management stuff.

And other, unexpectedly interesting, things happened. 

Within a couple of these sessions we stopped relating to each other like "the head of engineering talking to the head of QA, talking to the head of tech support", and became what we really were, which was "Phil talking to Hakan, talking to Eric and Sam etc..." Just plain human beings doing the best they can to get on with the job of managing, solving problems and making things happen. 

Soon, some other managers in the office picked up on this concept and started it with their teams.
And so several years later Henry and I founded a company called CoachingOurselves. It is a concept for practical management learning in a team meeting setting. No facilitators, no trainers and no consultants. The only requirement is a print out of the management topics, and a pen -- no laptops.

There are now thousands of managers around the world using our growing catalogue of over 60 management "topics" specifically written for CoachingOurselves by over 40 different management thinkers such as Henry Mintzberg, Philip Kotler, Marshall Goldsmith, David Ulrich, and Edgar Schein. We support managers by periodically asking for their top 2-3 management issues and suggesting topics that may stimulate productive discussions around their issues. Through these discussions the management teams do whatever they need to do to make things better for themselves, their teams and their organization.

It's still only just starting, but is already being used in 8 different languages by over 50 organizations around the world. With lots of hard work and a bit of luck, through CoachingOurselves we hope to help as many managers around the world as possible do a better job at managing, solving problems and making things happen.

Challenges & Solutions 

We have had, and likely will continue to have loads of interesting challenges as CoachingOurselves spreads around the world. 

 

My very first challenge was simply convincing my original team of engineering managers that I hadn't fallen off the deep end with this crazy "learning meeting" idea. After all, we were a group of engineering managers, we did things. We didn't spend our time reflecting!

 

I remember suggesting to the team that we think of it like this: "Right now we all spend some 50+ hours a week running around making things happen, doing things etc..... Now imagine if we spent 1 hour a week talking about what's going on, reflecting on some recent experiences around current management challenges, and discussing what we could do to make things better all stimulated by some really cool management topics developed by some of the best thinkers in the world. Then we could work with more focus, making things happen for the other 49 hours. Do you think we might get more done during the 49 hours then the original 50 hours?" 

 

Off course, since we always tended to talk about current management challenges, issues or subjects of interest in ways that never happened during other meetings because of the content the professor prepared for us, most everyone wanted to have these discussions now rather than later. 

Benefits & Metrics 

Things continue to evolve rapidly as this spreads. At the moment we hear lots of personal stories from individuals and teams, but in organizations where 15% or more of the management population is involved, there are stories of broader cultural changes occurring, and as Henry says in his HBR article, the organization is (perhaps!) being rebuilt as a community.

 

We have many testimonials of obvious, tangible changes such as teams:

 

• Coming up with and following through on a change to a filing system in a satellite office to make it easier for people to get what they need, 
• Enhancing the telephone script for how an admin worker answers incoming calls resulting in an increase in the number of sales,
• Developing large impact business changes such as coming up with and agreeing to a radical new production process that speeds up a major production cycle by 30%.  

We also have numerous stories about personal changes that come from self realization, with results such as having  loud people becoming less loud, and quiet people beginnng to speak up. There are also lots of stories of how the new ideas that came from the discussions, based on the professors' perspectives of different aspects of management were immediately used in different business contexts.

 

And off course, lots of people just plain love it, and thank us enormously for the sense of well being, community, strength, empowerment etc... that comes from simply having a space to talk with your colleagues about what you are really thinking about oneself, one another, the organization, the situation, and how you can help each other make things better for everyone.

 

 

Lessons 

Many times you just have to try something to see if it will work. And always be flexible and reflective.. then you can pretty much learn your way into anything.

Credits 

This idea was developed between myself, Phil LeNir, and Professor Henry Mintzberg.

Materials 

- CoachingOurselves website

- Henry Mintzberg website

- Business Week article "Management Education on the Fly", introduces CoachingOurselves

- Business Week article "The best leadership is good management", though it does not discuss CoachingOurselves directly, this article helps explain why I think CoachingOurselves is a story of "redefining the work of leadership" 

- Article in strategy+business "Management by Reflection" telling the story of CoachingOurselves through an interview between Art Kleiner and Henry Mintzberg. (Registration required but it is free)

- Recent article in the Economist discussing CoachingOurselves (Registration required but it is free)

- Video introduction to the work of Henry Mintzberg, also introducing CoachingOurselves

- Video introduction to CoachingOurselves by Henry Mintzberg

- CoachingOurselves in Facebook, CoachingOurselves on Twitter, CoachingOurselves on Linkedin

 

Videos 

Rebuilding American Enterprise: Henry Mintzberg and ‘Kittens are evil’: Heresies in public policy

Two friends of mine publish the J&E Alert, a fantastic newsletter highlighting thought provoking thinking on leadership, management and business. Below I share two snippets of their newsletter.

You can subscribe directly by sending an email to the editors (Mireille Jansma & Jurgen Egges)

Article –Rebuilding American Enterprise (Henry Mintzberg, June 2013)

Mintzberg has had it. "The root cause of the American economic crisis is not economic, and so will not be resolved by economists. That cause is managerial: too many corporate “leaders” have been trashing their enterprises for quick gains, instead of managing them for sustainability. The

American economy will have to be fixed one enterprise at a time, to restore the country’s renowned sense of enterprise."

On shareholder value: "Corporate correctness dictates that publicly-traded enterprises maximize “Shareholder Value”. Don’t confuse this with anything of real value, let alone any human values. Shareholder Value is a fancy label for pumping up the price of a company’s stock as quickly as possible, so that those in the know can cash in and run before the stock sinks."

Article - 'Kittens are evil': Heresies in public policy (Simon Caulkin, June 2013)

Great analysis by Simon Caulkin of why managing by targets and incentives is harmful. The article concludes with 4 case studies.

Caulkin: "When Tony Blair remonstrated some years ago, ‘No company would consider managing without targets,’ he was nearly right. Whether organisations using them call it that or not, results-based frameworks for performance management have come to dominate management thinking in many parts of the developed world, in both public and private sectors (...). Paying people for the results they achieve – it sounds rational and plausible; indeed it sounds like management’s Holy Grail. But if that is the case, why are two of the most enthusiastic proponents of results-based management, the banks and the NHS, conspicuous for producing outcomes that are the opposite of those they were set up to deliver – impoverishing the world rather than enriching it in the case of the banks and killing patients instead of curing them in NHS hospitals? And is there an alternative?

The answers that emerged from a fascinating and disturbing event organised by consultancy Vanguard in Manchester in March were, respectively: because people persist, and have a strong vested interest, in believing that making it work is a technical problem that we can solve if we’re clever enough; and yes, there is an alternative, and not surprisingly it’s the opposite of outcomes-based approaches – starting not from the back (the result) but the front (what’s happening now)."

Simon Caulkin is a writer and editor who for 16 years was the Observer’s management columnist, writing on subjects ranging from rock ‘n’ roll to the banking crisis. He has contributed to the Economist, the Financial Times, and many national and international business magazines. Aside from journalism, Simon has worked on books with prominent business academics and leaders such as the late Sumantra Ghoshal, Andrew Campbell and John Seddon.