2004 Review

This past year we've had the pleasure of participating in some great work with some very special people.

Our thanks to all the people and organizations we've had the opportunity to work with in 2004! We wish you and yours peace and harmony in 2005.

Here's a brief recap of some of our activities during this last year:

Ongoing Projects

We started out the year supporting Bell Canada's proposal to provide telecommunications services for the 2010 Olympic Winter Games. Bell was awarded the contract in October 2004, and we're working with them to plan the next 5 years leading up to the Olympics.

Our relationship with the Aerospace Techology Working Group continued throughtout the year. We manage and maintain their web site (www.atwg.org) and added more facilitation support in both their spring and fall 2004 conferences and we're planning the spring 2005 conference. The spring conference focused on returning to space with peace and hope while the fall conference focused on supporting the space exploration vision. The collaborative part of the fall event focused on creating a sustained presence on the moon.

In 2003 we did some work for NASA Dryden focused on developing a vision for an Global (Earth) Observation System. 2004 found us expanding on that work by designing and facilitating several collaborative sessions bringing together members of NASA, NOAA and the DoE to explore using UAVs (unmanned aerospace vehicles) for global climate change research. The first workshop in August focused on developing science goals. In the second workshop in December brought together a broader community to expand on those science goals as well as looking at the existing technology gaps in current UAV technology.

During 2004 we had the opportunity to continue our work with the Annie E. Casey Foundation's Center for Working Familes. This has been a several year project to develop a program to streamline products and services for low income families.

We are very pleased to welcome Mike Kent to InnovationLabs. He recently sold his first project into Yahoo and we're looking forward to a long and healthy relationship with them.

Collaborative Events with Educators

We also had the opportunity to support a handful of educators from around the country in some great projects. We began the year working with four small schools in Santa Cruz. The district was facing severe budget cuts and these 4 small schools had to plan what eventually became the The Branciforte Small Schools Campus (with all 4 schools sharing of one campus). Later in the year Langdon worked with the Santa Cruz City Schools leadership team and facilitated their annual retreat before starting the new school year.

During the year we did several projects in and around the Milwaukee, Wisconsin area. In February we worked with a small group from the Milwaukee Academy of Science to help them design a new high school. This new school was to be co-located with a local science museum. The high school opened in September with it's first class of 30 students. In July we worked with the New Berlin School District (a small district outside of Milwaukee) to design a comprehensive roadmap to a new assessment system for the district. And in December we worked with our friends at Cardinal Stritch University Leadership Center. This project involved designing and facilitating a fantastic group of African American leaders focused on improving economic conditions for African Americans in the city of Milwaukee.

During the year we also had the great opportunity to work with the State of Nebraska Department of Education as they begin their process of transforming career and technical education throughout the state. That relationship developed out of work we did with the National FFA Organization. We worked with National FFA to explore business models and plan the expansion of their LifeKnowledge product to be used in schools throughout the US.

Workshops

During the year we facilitated several workshops. We continued our relationship with the CapGemini Accelerated Solutions Environment and conducted our third workshop on Designing Collaborative Events. We also delivered this workshop and a workshop on visual modeling and StoryMaps to our friends at Bell Canada's Delta Centre. And, to finish up the year Langdon worked with InnovationLabs' Resident Associate for South Asia Avnindra Sharma to develop, produce and deliver, three workshops in India. These workshops combined work Langdon has done on Business Model Warfare with new work we are all doing on Innovation and High Performance.

All in all it was a great year and we're looking forward to a great 2005.

Choice and Options

Following up on that conference regarding leadership transformation and what I called 'Theory of Business' Bryan and I discussed the situation with the client and brainstormed possible activities the group could participate in to move them along with their intended outcomes - which are to begin to understand how their leadership performance impacts their bottom line results and their measure of employee satisfaction. Their current business results are reasonable but the scores on things like trust are poor.

We want to have the participants engage in a dialog with each other about what they hope to learn and how they see themselves growing and how they hope to shift their behaviors - then, if they choose to, they can have a coaching experience in the next 9 or 10 months going forward.

We thought it would be important to give participants a visceral experience - intellectual, physical (kinesthetic), and visual experience of their view of leadership as well as an exploration of how other organizations are experiencing leadership so they can develop a wider 'portfolio' of leadership options.

Some of the work needs to be done individually and some of the work needs to be done in small groups.

Individual explorations could include:

• What matters to you?


• What's working and where have we been at our best?


• Build a portfolio of successful behaviors and results (examples of things that they like - quotes, statements, images of the way we think about people, management, etc.).


• What is your best experience of being a team?


• What is your best experience of being lead?What is your best experience of being a leader?


• What is your concept of an ideal leader? organization?


• What's the difference between leadership and management? Different experiences of management and leadership.

We came up with some options for materials that could be introduced from outside their organization that might shed light on other ways of doing things. The two primary suggestion we had were works by Ricardo Semler and works by Alfie Kohn.


The Semler options could include:

April 1, 2004

Ricardo Semler: Set Them Free

By Brad Wieners

For nearly 25 years, Ricardo Semler, CEO of Brazil-based Semco, has let his employees set their own hours, wages, even choose their own IT. The result: increased productivity, long-term loyalty and phenomenal growth. Can his radical approach work for you?

http://www.cioinsight.com/article2/0,1397,1569009,00.asp

Case Study Abstract

(pdf file) This case introduces Ricardo Semler, CEO of Brazil's Semco S.A., one of the world's most respected champions of organizational change. The case portrays the internal turmoil Semoco faces as ownership is passed from father to son, and the company reaches the decline stage of its business cycle. The radically changing Brazilian economy serves as the backdrop and provides a compounded sense of environmental chaos as the company evolves from a culture based on paternalistic, command-oriented management to a highly democratic, participative management structure.

http://www.thunderbird.edu/pdf/about_us/case_series/a15980024.pdf

14th of September 2003

"Semco has no receptionists, secretaries, or personal assistants. All employees, Semler included, receive their own guests, make their own copies, and draft and send their own correspondence. There are no private offices, workers set their own hours, and office attire is at the discretion of each employee. Job titles carry little formal status since all workers are actively encouraged to question and constructively criticize their peers and managers."

This is a nice little 12 paged summary about Ricardo Semler and his Semco S.A. company.

(pdf file) http://www.t-bird.edu/pdf/about_us/case_series/a07980024.pdf

Ricardo Semler
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricardo_Semler

The Alfie Kohn options could include:

Alfie Kohn's web site

or his articles on management

The workshop would include small group activities exploring real applications to their work environment. One option we came up with was for this group to draft a revised HR manual with new leadership principles and guidelines. The group could also design some experiments they could try to see if results change.

The workshop will allow each participant to build their own models of leadership, explore options for changing behaviors and allow for follow on work on an individual basis - by individual choice.

What's Your Theory of Business?

The other night Bryan and I were talking about a challenge an associate of ours has - that of bringing a group of executives together to explore leadership, their leadership styles, the results they produce and the fact they continue to perform at a high level yet their associates (read, the people that work for them) do not rate them highly.

We were asked by our associate/friend for some ideas of how to work with this group.

The conversation eventually lead us to what some people call - the theory of business. One might call this a world view, a philosophy or a belief system. It's my contention that most people have a world view but not all people are aware of it. Business executives have a world view - a theory of business - they operate by whether they are aware of it or not.

Does it serve a person to put up a mirror and expose one's world view (theory of business)?

Most companies are designed following an age old pattern of hierarchy, command and control and as such have inherent belief systems and behaviors embedded in them. Most executives got where they are by 'playing the game' as appropriate to the culture of the organization they work in.

Is it beneficial to give executives (or workers) additional options to what they already know? Additional options to what has served them so well to get them to where they are now? And what if this group of executives is not the top of the organization and cannot influence change in the entire organization (meaning that even if this group of executives has some insight and decides to change, what if the rest of the organization doesn't?)?

I have always maintained that no matter what position one has in an organization it is incumbent upon them to 'transform their sphere of influence'. That's probably easier said then done but what other options are there? Play the game? Be a silent participant? Fit in? Separate one's worklife from personal life? Maintain the status quo?

Some business cultures may not be supportive of knowing their theory of business. But isn't that part of the theory of business in use at that organization? So what's your theory of business?

Dr. Deming used to say that executives/managers do not know what their job is. What's your job?

Getting Started

This post is really the beginning of learning the Blog landscape. The first subject will be Innovation and High Performance. We've recently created an outline for a book on the same subject and Langdon has just completed several workshops in India on Innovation (actually sort of a mix of Business Model Warfare and Innovation). The end result of those workshops will be the development of what will become an innovation dashboard or scorecard. A series of scales that can be responded to (measures) that then create a spider diagram - to give a company an idea of their innovation profile.

In addition, Bryan, Jay and I just completed a workshop where we combined two of our methodologies (Designing Collaborative Events and StoryMaps™). The focus of the workshop was Design - and using design to solve complex problems. The first day of the workshop we brought together a small group of designers (interactive media, industrial designers, an architect, and a small group of collaborative process facilitators). In that session we explored the definition of design, it's various manifestations in these different professions and we looked and extracting some tools (tricks of the trade) that designers use - as a way of applying some research that is taking place at the Santa Fe Institute in which you use the methods of one discipline to solve a problem in another discipline (that's the layperson's way of describing it).

We learned a lot and will continue to pursue our interest in business models, innovation, facilitation of design (the design process) and making complex information accessible to many people.