Leadership and the Necessity of Empty Spaces

Empty space is essential to the structure of the Universe.
And to the practice of leadership.
Here’s why…

According to a recent article in the NY Times, an experiment spanning half a century and more than $750 million verifies that “empty space in the vicinity of the Earth is turning.” This landmark project known as Gravity Probe B substantiates Einstein’s theory of gravity and general relativity, as reported by the Stanford University team leading it.

Even the smallest piece of solid matter is comprised of vast distances between the atoms compared to their size. However we may perceive it, the structure of our world includes enormous quantities of empty space. I don’t pretend to understand it all; I assume a posture of amazement and wonder.

Empty space is not only an element of our physical world. It transcends the physical into the realm of time and human experience. We fill our calendars with meetings. We fill our lives with activity. We fill our organizations with productivity. Generally speaking we strive to fill up time and space in our lives. We say our lives are “full”. What place, if any, is there for emptiness?

Whether it’s turning, spinning, disappearing, or just plain hanging there, the space in our lives seems to be more and more elusive. Or discomforting, when we stumble upon it. Many of us live with a fear of emptiness. As soon as we feel it, we fill it.

But “space” holds everything together, according to physicists. Leaders need to open up space not just fill it up. It can be as simple as calling a “time-out” in the middle of an intense, jam-packed, meeting agenda. Or exercising leadership by stepping outside and walking around the building once, as one client reported doing, before making a difficult and controversial decision.

Empty space is essential to the creative process and the very vitality of life itself. We too are part of the Universe.

More to come…

Hurry Up and Slow Down!

"I am not this steeply sloping hour in which you see me hurrying." Rainer Maria Rilke, German Poet

I am not hurrying even though I am in motion, constantly. I am managing my fear that everything I am supposed to be doing will end in my termination. The relentless pace of meetings and reviews hides the hopelessness I feel. Productivity trumps innovation; activity supplants creativity. My attention is not focused because my purpose is unclear. I have passion, but it mostly scares me these days. If I lead with passion and inquire about purpose, I'll lose my job. Meanwhile, I am losing me.

Identity precedes productivity. The courage to be is rarer today than the impulse to do. This is not just an excursion into philosophical speculation. It is a fundamental principle of high performance.

Are we a Research organization with a capital "R" or a development organization that will continue to place our bets on short-term incremental improvements on products already in the market? A student with whom I spoke not long ago at the African Leadership Academy in Joberg described himself as "an Egyption from Cairo who is Muslim who is also African, though my skin is not black, who wants to be a global citizen." He is actively claiming who is!

I am enacting the motion of working hard but am hardly working, in terms of my own deepest values. No matter! Management just asks for more. And I keep on keeping on.

Do you know who you are? Will you speak up? It does matter!

The Necessity of Empty Spaces

Just a few weeks ago as the New Year was upon me, I found myself rummaging through piles, boxes, folders, and computer files, wanting to pause long enough to review some of the rapidly accumulating evidence of past work.

I came across my “facilitator’s guide” for an event I designed and led for business leaders in the Mojave Desert some 15 years ago . We called it “The Necessity of Empty Spaces”. For three days we intentionally used the desert environment to escape from the demands of the workplace just to think, reflect, yes, even meditate. Among other tools, we used the Disciplined Inquiry™ methodology (which I still use with clients today) to work a real business dilemma.

Many creative and talented people today seemingly have no “pause button” which they can hit to escape the relentless demands of doing more with less. It is taking an enormous toll in the workplace as managers attempt to achieve greater and greater efficiencies.

Pacing productivity does not mean simply seeking ways to go further faster. It is essential that we recognize the value, indeed the necessity, of stopping from time to time, of finding and claiming some “space”. When is the last time you were caught in the act of thinking on the job? What is required for you to claim that kind of space for yourself?

The Chief Strategy Officer of a Fortune 50 company, one of my current clients, as part of a recent conversation on this very subject, directed my attention to a speech on Solitude and Leadership that was delivered to the plebe class at West Point last year. I encourage you to find a few moments to read it and then take a walk. Define some space that is intentionally empty. See what happens!

The Necessity of Accepting "Stuckness"

Yesterday I had a very frustrating day – not one which is totally foreign to my experience but with a slightly new and different twist. After enjoying three days of a long holiday weekend, I had set aside most of the day to create/compose/write my presentation for the American Astronautical Society which I am delivering in a couple days at their Imagine 2009 Conference. The day was virtually “wasted”.

Despite my good intentions and a plethora of ideas and angles and insights, I accomplished very little, until...

Early evening I posted the following comment on my Face Book page: “Some days it just seems impossible to be as productive as I know I am capable of being - why do I get "stuck" like this?”

Literally within minutes I had the following responses from several trusted friends and colleagues, including my daughter.

“Sometimes you just have to allow yourself a break. That can be a very good thing. “

“If I knew, my friend, I would share the answer, gladly.”

“It's called creative incubation. we all need it. :) “

“Productive and 'creative' are different things. Perhaps by being productive you mean 'efficient'. For being effective in what you do, if you are a creative person, you need periods like that. The worst you can do then is to try very hard.”

All of the above comments make sense to me intellectually. They were/are appreciated. But there is nothing that tries my patience more than believing that I SHOULD be able to produce right now, even though I am not. I become very self-critical and undermine my best intentions even more.

When it comes to pacing productivity, sometimes the most significant thing we can do or say is simply to acknowledge, “I’m stuck”. When I did that yesterday, everything changed within a very short span of time. I found myself in a new kind of "flow state" within minutes, though I did little or nothing different, other than state to my virtual friends what was obvious to me by the end of the day.

Sometimes THE most productive thing we can do is ease up on ourselves. I wonder how much creativity and innovation is lost because we fail to realize this in a timely way??

Greater Incentives, Worse Performance - Really!

"There's a mismatch between what science knows and business does," Dan Pink persuasively asserted as he made his case at TED for re-examining the use of contingent motivators. His TED talk hit my “sweet spot” in terms of professional concerns more than any other. The evidence from experimental tasks using little more than a candle and a box of tacks is compelling. Extrinsic rewards work well with simple tasks and narrow focus. Beyond a certain point, greater incentives actually lead to worse performance.

The most urgent agendas of the 21st century will be repeatedly undermined if we think we can motivate by incrementally increasing promised rewards for those who tackle them. “If, then, rewards don’t work! It makes me crazy!” Pink exclaimed. Yet we persist in trying to motivate our top talent in business today in ways that seem merely to increase stress and kill passion.

The failure of Encarta, Microsoft’s attempt to launch a virtual encyclopedia, contrasted with the massively expanding phenomenon of Wikipedia, is but one example Pink used to document his case beyond the behavioral experiments. “The building blocks for an entirely new operating system for our economy are: (1)autonomy; (2) mastery; and (3) purpose, “ Dan continued.

I resonate deeply with these principles. From the outside looking in on more than one corporate R&D function, it seems nearly impossible to find ways to free highly talented, once passionate scientists and engineers, from “processes on steroids”. I just completed writing a paper on "Gaining Employee Committment in Tough Times, Performance and Potential in R&D Today". Now that I think about it, in the afterglow of TED, we are positioning some practices with clients that are well aligned with what I heard Dan saying from the TED stage.

"Science knows what our heart confirms." No wonder I thought this was one of the best talks of the week.

Tapping the Full Potential of Top Talent

More than one of our clients in the last year has asked the question: “Are we maximizing the contribution or optimizing the potential of our technical employees?” “How do we know if the performance of our R&D pipeline indeed reflects the full potential of the top talent in our labs?”

While looking for a response to that question may be useful, any answer to it is inherently “political”. Why? First, because the criteria for “performance” are not widely understood and accepted the deeper one goes in most R&D organizations. There is often substantial disagreement about how “performance” is recognized and rewarded (and not much dialogue about what performance really means to the professional at the bench). Secondly, human potential cannot be captured by any metric. There is always more potential.

The answer will always be political; the inquiry, however, is essential.

When asked about employee potential, THE most frequent indicator that management points to is the “engagement survey” conducted by corporate HR or global shared services. I was recently sitting in a break-out group with a 10-12 scientists from the R&D function. We were asked to work on the low scores on an "engagement survey" related to “working with the customer”. The entire 90 minutes was spent debating what “customer” means for the R&D group. The group virtually discounted the value of the entire survey because of lack of shared understanding - not just related to ”customer” but other aspects as well for those completing it.

Trying to decode corporate surveys is no substitute for being engaged oneself.

The Power of Perfection

“If you become widely successful because you do everything right, you’re doomed.”

So said Clayton Christensen, academic, author, and authority on “disruptive innovation” whom I heard speak last week on the state of healthcare in our nation. While I indeed share many of his concerns about our healthcare system, the above comment at the beginning of his presentation was what loomed in my mind at the time and ever since.

Our drive to “get it right” is fueled by a confusion between excellence and perfection. I can’t tell you how many times I hear talented and highly trained PhD professionals working at the lab bench comment on the potential value of an 80/20% solution. Yet seldom is that deemed adequate, either by research professionals or management. Despite the rhetoric, the “line” doesn’t play. Why?

As individuals we're reluctant to attend to a root cause – the need we acquired as individuals, somewhere along the way, to be “perfect” in order to be accepted, recognized, loved. I can “hear” clients thinking, “Don’t go psychological on me!” However, such personality traits, multiplied many times over in a given organization, become embedded in the culture. We are more productive when we don't undermine ourselves and our projects with the unrecognized power of perfection. At least I am.

To know the difference between excellence and perfection is to understand what it means to be human.

Chronos, Kairos, and Creativity

International authorities responsible for keeping time precise announced that today, the first day of yet another New Year, we were given an extra second of time. How often we hear in our work that there is simply not enough time! Yet time hangs heavy for many these days - the uncertainty of a failing economy is more than a passing moment.

The ancient Greeks had multiple words for "time". Chronos refers to chronological time - the quantitative nature of time as before and after, time which is always scarce. Kairos on the other hand refers to a qualitative attentiveness, time as significant rather than dimensional. Kairos is a passing instant when an opening appears, offering a unique transformational moment for those who see it.

Too often we gauge our productivity in terms of "chronos" rather than training ourselves to be attentive to "kairos". Recently published research, "Time and Organizational Improvisation" argues that improvisation is an ideal basis for a synthesis of chronos and kairos, "blending conflicting concepts such as planning and acting, discipline and freedom, control and spontaneity."

Focusing on time solely as chronos distracts from the creative power of kairos. I look forward to discovering the kairos of 2009 in ways we have not yet imagined.

Happy New Year!

Our Need for "Answers"

Leaders are distinguished more by the questions they ask

than any answers they may have.

We have asserted this to be true since the earliest days of our consulting practice. It sounds good, most of the time. But affirming it in practice is yet another matter. When times are tough and resources scarce, I am struck by how deeply leaders struggle to find the "solution" by imposing on themselves, often unconsciously, the belief that they need to have the "answer", preferably yesterday! Ironically, the more intense the pressure for "answers", the poorer our questions become. Powerful persistent inquiry gives way to paralysis by analysis in search for the "answer".

Jim Collins, author of Good to Great, commented recently, "How do you create a climate in which truth is heard? The first thing is to increase your questions-to-statements ratio. Have someone track it and see if you can double it next year. The leaders in our studies asked lots of questions. They were Socratic. By asking questions, they got the brutal facts, as well as lots of insights and ideas." (Business Week, August 25/Sept 1 , 2008)

We're ready to do just that - track the balance of advocacy and inquiry in a given group or organization - and document the impact over a period of time - as a new component to our Disciplined Inquiry methodology.

How does one know, as leader, when to share the "answer" (if you, indeed have one) and when to pose a new, powerful question? If you're exhausted and feeling way overwhelmed, if not outright discouraged, consider the latter as indeed the more productive way to generate commitment and recover a productive path forward.

Intangible Drivers of Performance

"Not everything that can be counted counts,
and not everything that counts can be counted."

Albert Einstein

When I feel especially frustrated or impatient with those who want metrics for anything and everything of value, I reference this quote from Einstein. The play on words makes it almost too easy to throw it away as just another slick slogan. And I fear that's what our clients often do, regrettably.

I recently heard the CFO of a Fortune 50 company speak to a group of senior R&D executives about the impact of non-financial, intangible factors on how Wall Street analysts make their buy/sell recom-mendations. But when it comes to promoting innovation and enhancing performance, it's remarkable to me how quickly leaders revert to their apparent comfort zone of finding or creating metrics which can be analyzed, scrutinized, and then refined in order to make their case for improved productivity.

There is a great map of intangible assets as part of an article, "Do Intangibles Matter?" in the current issue of Chief Executive. Check it out! As the article notes, only one-third of executives polled "claimed that their companies were proficient in monitoring critical non-financial indicators of corporate performance."

What's required to appreciate more fully the impact of these "intangibles"? One place to begin: ask yourself the question, "What's the difference between inspiration and motivation?"

Too Many Meetings

"Boredom is a compromise between desire and fear."

A professional whom I very much respect and trust made the above statement in a recent discussion. We were talking about the endless number of meetings that populate the calendars of technical professionals these days. Indeed, in my experience, the number of ineffective meetings that land on calendars is a persistent and pervasive inhibitor to high performance.

I sit through any number of management meetings in a given month in my role as consultant. I repeatedly observe first-hand the all too evident behavioral signals of impatience, frustration, and boredom. "Why am I in this meeting?" the body language so readily communicates.

A column in last Sunday's NYT "Another Meeting? Say It Isn't So?" offers some tips for dealing with meetings run amok. There's nothing profoundly new here, but I find that it's meeting basics that even the most senior leaders need to be reminded of again and again (e.g. be clear what kind of decision you are asking for, if any, and who's making it).

Next time you're sitting through yet another "boring" meeting, you might ask yourself these two questions: "What is it that I desire?" "What is it that I fear?" Maybe what you attribute to boredom will be transformed to ... what?? Try it.

Culture and High Performance

Today I am working with anticipation and even some excitement on a presentation for a meeting at Cargill later this week with some twenty top leaders of RD&E from the greater Minneapolis/St.Paul area. We have just concluded with them Phase I of an empirical study on culture and high performance in RD&E functions. Our working hypothesis is that culture is the most under-utilized lever for creating sustainable high performance in RD&E.

While much of our learning to date is qualitative, we did ask all participants in the study to complete eight normative statements. The large majority of respondents agreed that “Culture is the main source of sustainable high performance in RD&E.” In contrast, however, there was a broad distribution in response to the statement, “My RD&E organization focuses on culture as a means of creating competitive advantage.” The scaled responses of participants indicate that many RD&E leaders do not focus on culture per se (though those surveyed overwhelmingly agree that it is a main source of sustainable competitive advantage).

We observe the following frequent disposition of RD&E leaders regarding culture:

• a belief that culture is a lagging phenomenon, not something that one works on directly
• an attitude that RD&E is too deeply embedded in the larger organization to address culture
• lack of confidence and/or skills to work cultural elements
• blind spots about the impact of culture to motivate and sustain high performance

Regardless of one's beliefs about culture, there are perceptions that it is nigh unto impossible to change the culture from the position of leadership in RD&E. AND, then there are those who are doing it!

We'll be expanding this study to the Bay Area in California in the fall. And writing a "white paper". Let's us know if you'd like to learn more.

Gamesmanship in Process Implementation

Remember the childhood game, "Chutes and Ladders"? We've actually used the elements of this game with a group of 200 scientists and engineers to capture how they are using one and the same process in different sites and functions globally. Yes, "Chutes and Ladders"!

The task is not to discuss changing or improving the processes. The challenge is simply to identify and describe the ways in which technical leaders and their business partners around the world use different tactics or behaviors to operationalize one and the same process. This is more difficult that it may seem - simply describing actions and behaviors; the tendency again and again is to suggest what's wrong with the process or a particular protocol.

For example, the need for coordinated in-country strategies that interface well with the respective cultural as well as market realities of a particular region is one such "process". Working in break-out groups, each group documents the "ladders" which represent ways in which one could accelerate or "cut a few corners" as well as "chutes" which represent traps, pitfalls, or other liabilities which result in going backwards.

The outcome is not playing a game; rather a graphic representation is made visible of how leaders actually work one and the same process.

Knowing there are "chutes" and "ladders" in every organizational system reflects an understanding of "gamesmanship" that also exists, for better or worse. Knowing when it is O.K. to "break the rules" and when one ought to "follow the leader" is a kind of political skill. It can be cultivated if acknowledged. Both are necessary if innovation is to thrive.