That’s why most of us make stuff up about the reality of our current situation. We are dishonest and manipulative about it to make ourselves feel better. And we will go to great pains to protect our made up version of the story – cause that is all it is – a story. It isn’t reality and it isn’t the truth.
However, what most people don’t realize is that if your on a journey and you have places to go, people to see and goals to accomplish, then fooling yourself and others about reality is a really bad idea. If I can’t describe and therefore don’t know where I am how can I possibly plot a course to where I want to go? And worse yet, if I am the leader of an organization and I convince others that my made up story is true, how can those who follow me truly plot their course?
Making up stories and defending those stories takes allot of energy. You have to first make them up, defend them, convince others, remember them and then keep promoting them. Whereas describing a situation in gory detail and dead honesty is really simple and once done you can then immediately talk about the discrepancy between your reality and goal and what actions you need to take to get rid of the discrepancies. No more to it then that. No stories. No drama. Just next steps in the right direction for the journey you want to take. Sink yourself in reality, you get used to it after awhile and it actually starts to feel really good. Honest.
My bike has 1 seat but 2 sets of pedals. Okay it is my imaginary bike but let’s consider the possibility. I jump on and I have to decide which set to use. I might put 1 foot on 1 set and 1 foot on another. I might reverse my feet. I might try 1 set then the other or I might just give up and push myself along. Or worse yet, I might just give up bike riding altogether because it is just so complicated.
It seems to be in our nature to over engineer. To add too many options, umpteen different ways of solving the same problem, pricing schemes that need pages to explain and pages and pages of detailed billing to verify. Software that let’s you do everything but what you want to do really simply. A proposal that is lost in pages of “trees” verbiage, so much so that you can no longer see and appreciate the offered solution or “forest” if you will.
What’s wrong with simple? What’s wrong with my old bicycle that has just 1 set of pedals?
I think a questioning, testing and probing mind is a wonderful thing to have. To constantly consider possibilities and outcomes is an awesome perspective. Interestingly enough there are two very different approaches that accomplish the same thing. The adventurous spirit “wonders” about what could be accomplished while the cynic “doubts” what can be done. Both question the situation but one is a creative force while the other is a road block.
Which view do you have?
Air Canada cancels their 5:30pm flight at 9pm. Not the night before, three and a half hours after it was supposed to leave.
They have no one there to tell everyone what to do. So you give up and leave. You find a cab. You find a hotel. You call reservations, wait on hold for one and a half hours, while paying US roaming charges I might add, and they rebook you through Chicago, which now turns what would have been a 2 hour flight into a 6 hour journey. The person you are talking to has no idea if they will cover your hotel expenses or how to submit your claim.
You show up the next morning and you discover that you have been booked on United and United is charging you to check a bag and get a seat. You hand over your credit card. Why I am paying additional charges to have Air Canada fly me out I have no idea.
You arrive in Chicago and your flight has been canceled from Chicago to Toronto. You walk up to Air Canada and say I need a flight. They say your with United and you quietly explain that no your are not. They insist that you go to United Customer “Service” (I use the term loosely) and there you find a line of 30 people and they are moving 1 person about every 5 minutes. You do the math. You call Air Canada reservations, wait on hold for an hour, while still in line, and still paying US roaming charges, and they say okay we will rebook you on a flight. They tell you see the agent and they will give you a seat and will re-route your luggage. Why the first Air Canada agent I walked up to didn’t do this in the first place is beyond me.
You go see the Air Canada agent again, line up again for another 30 minutes, and he can’t fit you on the plane, but he is the first customer focused person you have seen so far and realizes that you have been through a very messed up situation. He upgrades you to business class free of charge. Thank you! Why I am so happy at that point I have no idea but my joy was short lived. I then ask about my luggage. He explains he has no idea and that he shouldn’t even book me if I have luggage with United. I stare dumb founded. He says no worries he will ignore it. I still ask “how do I get my luggage”? He suggests I go to United baggage claim, see if I can find it, and if I can go back out through security, go to the ticket counter, check it, go back through security and all will be good. I say your kidding?
As of this writing I have given up finding the luggage and am just hoping that they don’t cancel my next flight. This is not customer service. Problems happen but it is how you deal with them that creates opportunities. If the flight had been canceled and Air Canada accepted responsibility and guided me through getting home I would have been impressed with how they dealt with a tough situation and I would have chosen to fly with them any chance I have. Instead they have made their problem my problem and at every step made the situation worse. I now know why they are once again heading for bankruptcy and it has nothing to do with a recession.
–
Update from Toronto. Yes I made it. No luggage though. Surprised? No. I go to Air Canada to file a claim. They say no can do, go to United. I go to United and they say, and I quote “They can’t just keep sending people over like this.” and they send me back to Air Canada. Air Canada tries to balk, I say no way, and after a day and a half of trying to get home it was pretty obvious that I was about to go postal. They say okay we will file your claim. Once again I am happy. But why? Why am I happy that this really messed up situation has been finally accepted by someone and they will do something about it. Happy that I am leaving with no luggage and no idea when I will get it. Because they won’t make any promises. Crazy. A couple of minor tweaks in this whole thing and I would be talking about how well they dealt with a bad situation. Instead I am dumbfounded with how dysfunctional they are. Porter Airlines here I come.
Seriously though, this is not service, if your organization moves responsibility for what you provide to your client what purpose do you have in the value you create for them? None. And if they realize they are paying for nothing, then they will go elsewhere as fast as they can. Right?
The success of a software development project is directly proportional to how often you say no. No to feature creep. No to technology for the sake of technology. No to trying to do more than one project at a time… No. No. No. And more importantly make sure that you clearly specify what you said no to, even more important than specifying what you said yes to.
Seriously.
Two days ago I posted my thoughts on why open source software stands to gain considerable ground and today I received this from the open office folks:
“Yesterday, Wednesday 28th., the one hundred millionth person clicked on the “Download OpenOffice.org” button since version 3 of the software was announced just over one year ago.
What makes the statistics impressive is that we only record downloads via the OpenOffice.org website, and exclude for example large numbers of Linux users who generally download software from their own distributor. In addition, many users obtain OpenOffice.org via other mirrors, peer-to-peer networks, CDs, or other media.”
I find this to be incredible. Maybe it is just me, but this just completely blows me away as to how far this open source application which is a competitor to one of the stalwarts of software of our time “Microsoft Office” has progressed. WOW
If I have a scarcity world view:
- I horde what I have
- I focus on keeping what I have
- I constantly compare what I have to what you have
- I play me too – if you get that than I get this – if you do that, then I get to do this
- I have closed dialogues – not open and sharing discussions
- I assume distrust
Pretty easy to see that scarcity will just beget scarcity. It doesn’t create anything. It is a negative worldview that leaves all of us fighting over a smaller and smaller pie.
Throw out scarcity! Get generous. Share what you have. Celebrate the rewards of others. Forget me too and start the dialogue about what could be created together from what we have together. Trust till proven otherwise. A generous worldview creates – a scarcity driven mentality is a problem rather than goal oriented view and it creates nothing.
My city, Toronto, is in the middle of it’s self declared open source week – check out the proclamation and the agenda. Open source software – free to use – free to change – free to distribute. Once the domain of the marginalized it now has the city of Toronto giving it 1 whole week out of 52 to celebrate. Wow, have things ever changed.
And what I find even more interesting are the phenomenon’s of our time and the potential impact of them to accelerate the open source movement even faster. Consider:
1. The exponential rate of change that we witness daily is predominantly driven by crowd sourcing that is enabled by accelerating communication technology. By this I mean I discovered something today and within the hour a fellow researcher half way across the planet reads about it and realizes that my discovery contains the missing piece to enable them to complete their discovery and so on, and so on.
2. The Internet has proven that we are not mindless dweebs sitting in front of the tube being fed mindless programming hour after hour. Or at least I hope this is true. TV is in a death spiral because we have left it behind to instead interact, create and publish at an alarming rate. We are prolific and the majority don’t care about giving it away.
Exponentially expanding crowd sourcing and creative proliferation. What do these 2 points have to do with open source software? These 2 trends from my perspective are inevitable, they are not slowing done, they will just get bigger and bigger, which means that the ability for open source software to get better and better by having more and more leveraged resources contributing to it are also inevitable and it will reach a point where no proprietary driven company can compete with the movement in a niche that has enough mass to support it. Think about it. The bigger the potential audience for an application the better the chances of it thriving under an open source license.
And, I can hear the groans now about hippy do gooders who just don’t understand business. Please, adopting open source does not mean we all give up our worldly possessions and do it all for free. It means we no longer sell licenses, instead we sell services, hosting, value adds, packaging, deployment, marketplaces, advertising, etc. etc. – the possibilities for making a sound business model around open source are limited only by the extent of our creativity or lack thereof. And the potential for improvement of the product is incredible.
Every digital signage statistic I read, and I read most skeptically, but let’s say they are half right, all call this industry one of the largest emerging markets of our time and while doing the same reading I occasionally run into a review of a digital signage open source initiative and the review is always somewhat skeptical. I just don’t think the reviewer has considered the context completely.
Something to ponder…
I hear it all the time “Google Docs doesn’t do tables as well as MS Word”, “Google Spreadsheets doesn’t highlight the cells in an equation like Excel”, and the list goes on and on and they are right.
But.
They didn’t weigh the ROI on collaboration when they started complaining about functionality. It is pretty rare that we work alone these days. We leverage teams and the diversity that they bring to make the result greater than the sum of the parts. An online shared doc is an instant collaboration machine with no version control or collation nightmare and no waiting for someone to finish before the next person jumps in. It leverages the crowd.
Look beyond the features that are lacking and calculate the ROI on collaboration before you forgo cloud based documents, spreadsheets and presentations.
Robert Fritz has a simple approach to those difficult, emotion charged management situations that we would always rather avoid and we just wish they would solve themselves. Problem is they never do and if left, they fester and get even worse. His approach is so simple that once you get it and start applying it you have one of those “ah ha” moments where you wonder why I never thought of that.
It starts off by not avoiding the problem. Face it head on. Define the situation for what it is, no adjectives, superlatives, long stories or excuses, just the facts about the situation please. Once everyone has a firm grasp of the situation and they all agree, then, and only then, talk about cause. What caused this situation to happen?
You will be surprised as to how easy it is to determine cause once you take emotion, stories and the blame game out of a situation. And once you have cause nailed down it is pretty to easy to look at the list of causes and take them out 1 by 1 with corrections. Corrections that are actionable; a clear outcome, 1 owner and a due date.
And to wrap it all up every situation, cause and correction analysis needs a follow-up to close the loop on the execution. By when will you all come back together to review and make sure this situation is closed and behind you. Which by the way is one of the primary tenets of another favorite book of mine Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done by Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan. I especially liked the audio book as the authors read it themselves and you could just feel the conviction and years of experience coming from the words as they spoke them.
As always there are a allot of subtleties to the above and my summary doesn’t come close to doing the book justice The Managerial Moment of Truth: The Essential Step in Helping People Improve Performance by Bruce Bodaken and Robert Fritz – second hand news is just that, second hand, go to the source for the real deal. Hardly a week goes by that I don’t use this in one form or another.
