Archive for April, 2005
High Point Regional Health System recently began to prescribe weblogs for post-treatment therapy.
The research suggests that by expressing their emotions through writing, patients help to reduce anxiety and other ailments, said Anthony Newkirk, a licensed professional counselor in the hospital’s behavioral health department.
“It allows patients who are going through a medical situation or crisis to put things into perspective,” he said. “We get more and more truthful through writing and we gain insight into who we are and our situations.”
The Marketing Department hopes that it will draw attention to their website.
For more information, check out the article from the Greensboro News.
You can view the blogs here…
A couple of things today worth seeing. The first is this Fast Company article on change. I was picking through FC in the concierge lounge of the hotel tonight when I came across this attention-getting intro:
Your own life or death. What if a well-informed, trusted authority figure said you had to make difficult and enduring changes in the way you think and act? If you didn’t, your time would end soon — a lot sooner than it had to. Could you change when change really mattered? When it mattered most?
Yes, you say?
Try again.
Yes?
You’re probably deluding yourself.
You wouldn’t change.
Don’t believe it? You want odds? Here are the odds, the scientifically studied odds: nine to one. That’s nine to one against you. How do you like those odds?
It’s a great summary of the current research on change, and it also reinforces advice we give all the time: it’s more compelling to communicate about change by introducing a new metaphor than by introducing a crisis (or “burning platform”). The article discusses this under the header “Framing Change,” and it has this nice passage:
Pioneering research in cognitive science and linguistics has pointed to the paramount importance of framing. George Lakoff, a professor of those two disciplines at the University of California at Berkeley, defines frames as the “mental structures that shape the way we see the world.” Lakoff says that frames are part of the “cognitive unconscious,” but the way we know what our frames are, or evoke new ones, springs from language. For example, we typically think of a company as being like an army — everyone has a rank and a codified role in a hierarchical chain of command with orders coming down from high to low. Of course, that’s only one way of organizing a group effort. If we had the frame of the company as a family or a commune, people would know very different ways of working together.
The big challenge in trying to change how people think is that their minds rely on frames, not facts. “Neuroscience tells us that each of the concepts we have — the long-term concepts that structure how we think — is instantiated in the synapses of the brain,” Lakoff says. “Concepts are not things that can be changed just by someone telling us a fact. We may be presented with facts, but for us to make sense of them, they have to fit what is already in the synapses of the brain. Otherwise, facts go in and then they go right back out. They are not heard, or they are not accepted as facts, or they mystify us: Why would anyone have said that? Then we label the fact as irrational, crazy, or stupid.” Lakoff says that’s one reason why political conservatives and liberals each think that the other side is nuts. They don’t understand each other because their brains are working within different frames.
The frame that dominates our thinking about how work should be organized — the military chain-of-command model — is extremely hard to break. When new employees start at W.L. Gore & Associates, the maker of Gore-Tex fabrics, they often refuse to believe that the company doesn’t have a hierarchy with job titles and bosses. It just doesn’t fit their frame. They can’t accept it. It usually takes at least several months for new hires to begin to understand Gore’s reframed notion of the workplace, which relies on self-directed employees making their own choices about joining one another in egalitarian small teams.
Getting people to exchange one frame for another is tough even when you’re working one-on-one, but it’s especially hard to do for large groups of people. Howard Gardner, a cognitive scientist, MacArthur Fellow “genius” award winner, and professor at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, has looked at what works most effectively for heads of state and corporate CEOs. “When one is addressing a diverse or heterogeneous audience,” he says, “the story must be simple, easy to identify with, emotionally resonant, and evocative of positive experiences.”
Indeed.
In another corner of the Web we find MindManager, an absolutely wonderful mind-mapping tool by MindJet that I’ve been using under trial. It’s a winner, especially if you’re a visual thinker, and if you’ve not yet been party to its tools, check it out.
MindManager isn’t the only thing to see here, though. I also want to point to MindJet’s corporate blog, The MindJet Blog, for two reasons. First, I think it’s a great example of a good corporate blog: first person, honest, well written, and intelligent. Second, amongst the blog’s recent posts, I found this entry on the pros and cons of using PowerPoint and 2×2 matrices. It’s a great summary of the For/Against PowerPoint arguments. A particularly nice passage:
Persuasion by the means of entertainment: James Gilmore and Joseph Pine, authors of The Experience Economy: Work Is Theatre and Every Business a Stage, would certainly back this requirement in the business world, and so would Jeremy Rifkin whose catch phrase states: “There is no business without show business.” Seth Godin, the marketing guru, put it more provocatively: “If you’re not trying to persuade, why are you here?”
Fine, but what if persuasion occurs at the expense of precision and sharpness in thinking? According to Schrage, organizations such as Sun Microsystems and the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the U.S. Armed Forces have banned PowerPoint from their meetings, assuming that the software is a “poorly tailored cognitive straitjacket” rather than a solid analytical tool.
I hadn’t heard the straitjacket line before. Of course, frequent readers of this page know our PowerPoint positions well. We’re in the “use it to do certain kinds of things” camp, and would always take passionate-person-as-message over slideware-as-message any day of the week.
Warren Bickford, upcoming Chairman of the IABC, has begun publishing a blog. Called the IABC Café, it’s subtitled “a gathering place for professional communicators,” and he’s been kind enough to include CommLog in his blogroll. While we’re not heavily involved in IBAC, many of our clients are, and the Café is worth checking regularly if you’re “in the business.”
Seems a day doesn’t pass in which I don’t coach a leader to make themselves less interruptable — to turn off the cell phone, and turn off the “auto-check” on his or her email and download messages only at times where they can process those messages.
Crazy looks, I get to that advice. But we’re certain it’s good counsel, and now thanks to London’s Institute of Psychiatry, we have some data to back it up:
Scientists at London’s Institute of Psychiatry found that environments with distracting technologies lower IQ by an average of more than 10 points when compared with quiet conditions.By comparison, other research has shown that smoking marijuana causes just a 4-point drop. A 10-point reduction is similar to the impact of missing an entire night’s sleep.
The “distracting technologies” to which they refer: email and phone calls. Yes, unless it’s the only thing you’re attending to, email actually makes you dumb. David Allen chimes in:
Does it really mean we’re dumber when we respond to communication? Hardly. I think it’s just reflective of the almost universal problem most people have in dealing with input and interruptions - with no real personal system they can trust (which includes consistent processing behaviors, by the way), people feel compelled to engage with the input as it shows up. But because they can’t really deal with it, they just add another loose bolt inside their engine.
I’ll toss a plug to David here as well: We’ve been using his GTD Outlook Add-In for some time at CRA, and it’s revolutionized how we handle our email traffic. Highly recommended.
A member of our firm, when talking about coaching very senior “C-Suite” executives often says, “If you want to coach these people, you have to be these people.” His point is that people only trust advisors whom they feel understand their perspective, and in particular, appreciate the nuances of the business challenges they face.
To that point, we’re constantly coaching communication professionals and senior managers alike to develop their business acumen. The deeper your appreciation of business and strategy the closer your seat is to the table, and you have to continually sharpen your strategic business saw if you want to add value to or as a senior officer.
Here’s a great resource for doing so: MIT’s OpenCourseWare, a free, open publication of MIT’s course materials. This includes the course materials of the Sloan School of Management, one of the most prestigious business schools on the planet.
So, interested in sharpening up on your understanding of operations? Check out the student presentations and readings for Theory of Operations Management. Lots at Sloan on leadership and communication as well.
(Hat tip to Free Enterprise Blog.)
There’s an article worth reading at DV Format about how “independent workers”–contract workers empowered by technology and expertise–are changing the employer / employee relationship. A quote:
The global communication technology is radically changing the speed, direction and amount of information flow even as it alters work roles across all organizations. The new free agent worker is creating role clarity for himself and herself. They figure out the top priorities and point themselves in that direction. They don’t pull back. They don’t wait for someone to give them details or marching orders. They give themselves permission to attach to the job. They feel their way along to the future. They are willing to “wing it.” They have reduced improvising to an art form. They accept the fact that work life is fuzzy around the edges.
They are confident that organizations aren’t going to look out for people’s careers as they did in the past. Because of this, it’s increasingly important to behave like you’re in business for yourself — you are. Today’s “employees” have to build emotional muscle. As Lily Tomlin once said, “We’re all in this alone.”
My Partner Randall recently passed out Management of the Absurd by Richard Farson to the consultants in the firm. Farson is a former CEO, professor, and psychologist who studied with the famous Carl Rogers for many years. His thesis: Life is absurd, human affairs usually work not rationally but paradoxically, and we can never quite master our relationships with others. As a result, leaders should appreciate paradox and focus on how to best play their part in it.
On the whole, his is shaping up to be an argument for authenticity. I’m just getting into the book, but one selling point is how Farson has structured the chapters as tenets of paradox. Examples of his chapter titles:
* The Opposite Of A Profound Truth Is Also True
* Once You Find A Management Technique That Works, Give It Up
* Planning Is An Ineffective Way To Bring About Change
* Big Changes Are Easier To Make Than Small Ones
* Morale Is Unrelated To Productivity
* Organizations That Need Help Most Will Benefit From It Least
And on they go. The foreword, by Michael Crichton, forecasts that Farson’s thinking will prompt you to feel “stimulated, intrigued, amused, and exasperated.” Given how some of the paradoxes run up against conventional wisdom, for many who have been reading much of the pop leadership literature out there today, that’s likely true.
That being said, a cursory review of the chapter titles also summarizes, sometimes nearly verbatim, much of the counsel we give clients, especially in our executive coaching practice. Examples (again, chapter titles from the book):
* Effective managers are not in control
* Technology creates the opposite of its intended purpose
* We think we invent technology, but technology also invents us
* The more we communicate, the less we communicate
* In communication, form is more important than content
* Listening is more difficult than talking
* Every act is a political act
* Every great strength is a great weakness
* Leaders cannot be trained, but they can be educated
And my personal favorite,
* There are no leaders, there is only leadership
I’d say we agree with all of these, and that’s part of the reason Randall found the book so compelling. I’m finding it compelling as well, and I’m certain I’ll have read it before returning home this Friday.
We’ve listed the book in the Books In Our Bags section in the right-hand column, along with the other books the folks in our firm are reading at the moment. We don’t list the dogs, so consider anything over there a recommendation.
Some time ago I stumbled across David Allen’s Getting Things Done, and it’s been extremely influential in helping the members of our firm enjoy dramatic increases in our ability to manage our time, understand our priorities, and true to the title, get things done. With our lives of relationships, tasks, and travel, it’s been our killer app of 2005.
Given how wired our professionals are, however, and given that our information platform is Outlook, David’s method would be more difficult for us to implement if not for his Getting Things Done add-in for Outlook. It’s difficult to describe what it does, but I can tell you what it creates: a full inventory of everything you need to do, now, soon, or someday, on your PC (sorry Mac owners) and your PDA of choice, and … best of all … an empty inbox at the end of every day.
That alone has been invaluable: we’ve all found the add-in a remarkable tool for managing email, and the days of 10, 100, or 1,000 (you know who you are) emails sitting in an inbox unprocessed are long gone.
The add-in has a free 30-day trial, after which there’s a $70 fee to register the tool. Worth every penny, and in fact, I would have paid more. And I’ve been referring it (and the book) to clients daily … indeed, the more senior and busy you are, the more you need the tool.
