How to Do a Simple Productivity Audit

A Simple Productivity Audit

Do you ever feel overwhelmed or have too much to do? Have you been known to move around like a headless chicken? If so, maybe it’s time to do a Productivity Audit.

Here are a few questions that will help you decide if it is time to audit your efficiency:

Do you feel in control of your workload?

Is your email inbox regularly emptied?

Are you a distraction free zone?

Are you as efficient and productive as you know you should be?

If you answered “no” to any one of those questions it may be a good idea to stop and take an impartial look at your current systems. By taking an objective look and making informed decisions about your personal efficiency, you will be one step closer to stress free productivity.

Here are a few simple ways you can assess your current systems to see if you are working as efficiently as possible.

Check Your Hardware

Is your PC or Mac slowing you down or holding you back? Maybe a larger monitor or a dual screen setup would enable you to work more quickly. If your current system is slower than you would like it to be, take a look at boosting its performance. There are many ways to do this, such as doing a hard drive defragment or by buying more RAM. The other option is to replace it completely. If you bought your computer 10 years ago and you are reluctant to say goodbye, take note of how long it takes your PC to boot up. Think of the seconds, minutes and hours over a year that you spend waiting on your programs to load and walk away without looking back.

Reassess Software Programs

Are the programs you use the best ones for what you need to do? Are you using a spread sheet program to store your customer database? Are you using your email program to the best of its ability? Are you using a calendar and syncing it with your phone? There are many ways to do things, but reassessing your goals and requirements is a good place to start to see if you have all the programs that you need to do your job well. The software that met your needs five years ago may no longer be the right one to fit your requirements today.

Share Documents

There are a couple of solutions when it comes to sharing documents. You can either install a wired or wireless network or you can avail of many of the “cloud” solutions such as Google Apps or Dropbox to share common files. Without these types of solutions you are at risk of having different versions of the same file in different places. Dropbox and Google Apps are useful even if you want to share your files with yourself. If you want to access your files on the road, these solutions can be ideal.

Do a Time Audit

How do you spend your working day? Do you work flat out from 9 until 5 or do you mess around and jump from task to task? Do you know how the hours in your day are spent or do you fool yourself into thinking that you only spent one hour yesterday between Facebook and Twitter? There are many programs that can be used to record how you spend your time on your PC, or if you are honest with yourself you can take a sheet of paper and write down exactly what you are doing and how long you spent on different tasks. Awareness is a powerful attribute to have on your side; only when you know how you are spending your time can you know if the things you “busy yourself with” are getting you closer to your goals.

Eliminate

From your time audit you will probably identify time spent on time wasting activities. Once you identify the time-wasters, you can eliminate them. Simplify to become more productive. There may also be work that you do that you think is of value, like browsing Linkedin, Twitter or other social networks. Again, an objective view is necessary. Are these activities adding value to what you are trying to achieve or are they just helping you to avoid the big ugly tasks on your list that you are procrastinating on?

Conclusion

A simple productivity audit can help you to make your systems more efficient — and save you a lot of time and stress. Give it a try…and let me know in the comments what you discovered.

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Ciara Conlon is a Personal Productivity Coach and author. Her mission is to help people achieve their best through working efficiently and being positive and present. “With Productivity and Positivity there is little you can’t achieve” Find out more about Ciara and sign up for her tips, articles and links at Productivity & Positivity

How to Do a Simple Productivity Audit
Ciara Conlon
Fri, 28 Oct 2011 11:00:26 GMT

Steve Jobs, Apple Co-Founder, Former Chief Executive, Dead at 56

Steve Jobs, a co-founder and former chief executive officer of Apple Inc. (AAPL), died today, the company said in a statement. He was 56.

Jobs stepped down as CEO in August after combating a rare form of cancer.

“Steve’s brilliance, passion and energy were the source of countless innovations that enrich and improve all of our lives,” Apple’s board said in the statement. “The world is immeasurably better because of Steve.”

Source: Bloomberg

Stop Ignoring the Stalwart Worker

There's an unnoticed population of employees in business today. Strangely enough, they're also the majority.

The diagram below illustrates the labels that organizations often use (knowingly or unknowingly) to classify their employees. The y-axis focuses on how a professional is measured on meeting the organizational performance criteria that fuel the business engine. The x-axis centers on how the professional fares on meeting the expectations of the human engine. In each of the four corners, we find the Stars, Sinners, Low Performers, and Saints. I'll go into more detail on the four corners of the diagram in my next post, but for now, I want to bring to your attention those falling in the middle of the diagram — the Stalwarts.

These solid citizens make up the majority of employees in most organizations. The odds are you may find yourself among the Stalwarts at some point in your career, no matter how high-revving your internal drive is. If so, you probably will find yourself questioning your significance.

That's because, despite the number of Stalwarts in an organization, these good, solid citizens of the organization go largely unnoticed. Few leaders think about the motivation, inclusion, and explicit career management of the solid performers. One Fortune 500 leader said, "I thought that it couldn't be true that so many workers are systematically ignored through no fault of their own (except for the fact that they may not be politically astute or they don't draw attention to themselves). But the more I reflected on my own company, the more I realized that I spend all my time worrying about the high performers and assume that everything is OK with everyone else."

So what exactly is the Stalwart temperament? Perhaps the defining characteristic of Stalwarts is their aversion to calling attention to themselves — even when they need to. They are like the proverbial wheel that never squeaks — and, consequently, gets no grease. The quickest way to identify Stalwarts is to list the people who make the fewest demands on the CEO's time. Such reserve is utterly alien to most Stars, who make sure that they squeak loudly enough to get the attention they want.

The other signature trait of Stalwarts is their deep loyalty to the organization. They are responsible and care deeply about the organization's values, and they generally steer clear of risk. Stalwarts are intrinsically motivated by the service they can render for the good of the organization, and they let their own careers take a backseat to the company's well-being. They feel that they have accomplished something if the company is running like a well-oiled machine.

If you're an executive or leader who manages Stalwarts, it may be time to reexamine the way you perceive your Stalwart colleagues. Leaders often have several misconceptions about Stalwart employees, including the following:

Myth #1: Stars are smarter than Stalwarts. Stalwarts are not necessarily less intelligent than Stars. Achievement is a complicated blend of intelligence, motivation, and personality. Research confirms that insight; dozens of psychological studies have demonstrated that Stars and Stalwarts differ at least as much in temperament as intelligence.

Myth #2: Everybody is the same. Not every employee wants to give his all (or even his best) to the organization, leaving little time and energy for people and passions outside the workplace. Stalwarts place a high premium on work-life balance, and they highly value the time they spend with family and friends. In fact, many of the most productive Stalwarts are recovered Stars who, for a variety of personal reasons, have made a conscious decision to drop off the fast track.

Myth #3: Everybody wants the same thing out of work. Leaders often assume that all of their followers share their drive for power, status, and money. That's just not so. Many Stalwarts want to influence others in their jobs. Others value autonomy, creative opportunities, or the chance to develop unique expertise.

Myth #4: Everybody wants to be promoted. Not every employee wants to climb the ladder and rise to corporate prominence. The truth is that many Stalwarts seek recognition and stability rather than promotion. Stalwarts strive for advancement, but not at all costs.

Myth #5: Everybody wants to be a manager. Corporate career-planning practices typically operate on the assumption that people will feel rewarded and special if they are given even nominal management responsibilities. For that reason, we often ask Stalwarts to give up their technical competencies for managerial ones. In the process, we often turn terrific specialists into mediocre managers.

Stalwarts bring depth and stability to the companies they work for, slowly but surely improving both corporate performance and organizational resilience. They are always there as quiet yet powerful reminders to high performers obsessed with themselves or as examples to low performers terrified of failure. They will never garner the most revenue or the biggest clients, but they are also less likely to embarrass the company or flunk out. They know intuitively how to stay grounded even when their footing may be unsure. And while managers often take this amazing ability for granted, it brings real value to organizations day after day. In times of crisis, Stalwarts can be an organization's saving grace.

Stop Ignoring the Stalwart Worker
Thomas J. DeLong
Fri, 26 Aug 2011 13:54:03 GMT

Visual workflow – driving productivity in the office environment

Support functions, from HR and finance to product development, have to manage a complex mixture of repetitive, project and adhoc work. Teams must prepare updates and reports on a regular basis and must ensure that both internal and external customers are handled in a timely manner. They must also respond at any time to unexpected requests for action or information from across the organization – frequently urgent requests from senior managers who are unaware of the disruption they cause. On top of all this, staff may be asked to spend considerable time in meetings to discuss, review and plan their work.

This environment makes it extremely difficult for managers and team leaders to measure and improve performance. Their teams may be working on multiple projects simultaneously. Without knowing who is doing what, it can be hard for leaders to help their teams prioritize tasks. Problems arise from this lack of transparency. For example, work may be unevenly allocated, with staff overwhelmed some days and under-occupied on others; or issues that threaten the delivery of important work may not become clear until it is too late to fix them. Most importantly, without a clear understanding of exactly how tasks are being completed, it is almost impossible to identify performance improvement opportunities. These issues drive poor utilization and productivity of staff simply because tasks are not effectively or efficiently managed. Contrast this with a manufacturing line, where basic measures of productivity (i.e., the rate of product being manufactured) are far more abundant and widely understood.

We have seen the support functions in a range of companies gain enormous benefit from a simple but extremely effective visual management system: the T-card board (Exhibit). Such boards are a familiar sight on factory floors and in maintenance workshops, where they are used to allocate tasks and to track progress. It is rare, however, to see them adopted in a whitecollar service environment.

Exhibit: A standard workflow board layout aids communication and simplifies cross-team reviews

Building and using the board

Typically, the T-Card board is set up to show a one or two-week schedule of work for a single team. Each team member has their own section on the board, with a limited number of slots per day. This limit is designed to keep the workload to a realistic volume, helping to minimize overtime and highlight capacity constraints. Regular tasks, including meetings and other project or administrative activities, are each recorded on a T-card in a standard format and allocated on the board by the team member at the beginning of each day.

Each morning, the whole team meets in front of the board for a performance discussion. Lasting 15 minutes, and with a tightly structured agenda, its aim is to discuss the jobs allocated for the day, review the completion status of the previous day’s activities and highlight any problems. Unresolved issues and key performance indicators are displayed next to the board for quick reference and provide a fact base for performance discussions.

During the day, team members tackle each of the tasks allocated to them and, when the task is finished, turn the relevant T-card over in its slot to show it as “complete.” This allows anyone to understand the current status of the team with a quick glance at the board. For example, if by mid-afternoon there are still a significant number of cards not showing the "complete" status, it is immediately apparent to team members and senior managers that work is not progressing as planned and remedial action can quickly be taken.

When requests for ad-hoc work come in, perhaps as the result of a telephone call or email from a customer, the team member receiving the request takes a blank T-card, fills in the details of the task and then places it in the next available slot on the board. Different colored T-cards highlight the different classes of work. For example, all ad-hoc work may be tracked on white cards, while regular tasks use green cards, and meetings orange ones.

The impact of the card

The introduction of T-card boards can have a rapid and profound effect on the way work is managed in support functions. Because each team member has only a finite number of slots in which to allocate tasks each day, the tradeoffs between competing tasks that may previously have been implicit, become explicit. Team members are able to give their customers much more reliable estimates for the delivery of work requests. At the same time, the daily reviews of upcoming tasks mean that teams more consistently prioritize work that is most important, rather than the customers who shout the loudest. A real-time visual record of task progress helps team leaders too. They can see at a glance if a team member is struggling to achieve what they need to do and can intervene as necessary, providing coaching and support to help them improve their performance. Or they can reallocate tasks if one team member becomes overloaded.

Furthermore, team leaders can use the board to streamline some activities. For example, a team leader can see all of the meetings their team plans to attend for the day (each shown on a color-coded card) and has the opportunity to reduce unnecessary meeting attendance – a common problem in officebased functions. At one large institution, the introduction of the T-card systems precipitated a 20 percent reduction in total meeting time within a month of its introduction. The company was able to reduce the number of ad-hoc meetings and standardize core customer and team meetings into a regular pattern with set agendas and attendees.

Most powerfully, a clearer understanding of the way work actually flows through a department provides the foundation for continuous improvement efforts. Often for the first time, team leaders and senior managers can see which teams are able to complete tasks most efficiently. This allows them to identify best-practices that they can communicate to others.

The workflow board also enables effective problem capture, allowing issues to be tackled in regular problem-solving sessions with team members and management. At one company, recording ad-hoc work requests on the T-card board made it immediately obvious that a large amount of work was coming from a small minority of customers, for example. Managers were able to interview these customers, discuss their requirements and see if more of that work could be scheduled in advance to reduce its disruptive effect.

The impact

The introduction of a visual performance management system in the white-collar environment often creates significant concern among staff. They fear that it may add an administrative burden or reduce the autonomy that they see as an important part of their professional roles. Sometimes managers resist the idea too, expecting systems of this type to be automated and embedded into IT solutions. It can help to explain clearly to front-line staff and team leaders that the workflow system aims to improve the efficiency of the team, improve customer service and allow more time to be spent on true value-adding activities. Ultimately, however, it will take a leap of faith to pilot the system and see it in action.

In our experience, demonstration is usually compelling, and attitudes among staff typically change within a few weeks of the introduction of a workflow management approach. The ability to physically move tasks and reassign, track and complete them, together with the regular interactions at team performance discussions, help to bring the work to life. The simplicity of the Tcard system also means teams can fine-tune and improve it to meet their specific needs. By contrast, an IT-based solution can be harder to evolve and less interactive. Once comfortable with the operation of the card-based workflow system, some companies explore the potential use of IT solutions to automate the production of KPIs and simulate the interactions using virtual T-card

* * *

Workflow management systems can be a core part of the "journey to lean" for business support functions, providing a solid basis on which to track and improve performance. The clear, visual representation of work is something that workers and team leaders find useful and satisfying too. Such a simple, powerful approach has been confined to the workshop for far too long■

About the author: Simon Middleton is a consultant at the Production Systems Design Center in the McKinsey London Office

 

 

What Do You Want to Say You’ve Done?

Several years ago, I was talking with one of my colleagues about a project he was thinking about taking on. We were both solidly in the middle of our careers, but his evaluation of the possible project surprised me. He said, "There are a limited number of things that I'll be able to say I've done in my career, and I'm just not convinced that this should be one of them."

What struck me about this conversation is that it took a backward-looking perspective. That is, my colleague projected himself to the end of his career and looked backward over his contribution.

By contrast, most of us tend to be forward-looking. We make decisions based on how we think that particular decision might influence the next stage. This strategy can be seen clearly in politics, where politicians often make decisions based on what will help them get re-elected.

Research on regret has made a similar distinction. Psychologist Tom Gilovich and his colleagues have compared the regrets of college students to those of people in their 70s and 80s. College students asked about what they regret almost always talk about actions they took that did not go well: asking someone out and getting turned down, getting drunk, or failing a test. In contrast, older people generally regret actions that they did not take: not learning to dance, not asking out an attractive person, not taking advantage of an opportunity, etc. The backward-looking perspective highlights missed opportunities and things left unsaid.

Throughout your career, there will be many potentially pivotal moments — times when you make decisions that might shape the next several years of your life. In these moments, there is a tendency to be risk-averse. People shy away from opportunities that might go wrong for fear that they will regret failing.

A second line of research, though, suggests that you should not be too afraid of failure. Psychologist Dan Gilbert and his colleagues have done work exploring how people's lives are affected by negative events. For example, he asked a number of assistant professors who were being evaluated for tenure how they would feel six months after the decision. Unsurprisingly, people predicted that they would be happier if they got tenure than if they did not.

The surprising part comes from a follow-up survey six months after the tenure decision. Professors didn't report feeling any happier if they had received tenure than if they had been denied tenure. That is, the many other facets of their lives that influence happiness (family, friends, health, etc.) had such a strong influence on their overall life satisfaction, that even what appeared to be a devastating blow to their careers did not have a huge effect on their life satisfaction.

The outcome of this experiment suggests that it is worthwhile to take a backward perspective on key career decisions. The specter of failure looms large when there is potential risk in a particular course of action. When looking forward, the risk of failure seems important. But even significant failures are unlikely to derail your career, and what seems like a catastrophe may have little impact on your overall life satisfaction.

Instead, base your career decisions (at least in part) on what hope to say when you look back on your life. You may not always succeed, but are unlikely to look back with regret on those decisions that gave you the opportunity to reach your aspirations. And statistically you are much more likely to look back with regret on the roads not taken.

John Lennon famously wrote, "Life is what happens while you're busy making other plans." It is easy to get caught up in small projects and the day-to-day minutia of business. At least once a year, though, it is important to take stock of how you are progressing on your larger goals. If you find that you have not accomplished anything in the past year that you will look back on with pride, think about what you can do in the coming year to get you a step closer to doing what you want to have done.

Finally, encourage your colleagues to take the same approach. Every company has lofty goals. An organization that consistently looks back on the present from the desired future has an excellent chance of achieving those goals.

What Do You Want to Say You've Done?
Art Markman
Wed, 24 Aug 2011 18:56:26 GMT

Speaking Up Takes Confidence, Candor, and Courage

Have you ever wondered whether your work efforts were really creating value? From what I've seen in organizations, a lot of people have that experience. The problem is that many times they don't do anything about it.

Not long ago I spoke at a company meeting about the challenges of complexity in organizations. At one point, I asked the audience members to identify and discuss simplification opportunities in their areas. During the report-outs, one woman described how she and her co-workers spent hours each week on the cosmetics of a particular report to make sure that it looked good when it went to senior management. She went on to say that this focus on style rather than substance was a waste of time. When I asked why she continued to do this, she quickly said that her boss expected it. Her boss was also in the room, and when asked about the report said, "I don't care what it looks like, as long as it has the right information."

This kind of disconnect is not unusual. One of the main reasons that employees knowingly continue valueless activities is the lack of candid dialogue between people at different organizational levels. For example, many times I've heard people say that their manager is "unapproachable" or "too busy" to talk about changing the way things are done. And while that observation is certainly true in many cases, it's also often code for: "I'm afraid of my manager's reaction." On the other hand, many senior leaders wonder why their people don't raise issues more proactively. As one senior person said to me, out of frustration, "I don't know how many more times I can tell them that they are empowered!"

So what does it take to break this logjam so that dialogue flows more freely and spontaneously? Let me suggest two steps:

Take responsibility for the truncated dialogue. And that means everyone — managers and subordinates alike. While it's easy to blame others, the reality is that it takes two parties to short-circuit a relationship. For the most part, this happens unintentionally. We usually make assumptions about what we can talk to our manager about or not, or what the boss expects — and then we act on these assumptions without testing them. We also may fear that the manager will think poorly about us if we bring up something that she doesn't agree with, so it's easier to say nothing. Managers, however, do the same thing — they assume that their people feel comfortable enough to initiate conversations, or send subtle signals to subordinates that they really don't want to be approached with new ideas.

Do something about it. Jack Welch used to say that self-confident people are one of the key characteristics of a high-performing organization — because they will not be afraid to speak up. But nobody becomes self-confident just because Jack Welch (or some blogger) says that it's the right thing to do. Instead you have to gain that confidence by pushing yourself beyond your comfort zone a little at a time. For example, if you realize that you're wasting resources on an activity that doesn't add value, but are hesitant to approach your boss, start by talking with other colleagues about it. See if others feel the same way. If they agree, develop a joint proposal for not only stopping the unproductive work, but also for reallocating time to higher payoff areas. Then go to the boss as a team, not only to talk about this idea but also to test his openness to these kinds of initiatives in general.

If you're a manager, you can foster self-confidence by creating "safe space" forums where anyone can raise issues without consequences. You can also encourage your people to get together and identify non-value added work and present it as a team. Or you can initiate a more formal process, like Work-Out or process-mapping to surface the ideas.

Whether you are a subordinate or a manager, the key is to take some sort of action to increase the candor and flow of dialogue in your organization. If you do nothing you are just reinforcing unproductive patterns. But if you do something, you can trigger a cycle of increasing self-confidence and higher performance — and create a much more pleasant place to work.

What's your experience with opening up a dialogue about unproductive work?

Speaking Up Takes Confidence, Candor, and Courage
Ron Ashkenas
Tue, 23 Aug 2011 17:57:46 GMT

Tim Cook and Apple’s Tricky Next Steps

 

And so it begins: the life of Apple, post Steve Jobs. Jobs announced that he would step down as CEO, effecting a smooth transition to known successor Tim Cook.

Jobs is surely not just any retiring CEO. As an entrepreneur, he built a company that changed history. Like many entrepreneurial founders, he did it by force of personality and personal vision, without much concern for consensus or committees. And like many, he paid the price when the narrative took hold that he'd lost his touch, and his board lost faith. But very unlike that typical experience, he found his way back to the CEO job and put the company back in the game. It was quite a feat, and speaks to the specialness of this particular man.

But now it's time for Apple as an organization to pull off a feat of its own: it needs to continue on its trajectory without a visionary founder to rally behind. It has had the luxury of having a personification of its ethos, and now it must either allow someone else to be that, or learn to operate effectively without one.

History shows it isn't easy. Wang did not survive the departure of An Wang; Digital Equipment never flew high again after Ken Olsen. Untold numbers of firms that hadn't attained such heights when they lost their founders fizzled more quietly.

But history also shows it's possible to continue on a bold path post-founder. Sometimes it's because a new visionary leader manages to inspire. Jeff Sonnenfeld notes in The Hero's Farewell (still the best book on CEO succession, and particularly good reading for this week) about IBM, AT&T, Sears, and General Motors that "their days of greatest glory were not under the reign of the founding entrepreneurs," but under the professional managers that followed them.

Sometimes, too, organizations go onto greater glory because they've learned how to manage without a legend walking the halls. It should be possible, after all: it's the organization is who has been doing the work all along. One man's labor is a drop in the bucket. This has been the achievement of UPS since Jim Casey. Post Sam Walton, it's what Walmart hopes to pull off.

The problem is that, in order to make the bold moves that keep companies from succumbing to creative destruction, leaders need license to act. And founder entrepreneurs have incredible license. At Apple, Steve Jobs' word can be law — and not just in the narrow sense of organizational policy but in the bigger sense of what deserves to be developed, what customers covet, what constitutes cool. Again, the license is not unlimited; founders who misjudge markets royally lose their license to operate. But the reality is that it often is not the perfectness of a particular idea, but the vigor behind its execution, that makes something big succeed. And a leader whose vision is unchallenged internally has a greater ability to marshal that energy. This is the sense in which Apple has enjoyed a luxury.

When a non-founder takes the helm, the organization is not so universally convinced that the soul of the company resides in him or her. The question of who is the true keeper of the flame is suddenly in play, and others on the premises, whether they aspire to the CEO role or not, anoint themselves. The mission zeal that makes an organization so powerful when united can make it, without a unifying force, disastrously prone to internecine battles.

Whether Apple's new leader can keep the company riding high is dependent on his own skills. Most important for Tim Cook is that he not assume that he has the same license, and that he seek consciously to earn it. But it is even more dependent on the organization - Tim Cooks' direct reports, and their direct reports, and the legions of middle managers who are the lifeblood of the place. They must remain committed to the proposition that an Apple unified is more powerful than an Apple divided. They must find ways to make bold decisions they can collectively embrace. They must learn to project their own guiding light.

Tim Cook and Apple's Tricky Next Steps
Julia Kirby

The Problem with Perfection

If you're not familiar with the law of diminishing returns, it states that at a certain point adding more effort will not produce significantly more gains. The challenge is knowing when you've reached that point. For many managers this is an important question: How far do I keep going on a project before I declare that it's "good enough" — and that further effort will not significantly change the outcome?

Several years ago I worked with a project team charged with increasing sales to its large corporate customers. At the first meeting the team brainstormed ways to drive up sales, but before moving ahead decided to collect data about current sales and survey sales managers and customers. Since it wasn't clear which ideas might work, this seemed like a logical next step — until the data analysis work dragged on for months as the team tried to reach the perfect answer.

I've seen this pattern in many organizations where, instead of moving into action, managers insist on doing more analysis. In some cases this is part of a company-wide "paralysis by analysis" culture, while in others it is a personal tendency of the manager or team involved. Either way this oft-repeated pattern results not only in wasted effort, but significant delays in moving forward.

From my experience, there are two often-unconscious reasons for this unproductive quest for perfection. The first is the fear of failing. In many organizations, coming up with a recommendation that doesn't ultimately succeed can be career limiting. So to avoid this fate, managers put in extra effort to get the "right" answer, and back it up with as much data and justification as possible. Then, if it doesn't work, nobody can say that they didn't do their homework.

The second driver of unproductive perfection is the anxiety about taking action. Studying problems and coming up with recommendations is safe territory; while changing processes, procedures, incentives, systems, or anything else is much higher risk. Action forces managers and teams out of their comfort zones, driving them to sell ideas, deal with resistance, orchestrate work plans, and potentially disrupt work processes for colleagues and even customers. So one way to avoid dealing with these messy issues is to keep the study going as long as possible, thus delaying any action.

Because of these psychological dynamics, breaking free of unproductive perfection is not easy. But if you are a project sponsor, leader, or team member, and want to move into action more quickly, here's an approach you can try: Instead of viewing "action" as something that follows research, think about how action can occur parallel to research. In other words, rather than coming up with perfect recommendations and then flipping the switch months later, start by testing some of your initial ideas on a small scale immediately — while collecting more data. Then you can feed the lessons from these experiments into the research process, while continuing to implement and scale additional ideas.

For example, in the sales case described above, the team shifted its patterns by selecting three corporate customers where they could quickly test some of their ideas, in a low-risk way, in collaboration with the sales teams. With one customer, the sales leader experimented with selling products and services together, rather than having services as an after-sell. A second sales leader added a paid advisory service to his offering. The third worked on building relationships higher up in the C-suite. The lessons from these experiments were then incorporated into the team's recommendations, which were then tested with several more customers and so on. Within a year, most of the corporate sales teams were working differently and increasing their overall sales.

Clearly the ideas that first emerge through this iterative approach are not going to be perfect, but by sharpening them through field-testing rather than theoretical analysis they will eventually become good enough to deliver results. Working in this way also reduces the risk of recommending the "wrong" ideas and the anxiety about managing change, since small-scale tests provide rapid feedback and engage others in the organization right from the beginning.

Perfection certainly makes sense when designing an airplane or an office building. But if the search for perfection is leading you to diminishing returns and an avoidance of action, it might be worth taking a different path.

Does your organization have a problem with perfection?

The Problem with Perfection
Ron Ashkenas
Tue, 16 Aug 2011 17:44:00 GMT

Finding Your Next Big (Adjacent) Idea

It's unusual that an analyst will ask you to stop thinking about the far future, but I need you to back away from the Corning A Day Made of Glass video on YouTube. All that clear glass is clouding your vision. More and more, as I talk with companies about their next big product innovation, they can't get far-flung ideas out of their mind. They can't wait to get there, but they can't justify making the investments needed to get there. They prevaricate while smaller, more proximal innovations, more likely to succeed rapidly, languish unattended.

The ideas won't pine forever; if you don't act on them soon, someone else will. We call these innovation opportunities adjacent possibilities and we have just written a new report about them called We've blogged elsewhere on the topic; let me share some more details with those who aren't reading Forrester's research.

To get this right, you have to think right. The idea of adjacent possibilities started with evolutionary biologist Stuart Kauffman, who used it to explain how such powerful biological innovations as sight and flight came into being. More recently, Steven Johnson, in Where Good Ideas Come From, showed that it's also applicable to science, culture, and technology. The core of the idea: People arrive at the best new ideas when they combine prior (adjacent) ideas in new ways. Most combinations fail; a few succeed spectacularly.

This has always been the case, but Johnson shows us that modern cities and networks accelerate the rate of idea formation. The more ideas circulate, the more they'll collide in new ways to generate new things. As they combine, these seemingly small ideas become big. Add a ubiquitous Internet and hungry developers and manufacturers around the globe and you should expect more of these innovations to accumulate in a shorter time than before. It's clear that this is happening. But what does it mean for you?

It means you should direct your team to obsess about today's adjacent possibilities, not tomorrow's distant improbabilities. Have the courage to set aside the ten-year future vision because there is no way you will anticipate all the adjacent possibilities that will have to combine between now and then to accurately predict what products you will sell or how you will sell them that far out. That's not for lack of intelligence on your part. It's because most of those adjacent possibilities on which you will ultimately depend have yet to emerge from the combination of other adjacencies on which they will depend.

Therefore, rather than try to predict what your company will be like in ten years, spend your time observing today's adjacencies more carefully. Start with the core customer need that you fulfill — understand it clearly by regularly scouting out other, sometimes nontraditional, ways customers meet the needs you think you are satisfying. In the world of whole-home audio where companies like Sonos and Logitech want to distribute music throughout the house, the biggest competitor to their products is the simple act of turning up a stereo really loud in one room so you can hear it in another.

Once you're ready to see all the adjacent ways that people meet the needs you hope to fulfill, you can then explore the entire product and service experience that you deliver. What are the adjacent product experiences that you could create to reinforce the value of your current product? Bathroom scales may not seem a fertile ground for innovation, but there is an entire revolution yet to occur in the digital relationship that wraps around that bathroom scale. If your company could offer a scale that connects to a health and weight loss app on your customer's mobile phone, would you even try to make money from the scale or would you give it away for free as long as people use your app?

Think of all the companies that should rightly think that this product experience is an adjacent possibility that they could offer — Logitech, Jenny Craig, the producers of The Biggest Loser, the insurance company — the range of possible competitors (and partners) is varied and extensive. This product is so obvious that if this is an adjacent possibility for your company, you should stop reading this and begin planning how you'll participate now.

That's the kind of urgency and immediacy that innovating the adjacent possible leads to. While it's intellectually stimulating to understand where good ideas come from, it's terrifying to realize just how quickly good ideas that can upend your business will appear in the future. If you're not prepared, it will be immobilizing to find just how easy it is for competitors to act on these ideas because they learned how to identify, depend on and even exploit adjacent possibilities — things that are already possible today and can be easily recombined in a new way to generate the next big thing.

Finding Your Next Big (Adjacent) Idea
James L. McQuivey
Tue, 09 Aug 2011 12:25:56 GMT

Why You Should Never Make Wishes

Next time you come across a wishing well or fountain, don’t fall for it. You can still pitch in a coin or two if it’s for a good cause but just don’t make a wish like you are suppose to. In fact, you should NEVER make wishes if you want to be successful at anything.

Too often we end up wishing for things. We wish we could have more money. We wish we could be better looking. We wish we could be in better shape.

What I would like to do is propose that you wipe out the word ‘wish’ from your vocabulary. Instead, replace it with the word ‘commitment’. So instead of making wishes for the things you want in life, make commitments instead.

Make Fully Committed Decisions

When I do my motivational keynotes, I tell my audiences to make ‘fully committed decisions’. That is, they should make strong decisions to pursue their goals with total commitment instead of just wishing to become successful.

This may seem like a simple play on words to some people but there is indeed a significant difference between making totally committed decisions and simply making wishes. Whenever commitment is involved, there will be a much stronger incentive to take whatever action is required to work towards achieving your goals.

Example Of Commitment

Early on in my martial arts competition career, I marveled at the World Champions I saw. I wished that I could perform martial arts at their level. I wished that I could become a World Champion myself. I trained regularly but didn’t really excel in competition at the beginning.

Then instead of merely wishing to become a World Champion, I made a totally committed decision to try my darn hardest to work towards a World Championship title. I decided that I would do whatever it takes to win. I even had this down on paper.

This commitment automatically resulted in certain actions that I didn’t do before. In addition to committing myself to a strict training schedule, I booked myself to attend more major tournaments across the continent just so I could get more exposure to the top competitors in order to learn from their performances. I accepted that fact that I wasn’t going to win right away at these bigger events.

I also found and connected with a few past World Champions. These past champions were in the position to offer me some private coaching sessions even though I had to fly somewhere to meet up with them (and pay hefty fees). My justification was that the best people to learn from are those who have already accomplished what you are aiming to do.

I don’t remember exactly when I made this mindshift from just wishing to actually making a totally committed decision to become a World Champion. But I do know that the progress was not quick. However, there was steady progress over several years and in 1999, I finally became a Karate World Champion for the very first time.

Steps To Move From Wishes To Commitments

So based on my experiences so far, here are the major steps to move from simple wishes to major commitments for your success.

1. Identify what you wish for in life (career, health, finances, relationships, etc.)
2. Extract the goals you are willing to make fully committed decisions on
3. Write these fully committed decisions down on paper and sign it as a self contract
4. Announce these commitments to others

The reason why this mindshift works is because commitment does interesting things to our heads. It helps set us up in a way so that we end up doing the things we have to do in order to become successful. Making totally committed decisions will have a positive, profound impact on your life.

Why You Should Never Make Wishes 

Clint Cora Mon, 

08 Aug 2011 16:00:40 GMT

Don’t Give Up

Life is full of twists and turns and it is sometimes easy to get sick of the many gyrations that are needed to make a business thrive, a project launch, or even to get internal signoff in some bureaucratic version of the Hokey Pokey.

It would be so easy to quit.

But a part of you knows that many a failure turns into the big success story. In start-up land, Air B&B notably went for 4 years with scraping the barrel kind of funding and just recently received $112 million. Most people don't remember how dire the Apple situation was in 1997 when Steve Jobs returned. A share of Apple back then would buy you a cup of coffee; now it'll get you a nice bottle of Opus One from, say, 1987.

Business is full of stories of perseverance and pursuit — of the almost-failed hero who didn't quit when times were dark. Those stories admonish quitters, and honor the survivors. I should know. I am both.

My dark night literally came in a late evening 1987, when I was attacked by a serial rapist (I was #24 in a long string of crimes, I came to learn later) as I walked home alone to my rented room after a college study session at Denny's restaurant. After the attack, I spent hours with the police capturing details, viewing a police lineup, and visiting the ER to do the rape kit and get sutures for a knife wound.

There were moments in the middle of that night when I thought about quitting. By this time in my life, I had already experienced enough child protective services, enough violence, enough sadness, and enough battles to last many lifetimes. Until that point, I had believed that these struggles were escapable. But the terrorizing thoughts that ran through my mind that night were that I was somehow doomed to this kind of existence. That 

I must have deserved this. That it was a punishment from God for being disrespectful to my family in even trying to escape. The terror was that I must have done something to bring this on.

If there is such a thing as hell, I am convinced it feels just like that night when a fire of ugly thoughts burns you up from the inside. I admit that I wanted to give up on my life, to end it then because I didn't want to face the shame. I didn't think my friends would want to know me. I didn't think I had the strength to face the pain that would surely follow as the incident took its course through the justice system, interminable counseling sessions, and vivid night terrors. But I did fight. I fought for my dignity. I fought for strength, and I fought for the love-filled life that I experience today. If I had given up, I would not be here to experience any of today's joys, probably the most precious of which is my relationship with my husband and son.

I could have shared a professional business story because I have those too, but it is the visceral nature of our darkest moments I want us to connect to. The desire to quit never comes on a sailboat, feeling the wind on your face, during long hikes in the mountains, or after joyous mountain bike summits. It's not those puppies and sunshine moments that test us. It is when we feel lost, overwhelmed, and exhausted that we feel the desire to quit. Wanting to quit comes when you are tired of the fight and sick of being beaten down in the darkest times of suffering and loss. It's when we can't raise funds and we will be forced to shut our doors. It is when we find out we were betrayed by a fellow founder. It's when a product that needs to work isn't living up to its promise and the marketplace is beating the crap out of the company. It's when we don't know if we'll have another client and we don't know how we'll feed our families. These relentless fears crowd in on us, taking up space. We need something to break our way our way, but instead just the opposite happens — we feel more trapped than ever. That's when the desire to quit floods in.

While I am a survivor, I am also a quitter. In 2010, I shut down my strategy consulting company. I just wasn't able to find a way for it work without a level of persistent attention and energy that had become unsustainable. What had once been inspiring and challenging had become a grind; it was sapping me of my energy. After 11 years of building it, I did what seemed to others a sudden about-face and quit. Colleagues, clients, friends almost universally thought I had lost my mind. I was told I had failed, and I heard that people said to one another that I lacked courage. Hmmph. I mean really. Hmmph.

Life is full of twists and turns. But it also has straight stretches of open road. As each one of us has to learn for ourselves, failure can lead us to a new place. Many times that means sticking it out, pushing through, and yet, sometimes that means putting the thing down. Perseverance is needed in life to be successful, and it is wisdom that lets us know when enough is enough. Sometimes, to get where you're going, you first have to leave where you've been.

If I hadn't put down Rubicon, I know I would still be doing that one thing. All. The. Time. And many people I respected pointed me back to the consulting life because I had proven to be successful at it. As if what I'd done up to this point defined all of what is possible in the future. But a part of me imagined there could be a different way to contribute my domain expertise, and passion for igniting cultures of innovation. And this is key; I imagined it before it was true. I had no proof that I would find a new outlet to use my abilities. That is until this week, when I joined the Board of Directors of EPAX, a NASDAQ-traded education company.

And so sometimes quitting lets us create space to create the next thing. My career wasn't going to be over just because I didn't stick to the firm I had started, and built and led for 11 years.

While your story of wanting to quit will certainly differ from mine, I want to share this: just because you stop doing something doesn't mean you are quitting. Sometimes it's bravery to know it's time to stop and walk away. Experiencing failure isn't the same thing as failing. Letting go doesn't mean you're giving up. And stopping isn't quitting; it is just a pause that lets you sort out where you'll turn next. In our black-and-white, win-or-lose society, we admonish quitters and we celebrate survivors. But life is more nuanced than that.

When might it be your time to "quit"? I can't answer that for you, but I can give you this as a guideline: You can quit things like businesses or projects if you know they are merely one means to your passion. You know if you've done your very best to make it work. But what you can't quit is fighting for your purpose, and living, and finding new, more effective ways to bring forth your passions in the world. We can quit things, but what we can't quit is fighting for our dreams.  

Don't Give Up
Nilofer Merchant
Wed, 03 Aug 2011 18:12:36 GMT

The Price of (Not) Speaking Truth to Power

"Are you familiar with the term willful blindness?" This was the question that floored the Murdochs at Tuesday's parliamentary select committee hearing because it cut right through the narrative News International executives have been spinning to counter the hacking scandal that has engulfed the media group in recent weeks.

Innocent ignorance has been NI's defense from the start. Rupert put too much trust in his key lieutenants, James could not be expected to know every detail of the NI operation and Rebekah merely delegated responsibility to her staff and relied on their good judgement. Those at the top could not be expected to know everything that was going on in NI and, besides, who could have anticipated that the work of a few rogue freelancers would undermine the entire News Corp empire?

As a performance, it was neither convincing nor original. We have seen and heard it all before from leaders during other crises. Consider the Royal Bank of Scotland, BP, Enron and Lehman Brothers, Fred Goodwin, Tony Hayward, Jeff Skilling and Kenneth Lay variously professed ignorance, surprise and contrition at the corporate disasters that occurred on their watch, but the fact is that they all had countless opportunities to step in and deal with the systemic failures that launched their respective crises.

Reminding leaders that there is a difference between ignorance and deniability is fundamental for an organisation's health and, perhaps, survival. The Murdochs looked distinctly uncomfortable when confronted with the concept of "willful blindness," a legal term that recognizes that if you intentionally fail to be informed about matters that make you liable, you are still responsible in law. In other words, it is a leader's responsibility to ensure that they don't turn a blind eye to practices or complaints that could seriously damage their organisation's operations or reputation.

In my experience, most leaders understand that they must foster open and transparent cultures, keep their eyes open and take seriously any suggestions of wrongdoing. But there is a huge gulf between knowing and doing and I am not at all convinced that leaders are able to translate fine words into action. How many leaders are genuinely prepared to listen to people from every level in the organisation? How open are they to criticisms of their leadership and wider organizational practices? How many employees really have a voice? 

What are the channels and opportunities for communication? And what, if anything, changes as a result of speaking up?

Let's imagine a likely scenario at News International. A mid-level reporter on the News of the World, you are aware of rumors that senior reporters are using "creative" means to obtain information, including phone-tapping. You watch as your colleagues fall into line when the editor tells them to do everything it takes to get the story. You feel the high when a great story breaks and the editor is pleased. Soon you are the one who is being asked to get the story. What do you do? Challenge the status quo and risk losing your job, or just get on with it and get the promotion and rewards you feel you deserve?

We know how the story ended at the NoW. Employees who spoke up against dubious practices were ousted, while the collective failure to challenge the same practices resulted in the newspaper being closed and hundreds of jobs being lost. Meanwhile their leaders resigned, having accepted millions of pounds in severance pay.

Now consider the same scenario in your organisation. Are you being asked to do the impossible by your boss? Is he or she oblivious to your requests to be reasonable? Do you have serious concerns about operations or the company's strategy? Do you have information that they really need to hear? Do you go out on a limb to challenge your boss or accept that there is nothing you can do? Do you risk losing your job for failing to get that message across?

It is not easy to speak truth to power, whether it is telling the boss he or she is wrong or owning up to one's own mistakes. Bosses have many means to intimidate — by position, power, personality or even wealth and a sense of entitlement. And even if they do not openly intimidate, most executives expect and assume that employees will not question them and company policy, or, if they do, that they will go quietly. Those who see wrongdoing and are impelled to speak up or "go public" can be condemned for not being team-players or branded as troublemakers.

Albert O. Hirschmann, a social scientist writing in the 1970s, suggested that employees who disagree with company policy have three options: "exit, voice, and loyalty." In other words:

1. Offer a principled resignation
2. Try to change the policy (speak truth to power)
3. Remain loyal "team players."

In truth, most people choose option three, the path of least resistance. This was the story at the NoW: its leaders probably turned a blind eye, staff swallowed their moral objections and did what they had to, knowing that lacked the power to change things and that they would probably be punished if they attempted to do so.

What are your thoughts on telling truth to power? What are your experiences or observations? Do you have a real voice in your organisation? As always, your thoughts and comments illuminate, inform and develop the discussion — so I look forward to hearing them! 

The Price of (Not) Speaking Truth to Power
Gill Corkindale
Thu, 21 Jul 2011 14:50:25 GMT

Nobody Has Time for Interns

Interns take note: energy and enthusiasm are no longer enough. You've got to bring something more meaningful to the table.

A friend and senior executive at Yelp recently shared how busy she was balancing a demanding job, a busy travel schedule, and a newborn at home. We were catching up at a Northwestern University alumni event; so naturally I suggested she take on a student as a summer intern. She looked at me square in the eye, without a trace of irony and stated, "I have no time for an intern."

Isn't the whole point of an intern to make your life easier? When an overworked young Gen Y executive says she has no time for an intern, isn't something wrong with our system? Interns aren't supposed to be a drain on time, energy or resources.

In practice, however, they can be. In today's competitive economy, where everyone is doing more with less, you've got to figure out a way to be value add from the start. Interns, you might just have to come up with your own projects, figure out how to insert yourself into team projects, or just navigate this crazy world of work all on your own. Here are several ideas of how to do that:

Take charge

One of the best ways to get ahead at work is to make your boss' life easier or better. If you want an internship at Yelp, Everyblock, or with a small-business start-up, go ahead and propose your own projects. Think about areas that interest you and where you can add value. Then go ahead and pitch yourself as an integral part of the team. Show your new employer how you're going to solve a specific problem, fill in a missing need, or simply be someone who can hit the ground running on a specific and manageable task. The "here's what I can do for you" line is a lot more powerful than an "I'm excited to learn and do whatever you ask of me."

Play to your strengths

Gen Y: You and your peers are tech-savvy to a degree most of your Gen X and Boomer counterparts simply can't match. You have an intricate and intuitive understanding of the power of social media and you're harnessing it in your personal lives daily. Think about how you can leverage your technological, well-connected selves to bring new skills to the marketplace. Can you set up online promotions for a company? Launch a twitter campaign, create and manage a LinkedIn group or beta-test a Facebook marketing push? Everyone wants to jump on the social media bandwagon these days, but many organizations don't have the technical know-how to do it. Social networking/marketing presents a great opportunity to work on bite-size, measurable projects that you can start and finish during a summer internship.

Use the multiple-choice strategy

Contrary to popular belief, asking someone "How can I help?" isn't all that helpful. Sure, your intentions are good, but asking your manager or boss how or where you can pitch in creates work for him in coming up with something for you to do.

If you really want to impress, go to your manager and use the multiple-choice strategy:

"Chris, I want to be as helpful as possible so I've thought about a few areas where I can jump in and help out. Would you like me to start pulling together materials for next week's meeting, compile results from last week's polling data, or research the local statutes that we're basing the data on?"

Give Chris two or three concrete ideas of ways you can help out. It shows that you're thinking about how best to put yourself to work. It also shows that you're in the know, demonstrating for Chris that you have some idea about the workflow that's going on around you. More often that not, Chris will take you up on one or two of your ideas, or the offer may prompt him to come up with something different entirely. Either way, you'll make it easy on him to put you to work. Mission accomplished.

Don't give someone the excuse to say they don't have time for you. Take charge of your workload, play to your strengths ,and make it hard for someone to refuse your overtures of help. 

Nobody Has Time for Interns
Jodi Glickman
Wed, 20 Jul 2011 15:51:44 GMT

How The Murdoch Email And Website Hacks Could Happen To You

This week News Corp. execs James and Rupert Murdoch were dragged before a investigatory committee of Parliament over the U.K.'s phone-hacking scandal. Meanwhile hacktivists LulzSec decided to take matters into their own hands, and targeted the website of News Corp. paper The Sun, replacing its homepage with a faked edition. Shortly afterward, LulzSec said it had also acquired a huge amount of corporate emails from the Murdochs. They've since pledged not to release them, lest they compromise ongoing legal cases against News Corp. and its executives, but the Murdochs may still face having their email dirty laundry aired in the future.

How is this kind of hack pulled off? We spoke to our expert adviser, Nick Percoco of Trustwave's Spiderlabs, to gain an insight, based on his expertise as an ethical hacker--hired to pull off these kinds of attack by companies themselves.

The Website Hack, Simply Done

Website redirects are pretty common nowadays--it's a relatively low-grade kind of hack, and the other large online hacktivist group Anonymous was itself a victim of a website hack this week.

One redirect involves gaining access to the Domain Name Server infrastructure--the code and hardware that directs a visiting web surfer's browser to an IP address when you type in a web URL to a browser address bar (because servers call themselves a relatively boring set of numbers rather than companynameX.com). Hackers can do this by either a frontal password-cracking assault on the domain account at the relevant third party Domain Name managing company, or by pulling off a social engineering trick.

As Nick points out to us, it's relatively easy to call up a company like this, acting all frustrated and pretending to be a power user from News Corp. (or whatever the target is, picking something newsy) and say "this is related to the phone hacking scandal and we need to make some DNS changes and blah blah...I need to reset my password." If you're lucky, the person you're speaking to will be fairly junior in the company, and probably in their career, and with chutzpah you get the passwords and then access. 

Percoco highlights how powerful this attack is: "If I were to gain access to someone's DNS system, I could redirect the website in probably 30 seconds." Because once you're in, it's just a question of filling in a webform, or editing a file, clicking "save" and then anyone visiting companynameX.com is redirected to a different IP address, where you have your alternative web page.

The Website Hack, Done More Cleverly

A more sophisticated attack on a target, Percoco says, involves "trying to hack into their infrastructure directly"--more like the hacking you see in the movies. In his work, Percoco's worked with larger companies that have thousands of sites in their infrastructure. Some may be old, set up for something like a marketing campaign that has since ended. 

This is the hacker's in-point, because a site that's been sitting online for several years, without being upgraded or checked from a security standpoint, is bound to have vulnerabilities. This is because the cutting edge of cybersecurity and attacks will have moved on long since, but the old site hasn't been maintained to keep up. A very similar method was actually used by the LulzSec to access the Sun's online presence, through a "retired" server that was used to manage the Sun's micro website content.

A third way in, especially with a site like the Sun, is through its Content Management System, the code that organizes how stories are published to its website. By hacking into this, via a known exploit or simply by cracking a user password (such as may be used by a journalist working remotely, to gain access to their account), hackers can then gain access to the published web content on a target's website directly, and chaos will ensue. It's not always tricky to do this, because we are all pretty bad at using secure passwords. An attack like this is roughly what hit Gawker Media earlier this year. 

The Email Hack

LulzSec's attack on News Corp.'s email system has potentially more damaging implications. It's easy to restore your website, but there's possibly plenty of compromising, or at least private, data in a high-profile user's email account.

If LulzSec gained access to News Corp.'s web servers and other systems, presumably they could also gain access to other accounts, says Percoco, perhaps even an IP administrator's account or someone else who has access to mail servers. Via these sources, hackers could gain direct access to the company email account. 

"Firstly I'd try to see if they had any external web-based mail system, like a Microsoft Active Sync system," says Percoco, and then it's a game of working out a user name and guessing a user's weak password (and hoping the system lets you try a large number of times without locking the account).

Or, assuming you've gained access to the company's network via a website hack, you may be able to work out where user-account data is kept and then extract it. When you crack it, offline, you'd have a list of usernames and passwords directly. Then it would be as simple as pretending to be a new device like an iPhone syncing up to a perfectly normal user account, and you'd identify to the network as a real user--and then their whole email history is synced to your device. This likely wouldn't raise red flags with IT since it's exactly what happens when a genuine user connects to a real account.

What You Can Do To Protect Yourself

News Corp. was pretty aggressively penetrated by hackers, who seem to have carried out a coordinated and sophisticated assault. But many companies are similarly vulnerable and would have their business compromised if 4GB of executive email was sequestered and plopped onto a file-sharing website. The defenses are manyfold, but pretty straightforward: Keep your web properties well managed, and ensure that no old "appendix" webpages are left online with vulnerabilities ready to be infected. This plan could even involve making sure there's good information sharing among IT staff--who tend to have a pretty high churn rate. Companies can check their online systems repeatedly, and also hire white-hat hackers to detect loopholes on contract--before a hacker with malicious intent does it for you.

How The Murdoch Email And Website Hacks Could Happen To You
Kit Eaton
Fri, 22 Jul 2011 22:15:30 GMT

Mind Mapping: A Simpler Way to Capture Information

This visualization tool can enable practitioners to make sense of large volumes of interconnected data and fast-track implementation of Lean Six Sigma.


Hospitals and health plans know that the high cost of care is squeezing the U.S. economy. That’s why so many of them are using Lean Six Sigma to control spending by refining internal processes—while still satisfying customers in a highly competitive market.

A major health care consortium based in the Dallas-Fort Worth area recently used Lean Six Sigma to find ways to improve its health insurance validation process and thereby improve customer satisfaction.  With a looming deadline before them, Ralph Jarvis, principle of Jarvis Business Solutions, and his staff used “mind-mapping” to kick off and manage a Lean implementation that resulted in a dozen ways for the hospital to improve its insurance validation process.

Mind mapping software uses visual shorthand to capture in one screen the kind of complexity and depth that might otherwise take many pages of text to represent. It does this by: encouraging the use of keywords and phrases, rather than full sentences; providing a library of icons that can be used to express graphically what otherwise requires words; and enabling users to place each piece of data into spatial context with related pieces.

As a result of this technique, the healthcare consortium team came up with a dozen ways to improve the company’s insurance validation process, which, when fully tested, is slated to be rolled out to 11 affiliated hospitals across Texas.

“The goal was to improve the patient experience by reducing wait times,” Jarvis said. “By improving the way it captured and reused information, the hospital could reduce the amount of paperwork needed to move patients within and between hospitals in the consortium."

What’s the Problem?


Jarvis’s Lean team decided early on to use the DMAIC methodology. Critical to DMAIC is the ability to gain a clear understanding of the “voice of the client.” Experience has taught Jarvis that while the client may have already identified a main problem, it often turns out that the real problem is somewhere else. Part of the Lean team’s job was to combine the DMAIC roadmap with empirical data to identify and then solve the real problem behind the validation process.

Jarvis and his team held initial brainstorming sessions with key hospital stakeholders. The goal was to gather ideas and insights that would help identify potential trouble spots. Jarvis knew that one of the best ways to manage the kind of divergent-to-convergent thinking typical of brainstorming was to use mind mapping.

As can be seen in Figure 1, mind maps capture information in a format that resembles the top-down view of a tree, with a central core, main branches that reach out from the center, and then branches that get smaller (sub-branches) and smaller (sub-sub-branches) the further out you go from the trunk.

Figure 1: Mind Map of Plan to Improve Insurance Validation Process

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Using this visual metaphor to capture their thinking, the team discovered that what they thought was one problem was, in fact, three separate but connected problems: One customer-focused, one focused on the hospital and the doctors, and the third focused on insurance. 

A Better Way to Take Notes

For each problem they created a project team. Each team included from 15 to 20 participants, from senior executives to the data entry clerks. And each team used mind mapping to keep track of their progress.

Mind mapping made note-taking a central byproduct of their meeting process. One person on each team was responsible for creating the notes. Unlike most note-taking methodologies, however, mind mapping enables that person to be an active participant in the meeting. Projected on a wall or screen, mind maps gave each team instant feedback on its thinking process and:

• Created very accurate notes, with team members correcting errors or omissions as the notes are created.
• Kept teams focused and on track, their thinking displayed clearly before them.
• Turned into agendas for subsequent meetings, complete with assigned tasks and due dates.
• Provided a concise, content-dense way to archive team thinking.

However, the term “note taking” falls far short of describing the true power of mind mapping. Unlike typically static meeting notes, mind maps are alive and dynamic. As time passed and team members continually refined their thinking, they added new thoughts to the map and revised old ones.

Putting Meat on the Bones

Now that each teams had identified its respective problem, the next step was to add relevant data. The DMAIC road map is a data-driven process.  That’s why, as part of the DMAIC process, participants must agree at the beginning of the process to provide needed data. In a sustained environment, stakeholders from, say, accounting, IT, and process owners would capture that information through system usage. But in this case, the data wasn’t immediately accessible. 

One data set the hospital teams needed was a clear understanding of the current registration process (see Figure 2). First they mapped out the process itself: Someone has an appointment to see a doctor, they come in to the hospital, they register, and their insurance information is taken down— as is their address, medical history, doctor, appointment time and reason for seeking medical care.

Figure 2: Mind Map of Current Registration Process

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The team set about linking the maps to new information and data in the form of reports, spreadsheets, slide shows, and websites. The mind maps’ drag-and-drop functionality enabled them to place supporting data immediately adjacent to the relevant insight or idea.

The team also used mind maps to analyze “internal” data – the information that is created when individuals are able to react to external data and interpret the data based on insight born from intimate familiarity with the subject. This juxtaposition of information and previous experience is where some of the best thinking and planning can take place.

Rather than being seen as isolated items or bullets frozen into a list, mind maps treat each piece of data, each idea, as pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that can be moved around at will to find the place where they fit best (see Figure 3). This kind of flexibility invariably sparked creativity as team members could see, understand and build on each other’s thinking.

Figure 3: Example of the Flexibility of Mind Maps

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“The fun part about any kind of consulting,” Jarvis said, “is when you get to brainstorm with the client, to extract information regarding the issues, regarding the problem. This is an opportunity to tap in on the creative side of your clients. Once analyzed, this information can lay the foundation for a successful project.”

From Bird’s Eye to Worm’s Eye


Analysis of this much information and ideas requires a degree of dexterity that traditional office tools are hard pressed to manage. Mind mapping uses visual shorthand to capture in one screen the kind of complexity and depth that might otherwise take 10 or 20 pages of text to represent. It does this by encouraging the use of key words and phrases, rather than full sentences; by providing a library of icons that can be used to express graphically what otherwise requires words; and by enabling users to place each piece of data into spatial context with related pieces.

This much information on one screen could be overwhelming. But another advantage of mind mapping over traditional business documents is the ability to selectively hide information. Mind map branches can, with the click of a button, collapse to reduce clutter on the screen and focus attention on a small part of the map.

Conversely, the branches also can be expanded to enable users to drill down to as much detail as they have stored in the map. By clicking on the “+” signs on the map, users can reveal additional information. That information can range from a quick thought jotted down on the fly, to entire reports, relevant emails, or information typed into a “notes” field associated with that branch. The chain links icon above indicates that additional documents or websites are hyperlinked to the branch.

The end result is an easy-to-manipulate, content-dense, and yet easily navigated kind of “information object” – a single document that gives users intuitive access to a vast amount and variety of information – all in one location.

With its initial analysis completed, the team then switched from mind mapping to project management to start optimizing the current validation process. Jarvis used a mind mapping software suite that included both mind mapping and project management capabilities to help them through this phase of the project.

Once Jarvis and his team implemented a number of control systems to monitor the reconfigured insurance validation process, mind mapping again served a key role as a concise visual overview of the new process – an information object to which new notes, screen shots, user input, and data could be added. In keeping with the final DMAIC stage of controlling the future state process, this single view helped ensure that the hospital could create a record of process imperfections and how they were corrected to keep the new process flowing smoothly.

Mind mapping’s ability to transform unstructured brainstorming into a highly structured project plan enabled Jarvis’ team to move quickly while still keeping its eyes on the main objectives established at the beginning of the project. The combined power of mind mapping plus project management supported his team through the entire project lifecycle, he said, and made it possible for the group to provide hospital management with 12 critical recommendations for its customer satisfaction improvement.

Adding to the Lean Six Sigma Toolbox

“What you're really trying to do with Six Sigma is to create a process that eliminates defects – all the things that don’t add value to the end customer,” Jarvis said. “You want to increase the customer's satisfaction with your products or services, and reduce costs associated with defects and inefficiencies. It’s all about focusing on what you need to get to the marketplace and satisfy the customer’s needs.”

Jarvis’ statement fits into a concise paragraph, but the process of following DMAIC from initial brainstorming through problem definition, data aggregation and measurement, process improvement, and finally control of the future process can be quite complex. Mind mapping is just one of the many tools that seasoned managers like Jarvis can implement with DMAIC to help streamline and simplify complexity.

Mind Mapping: A Simpler Way to Capture Information 

Fri, 15 Jul 2011 22:37:07 GMT