Month: September 2019

In the military, as in any organization, giving the order might be the easiest part. Execution is the real game. – Russel Honore

Every once in a while you look around and wonder what people do at work.

One answer is found in Robert X. Cringley’s 1993 book Accidental empires.

In his book he talks about the way companies grow – and likens what happens to a military operation.

As an army brat I grew up conscious of uniforms and rank; packing light and always being ready; and learning that I didn’t like being told what to do by anyone else.

There’s a place in an organisation, however, for almost any kind of individual – whether you fit in or not depends on what stage of growth the company is in.

In a startup, for example, you’re low on resources.

You don’t walk into a startup and get an induction and a tour and a few days briefing.

When you’re employee number one or number two into a startup you probably spend the first day building your computer.

I did anyway – I think I worked off my own machine for a while, actually.

The point is that the people you want on your team in the early days are the ones that think and act like commandos.

If you want to invade a country you don’t stroll up with your army.

You send in commandos first – so they can blow up roads and supply lines and generally soften the target before you commit your main forces.

The job of a startup is to take the beach – establish a presence in a market.

That means nothing matters except customers and product.

All the rest of the stuff can wait – policies, HR, timesheets, legals. None of those matter until you have a product or service and customers ready to try you out.

When you’ve established your presence, that’s when you send in the infantry.

These folk get into their trucks and tanks and roll up.

Yes, they’ve got to do some work. They’re the main force and they take over the job of securing and expanding your presence, fighting their way through the rest of the country.

That’s the scale up stage of your startup – when you go part the three or four people who were there from the start and bring in people to do jobs – jobs that didn’t exist till you created them.

Now, once you’ve taken control of your territory you need to get settled for the long haul.

This is when you need the administrators and the police – the rules and regulations that make for a society.

That’s the point in the life of the company where you bring in people who write policies and administer them. The ones who make rules and make sure you all follow.

This is when it becomes important to monitor and measure and watch over what your people are doing.

Customers are a lot less important now – what’s important is control and process and standards.

The first stage is exciting and you get a chance to be creative – but there’s also a very real chance you’ll fail – but also a chance you’ll do very well.

The last stage is safe and you’ll have a good career – perhaps end up being a well-regarded professional.

The middle is a solid place to be – good experience that you can take to any other company looking to scale up and build its business.

The important thing really is figuring out which one of these three types of workers you are – and then checking if you’re in the right kind of company.

If you’re a commando, you won’t last long in a third-wave company – they just wont know what to do with you and your habit of not following the rules.

And, a police officer in a first wave company will have nothing to do – everything will need policing because it’s all being done too fast and doesn’t follow the rules – but no one will stop long enough to listen.

But what’s important is knowing what’s right for you.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

The world as we have created it is a process of our thinking. It cannot be changed without changing our thinking. – Albert Einstein

The writer and podcaster Tim Ferriss came up with a soundbite that he found resonated again and again with audiences.

“The major fears of modern man”, he said, “could be boiled down to two things: too much email and getting fat.”

I don’t know about you, but I have any number of excuses for why I can’t exercise right now or tomorrow or every day.

And many of us have experienced the oscillations of diets and impulse eating and in general just how hard it is to get and stay healthy.

But this challenge is the same in many other fields as well.

It’s hard to create and sustain a healthy sales process, an operations process or a commitment to creating research output or content.

Now, when we look at problems we often come at them in one of two ways.

We think of solutions – ways to solve problems.

Or we think of them as investigations – looking to understand and explain what is happening and, in doing so, improving the situation.

But, even if you know using these processes or others what needs to be done – what stops us or our clients from implementing them?

For example, if you know and your clients know that they should have a social media marketing strategy – then why don’t they just go ahead and do it?

Are they lazy? Uninformed? Lacking in vision? Unable to grasp the nettle? Reach for the stars?

Cliches leap to mind when we think of others and how they fail to do the bleeding obvious.

The situation is more nuanced when it comes to ourselves, of course.

So, in such situations the stages of motivational readiness for change model by Prochaska and DiClemente (1983) might be a useful one.

The model, as shown in the picture above adapted to the problem of physical activity has five stages.

In the first stage you’re just not thinking about being active – it’s home from work and feet up in front of the telly.

In the second stage you’re aware of your expanding belly and wondering what you might do about it.

In the next stage you take some tentative steps – walking more, perhaps. Going for a run.

In the fourth stage you’re doing enough activity and you have been doing it for some time – perhaps exercising three times a week for the last six months.

In the last stage you’ve made it a habit – you exercise regularly and have arranged your life so that it’s something you do as part of your daily routine.

There are a few things worth noting about this model.

The first is that if you skip stages you are more likely to fail.

For example, if you are in stage 2, thinking about change and jump straight to going to the gym three times a week, the effort required and the increased chances of injury are quite likely to stop you when something goes wrong.

And when that happens you don’t go back a stage, but perhaps all the way back to the very beginning – when you stop thinking about change at all.

The second is that wherever you are in this model, you could always slide back – it’s sometimes seen as a cyclical model for that reason, as you fall back a stage and then clamber forwards again.

If you do social media marketing the similarity with a client’s journey is probably obvious.

A tool making company’s crusty old founder thinks that this whole social media thing is complete nonsense.

The next generation are more digitally savvy and trying to see what they can do.

If they move too quickly the founder will rein things in – so that have to start with a little activity.

Then, as comfort with the process grows they ramp up until they’re doing enough to keep up with the competition.

And finally, they reach digital maturity – become digitally native and thrive.

Or slide back and go out of business.

Each one’s mileage varies.

So, if you recognise that you’re in one of these stages what can you do to move forward?

Here are a few suggestions.

First, start with small changes and work up to bigger ones. Try and do things that result in success – remember that nothing succeeds like success and that works for this too.

Second, make choices that work for you and not because you think they are the right ones to do.

Don’t go running because your friends do – when you would rather lift weights or jump rope.

Pick things that work for your body and environment.

Third, assume you will fail and work out what you will do when that happens.

If you planned to go for a walk, for example, and the heavens open – what are you going to do?

Watch telly or do some yoga?

It’s important to decide ahead of time what you’ll do when things don’t work out because you’ll probably do the easiest, most pleasurable thing – like flopping on the sofa and watching telly.

The main point of this model is that even if you know what you should do – it’s really hard to get yourself motivated to do it.

The key is making it easier for you to create, grow and sustain a habit – whether it’s do with exercise or the way you run your business.

And it all starts with being more aware of which stage you’re in right now.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Tuesday, 9.01pm

Sheffield, U.K.

I am a poor mendicant. My earthly possessions consist of six spinning wheels, prison dishes, a can of goat’s milk, six homespun loincloths and towels and my reputation, which cannot be worth much. – Mahatma Gandhi

Have you ever wondered how you would pass the time if you were in prison?

Not because you’ve done something wrong and been punished by the state – but because you have done something that you believe in.

Like the people we see in stories in other parts of the world – stories about people protesting for freedom, protesting against their politicians, falling foul of a state, or perhaps as a consequence of conflict – as a prisoner of war.

The point really is not why you’re in prison, but what you’re going to do once you’re there.

This arresting TEDx talk by Captain Charlie Plumb is about the 6 years he spent in captivity in Vietnam.

Six years where he paced three steps up and three steps down – the 8-foot length and width of his prison cell.

If you were in prison, perhaps having books or even pen and paper might make it more bearable.

Surely you could at least be with your own thoughts?

Charlie Plumb didn’t have those.

Neither did Jakow Trachtenberg – who was imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp – where he came up with his system of mental mathematics to keep himself occupied.

So, how did Plumb make it through the six years he was there – what lessons does he have for the rest of us?

The starting point, he says, is that a prison eight feet long is bigger than the prison 8 inches wide that many people keep between their ears.

Whether you’re trapped in a situation you don’t know how to get out of, or are unsure about what to do next – the things holding you back can often be found in just one place.

You can do three things to escape, Plumb says.

The first thing is to pack a parachute – to be ready physically, mentally, spiritually for what may come.

Prison is a scary place – and yet people throughout history have overcome that fear to make their point.

Gandhi, for example, ate from metal prison dishes even after he was released to show that he was always ready to go back to prison in the service of his cause.

Plumb, as a military officer, had been trained for what he might face – but that didn’t make it any easier.

But being packed must have helped.

The second thing you can do is drop an anchor.

That means having something to hold on to – memories of home, of people. Faith in a higher power.

Something more than yourself – a purpose that flows through you and helps you get through each day one at a time.

And the final thing, he says, is to tug on the wire.

The wire, in his story, is the way the prisoner in the next cell communicated with him.

They had a code they could use to pass messages by moving the wire – and suddenly he had the ability to talk to someone else.

But, at first, he nearly stayed away from the wire – away from something new and risky.

And the lesson there is that when you are given a chance to try something – take it.

Be open to experimenting, to learning, to finding out.

The chances are that we’ll never have to have the same kind of experience – we hope we never have to.

But, if you think about what you would do – you probably can’t help but get stronger inside.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

In the longer run and for wide-reaching issues, more creative solutions tend to come from imaginative interdisciplinary collaboration. – Robert J. Shiller

Every once in a while I look for books at random – picking up something just because its title looks interesting.

One such book that caught my eye is Thinking theory thoroughly: Coherent approaches to an incoherent world by James N. Rosenau and Mary Durfee – dedicated to “all those who are willing to acknowledge and probe the complexities of world affairs.”

That’s a good start, in my view.

What’s also nice about the book is that in the very first chapter we’re given a useful model for thinking about theory.

But before that, why should you think about theory at all?

Well, it turns out, in case you hadn’t noticed, that the world is complicated.

It’s full of people, groups, countries, institutions, societies, tribes…

So much detail that it’s hard to imagine being able to understand any of it.

But, we can’t just give up because something is complex – we ought to make the effort to make sense – try and find meaning (or the lack of it) in what’s going on.

Rosenau and Durfee suggest that there are two things we can do.

First we can be humble – remembering always that what we think could be wrong and be open to being corrected.

And second, we can use theory.

So, what is theory.

The model of theory in the book starts with asking what reality is.

Reality is clearly the best model there can be – it’s there in complete detail laid out in front of you.

The problem is that we can’t capture all of it – imagine trying to draw a life size map of the world.

So what you have to do is choose, picking out features of interest – trees, streams, animals, houses, roads, hills.

You select things because they seem significant – in effect you’re sorting and ordering information and that is when you start creating theory.

Now if you imagine a ladder grounded in reality, the minute you step on the first rung and look around – you’re no longer standing in reality.

You are now looking down, selecting features that you can see and that seem significant.

What people forget is that the set of selected features (let’s call it theory) is no longer the same as reality – what you’ve selected forms the basis of how you look at things but a different observer may pick different things and see the same reality differently.

In other words your theory is not the same as “truth” – it’s just one point of view.

Why this matters is that as you climb the ladder and continue to select and order features and start to create stories that make sense of what you’re seeing, the theory you create evolves and changes.

And that’s how religions are created.

One comes up with a theory about a god bringing the world into creation and another comes up with a theory of a big bang.

Different facts for different folks.

Now, at the very top of the ladder you’re quite some distance from reality and a platform emerges that floats in mid-air, suspended on theory alone.

This is a paradigm – a set of ideas that can explain everything that matters.

A person who is very religion and a person who is very scientific both stand on platforms that are paradigms.

They don’t agree with each other because, to each one, they look down on a world that makes perfect sense to them.

Now, the purpose of this post is not to reconcile science and religion, but to look at other situations where arguably it’s more important that we find an accommodation.

The debate between the use of renewable energy and low carbon energy, for example.

Some people argue that we should only invest in energy from renewable sources – wind, PV and so on.

Others argue that if our aim is to use forms of energy that emit less or no carbon, we should also look at gas and nuclear.

This makes choosing which party to vote for a difficult proposition.

We like the Greens, but if we live in an area where we have the skills to make the components needed by the nuclear industry should we vote for the party that promises new nuclear jobs?

Going back to the book – it’s about the use of theory in international relations – how to manage the relationships between countries that have differing ideologies, societies and economies.

For example it argues that one paradigm – the “Realist” one – is captured in this quote from Thucydides, “The strong do what they have the power to do, the weak accept what they have to accept.”

A variant of realism called neorealism explains how any superpower will act – its fundamental goal will be to prevent others from reducing the gap in their relative capabilities.

You just have to look at what’s happening in the world now to see this playing out.

A more hopeful variant is idealism – that thinks of humans as good and moral and looks to use education and reform to improve things, with the rare use of force.

The point, I suppose, of understanding this model of theory is that you can see that we’re all stood on ladders of one kind of the other.

What you do depends not just on what you believe but on what the others around you believe – because the way they act is going to be based on the theories they have.

The tactics of non-violence that worked with the British, for example, have been less successful with other nations.

In a nutshell – it’s important to know yourself.

But more important to know your friends and enemies.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Friday, 7.01pm

Sheffield, U.K.

Our house is on fire. I am here to say, our house is on fire. […] Adults keep saying: “We owe it to the young people to give them hope.” But I don’t want your hope. I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. And then I want you to act. I want you to act as you would in a crisis. I want you to act as if our house is on fire. Because it is. – Greta Thunberg

One assumes that you are aware of the issue of climate change – and you are also aware of the news stories about how young people are asking for something to be done about it all.

It’s a reasonable question that they have, really. Why aren’t you doing more?

You older people, that is – the ones with the power and the money and the responsibility – the ones who can make things happen.

We older people…

Is it unwillingness or inability?

The thing is that the whole issue falls into a general class of problem to do with change.

Let’s say you’re driving a car and you see on the overhead signs that there is a lane closed ahead, at what point do you change lanes?

Few people pull over immediately – most carry on.

Some start to pull over as they see other cars doing so.

And some wait till they can see the lights flashing or the line of cones appearing that warns of the closure ahead.

And a few wait till the very end, coming to a complete halt at the end of the road before attempting to change lanes.

We’re just not wired, it seems, to fix things before they break.

So, I thought it might be interesting to ask why that’s the case – but it seems hard to find an answer.

One possible answer is in a paper called Nobody ever gets credit for fixing problems that never happened: Creating and sustaining process improvement by Nelson Repenning and John Sterman.

They use a systems dynamics model to explore what happens – and this is shown in the picture above.

In a systems model, then you can think through six steps.

1. Actual performance comes from capability and time

You can think of capability as a stock – a quantity that you can add to or lose by investing in it or simply allowing it to erode, for example by losing people through resignations or retirement.

How you do at anything you’re working on depends on two things – the capability you have and the time you spend.

The combination of these results in actual performance.

So then you can look at the performance gap – the gap between desired performance and actual performance.

A change in the desired performance widens the performance gap while a change in the actual performance can reduce it.

2. Spending time on improvement increases capability

The next obvious insight is that spending time looking at how you do things and trying to find ways to do them better increases your capability.

If you study your processes and do things with less materials, less energy or fewer people, you become more effective, more efficient and more capable.

But, it doesn’t happen at once – you first experience delays as you take the winding roads and wrong turns before you learn how to do things better.

This delay is quite important – we’ll come back to it later.

3. Improve performance by working harder

You can get a boost in performance by spending more time on the job.

If you work 40 hours a week, then work 50, or 60 or 200 hours a week.

Whatever it takes to get the job done.

Ah… there are only 168 hours in a week – so you’re going to max out at that limit.

Except, if you work 24 hours a day for two weeks you’re probably going to be unable to do much more work for a while.

So working harder boosts performance but often only in the short term – and you often sink below the original level as people and machines burn out.

4. Improve performance by working smarter

Working smarter means putting pressure on people to get better at what they do – to improve capability.

This means they have to spend more time on improvement work.

Which in turn improves capability – not immediately, but over time.

But people don’t like to wait or are uncomfortable with the idea that they might not get a result – or at least not the same kind of immediate result they get by just working harder.

5. The pressure to work harder takes time away from improvement work

When you ask people to work harder, they stop doing less important stuff – like maintenance and improvement.

In a sense they reinvest in doing less improvement – and so things start getting worse again.

6. Start taking shortcuts

At which point, people start taking shortcuts – hiding things, cutting corners or doing the minimum.

In effect they trade short term performance for long term maintenance.

But, as you’ve guessed by now, this also eventually causes problems as the shortcuts mean machines fail, documentation is non-existent and training gets cancelled.

The only way is to take the time

The only long term sustainable solution is to take the time to improve capability – and accept that there will be a delay before things improve.

If you start a business right now – accept that it could be three years before you invoice your first client.

Accept that if you start a sales and marketing program now it could be three years before your pipeline looks healthy.

And accept that if you want to reduce the amount of carbon you emit, it could be three years before you see a statistically significant reduction.

Or it could be longer.

The point is that just saying that we are going to reach a point of no-return in a year is not enough.

If that is the case, we’re going to have to learn to live with that new normal.

What we can do is start to work towards long-term change, by improving the way in which we live on the planet.

Because here’s the thing – the planet really doesn’t care whether you exist or not.

If you accept the Gaia hypothesis, the Earth will find a way to self-regulate itself – perhaps by creating conditions where humans cannot live.

Or, it could just stop being able to support life at all – become just another rock in space.

The fact is that humans have to act smarter – together.

Can we?

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh