It’s nearly Fezziwig time – a reference to the beloved Dickens story, A Christmas Carol. Fezziwig was a jovial business owner who was known for throwing warm and family-friendly business parties on Christmas Eve.
As we prepare for our own end-of-year celebrations, many of us are being faced with the proverbial fly in the punchbowl this year. As I do my regular year-end check-in calls with senior leadership with technology backgrounds in both op’s and staff roles, I’m hearing one key theme louder than ever.
Fatigue.
Unanticipated Collaboration
In broad strokes, there are two kinds of fatigue. The first is when we have to create something we know how to do, yet we have to do it too long and we approach exhaustion. This is a time-on-task problem. The second type is when we need to create results and don’t have a clear path or process so we find a way to move in the right direction, no matter how inefficient, and struggle through it. This is a framework and process problem.
This pandemic drove us into the second type – almost overnight. Senior leaders needed to meet daily to make decisions that had the effect of setting global policy. This led to an unprecedented need to work cross-functionally in the firm…building the proverbial airplane while flying it.
If that pressure wasn’t enough, there is a natural pattern and challenge in having the production domain work directly with the creative domain. Those who work in the production domain favor simple and low-risk paths to solutions. Creative domain leaders tend to think outside of the box and want to move rapidly from idea to implementation, sometimes combing multiple ideas at the same moment. You would think that would be great, but without careful decision-making contributions from process guardians, it is easy to get substandard decisions.
All things considered, this work needs to have a strong champion and an agreed structure to work well.
How the STRIDE Framework Can Help
Some time ago, recognizing the need for this structure for cross-functional teams led to the development of a framework used to help teams, leaders, and sponsors quickly form and guide mission-based teams in a productive way.
The first feature of this framework is that the creative work and the work to scale are two separate zones (the double line in the adjacent image). Secondly, the journey of creating and scaling is broken into five zones, which helps the team to not get in front of the needed work to successfully complete the mission. Parsing the work into these five zones allows the group to ask the right questions and have confidence that before they invest in implementing, the solution will be vetted. Once the team has a structure and a vocabulary, it moves the work to a time on task problem and allows the work to be spread more productively in the group (For more information on STRIDE please see articles here, here and here).
Experience pointed me toward three zones these senior COVID teams would find difficult, and having that foresight allowed me to help these groups prepare and move through them.
#1: Expecting Consensus on One Path Forward
What it is: Team after team would start down the path of trying to come to a concrete consensus in the midst of ambiguity. They would get frustrated at the need to backtrack and remake decisions that seemed already made.
How it causes stress: The drive to one viewpoint is like trying to complete a puzzle when pieces are missing. You think you’re about there and then realize that there is much more to the pattern. When data doesn’t fit the story it threatens all the progress up to that point.
How to defuse it: Use scenarios to capture more than one viewpoint when developing strategy allows pictures to form and be useful in the face of ambiguity. Scenarios release creativity by not forcing conformity too early in the process.
Using the first two phases of STRIDE, we work hard to uncover what we know and what we know we don’t know. We then go to work in Reality to surface the unknown unknowns.
In one client’s case, we needed to look at getting needed production from their upstream suppliers, rapid fill contractor manufacturing, and bringing their own resources back online. By working the three scenarios, they were able to meet all their just-in-time delivery levels and smoothly transition to business as usual. If they had driven a choice that gave them a single path, they would have been unable to meet demand.
#2: Expecting strategy would flow directly to ops implementation
What it is: There is a natural divide between those who research and create products and those who produce them in how they are measured, their processes, and work styles. When the ops group loses an hour of production, they never see it again. When the creative group invests an hour out of due diligence, one moment of insight can save the firm – literally. With the addition of COVID stress, the divide was even sharper.
How it causes stress: To monetize creative work, it must pass from the concept domain to the production domain. In the STRIDE model, this is the R/I handoff, and if you don’t anticipate and plan well for it, the baton will drop every time.
How to defuse it: Carefully build the team and lead them in a way that honors both groups. In our work, we teach leaders to curate the right team members, equip them to truly work as a team, and set them up for success with decision-making systems that are anchored in creating client value. The key to this is finding vocabulary and a bridging objective that becomes the “why” for the team to work together.
#3: Expecting ops to be able to run independently too quickly
What it is: During “normal” times we value efficiency in our operations and want them to run “lights out.” We build people, process, and technology systems that have careful control, great stewardship, and reliability. In times of challenge, we have to take things off “auto-pilot” and manually intervene.
How it causes stress: Suspending normal operations is always stressful, as there are always unanticipated consequences. Leaders who are risk-averse and conservative will have strong emotions associated with anything that increases risk and generates waste.
How to defuse it: To effectively run in hybrid mode takes the full scope of leadership capabilities represented on the team including charismatic visionaries, intense catalytic operators, deliberate process-oriented team members that thrive on details. This mix led by a skilled integrator champion can take the team “around” the crisis and get it back on the tracks. In our work, we invest time and energy making sure that the team has access to passionate thinking from each of these viewpoints and listen carefully for any voices that are missing from the debate.
Fatigue Makes Us All Vulnerable – A Little Coaching Goes a Long Way
Conquering the complexity that COVID has sent our way has been job one for 75% of 2020 and its normal to be feeling its effects. It’s also normal to want to get more control and more insight into how to move through this “mid zone” to the better normal we are all looking for.
If you’d like to go to work on some personal coaching or gather more information on STRIDE and how it could take some uncertainty out of your world, please reach out.
You can reach me at scott@scottpropp.com or text me at 847-651-1014.
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