Stephen Billing’s Blog

In the previous post I pointed out the significance, for generating new ideas, of conversations with diverse people – people with different backgrounds, ways of looking at things, and professional affiliations, for example.

Any leader in an organisation, or entrepreneur has to engage in interactions with others in order to get a business going or keep it running. The entrepreneur or leader may have clear goals in mind, or may be in the process of shaping up his or her intentions, exploring different options and potential paths. Either way, it is through interactions with others that these plans take shape and are brought to fruition. The others that the entrepreneur is interacting with have their own intentions, goals and plans. The entrepreneur has to respond to these different goals and intentions, as they emerge in the course of these interactions with others.

Some of these interactions will take place during meetings that might be quite formal and have agendas that are known in advance, written down and followed quite closely during the meeting. Other important interactions will take place much more informally – sometimes in response to an unexpected opportunity, a chance meeting or as a result of a casual conversation over coffee. It is important for leaders and entrepreneurs to be looking for such opportunities and paying attention to what is going on.

A colleague (Diana Jones) told me the other day that there is quite a lot of interest in so-called agendaless meetings. Rightly so, in my opinion, because most interaction does take place in agendaless meetings, in more informal settings, and through casual conversation during which no formal agenda is ever put together.

But it would be for many people working in organisations, quite risky to get together a group of senior people to meet without having a formal agenda. At the same time, many would find this idea appealing, recognising the opportunity for generating ideas, relatively free flow of information and learning what people really think.

In such meetings, the traditional chairing skills and formal meeting procedure would not be very useful. What is important in such meetings is facilitation, such as making sure everyone has the opportunity to speak, handling conflict productively when it arises, listening to others, expressing your point of view, noticing the patterning of the conversation especially when something new happens, finding ways to take advantage of unexpected opportunities that arise.

Such informal "agendaless" meetings are given far less prominence in the leadership literature compared to the weight placed on presenting and chairing at meetings. This is somewhat strange given that, although leaders and entrepreneurs will have to chair formal meetings with agendas and follow meeting procedure, the bulk of their interactions take place outside such formal settings. And the formality of such settings can reduce the range of acceptable contributions that people make to the meeting.

If you are trying to generate new ideas, innovation or creativity, you actually want to stimulate a range of diverse input, rather than reducing the kinds of contributions that people make through formalising them.

Therefore, as a leader or entrepreneur, do pay attention to the casual conversations you are part of, and recognise how important they are to your results as a leader or entrepreneur. And consider convening some group interactions as "agendaless" meetings to see how you go. Of course, the term "agendaless" refers only to the lack of a formal agenda. There is no such thing as a truly "agendaless" meeting because all the participants will have their own intentions, interests and goals (or agendas) that they want to pursue. This comes with the territory of being a human working in an organisation.

Having a formal agenda doesn’t do away with the goals, interests and intentions of the participants. Such goals, interests and intentions of the participants are unlikely to make it onto the formal agenda of a meeting anyway.

To find more posts on this blog about formal and informal meetings, click here.

Entrepreneurship is often considered to involve the establishment of something new. So it is worth thinking about how new ideas come about in organisations.

It has long been thought that it takes a certain kind of person to come up with new ideas. The tortured artist mining the depths of an extraordinary imagination or artistic vision is one instance of this. Another is the model found in advertising agencies where the "creatives" are responsible for coming up with ideas according to the briefs developed and sold by the "suits".

So creative ideas have commonly been considered to be the domain of certain individuals who have a predisposition to creativity. For example, it is said that Einstein dreamt that he was riding a wave of light and this was a key part of his theory of relatively. Or Archimedes sitting in his bath shouting "eureka" when he realised his body mass was displacing the water. Or Newton coming up with the theory of gravity after being hit on the head while sitting under an apple tree.

While some individuals undoubtedly have greater facility for creativity than others, this does not reveal much about how it comes about that these new ideas are generated, apart from some mysterious faculty possessed by these creative people and not by others.

In studies of complexity, computer agents are programmed to interact with each other, over and over again. The computer can model countless iterations of populations of agents interacting with each other, which in the real world would take years or centuries to study. For example, patterns resembling the flocking of birds or the swarming of bees are able to be replicated, as are models of the rise and fall of populations of different species, as some species (i.e. types of agents) become populous and dominant for periods of time, often long periods of time, before they wane and die away. These patterns very much resemble the rise and fall of civilisations like the Greeks, Romans and even the British empire.

One of the most useful and interesting applications of this computer modeling of the complexity emerging from myriad interactions like this, is that the patterns that arise in the populations only change if the agents are different from each other. If the agents are the same, then the patterns repeat themselves. It is only if the agents are different from each other that new patterns emerge.

This is to suggest that it is from the interaction of diverse agents that novelty arises. Innovation or newness in these patterns, then, could be said to be a property of the interaction of diverse agents itself.
 

This provides an explanation for the innovative potential of multi-disciplinary teams, as long as the differences can be handled in ways that don’t blow the team apart through conflict.

This suggests that if you are an entrepreneur wanting to generate a new idea or establish or grow a business, you would do well to seek out interactions with others who are different from you in their backgrounds, professional history, experience, professional discipline, and approach. Seek mentors, directors and investors who think differently from you and have different world views. Seek employees who likewise have different backgrounds from you.

As an entrepreneur, it is from these multiple interactions and discussions you have with diverse others that you will generate new understanding and ideas that you can use to grow your business.

I think the main thing that distinguishes entrepreneurship from management or other forms of organisation is that with entrepreneurship a person takes the risk of bringing into being about an idea in a business form.

Much thinking about entrepreneurship focuses on the originality of the idea, and there are certainly plenty of examples of inventors or people with original ideas who create successful businesses.

For example, I am quite excited about the guy who has invented a jet pack that allows personal flight and am looking forward to the Jetson-age type of travel this might allow – no more traffic jams! Please hurry up and get this idea commercially perfected so that I can easily fly into Wellington city for my day’s work. Although I am also imagining mid air crashes and a whole set of new airborne traffic regulations.

However, I don’t think entrepreneurial flair is actually so much about the originality of the idea as it is about a combination of the idea and the execution. Richard Branson is an example of someone who would be seen as an entrepreneur, but not necessarily an inventor of new ideas.

I think about my own business, for example. I am a management consultant, and I am certainly not the first management consultant to exist in the world. In fact, I owe a great debt to other management consultants who have gone before me and have created a tradition in which I walk that has generated a market for the services I offer. Nevertheless I definitely offer these services in my own unique way.

So, what is it that is entrepreneurial about all this? One aspect is not working for an employer – being your own boss, and, so to speak, probably gaining the hardest boss of all. (more…)

In my last post I highlighted Saras Sarasvathy’s simile of a meal that can be prepared either by designing a menu and then assembling the ingredients to make the meal (which she calls causation) or by looking to see what ingredients are to hand and choosing the dishes based on the ingredients in the cupboard.

I am struck by how many corporate change initiatives focus on the set pieces such as road shows, documents and deadlines. The change team prepares a plan with these events set to occur at certain intervals. This is very similar to preparing a series of three course dinners over the course of the project. (more…)

Saras Sarasvathy from the University of Washington uses the analogy of creating a menu for a dinner party, where you decide in advance what dishes to have and then go shopping for the ingredients (in an article published in the Academy of Management Review (available by subscription). She contrasts this with cooking a meal by looking in the cupboards to decide what to cook that evening. At our place, we use both methods, depending on the circumstances.

Sarasvathy points out that you can have dinner by either method. You can plan a menu in advance, then go shopping to make sure you have all the ingredients. This method she calls causation, because it’s a process of determining in advance what the meal will be, and then causing it to happen by shopping or acquiring the ingredients which cause the predetermined dish to materialise.

You can also have a meal based on what is in the cupboards, fridge and freezer – looking for the ingredients you have on hand and then deciding what to make with those ingredients. For example, we have a copy of Digby Law’s Vegetable Cookbook which is arranged in order of vegetable used. Inserted in this book are many recipes using particular vegetables so that if we are looking for what to do with cauliflower, for example, we have Digby’s ideas already published in the book plus a number of clippings for cauliflower recipes that have been stuffed in the relevant section like book marks. It’s primitive, but it works for us when we are trying to put together a dinner from what’s in the fridge. We also use Cuisine magazine’s amazing Meal Maker function for this – you can enter your ingredients and the software searches Cuisine’s recipes using those ingredients to give you some ideas for what to make with, say broccoli. Brilliant.

Planning a menu in advance, or causation, is similar to what happens in organisations when senior managers (i.e. chefs) determine in advance what results are wanted and then cause it to happen, through their actions. Let’s assume for the purposes of the post that managers can decide what result they want and then bring it about. This idea is problematic but is not the subject of this post, so I’ll leave it there for now.

Making a meal from available ingredients is what Sarasvathy calls effectuation, and she likens it to the entrepreneur’s task of working out what to do with the limited resources available. In other words, the entrepreneur does not have the resources available to go shopping to buy expensive ingredients like caviar and crayfish, but instead must work out how best to utilise the available resources such as contacts, technology and finances to create something that potential customers will be interested in. 

More information on Sarasvathy’s ideas on effectuation can be found at www.effectuation.org.

I posted earlier about thinking being a silent conversation one has with oneself, and this is an inherently social way of viewing the process of thinking. It is inherently social because it is viewing thinking as a process of silent interaction.

There is another, less obvious way in which this view of thinking is radically social. It is in the make up of the participants in the silent conversation that consitutes thinking.

Who is talking to whom in this silent conversation I am having with myself? Who is doing the talking, and who are they talking to? Please bear with me and see if I can answer this question, drawing on George Herbert Mead and Ralph Stacey.

The answer is that different aspects of the self are talking to each other. "I" am talking to "me." The aspect doing the talking is "I" as the subject, doer or initiator of action.

The aspect being spoken to is "me" as the object, the recipient of the action.

The "I" as the subject doing the talking is the individual in the present moment responding to the "me."

Mead pointed out that as humans we have the capacity to take on the attitude of the other person. In other words, you can perform an imaginative feat in which you experience what it would be like to be in the other person’s place. Mead said that it is because we can imagine ourselves in the other person’s shoes that we have human consciousness.

You imagine yourself in the other person’s shoes based on your experience of many social interactions over time – the results you received from these interactions and what they meant to you. These imaginings are therefore socially based because of the social experience you have had. For example, I moved around a lot when I was growing up and so would often have to leave my friends behind and make new ones. If you were brought up by different parents or in a different culture you would have different experiences and so your view of what the other person would be making of you would be different.

Humans also have a tendency to generalise.

The "me" taking part in the silent conversation of thinking is a generalisation that represents your generalised view of what society thinks of you. Society in this case is that group of people whom you identify with.

In a process that utilises both our human tendency to generalise and also our capacity to take on the attitude of the other, we imagine what others think of us. Our imagining of what others think of us is the "me" that is participating in our silent conversation.

This conversation between "I" and "me" is never resolved. It is a conversation in which "I" am constantly responding, in the present moment, to "me." In other words I am constantly responding to the generalised view that I think others have of me.

There, simple eh?

Thinking is a process of silent conversation with oneself and is therefore a social activity.

It makes you more effective when thinking about organisational change to be able to articulate what you think it means to be a person and to think. Why? Because how you think about what people are doing in organisations when they are thinking affects what you do to help influence the course of change. This is so in many subtle ways, whether or not you are aware of your assumptions about human consciousness. If you are aware of your assumptions about what it is to be human, you can be more deliberate in your effectiveness in organisational change.

Most people think of the mind as being something that lives inside a person’s head, something separate from the brain, that controls the actions of the body.

George Herbert Mead talked instead about a conversation of gesture and response in which meaning arises from the gesture and response taken together.

He proposed that thinking was the process of engaging in silent conversation with oneself. This makes sense in terms of our experience in which we do talk to ourselves. As a tennis player I tell myself to do things like hit up through the ball. And I hear other players admonishing themselves to "Concentrate" or "hit it" or "move." The silent conversation is then spoken aloud and in some cases becomes an exasperated shout!

So, this highlights one way in which the process of thinking, because it consists of silent interaction, is a social process.

Instad of thinking about thinking as a property of the individual, think of the mind and its process of thinking as silent conversation. This silent conversation is what constitutes human consciousness, and one of the great benefites of this view is that it means that cognitive processes do not need to remain a mystery as properties of individuals that we can never reveal or become aware of.

Instead, if you realise that thinking is a process of silent conversation, you can become aware of it and engage with others in their process of silent conversation. This will make you more effective as a facilitator of change in your organisation.

Suggestions for team meetings

Looking at the whole context of your group’s dynamics over a month or so can help you to identify the natural flows of interaction and how your team meetings can best contribute to and shape it.

What kinds of interaction does your team need? in a month? Most teams need opportunities for the following:

• Understanding what is going on in the organisation that may affect their work.
• Working on ideas for improving your operation.
• Catching up on new developments or information that affects the team.
• Knowing how the team is performing.
• Acknowledging / celebrating success.
• Letting off steam.

Some team meetings rather unrealistically try to achieve all these things in one session – no wonder no one ends up being satisfied! Please don’t think that the team meeting has to accomplish all these things. Think of the other avenues you have for the different kinds of interaction that are required.

For example, do you have Friday night drinks, or a regular day when you have morning or afternoon tea together? If so, then that can provide an opportunity for people to let off steam. You can couple that with acknowledging success. One company I know puts up their wins for the week on a whiteboard at their Friday night drinks – this practice began when they were first starting out. Facing some tough times they decided to use this as a way of focusing on some of the positive things that tended to get buried during a difficult period.

In one group I know, everyone comes to work 30 minutes early (not because they’re super-motivated – it’s so they can get a carpark) and this time before work is where they catch up on how things are going in their personal lives, let off steam and develop their informal relationships with each other.

Even if you don’t have this kind of opportunity for informal group dynamics to take place, you could consider having an ‘informal’ meeting every second time you meet, where there is a much more informal agenda.

Or you could allocate a section of the meeting for informal checking in, perhaps at the start for example. There will always be new developments in your organisation and so it’s good if you can keep this on the regular agenda.

As far as team performance goes, if you are reporting monthly, then you could include this as part of your meeting once a month around reporting time, so it doesn’t have to be on every agenda.

The thing with team meetings is to consider the overall flow of your team’s work and how the team meetings can assist in facilitating the group dynamics your team requires to accomplish its work.

In which I begin contemplating that common bug bear of working groups: team meetings

Recently clients, friends and participants in my management development workshops alike have all been talking with me about team meetings. What are yours like? How frequent? Do you and your team look forward to them? Or are they in the category of “necessary (or unnecessary) evil”. 

When it comes to making team meetings more productive, there is plenty of advice out there about improving team meetings by tightening up control of the meeting.

The following, for example, are all ways of attempting to gain control of the meeting in order to make it more productive:

• Having a preset agenda. 
• Rotating the chairing of the meeting.
• Establishing ground rules.
• Assigning strict amounts of time to each topic.

Of course, these are all attempts by the facilitator to control the meeting in the interests of achieving the predetermined outcomes.

Needless to say I have a different approach.

I think it is useful to consider team meetings in the context of the overall patterns and flows of communication throughout the course of a week or a month.

What do I mean by that? More about this in my next post.

 In which I discover the blog of Chris Mowles and appreciate his take on how we might make the best use of time in meetings.

I have just discovered the blog of Chris Mowles called Reflexive Practice, who, like me, is exploring organisations as complex responsive processes. Chris and I did our doctorates together and he is now on the faculty of the Complexity and Management Centre at the University of Hertfordshire where we studied together.

Coincidentally, as I have been writing my most recent posts about time seen as the living present (here, here and here), Chris has also been writing about the living present (here) – in his case about how our theories of time affect our meetings.

In his latest blog post, Chris points to how our desire to ‘make good use of the time’ in the meeting can lead to over-planning and attempts to tie things down to the last minute. He makes a good point that it assumes that we can anticipate how things will unfold at a certain time in the future and that our current thinking is adequate for the situation we will encounter when we meet together.

Chris comes to the conclusion that our meetings never unfold in a linear fashion but emerge as we struggle with each other over what we think we are doing and who we are. Skillful discussants then will allow for episodes of reflection, be alert to suggestions and conflict, be tolerant of ambiguity and and have an expectation that important and unplanned things may arise as a consequence.

I have written in a similar vein from the point of view of facilitation that tolerates and encourages this reflection and ambiguity.

Thanks Chris, I am looking forward to reading more of your provocative work.