Easy in theory, difficult in practice

Regular readers of my blog will know how much I loathe the term "lessons learned". I've written and spoken frequently about implementation issues such as waiting too long to identify them, storing them in a manner which makes accessing them challenging and not responding to them in an appropriate manner. One of the more common problems I have encountered when reviewing lessons is a lack of contextual information to enable a reader to understand whether a given lesson is going to help or hinder them.

This is not a concern when the lessons are going to be applied to the same project in which they were identified. For example, if a team identifies a learning from a retrospective and decides to apply it afterwards, the likelihood of context drift is low, hence the lesson is still apropos. It is also not as big a deal if lessons are shared verbally, for example, through a Community of Practice meetup. During such events, if a participant shares a learning, contextual information will usually be shared through the normal back and forth discussion about the practice.

But when practitioners are reviewing lessons captured in the past without the benefit of access to the originator, if context is absent there is a much greater likelihood of practices being applied in situations where they won't be helpful (i.e. a false positive) or practices being discarded based on the incorrect assumption that they weren't applicable (i.e. a false negative). In both cases, an opportunity to benefit from organizational knowledge assets is lost.

So what context might we capture?

At a bare minimum, we should record when the lesson was identified, on which project and by whom. Doing so will take the least effort on the part of the lesson identifier and the lesson curator (the person who is responsible for distilling "raw" lessons into published knowledge). With this, an interested reader has the ability to follow up with the person who identified the lesson to get the missing context.

Unfortunately, memories do fade with time and people will move into new roles or leave the company so such minimalist context may be insufficient. Time and cost permitting, the following additional types of contextual information could be captured:

• Quantitative metrics about the project such as its duration, cost, and peak staffing level
• What stage or phase of the project is the lesson applicable
• What type of life cycle was used to deliver the project (e.g. deterministic, adaptive, iterative)
• A categorization of the project's scope (e.g. process engineering, launching a new product, building a dam)
• Specific background details about the lesson which may have been stripped away from the main description through the process of scrubbing it to be useful but shouldn't be discarded entirely

This seems like a lot to capture and will take effort to do so. But if we remember that lessons are an investment in improved future project outcomes, the returns will justify the costs of doing so.

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair" - Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

Had Charles Dickens been alive today he might have been writing about 2020. Given the human suffering generated by the pandemic in addition to the cornucopia of "normal" annual calamities, it would be very tempting to try to forget this last year as quickly as possible.

But to do so means we lose the chance to appreciate what we have learned over the course of the year. Here is what I learned.

Don't try to time the (shopping) market

Just as it is true that attempting to purchase a company's stock when it is soaring is a bad idea, the same is true when it comes to shopping for specific products. Emotions and expectations drive buying trends in very much the same manner as they do the direction of the stock market.

With personal protective equipment, baker's yeast or exercise dumbbells, I found myself trying to purchase during a time of peak demand and ending up paying premium prices or just not finding what I was looking for. I am still wishing that I had bought an extra pack or two of Lysol disinfectant wipes when I had the chance.

On a positive note, I consider myself to be very lucky that we took the decision to adopt a puppy in the early summer just as the demand for pets was surging. Had we procrastinated, we might have still been waiting and would have missed out on the all the fun and frustration which comes with the arrival of a new member to the family.

Every change has a silver lining

I will admit that I was a holdout when it came to delivering live virtual courses. There is something about the personal human connection which is greater when teaching in person than can be achieved through the use of video conferencing technology. But when it became apparent that to resist transitioning meant I'd be idle for the remainder of the year, I committed to making this work.

We were fortunate to have picked a great platform in Miro, and through the process of migrating our courseware to it, I joined a thriving user community. I could never have anticipated that this experience would give me the opportunity to become a community moderator, get some short moonlighting gigs helping others with their virtual board design work and contribute to the evolution of the platform.

Time keeps on slipping, slipping, slipping, so carpe diem

In the late Spring, with my forecast of work for the remainder of the year at a much lower level than normal, I felt sure I'd be able to knock off quite a few personal projects. Unfortunately, Parkinson's Law applies to low value activities as much as it does to meaningful work. Having that many more free days meant I had that much more time to COVID-19 doom scroll, watching one news show after another about the pandemic and, of course, Netflix binging.

I spent more time on personal development and delivered more presentations than I had in previous years but I could have done more. When December arrived and I was left with just a couple of weeks, I finally developed the true sense of urgency I needed to start the publishing process for my first book. I guess I can say better late than never!

So what will you take away from the past year?

Daniel Goleman wrote this week in an HBR article with regards to emotional intelligence: "...one of the most persistent things I see people get wrong about the concept is that it equates to being “nice.” But it doesn’t, and misunderstanding this can get people into trouble."

Some people have the same misunderstanding about psychological safety.

If team members misinterpret safety to be about prioritizing each other's happiness over all else, this might result in a seemingly pleasant work environment. When staff suppress legitimate concerns with what others are either doing or proposing to do to avoid coming across as being unpleasant it can lead to issues such as:

• Health and safety incidents. Lets say a team member, Bob, insists on using an electrical space heater to warm his office workstation area in the winter months. This is not permitted by facilities management in order to avoid potential fires. Bob's manager, Sally, and his cubicle neighbor, Jim, are both aware of the space heater and the fact that its usage is not permitted, but are unwilling to request that Bob remove it. They value short term preservation of the "nice" team atmosphere more than the potential long term benefits of reducing physical risk.
• Contributing to increased staff frustration. In the previous example, lets say that Jim is someone who likes to follow the rules and it really is bothering him that Bob is not doing so. Jim might be sufficiently self-aware to acknowledge his reluctance to directly challenge Bob, but would expect that Sally as their reporting manager should have already done so. Jim's respect for Sally will decrease and, over time, he might start genuinely disliking Bob. Such perceptions will reduce team morale as well as the team's performance. In an extreme situation, if Jim gets too frustrated he might even request a transfer to a different team.
• Groupthink impeding experimentation and true innovation. Creativity demands the type of healthy interpersonal conflict which emerges when there are differences of opinion on how to proceed. But if staff are concerned about coming across as being overly argumentative or un-supportive of their peers ideas, those ideas will be implemented without challenge which is likely to result in mediocre or even failed outcomes.
• Throttling personal development. Self-awareness is a catalyst for personal growth but constructive, candid feedback is usually more effective. It helps individuals to become aware of the need for personal change sooner than they would have otherwise. It also helps them on an ongoing basis by providing the reinforcement required to sustain a behavioral change.

In her Radical Candor™ framework, Kim Scott calls this dysfunction of co-workers prioritizing niceness over other positive behaviors as Ruinous Empathy™ and it runs counter to the essence of psychological safety which is to remove fear from the workplace.

If we are afraid to be seen as "not nice" by providing feedback, challenging a decision or taking a stand then how can we say that we feel safe?

An article published this week on HBR.org indirectly identified another casualty of low psychological safety: future leadership.

In the article, the authors highlighted three key reasons why capable people are reluctant to lead. Laziness or inertia did not make the list, but if we give the Homer Simpson who is in all of us an opportunity to take over, his influence could be a fourth contributor!

The three causes of reluctance which were identified are:

• Interpersonal risk which is the perceived or real fear of damaged relationships with our (former) peers when we are now leading them
• Image risk which is the fear that our peers might think badly of us for taking on a leadership role
• The risk of being personally blamed if the people we are leading are unable to achieve team goals

What was very surprising to me is that the authors never made any explicit references to psychological safety, and yet that is an effective vaccine to prevent these ailments.

Later in the same article, the authors provided some suggestions on how senior leaders can reduce these fears by:

• Actively encouraging and supporting those junior colleagues who might be reluctant about taking on leadership roles. This could include actions such as publicly recognizing those who were willing to "step up".
• Demonstrating ways of effectively managing conflict so that these future leaders learn to recognize the differences between task-related, healthy conflicts and relationship-oriented, unhealthy ones. This will help staff to become less worried about how to handle the team conflicts which they will inevitably face.
• Reducing the probability of failure by finding low risk opportunities for staff to lead. When staff are able to successfully fulfill their first few leadership roles, they are likely to be more willing to take on riskier ones.

All three of these are also recognized as appropriate actions for cultivating psychological safety.

Ralph Nader said "The function of leadership is to produce more leaders, not more followers."

Producing more leaders means that we need to help our staff to overcome the reluctance to lead. To do so, the ability to build psychological safety within teams needs to be given the same weighting when evaluating leadership competencies as utilizing strategic thinking or demonstrating good judgment and hence it deserves to be explicitly called out in such articles.

The final stage in the three-step model for building psychological safety within your team is to champion it. A champion is not afraid of taking on all challengers and you might face plenty of those.

You may have some team members who are used to getting their way by ridiculing or bullying others.

You could have a mix of managers and their direct reports within your team. Some of these managers might wield their formal authority to suppress concerns raised by their reports. In other cases, the managers might be quite comfortable to operate in a flat power structure alongside their staff, but their reports might be worried or insecure about challenging their managers.

There may be some stakeholders outside of your team such as the project customer, sponsor or a functional manager who behave in a manner which reduces the team's safety. This could include actions such as criticizing them with personal attacks during meetings or threatening them if they don't meet certain milestones.

Assuming you have followed some of the planning suggestions I provided in my earlier article, it is unlikely that these behaviors are the result of the perpetrators being ignorant of the importance of psychological safety and the relationship it had on team performance. A a leader, once you have confirmed that the behaviors are not just your perception, it is your responsibility to confront the stakeholders and convince them to change how they interact with your team.

How you go about doing that is context-specific and will depend heavily upon your powers of persuasion as well as the degree of influence you have over them. It is possible that the stakeholder might be senior to you, or worse, might even be your people manager or your manager's manager. That is not an excuse for not creating a safe space for your team.

Hopefully you can convince the stakeholder that creating team safety will increase the odds of a successful project outcome, but if the success of your project is not something they care about or they refuse to change in spite of the negative impacts their behavior has, don't hesitate to escalate to someone who is keen on seeing the project succeed and is able to apply the necessary leverage to the offending stakeholder.

But if those approaches don't work, what next?

Champions carry shields to protect them during duels and you might need to act as a human shield between the stakeholder and your team members. It could be very difficult to force this stakeholder to solely interact with you, but that might be the only way to keep them from affecting team safety.

And if that fails, you have to decide between your personal safety (e.g. your job or financial recognition) and the safety of your team. Drawing a line in the sand and being comfortable with walking away from the role if the situation is not addressed might seem like an extreme action, but positive changes sometimes only happen when one person makes a stand.

“If you make any excuse for not extending psychological safety, you’re choosing to value something else more than human beings.” - Timothy R. Clark, The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety