Change Agent Leadership and Facilitation
Published in
9 min readNov 10, 2021
Links to support further development in change agent leadership and facilitation
Meetings and Schedules
- Manager vs Maker schedule — https://www.fs.blog/2017/12/maker-vs-manager/
- The original Paul Graham article is here- http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html
- 6 meeting rules — https://blog.percolate.com/2014/06/6-meeting-rules-of-percolate
- Motivating people to be on time — http://innolution.com/blog/motivating-people-to-be-on-time
- Meeting agreements for high performing teams — https://blog.usejournal.com/meeting-agreements-for-high-performing-teams-b10311a630d0
- Estimate cost of a meeting — Fun calculator to show how quickly the cost of a 1 hour meeting with a lot of people add up -https://hbr.org/2016/01/estimate-the-cost-of-a-meeting-with-this-calculator
- Are ghost rules holding back your team — http://www.accidentalcreative.com/leading/ghost-rules-holding-team-back
Coaching and Facilitation
- The need for facilitation — https://medium.com/@designforsustainability/the-need-for-facilitation-b0c776922bc1
- Do you coach or mentor and do you know the difference? — https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/do-you-coach-mentor-know-difference-brett-o-connor
BOOK — Herding Tigers: Be the Leader That Creative People Need — Todd Henry
Relating to decision making and biases
- Jeff Bezos — Disagree and commit — https://www.businessinsider.com.au/jeff-bezos-explains-the-perfect-way-to-make-risky-business-decisions-2017-4
- “Most decisions should probably be made with somewhere around 70% of the information you wish you had. If you wait for 90%, in most cases, you’re probably being slow,”
- Leader’s framework for decision making — Introduction to Cynefin Framework for understanding problems — https://hbr.org/2007/11/a-leaders-framework-for-decision-making
- More on Cynefin Framework developed by Kurtz and Snowden.
- Learn how to be more effective by applying the 6 principles of persuasion => Reciprocity; Scarcity; Authority; Consistency; Linking; Consensus
- Mental models and Cognitive Biases — Related to the group think topic we ran through
- Mental models I find repeatedly useful — https://medium.com/@yegg/mental-models-i-find-repeatedly-useful-936f1cc405d
- Useful mental models — https://globaldigitalcitizen.org/useful-critical-thinking-mental-models
- Mental models — http://www.defmacro.org/2016/12/22/models.html
- Normalisation of deviance — http://sidneydekker.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/NewAccModels.pdf
- Clearer thinking — https://www.clearerthinking.org/
- Why facts don’t change our minds — https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/02/27/why-facts-dont-change-our-minds
Podcast- You are not so smart — https://youarenotsosmart.com/
- “The central theme of You Are Not So Smart is that you are unaware of how unaware you are. There is an old-and-still-growing body of research across several disciplines with findings that suggest you have little idea why you act or think the way you do. Despite this, you continue to create narratives to explain your own feelings, thoughts, and behaviours, and these narratives — no matter how inaccurate — become the story of your life”
BOOK — “The Art of Action” Stephen Bungay
- Knowledge Gap — The difference between what we would like to know and what we actually know
- Alignment Gap — The difference between what we want people to do and what they actually do
- Effects Gap — the difference between what we expect our actions to achieve and what they actually achieve
BOOK — Influence — Science and Practice — Robert B Cialdini
- “When we make mistakes, we must calm the cognitive dissonance that jars our feelings of self-worth. And so we create fictions that absolve us of responsibility, restoring our belief that we are smart, moral, and right — a belief that often keeps us on a course that is dumb, immoral, and wrong. Backed by years of research, Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me) offers a fascinating explanation of self-deception — how it works, the harm it can cause, and how we can overcome it.”
BOOK Switch — Chip and Dan Heath
- “In a compelling, story-driven narrative, the Heaths bring together decades of counterintuitive research in psychology, sociology, and other fields to shed new light on how we can effect transformative change. Switch shows that successful changes follow a pattern, a pattern you can use to make the changes that matter to you, whether your interest is in changing the world or changing your waistline.”
High performing teams and leadership
- High-Performing Teams Need Psychological Safety. Here’s How to Create It — https://hbr.org/2017/08/high-performing-teams-need-psychological-safety-heres-how-to-create-it
- What google learnt from quest for perfect team — https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/magazine/what-google-learned-from-its-quest-to-build-the-perfect-team.html
- Re:work Google and team work — lots of great links and management tools Google uses to run the world — https://rework.withgoogle.com/blog/five-keys-to-a-successful-google-team
- Why hiring the best people produces the least creative results — https://aeon.co/ideas/why-hiring-the-best-people-produces-the-least-creative-results
- The multidimensional or layered character of complex problems also undermines the principle of meritocracy: the idea that the ‘best person’ should be hired. There is no best person
- Creating trust in teams — http://firstround.com/review/our-6-must-reads-for-creating-and-accelerating-trust-on-teams/
- Optimise your teams workflow by reducing cognitive load — relates to sales team but useful information to think about task switching at the start https://mattermark.com/optimize-sales-teams-workflow/
- Podcast- Radical Candour — https://www.radicalcandor.com/ Become a better leader by learning to give and solicit radically candid feedback
- Acumen Presents: Kim Scott on Radical Candor
- This short video provides a compelling example of why you should only focus on delivering the next block of work and not multitask.
- Communicating with your boss and your job as a leader.
- Why the right change often feels wrong — http://scottberkun.com/2017/why-the-right-change-often-feels-wrong/
- We like to believe change and progress are predictable, especially if we’re applying an idea we’ve used before or that is widely accepted. But … even when we’re making the right change, at the right time, confusion and fear are likely.
- Satir Change model
Relating to creativity and brainstorming
- How to make the best possible choices — reference with lots of great links — https://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newTED_00.htm
- Design thinking tools- Consider using the Experience Map, Empathy Map, and systems thinking tools to help you look at connections and linkages beyond the linear 5 why’s type analysis.
- A wonderful example of the design process being used to understand and find the clients pain points and the problem that requires solutions is the HCD case study — Toward a veteran centred VA.
- If you find yourself stuck, look at reframing the opportunity — this allows you to step back, examine your biases, and open up new solution spaces — how would you solve it if you had no money; all the money
- For Better brainstorming tell an embarrassing story — https://hbr.org/2017/10/research-for-better-brainstorming-tell-an-embarrassing-story
- Google X and the Science of Radical Creativity — How the secretive Silicon Valley lab is trying to resurrect the lost art of creativity — https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/11/x-google-moonshot-factory/540648/
Podcast- Astro Teller — Astro Teller, CEO of X — How to Think 10x Bigger — https://tim.blog/2018/04/18/how-to-think-10x-bigger/
- Find your innovation sweet spot — https://hbr.org/2003/03/finding-your-innovation-sweet-spot
- Stop brainstorming and start sprinting — https://medium.com/@jakek/stop-brainstorming-and-start-sprinting-16180839b43d
- Three Ways To Make Your Entire Team More Creative | Fast Company | — Create constraints; encourage debate; foster positivity; — https://www.fastcompany.com/3064281/three-ways-to-make-your-entire-team-more-creative
- Collaboration is messy. Creativity happens in fits and with many false starts. There’s no linear path from problem to solution, and there’s no magic formula to innovation.
- But there are ways that leaders can intentionally create an environment that fosters curiosity and a willingness to engage with new ideas to see where they might lead.
- You’re probably not brainstorming long enough — https://www.fastcompany.com/3063855/youre-probably-not-brainstorming-long-enough
- Third third in brainstorming — https://lateralaction.com/articles/better-brainstorming/
- Optimize to be Wrong, not Right — https://www.mindtheproduct.com/2017/04/optimize-wrong-not-right/
- People tend to forget that the measure of progress for innovation is not how many “good” ideas you validate, but actually how many you invalidate quickly and inexpensively. Not over-investing in ideas and/or methods with little or no traction frees up investment and time to pursue alternatives based on valuable information we obtain from invalidated experiments.
BOOK — inGenius — A crash course on creativity — Tina Seelig
- there are opportunities for creative problem solving everywhere. Anything in the world can inspire ingenious ideas — even a simple name tag. Take a look around your office, your classroom, your bedroom, or your backyard. Everything you see is ripe for innovation.
BOOK — Designing for Growth: A Design Thinking Toolkit for Managers — Liedtka, Jeanne & Tim Ogilvie
Great book with so many ideas on how to dig deeper — From Chapter 5 on Brainstorming:
- “Use catalysing quotes and stories.”
- “Question your assumptions. We all have unarticulated assumptions about how things are done in our business. Unexamined and unquestioned, they can be the greatest impediments to seeing new opportunities. One approach to recognizing these mental “rules” is to lay out how our business operates today. Your value chain analysis should help you do this. How do your offerings move physically to the market? How does information flow? What about how the financials play out?”
- “Explore the extremes. Extreme scenarios can often trigger novel thoughts. Imagine where Kodak might be today if, back in 1996, it had seriously explored the trigger question, “What offerings will we provide if 90 percent of the market shifts to digital photography?” If you are in the business of providing health care, ask, “What if we could be paid for this service only on the basis of health outcomes?”
- Change who does what. Many of the most successful innovations come from shifting key roles in the value chain. EBay gets its sellers to “store” the inventory. IKEA gets the customer to assemble furniture. Online banking turns you into your own teller. Boutique hotels become the entertainment, instead of merely housing you in close proximity to the entertainment. To explore the notion of shifting roles, include trigger questions such as, “How could we offload (difficult task X) to another party?”
- Explore technology scenarios and trends. Most markets are undergoing technology-driven changes. A good trigger question to explore this could be, “How can we let customers do self-service?” Another set of questions can come from the top trends affecting your markets. If you are in a consumer market, a[…]”
- “Pretend to be somebody else. Imagine that you are someone in an industry quite different from yours. As you strive to address an unfamiliar opportunity, ask yourself, What if:
- your firm was Apple and could find partners to orchestrate a seamless platform experience?
- your firm was Google and had a mission to empower the world with the ability to find information as quickly and easily as possible?
- your firm was Virgin and was by nature fun, irreverent, youthful, and engaging?
- your firm was Disney and saw all customers as guests to be treated royally?
- your firm was Wal-Mart and wanted to share savings with customers to keep them coming back for more?
- your firm was Harrah’s and could anticipate and respond to the exact moment a customer was ready to walk out of the casino?
- Stand in the future and back-cast. Finally, some people will find it easier to imagine an alternative future if you place them in that future and ask how they got there. We call this back-casting”
BOOK — Thinking Better: An Innovator’s guide to Productive Thinking -Tim Hurson
- “Think Better demonstrates how you can start with an intractable technical problem, an unmet consumer need, or a gaping chasm in your business strategy and, by following a clearly defined, practical thinking process, arrive at a robust, innovative solution”
BOOK — The power of moments — Chip and Dan Heath
- “Defining moments shape our lives, but we don’t have to wait for them to happen. We can be the authors of them. What if a teacher could design a lesson that students were still reflecting on years later? What if a manager knew exactly how to turn an employee’s moment of failure into a moment of growth? What if you had a better sense of how to create lasting memories for your kids?… we want to show you how you can create defining moments by making use of those elements. Why would you want to create them? To enrich your life. To connect with others. To make memories. To improve the experience of customers or patients or employees.”
BOOK — Change by Design — Tim Brown
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Get in touch… — https://tomconnor.me/
