The Discovery: How to Avert an Organizational Disaster
“I make such a good statistic someone should study me now
Somebody’s gotta be interested in how I feel
Just cause I’m here and I’m real”
-Ani DiFranco
Imagine for a few blissful moments that at least once, someone–maybe even a team of people–show up with the express purpose of asking you all about your job: what you do, how you do it, why you do it, what systems support you, what works, and what doesn’t. Imagine that team of people ask what most needs to be fixed–because as someone who works intimately within your system, as an integral part of your organization–you have just a little bit of understanding about how your system operates.
In other words, someone sets out to study you, and lots of other people like you within your organization, to find the very best path forward to a road of continuous improvement and operation.
This glorious phenomenon exists, and it’s called Ecosystem Discovery.
Let me explain, in two semi-disastrous examples, why such a thing might need to exist. Then I’ll explain what it actually is and how Ecosystem Discovery can avoid organizational solutions that don’t solve anything.
As one of my colleagues recently put it, the leadership of any given organization seem to think they have a good handle on what’s going on within their organization, but of course they see things through their own lens. This myopia is true even when they ask the members of their organization what might be needed.
Example One: Two-Hundred Dollar Book Club Gone Wrong
One year, around May-ish, the principal of our school–whom many of us quite liked–asked our English (language arts/literacy/etc) department what ideas we had about improving literacy and reading scores. Because we actually care about our students, jobs, and both the actual and functional literacy of our graduates, we took this question seriously, and engaged in research and discussion. We requested that we spend the following fall participating in a professional book club (something along the lines of I Read It But I Don’t Get It by Cris Tovani), utilizing the book itself as a sort of professional learning community experience to develop department wide learning strategies to enhance reading strategies for all of our students. I remember feeling genuine excitement. The book, new, currently costs $31.00–plus shipping, of course, but tax free, friends. That’s the cost of a new book; but back then, it was around $10 cheaper, so for our little department, we’re talking an up-front cost of just a few hundred bucks. (Also: we’d have been happy with used copies. We also would have been willing to devote lunch time to this study, so all in all, we’re talking about a sneeze from the budget, even for public education.
When we came back in August, we did not have copies of any book. Instead, we had an expensive, shiny, bells and whistles electronic program called StudySync that promised it would teach kids reading strategies and so much more! We suffered through hours of training on the digital platform with blank faces and crossed arms. One problem? It had whole! Units! Of! Study! planned for us–but not, of course, the actual books. Another problem? Access to computers (we weren’t yet a 1:1 building). Listen, I always could plan a pretty darn good unit of study on my own. Around books to which we had access.
Another problem? It cost thousands of dollars, I’m sure. And it didn’t ever empower any of the teachers themselves with strategies to teach struggling readers. What happened to the book club we asked for? StudySync was probably strong-armed through, from the very top down, because someone somewhere said it improved test scores.
Example Two: Ask for a Ziploc; Get a Snowmobile
I swear: in education, leadership requests for information, wishes, and needs always came around May. When I was young and naïve, I then spent the summer feeling semi-excited and hopeful about what might come of our requests. Then, in August, they’d happily reveal what our requests turned into…and…well, it was like a strange game of telephone.
One May, we received a poll asking what our needs were for recording and reporting grades. What, they asked, did we need?
Pretty simple, we said. Basically, we need an easy place to record student progress as well as report that progress to students and parents. This was roughly equivalent to asking for a Ziploc baggie.
In August, we waited with baited breath for the curtain to be raised to reveal our request. Our district leadership was very excited to show us what they came up with, and the curtain was raised to reveal: a snowmobile! Look at all the cool features it has! Okay, so the engine doesn’t quite start yet…but it will soon, and then, you’re gonna LOVE IT! I’m telling you: we asked for a simple recording and reporting platform–the Ziploc. What we got was so far from what we asked for that it wasn’t even in the “bag” category: it was something else entirely.
Our snowmobile, back then, was a grading and reporting system that required hours of training and still didn’t always do what we needed it to. We also had to train students and parents. Like any digital platform, it’s gone through many iterations, each of which have required updated training. I did, over time, grow to appreciate its features. I also utilized its features. I (eventually) saw the benefits of many of its features. I adapted. Even after adaptation, though, there were times I had to contact someone with frustrations and complaints–for example, I found that the Snowmobile™ required, in certain situations, double data entry. When I logged this complaint, I was first told I was doing it “wrong,” then told I probably didn’t understand our “district’s educational philosophy” properly. I’m no working there, but teachers who are working there still face multiple levels of double data entry duty. The ironic upshot of this is that some teachers now enter fewer assignments than they used to, communicating less information to students and parents because it’s so difficult. Philosophy aside, the system is not a simple recording and reporting platform.
Of course, I’m writing both of these examples from the perspective of the end-user. The person who is entrenched in the organizational web. And that’s exactly my point: as I said earlier: “the leadership of any given organization seem to think they have a good handle on what’s going on within their organization, but of course they see things through their own lens.”
Education, in my experience, has a hard time consulting their teachers, or their end-users, as valuable sources of information. They’d be wise to take notes from the United States Space Force; the USSF is showing wisdom in organizational leadership by utilizing the strategy of the Ecosystem Discovery to quickly identify high value solutions for their organization.
The Discovery
Silicon Mountain has had the pleasure and honor of participating in the Ecosystem Discovery process with the USSF since long before I arrived with the company. I’m still a newbie with the process, but I find it to be one of the most delightful processes that I’ve been a part of in my entire career.
We’re tasked by a particular leader, who knows that he has that “leadership” lens through which he sees his organization. He wants us to help give him a broader view (and he’s excited to know what we discover–the good, the bad, and the ugly). He gave us the first, say, 8–10 names of people to interview. Once we schedule interviews with those 8–10 people, we have the opportunity to have an in-depth interview with each of them, wherein we discuss what is usually a similar outline:
- Who are we/questions for us
- Tell us about you
- Your job/daily/people you oversee
- Tools you use
- Frustrations/pain point
- One thing totally counter-productive
- One thing you’re proud of
- If there was ONE thing we could fix, what would it be?
Sometimes, we have cause to deviate from these questions, and always, somewhere around the “tell us about the tools you use” or even before that, as our interviewees tell us about their jobs, things start getting pretty specific, and our interview begins to take a natural course. The people we talk to are passionate about their jobs; they’re intelligent, articulate, and insightful. They have interesting and diverse backgrounds. They appreciate the opportunity to be heard. They have great ideas and observations about the organization in which they work, daily, to make the gears go ‘round.
As for us, we keep their names anonymous but go to a lot of effort to capture a solid snapshot of our interview, which we track and report to leadership. This helps us track known challenges to the organization, and how often those challenges repeat.
When the first round of interviews is complete, we solicit names from the participants of the first round. Wash, rinse, repeat, until we have interviewed as many people as we can within the organization, allowing us to listen to people across all ranks of the organization.
Once the interviews are completed, we utilize working groups to assess the highest value ideas, opportunities, and solutions. The ultimate goal of the process is to generate a list of opportunities that are evaluated against each other in terms of overall value to the organization and the complexity to implement: some may be “easy wins:” low complexity, high value; others may be “strategic initiatives” owing to their high complexity but also their high value. Still others may be “deprioritized” because they have low value but high complexity.
Importantly, SMT doesn’t necessarily complete the Ecosystem discovery with a lens of what we can solve. Our job is simply to complete the discovery process with an unbiased view to help zero in on those high value opportunities and solutions.
Back to Book Clubs and Ziplocs
So what does this all have to do with a lost opportunity for an English Department to have a book club, and one small school district teachers’ population long lost wish for a simple, elegant, Ziploc baggie?
Simple. The school district implemented leadership-chosen, top-down solutions to challenges facing the organization as seen by leadership. Leadership of that organization could have invested the time, effort, or money into an unbiased discovery process, wherein they truly spent time doing the following:
- Understanding how the system operates (again, not just from the lens of leadership, but from all lenses)
- Talking to as many people as possible at all different “ranks” within the organization (end users included, even emphasized)
- Developing value streams, workflows, and Personas to understand who your end users are
I’m not suggesting that had they done so, the English teachers would have gotten a book club. Possibly, the book club would have been “deprioritized” for not impacting enough of the organization. Conversely, there’s a possibility that anyone truly engaged in the discovery might have found the impact to be far reaching (reading strategies, department-wide, for all students at the high school level? Would that not help non-fiction readers in…all departments? All for the low low cost of…a few hundred bucks? Project is GO!).
On a larger scale, though, having a true understanding of your organization allows you to implement changes and solutions with more insight and wisdom. Perhaps understanding your end users allows you to select opportunities with more foresight. Perhaps it changes the way you train your users. Even better, perhaps it changes the focus of your leadership lens, providing clarity you didn’t have before.
Leaders: your organization is worth studying.
“End-users,” teachers, workers in the trenches: I see you. You’re making the world go around. What’s one thing you’re proud of?
