THE LEAFLET
November 30 2023
backpocket constitutions, numbers vs adverbs, 1:1s as tutoring
BACKPOCKET CONSTITUTIONS AS CHANGE MANAGEMENT
The most effective leaders I’ve seen steer their organization, particularly their next level leaders, through a process that allows those next level folks to co-create and co-own this change. They do this more time-consuming and difficult process instead of simply sharing their original proposal and saying some version of “you all good?”
A metaphor I’ve heard for this approach is James Madison’s Back Pocket Constitution.
In this likely apocryphal story, James Madison, the primary architect of the Constitution, arrived at the Constitutional Convention having already written out the whole thing.
Read the rest here.
-Ben
REPLACE YOUR ADVERBS WITH SINGLE-DIGIT NUMBERS
In communication to teams, I have found it helpful to replace adverbs with single digit numbers.
Instead of: “This problem is insanely complex!”
Try: “My best guess is this problem has 5 layers.”
The first statement is a crude painting of panic. The implicit statement is: “I am stressed!” The second one is an invitation to discuss, diagnose, and remedy. The implicit question is: “What’s your take?”
Instead of: “The team has been working incredibly hard.”
Try: “The average person has put in double-shifts on the weekend for the last 3 weeks.”
Instead of: “I am extremely annoyed.”
Try: “This has happened 3 times in the last week. I needed 15 minutes to walk around the office before I could talk about it calmly.”
These single-digit estimates can make it easier to pursue a “what is so | so what?” conversation. You start with facts then move to stories about those facts and plans for what we do about them.
Read the rest here.
-Eric
USING 1:1 MEETINGS AS TUTORING INSTEAD OF OFFICE HOURS
What separates a truly great 1:1 meeting with a leader from just a fine one, is that it's developmental, not just informational. The developmental meeting improves capacity far beyond the time you spend in this meeting and will be a multiplier on that person's performance.
The way I like to capture this difference is high school tutoring vs college office hours. If the model is office hours like a college professor’s, where you sit there in your tweed jacket and hear somebody ask questions that interest them, the reality is that you end up having fascinating conversations and not necessarily improving anybody's capacity.
Instead of professor office hours, you want to actually think of your 1:1s more like high school tutoring sessions. In the tutoring version, somebody comes to you and says, “I can't do this math problem.” And you don't just think, “Let me help them figure out this one math problem.” You think, “oh, how can I make sure they do problems like this on their own from now on without me?”
Read the rest here.
-Ben
COMPELLING QUOTES
Innovation researcher Jeff Dyer on getting your ops and business folks in on the innovation work:
We’ve observed this challenge elsewhere. Companies relegate innovation to the R&D unit, where people should innovate, but those on the business side are expected to just execute and skip the same innovation challenge. The result (in 3M and other companies) is that a lack of business innovation can easily stifle technology innovation. Not surprisingly, this can deflate folks in the R&D side of the business. Moreover, the company can miss disruptive opportunities that it wouldn’t miss if it could only innovative a bit more in how it manufactures, distributes, markets, prices, or allocates resources to a product.
Anthropologist Robin Dunbar, in Friends on the power of proximity:
You will make the effort to see someone, and view them as important to you, if they live within thirty minutes’ travel time of where you live. It doesn’t seem to matter much whether this is thirty minutes on foot, by bicycle or by car. It’s the psychological significance of the time it takes you to get there. That being so, you might suppose that you would be more inclined to phone or text those who live beyond the thirty-minute limit to make up for the fact that you can’t get round to see them in person. In fact, it seems that you don’t. You are more likely to phone the friends that live near you, as Hang-Hyun Jo was able to show from an analysis of phone-call patterns in the Aalto mobile-phone database. Contrary to what you might suppose, you phone most often the people you see most often.
Physicist David Deutsch, in The Beginning of Infinity on sorting different theories:
Whenever a wide range of variant theories can account equally well for the phenomenon they are trying to explain, there is no reason to prefer one of them over the others, so advocating a particular one in preference to the others is irrational.
Keep going, keep growing,
Ben & Eric