PRE-FIGHT: Let's Glove Up

Here's how my pea brain's mind's eye sees things:

ON ONE HAND

We have various organizations and institutions, for and not for profit, that are committed to fighting the Cerebral Palsy fight and improving outcomes as they relate to CP. 

To me, they look to be doing bang-up jobs: pounding away at key challenges and opportunities; landing their share of punches. Becoming...thanks largely to advances in fields like genetics and robotics and brain science...encouraged and emboldened -- even to the point of believing that theirs-and-ours is a winnable battle. Even in the previously inconceivable sense that CP will someday be both preventable and curable. 

I'm excited along with them. 

I'd be a lot more excited if I knew that their various visions were about to be realized, say, this week. Even a year from now would be a more than acceptable time frame. 

Unrealistic? Could never happen? 

Maybe. 

Who's really to say? 

At a bare minimum, I don't think it's too overly whacky to suggest that big things could conceivably happen in the CP arena sooner rather than later and that, furthermore, we all ought to open our minds' eyes -- wider than they are now -- to what's possible. 

ON THE OTHER HAND

Over the past few years, I've immersed myself in enough management writing to have at least a feel for who the more influential thinkers are and what they're thinking about. What interests me most is their work on helping organizations get smarter and better, faster. (much of which is intimately tied to disruptive technologies like cloud computing, social media, mobile, and big data)

How're they doing? 

They're figuring things out. They're making discoveries. They're experiencing some wins. 

Many of them are fired up about what's possible, too. 

I'D LIKE TO RECOMMEND

We in the CP sphere should take greater advantage of what those management gurus -- those business brainiacs -- have to offer. 

Why's that?

Because CP has been kicking our butts. 

No offense to any one individual or CP organization, but -- we need help. All the help we can get. Why fight with one hand tied behind our back if we don't have to?

The good news is that the products of those folks' energies and efforts are more widely and readily available than ever before. They're there for the taking. So, too, are the opportunities for making personal connections. Accessing them, and attracting them to us and our "defeat CP" cause, should be straightforward.

We'll have to strive as a group, however, to become more:

1. OPEN

At the risk of exposing my own biases and nincompoopery, I am (via this post and this blog) putting myself out there in hopes that someone will come along and help me become a better / smarter CP fighter. Our orgs need to follow suit. To "get back," we need to give. We need to offer up our challenges and opportunities, our responses and results -- the whole of it -- to critical thought and commentary. 

May be worth taking under advisement:

• We should resist believing we're on the right track and therefore in no need of new and different ways of thinking or acting. The truth is, our mental models, e.g., our strategies and roadmaps and visions, are laughably small relative to the enormousness of our challenges. 

• Like CP itself, the problems we face are complex. In the words of David K. Hurst, "good questions are (often) better than good answers." Wisdom begins with an admission of ignorance. 

• A lack of funding doesn't have to slow us down. Money's just one of many resources we may acquire, mobilize, leverage, etc. 

• Keep this in mind: “There are always more smart people outside your company than within it.”* The staff at SUBWAY this month is wearing t-shirts that read "Make Us Better / Take Our Survey." If the biggest corporations are looking every which way for better ideas, we should probably be doing the same.

2. FINDABLE/ LOCATABLE 

I hope to be able to use this blogspace to make our leading CP organizations more visible to leading management thinkers -- and vice versa. My little mission is to facilitate connections. Very-best-case outcomes, to my way of thinking, would involve collaborative problem solving and co-creation activities between both sides. (both "hands") To that end, I invite participation. 

So, for example, to:

• Cynthia @ Reaching for the Stars: If you want to share your views here about what you believe it'll take to build "a foundation of hope for children with cerebral palsy"; if you want to name your pains; if you want to go public with your lengthy "things to do" list -- either directly or indirectly through me -- you're more than welcome to!! 

• John Seely Brown and John Hagel @ Deloitte Center for the Edge: You wrote in The Power of Pull (2008) about "Harnessing Pull to Change the World," and specifically about mastering pull "at the individual and institutional level to achieve much broader impact in economic and social arenas." I welcome either or both of you to use this forum to teach us how to beat CP. Feel free, in other words, to stop by and solve our problems for us!!

There's also a Twitter component to this. It'll be devoted to more of the same (as above) but revolve around a particular, pick-up-the-pace goal. 

I want things to move faster. Way, way faster than we're generally envisioning now. Using a (crude?) boxing analogy, I hope to be able to look at the next year as if it were a 12-round fight -- with an intention of knocking CP on its duff by the end. As Chief Inciter, I'll report on how the fight's progressing and do whatever I can to influence things in our favor. My tweets and interactions will be directed at the level of the organization, but anyone's more than welcome to follow along @KnockOutCP.

CLOSING

`A la Ralph Waldo Emerson, David Weinberger writes in Too Big To Know (2012): 

We thus do not yet have any good idea of what cannot be done by connected humans when working at the scale of the Net. 

We truly don't know what can or can't be accomplished. 

So...

Why not get ready to rumble?

Round one's set to start on June first.

*quote attributed to Silicon Valley icon Bill Joy (co-founder of Sun Microsystems)

A Tale of Two Hope Machines, 9.3.5.B.1

I want to try to get at the reasoning behind some of UCP's recent innovations and determine if they represent innovating at the PRODUCT and SERVICE level (?) or at the INSTITUTIONAL level (?) and then use whatever I come up with as a basis for further questions and comments.

Because I've been reading about leadership development programs, let's first have a cursory look at the Emerging Leaders Academy. (which I classified as innovation-ish in a previous post)

*  *  *  *  *

The Emerging Leaders Academy is a new leadership training and mentorship program offered by UCP-National to selected mid-career affiliate staff members.  It's an excellent example, in my opinion, of how the folks on K Street are trying new things and taking the organization in new directions.

But, is it innovative? Is it  -- I like this definition from Scott Anthony, managing partner of the strategy and innovation consulting firm, Innosight -- “something different that has impact”? 

I'm gonna say "no," strictly speaking. Why? Because, although it may turn out to be a good idea, to qualify as an innovation it has to be more clearly linked to revenues, net income, or free cash flow*. It has to fill the coffers.

That said, however...

One of the keys to innovating at the institutional level -- besides tapping into flows of knowledge -- is leveraging talent, i.e., helping employees perform better faster. Emerging Leaders is clearly endeavoring to do that by facilitating leadership mentoring and creating new avenues for passionate employees to connect and learn from others across the UCP network.

As for how JSB et al. would JUDGE the program, qualitatively, I'd need to know more of the specifics to hazard a guess. I'm sure they'd bring up the fact that programs like these "mostly focus on transfer of existing explicit knowledge, rather than the creation of new knowledge or even on giving participants the necessary learning skills to tackle knowledge flows." Hence, they'd want to take a closer look at the specialized instruction, i.e., "master tracks" component... 

I'll hold off for now on further commenting.

*  *  *  *  *

Since I've been doing some reading ahead for section eleven, though, I *would* like to interject a few words -- a little more food for thought -- about the implications of David Hurst's ecological model for the development of people within an organization. 

If I had to pick one sentence that captures the essence of what he sees as a top manager-leader's JOB ONE, it would be this from the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead: 

The art of progress is to preserve order amid change and to preserve change amid order.

Accordingly, Mr. Hurst believes emerging leaders need -- above all -- a "deep appreciation of the contexts in which they are operating." Of UCP-National he'd ask (regarding this training program): How can you help your affiliate up-and-comers develop their contextual intelligence? How can you help them acquire this ability?

His answer /advice: 

Provide them with the right kinds of experience. Via the right kinds of experience, your people can develop their capacities to play their roles better. He adds, "The use of  live ammunition -- real issues -- is the essential ingredient of effective management development programs." (The best kinds of ammo? Uncomfortable circumstances. Severe personnel problems. Bottom line pressure. Unexpected turns in the road...)

The challenge for UCP-National in this case would be to create "career paths that expose young managers to new challenges every two to four years and prepare them to benefit from those assignments." This would require structuring meaningful experiences into a sequence of escalating challenges. Mr. Hurst's model carries within it a code for doing so. 

I don't see signs that this kind of thinking or, more specifically, this sort of structuring is currently a part of the Emerging Leaders program, but -- 'specially given the fact that there are in the neighborhood of 100 network affiliates -- it could be. 

May well be worth looking into. 

*from Wikipedia: "essentially the money that the company could return to shareholders if the company was to grow no further"

A Tale of Two Hope Machines, 9.3.5.B

Got edges?

Conventional wisdom says an ailing organization should aggressively cut costs and /or develop new products and services to raise revenues. UCP's done both of these in recent years. To minimize operating costs, the former UPC of Central OH merged with another nonprofit (that also serves people with disabilities). On the revenue side, the national office has introduced at least three significant new service offerings...

Assuming for a minute it's done all the COST CUTTING it can do -- organizationwide, affiliate network included -- I want to focus this post on the GROWTH side of the UCP equation. 

"When organizations speak of pursuing growth, most are speaking of product- or service-level innovations produced in the core of their organization." 

The word "core" is key here. The authors of The Power of Pull contend that innovations derived from core operations are offering diminishing returns these days. Marginally improved, marginally differentiated products and services aren't moving the dial. As it relates to UCP, their concern would be that improvements of that ilk would likely not generate enough dough to make up for any losses the organization is experiencing due to reduced government support and /or increased competition.

(Do LIFE LABS, Mission Driven Consulting, and The World CP Challenge represent just marginally improved or differentiated services? If so, are they destined to provide  mediocre-at-best returns? If not, are there additional things UCP could do to ensure their sustained effectiveness? I hope to make those sorts of questions the subject matter of the next post.)

JSB et al. would counsel against pursuing marginal returns. It's not sensible, they write, "to keep pushing harder and harder on existing resources with minimal gains." 

If this is the organization's m.o., it should consider looking to the edge and learning to innovate at a more fundamental, institutional level -- for at least three reasons: (1) there's a good chance market opportunities are being missed (2) pursuing edge opportunities can be relatively less costly [because you're leveraging external resources] and (3) significantly, UCP would develop new institutional capabilities in the process.

If things are "difficult" for UCP, that's a sign that more changing and adapting need to be done. Changes in management mindsets are likely in order.* What the authors offer is a pragmatic pathway to making said changes and to improving, specifically, UCP's ability to learn.

In the next post I'll try to characterize and categorize some of UCP-National's innovations. Then, after that, I'll go into how UCP could inch itself closer to the edge.

*Question for UCP top managers to ponder: Do you consider it your purpose to be an orchestrator for your people to connect and learn from others, i.e., to improve their performance?

A Tale of Two Hope Machines, 9.3.5.A

Back to this JSB-JH3 approach, the one that hinges on the pursuit of edge opportunities: Should UCP have a closer look?

"Yes," if it:

• is interested in getting better faster 

• is turned on by the prospect of capturing "market opportunities that are appearing more rapidly than ever and that present large upside potential." (Note: Disruptive technologies -- social media, cloud computing, mobility, big data analytics, etc. -- figure prominently in the authors' formula but said opportunities aren't for technocentric industries alone; they're open to organizations of all kinds.) 

• has challenges to overcome. 

To the last point, this new approach is 's-much-as-anything an antidote to poor performance. It's for counteracting the effects of "The Big Shift," which is tied to globalization and rapid advancements in technology, and which has "dramatically intensified competitive pressures on firms over decades." More specifically, it's for organizations whose tried and true solutions ain't cuttin' it. It's for organizations whose core processes are in need of transformation.

Is UCP feeling performance pressures?

I don't have a lot to go by. My impression, however, is that UCP *is* being exposed to performance pressures. From UCP-National we have the President and CEO telling us the economics of providing services for disabled children are "difficult." At the affiliate level, I know (this is my lone example) that UCP of Central Ohio merged a few years ago with Goodwill Columbus  in order to lower operating costs -- which it had to do because it was unable "to raise the money it needed to thrive." 

These may be signs that performance improvement is imperative and not just something that'd be nice to achieve. I keep hearing about steady declines in government support. Are these actual, or threatened? At which levels of government? As for the effects of globalization and technology advances, I wonder: is UCP is seeing second order effects like service life-cycle compression and /or donors becoming more fickle in their giving patterns?

Obviously, I need to continue to learn about the nature of UCP's challenges. In the meantime, though, I'll proceed from the glass-half-full perspective that says new opportunities are springing up faster than ever. In my opinion, UCP should be open to any evidence that may exist to the effect that it could do better by making changes. It should be open to new opportunities and to looking, if need be, in new places for them.

Like edges. 

More about those, next.

A Tale of Two Hope Machines, 9.0

The Power of Pull, initially published in 2010, just now out in paperback, is one of my favorite books of the last few years. In this section, I'd first like to overview it broadly-shallowly-quickly and then relate two of its big ideas narrowly-deeply-deliberately to Red Treehouse and UCP. 

Here’s how I see things unfolding:

9.1: OVERVIEW /KEY CONCEPTS

Thesis. “To get better faster at whatever it is you do, you’ve got to be supported by a broad array of complementary people and resources from which you can pull what you need to raise your rate of performance improvement.” 

Three levels of pull. Pulling is about accessing (searching), attracting (making serendipitous connections), and achieving (collaborating). The last set of practices entails participating in what the authors call creation spaces -- which are akin to Gartner’s collaborative communities. 

Success formula. Use pull techniques to: (1) define compelling trajectories for change, (2) provide leverage to the passionate individuals who are attracted to these trajectories, and (3) amplify the impact of these individuals. 

9.2: SHAPING STRATEGIES

"By grasping how pull works we can build institutions that can act as platforms to catapult change, and maybe even transform the world in necessary and far-reaching ways." 

Should UCP pursue a shaping strategy, i.e., should it attempt to reshape the CP arena on a global scale? Based on the BIG SKY PROJECT vision of the future for people with disabilitiles, is UCP already moving in this direction?  

Inquiring minds want to know. 

9.3: KNOWLEDGE STOCKS AND FLOWS

The authors contend that the sources of economic value are moving from "stocks" of knowledge to "flows" of new knowledge, and that we must "accelerate a shift to a very different mindset and to practices that treat knowledge flows as the central opportunity and knowledge stocks as a useful by-product and key enabler." 

What are the implications for UCP and Red Treehouse?

I can say already that the implications are huge. Our new ways of knowing impact everything these organizations do. In posts 9.3+, I'd like to look closely at UCP's Public Education & Outreach (PEO) efforts -- and then use that as a springboard for exploring David Weinberger's new book about "networked knowledge" (Too Big To Know) in section ten.

A Tale of Two Hope Machines, 8.5

Practically speaking, will it matter much if UCP and Red Treehouse don’t get a handle on social media? If they never master community collaboration? If they decide not to take all the steps Gartner would have ‘em take to reach the FUSING – or even the FORGING – stage? That takes a lot of work…

Why not just take a pass? 

To Ronald McDonald House of Cleveland: Red Treehouse is just one of your several initiatives and you only have a small staff to support it. Even still, I'd venture to guess you’ve had success growing your network of families, professionals, and organizations this calendar year. Social media's played no role. Why bother even dipping a toe in at this point ? 

UCP: You’re one of the larger health nonprofits, but you’re not some Fortune 500 giant in some crazy-competitive industry. Your reputation's secure. I’m sure donations are steady. Besides, your top priority is your network of affiliates: their work is mostly hands-on, face-to-face, and local. 

   

Either or both of you could opt out gracefully. You could “blame the tools, conclude that social media lacks business value, or assume your organizations simply aren’t ready.” In UCP's case it’d be simple as pie to say that it’s given Twitter (and the like) the old college try but decided to pull back the reins.

Maybe the wizzes at Gartner don’t know what they’re talking about. 
Maybe social media isn’t what it’s cracked up to be. 

In fact... 

*  *  *  *  *

JOHN KOTTER -- Professor of Leadership, Emeritus at Harvard Business School, author of 18 books, co-founder of Kotter International – THE GREAT JOHN KOTTER DOESN'T SAY A SINGLE WORD ABOUT SOCIAL MEDIA in his piece about staying competitive “amid constant turbulence and disruption” in last month's Harvard Business Review. 

What he does say, instead, is that the organizational structures we’ve used in the past “are no longer up to the task of identifying hazards and opportunities soon enough, formulating creative strategic initiatives nimbly enough, and implementing them fast enough.” And, organizations need to come up with better ways of continually assessing their operating environments and reacting “with greater agility, speed, and creativity.”

His general solution, or antidote? Involve “more people than ever before in the strategic change game.” Do it in a way that’s economically realistic, i.e., that gives you the biggest bang for your buck. 

Specifically, Mr. Kotter introduces in the article his concept of the DUAL OPERATING SYSTEM: two separate operating systems running in concert, with the second one – a.k.a. the network – employing an agile structure "and a very different set of processes to design and implement strategy.” The job of the network...is to use volunteers (employees and others) to “liberate information from its silos and hierarchical layers and enable it to flow with far greater freedom and accelerated speed.”

Although he doesn't explicitly say it, I take it as a given that he’d be OK with using social media as a means to those ends. Social-media-enabled collaboration is inferred.

*  *  *  *  *

I find the similarities between Kotter’s dual operating system and Gartner’s COLLABORATIVE COMMUNITIES (“a communal structure within the enterprise”) to be remarkable. Both start with the proposition that organizations are being forced to “evolve toward a fundamentally new form.” Both stress the importance of getting smarter faster…

Even their pitches and promises are alike. Namely: Those organizations that get their acts together now (i.e., the ones that take the consultants' advice) will see immediate and long-term success. They’ll be more profitable. They’ll produce better goods and services. They’ll be more competitive. 

They'll win. 

Hmm. 

I wonder how those sorts of messages /promises would be received by the respective management teams at UCP and Red Treehouse. Would they resonate? Inspire? Excite? Would they compel either or both org. to keep exploring social media? To keep learning through trial and error?

I could see where they might miss the mark. Where they might be too removed, too abstract, and too much in the P&L language of business as we've known it --

It's partly because of that that I now want to move away from Gartner (and Kotter) and head in the direction of a trio of thought leaders who make similar and complementary recommendations, who offer their own unique twists, and who in many ways, IMHO, do a better job of getting to the simple essence of things.
 

The guys I have in mind -- John Seely Brown, John Hagel III, and Lang Davison -- are big-time business consultants in their own rights. Surprisingly, though, they talk less in terms of "beating back threats" and "outracing the competition" and more in terms of using social media to: DO more. HELP more. ACCOMPLISH more. Success, to them, boils down to the choices and passions of each and every individual with a stake in a given organization.

*  *  *  *  *

It's a personal thing.

Our "new digital infrastructure," as they say, gives us unprecedented opportunities to live up to our potential. Individually and institutionally. If we passionately want to improve and get better faster at what we’re doing, i.e., if we care, we’ll explore and master the new tools and techniques. We’ll move outside our comfort zones. We’ll connect and join forces with talented others who have similar interests.

What advice would they give UCP and Red Treehouse? Being all you can be does depend on your getting a handle on social media. It does matter. Lip service isn’t enough. Dipping one toe in isn’t the answer. Real human commitment is. 

To me it's even more personal. MY DAUGHTER AND OTHER KIDS LIKE HER ARE COUNTING ON YOU to make the smartest possible uses of the resources (you're privileged to have) at your disposal. That's what this social media thrust is about. 

I'd like for you both -- I think it'd behoove management at UCP and Red Treehouse -- to hang in there and learn what the authors of The Power of Pull have to teach: how small moves, smartly made, can set really big things in motion.

*  *  *  *  *

Go fail. And then fail again. Non-profit failure is too rare, which means that non-profit innovation is too rare as well. Innovators understand that their job is to fail, repeatedly, until they don't.*

*from seth godin's BLOG, dateline November 30, 2012: "Non-profits have a charter to be innovators"

A Tale of Two Hope Machines, 7.0

I believe the best way to get from here to there -- where “there” is sound, social media related recommendations UCP and Red Treehouse can use to deliver the social goods -- is to do it methodically. To follow a framework that's logically consistent and proven effective, and that meaningfully addresses the key drivers of organizational success.

BRING ON THE EXPERTS.

Here are a few big thinkers whose frameworks fit the bill, along with a sentence or so about how they frame the challenges all organizations today face:

• John Seely Brown, John Hagel III, and Lang Davison: authors of The Power of Pull. How do you systematically draw out people and resources as needed to address opportunities and challenges? 

• David Weinberger: author of The Cluetrain Manifesto  and  (released in January of this year) Too Big To Know. How do you build networks that make people smarter? 

• The Social Business Bunch ('cept that there is no such bunch, ‘s’far as I know; this is just my shorthand for management consultants with social business* offerings -- a few at the front of the pack being): 

• IBM: IBM. How do you become an agile, transparent, and engaged organization? 

• Dachis Group: the social marketing optimization software solutions leader. How do businesses re-envision their inherent architecture to meet the challenges and take advantage of the opportunities brought by changes in technology, society, and work? 

• Gartner, Inc: the world's leading information technology research and advisory company. How do you use social media to identify, catalyze, empower, and derive value from a community and their mass collaboration? 

IN THE NET THESE PEOPLE TRUST.

It's their belief that those who know how to take advantage of the digital infrastructure have opportunities to create disproportionate impact and do great work.

My daughter and I have a stake in UCP’s and Red Treehouse’s great or not-so-great work to come. I want to be sure both organizations are at least considering -- 'cause I’ve been drinking more or less the same Kool-Aid -- what these experts are serving up. 

I’ll be methodically snooping around for signs that they are, and reporting back in the posts to follow. 

*One definition of a social business: An organization that has put in place the strategies, technologies and processes to systematically engage all the individuals of its ecosystem (employees, customers, partners, suppliers) to maximize the co-created value.

Getting Smarter Faster

We thus do not yet have any good idea 

of what cannot be done by connected humans 

when working at the scale of the Net.*

Sure would be nice to be able to broadcast to the world “Here’s a description of my precious little girl. She wants to live a life without limits.** We’re looking for knowledge and related resources we can use.” -- and to have what she needs come streamin’ in: automatically, continuously, and right on target.

What kinds of knowledge and resources? Well, answers to all the questions I have in mind to ask; ideas and information that hadn't previously occurred to me to look for; opportunities to collaborate with others to create new knowledge...

I want my daughter to be an epicenter for these heady things. 

I’ve read enough books filled with enough accounts of effective, real-world "pulling" to believe she could be. Here's a wee bit about three (3) such books worth noting as they relate to our discussion:

• Pull: The Power of the Semantic Web to Transform Your Business [2009] by David Siegel. The so-called semantic web is “a new way of packaging information to make it much more useful and reusable.” It represents a vision (at this point) of what the Net could become, i.e., an extremely powerful tool for getting what we need when we need it.

• Too Big To Know [2011] by David Weinberger. Everything you ever wanted to know about knowledge in our new networked world. Among many other things pull-related, Mr. Weinberger writes thoughtfully about strategies for filtering knowledge (forward) in order to successfully keep on keepin’ on. 

• The Power of Pull [2010] by John Hagel, John Seely Brown and Lang Davison. About ways individuals, teams and other groups are using pull techniques to their advantage. I’m most interested in what they have to say about "shaping strategies," which have to do with motivating big groups of people and institutions to work together to solve problems.

The notion that we can use the Net to perform better -- i.e., be more efficient, learn faster, and have greater impact -- runs through each book. Hagel, Brown and Davison, in particular, talk in terms of “increasing the rate at which we can improve performance.”

How might "performance" enter in when we're talking about CP? In countless ways, I'm sure, but what matters most is how well our kids are performing.

I wonder: 

• Can we use the Net to help more kids with CP achieve more than anyone's ever dreamed possible?

• How quickly can we get to the point where we’re laughing at the very things that are limiting our kids today? 

• Could it be that what holds our kids back the most are our limited capacities as adults to learn and imagine better ways of doing things?

*from Too Big To Know
** "For people with a spectrum of disabilities, life should be without limits" comes from United Cerebral Palsy (UCP).