Informal Teaming: Romance Revisited

We took sweet counsel together.

Psalms 55:14

Against stupidity the very gods themselves contend in vain.

Schiller

There are horizons—frontiers to be expanded and pushed outward. Our shared ultimate end is to celebrate both human individuality and the bonding of distinct personalities into an enhanced community of great purpose and worth. That purpose is to serve a larger and meaningful enterprise with distinction, satisfaction and joy; e.g., in General Electric’s phrase, “to bring good things to life.” As Q admonished Star Trek’s Captain Picard, “That is the exploration that awaits you. Not mapping stars and studying nebula, but charting the unknown possibilities of existence. See you ‘out there!’”

My purpose remains to point your management vision “out there,” and to provide sufficient principles and practices to launch you on your way. Lao-tzu said, “A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step.” The Process for Innovation and Consensus (PIC) is our first step on the road leading toward the highest quality/project management aspirations. We know the character of organic communities, enabling environments, corporate cultural change, resistance to change, innovation, satisficing consensus, and effective teaming.

All that remains is to do it.

DOING IT

Think like Lao-tzu! Start small! Small pleasant tastes stimulate appetite. Instead of dragging people into formal teams, chartered to find and resolve quality problems having little or nothing to do with their work, enable them to approach their own work more effectively. People reject interference, but grasp eagerly at help.

The first thing some employees say to me as a visiting consultant is, “Who are you to come in here from the outside and tell me (us) my (our) job?” After convincing them that I would never presume to do that, I ask them if everything is perfect. The answer is, of course, “No!” I then ask them if there are some relatively small but irritating matters (events, not people) that refuse to go away. I have never yet received a no answer to that question. Lastly, I ask if they would like to get rid of them. “Yes, yes,” comes the reply. When I remark that we shall approach and treat the issues in somewhat strange ways, their interest perks. They never refuse to accept my process rules and catch on immediately to their nonthreatening qualities.

Note the following hints that you as a peer facilitator can use to interest a few coworkers:

•   Focus on work deemed important by your peers.
•   Gain their initial trust.
•   Ask them if they would like to resolve work impediments.
•   Ask them for several small irritants that can be addressed quickly.
•   Have them choose one to start. If a dozen or more issues arise, exercise them through convergent nominal group technique to immediately experience satisficing consensus on a few most preferred issues.
•   Ask them to let you, as facilitator, select a topic (from out of their most preferred) that 1) you see can be addressed in a few hours or less, 2) is under their primary control, and 3) requires exercise of only one relatively short PIC technique.
•   Do not lecture or explain the process. Start them immediately on exercising individual issue-appropriate PIC techniques under your careful facilitation.
•   Ensure that they eventually address several of the selected small issues, involving only interested participants.
•   Once they feel confident enough to ask questions about the techniques, give them short interactive explanations, and suggest some readings.
•   As issues involving internal suppliers and customers (often from other departments) arise, encourage them to become involved.
•   Do not generate reports. Simply implement consensus actions under their control.

PERSONAL EXAMPLES

A few personal examples will show how these hints work. A military engineering station division head asked me to help resolve a crucial issue demoralizing his eleven engineers and technicians. They regularly traveled back and forth between two test facilities almost two hundred miles apart. Both technical and personal problems, associated with traveling, plagued them for years. Equipment unavailability and breakdowns constantly occurred, and their families grew more and more upset over their continuous absences. They developed six less-than-satisfactory solutions, none of them earning anything close to consensus.

The division head asked me how long it would take to resolve this years-long albatross. I told him three hours. “Seriously,” he laughed, “how long?” “Three hours, plus or minus thirty minutes,” I said. It took three hours and thirty minutes.

We constructed force field diagrams on large flipchart sheets for each of the six existing solutions. Hanging them side by side on a wall, I facilitated them through a random brainstorming exercise that clearly illuminated competing positive and negative consequences of each solution. They discovered one entirely new short-term solution and, by mixing a few elements of them all, settled on one of the six as their long-term solution—all with 100 percent satisficing consensus. They expressed total disbelief over the result, wondering why they had allowed such shared suffering to go on for so long. They wanted to do more; they did, and they successfully implemented their two solutions.

The next example is even more astonishing. A friend and five of his colleagues working in the public works department of a huge industrial complex had used the PIC to generate seven solutions to a vexing problem. They found out that all seven recommendations violated both corporate and county regulations. Giving up on what now seemed illegal and useless solutions, my friend asked me to help. I told him to reconvene his group, bringing in one county and one corporate officer. Their task was to 1) examine the limits and specific applications of the relevant regulations, 2) rethink and reinterpret their still viable solutions keeping what they learned about the regulations in mind, and 3) rebrainstorm their solution set. They generated fourteen new solutions within fifteen minutes (each of them variations on the original set), converging them down to five finalists with 100 percent consensus in ten more minutes. Two of the five also turned out to be illegal, but three of the new interpretations were quite legal. The entire exercise took about half an hour, culminating in three perfectly workable solutions, drawn imaginatively from a basket of ideas they had nearly discarded.

Finally, another engineering friend did his teaming essentially alone; yes, he teamed with himself. He could not figure the cause of an intermittent failure in a missile fire-control system. He drew a why-because pursuit logic tree on a large sheet of paper and puzzled over it for several days, slowly but surely driving deeper and deeper into potential root causes. He stopped people in the hall, the lunchroom, the gym, and the parking lot for instant insights, and he got them. He even showed them to his wife and children, who knew nothing about the technology but could reason logically. They gave him some important entries. He finally converged (with the assistance of six peers) approximately 150 entries down to eight possible root causes (five of which had never occurred to him earlier). Careful circuit analysis and equipment troubleshooting verified two of the final roots as causes of the breakdown. The entire exercise consumed about four days of concentration and not only fixed that specific problem, but also suggested a design change guaranteeing that the problem would never occur again in any of the systems installed around the world.

REITERATION

Think back! Imagine working in a totally fulfilling professional environment. Picture a genuinely transforming corporate culture driven by confident peers willing and able to overcome their addictive habitual attitudes and behaviors, work through change-generated senses of loss and grief, and reverse their natural resistance to change. Fantasize about you and an ever-widening circle of colleagues performing accelerating numbers of PIC teaming exercises concerning self-selected issues of importance. Finally, walk yourself mentally through PIC techniques, transposing words into action images.

Then gather some peers, and begin informal work-related teaming. You now know how to do it. Do not worry about inevitable mistakes. Celebrate them just as you do your child’s first stumbling efforts to walk. We learn as much in failure (perhaps even more) as we discover in success. Everything you need to start rests between these covers and in your personal capacity to choose.

Always remember that teaming techniques (including the PIC) attempted without driving philosophy and theory lead to eventual despair and cynicism. Both quality management and project management histories substantiate this truth. Direct, therefore, what is toward what ought to be.

“See you—‘out there!’”