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The cold spell over the Nordic countries was felt by all the delegates to the COP15 conference on global warming. The result of the summit was a lame document that despite its lameness wasn’t accepted by all countries [1]. Is there a connection between the cold weather and the outcome?

This may sound like a condescending question insulting the delegates’ intelligence. Of course there are a lot of reasons for the failure of the conference. I think the question is relevant to some degree though.

As I’ve hinted in an earlier post, the mitigation of the global warming is the greatest change management project humanity has ever undertaken. The idea is to fundamentally change the way we produce and use energy to avoid dramatic changes in our environment and living conditions.

So why does freezing one’s butt off matter? Humans are, despite the evolution of the large neocortex fundamentally controlled by the old “reptile brain”. This part of the brain is what makes us angry, makes us make love, makes us eat candy, and makes us do many other things based on emotions. Emotions are very strong motivators, often stronger than any “higher order” logic we can come up with in our cortices. Emotions are rational in the way that they have kept us alive and procreating from the time when our ancestors were tiny lizards (yes, you have lizards in your family). We base many of the biggest decisions in life on the emotional “click, whirr” response described by Robert Cialdini in [2].

Recent change management literature emphasizes the role of emotions in leading and promoting change. Dan Cohen says: “Both thinking and feeling are essential, and both are found in successful organizations, but the true heart of change is in our emotions.” [3]. Black and Gregersen discuss the importance of creating “confrontations” to move people to change. These confrontations should be what they call inescapable experiences that “cannot just be mental” [4]. Instead they “need to actively involve as many of the senses as possible: touch, smell, sight, sound, taste.” Although Black and Gregersen don’t use the e-word, the clear purpose of that multi-sensory experience is to evoke emotions, not just thoughts.

To evoke the right emotions, the “inescapable experience”, the summit should probably have been held in a very hot place – without air conditioning, not in a cold place like Copenhagen in December. An inescapable category four hurricane passing by the venue would probably have added a few signatures to the treaty.

Links and references

[1] Preliminary version of the Copenhagen Accord

[2] Robert B. Cialdini, Influence, Science and Practice

[3] Dan S. Cohen, The Change of Heart Fieldbook

[4] J. Stewart Black and Hal B. Gregersen, Leading Strategic Changes, Breaking Through the Brain Barrier

I watched the Nobel Peace Prize concert last night. The Norwegians know how to throw a party! I immediately fell in love with Esperanza Spalding’s music. And Natasha Beddingfield, who also performed, has been one of my personal favorites a long time. Anyway…

The Peace Prize is about making change happen. Each and everyone on the list of laureates have been instrumental in making this world a better place. Perhaps Obama was given the price more in anticipation of future deeds than already accomplished changes but many of us still have high hopes.

Big changes in the world seem to be associated with strong leaders and role models. It is hard to imagine the civil rights movement without Martin Luther King, the abolishment of apartheid without Nelson Mandela, or the democratization of Poland without Lech Walesa, all of whom have also received the Nobel Peace Prize.

So what does it take to become such a leader? Can we learn anything from the Nobel Prize Laureates? I suggest that conviction and perseverance are the main characteristics of these leaders. While some of them, such as Martin Luther King had a lot of charisma, others such as Martti Ahtisaari don’t strike me as particularly charismatic. (But like most Finns, he had that particular Finnish perseverance and stubbornness that we call sisu.)

In his book Good to Great Jim Collins actually emphasizes that charisma is not required (he says it may indeed be counter-productive) for leading and changing the successful companies that he studied. Instead Collins talks about the ability to keep the core values of the company and being there for the long term. He also believes that leaders should be “clock builders” rather than “time tellers”. He means that they should focus on building capabilities into the organization rather than insisting on becoming or remaining the visionary decision maker.

Indeed, many of the Peace Prize winners and other great leaders have left a lasting legacy. South Africa is well on the road to healing the wounds of apartheid. Mahatma Gandhi’s India is the world’s largest democracy and is rapidly becoming one of the major economic powerhouses. Poland is one the of the best performing former communist countries. And while the US still has its problems, it has come a long way since Rosa Parks was arrested for not giving up her seat on the bus for a white person.

My conclusion is thus that it probably takes an energetic and convinced person to lead big change. But that the person should at the same time down-play his or her role and focus on building systems and capabilities that enable the change to last. I wonder who is going to step forward as the leader of the greatest change project in the history of mankind, the mitigation of the global warming.

Links and references

[1] Good to Great, Jim Collins

[2] The Nobel Peace Prize 2009

Every so often organizations that aren’t happy with their operational performance embark on a process improvement program of the “one-size-fits-all” variety, decide to implement the latest hyped-up development process, or purchase the latest model-based development tool without investigating what their prioritized improvement needs really are. One company that I was helping had for instance planned to ramp up their verification and validation activities as part of a general “quality improvement” effort. When we started talking about their quality and other priorities, we found that both customers and other stakeholders were very happy with the quality of the products but not with the responsiveness to new customer requests. Clearly, in this case, more verification and validation was not what they needed the most.

A simple process for finding improvement opportunities.

A good starting point when looking for the most important improvement opportunities is the organization’s set of business goals as stated in a business plan or similar. (When no business plan exists, key people within the company can usually write a good enough business plan in about one hour.) Information that I want to find in a business plan include:

• What customer segments do we want to target?
• What value do we deliver to the customers?
• What value do we deliver to the customers’ customers?
• With what products and major product features so we deliver that value?
• What are our tactics to lock out the competitors and lock in the customers?
• What are our unique selling points? Why buy from us instead of a competitor?
• Do we have other stakeholders with specific requirements or needs, e.g. authorities or employees?

From this information we can start reasoning about the results that our customers and other stakeholders expect from us and that will make us stand out relative to our competitors; what we need to be really good at producing. Particularly important results are those that support our unique selling points, the product features and our interactions with the customer that make our company different (and hopefully better).

Typical product features that might give us a competitive advantage include aesthetics, availability, ease of buying, functionality, performance, conformance (to standards and regulations) and price. In our interactions with our customers we could excel in e.g. responsiveness, innovativeness, security, accessibility, reliability, competence, credibility, and empathy.

A good example of the ease of buying product feature is Amazon’s one click shopping feature. It eliminates all time-consuming typing and makes it (almost too) easy to buy yet another book or widget. The same company’s success is very much tied to the security of the interactions over the web.

In parallel to identifying customer-oriented results that are important to our success, it is often useful to look at the same issue from an other angle by identifying risks for not reaching the business goals. As a complement to finding out what we need to do right, we here brain-storm what can go wrong. There are various more or less standardized risk analysis methods for finding risks. I will return to these in later posts.

Some capabilities.

Having the desired results and identified risks, we can start to identify what capabilities we need to produce the results and to mitigate the risks. It is also useful to think about what you can do less of (like in the example in the first paragraph of this post).

If for instance aesthetics is a unique selling point, or at least an important product feature, then we probably need to hire a designer or buy a corresponding service that will accomplish exactly that. We may also perhaps add a “look and feel” review in the development process or even a focus group. If conformance to regulatory requirements is crucial or even mandatory, then we need to know those requirements and build them into our work processes.

A number of general capability categories are illustrated in the exhibit to the right. (“Product baseline” refers to the previous version of your product. When developing a new version of a product, the starting point is obviously a very important success factor).

There is no rocket science here of course. But it does pay off to from time to time do the analysis according to the above steps in a structured way. If you are lucky, you may even find that you can actually do less to achieve more.