Month: April 2017

Hi folks,

As you know, we’re ramping up some of our security training efforts, so the topic of learning is on my mind.  And who better to teach us about learning than Socrates?

Most of what we know about Socrates comes from what his student, Plato, wrote in a series of dialogues starring his teacher.  In the dialogue Protagoras, Socrates and Protagoras argue over whether virtue can be taught.  Just prior to their big debate, Socrates is approached by a Protagoras fanboy who asks Socrates to put in a good word for him so he can study with the famed sophist.  Socrates – likely being a painfully annoying guy in real life – teases the youth by asking a series of questions:

• If you wanted to be a great doctor, with whom would you study?  And what would studying with them make you?
• If you wanted to be a great sculptor, with whom would you study?  And what would studying with them make you?
• And so what are you trying to become by studying with Protagoras?

The fanboy struggles to come up with an answer other than “wise.”  To which Socrates basically asks “what’s the point?”

It’s a similar challenge that we face on a daily basis.  We hear about things that excite us and – out of the best of intentions – we enthusiastically embrace them in the interest of improving.  New technology?  Better philosophy?  Latest book?

But that doesn’t always work out in our favor.  Take the 2013 Target hack, for example.  Target took security seriously and invested hundreds of millions into it, buying the best technology and lots of talent to staff it.  But when they were compromised and the alarm bells started ringing, nothing happened.  Why?  At least one speculation is alert fatigue – when your highly trained personnel become desensitized to alerts and fail to react appropriately.  So Target – with best of intentions – jumped at the chance to install newer/better/faster/stronger technology, but didn’t fully consider the end game: how could they effectively consume the output of that technology?

While we’ve recently talked about the value of failure, that doesn’t mean we want to fail.  We have limited resources, and we want to focus those resources where they’re most needed and most likely to yield positive progress.  New ideas and capabilities are exciting and they can drive us towards unexpected levels of excellence.  But instead of immediately jumping on board the latest trend/best practice/technology, we owe it to ourselves, our colleagues, and those we serve to fully consider the end game – what are we trying to achieve?  And are we likely to achieve it?  And that means pausing to consider, in the spirit of Socrates, what’s the point?

Rex

Hi folks,

As you heard last week, I’m continuing to remodel a bathroom in my house.  Which not only makes Home Depot my third space, but also adds a sense of adventure to potty-training my 3 year old.

It’s also been a good (re)education on the limit of my skills.  Like how I described last week when I tried to stucco my walls and they ended up looking like Salvador Dali and Bob Vila had a party in my basement.  So I reversed course, chiseled 200 pounds of concrete off my walls, and cried bitter tears over how much time I wasted on a project dead end.

Last week we talked about the need to embrace failure as a learning opportunity – and the steps you should take to extract value from your failures.  Those generally look like:

• Actively look for failures
• Analyze them and uncover the root causes
• Get comfortable with failure through experimentation

In my case, finding the failure wasn’t hard.  It was staring me in the face.  But uncovering the root cause(s) was more challenging.  I found two.

One, I took the first solution that came my way.  I had a problem in front of me – how to cover a concrete block wall in a water/mold resistant way with only .5” of clearance – and lots of googling hadn’t yielded much help.  So when I stumbled across this idea, I ran with it.  It was only after I was halfway done that I came up with an alternative, superior solution.  Had I let my creative process continue for a while rather than jumping at the first seemingly viable solution I found, I could have avoided a lot of wasted effort.

Two, and perhaps most instructive, I didn’t realistically assess my own skills prior to starting the work.  It’s one thing to watch a few (dozen) YouTube videos on something, but it’s another thing entirely to actually execute it well.  In my case, I knew from prior experience that I wasn’t really skilled at this art, but I stormed forward, blinded by the prospect of a solution to a difficult problem.

The point is this.  That value can be extracted from failure if we put in some effort.  Once I stopped lamenting my poor remodeling choice, I was able to 1) commit to a more thorough creative process next time and 2) commit to a more realistic assessment of my skills.  So the next time I have a problem in front of me, I’ll be less likely to waste time and resources pursuing a solution I can’t effectively implement.  And not only are these specific lessons ones we can all adopt, but the process of extracting value from failure apparently works.  And all of these are lessons easily implemented as we pursue our mission within ECD.

So, boom – multi-layered value achieved.

Rex

Hi folks,

For the past few weeks, I’ve been working on a bathroom remodel in my house.  Which is about as awesome as it sounds.  I’ve (re)discovered that I’m good at the demolition part, but I don’t really enjoy the whole “put things back together in a functional way” part.  But, it’s been a learning experience.

Beyond simply relearning my shortcomings as a general contractor, I’ve picked up a few lessons along the way.  Today I want to share the first lesson: there’s value in failing and failing fast.

My house was built in 1939 and has some unconventional (read: not nearly to modern code) “features” sprinkled throughout.  Which means I had to come up with some creative solutions – one of which was stuccoing the basement walls with concrete.  And while that solved one problem – the tight space tolerances – it also ended up looking like crap.  So I’m now chiseling 200 pounds of concrete off my walls.

Unfortunately, yes in my house.  But for as much as I wish I had made the right decision in the first place, I’m glad I declared the stucco a failure and took a different course.  Because living with my bad decision for years to come would have been far worse than stopping, changing direction, and correcting this early in the process.

Comfort with failure is a modern theme in business as well.  Countless articles and books extol the virtues of failure – but only under certain circumstances.  You need to be well positioned to extract value from failures in order to make them worthwhile.  In 2011, Amy Edmondson of Harvard Business School outlined three activities through which an organization can learn from failure: detection, analysis, and experimentation.  Years of research went into her conclusions, but at their core, they’re pretty simple:

• You need to look for failures, both large and small, both stand-alone and aggregate.
• When you find them, you need to consciously analyze them, uncovering the underlying root causes.
• Finally, try to produce failures through experimentation when appropriate and culturally embrace the inevitability of failure.

Within my team at work, we do some of this well, but we have ample room for improvement.  While I think/hope we have a culture that doesn’t blame the messenger and, thus, encourages the identification of failures when they happen, we don’t perform any real analysis of failures nor do we frequently set up experiments where failure is a likely outcome.  If we’re going to get the most value out of our failings, these are things we should do better.  So, we’re going to experiment a bit more, but also prepare to sink some time into examining our inevitable failures.  If nothing else, all our new failures will give us good stories for years to come!

Rex