Leadership Practice #3 – Envisioning
If you are going to be a leader within an organization, then you need to be able to clearly communicate a compelling vision. The communication part is relatively easy to practice, but the vision part is worth practicing too.
There are two primary mechanisms for team communication that we can practice easily: Speech and Writing. We can practice speech by participating in groups like Toastmasters. We can practice our writing by using tools for text analysis and review.
Both mechanisms have the benefit of providing very rapid feedback and the feedback can contain lots of fine-grained detail. These are two critical attributes of practice. The feedback needs to be almost immediate(the sooner the better) and the feedback needs to be very detailed and specific so that we can fine tune our performance in a meaningful fashion.
When it comes to vision, one reliable place to start is with a clear statement of the problem you want to tackle. Coming up the problems is the easy part: ask the customer, ask the team, ask the project stakeholders. If you get that far you should have a list as long as your arm. Here’s a pro tip: keep those customer problems at the top of the list. Coming up with that list of problems is an important skill that can be honed and refined. There are places that you can go to look for problems that may be hiding in plain sight: recent communications from customers, defects, impediments. Keeping an updated list would be great way to practice.
Now unless you are very lucky, most of your problems will be vaguely stated and unclear. One of the best things to help you clarify the problem is to actually see it and experience it for yourself. Go to where the problem is. In the lean world this is often referred to as “Going to the Gemba.” The Gemba is the place where the work gets done.
Seeing for yourself will give you the rapid, high quality feedback you need to assess the nature of the problem. You can use techniques like The 5 Why’s to help get at the underlying causes of a problem. Often times the refined problem statement that you end up with looks nothing like the problem statement that you started with. Now these techniques are great for refining the problem statement, but what we are really after here is a vision – the possible solutions to the problem.
Fortunately there are a wealth of different brainstorming strategies that you can use to help discover a set of possible solutions. Here’s one technique that I use (taken with some minor modifications from the wonderful book Thinkertoys by Michael Michalko):
State the challenge
List your assumptions
Challenge your fundamental assumptions
Reverse each assumption
Record differing viewpoints that might be useful to you
Ask yourself how to accomplish each reversal
What you end up with at the end of this exercise is a list of potential solutions to your problem. Pick one. Now all you need to do is to communicate it!
The thing that I really want to convey is that many of these techniques can and should be practiced. With practice we will improve our communication techniques and our problem solving techniques. Put the two together and you have the recipe for someone who can communicate a compelling vision.
#writing #toastmasters #problemsolving #vision #speech #practice