Learning how to make the business better

In this article, I share ideas about Step 3 of the Releasing Agility model. This is also episode 5 in the Releasing Agility mini series.

Transcription

(May contain errors as done by a computer)

Welcome to another episode of Here's an Idea With Playing With with me, Rob Lambert. Now this is episode 5 in a little mini series called Releasing Business Agility. A 5 step thinking model that I use with leaders and managers to move smoothly and quickly towards our goals. Now we've already covered the first four steps.

Episode 1 gives you a bit of an idea of the model. But just to very quickly recap, step 1 is about painting a picture of the future, telling a story about where you wanna get to, and then designing some goals that sit beneath and in that painted picture. Step 2 is about then asking the question, if this future is so compelling, so amazing, so exciting, why are we not already there yet? What's stopping us?

And identifying those obstacles and blockers and then putting in place a plan. And if you have step 1 and step 2, I'd argue you have a strategy at this point. Now, both of those first two steps are about getting clarity. Very very clear about what it is we're trying to achieve. Then we move in step 3 which is about putting your hand on your heart as a leader or manager and saying, this is the team to get it done.

And if it isn't and you can't do that, then what are you doing about that? Because people need a plan too. And there with step 2 about the obstacles and the plan and the strategy and step 3, the people, you've got alignment. The goal is to align people around the strategy so we can move into action. And then step number 4 which we covered in the last episode which is about routines and process.

This is about looking at processes and routines and habits and altering, fixing, improving, and building them. So that if we were to remove the painter picture entirely and we followed the routines and habits, we would still get to a wonderful positive better place than where we are. Now with all of these episodes, I'm not gonna be able to go into any depth and the model itself is not prescriptive. You know, it's more about thinking. Do we have these things in place?

How you then tackle those challenges and those problems and those opportunities is gonna be extremely contextual to your world, to the people you have, to the money that you have as a as a sort of finance frame, and loads of other variables that I would never wanna codify into a model. This is to get you to think about it.

Learning

Now here in step 5, we're thinking about learning and improving. But really here what we're looking at is a few things. We wanna get better.

And one of the ways that we can get better is to treat a mistake as nothing more than a chance to improve ourselves or the business.

Now this flies in conventions to the way that a lot of leaders and managers run teams where they're always looking for blame. There's always someone to blame for a mistake. Or really, when you think about it, everything bubbles up to leaders and managers. So maybe they should draw a circle around themselves and look for problems there first before we look for blame as to why somebody made a mistake with a process or shipped a product that wasn't quite ready.

For example, we might want better routines and processes if we end up with a mistake. Let's say that we do ship something that doesn't quite meet the quality bar that we had. Well, why is that? What happened?

And we wanna get to the root of these problems and then fix them and improve them. We might call this root cause analysis in the sort of lean agile world. But ultimately, what we wanna do is we wanna make the business better.

And we can only do that if we're honest about mistakes, if we're honest about things that don't work very well, if we lean into the realities of the gnarly problems that are in our processes, our routines, our people, even with our leaders and managers.

We wanna be looking at where we can improve the business so that we don't make those mistakes again. But it's not just about mistakes, it's also about building capability.

Capability

Now, with capability, I'm always a little bit cautious to use that word. I know it's a sort of generic word that's been used everywhere. But really when we break that word apart, capability means that somebody has the ability to become capable.

And I think it's really important when we're talking about learning and improving to separate this out.

So for example, we have people who are already capable of doing the work whatever that is.

That might be coding, it might be marketing, it might be leading, it might be running, I don't know, an event. So we already have people who are capable or they're on a learning path to become capable.

We also want to identify people who have the ability to become capable - capability. And this is really the role of managers getting to know their staff, understanding what people want. What their own career aspirations are, what their strengths are, what their weaknesses are, and whether they have the ability to become capable at various skills, roles, activities.

Yet, most leaders and managers use the word capability to encompass everything that can get done. But we need to get to an individual level here.

We may have a team that has the capability of coding software. But there'll be people in that team who are more capable than other people. And there might also be opportunities to move to other roles and people may wanna go and apply for those but do they have the ability to become capable in that role?

And this is really where leaders and managers need to spend a lot of time thinking about those two things.

We want to identify people who are capable, people who have capability, and people who should probably not go on that particular path and might be actually better going and doing something else.

And then designing and building coaching and learning and, training to enable people to move through from capability to capable and then all the way through that.

Now here as well when we talk about learn improve. One of the best ways to grow your ability as a team or a business to get stuff done is to pair people who have the capability.

So with enough training, support, and learning that person has the ability to become capable with people who are already capable of doing that work. This is on the job training.

There is no better form as far as I can see of pairing together 2 people, where one is the coach, the leader, the mentor, and the other is the trainee and they grow together and you help to bring about a more capable team.

Now of course, this is there's a lot more that sit beneath this, but really I break it down into 2 particular approaches to learning.

1 is information acquisition, which is a little bit like this podcast. You're consuming information. There's information and tactics and ideas worth playing with that you could write down and you could go back to work and have a play with. But it's information until you go away and play with it. It's like reading book, that's information acquisition or even most training courses really are information acquisition.

We sit there, somebody teaches us something, but we don't really get to put it into action. And that's the second way to learn which is called task acquisition, which is to learn by doing the work itself. Now I use the analogy of learning a musical instrument. I've got a piano next to me here in the studio as I record this. I could read every book on the planet about how to play the piano and that's information acquisition.

And trust me, there's a lot of people that do nothing but consume information and then regurgitate that back to other people and they sound super knowledgeable.

But what we want to do is we want take that information and we want to put it into action to create knowledge and that's task acquisition.

So learning the piano, I could read everything that's information acquisition, but I still can't play the piano until I sit down and play it. The chances are I won't be able to play it until I sit down and practice it and do the work, do the activity itself which is task acquisition. Now ideally, you'd have a bit of information acquisition and you'd have a lot of task acquisition.

But also it's entirely possible to learn something just by doing it.

So that's why I'm a big fan of task acquisition and on the job training is a form of that.

You're doing the work while guided and mentored and coached by somebody who's already capable of doing that work. By far and away one of the most effective techniques to use if you're trying to grow your team's ability to get more work done to a better standard. And this whole section here is all about learning.

You know? It's about retrospecting on what went well and what didn't go well. Root cause analysis, personal development, and growth. And really, it shouldn't sit as a separate part of the model. It should run across underneath all of it.

But just for simplicity reason, I've put it there as a sort of 5th step of this model.

But ultimately from day 1, when you start painting a bright picture, you're gonna be learning about yourself, about the business, about the problems, about the opportunities. And that's why this model is really designed around getting better.

What can we do to get smoother and quicker towards our goals? And inevitable in anything that you do in this model, you are going to be needing to learn and grow and develop as individuals, as a collective, and learning how to make the organization better.

So with that, that's the 5th step in this model.

Like I say, it probably should run underneath all of it, but I call it out separately because there's a series of initiatives that we're gonna need to do that are separated out as things we're gonna do to learn and improve.

And if you get this right, you'll be moving smoothly and quickly towards your goals and creating an organization that enriches the lives of all who work in it. And that pretty much sums up the goal of cultivated management. To be honest, that's what I'm trying to do with, with my organization is to create workplaces that enrich the lives of all who work in them whilst achieving phenomenal business success as well. There is no reason not to have those two things. They're not mutually exclusive.

And with that, hope you've enjoyed this little mini series. There's gonna be a book as well on the way out. Probably not this year, maybe 2025. And there will be a dedicated book called how to release business agility, where I jump into more depth around some of these things and a little bit more details about how I would do the steps that sit below this.