David Hinde's Blog

Last week at a medical conference in London, Babylon Health claimed that their chatbot can achieve medical exam scores on par with human doctors. It seems a stunning claim. However maybe the more extraordinary claim was made later in the day, when a spokesman for the Royal College of General Practitioners said, “No app or algorithm will be able to do what a GP [doctor] does.”

Maybe the doctor who gave that quote might want to talk to a Mr Lee Sedol. Like a doctor, Mr Sedol is well respected for his cognitive abilities. However his intellectual prowess doesn’t focus on medical diagnosis, rather he plays the incredibly complex game of intuition and strategy called Go. In fact he doesn’t just play Go, he has been consistently ranked as one of the world’s greatest players of the Japanese strategy game. (If you’ve never heard of Go, think of Chess on steroids.)

In 2016 Mr Sedol was challenged to a game of Go by the people at DeepMind, an artificial intelligence (AI) company based in London. They had created a system called AlphaGo which rather than being programmed with responses to specific moves, uses an approach called machine learning to teach itself. It looks at vast amounts of data from previous games, to work out the best plays to make.

Mr Sedol was confident and predicted he would have a “near landslide” victory. A few months later, having been beaten comprehensively 4-1 by the machine he had changed his view. “I’m quite speechless…I am in shock…I kind of felt powerless.”

I think Mr Sedol sums up what many of us feel about the arrival of AI. On the one hand it is deeply fascinating and yet on the other utterly terrifying. It poses all sorts of as yet unresolved questions about humanity’s place in the workforce.

But I think more and more of us are coming to the conclusion that AI will significantly disrupt our organizations over the coming years. I was challenged only the other day by a very bright learning and development executive. We had been discussing a management training package for his graduates when he said what he really wanted was a chatbot which could help his graduates diagnose management problems and save them the time and effort of going on a training course.

Will machines completely replace humans in some job roles? It seems unlikely. In fact Ali Parsa, Babylon Health’s Chief Executive says, “We are fully aware that artificial intelligence on its own cannot look after a patient, that is why we complement it with physicians,” However many of us seem unprepared for this next big disruptor looming over the horizon.

 

 

Do you feel sometimes feel like you are a to-do list slave? I certainly do. Of course all of us are busy people, and we need some sort of time management system to make sure we get stuff done, but to -lists can encourage a rather robotic, unthinking mentality. Stuck in this mind set, we’re not taking on fresh ideas or approaches or meeting new people all of which might give us a step change in our performance.

I’m trying to overcome this problem by taking micro work-related sabbaticals. They are a few hours of my work week, where I put the to-list to one-side, grind up some of my favourite coffee beans, put some good music on and just “play” in a work-related way. The time has no specific objective other than it needs to be loosely work-related and enjoyable. I might watch a TED talk I’ve been meaning to see. Or read a chapter of that book on artificial intelligence. I could catch up with my LinkedIn connections. Or have a play with a new software tool.

I’ve found these “sabbaticals” very useful. For one it makes my working week more enjoyable. I’ve always had a strong belief that because we spend so much of our lives working, at least some of that time needs to be fun. I find as well it puts me into a different mental state; a more creative state, where I can see beyond my immediate work concerns and look further afield to the good places I would like to go. And lastly it helps to lower my stress and drink some good coffee!

So why not give it a try? Free yourself from the yoke of your time management system at least for a few hours each month and see where it might take you.

Mastering your emotions is a key skill in any workplace. Emotions like anger or frustration can drive you to inappropriate actions and behaviour. Negative emotions can interfere with your performance, furring your thinking, decreasing your energy and creating stress. Understanding both your own and other people’s emotions help you to build strong business relationships.

In her recent book, How Emotions are Made, psychologist Dr Lisa Feldman Barrett explains the latest research on neuroscience and how we can use it to master our emotions. She shows that we all create emotional concepts in our heads. So my version of “happy” might be quite different to your version of “happy.” All humans across the planet feel differently when they decide to be “happy”. In fact there may be humans from some cultures who don’t even know the concept of “happy.”

The brain doesn’t come hardwired with these emotional concepts. We construct them over the years. When faced with a situation we decide which of our emotional concepts to use and this drives how the brain will decide to prepare our body for that situation. Will it need to increase our heart rate, increase blood pressure or alternatively send us to sleep! Given what the brain does to our body we will “feel” something and start to behave in certain ways.

Using this knowledge, how do we get better at mastering our emotions? Dr Barrett describes studies that show that spending just twenty minutes per week improving your knowledge and use of emotional words can have a dramatic effect on your performance. The more words I have, the more emotional concepts I can create. If I have only one emotional concept to cover difficult situations in work called “stressed”, then my brain has only one action plan. But if I realise that in some stressful situations I might be better to use the emotional concept “discouraged” in others I could use “trepidatious’” and in others I could use the concept “excited” I now have three action plans that I can start to use in a far more tailored way that “stressed.”

Dr Barrett recommends looking at other languages to find concepts that aren’t described in your own. For example there is really no English equivalent for the Dutch word “gezellig” which means togetherness. Or if you can’t find a word make one up or use a silly word. For example, when I’m feeling overloaded with work, I used to describe this as “stress”, but using Barrett’s technique I now have invented a new term “work collywobbles”! Firstly it’s a ridiculous term which is hard to take serious, which makes me feel better right away and secondly I’m starting to construct a more appropriate reaction to it than to “stress.”

There is far more to Dr Barrett’s book than I – as a non-scientist – can do justice to in this brief article. Take a look at her book or alternatively to her TED talk.

Culture is a hidden force in many organizations which is difficult to spot and hard to define. It can be accepted behaviours, common shared values, widely-held beliefs and hidden assumptions that are made regularly by an organization’s staff. It is “how things are done round here.” The people within an organization rarely notice its culture; it is so ingrained into them that they tend to follow its rules at a subconscious level. Culture is most obvious when someone tries to go against it; for example by openly questioning the boss in a highly hierarchical organization.

To successfully change any aspect of an organization, a change management team need to take account of the prevailing cultures. A good analogy is a boat sailing along a channel on a seemingly calm sea. Underneath the water however there is a strong tidal pull. If the boat is sailing against this tide it will hardly make any headway. Sailing in the other direction however, the tidal force will enhance the power of the sails to propel the boat forward. Just like the boat, if a change is pushing in the same direction as culture it will have far more chance of success than a change pushing against culture.

I did some consultancy recently for an organization that was trying to change to a more flexible working practice. They wanted to encourage employees to work at least one day from home. They hoped that this would give the employees a better work/life balance, improve morale and also enable the firm to cut back on expensive office space. The change management team had no problem delivering the more tangible products needed for flexible working: new laptops for the employees, secure remote access to the company’s network and home office equipment. However, they hadn’t taken into account, that flexible working went against the prevailing and very strong office culture. Presenteeism, the practice of turning up to work even when ill, was rife. Unconsciously senior management encouraged this by working long hours at the office themselves and by an overly controlling and supervisory style of management. Employees were very reticent to be away from the office for any length of time in case it damaged their employment prospects. The change failed to gain any traction in the organization.

The change management team needed to deliver an element of cultural change and this is one of the hardest changes to make in any organization. Culture is deeply ingrained and widespread. In this case, cultural change needed to start at the top. Senior management needed to lead the way by starting to work from home themselves and adapting their management style to be less supervisory and more focused on results.

Culture often has very deep roots in an organization, and if these roots are strangling a change initiative, the change management team need to allow a lot of time and effort to dig up these roots and create a more stable foundation for their change to flourish.

Step one – create a risk management strategy

In my experience risk management is something that is talked about a lot but rarely done well in project management. Creating a risk management strategy early in a project which makes it clear how risk will be managed goes a long way to mitigating this problem. It would outline the way in which risk would be identified, evaluated and dealt with in a project. It would show who should be responsible for carrying out the various risk management roles. It would also define the threshold level of risk that project stakeholders are willing to bear. The strategy is put together at the outset of the project; and would then be reviewed and signed by all the key project stakeholders.

Step two – decide how you will identify risks

Where do you start when it comes to identifying all the potential risks in your project? There are a number of approaches. These include reviewing lessons learned from previous projects, carrying out a risk brainstorming session, using an industry specific prompt list showing likely areas of risk or creating a risk breakdown structure. The latter is a hierarchical diagram like an organization chart. It can be sub divided in a range of ways, for example by product, by team or using PESTLE (political risks, economic risks, social risk, technological risks, legal risks, environmental risks) It can be used as a focal point for a workshop to identify all risks in each area of the project.

Step three – identify some early warning indicators of increased risk

It is all too easy for a project manager to myopically focus on a small set of performance areas such as work completed to schedule. However there are a range of other early warning indicators that identify how the project is performing. For example percentage of approvals accomplished, number of issues being raised and number of defects being captured in quality inspections.  Reviewing all these performance aspects of a project increases the likelihood of identifying more critical risks.

Step four – assess the project’s overall exposure to risk

It is good practice to regularly assess a project’s overall exposure to risk. Each risk is assessed in terms of its probability as a percentage and its impact should it occur in monetary terms. By multiplying one by the other an expected value for each risk can be calculated. Adding up the expected values of all the risks gives a monetary figure that gives an indicator of the project’s overall exposure to risk.

Step five – evaluate the proximity of each risk

Another good practice is to assess when each risk is likely to occur. This is called the proximity of a risk. Each risk could be assigned a category depending on when it might occur such as imminent, in the next stage of the project or after the project. The project manager should also consider whether the probability of the risk occurring and/or the impact on the project if they do occur, might vary over time. Having this information can help focus on risks that are of a more pressing concern.

Step six – identify the causes of a risk

Rather than just thinking about the event that may or may not occur such as a road collapsing underneath a heavy load, the project manager should also consider what could cause the risk. This allows for a deeper analysis of any individual risk. If the road collapses it could be caused by heavy rain, bad driving or initial poor construction of the road by the council. Understanding what are the most likely causes for each potential risk event, can help implement better mitigation plans to deal with them

Step seven – focus on opportunities

Risks can also be opportunities. For example a new technology might appear to speed the programming of a software module. If opportunities are spotted the project team might consider three ways of approaching them: exploit them by doing something that ensures they occur, increase the probability or impact of the event occurring or simply reject the opportunity. In practice a good project manager is always looking for opportunities to improve their project, but making this explicitly part of the risk management process, improves the probability of spotting more.

We constantly read about projects delivering months (or even years) late and coming in well over budget. This of course has a significant effect on organizations bottom line and cash flows. I think with all these situations there will have been a point, somewhere near the beginning of the initiative where someone accepted sloppy estimating, someone didn’t delve into a set figures and ask the question, why? Someone was in a rush and put a metaphorical finger in the air and came up with some time estimates with little basis in reality.

This article describes one approach to estimating: planning poker. You can follow it if it makes sense for your environment or discard it if it doesn’t. But the main thing approaches like this do is make us stop and think about our estimates and take more time considering the basis for our figures. So whether you use this approach or not, the key thing is to think carefully and challenge forecasts at the early stage of any project.

Planning poker comes from Scrum. Scrum is a way of managing projects so they are more agile and responsive to change. Planning Poker helps a group of individuals agree on an estimate for a piece of work.

A planning poker session starts with a group of people with knowledge of the area to be estimated agreeing on a benchmark task. Everyone in the group should understand how much work is involved with this benchmark task.

Next, a facilitator gives each person a set of cards. This could be a standard set of playing cards; however, many Scrum teams use special planning poker cards. Each planning poker card contains a number from an irregular series of numbers such as the Fibonacci series. (1, 2, 3, 5, 8, and so on) The lack of regularity is supposed to reflect the randomness of estimating. Sometimes there is a card with a question mark in case anyone is stuck.

The facilitator then describes the task to be estimated and asks the group how much bigger (or smaller) they think it is compared to the benchmark task. Each person picks a relevant card and places it face down on the table. Everyone turns over their cards simultaneously. This method is used to avoid having any one person sway the estimates.

The people with the lowest and highest estimates then have an opportunity to explain their figures. The group repeats the process several times. The final estimate is the average of the last round of results.

Back in 350 BC Aristotle said, “Anyone can become angry – that is easy. But to be angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose and in the right way – that is not easy. “Being intelligent with one’s emotions, it seems, was just as much a challenge to the ancient Greeks as it is for us today.

Daniel Goleman popularised the term “emotional intelligence” in his book Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More the IQ (Bantham Books 1995). He breaks down the skill into five areas of competence:

Self-awareness:  the ability to understand one’s internal states, preferences and realistically assess one’s strengths and weaknesses
Self-regulation: the ability to manage one’s internal states, impulses and resources
Motivation, the long-term ability and persistence in pursuing goals despite obstacles and set-backs
Empathy: the ability to be aware of others’ feelings, needs and concerns
Personal skills, the adeptness at inducing desirable responses in others

In this article I will focus on self-awareness. I’ll cover the others in later posts. However focusing on one area in isolation is not a good development tactic as they all interlink. For example it is difficult to self-regulate one’s emotions if you are not aware of them.

To accuse anyone of not being self-aware seems a very derogatory thing to do. Surely we are all in a prime position to work out what is going on inside our heads? But as I know to my own cost, it’s not always easy to understand ourselves. Sometimes our own emotions take us by surprise and drive us to behaviours that in retrospect would have been better avoided.

Ask yourself right now – how do I feel? Interested? (I hope so), anxious, positive, cynical, happy? You might be surprised by the answer. (Just so you know as I am sitting here writing I’m feeling lively but with a slight piece of anxiety about a big presentation I’m giving tomorrow.)

For me certain work situations, such as difficult meetings, can cause stronger emotions. Excitement that people are listening to my ideas, frustration that they’re not, sympathy when someone is having a difficult time or anger when there’s conflict or arguments. I find practising self-awareness is key. I try to internally “check-in” with myself from time-to-time during the meeting to ask myself how I feel. Once I realise that, for example, I might be getting frustrated that’s usually enough to stop me making a comment I might regret later on.

Learning emotional intelligence unfortunately is not just an intellectual process. In a recent workshop I ran we talked about emotional self-awareness. Everyone seemed to understand the theory. However in the next group exercise one of the men became more and more irritable with his fellow attendees and he started to be quite brusque to the detriment of getting the group to work together.

I caught up with him later in the day. “What did you feel like when you did that exercise?” I asked him. As he began to reflect on his feelings and how it had made him act he began to smile at me, “Goodness I wasn’t being self-aware at all was I!?”

Of course he’s not alone. If only I could say that because I teach emotional intelligence I have cracked it. I definitely haven’t. There are numerous occasions where, despite me best efforts, emotions take over and not always with positive results.

I think being self-aware in the modern world is, if anything, more difficult than ever. We’re all checking our phones, emails, instant messengers and all this “noise” from all these sources takes us away from being connected with how we feel and how we behave.

Another part of self-awareness is having a greater understanding of our preferences and values. In my twenties I had a choice between taking one of two jobs. In the first job interview I sat with the managing director and he had asked me how I thought the company should proceed. He had introduced me to his staff and they had taken me out for a friendly lunch. They were working on a new area of technology that seems interested, but being a young company they couldn’t offer me much money. Their office was pretty rough and ready as well – in an old, draughty building which used to be a warehouse.

The other job was very different. I was interviewed in their offices on the fortieth floor of a plush new skyscraper. I was shown my potential office with a panoramic view of London. I would be called the vice-president of development. The technology area was important, creating infrastructure for corporate web sites, but not exactly ground breaking.  Everyone wore sharp suits and they offered me 30% more than the other job.

The result…well you can guess. I took the second job and after the initial excitement I had a miserable eighteen months until thankfully the company went bankrupt. It was a good lesson for me. I realised I valued things such as working with friendly, clever people over money and sharp suits, I realised I didn’t care about job titles, but more about intellectually stimulating subjects. I realised that I valued environments where I was respected and listened to.

 So being aware of ourselves isn’t always easy. Ironically it’s particularly difficult when we need the skill the most, when we get flustered, irritated or angry. But little things like internally “checking-in” and asking how we feel today and reflecting on the things we value most can go a long way to improving a very important life skill, both inside and outside work.

On page six of Scrum.Org’s Scrum Guide in a section about the Scrum Master role there is an innocuous looking line, “The Scrum Master is a servant-leader for the Scrum Team.” I think a number of Scrum environments misinterpret this sentence to mean Scrum teams don’t not need to be managed or lead, they will miraculously self-organize themselves. They then wonder why no-one seems to be talking to each other, getting along with each other or even sometimes why they keep arguing. What better Scrum teams come to realise is that servant leadership does not mean no direction, no control and no management it means that the Scrum Master needs to adopt a style of leadership which will serve and grow their team.

The history of the phrase servant leadership goes back to the 1960’s. It was coined by Robert Greenleaf, an organizational change expert, after he read a story by Herman Hess called Journey to the East. In the story a group of travellers are helped in the journey by a happy and helpful servant called Leo who keeps the groups spirits high and listens and helps them with their problems. One day Leo disappears and the group realises how much they needed him. They eventually lose all morale and give up on the journey.

 Greenleaf saw that the most effective leaders start off with the motivation to serve their teams rather than trying to have power and control over them. Then the team members can develop and grow rather than be stymied by a constant autocratic leadership style. Ghandi, Mandela, Mother Theresa are all good examples of servant leaders.

 What sort of behaviours do we expect to see from servant leaders? Well they would develop relationships with their teams through trust and integrity rather than wielding their positional power. They would value listening to dissenting views and facilitating the group to come to decisions over pushing decisions onto others. They would create an environment of trust and security where people where supported and blame wasn’t attributed when people made mistakes. But also in certain circumstance they might lead and direct if that served the team best. For example when an inexperienced team member is struggling clear direction and a more controlling style of management might be best for both the team and the individual.

Servant leaders might even fire people. Most people respond well to a servant leader approach but what if they don’t and start causing havoc with the team? A servant leader will probably want to first get to the root cause of the behaviour and try and support this individual but there comes a point where the servant leader best serves the team by cutting ties with this individual which allows the group to be free of their potentially time wasting and destructive behaviour.

The whole idea of the team being managed or led with a command and control approach is an anathema for many scrum advocates. In some circumstance that is fair enough. But I worry that some scrum people over focus on the word servant and forget that leadership sometime means making tough decisions, correcting people’s bad behaviour and directing people. For me servant leadership is a healthy balance between serving and leading.