We some many options available to us, it feels like it should be easy to work out what it is we need to, or which goals we should focus on. However, this wealth of choice can be overwhelming and sometimes leads to people hesitant to focus down on any specific area.
In this episode, Rob and Paul look at some of the causes and discuss strategies for getting momentum on the few things that will have the biggest impact.
This podcast is part of a short series on productivity, where we are exploring how you can Sell More, Save More and Do More, both personally and for your team.
We are looking forward to attending the Festival of Work, a fantastic new event run by the CIPD, and showcasing our game-based learning resource What Would You Do? (WWYD).
Running in London on June 12 and 13, the Festival of Work
combines the CIPD’s Learning and Development and HR Software and Recruitment
shows, with an added element focusing on the future of work.
It should be an informative and inspiring event for HR and L&D professionals – and we’re hoping some of them might like to drop by our stand and try out What Would You Do?
Based on concepts of peer-assisted learning and psychological
safety, the game aims to prepare managers for potential workplace situations
before they occur in reality.
We’re firm believers in the power of game-based learning, and we’ve witnessed the benefits for ourselves while introducing What Would You Do? to L&D practitioners.
So this blog takes a look at the reasons why game-based
learning is so effective in helping to solve business and management issues.
Read on to find out more.
Why use game-based learning?
It unlocks latent tacit knowledge and skills
All employees have knowledge that’s almost never
utilised. Game-based learning can unearth this hidden potential by bringing
people together to discuss everyday scenarios, and share knowledge and insights.
It brings
learning to life
Fed up with not getting ROI from your training
investment? When learning lacks practical application, it fails to stick. Gamification
brings teams together to discuss how the theory they’ve learnt in the classroom
would work in practice, test meaning and find a solution to common issues.
It removes
friction and improves collaboration
Gamification makes learning social, which improves collaboration,
communication and team work. It helps to break down internal friction and
barriers by increasing awareness of peers’ roles, ideas, perceptions and
experience.
It
removes silos and presents the bigger picture
Specialised teams (silos) can be susceptible to a lack of
communication, an insular perspective and unhealthy internal politics.
Game-based learning brings people together from different teams, increasing
collaboration and communication, creating continuity, and helping individuals
see issues from a wider viewpoint.
It creates
psychological safety
Gamification creates a safe environment for players to
share thoughts and ideas, and to discuss and debate issues in the interest of
playing the game. This means players can be more open, communicative and
creative without fear of failure.
It’s
engaging and fun!
Traditional training can be uninspiring and fail to
resonate with learners. Instead, when people focus on a game, they are so
engaged, they don’t even realise they are learning!
Find
out more about our game-based learning tool What Would You Do? by visiting stand
F11 at the Festival of Work on June 12th and 13th at Olympia London.
Social
learning is about the way we learn, while the 70:20:10 model concerns where we
get our learning from. Both are linked and relevant, we think, to the work that
we do at Thinking Focus, so we thought we’d take a closer look at them.
The
social learning theory first formulated by Albert Bandura in 1977 shows that we
learn best by imitating the behaviour and actions of others. It’s all about
people learning from each other; picking up new skills, ideas, opinions and
experiences from those around them.
This
applies equally to learning in the workplace. Think about it: where do you feel
you have learnt most of what you know? During formal education? Or from your own
experience and the insights of your colleagues?
Social
learning in the workplace is about interacting with others through good
communication, knowledge sharing, discussion, collaboration, and being
transparent about what you’re doing and why. Colleagues can help each other,
either explicitly or tacitly, to understand ideas, experiences, systems,
methods and processes. Yet most of us come into work with the rules set that
tells us to do exactly the opposite, work it out on your own, don’t share,
don’t copy other people’s work. These are the learning rules that schools
operate by.
Most
L&D professionals are familiar with the 70:20:10 model proposed by Charles
Jennings. In fact, it has become a standard part of discussion regarding
learning and development processes in the workplace. The model evolved from a
report in the 1980s which analysed a survey of 200 senior managers. It found
that they reported that 70% of what they knew had been learnt on the job or
through experience, 20% had come from social interaction with other people, and
just 10% had been learnt through formal education.
Although
there’s been some criticism of the 70:20:10 model, some of which we agree with,
we nevertheless think it’s useful in showing the rough proportions of
experience, social interaction and education needed for learning. It does
broadly tell us is that, to meaningfully and effectively learn new things, your
experience and the input and experience of people around you is the most
important thing. Social learning does tend to fit into 90 per cent of this
model.
It’s
all a great starting point for reflecting on how individuals within your
workforce learn and what the best ways therefore might be for their personal
development. It can be used as the basis for a wider L&D strategy that can
have far reaching effects on the culture and mindset of the organisation as a
whole.
At
Thinking Focus, we recognise that we essentially offer the 10 per cent ‘formalised
learning’ part of the Jennings model, but we do so as the basis for encouraging
people to behave in the 20 per cent of the Jennings model by interacting with
people, and to share the 70 per cent, their experience and knowledge.
In our coaching sessions and training workshops, and through our learning resources such as the Strategy Wall and our management development board game What Would You Do?, we are encouraging behaviours that enhance social learning. We create environments where the group learn from other and teach each other, generating conversations and giving people the tools to go and do the 20 per cent in real life. We are highlighting the untapped knowledge and experience that people could access from their colleagues.
We encourage
meaningful face-to-face discussion and debate. We offer formalised learning
elements and use them to highlight, encourage and create social learning by
developing skills and behaviours that cause peer-based learning and
self-reflection.
In
our work helping business teams to become more engaged and active with
learning, time and again the concept of cognitive disfluency comes up. The idea
that we process information differently depending on how much effort it
requires is a fascinating one, so we thought we’d take a look at it in more
depth here.
What is cognitive
disfluency?
Cognitive
disfluency is a term that was first coined by the psychologist Adam Alter, assistant
professor of marketing and psychology at New York University’s Stern School of
Business.
What
it essentially describes is the idea that people process information
differently, and that some of it is easy (fluency) and some of it requires
effort (disfluency). An example of how this works was shown in an experiment
that presented a printed question in two different typefaces – one hard to read
and one easy – and asked people to spot the mistake. The proportion of people
that noticed the error in the hard-to-read font was higher than the
easy-to-read one. Alter suggests that a harder-to-read font makes us put more
mental effort into reading, and we are therefore more likely to retain the
information.
On
a wider scale, fluent processing allows us to take in key information quickly
but not necessarily to retain it or even understand it in a meaningful way. The
whole experience becomes meaningless, less engaging and unsatisfying. Conversely,
we process disfluent information more carefully and deeply, and this naturally
results in us understanding it better. This is why the idea of cognitive
disfluency has been suggested as a great way to assist learning.
Why is cognitive
disfluency important in business?
Think of all the data and information that is presented before us – or our teams – within the workplace. Most organisations now offer their people key decision data in an easy (fluent) way, whether through dashboards, reports or search engines. While these tools can be invaluable, they can also make the data meaningless and hard to retain because they allow people to get to the specific number, target, forecast or performance data whenever they want to. This often means we don’t have to think about, generalise or extract the data.
So
why is that a problem? Well, if people don’t have that data with them when
making key decisions, or if they don’t have an intuitive understanding of the
information and what it means, they will be unable to incorporate it in their
decision-making. They will also be unable to learn from it. Data creates
knowledge, and knowledge creates understanding – but when there is too much
fluency in the information, it reduces this second step.
So should we make
information more disfluent?
A
lot of the data that we use day to day needs to be fluent. We need to be able to access and use it
quickly, so it should be easy to digest.
However, information that is easily consumed is also easily forgotten.
In almost everything we do there are a few key measures that tell us how we are doing against our goals and targets. Data such as production data, sales information or financial projections need to move beyond abstract numbers and become more intuitive, becoming much more central in our awareness, moving from organisation knowledge to personal understanding. It is this data that needs to be deeply understood so that it can underpin the decisions we make.
How should
organisations present their people with important details and data to ensure it
is meaningfully understood and retained?
It’s a good idea to look at the fluency of key data
or information within your organisation. If it’s being presented to people too
easily, make it more disfluent so they have to think about it. You can do this
by:
Asking for
reports that require some small amounts of manual work to create, such as
looking stuff up
Ask people to
interpret data, not just produce it
Change layouts
so people have to search a little, or read more carefully, to find things
But beware
A
word of caution, though: Disfluency should be used sparingly. We’re not
suggesting that you should make your people work hard for every piece of
information they need. After all, not all data needs to be retained or fully
understood.
In addition, too much disfluency can be draining. It
uses up more energy, increases complexity and heightens stress levels. Instead
of continuous disfluency, there should be brief moments of it when appropriate
for processing essential data and information.
Bringing the number to life is vital, whether you’re working in sales, managing a project, leading a team or running a production line.
If you understand and internalise the number, it allows you to monitor your progress and your tracking, intuitively know where you are and what you need to do, inform your decisions, understand how you need to react in real time, and see the bigger picture.
Otherwise, it’s just meaningless data to you.
Here, Paul and Rob discuss why many people are looking at the numbers but not really thinking about what they mean. They discuss the importance of bringing the number to life, and how we can do it.
What’s stopping us from bringing our number to life?
There is too much information at our fingertips.
Think of the wealth of reports, dashboards, BI systems and other technology that we can extract data from
It’s too easy.
We can easily look up the number we need at a particular point in time, and therefore we don’t need to retain the information in our head
The desire to measure everything.
You simply can’t retain every single piece of information put before you – which leads you back to relying on dashboards or systems
So, how do we bring the number to life?
Keep it simple.
If you have a wealth of data in front of you, focus on maybe the three or four core measures that really tell you something. Break down the number to give you something tangible about what you need to achieve each week/month
Engage with the data.
Too many people just input numbers into a system or sales platform without recognising the importance of thinking what those numbers mean. The idea of ‘cognitive disfluence’ is key here – the fact that we retain information and learn more if we actually interact with what we’re trying to learn
Start with the goal.
Instead of looking at the data and feeling that we have to do something with it, look instead at what you’re trying to achieve. What numbers do you need to pull out and understand to reach your goal?
Leaders. If you’re a leader, help your people to work with the data and think what the number really means. Give them the raw information they need and ask them to compile a report about some of the core data. You could break it down and ask different people to look at particular bits of the data. Ask them: Help me understand what’s in your figures and what does that tell you? Are you seeing what I’m seeing? Why has this bit changed? What does that mean?
In our work, we usually tell people that having focus is a good thing. But when it comes to sales, just being focused on the sale and nothing else is not so good. Sales is part of getting your service to your customer, but you can’t just be focused on that – you’ve got to have a bigger purpose as an organisation.
In this podcast, Richard and Graham discuss why some salespeople only think about the sale – and how such tunnel vision can impact on your customers and your colleagues.
Sales
people are, of course, very targeted and often very driven by what they need to
achieve. But having such a singular focus can mean you forget about the other important
things that sit around the sale.
If all you’re concerned about is getting that sale – hitting your targets, getting the number – then you disregard the other parts of the sales process that are really important. A company that’s all about sales creates an aggressive culture, with salespeople who are highly motivated and focused just on getting money from the customer. They’re not bothered about the end product that the customer gets, or the quality of service. And colleagues in other departments, particularly customer-facing staff, can often feel like a spare part, tasked with delivering impossible promises made by the salespeople just to win the sale, or sorting out complaints from dissatisfied customers who have been promised one thing and received another
Of
course, if your job is in sales, you need to be concerned with ‘the number’.
But you also need to consider the customer experience, your product, the health
and wellbeing of your colleagues, and your organisation’s culture and ethical
boundaries. Ask yourself: If I make the sale in this way, what does it mean for
the customer and for us as a business, and how might it impact on the other
departments?
Considering
the culture of your organisation is particularly important if you’re the person
setting the targets. Be mindful that the targets you set will drive a certain
kind of behaviour so make sure that the sales process you’re encouraging
reflects the culture of your organisation.
Over the last 15 years I have worked with many senior
leadership teams that are grappling with necessary organisational changes.
These are often to take advantage of market or political trends, consumer
demands, or to gain first mover advantage. Having said that, in one case a
number of years ago, it was because the senior team had been given the feedback
that the vast majority of people in the business were unhappy.
It was around this time that I became interested in the
subject of trust.
It seemed to me that the leadership team mentioned above just
wasn’t trusted anymore. Nobody believed what they said. Since then, I’ve seen
it time and time again. A leadership team that thinks if they make the right
noises for a while, people will get on board.
A lack of trust in all walks of life makes things very hard.
Do you like being around people you don’t trust? Of course not. It brings a
heightened sense of anxiety and caution to everything we do. If you are in this
situation on a daily basis or in your personal relationships, it makes life
unbearable.
My work over the last few years has led me to talk to teams
about the need for them to rebuild trust or ensure they are trusted before
embarking on changes, big or small, in their organisations. As ever around the
subject of change, some people get it but many don’t. Many assume that just putting
a good plan in place and some positional authority behind what they are saying means
that people will just come on the journey with them.
So, as I explored the topic further, I began to develop
something I call the ‘Trust Index’. Although rudimental, it was based on hours
of talking to people in organisations. This simple research helped me identify
three key factors that are needed to build trust:
Competence, honesty and
reliability.
I would then ask people in the organisation three simple
questions based on these factors.
1. On a scale of 1-10 do you think the senior team are
competent as leaders?
2. On a scale of 1-10 do you think they are honest with you?
3. On a scale of 1-10 do they do what they say they will do?
I’d then take all the responses and convert the answer to
each of the questions into an overall percentage. As I said, very rudimental! However,
it did give me a really good guide about how much people trusted their managers
and team leaders.
I then went back to senior teams that were being given a score
of 50% or less by their people, and suggested that they should think twice
before making any changes of significance in their organisations, and instead
wait until they had won back the trust of their people.
Recently, I came across something along the same lines as my
research, although rather less basic! While on a long train journey, I was
flicking through Ted Talks on my laptop when I saw one by Frances Frei, a
professor of technology and operations management at the Harvard Business
School.
She had been working at Uber following their recent problems,
and had noticed three things that were broken in terms of trust within their
culture.
Her talk is funny, informative and a great watch. She puts
things so much better than I had been able to with my simple research. She talks
about the following three things being needed to gain, maintain and rebuild
trust:
Authenticity, logic and
empathy.
Firstly, I was really pleased to see that my own limited research had given results that were similar to those Frances was talking about. However, as only one of us is a Harvard professor, I am more than happy to take and work on her three factors!
We’ve created this diagram below based on what Frances says in her Ted Talk:
So, why not ask yourself the following three questions, either in relation to the people you lead or the people who are leading in your company.
1. Authenticity – Are they seeing the real you?
2. Logic – Does it (whatever it is you are proposing) or do
you make sense?
3. Empathy – Do people see that you care about them?
If any of these three are missing, the whole
thing goes very wobbly and certainly means you don’t have the basis on which to
launch a programme of change.
Assumptions, beliefs and past experiences are going to shape how we think about the sales process and the customer. Added to that, we also have to deal with pressure from targets and our managers.This will all condition how you behave during the sales process.
In our latest podcast, Ricky and Rob first discuss the reasons why we typically talk ourselves OUT of the sale, before looking at ways of talking ourselves INTO it.
Reasons we might use to talk ourselves out of the sale include making assumptions that our competitors are better than we are or that the customer doesn’t want what we are selling. We’ll second-guess how the customer’s going to react and what they’re going to say. We’ll ask ourselves: Why do they want what I’m selling, and why do they want it from me? Am I good enough? Is my product or service good enough?
So, how can you turn that around and to talk yourself INTO a sale?
Firstly,
focus on all the great things you do, the great experiences you’ve had in the past,
and the wins. Play over the narrative that was in your mind when you did well in
that call, sales meeting or sales follow-up.
Get other people involved, if possible. Reflect on a sales meeting with a colleague or sales manager, look at the successful elements that you can draw upon and learn from. For the less successful parts, think what you might do differently next time.
Be self-aware. You will only improve if you can reflect and learn from what you do. Nurture a growth mindset in yourself. Ask: What can I learn from this?
Finally, during that next sale, don’t get caught up in the moment and in the pressure of having to make the sale, or the need to deliver targets or win a new customer. We might wonder if our product or service is good enough, or worry that we don’t understand the product fully. As sales people, we’ll focus our attention on the product’s weaknesses, which we may have to defend, but spend hardly any time on why the product is great. We need to think from the customer’s perspective, not our own, and see the world the other way round – after all, they are buying it for what it can do, and not what it can’t.
What you actually want is to get the right outcome for the customer rather than selling for selling’s sake. Just focus on building a great relationship, understanding your customer and what they need, and then positioning your product for them.
If I told you that you were only performing at 60% of you, would you want to do something about it?
Once you got past the emotional reaction of feeling criticised (“Who is this guy?”, “Who is he to challenge me?”), it is likely you will feel the need to justify yourself. You’ll probably point out how hard you and your team are working and highlight your performance versus your targets and KPIs.
But this is not about targets and KPIs, this is about potential.
It is not my intent to criticise; I am instead challenging the way you see the world. I see it in every client we work with, and it sits at the heart of our Thinking Focus belief statement:
We believe that people, teams and business units underperform, not because they want to, not because they mean to, but because they can’t get out of their own way!
Every day you and your people face challenges and constraints, either self-imposed, real or perceived. Your people face systems and processes designed with the best intent yet which fail to empower them to deliver greatness, forcing compliance and restricting innovation and creativity, all in the name of consistency. Well, guess what: the only consistency is your people consistently underperforming and not reaching their potential!
In over a decade of working with clients across the world, I and my colleagues at Thinking Focus have noticed the startling reality that, when asked, people in all businesses state that ‘interference’ (the stuff that gets in our way) amounts to an average 40%. Yes, 40%! Which means that, if this is true, people are performing at an average of just 60%!
While I accept that this observation is hardly scientific, the consistency in what more than 200 clients have reported to us over all these years is uncanny. Moreover, a CIPD survey suggested the exact same number, give or take 1%. It would seem that our anecdotal findings are actually supported by an external reference point!
So we know there is a problem, now let’s look at what can you do about it.
Here are three things you can do to get started, and they won’t cost you a penny or a huge amount of time:
1. Quantify the size of your problem or opportunity
The key here is not to get to focused on the number, but instead to look for the opportunity. Dig beneath the surface. One obvious thing to do, which is rarely done, is to ask your people what it is that gets in the way of them doing their best work. So ask them:
What ‘interference’ do they have to deal with every day? Get them to externalise it but don’t justify, defend or seek to fix it at this point. Your goal is to understand the issues
Can you quantify this interference as a percentage? Ask them how much it affects their ability to perform at 100% of their potential
Use this as a rudimentary guide, to size your problem/opportunity
So, for example, if they suggest that the ‘interference’ is at 35%, this means that they are performing at 65% of their potential. Ask them what impact a 1%, 2% or 10% shift would have on their performance. Is it worth fixing? If yes, go to step 2.
2. Review the ‘interference’ list
Invite your people to review the list of ‘interference’ and ask them to focus on just three right now; three that could add the greatest value with least effort. In essence, identify the ‘low hanging fruit’ which will eliminate, improve or mitigate the impact of ‘interference’. Then invite volunteers to pitch up and take on the challenge to fix one.
3. Let them go!
Now, support them, provide time and resources, and let them go unlock some potential for you. This is important as you are empowering them to own the problem and fix it. It also means that any long term solution will be owned by them and will likely lead to wider adoption of their solution than any imposed by management.
There are many benefits from adopting this approach, including:
There is a cathartic release from sharing ‘interference’
We talked about how this interference can be either organisational or self-imposed, and discussed the importance of recognising interference as the first step to improving productivity.
In this blog, we’ll take a look at how important it is not just to identify these barriers, but to understand just how interference affects productivity.
Regardless of whether the constraints to productivity are organisational or self-imposed, all forms of interference have the same effect. Here are just some examples of how interference affects productivity:
It slows down our rate of work, which causes frustration
It causes us to repeat work tasks and processes, leading to inefficiency and wasted effort
It creates mistakes, meaning that valuable resources need to be used to rectify the mistakes
It causes us to avoid doing things, which means that potential deadlines can be missed and work is not completed on time
It creates stress, which can ultimately result in absenteeism
It causes a feeling of isolation and anxiety about doing the right thing, which means that we don’t achieve our best result
It can lead to poor decision-making, lack of clarity and ambiguity, all of which means that we don’t actually complete the work required to the standard that was asked of us
It causes tensions and protective behaviour by individuals within teams, leading to disagreements or arguments, and people avoiding responsibility and not taking ownership
It creates the need for more supervision or management of tasks and people, which means that the amount of management time and resource increases
It can become a talking point among individuals and teams, rapidly turning into moaning, fault finding and finger pointing – during which time less work is actually being done
It can create a perception of unfairness when a person or team doesn’t seem to ‘suffer from’ the same interferences as another person or team, which in turn creates gossip, rumour and a culture of blame
Thinking Focus works with organisations to identify and remove barriers to productivity, helping teams and business units achieve their potential. Read more here about our approach to unlocking productivity.
