Tag Archives: effectiveness

The power of a question

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Solving complex problems starts with asking questions

Solving problems at work is a difficult job. The context of problems can be very complex in large organisations, where many units, professions, and technologies interact to deliver a product or service. A key challenge that I have observed again and again in more than 25 years of experience in the IT industry is, first of all, and long before we even try to suggest solutions: understanding the problem.

Many of us have experienced an education system that promotes and rewards knowledge, and that does not so much focus on finding the important questions and fields of learning. School curricula already give the collection and structure of questions to be answered and things to be learned. The ‘job’ of pupils is to eagerly acquire the knowledge in these fields and to be able to answer defined questions. That’s mainly how we educate people.

Even during higher education, this pattern will prevail before we might do real science, all at the end, in a doctoral thesis, for example. And a lot of that makes a lot of sense, because it is based on good scientific, technological and practical knowledge that our industries, sciences, and societies have acquired over centuries. However, just this very knowledge and experience can stand in the way when it comes to solving problems.

If the nature of a problem is basically a lack of using available knowledge, that knowledge will be the main ingredient for a good solution, together with basic analytical and structuring skills. Repairing a mechanical defect on a car would be an example. But if we look at complex problems, the perspective changes: Typically, here we can only see parts of what is going on, and such problems are not easy to grasp and understand as a whole.

The challenge is to find out what actually happens in the first place, then to understand what factors are relevant or irrelevant as possible root-conditions and finally to figure out how things are connected and in which kind of dynamics they interact. Only then will we be able to propose and test countermeasures. In consequence, for such complex problems, we will rather have to deal with a lot of unknowns and with a lot of questions that can not be answered directly.

At school, unanswered questions would mean low grades and homework not done. Also, in our jobs, most times, we get paid to propose solutions and to do something, not to ask questions that nobody can answer. That’s why intuitively we tend to seek answers quickly, and we don’t feel well with having so many unanswered questions. Shouldn’t we be the ones who know what is going on in our work environment? And who should know how production or services are organised? Who should understand technology, roles, and how all that plays together? Isn’t that what we get paid for? Will we make a career by asking questions, or rather, others who conclude, suggest, and do something faster than we?

That’s how it probably feels. If we add an eagerness of ‘wanting to know’ and an inborn strength of our brain to compose stories out of nothing, we are quickly on a subconscious fast-track: We are composing our idea about what that problem consists of and what is probably causing it. Our brains love to build stories; this is actually what made homo sapiens survive in not-so-safe environments a long time ago.

And that’s what our brains will do, when we look at a complex problem full of white spots: It fills the white spots with whatever we know from the past and whatever we can imagine might fit in halfway — because we need a somewhat functional model of reality, if we want to get orientation and if we want to be able to act.

In the attempt to solve complex problems successfully, this is where the potential trouble and risk start: If we fill white spots with assumptions, if we frame new situations based on what previous experience made us learn, we risk being wrong about what we have in front of us now, right from the start.

Unfortunately, also in this case, “reality bites”: The reality of that problem does not care about how we imagine it might be. We only get it solved if we see how things really are, and how things are connected and caused. The first attempts of construction of the Panama Canal by a French project (1881–1889) failed, because the causes of Malaria were assumed wrongly: ‘Mala aria’ — ‘bad air’ — goes back to what the Romans once thought was the cause. And the US project (1904 -1914) nearly failed due to the same issue of too many severely sick or dead workers, before Dr William C. Gorgas brought scientifically proven new insights in 1905: Malaria is caused by mosquitoes, of course, as we know today.

That’s where the power of a good question comes into play: If we accept that it is wise to ‘respect’ and appreciate unanswered questions as what they are: Things that we don’t know and that we need to investigate to better understand reality. Then, one good question can be worth much more than tons of knowledge that simply does not really apply in this case.

During problem solving in large organizations, such questions turn around what actually happens in a process, about people dynamics, about the influence of incentives, about what facts we have vs. what facts we should have, and what ‘good’ would look like versus what is the gap at the moment. And finally: Why is this important now? (Is it important, really?)

Good conversation and coaching techniques help us to use questions in a powerful way, which will generate new insights through different reflection, different action, and different communication with others. And it will help to make the problem owner see also her/his own individual way of acting and thinking, and where the limits, strengths, and weaknesses are.

It requires discipline from a coach to guide such conversations, because the role is not to think about the problem himself, but to observe how the other person is looking at the problem. That allows us to choose questions that will make the other one think and reflect with a different, wider horizon. Open questions (in contrast to leading or closed questions) are most powerful because they widen the view and stimulate reflection and investigative action.

Two more things can make these conversations and open questions even more powerful: Honesty and reduction.

Reduction — what does that mean? One of the challenges that experienced coaches have is their own rich knowledge and astute ability to detect potentially important questions and new perspectives around a problem. In his wide universe of experience, a lot of concepts and considerations seem to be quite ‘clear’ and ‘understood’ for the coach in terms of their potential importance and value. Thus, there are a lot of questions that can be brought up — and quite fast, that is too many questions for the counterpart and too much of the coach’s own subconscious hypothesis-forming, creeping into the conversation again.

It is simple: We can avoid that by remembering ourselves that it might be one very simple, good question, that makes the other one think, reflect, and start to investigate into new horizons and perspectives. And by doing the hard job of choosing which very few questions are probably most helpful for the other at this point of work on the problem. That must not be the super sophisticated question — things that might be about simple and basic aspects — or even better: white spots — might turn out to be the most powerful questions. It might not feel like this after a life of experience, but actually, many times less is more and simpler is better in such conversations.

What is simple and obvious for an experienced coach might be new and rich in insights for somebody else. One of the most powerful and simple questions, for example, is: What has actually happened? And what do we make it mean? I have seen so many conversations, where this was not well investigated or understood, but lots of assumptions and hypothesis and stories are already there in the minds. Smoke above the fire… that blurs the view of reality.

The second thing is honesty. What does that mean in the context of questions? This might occur less frequently, but is even more important in more progressed conversations: If a conversation about a problem starts to feel strange or cumbersome or unproductive — or if it feels like: “Something is missing here… but I can’t tell what it is.” Then you are probably at a very interesting point in the coaching or conversation, but might hesitate to express this just simply as it is, because that feels dumb or potentially offensive. I found that then just this can be the most helpful thing to do: Ask simply and very honestly: “I feel that something is missing in this story: What might that be?” Or: “I am lost — how does all that fit together?” Or: “Wow, this is complicated, and difficult to understand — should it be like that? Is that complicated story helpful for others to see what’s going wrong?”

With such honest statements and resulting simple, ‚dumb‘ questions, I got great ‘aha’-moments in conversations, where I felt we were lost and stagnating. That honesty changed perspective, made others think and triggered inspiration to seek new perspectives. And it helped me as a coach to not get stuck with my counterpart, just because I felt I had to find a more sophisticated question.

Thus, let’s welcome unanswered questions and things we don’t know as valuable resources to let us find the way towards reality. And reality seen, as it really is, dramatically increases the likelihood of our solutions being effective. But this needs humility, openness and taking a break from motives like ‘looking good’ and ‘giving a smart impression’. Maybe this can be compared to the innocence of how children look at the world: “Oh, marvellous, all these things that happen around me — and how can I learn to understand all that?”

Seen from a different angle: Work Overburden

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Work overburden – Is it inevitable, should it be glorified? Or is it rather an ignored source of truth?

In a newspaper article, it was stated that in the medical industry in Germany work overburden is being ‚glorified‘. The story was about women engaging in a surgical career successfully, but who are then more or less mobbed and pushed aside, once they become pregnant and mothers. And if you are not permanently available to at least 130 % or more at any time, you are not seen as somebody seriously pursuing a surgeon’s and scientist’s career.

From my long experience in large IT organisations, I know that they are not the only industry where work overburden is being ‘glorified’. In IT professions at all levels of the hierarchy, work overburden is a more or less normal state for many. For the doctors, it is the high need for surgeries across the country that pushes work hours. For IT professionals, it is the growing customer demand and a fast technological change clock rate that makes them sit longer and have meetings for long hours, even during the most beautiful warm summer evenings. 

Glorification

Is it like that? Really? Are these the real causes, and that’s it? Let’s look at this from a different angle. And I want to use the newspaper story about women’s careers as surgeons to make a start: In Germany, meanwhile, more than 70 % of graduates in human medicine are female, and there is indeed a high need for specialised and qualified surgeons in the hospitals. Basically, in that situation, you can’t afford to let talented, engaged, and motivated women behind and push them out of the operating theatres, because they have a baby. Btw., ethically and from a fairness perspective, this is highly questionable, of course.

But for the moment, I want to stay with simple business logic and value creation perspectives. And then you end up here: The still big majority of 78% male surgeons are spending 10 or 12-hour days in the operating theatres, because there are not enough qualified surgeons to cover the demand for surgeries. So this is, to some degree, self-made work overburden, because the chief doctors are actively pushing highly qualified and talented women out of the operating theatres. Is this being discussed as an ethical and fairness issue? Yes, a bit. Is it being seen as a business issue? Not really. Because, indeed, work overburden is seen as a part of the normal life and ‚professional pride‘ of doctors. Conversations with doctors in my private environment confirm this. Because you can’t let the patients wait, because it is so important to save lives and health, because they are the cream of the crop of the most difficult and admired professions in the country. And, yes, all that is true. They are doing highly qualified, difficult work and are doing so much good to so many people with that hard work. But all of these statements also come as a reflex so fast, so indisputable, that it prevents these doctors from objectively looking at this as a serious, unsolved problem of how they organise this important work. 

Btw. also from my own experience and the experience of others, I can say: Patients are waiting so much and so long in these high-end hospitals. So, all the work overburden does not even make the promise true, “we can‘t let patients wait”. Very obviously, there is a pretence. And that pretence has a cost. 

Work overburden kills productivity and quality

So why is overburden an issue beyond the question of whether the surgeon can spend leisure time earlier on a warm summer evening? Let’s look at that briefly: 

Overburden creates stress. Overburden tires those who carry it. Overburden makes people rush and hurry. Overburden leads to prioritisation and re-prioritisation and pushing things to the waiting bench. Overburden leads to start-and-never-finish actions. Overburden leads to repeated requests because they are missed or not done the right way. Overburden does not leave space for reflection, learning, and communication beyond the pure doing of the job. And long-term chronic overburden makes people give in, in the sense of: They will just try to survive the day and the week, with no energy left to try to do things better or to talk about recurring issues for example. No energy or goodwill left to collaborate, to support others beyond what is in their own job description. In consequence, all this leads to a higher chance that mistakes and errors happen. And it leads to much lower chances and less possibilities that things can be improved over time.

And that is the same in both types of jobs: For surgeons, it might be small complications, with low or no impact on patients. Sometimes it might be bigger complications, with a serious impact on patients. And that will result in rework or even bigger trouble when patients have issues afterwards. Or it might be much less, but also that will leave traces: Shouting at subordinates or nurses. Slowly losing patience to talk to patients as you should and would like to. The result: Trust fades away, and the cooperation between all these roles suffers, which makes work more difficult in the end: Patients keep asking questions and complaining. Nurses and assistant doctors only do what they are told, and will not take any responsibility or initiative themselves anymore. They might even leave the job. 

In IT organisations, it results in errors that happen while working on customer systems, leading to incidents and outages. Or you have unnoticed little configuration errors or suboptimal maintenance creeping into the systems, increasing the likelihood that later you see surprises (‚oh, this is not like the standard’ – ‚ah, weird system behaviours, I didn‘t expect that could happen’). Such deviations will make further changes, maintenance, and system restores suddenly complicated and laborious. It might be that IT-support and service experts don’t take the time to truly understand what the customer wants and needs – or to understand what issue the other guy in the other IT-department or at sales has, and why the hell he can not simply just do his job the right way?

These are some examples of negative effects that you don’t want to have in your working environment, because they make it more difficult to get good results, and the risk of issues increases. From long experience in production management, we know: If you push the utilisation of your people beyond 80% of their real capability, you will not get more output, but less. Productivity and quality go down. Or would you expect that a surgeon or IT-administrator will still be very fast and accurate in the 10th hour of hard work?

Learning from work overburden

Basically, you can’t afford to have such effects, especially if your hospital or IT-company is already working at the limits, in permanent work overburden, because that can quickly create situations and issues (like mass outages of systems, too many customers pressing and urging), that then finally and definitively exceed your capability to react and to stay in control – you end up in what you could call an ‚overburden meltdown‘. And if that does not (yet) happen, you can at least be sure that these effects generate enough inefficiencies to keep levels of work overburden high. It is a self-reinforcing vicious cycle. 

Thus, what is the solution to reduce overburden? To stay realistic: If you are close to that ‚overburden meltdown‘, you need to identify what helps to stabilise your situation. In IT, this is, for example, to install ‚early warning‘ structures and habits that bring new risks and issues to the surface early – before all customers are affected, for example. Or before half of your surgeons suddenly must stay at home with the flu. Then you look at these risks and issues and take action immediately to mitigate risks and impacts. That will keep your workforce away from even more overburden, and that might even uncover some sources of recurring issues.

But at the start, that is just a tactical need to survive and to stay in a space where you can still act and can still make choices. It does not solve the overburden problem for good. It does not sufficiently bring you on a road to uncover the root conditions of work overburden. 

Call a spade a spade: Work overburden is an issue

To start walking on that journey, there is a very essential first step. A step that does not cost you extra resources, or expensive material, or investments: Stop glorifying work overburden. Stop calling work overburden a normal and inevitable thing in your industry. Start naming work overburden what it actually is: An issue and a threat to your business, your value production, and your purpose. And as this has now been identified as a problem with serious impacts, you can start to ask: Where is this coming from? What is causing work overburden? Is it just all the load of new customers and customers’ demand? Or is it, – seen from a different angle – rather a problem of not being productive and proactive enough to serve these waves of demand? And look at the types of demand: Are you overwhelmed by incidents and customers escalating to get things fixed and back working? Then ask yourself: Are customers the cause of this? Well, no, not really – there is something that causes incidents that you might want to manage better in the future. Walk into the neighbouring department, sit down with them and ask them: What could I do to make work easier and more productive for you? Are there things that you would need from others? Are there pieces of work or requests coming to you, where information or preparation, or inputs from others are missing, and you can’t process them well? When you have shifts where customer requests are at 180% of what your team can possibly do in 8 hours, then ask yourself: What is wrong with how that demand is being channelled into your organisation and towards different shifts? 

To put it in a nutshell: Work overburden seen from a different angle is not normal, is not inevitable, and is nothing to glorify (at least if pushed to people in a way that they have no choice). It is an issue that you can’t afford for long-term success, and that issue wants to tell you something. Look at it, listen to it, understand how work overburden arises, with a perspective across the whole value chain, and considering all levels of decision-making and work.

Escape the rat race – not only at Christmas

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Christmas has arrived. This is a magical time. We remember how we stood as children in front of the Christmas tree with big eyes and curiosity for the parcels, silently listening to stories and songs while the snow fell just as silently outside. After all the seasonal rush, the holidays have finally arrived now also for us adults. We step back and get distance. Relax and redirect our attention towards our loved ones. Different thoughts and a wider vision of life may come into our minds. We can enjoy a healing break full of contemplation, walks in the snow and joyful family dinners. Mind and body get a rest, our professional ambition paused momentarily until the new year.

We might reflect and see our busy job life from another point of view. Not from the productive, planning, executing side or simply getting through all the busy-busy-bang-bang work, but from our sense of achievement – what we now enjoy as a result of all that effort, and taking pride in knowing we tried our best. Different views and ideas flow up to our conscience that had to wait behind all this busy activity at work. We can watch it now from a different angle, in a clearer light. We might think about what it was good for at the end. With this calm and distance, now in our reflections we see that much of it was pointless.

In the middle of the usual work rush we have by far too few occasions where we allow ourselves to get this distance and honesty. Daily we get pulled into the busy-busy-bang-bang noise, feeling a necessity to react quickly, reacting with no time to think, no time to reflect or to choose what really makes sense. Our attention is more and more absorbed by the details and urgencies of these things. We become reactive and try to hurry with all what we do, up to a point where we do not even see any more our original purpose. We find ourselves overwhelmed in noisy activity for the sake of activity, creating the impression of motion – but without real progress. While we keep on moving like this through the weeks, we do not pay much attention to how we can create conditions to have more of these moments of distance like at Christmas. But how do we stop the noise and listen for the right signals?

The real job that we have to do is not trying to find how fast we can do what we already do but how do we do things differently and better to create new value and possibilities. Time for reflection is important as it provides a much needed course correction back to our purpose. Admitting this, we have to ask ourselves: Why is this hardly done in daily work? Why is it so difficult to shift behavior? To say “we are too stressed and busy” leads us back in a loop and that does not help to escape the trap – in contrary, if we say this, we surrender to the rat race and accept to live with the damage every day. And we might not even be fully aware of what the damage and cost is.

What I can say about the months of September and October this year, which were driven by a lot of work and overtime, effectiveness started to suffer as soon as the noisy workload took me off course. I lost my sense of direction and purpose because I had chosen to forsake reflection. The necessary timeouts were cut off by just too much overtime in the evening. I did things where I said after three days of fervent activity “Oh, this could have been much simpler, a more effective way would have created more benefit.”  If I only had had more time to think about a better approach… So many times I chose to ignore these thoughts, reacting to the busy-busy-bang-bang noise, having lost the sound of purpose in all the clamor. I was so busy getting it done…But to be honest, I was just running fast on cumbersome detours, running after the needs and issues of average or even pointless, purpose-failing approaches. Isn’t it frequently like that, that in the middle of all these details, issues and struggles of execution, we lose sight of the purpose? 

With this running, we are the driving force in a vicious circle – we are the ones who keep it spinning and thus it is us who have a choice to stop it. Ask yourself honestly: What is the relationship between the level of value that a busy piece of work produces and the degree of how busy (or overloaded) we are with all our tasks. Consider two backfiring effects in that relationship. First: Being busy and stressed causes a lack of time and distance to reflect and to identify better approaches. Second: Vice versa, the lack of better approaches causes us to be very busy and stressed. Because our not well reflected approaches are relatively ineffective and misdirected. This is keeping us busy with all the issues, insufficient results and even more negative side-effects that we or others have to deal with.  So there you go, the vicious cycle is closed and the rat race is accelerating.

Isn’t that a great insight, a great opportunity found? We are the ones who keep ourselves busy, thus we also have a choice to do it differently. To continue the struggle and just refine and make our action more efficient, is not an alternative, because this will always still suffer from a lack of effectiveness and a lack of right direction. We will just feed and accelerate the vicious circle to turn even faster and to create even more damage. The way to escape this “hamster-wheel” is to make ourselves aware that taking time for reflection will not make us slower, but will let us go the shorter way to better results. We escape the struggle if we admit that taking time will save time and increase impact.

It can be quite simple and does not need big seasonal events like Christmas. I have found one way to pull myself out: Just two weeks ago, in the middle of a pile of other tasks and deadlines, I was reviewing a draft newsletter, and while I was rushing through the detail changes a feeling of doubt got stronger and stronger as if this was the right thing to do at all. Would this have the impact that we needed? I noticed that I had lost focus on what we were trying to achieve. I had simply stopped thinking about what made a really good approach. Frustrated, I felt the wish to have a break, turn away from the computer, that darned mind-absorbing-machine, and to just take a piece of paper, a pencil and a coffee – and think. Get distance from the text and from the whole busy activity. Let my mind escape from the busy-busy-bang-bang mode, see what I have in front of me, think about what counts as a result and look at what I am doing right now. Why let my thinking be constrained and captured by my own prior choice of what seemed to be a common sense action? Why must possibilities be limited by the worriedness to execute fast enough an average approach with doubtful impact?

So I retreated to the coffee-corner and thought about what we knew, what we needed and what might be better options. As a result, I decided to talk to colleagues about what they usually took away from newsletters and adapted the frequency and content based on their feedback.

There are so many opportunities that are not seen, not thought about, not explored because we get too busy, too deep, and too quick to action. We miss the signals and opportunities for great leaps because we are doing noisy, ultimately unproductive quick fixes. I hope I will take a lot of this Christmas silence, reflection and distance into the New Year and I will remember to choose to go for the paper-pencil &coffee-approach more often. When I want to move faster, I will remind myself that I will be faster if I take the time to reflect. And more importantly, I will consider how I can make it a standard for the planning and review of new work-tasks. A piece of paper, a pencil, a coffee and the good feeling that this investment in reflection will pay back not only in saved time and effort,   but also in more value and more impact on what I do every day.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year full of distance, reflection and purpose.