A521.2.3.RB The Danger of a Single Story

Hello readers and welcome back the Educated Leadership blog! This week we were privileged to watch a Ted Talk by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie called, “The Danger of a Single Story” (2009). Ms. Adichie hails from Nigeria and has gained acclaim as a novelist. She tells a story that takes us with her from early childhood through her college years and into the present. Along the way, she realizes how much influence the stories she has read have actually had on her perceptions of others.

As a very young girl in Nigeria, Chimamanda read the books that were available to her. They happened to be tales written in England and the United States. When she began writing stories, around the time she was seven, her stories focused on the characters she had read about. Caucasian kids that played in the snow and drank ginger beer proliferated in her tales. The interesting point was that she had never seen snow and had no idea what a ginger beer even looked like. She didn’t know any other way to write, though.

Her first epiphany occurred when she was given some books by authors from Nigeria and other African countries. For the first time, she realized that people and topics with which she was familiar could be the subject of literature. She looked back and realized the stories from her early childhood were the first dangerous stories she had read. They became her perception of the world, regardless of what she was experiencing. The new stories opened her eyes to a broader existence.

She goes on to relate the interactions she has with her college roommate at a school in the USA. It becomes apparent that the roommate has been exposed to stories about Africa that we all of limited perspective. Chimamanda fields questions about what her “tribal” music sounds like (she grew up a city girl in Lagos) and has to dispel the idea that she may be unfamiliar with a stove and other appliances. The roommate has fallen victim to a single story.

Ms. Adichie goes on to describe other situations where the story of a culture or people she has been exposed to predisposes her to a way of thinking that is proven false upon further investigation. Even as an adult, she gets tripped up by this phenomenon. It is a seductive trap into which we can all fall.

Listening to the presentation, I was reminded of the idea of ‘cultural lenses’ that I learned about during Diversity and Inclusion training. Cultural lenses are the experiences that we collect through the years that impact the way we see the world. The lenses are powerful and can drive us to assumptions. These assumptions are very open to the influence of stereotypes that bolster them. The stories Ms. Adichie read and heard formed pictures of the world for her. It wasn’t until she had other, contrary, experiences that she began to realize her perceptions may not have been based upon complete information.

Personally, I was impacted by this lecture because it made me think about the stories I have clung to that may not give the full picture of a situation. Upon introspection, I could identify a couple right of the bat. The first was about another work group in my building with whom my team and I are having a difficult time working. I realized I need to get more information about issues that are impacting them and to try and learn what cultural lenses may be impacting them and their ability to cooperate.

The US Presidential campaigns jumped to mind, as well. The candidates push their story and their campaign managers ensure their candidates version of the truth gets aired as much as possible. They are banking on the hope we’ll all believe the story they are telling and not ask questions. The media has become the automaton of the political parties, broadcasting whatever is said in order to get ratings. The result is a public that epitomizes being the victim of a single story.

Interestingly, we also learned about the technique of telling a springboard story this week. The springboard is used to provide leadership and vision to a group that a speaker wishes to influence into action or change. (Denning, 2011, p. 60) The springboard, like many kinds of stories, could be an example of the single story about which Ms. Adichie warns us. As leaders, we can prevent that from being the case by authoring stories that provide more than one perspective as springboards. By definition, a springboard is told from the point of view of one protagonist (Denning, 2011, p. 68-69). However, the protagonist can exhibit and extol more than one perspective. That clarity may work to illustrate the breadth of knowledge of the protagonist, possibly eliciting a stronger feeling of trust from the audience.

If you get the chance, I hope you can watch the video. I have posted the link below. 

I showed it to my team today. I will close with the same question with which I closed our meeting, “What single story are you influenced by?”

Until next week….

Adichie, C. N. (2009). The Danger of a Single Story, Ted Global.

Denning, S. (2011). The Leader's Guide to Story Telling - Mastering the Art and Discipline of Business Narrative. San Francisco, CA, Josey-Bass.           

http://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story

A521.1.4.RB Stories in Your Organization

Hello and welcome back to The Educated Leadership Blog! This week we are going to look at stories about the organization in which I work and the impact they have on the culture and values therein.

I work in an organization that is the reports up to another organization that reports to another organization that reports to the ultimate corporate level. The overarching corporation is The Boeing Company. Finding stories that are illustrative of the goals, ideal, and culture of the company is a task of relative ease. A search of the web will return dozens of books about the history and challenges of Boeing. There are a few stories, in particular, that resonate with me as they pertain to the culture of a company that is turning 100 years old this summer.

Of my favorites, there are three that point to the spirit of Boeing that I know. Those would be the story of Tex Johnston doing barrel rolls over the SeaFair festival in the B707 prototype, the story of the design and development of the B747 led by Joe Sutter, and the story of the design and development of the B777 led by Alan Mullaly.

Let’s focus on the story of the B747. If you haven’t had the chance to read “747: Creating the World’s First Jumbo Jet and other Adventures from a Life in Aviation” by Joe Sutter and Jay Spenser (2006), here’s a condensed version. Back in the 1960’s, the commercial aviation battle between Europe and the United States was focused on the development of a supersonic transport. Europe was busy developing the Concorde and the United States had entrants from a number of manufacturers, including Boeing, who were vying for a government contract. There was a tremendous amount of prestige around building such a sophisticated piece of machinery, especially for the time. Remember, computers were not commonplace. As the competition wore on, the costs continued to mount for all the entrants. Boeing committed a vast majority of its aeronautical engineers to the task. However, one engineer, Joe Sutter, was asked to stay focused on building an airliner that Pan Am was interested in buying. Pan Am had bought the B707 and flew them all over the world. The airline’s president, Juan Trippe, loved having his jets viewed as icons of world travel. He was now looking for the next best big thing.

Juan was convinced he wanted a double-decked B707 and had asked Boeing to investigate building it. Joe Sutter was the lead engineer and was faced with trying to satisfy a very demanding customer with limited engineering resources. Undaunted, Joe took on the challenge. He provided vision and leadership for his team and they united behind him. It wasn’t too long before Sutter’s team realized a double decker was not going to work. However, they did figure out that if the floor plan of the B707 were doubled in width, they could design a plane around it. Trippe remained adamant about the double decker. In a pivotal moment, Sutter sent an engineer to New York to visit Mr. Trippe at his office on Park Avenue. Luckily, the meeting room where the two were to meet was over 24 feet wide. Why was that lucky? Because the engineer had a 21-foot strip of material to roll out to show Mr. Trippe how wide his new jet would be.

Trippe agreed to go ahead with the deal. The next challenge was that there wasn’t a factory big enough to build a jet of the size Sutter’s team had drawn up! The answer Boeing and Sutter came up with was to build the factory as the built the first airplane! Coincidentally, the supersonic transport program was shut down by the US government and all of the engineering assets it had tied up became available to Sutter. So many unforeseen issues and challenges were encountered and conquered by Sutter and his team that they earned the nickname, “The Incredibles”.

The ingenuity, resilience, and resourcefulness of the people who got the B747 onto and off the drawing board and then into the air are looked to as pillars of Boeing’s existence. The story is almost mythical in its importance to the history of our company. Every employee who has seen a B747 or been lucky enough to visit the Everett factory gets a sense of pride when they hear the story. I still have a physical reaction, in the form of getting the chills,  when I see a documentary about the struggle Boeing went through to produce what had been inconceivable to anyone up to that point in history.

I have been very lucky to have had the opportunity to fly the B747 and to teach pilots from our customer airlines how to fly it, too. I feel a sense of responsibility to all those who built those planes and to the reputation of the overall company. I have that expectation of my colleagues because of the commitment and efforts put forth by the employees who preceded us. The story of the B747, the B777, the B29, and the B707 are all records of defining moments at a company this is known for producing products that few believed could dream of, let alone make. We have tied the characteristics that these teams exemplified into our leadership attributes and we strive to be as innovative as those before us have been.

Stories are powerful tools for leaders. Stories that help define culture and values can be referenced time and again. Look for stories in your organization, family, or group that can aid you in describing the values you want to prosper. As we continue through the weeks of our course on communications, we will learn how to bring other tools to bear and how to be more effective leaders.

See you next week!

Joe Sutter, J. S. (2006). 747: Creating the World's First Jumbo Jet and Other Adventures from a Life in Aviation. New York, NY: HarperCollins.

A632.9.3.RB_DavisCarl Role of Emotion in Decision Making

Snoqualmie Falls, Cascade Mountains, Washington

Hello, readers!

We’ve reached week nine! This will be the last blog for the term and we’ll be talking about emotion as it impacts decision making.

This week we read about Information Cascades (Hoch, et al., 2001) (Tunkelang, 2010) and have watched a video (Stanford, 2011) about the impact of emotion on decision making. Information cascades, or following along with the crowd, have an element of wanting to belong as one of its drivers. The emotion of fitting in or belonging feeds one’s confidence in a decision and can lead to a loop of following along.

Prof. Shiv talked about the role confidence plays in decision making. In particular, it is the projection of confidence that can persuade followers that the leader knows what he or she is doing. In other words, as Prof. Shiv said, “Emotion is what yields decision with conviction.” (Stanford, 2011, 1:08) As a side note, I find it interesting that Prof. Shiv exudes very little in the way of emotion while giving his persuasive presentation. He makes his point, nonetheless.

Athletic coaches, military leaders on the brink of battle, politicians at election time, and late night infomercial hosts are all examples of people who use passion and confidence to sway people to their way of thinking. Nancy Duarte, in a speech at TEDxEast in 2010 discussed the way great communicators built the emotion they wished to convey into their speeches. Emotion is a powerful tool and driver of decisions.

As I review decisions about which I was very confident, my decision to leave my dream job at Delta to join The Boeing Company is high on the list. I can remember thinking, as I was walking into the interview, “This is the place I am supposed to be. I am the man for this job and the interviewers are going to know that by the time we are done.” I had weighed the opportunity against staying in my current job and felt the positive impacts for me and my family would far outweigh the negatives. Some time after being hired it came to light that I scored the highest of all the candidates that interviewed that year in my department. I give full credit to the confidence I exuded in boosting that score. After getting the job, the transition to the Pacific Northwest didn’t go as smoothly as we’d hoped. As is often the case, I didn’t know what I didn’t know and the move was very difficult for me and my family. However, after riding through the initial rough patch of moving 1800 miles to a new place the benefits started kicking in. I know I am a better person for the experience and my family has seen benefits they would not have realized had I stayed at Delta. I have been able to experience deep satisfaction as I helped customer pilots master the skills to fly Boeing jets, I have also experienced a sense of pride like never before when the team I had recruited and hired honored me at a dinner via a surprise presentation of a genuine officer’s kepi from the French Foreign Legion. My diverse team had been given that nickname by other employees at Boeing and it became our unofficial moniker. I’ll admit that I broke down in front of them. The emotion was overwhelming.

The decision I was less confident about may surprise you. It would be the decision to start flying lessons. I was by no means sure that I wanted to learn to fly. I had worked around airplanes and grown up in an airline family. The “flying bug” just hadn’t bitten me totally. The main reason I decided to start was I felt a distance growing between my father and me. I thought that if we had aviation to share, we could bridge the gap. That idea didn’t really come to fruition. However, the more I flew the more I realized what I wanted to do for a career. Getting into an airline cockpit became an obsession and I worked feverishly on attaining that goal. I felt my confidence growing every day. My sense of joy and learning to seek out responsibility were also growing all the time. In the end, my attempt to repair a relationship opened the door to experiences I had no idea I would find. The friendships, the emotional and intellectual growth, and the responsibility I have been fortunate to merit are all results of my stepping forward into something about which I was unsure.

Emotion can impact decisions. Lack of emotion can also impact decisions. As I like to tell diversity classes I teach, No one wants to hear Mickey Mouse on the airplane’s public address system when there’s an emergency. They want Cool Hand Luke, John Wayne or Tony Stark to tell them it’s all going to be ok. Your team wants that, too… So do your bosses.

Take a look at the references below and keep working on building your EDUCATED LEADERSHIP.

Until next class!

Hoch, S. J., Kunreuther, Howard C., with Gunther, Robert E. (2001). Wharton on Making Decisions. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.

Stanford University, Prof. B. Shiv. (Producer). (2011). Brain Research at Stanford: Decision Making. [Filmed lecture] Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRKfl4owWKc

TEDxEast, N. Duarte. (Producer). (2010). Nancy Duarte uncovers the common structure of greatest communicators. [Lecture] Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1nYFpuc2Umk

Tunkelang, D. (2010). An Information Cascade.  Retrieved from http://thenoisychannel.com/2010/11/17/an-information-cascade

A632.8.3.RB - Reflections on the Cynefin Framework

Hello again and welcome back to the Educated Leadership blog! It’s week eight and we are examining a system for classifying the context in which a decision must be made. The system is called the Cynefin Framework and was described in an article in the November 2007 Harvard Business Review titled “A Leader’s Framework for Decision Making” (Snowden and Boone).

The framework is divided into five domains. In increasing order of complexity and entropy, they are: simple, complicated, complex, chaotic, and disorder.

Simple decisions are the type that is sensed and then a response is made. The answer seems almost immediately apparent. As an example, I think of the action one takes when approaching a stop sign when driving.

Complicated decisions are sensed, some analysis is required, and then a response is made. The answer may be dependent on some variables, but there is no doubt an answer will be discovered. This reminds me of what sorting mail must be like for a postal worker. They read the address and decide which box the mail goes into for delivery or return.

Complex decisions are those to which an answer is not readily apparent. There must be probes made, the decision sensed, and then a response made. Interestingly the complex situations appear to have been merely complicated, often, upon hindsight. However, at the time of presentation, the path to an answer is not immediately evident. It may not even be clear, until time and investigation are applied, that there will be an answer to a complex problem. At my work, we face complex decisions when dealing with customer requests that are outside of our normal offerings. Many times, our ability to satisfy the request requires extensive investigation and coordination before we can reply. Our answer to the customer remains in doubt for periods of time and our ability to agree is never totally a given.

Chaotic situations require a leader to act in the best way they can initially. The goal here, frankly, is to buy time by mitigating the most emergent aspects of the situation to allow one to sense the holistic situation and then respond accordingly. This is the rare time that a leader has to make the quick answer from instinct, experience, or just pure intuition. Emergent situations that are out of the ordinary are the easiest examples to cite. Many Americans above the age of 30 will flash to September 11, 2001 when asked about a time they faced that was unlike any other.  When facing chaos, the ultimate goal for the leader is to drive the situation as safely and quickly as possible toward a lower state of entropy, and thus, manageability. If one remains in the dictatorial mode too long, the probability of generating more complex or chaotic situations increases. Servant and transformational leaders will definitely know that they need to be directive only as long as absolutely necessary. I know, because I ascribe to those leadership styles.

In the middle of those four levels of entropy lies an area of disorder. In this area, decisions cannot be made. It is up to the leader to break the situation down into parts that can be classified and handled via one of the other four classifications. When faced with a situation like this, I am reminded of the adage, “How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.” Tackle the situations that are readily identifiable and start working on classifying the rest.

In the aviation operation of which I am in charge, we are constantly looking for ways to move complex situations down in entropy to a complicated state. At the same time we look for opportunities to move complicated decisions to a simple state.  We do this by reviewing situations and looking for similarities. For instance, we are asked to have our pilots apply for pilot’s licenses with regulators all over the world. Each country has its own form and required documentation that must be completed and submitted.  We know that the data on many of the forms will be the same; the difference is where it is entered. We also have learned that many regulators are looking for the same documentation (passport, FAA License, FAA medical, etc.) We have created a database, on an encrypted server, to hold this data. By having the data readily on file, we have lowered the number of steps required to reply to a customer, reduced the turnaround time, and lowered many of the requests from a complex task to a complicated one.

Another area we attempt to reduce entropy is in the area of chaotic situations. In our business, it is not a question of if, but when we will face a chaotic situation. Whether it is an aircraft incident or accident, having an employee pass away while deployed in a foreign country, having an employee become the victim of crime or a natural disaster, the possibility of a chaotic situation presenting itself is ever present. To help drive those situations from chaotic toward complex, or even complicated, we have done pre-planning.  We have created check-lists for all the situations we could dream up. We all know that our ability to think broadly is severely hampered in times of stress. Utilizing the benefit of calm times, we took time to build emergency reaction plans. Were we able to think of everything? I am sure we were not. However, we have tools in place that will assist us greatly in driving chaos toward complex and complicated levels of entropy.

If we look at the cynefin framework from a critical thinking point of view, we could say the tool is a way to classify situations and provide a guide for how to handle each type of decision. In other words, cynefin provides a way to quickly categorize  situations while illustrating both the way a leader can begin to handle the decision process and attempt to drive situations of high entropy toward lower levels.

 For example, the next time you go get the board game Monopoly ™ from your kids’ closet and open it, chances are the pieces and money will be in disarray. That is chaos. If you separate the money, pieces, and cards into piles, you are now looking at a complex situation. If you organize the money into denominations, the deeds into colors, and the pieces by into hotels, houses, and characters, you’re looking at a complicated situation. For a game of Monopoly ™, that’s about as low as one will get the entropy. Even dice rolls in the game can lead to complicated decisions.

It’s like rotating a camera lens to get a picture into focus. One can make order out of the chaos, but like a picture from the Hubble telescope, even a picture in focus can be complex, complicated, or simple.

See you next week!

David J. Snowden, M. E. B. (2007, November 2007). A Leader's Framework for Decision Making. Harvard Business Review, 9.