good better best....

My formative years in work were subject to many days of training, all aimed at making me better at what I was doing and would do in the future. The organisation I worked for adopted "Total Quality" and later used the EFQM model. They talked about the target of having an excellent workforce. The ongoing performance management echoed that. There was a continuous improvement ethos that was built in and embedded to everything we did.

In my horsemanship it has never been much different. And a certain natural horseman has a string of sayings all aimed at improvement, excellence, quality. One of which I remember my father quoting when I was a young girl:

Good, better, best
Never let it rest
Til your good is better
And your better best.

Recently a project management discussion forum posed a question "what would make you leave project management ?"

My initial answer was that it would be working for an organisation that knowingly asked me to do something second rate.

Today I had an interesting conversation when someone from HR suggested that he thought maybe I set my standards too high. While I suspect he was trying to say I was being too tough on myself, wasn't he effectively saying "don't be the best you can be" ?!

Here's a quote to sum up how I feel about that: 

It's not about changing who you are, it's about being the best you can be. 

Eileen J Roden

Asking the right questions at the right time

So this is much more about work than horse, but it may lead me there as it is equally important to ask the right question at the right time in either context.

I first came across a stage and gate project approach many years ago in a private sector context. Basically the idea is that every project has clear and obvious decision points along its journey. Between those decision points, the team does its work. While the overall vision is still what guides the journey, between gates the tasks and work that are done relate to getting you to the next decision "gate".

At each "gate" there are a series of checks that will be done to allow the project to get a clean bill of health to start the next leg of its journey.

There is an implication here that a project is never guaranteed a "pass" at the gate. It may fail the test. In which case it may either take corrective action and represent, or the project may be closed. The resulting profile of projects was referred to as a funnel - because there would be more projects in the early parts of the journey than the later.

At each decision gate, the project would effectively be given delegated authority to progress and would only need to refer back to the decision group if the project went outside its approval (time, cost, scope, etc) and hence was in exception. The approval was to the next gate, but with the long term vision still as the ultimate end point.

As I have worked for other companies since then, it has become clear that many organisations use a similar approach even if they call it something else, and their project pipeline has a different profile and shape.

In my (humble) opinion, one of the key factors in a successful stage and gate approach is being clear what decision is being made and what authority being delegated at each stage.

For example, an early decision gate might simply be "Is this a good idea ? Does it align with agreed strategy ?". Such a decision would only require an outline of the idea and would only be granting approval/authority to take the investigation to the next stage - which in this case would be to explore feasibility and, inherent in that, options for delivery. And to make that decision (to explore Feasibility) does not require a high level of detail or fully explored Cost Benefit Analysis.

Even after Feasibility has been explored, it may only be possible to give a range of figures for time, cost, scope. But the decision at the end of the feasibility work is merely to progress to refine the solution, and confirm design etc. At this stage the decision may be to exclude certain option - for example "it needs to cost less than...." or "it needs to be complete by....". But again the information behind the decision only needs to be appropriate for that decision.

If you skip stages, then you are effectively also slipping decision points. So you might go straight from "Is it a good idea ?" to "Can the build/development work start ?". But if you do that, you need the information to inform the "start" decision rather than the information you would use to agree feasibility work. This may be absolutely the case where the feasibility and solution are already well defined - but if it is already that well defined, the information for a fully detailed business case should also be available with relatively little effort.

If the decision makers require additional detail and information at the earlier stages, there are a number of risks. For example that the figures and detail provided are by their nature much more liable to error and will have a much lower confidence level. Relying on that detail to inform a decision that does not require it could mislead the decision making process. There is also a risk that assessing, for example, financial fitness at an early stage could provide a false sense of security and lead to less rigorous scrutiny at a later date - i.e. that there is an implicit "pass" at all future gates if the information has been seen once (despite its low confidence level).

You get what you accept

I confess I have found myself quoting this at work a number of times over the past few months. But it was only recently that I stopped to think about what I really meant. Well not so much stopped as mildly ranted at a friendly colleague when discussing the latest work frustrations.

So here is my first "compare and contrast"

You get what you accept.... with a horse

In the horse world, this is normally about a rider/handler and the horse they are working with. There will be rare situations where a handler is working with multiple horses - driving a pair or four for example. But for most of us it is a one to one situation.

In the interaction with a horse we have to decide what our boundaries are, what is "ok" and what is "not ok". Anything we accept becomes, by accepting it, "Ok".

What is the difference between accepting and not accepting ? It's interesting how we humans tend to think of these things in terms of a BIG reaction. A BIG reward for getting it right, an equally BIG reaction of some form for getting it wrong. The reaction for the "wrong" result depends very much on your personal philosophy.

But for a horse it can be something much smaller than that. A release can be a reward, and can be as small as an exhale. My second pony had a rough time in his youth - when we first got him he would *shake* if you raised your voice. When asking for something, Parelli talks about four phases - and uses the idea of "air, skin, muscle, bone" to give you the idea of how those phases progress. (I doubt many of us ever use a true phase 4. But in the same way, I suspect we tend to go in somewhere more than phase 1)

I think that makes the cue a negative reinforcer - as the required behaviour terminates the reinforcer. Initially they (Parelli) weren't into treats and thinking about it, even "rub to a stop" is a negative reinforcer (the rub stops when the horse stops). More recently the horsenality concept has meant treats are used with appropriate types of horses.

But that is straying into another subject, about rewarding wanted behaviour. "Accepting" can simply be that - no reaction, no reward, just accepting. Not accepting doesn't have to be a negative reaction but could simply be asking for the same thing again.


You get what you accept... at work

In a work situation, by contrast, we are rarely in a one to one situation and more often in a one to many or many to many context. Added to that, you aren't always in the leader role and may instead be in peer groups, or working across different levels of hierarchy within the organisation.

So in work, how does "you get what you accept" work ? While almost by definition there is an implication that if you don't want a particular behaviour to persist - you have to "not accept" it. But how acceptable is it to "not accept" something in work, especially if the unacceptable behaviour is from above you in the organisation hierarchy ?!

Is there a greater need for diplomacy in a work environment ? My initial reaction is yes, but I dislike the implication that I can somehow be undiplomatic with my horse. A horse tends to expect a much more straightforward or honest reaction, whereas at work people come to expect a certain amount of dissembling.

The reality of needing to keep your job, to pay the bills, simply does not form part of the interaction with a horse, but can not be escaped in the work situation. How much is it ok to compromise your integrity in the work place ? If the presiding culture simply does not support active challenge, where do you draw the line in terms of speaking your mind versus biting your tongue ? And if there is no option to "unaccept" within the work environment, is the only option to reject the entire work environment and change job ?