The Polymathic Hourglass

The term “polymath” (wikipedia) may be new to you, but perhaps you have heard someone talk about people with a “T-shaped” set of skills. Both represent the idea of going deep in some spaces and broader in others.  There are a few practices where going very deep with some skills is most ideal for quality performance and there are others that reward a jack of all trades.  For the vast majority of situations it pays to be somewhere in-between.

This post is not about the concept of polymathism, but more about one way to achieve it and/or optimize it. The image of the hourglass is used to represent a waxing and a waning from a focus on a broad set of topics to deeply honing in on less.

As is often the case with the blog posts on this channel, they occur to me due to a confluence of ideas and/or activities to which I am exposed.  In this case it is a connection of 3 different ideas

1. I have been doing annual reviews for my direct reports at work.  I meet with my reports every two weeks and aim to give them advice on their performance in each of those meetings.  Additionally, an annual review forces a deeper reflection.  As such, I have been contemplating learning and operating paths to success.
2. I listened to a “PolyMathic Product Managers” presentation from Penny Szeto of Amazon at ProductCon
3. I helped create a middle school math program that used technology to select which skill each student was going to work on each day.  We had to take into account individual readiness and also cohort sub-groupings.  We found that in order not to channel students, we needed a way for some students to go broad while the other students were catching up. That allowed them to all keep coming back together periodically.  We called it the “Hourglass Progression”

After sitting down to write this post and doing a little interwebs research, I found that I was not the first to put “Polymath” and “Hourglass” together.  David Miller talks about it in his post, “The Hourglass Analogy“.   In that post he touches on the need for both deep AND wide.  I aim to go a bit further.

My hypothesis is that the whole point of polymathism is to create variety and perspective.  Thus, it is important to specifically alternate between deep and wide….essentially taking breaks between each deep dive in order to examine the world and all the connections that you might be able to make with the newfound deep knowledge.  Essentially an application phase.  This is the broad part of the hourglass. 

Then, when the time is right, the sand accelerates into the narrow part of the hourglass and the person is learning something else deeply.   Versatility is an important facet of a polymath, but a diverse team with a variety of backgrounds, skills, and viewpoints can accomplish that.  What a team of individual experts is likely to struggle with that the polymath is well suited for is connecting ideas.  Thus, shouldn’t we optimize for maximum connections?   It seems to me, it is the alternating phases between the broadening and the deepening that will accomplish that goal.

In fact, I would encourage polymaths to actively capture their full set of interests and then after going deep on something (or during) to take some time out to do a “solo-roundtable” where you individually contemplate the connections between the new deep topic and each of the items on the list of broad topics. Are there opportunities in those connections that have not occured to you before?

If you seek to learn and operate as a polymath, do you have a process by which you select your goals?  Do you follow the hourglass approach?  How long do you spend in each of your deep phases? Has anyone tried this “solo-roundtable” to connect the deep part of the T to the arms?

Measuring Learning Value

I have been managing education products for 25 years. First as a consultant for other firms and then as a product management team lead for several educational providers. At only one of the firms I have worked did we take shared responsibility for the success of our students. Most learning firms seek to maximize customer satisfaction as measured by feedback ratings and NPS scores. Oddly, learning buyers don’t seem to demand any sort of measurable effectiveness/impact scoring for the courses they buy.

The Wanamaker adage about advertising seems to be the approach to workforce learning procurement also. Buy courses that appear to have a quality design, cover the right topics, and students enjoy…..hope that they are having the desired effect.

HR and learning professionals who approve the workforce learning purchases should be pushing for more value per spend. They should expect their learning providers to partner with them to measure that value. If your learning provider can’t/won’t do that, maybe its a factor to consider.

Switching to a measurement model is easier said than done so here are two concrete recommendations to get started down the path

1. How much time/effort does each course spend on the APPLICATION of the content to the work that the student will be returning to. In the case of K-12 and higher ed, how much effort is spent on helping the students understand the “WHY” of what they are learning.
2. Does the learning provider measure retention some time AFTER the course completes? Do they provide content/support to fill any gaps that show up in each learner’s knowledge at that time? It’s one thing to enjoy a course, its another to have internalized all the content well by the last day of the course……it is yet another to have internalized the content into long-term memory months after the course completes.

These feel like “no-brainer” learning evolutions to me, but I have discovered the hard way as a product manager to seek to understand the market directly rather than projecting my personal impressions. This blog post may have skewed your opinions on extended learning. It would be really helpful if you could post the link to a four minute survey (without the blog post). I am happy to share the survey results with anyone who comments on LinkedIn, on this blog, or by leaving their email in the survey.

Survey Link for sharing: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/F8LX9LZ

Not Everything is a Project

I was recently asked to do some work on portfolio management structure around a set of projects. I decided to wrap some project management (PM) best practices around the effort. There was a difference of opinion on whether this needed those elements or whether it was just a “task”.

I will describe more about that situation and how it ended up, but first lets take a look at a framework that aids in talking about it. While Dave Snowden was with IBM in the 1990’s, he developed the Cynefin Framework (wikipedia) and HBR published a good article about it. One of the podcasts that I regularly listen to had Mark Madsen on to talk about “Why Agile might be wrong for your product project”. He used Snowden’s Cynefin framework. I am certainly no Dave Snowden, but I will aim to summarize…..

1. Clear: These are the known knowns. There is no ambiguity about the cause and effect. A given effect is desired so it is clear what cause should be undertaken. “Tasks” definitely fall into that category: Do the dishes, sort this list, pick the fruit from the tree, etc….. As the world changes, it is possible that the cause/effect can change. One should always be on the lookout for “because that’s the way we have always done it”.
2. Complicated: again, here, there is clear cause and effect relationships. But, this time one needs expertise to know them. eg. a good car mechanic can find and diagnose many different car issues in a few minutes. The cause and effect is there, most of us just cannot recognize it. While finding and relying on experts is very efficient, here too, we must make sure that experts are continuously updating their cause/effect understanding rather than resting on static laurels.
3. Complex: for these types of problems the inputs may be less well understood or the cause/effect relationship of different actions may be uncertain. Most problems at a senior level in the business world fall into this category because there are so many contributing factors to any decision. Measurement and especially leading indicators with correlation to desired outcomes have become important as a part of trying to bring some order to the complexity. In this realm one has to be open to decision by probability and fast fail experimentation.
4. Chaotic: This environment is pretty rare. One could argue that the early days of COVID fell into this category. The job of a leader here is to convert portions of the chaos into complexity and prioritize resources towards working on that complexity. Chaos is also emotionally difficult so a good leader provides a calming and motivating influence in order to support focus over flailing. Because these environments are so emotionally and intellectually challenging those who do successfully lead through them are often seen as heroes.

Understanding your environment and acting accordingly is not something taught effectively at most business schools. Yet, one could argue that using the wrong playbook is never going to work regardless of how good the plays are.

Back to the situation that spawned this post:

• my interpretation of the situation was that there are multiple stakeholders, they all have different goals/prioritities/skills/etc…. and therefore any system that is going to help them organize and prioritize definitely falls into the Complex category. My first action was to seek stakeholder info.
• my colleague’s interpretation of the situation was that the situation was Complicated. She felt that we should document some best practices based on limited information, present that to the stakeholders, and then adjust based on feedback.

Both approaches are supported by modern methodologies. The first is a customer development approach that seeks to understand customer/stakeholder needs and then iteratively develop to those needs. The latter is a hypothesis driven approach that seeks to develop intelligently formed hypotheses and then test how customers respond to them.

Ultimately, if my colleague and I had used this framework to understand each other, we likely could have more easily/quickly aligned.

Practice without Pressure

COVID and Work From Home (WFH) have been creating dramatic workplace shifts. The title of this blog is “Future Business” so those shifts are obviously of intense interest to me. My last two posts have been macro thoughts on productivity. This post is going to be more of a micro topic that each workforce member, learning designers, and product managers may find interesting.

I remember as a teenager coming across the slogan “Perfect practice makes perfect”. At the time I was on a ski race team and played competitive junior squash. The pivot to thinking deliberately about every single ski turn and every single court session improved my performance dramatically.

In a workplace setting, the supremely diligent learner will reflect on every single workplace interaction and learn from it to strive for continuous improvement. Most of us don’t have that level of power for self-reflection and instead perk ourselves up to assimilate learning at some key moments.

Learning events (Classes, conferences, webinars, etc…) are obviously some of those key moments. Learning designers’ job is to do their best to create the environment where each learner can effectively adopt some version of best practice into their own practice. We need to better connect learning and practice.

I recently read Koreen Pagano’s “Immersive Learning: Designing for Authentic Practice“. One of the great points she makes is that learners make better strides when they are practicing in low stakes environments that are reasonable facsimiles of real-life work situations. She makes a secondary point of warning against the urge of learning designers and managers to measure all progress. When the learner knows they are being measured, you have lost the “low stakes” portion of her recommendation. When being measured, learners are less likely to take risks that could lead to enhanced understanding. Measurement triggers our extrinsic motivators. Dan Pink makes a great point in his book “Drive” ( Ted video) that intrinsic motivators are usually far more effective at guiding actions.

Amazon is already running into some of these “over-measurement” problems in their pursuit of efficiency. Drivers complain of peeing in bottles and warehouse workers stress out about their break time. If we are trying to make the most widgets in the next hour, stopping to learn will never be the right choice. But, studies have shown that education and professional development is a tried and true path to many long-term desired outcomes. Long-term success will require thinking about workforce contribution both in the present and over the longer term.

There was a lot of good PR for “5% time” that seems to have waned lately. Companies like Google allowed workers to take a half day every few weeks to work on a passion project. This is a great example of leaving room for low-risk practice designed to grow people and support overall corporate innovation.

We should all be mindful of the way we are directing our teams to operate. While I am generally a proponent of measurement because it guides us towards desired results, we should be careful how far we take that and we should be careful that we are not taking short-term measurements to the detriment of longer-term outcomes. If you are in the learning space, be deliberate about maximizing the long-term benefit of the time you do get with learners. Build safe low-stakes practice into your learning experiences. If you are a learner, seek out practice oriented experiences. If they are hard to find, at least run your own thought experiments while learning about how you will put the ideas into your own practice.

What is the best practice-oriented learning that you have encountered/created?

Is your productivity up or down recently?

Lots of discussion recently re: the impact of work from home (WFH) on the productivity of workers. The optimistic viewpoint is that managers will be forced to measure and drive output metrics rather than input metrics like “butt in seat” time. This should be good for the company and good for decreasing micro-management. A few pessimistic viewpoints are that employees are less focused on work in the home environment and that they are losing their attachment to the corporate mission due to physical separation. I will investigate both of those viewpoints further in future posts.

For now, this topic of productivity has re-kindled a wondering for me about why innovation and particularly exponential technological innovation has not been driving overall productivity gains in our economy. It seemed at the beginning of the digital era that we were on a correlated path of productivity acceleration (see chart below). But, then in the last 10 years we have seen the productivity growth number come back down to just 1.4%. This reversal is an unexplained mystery. There are schools of thought, but no clear agreement on why it is happening.

Let’s take a step back and think about what Productivity is before considering an explanation for the trend.

Productivity is usually measured as the amount of labor input it takes to create a certain amount of goods/services output. It can be measured at a unit level, a company level, or even a country level. The numbers in the attached chart are for the whole US. However, some challenge this measure. All the way back in 1988, HBR published a good article talking about how the measure should be the sum of all inputs vs. the output rather than just the labor input. Vox also has a more recent article that starts to talk about some possible explanations for the drop.

Aspects of their explanation that make sense to me include the following:

Deflationary Tech: If some of the non-labor costs are decreasing, then in an output/labor ratio, one could imagine the deflationary influence lowering the numerator and therefore the overall ratio from what it would otherwise be.

Value not captured: “Output” is measured by quantity and price, not value. Yet, there is no doubt that enhanced versions of existing products and new step-change products are creating more incremental value than their price is increasing.

Or are we doing something wrong? Many WFH workers have been complaining about having to work longer and harder.

45 percent of remote workers say they regularly work more hours during the week than they did before, according to a 2020 survey of 2,800 workers by Los Angeles-based staffing firm Robert Half.

Yet, we are not seeing the fruits of that labor. Ideally, if the labor productivity goes up, it should provide some of that benefit back into the pockets of labor. Unfortunately though, more work does not always create more or better output. There is definitely a portion of the population getting rich, but it is not labor.

Every decade since the 80’s (except the Great Recession where everyone lost ground), the top 20% and the top 5% of incomes have grown their income more than all others.

Are some people working smarter while others are not? Are our leaders encouraging the workforce to take time out and think about the hard problems and potential mis-directions or are they just pushing for heads down and run faster in the current direction? Many factors impact income disparity, this focus differential may be one.

Running faster, but not smarter makes me think about a social club concept called the Hash House Harriers. Their events include running courses where the faster runners end up going down dead ends and have to return back to the point where they branched off. The sudden return of the mis-directed, alerts the rest of the runners before they reach the dead-end and everyone returns to the correct path together. That is fun in a game context, but for business we should seek to shorten those dead-end branches so that the whole organization is more closely approximating the speed of the faster runners and lifting the productivity for all.

As a product manager, I spend a lot of our time out on “the course” with customers and potential customers trying to understand what path will create the fastest/greatest value. There is risk in almost everything, but we are looking for ways to either reduce risk or at the very least maximize the value/risk ratio. Product Management is a relatively new profession and in fact modern product management that includes hypothesis testing, MVP, A/B testing, and the like has only been around 15 years or so. My first exposure to it was Steve Blank’s “The Four Steps to the Epiphany“. Nerdy to admit, but it blew my mind back then.

Educators often claim that their goal is to teach students how to learn. I would like to see these product management concepts driven more and more from business schools down into university learning and even secondary school methods for all workers. Imagine a world where the majority of the workforce is thinking beyond the tasks in front of them towards increasing value and controlling risk along the way. What would that do to productivity?

Office Co-location Network Effect

Modern entrepreneurial discussions and especially within product management circles one hears about network effects.  Meaning that the value of a product/service which increases exponentially the more nodes (people or whatever) are part of that network.

So, for example if there were only 3 people on facebook and then a 4th joined. That fourth has the potential to find more value in the system than each of the existing members could obtain before the new addition (everyone now has 3 people to connect with rather than the original 2 each) AND the new person creates more value for the existing members (one more person with whom each can connect).

Most people would agree that for certain types of interactions, in person has value over remote.   Not going to cover that debate here…I know there are many people who believe we can be equally or even more effective collaborating 100% virtually.  Due to limitations on existing technologies and the current cultural dynamics of human relationships, I am not one of them.

So, let’s consider this network effect in the context of office environments.  As stated above, I am going to assume there is some marginal value to being co-located.   Because the value is derived from the connections, as with the Facebook example, it grows exponentially with the number of people interacting.   Conversely, if you remove only a few people from the “network” because they are staying home more or completely, the overall value goes down significantly…..just from losing a few people!

What if we lose whole departments or a large portion of the people?  Half the people does not mean half the value, it means 1/4 or less of the value.

In a scenario where on any given day, the office has less co-locators, those  remaining in-office workers are feeling less value derived from being co-located.   Now they are wondering why they make the commute, etc… and are likely to drop off also….leaving the whole network in a downward spiral towards a skeleton crew of people who derive value from the office environment unrelated to co-location with their co-workers.  (Maybe more peaceful than home, especially with no other workers there).  🙂

I know that office managers and corporate leaders are thinking about this dynamic, but as with many exponentially oriented curves (like Moore’s law) it seems to me that humans struggle to perceive the trajectory of that curve traced by value on one axis and proportion of the office on the other.

In the chart to the left, I have defined total “value” as 1 for each person in the office and 1 for each connection they could make to another person in the office.  I know that there are also combos of people beyond 1-1 connections (most meetings), but that will only increase the network effect and this is enough to make the point.

How do you think this effect will impact your return to the workplace?  Are you considering specific days for certain depts?  Is that a large enough network to create enough value for the commute?  Don’t underestimate the network effect!

Comparing your inside to other people’s outside

I was just listening to Minnie Ingersol on Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders and all of a sudden two dots connected for me……Neither is revolutionary on their own, but recognizing the similarities of the two is at least new to me.

The first is facebook. I’m not much of a facebooker. Not merely because it feels to me more like personal marketing than genuine connection, but also because I much prefer the complex ideas and thoughts that my friends have.

Perhaps I am missing a sensitivity gene, but I don’t care about seeing my friends with their kids at the beach. I would love to hear about the wonder in their child’s eyes when she first played in the waves, but fbook is not so good with that type of subtlety.

So, what I get instead is a glossed up picture of their outside, with almost no insight into their messy interesting inside.

The second “dot” in this story is your current job vs. your possible next one. We are all aware of the messy inside at our current place of work including both its joys and its frustrations. Just as with any relationship, over time the challenging parts begin to grind on us more and more.

In contrast, when we go to interview, we read the new firm’s website, we read about them in the news, and we talk to their interviewers. Everything is very glossed up and exciting. We imagine a world without messiness where we can completely spread our wings.  Of course, we seek out the dirt too via our connections, glassdoor, twitter, wherever, but summarized dirt is not internalized in the same way as living it and feeling it.

In both cases we are comparing our own messy inside with someone else’s glossy outside. We should be careful about luring ourselves into thinking we are making an apples to apples comparison when we really are not.

Getting outside your comfort zone

I recently participated in a “Biggest Loser” weight competition.  Like most people I have some pounds to lose, but I’m not sure anyone would call me overweight.

I was successful at all the goals I set and felt great about the experience despite the discomfort I endured in the process.

I did it for a few reasons:

1. To lose about 10lbs in order do achieve a more ideal weight.  I had been living at my previous weight for quite a long time (upwards of a decade) and I really wanted to shake it up
2. To jumpstart training for a triathlon 3 months later
3. I like to compete
4. To experience something I had never tried before

Mostly due to #3, the experience was pretty intense.  And though I am not recommending that everyone get outside their comfort zone in this way, re-considering some of the ways that I had taken food and the way I relate to my body for granted was illuminating.

A few months ago I read a book called Living with a Seal all about an amateur athlete and entrepreneur who wanted to achieve a higher level of performance by getting a seal to train him.  It’s a very amusing light read….my most surprising takeaway (and the authors) is that the seal’s perspective can be applied to many aspects of life.

I am making this post within a business oriented blog because one of those applicable aspects is your business life.  If you are going to gain perspective and grow, you and your company need to have the capacity to examine issues/opportunities from a variety of angles.  Getting input from a broad set of people helps.  If those people are well rounded, complex people your analyses will be even better.

Are you continuing to grow?  Are you stopping to think about what is the important work that is not right in front of your face?  Are you challenging yourself and your business to explore outside of its comfort zone?

Take a few minutes and think about some sort of challenge that you could set for yourself where you are not certain of success because you’ve never tried something like that.  I guarantee you will learn a great deal in the process.

 

Reaching for the Stars

There are several platitudes about goal setting that reference the stars and the moon:

• – “Aim for the moon. If you miss, you may hit a star.”  has been attributed to Peale, Littrell, and Brown
• – I have also heard “Reach for the stars and land on a mountaintop”

The two above are actually quite different.  One says to shoot for something really hard and maybe you will find you accomplish something even greater.  The other says to shoot for something impossibly hard and be satisfied with a smaller, but still significant accomplishment.

They are both recipes for failure.  They were coined at a time when there was much less data that we could track about our progress.  In both cases the resources are lined up in a different direction than they are moving…not good.

Think about if you had such a slice in golf that you had to line up at a 45degree angle to where you wanted to hit the ball.  Is it a better idea to continue with that approach or should you work to fix the slice?

Some of the damages that come from these philosophies include:

1. miscommunication with stakeholders
2. constant re-work of priorities
3. demoralized staff

To be fair, there are positives:

1. There is no risk of complacency or resting on laurels (unless the team starts to give up in despair)
2. There are many decision points to decide which x of the >x is going to get accomplished
3. There is tremendous pressure for efficiency in order to minimize the under-accomplishment.  Those efficiencies likely live on past the deadline

However, the above positives can still be realized without the extreme pressure of under-delivery that comes with an over-promise.  Thus, they are not worth the negatives.

Let’s examine each of the negatives…..

 Miscommunication with Stakeholders

There is a consulting adage of “Under promise and over deliver”.  This approach is the opposite of that.  You are telling people that you “want” to accomplish >x when you only have a historic or estimated capacity to reach x.

While stakeholders definitely want great things, they also want predictability.  The world is variable enough without starting off misaligned.

Alternatively, provide two sets of goals to your stakeholders: the realistic goals and the stretch goals.  Ensure that there is contingency built into your realistic goals so that if everything goes according to plan, you will be able to accomplish some of the stretch goals.

Constant re-work of priorities

When you are building plans that get you to a fixed deadline with >x accomplished and you then find yourself on a path towards x, you must constantly change that plan.  This requires significant overhead both for the people whose job it is to plan and organize, but also for the resources who are being communicated a different plan each week or month.

The three levers of resources, scope, and time will constantly be under pressure as you keep trying to squeeze >x into an x sized box.  If you don’t make the scope or resource changes, the deadline will be missed.

Demoralized Staff

Either your people were not invested in the first place (different problem) or they will now become less invested.  Nobody wants to sign-up for an impossible task unless they think somehow they can make it happen.

Most people want to be on the winning team.

If Candy Crush and Angry Birds have tought us anything is that many people are goal seekers.  They crave mini-accomplishments.  If your team is never hitting the goal, team members will start to seek their “success fix” elsewhere.

Conclusion

In this age of data abundance, you can accurately measure just about anything.  Do so.   Set goals that can be accomplished.  Don’t make them easy.  Everyone wants a challenge.  But, put the goal within reach so that your people, your organization, and your stakeholders can all feel like a success together.

How do you decide to set your goals against capacity?

Also posted on Linked Pulse if you prefer to comment there

Shark Tank Innovation

Medium to large sized organizations are always trying to find ways they can increase their innovation quotient.

Look no further than the Shark Tank TV show where entrepreneurs come to pitch their ideas and hopefully win investment.

The next time your organization is thinking about getting a department, a division, any portion of the firm together to share information etc…think about doing a “Shark Tank”.

1. Break your people up into teams that each represent a nice segmentation of roles, depts, whatever you think will give them the tools, variety, and creativity they need.  The best size is probably 5-6 people per team
2. Task each team with coming up with a creative effective idea for your dept, division, whatever.
3. Give them a very limited time (maybe 3-4 hours) to discuss what their idea should be, work it out a bit, and come up with a pitch that includes cost vs. benefit.
4. Build a team of sharks that includes both management and savvy/trusted non-management.  They will be the panel that reviews all the teams ideas
5. Have the teams present (don’t allow management to present) for up to 10 minutes in front of everybody
6. Allow for 5 mins of Q&A from the Sharks in-front of everybody.
7. Do some online polling in waves after 4 or so have presented so that people remember which ones each of them are.
8. Give the sharks the results of the polls, but let them pick the winner from among each wave.
9. If the sharks want to negotiate with one of the teams to drop or add parts of the idea, they can.

After your get together is over, the winning team(s) should be given some additional time (maybe 20 hours) to continue enhancing and fleshing out their idea.  They should get an opportunity to pitch again in a more prepared fashion.  The shark tank panel should also be prepared this time around.  If you have enough teams in the second round, you may even want a third round.

Keep the full population of your original dept, division, full organization (whatever you started with) apprised of the progress.  Who did you pick and why?

A session like that will be fun for your team, will get their innovation juices flowing, will get each team of cross-functional employees to know each other well in order to build bridges across groups after the session, and will hopefully create a pipeline of possible projects for your org.

Keep a summary of each pitch along with the people involved and a link to any powerpoint or other images they presented.  You never know when a non-winning idea will spark a winning one outside of the Shark Tank “game”.

Post in the comments if you have done anything like this in your organization and whether it was successful.