For some years now I have been noting occurrences where connections are made between people. I’ve had this loose tag, Community Indicators, that I’ve slapped on my blog posts, on delicious, etc.
Here is one to add – for the ages!I Followed My Stolen iPhone Across The World, Became A Celebrity In China, And Found A Friend For Life. Hat tip Steve Crandall.
Well, this seems to be a fitting follow up to my last blog post.
Amabile: I believe it’s important for leaders to understand the power of ordinary practices. Seemingly ordinary, trivial, mundane, day-by-day things that leaders do and say can have an enormous impact. My guess is that a lot of leaders have very little sense of the impact that they have. That’s particularly true of the negative behaviors. I don’t think that the ineffective team leaders we studied meant to anger or deflate the people who were working for them. They were trying to do a good job of leading their teams, but lacked an effective model for how to behave.
So, I would say sweat the small stuff, not only when you’re dealing with your business strategy, but with the people whom you’re trying to lead. I would encourage leaders, when they’re about to have an interaction with somebody, to ask themselves: Might this thing I’m about to do or say become this person’s “event of the day”? Will it have a positive or a negative effect on their feelings and on their performance today?
Amabile also calls out the rich, internal emotional lives that we all have, and how that influences our working together and collaboration.
One, people have incredibly rich, intense, daily inner work lives; emotions, motivations, and perceptions about their work environment permeate their daily experience at work. Second, these feelings powerfully affect people’s day-to-day performance. And third, those feelings, which are so important for performance, are powerfully influenced by particular daily events.
This again has resonance with last week’s #UdGAgora work where we explored the role of empathy in course design. The red threads are really showing up today. Maybe this will help me start pulling together a full post about The Agora. Alan has already started the “reflective ball” rolling.
Source: The Power of Ordinary Practices — HBS Working Knowledge
Johnnie Moore pointed to an interesting article on why checklists don’t always produce the kind of positive results expected in hospital operating rooms.
I remember a few years back when I had major surgery. I had been rolled into the operating room. I was looking around and I commented on the team’s use of a checklist. They looked at me, surprised that I noticed. I said I’m interested in group process. With that, they gave me my anesthesia. I think one of the things on the list was to shut up talkative patients. 🙂 But I wondered, did the checklist make a difference for that team? It seemed like they were comfortable and well-practiced…
Outside of hospital operating rooms, where I have no expertise other than as patient, I’m fascinated by what sort of invitation gets people to engage with tools that can increase their individual and collective performance. It seems to me the invitation is as important as the checklist. Here is a related snippet from the article:
Dixon-Woods did identify one exemplary ICU, in which a high infection rate fell to zero after Matching Michigan began. The unit was led by a charismatic physician who championed the checklist and rallied others around it. “He formed coalitions with his colleagues so everyone was singing the same tune, and they just committed as a whole unit to getting this problem under control,” says Dixon-Woods.
I don’t think the intention here is blind lock-step and I cringed a bit at “singing the same tune.” What I do think matters is that people understand the value of something they are asked to do, and that leadership walks the talk. That starts with an informed, intelligent invitation to participate. Not blind obedience. Not “because you have to.” And the ability to critically question an invitation, checklist or whatever, because in complex settings, not everything is predictable.
I’m currently reflecting on the last two weeks where a team of us co-facilitated 2 rounds of a week long learning experience for professors at the University of Guadalajara system in Mexico. (More to come on that.) I suspect where we created warm, intelligent INVITATIONS to experiment with mobile technologies for engaged teaching and learning, we had more professors “accept,” dive in and learn. Where we focused too much on content, we started to lose people. Interesting, eh?
Source: Hospital checklists are meant to save lives — so why do they often fail? : Nature News & Comment
Give. Just sayin…
Next of course, my attention went to the question of “Where to donate?” I received several emails from charities that I already support that do work in the area. I donated to Save the Children. On Facebook, I noticed a list of vetted charitiesshared by another trusted colleague who works in the nonprofit sector, Peggy Duvette. I shared the article on my wall. This sparked a few other recommendations from friends about where to donate. Knowing that Robert Rosenthal had been working and living in Nepal, I was curious to see if he had any recommendations. He posted a link to this Global Giving Fund, a giving network of charities in Nepal, vetted for impact. In the thread was a comment from Nancy Schwartzsuggesting that we all share this wide and far. So, I shared it on my wall tagging friends, many of whom re-shared the post, and made a donation.
via Please Donate to Help Nepal’s Earthquake Victims Now | Beth’s Blog.
Knowledge sharing can be enabled or blocked based on organizational policies and infrastructure. This is essential in sectors that are (or claim to be) for the public good, like non profits, donors and foundations, NGOs and educational institutions. I was happy to read that the Ford Foundation has added Creative Commons approach to all their work, joining the Open Society Foundations, the Packard Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the CGIAR and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Ford Foundation Expands Creative Commons Licensing for All Grant-Funded Projects
(New York) – The Ford Foundation announced today that it is adopting an open licensing policy for all grant-funded projects and research to promote greater transparency and accessibility of materials. Effective February 1, grantees and consultants will be required to make foundation-funded materials subject to a Creative Commons license allowing others, free of charge and without requesting permission, the ability to copy, redistribute, and adapt existing materials, provided they give appropriate credit to the original author.
Walking the talk is harder than publishing the policy. Some people still worry that setting their knowledge free will hurt them. So we need to look at how certain professions are rewarded (or punished) when it comes to sharing intellectual property. For example, our way of educating and validating researchers and scientists (“publish or perish”) still pushes people to withhold (particularly data sets) rather than “set free.” I’d be very interested if any of you have research/data that links the benefits of sharing knowledge to professional advancement. I think we either have some myths to bust, or we have serious infrastructure changes needed.
This is resonant with another article shared with me today, from the Stanford Review on the role of including gender perspective for research breakthroughs. Being open allows access to thinking of others, to diverse perspectives which then inform our work, decisions and results.
Doing research wrong costs lives and money. Ten drugs were recently withdrawn from the U.S. market because of life-threatening health effects – eight of these posed greater threats for women.
Clearly, doing research right has the potential to save lives and money, and this is the goal of the Gendered Innovations in Science, Health & Medicine, Engineering, and Environmentproject directed by Stanford history Professor Londa Schiebinger.
With an international team of more than 60 scientists, engineers and gender experts, Schiebinger has explored how gender analysis can open doors to discovery.
“Once you start looking, you find that taking gender into account can improve almost anything with a human endpoint – stem cell research, assistive technologies for the elderly, automobile design, transportation systems, osteoporosis research in men, and natural language processing,” Schiebinger said.
Open our databases. Open our practices. Open our minds. Open possibilities.
