The Process Is Personal

Increasingly I'm speaking to groups of senior level professionals - CEO's, successful entrepreneurs, Fortune 500 executives, and the like. My current message is how the personal productivity dynamics play out in an organization's culture - for better and for worse. It's about decision-making, communication, accountabilities, and stress. Most in my audience seem transfixed, as if I've secretly been sneaking around their own division, taking notes!

Much of what plagues organizations these days has to do with their processes. And the processes have everything to do with the personal processes of the individuals involved. Read between the lines here: "organization" can refer to two people in a relationship, as well as a multi-national corporation. Process vulnerabilities are challenged with stress, which is mounting daily in our world because of the increasing volume and speed of input that changes things. Most of you reading this have received more priority-shifting and project-creating stuff in the last seventy-two hours than your parents probably received in a month.

Change always produces pressure on a system, even if it is totally for the best. Because systems are created to match the needs, direction, and outcomes of the organization at a certain point in time, when times change and those drivers are altered in any way, it puts stress on the organism until it adjusts appropriately. How well does it respond to new situations and input? What happens to the systems, the grooves, the procedures, when something out of the ordinary, something unexpected in substance or scope, lands on the radar? And not just the unexpected stuff out of left field - what happens when already-foreseen new goals and horizons are identified and tossed into the organization to implement?

Pressure on a system will always show up at the weakest connection points. Where are they, organizationally? The same places they are individually - avoidance of decisions; unclear, incomplete, or nonexistent communication; ambiguous accountabilities; and swollen inventories of potentially conflicting commitments.

Example: A new situation occurs (a competitive product launched, a senior executive fired, a new regulation enacted, an irate neighbor, etc.). Someone is aware of the situation, senses that something ought to be done about it, but doesn't make a decision about what, exactly, is needed to be done. People who ultimately will need to know about the problem or issue in order to deal with it are not informed. There is a lack of clarity about who, exactly, owns the resolution of the situation and therefore no one has their gut tied enough to it to move it to completion (amidst the chaos of everyone else's current set of agendas). And anyone who has any awareness that they have some involvement with the situation or its impact feels the pressure of an "open loop" holding some piece of their psyche hostage, contributing further to overloaded circuits. This then leads that person to avoiding decisions... etc., and the whole cycle becomes contagious. Does any of this sound familiar to you, about something in your universe, as you read this? Virtually everyone I have ever coached has identified at least one if not several such scenarios going on, at that moment.

The insidious factor is that the faster things change, the easier it is for these unproductive and unhealthy syndromes to emerge and multiply. And the more senior the person involved in these less-than-ideal practices, the more they are magnified in consequences for the culture, simply because his/her micro is a lot of other people's macro. Ever been whipped around at the end of a chain of folks hanging on to each other on an ice rink? One of the greatest sources of stress and saboteurs of productivity is mid- to senior-level people avoiding action decisions about situations when they first arise; waiting until the heat gets so hot (from their boss, the client, or the circumstances) to determine what needs to happen and who needs to do it; and at the last minute spewing the resultant crisis through multiple levels in the organization, creating pain, frustration and the derailment of process and morale.

The bad news is that this seems almost universal, in even the best of environments. The good news is that there are things that can be done to improve those practices. But it's not handled by blaming individuals or preaching platitudes about productivity and quality. It can only be improved by a change in the behaviors of all the people involved. If physical and mental environments were kept cleaner, focus was more specific on discrete inputs, systems made seamless and more efficient, and kick-start actions were determined and appropriately allocated on open items from the start, these weak spots in organizational process can be plugged up. Whole cultures can move themselves up the food chain in constructive responsiveness to change. We've seen this happen in varying degrees, depending upon the buy-in of the most visible players and whether those old dogs are willing to learn new tricks.

The most successful executives/professionals/people keep their decks clear, make decisions on the front end, dispatch the results to trusted people and systems, track commitments rigorously (their own and others') and get physically engaged taking actions on the projects they own. Those are learnable behaviors, able to be systematized, that build capacity for dealing with the next surprise as the next opportunity.

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You can find out more about David Allen and GTD at www.davidco.com.

The David Allen Company is a professional training, coaching, and management consulting organization, based in Ojai, California. Its purpose is to enhance performance and improve the quality of life by providing the world's best information, education, and products in the fields of personal productivity and work/life balance.

Comments

[Rule Of Law]

So, what about poor folks? Was my earlier question re actually stooping to help those who need it most too jarring for you?

[realitytrumpsbull]

I've got a process for you: Go through, and remove ALL the computers out of the offices.
Hand out pencil and paper. See what happens when people mentally recover from computer dependency. That'd be interesting to watch.
Dependency CAN be unlearned. You DO sort of have this 'computer' between your ears...but is the operator trained to use it? Not no more...hence anti-collision devices being installed in cars. Sad, sad circumstances.

[NicoleAnonymous]

I think at some point if you're working in the corporate world you have to accept most of it is crazy and it will drive you crazy unless you just pretend to go along with it.

My breaking point came when my company insisted that everyone in the company, and that is over 10,000 people, had to take "personality tests" and then we had to have meetings to go over the results from these "scientific" tests and it was going to help our managers know which job is best for us. Of course the company paid the company giving the test $10 every time someone took their "scientific" multiple choice test which consisted of something like this:

Choose which of these best desribes you:

I like to be around people
I like to be by myself
Neither

Sometimes I like to be around people and sometimes I like to be by myself - it's not always the same! I got in trouble because I told the people at my company that personality tests weren't based on science and they told me I'm just "being negative" amd trying to create problems. Then they made us all go to a meeting where they desribed the results of the tests and told us how we could buy videos and books by the same company if we wanted to know more.

[SamThornton]

Coaching doltish suits in corporation-land in how best to squeeze the last drop of effort from their serfs by using mind-f**k games has become a cottage industry for many, particularly if they can, at the same time, convince the corporate dolts they are somehow ennobled by these exercises in hypocrisy and exploitation.

Things you wanted to ask about Mr. Allen but which aren't covered in his HuffPo Bio:

1) Fuller bio - http://tinyurl.com/yrsc5q

2) Mr. Allen's system - http://tinyurl.com/e898w

3) Mr. Allen's other interest - http://tinyurl.com/ysofvb

[TheKat]

Wow, this is really interesting. Thanks for the links. I'm an organizer who was overwhelmed after I read his article. I think the plague dogging Mr. Allen is his processes.

If I spoke to my clients like this, they'd think I'd gone off the deep end.

Kitty Kaufman

[DickTater]

Stockholm Syndrome. Becoming a sympathizer with and/or aiding your tormentors.

That's what "Career Advice" and "Corporate Happiness" sound like to me. How about "How I sucked up and made friends with Hitler and the SS"

I am sorry, as good as Mr Allen's advice and counsel may be....I can only see it as misguided. What does it profit a man to do well in CorporoFascismLand, if he loses his soul?

[Clinton]

Funny, and so true.

[drumdance]

Wow, you have an excellent view of the trees, so much so that you don't see the forest. David's techniques can be applied in any position. Whether you're a teacher, minister, environmental activist, entrepreneur or, yes, employee of a large corporation, you will benefit from getting a clearer idea of what it is you're trying to achieve and what the exact steps are to achieving it. And you will suffer less stress as a result.

If you believe that's only applicable in CorporoFascismLand, then maybe you should go read David's biography.

[jbkendrick]

I agree, and while his GTD system can be done with or without a computer, many of us in this age are never very far from some computing device. There are several applications out there that allow you to use a variety of technologies carry your system with you wherever you go. I've described the one I recently begun using on a recent blog post at http://johnkendrick.wordpress.com For anyone who hasn't tried David's system, I urge you to get his Getting Things Done book and give it a try. It certainly worked for me, and has simplified my business and personal life, even after two decades of fanatical Covey planning. John