Don Sorsa's blog

Is there really a Boss’ Day? That’s weak.

Yesterday I skimmed an article somewhere about the upcoming National Boss Day. The gist was your boss is your boss so employees have to adopt to their management styles, preferences, and idiosyncracies. On the organizational chart at my university, a department “reports” to me, but I like to think we plan and set goals together. I do have scheduled one-one meetings, but I also aim to talk to everyone at least once a day. These might be 3 minute phone calls just checking or they might be 20 minute meetings or maybe 2-3 hour sessions. They might have regarded my phone calls or visits as intrusive when I first started making them, but they don’t any more.

I don’t wait for my department/staff to initiative anything or report problems or brainstorm ideas; if I’m out of the loop, that’s my shortcoming as much as anyone else’s. My job as “boss” is to know what people are working on and with whom, what obstacles exist, what unexpected events have occurred. In an earlier posting I mentioned that our collective brainstorming and organization was very successful, but I didn’t know if that success occurred because of the process or because of the individuals involved. I still wonder – how do bosses adapt their managerial styles to the people they supervise?

Is your “life coach” 20 years younger or older than you? Opposite sex? Different background? Hmmm.

I just read an article in the New Yorker on coaching by Atul Gawande. His point was that tennis players, opera singers, and other professionals often have personal coaches. Gawande is a surgeon, and he wondered if his surgery techniques could be improved by having another experienced surgeon observe him in the operating room. So he reconnected with a surgeon who had been his teacher years before and arranged to have his surgery observed and commented on.

Without going into the details, he concluded that having a personal coach helped make him a better surgeon.

One of my projects right now is helping improve teaching at the university level. I’ve developed a new program for vetting potential faculty, certifying them to teach their 1st university courses, and then mentoring them while they teach. I think that the program is generally successful because it aims at the parts of teaching that are the most difficult to master: 1st, learning to give students individualized feedback that is meaningful, relevant, and appropriate. 2nd, leading synchronous and asynchronous discussions. 3rd, managing the workload of teaching classes with a heterogeneous mix of students. 4th, creating meaningful activities in the classroom that are tied to course objectives.

The difficulty is that incoming teachers can work on these activities while they are going through the certification process, but then when they get into a classroom they can revert to their traditional, comfortable habits of teaching. Our mentoring program is designed to support and guide them, but I’m not sure that a mentor is the same thing as a coach.

We hold our training and orientation sessions in synchronous online settings using Adobe Connect, and most of those sessions have 2 or 3 people leading them. One advantage to this system is that the 2 or 3 leaders can have private chats where they collaborate behind the scenes in order to make adjustments and more effectively lead the discussion. (I do think collaboration in the classroom is critically important.) When I participate in a session, I do view myself as a coach so that the comments I make in the private chats are intended to guide the certification leaders.

In the kind of work I’m doing right now, a mentor would be more useful than a coach because I need strategic guidance more than tips on somewhat technical issues. Nevertheless, I’ve had many conversations and meetings where I would’ve appreciated some coaching afterwards to help me in my communications.

So this reminds me of a graduate student I had in a research methods course maybe 15 years ago. She was in her early or mid 30s, very attractive and personable, smart, a background in theater, and she made her living as a life coach. She told the class that almost all of her clients were successful businessmen in their 40s and 50s who were at a “dead-end” in their lives. Her job was to help them “get their lives back on track.” I’m no longer in my 40s and 50s and I’m not a successful businessman, but I don’t think the coaching she provided is the kind that I’m looking for.

Do the executives and directors you work with have coaches? Do they have mentors? Is the idea completely foreign to them? I wonder…

Reorganizing the department: bringing people together to rethink and change their work

So we had several resignations for personal reasons or career advancement and therefore open slots in our department. We looked at that as an opportunity to rethink the work that everyone did. We brought the staff together once again, everybody in one room at one time with the big giant whiteboard. We began by writing creating a list of every activity that we were currently doing or that we wanted to do in the near future. It took a couple hours. After that we wrote each of those one sentence actiovities on a sticky and then we rested for a couple days.

Our next step was to take big Post-it notes and start organizing and putting together the functions that seemed like they could be done by the same person. The idea was not identifying who currently did these activities but rather seeing which activities might fall into different buckets. We then gave titles to the people who could do each of these operations, and the miscellaneous category wasnt too bad, fewer than 10 items.

The end result was that the staff concluded we could shrink the staff by 2 people if we realigned responsibilities and created one new position because there were many “to-do” items nobody was working on. The reorg worked. Was it because of the people or the process? That is something I do not know.

Group work in college. Are multiple perspectives represented when students are from one course?

Collaborative learning and higher education. Many universities require students to work on projects in teams. This was true in my doctoral program at Northwestern University, and I think it was very successful in that environment because the people who worked together came from different disciplines and brought different skills to each project. For example, a typical project would include one person with a background in computer science, a 2nd with a background in education, a 3rd with a background in communication, and a 4th with a background in social sciences. We divided up the tasks according to our skills but the project ultimately had to come together as one coherent package.

Many universities require students to work in learning teams to write papers or put projects together. One well-known difficulty is that one person on the team may not pull her or his weight so the others have to pick up the slack. I think that there is another problem which is that the collaboration, the learning team creating an object, involves a relatively homogeneous group: everyone is taking the same course at the same time and demonstrating the same skills. True they bring slightly different backgrounds and knowledge to the project but they all have the same identical learning objectives and course outcomes to demonstrate.

I would like to see more heterogeneous groups working together on projects in classes. So imagine combining, for example, nurses, urban planners, teachers, and computer scientists, to create some to work together on some joint project. The difficulties are obvious which is that nurses have to learn different things than do urban planners are teachers or computer scientists and so figuring out the project and how an individual’s participation demonstrates the desired learning not outcomes, that is difficult. Nevertheless, it’s something that I would like to think about exploring.

Big cities, multiple communities, networks for innovation

Here’s an idea I like a lot, especially since I’m big city guy. Still talking about Steven Johnson’s book, on page 160 he summarizes research from a Berkeley sociologist named Claude Fischer. Fisher had one overwhelming conclusion published in 1975: “big cities nurture subcultures much more effectively than suburbs or small towns.” One of the points is that a large city allows people outside the mainstream to find others with whom they can connect. And part of this is just mathematical if there’s 100,000 people it would be easier to find somebody if you’re on the edges it would be easier to find somebody with you and in a community of 100 people. And so Fischer’s point cited by Johnson is that, “clustering creates a positive feedback loop as the more unconventional residents of the server suburbs or rural areas migrate to the city in search of fellow travelers.”

This is very closely related to research that was done by a Stanford professor named Martin Ruef who concluded that “the most creative individuals… Consistently had broad social networks that extended outside their organization and involved people from diverse fields of expertise. Diverse horizontal social networks… were three times more innovative than uniform vertical networks. In groups united by shared values and long-term familiarity, conformity and convention tended to dampen any potential creative sparks.” To continue, “employees who primarily shared information with people in their own division had a harder time coming up with you with useful suggestions… When measured against employees who maintained active links to a more diverse group.”

This leads to Johnson discussing Watson and Crick who are notorious for amongst other things connecting with people outside their regular circles and “taking long, rambling coffee breaks, were they tossed around ideas in a more playful setting outside the lab–a practice that was generally scorned by their more fastidious colleagues.” Time to go for a walk and ask the bus driver what she things about punctuated equilibrium.

Serendipity, keeping records, inventing a million things

On page 78 Johnson (Where Good Ideas Come From) begins discussing the role of hunches that are alternatively fed and left on the back burner, and on page 86 he described the notebooks of the Darwins and Joseph Priestley which are filled with hunches and unconnected ideas.

On page 104 Johnson summarizes research and conclusions by Robert Thatcher that, “the more disorganized your brain is, the smarter you are.”

On page 122 Johnson discusses the importance of a “creative walk” for spurring new ideas and making new connections. Johnson suggests that people, “…carve out dedicated periods where you read a large and varied collection of books and essays in a condensed amount of time.” And later, “But there’s no reason why organizations couldn’t recognize the value of a reading sabbatical…”

Johnson himself uses DEVONthink as a tool for collecting his ideas and “an improvisational tool as well.” Page 115

On page 123 Johnson asserts that patents, DRM, IP, trade secrets, proprietary technology claim to support innovation with the assumption, “… in the long run, innovation will increase if you put restrictions on the spread of new ideas, because those restrictions will allow the creators to collect large financial rewards…” Johnson believe “The problem with these closed environments is that they inhibit serendipity and reduce the overall network of minds that can potentially engage with a problem.”

On page 136-137 Johnson quotes and paraphrases William Stanley Jevons’ conclusion that, “The errors of the great mind exceed in number those of the less vigorous one.” In other words, ideas from great thinkers occur in part because those thinkers are always coming up with new ideas, one after another after; their minds don’t create just one great idea – they create scores and scores of ideas, some of which are unfinished, others not pursued, and others which are eventually connected and become brilliant insights or innovations.

The point? Generating new ideas and innovation occurs when people (1) generate lots and lots of ideas, (2) keep track of them, (3) share them with a diverse group, (4) get ideas from a diverse group. There may be a genetic disposition (defect? JK) to write down all your thoughts… and most people don’t live in a community for #3 and #4 (although living in a city makes this easier). So, this is why I am loving Twitter. I have input from a larger, more diverse community than ever before, and this might be making me more creative.