Abilene Paradox and False Agreements

An Abilene Paradox from Richard Boyle on Vimeo.

Many years ago Professor Jerry B. Harvey discovered that the fundamental problem of contemporary organizations is the inability to cope with agreement--not conflict. He finds that most agreement in organizations is actually false consensus. It occurs because many people feel they might be isolated, censured or ridiculed if they voice objections. This often leads groups to act on inappropriate goals and is a setup for organizational failure.  Harvey also believes that organizations stay away from conflict and keep ways of being that is not core to their beliefs and mission/vision.  These series of false agreements compromise the livelihood of many organizations.  

Core Challenge iZone360

Here is the challenge from Megan Roberts and her iZone360:

One of our challenges is to situate our reform initiative into the larger department of education. We strive to create support structures (money, people and advocacy) that allow individual schools to expedite a change process whose results will increase success for students. Our goal is for the new and innovative strategies that emerge from these schools can be diffused to other schools throughout the city. That said, the challenge is that changing school structures, even when expedited, can take years. Additionally, we struggle to maintain support for schools while also having clear expectations as well as measurable outcomes that show that our initiative is making a difference in the lives kids in the short term.  

Alcoa and the Afternoon Cookie Habit

Charles Dugigg talks about his cookie habit.

In Chapter 4 of his book Power of Habit, Charles Dugigg shares the story of Paul O'Neill and his leadership at Alcoa Aluminum.  O'Neill, the former United States Secretary of the Treasure under George W Bush, shocked investors and employees when in his acceptance speech at the yearly he said:

I want to talk to you about worker safety. Every year, numerous Alcoa workers are injured so badly that they miss a day of work. I intend to make Alcoa the safest company in America. I intend to go for zero injuries.

Investors called their clients and advised them to sell their stock immediately.  Alcoa was already doing poorly and some were talking of the end of the business.  The new CEO needed to save the company.  However, instead of focusing on profits O'Neill was introducing what he thought would be a keystone habit.  Dugigg writes:

O’Neill believed that some habits have the power to start a chain reaction, changing other habits as they move through an organization. Some habits, in other words, matter more than others in remaking businesses and lives. These are “keystone habits,” and they can influence how people work, eat, play, live, spend, and communicate. Keystone habits start a process that, over time, transforms everything.

As the company focused on safety, employees and investors were amazed at the other areas of change, as well. Alcoa eventually rose to new heights in production, employee satisfaction, and in their portfolios, as well.

The Power of Habit is an excellent book.  There are two ways we can apply it to the work we are doing.  

1.  Much of what principals, teachers and students do is based on their habits.  If you cannot change a habit then you can change their approach or performance.

2.  Transformational change, especially in touch situations, must focus on these keystone habits.  

See how to change a habit below:

Hack: A Long History at MIT

The Great Balloon Hack of '82 from MIT Admissions on Vimeo.
The Great Balloon Hack of 1982 by MIT Students at the Harvard Yale Football Game.

The term hack has many meanings by this point.  Originally, it meant a quick job that produces what is needed but not always so well.  It has also meant a job that was done incredibly well and produces exactly was needed to solve a problem.  In popular culture is has been used to describe something that must be dealt with such as, "I can hack being a NYCDOE principal."  In the design community it sometime has been used to describe something that is being worked on.  AT MIT, the term originally was applied to describe a low cost solution to an engineering problem.  At MIT, the term has evolved describing pulling a prank.  A hacker is someone, or often a group of people, who pulled the Great Balloon Hack of 1982 at the Harvard Yale Football team.  MIT has a culture know of students setting up pranks on basements, roof ledges, and steam tunnels of large, institutional buildings, to the dismay of Physical Plant workers and Campus Police.  Lately, it is commonly applied to computer programmers who "break in" to computer systems.

The early history of hackers is centered around MIT in the 1950's and 1960's. Naturally curious and intelligent MIT students who had been exploring the phone switching network and the control systems of the Tech Model Railroad Club were drawn to the computers of the MIT Artificial Intelligence. The director of the lab, Marvin Minsky, was sympathetic to the hackers' desire to explore and impressed enough with their accomplishments that he allowed them to have direct access to the machines, even though the true hackers among the group had by then dropped out of school to spend more time hacking. Legendary hacker figures from this time include Peter Deutsch, Bill Gosper, Richard Greenblatt, Tom Knight, and Jerry Sussman. 

Even with all of its different meanings there is only one to characterize hacking: ingenuity.  Here is an example:

In 1961, students from Caltech (California Institute of Technology, in Pasadena) hacked the Rose Bowl football game. One student posed as a reporter and ‘interviewed’ the director of the University of Washington card stunts (such stunts involve people in the stands who hold up colored cards to make pictures). The reporter learned exactly how the stunts were operated, and also that the director would be out to dinner later.  While the director was eating, the students (who called themselves the ‘Fiendish Fourteen’) picked a lock and stole a blank direction sheet for the card stunts. They then had a printer run off 2300 copies of the blank. The next day they picked the lock again and stole the master plans for the stunts — large sheets of graph paper colored in with the stunt pictures. Using these as a guide, they made new instructions for three of the stunts on the duplicated blanks. Finally, they broke in once more, replacing the stolen master plans and substituting the stack of diddled instruction sheets for the original set.  The result was that three of the pictures were totally different. Instead of ‘WASHINGTON’, the word ‘CALTECH’ was flashed. Another stunt showed the word ‘HUSKIES’, the Washington nickname, but spelled it backwards. And what was supposed to have been a picture of a husky instead showed a beaver. (Both Caltech and MIT use the beaver — nature's engineer — as a mascot.)  After the game, the Washington faculty athletic representative said: “Some thought it ingenious; others were indignant.” The Washington student body president remarked: “No hard feelings, but at the time it was unbelievable. We were amazed.”

You can see more examples of great MIT Hacks here.


MIT Pranks, Hacks and Creativity from Creating Innovators on Vimeo.

Elmo Calling Apps and IDEO

Elmo Calls from IDEO on Vimeo.

Prototyping for Elmo's Monster Maker iPhone App. from IDEO on Vimeo.

IDEO is a global design consultancy that helps organizations to grow, innovate and develop through a human centered, design-based approach.  They believe that organizations can find new ways doing things by uncovering the latent needs, behaviors and desires within organizations.  They believe in helping organizations creative culture to sustain innovation.   

On the IDEO website they write,  

Thinking like a designer can transform the way organizations develop products, services, processes, and strategy. This approach, which IDEO calls design thinking, brings together what is desirable from a human point of view with what is technologically feasible and economically viable. It also allows people who aren’t trained as designers to use creative tools to address a vast range of challenges.  Design thinking is a deeply human process that taps into abilities we all have but get overlooked by more conventional problem-solving practices. It relies on our ability to be intuitive, to recognize patterns, to construct ideas that are emotionally meaningful as well as functional, and to express ourselves through means beyond words or symbols. Nobody wants to run an organization on feeling, intuition, and inspiration, but an over-reliance on the rational and the analytical can be just as risky. Design thinking provides an integrated third way.

IDEO thinks that people should keep three things in mind:  inspiration, ideation and implementation.  Inspiration is problem or opportunity that motivates the search for the solution.  Ideation is the process of generating, developing, and testing ideas. Implementation is the path that leads from the project stage into people’s lives.

Sesame Workshop partnered with IDEO to design a line of Sesame Street-themed apps for Apple’s iPhone. The Elmo Calls app, which functions as a utility app for parents and as an entertaining behavioral-development app for kids, is now one of the Top 100 paid iPhone apps in the iTunes store.  The collaboration began with a mutual desire to bring the show’s beloved characters to the iPhone platform – and to do so using a human-centered design approach. Child-development experts, educators, toy and interaction designers, and even the Sesame Street puppeteers weighed in on the design decisions. The team also worked closely with families throughout the project — from initial concepts to early prototyping to the final development — in order to stay focused on how children actually use the iPhone for play. The games were designed accordingly. For example, the team omitted menus from the Sesame Street apps to keep the experiences simple, playful, and fun for a young child. And each game features exclusive newSesame Street videos, allowing players to enjoy “lean back” moments along with interactive ones.  The resulting iPhone applications let children engage with the favorite Sesame Street characters in a whole new way. Kids touch, shake, swipe, and tilt their way through original games featuring Elmo, Grover, Bert, Rosita, and The Count.

IDEO has established a Design Thinking for Educators.  The toolkit which can be downloaded from the website contains the methods and process that IDEO adapted specifically for K-12 schools including examples for schools.  Tim Brown, CEO and President, has written an excellent book Change By Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Thinking.