Those who’ve worked with us for process improvement training might have experienced the Negative Brainstorm. It’s a tool we use to generate a lot of ideas for what not to do, and it has the surprising and powerful effect of warming up the brain and encouraging honest thinking.
We find that negative brainstorms generate long lists remarkably quickly. One of the first questions we ask when reviewing the output is, “If we’re honest with ourselves, do we do any of these things?” With Halloween fast approaching, let’s not shy away from the scary side. Instead, let’s use it as an opportunity for a little self-reflection.
The leadership behaviours on the following list may have come from a brainstorming exercise, but they contain more than a grain of truth. They’re all things we’ve seen, in one form or another, over the years. Some may be scarily familiar…
At the early stages of a project
- Coming in with a “pet project” rather than an important and strategically aligned problem to be solved.
- Coming in with something too big. One of our Green Belts was asked to improve performance for 42 KPIs! That’s more than even Dracula could sink his teeth into.
- Presenting a pre-determined solution.
During the project
- Expecting people to deliver project outcomes without creating the time, support, or priority to do the work properly.
- Lack of self-awareness. For example, dominating discussions, shutting down alternative views, or unintentionally make it difficult for people to speak openly during workshops.
Around measurement and data analysis
- Confusing what is fact vs what is opinion. Treating assumptions, anecdotes, and strongly held beliefs as if they are evidence.
- Weaponising the data by using metrics to blame people rather than understand and improve the process.
- Making root cause analysis really uncomfortable. Focusing on who caused the problem instead of what in the system allowed the problem to occur.
- Rushing through this phase and jumping to solutions before the causes are properly understood.
- Looking for data that backs up your opinion by telling the team, “Keep slicing and dicing the data until you find something that proves I’m right!”
- Demanding certainty. Expecting the data to provide absolute answers when improvement often requires making decisions with imperfect information.
At the solution stage
- Prioritising everything! Create a list of twenty “top priorities” and wonder why nothing gets implemented.
- Delivering the changes but forget to track whether the promised outcomes actually materialise.
- Failing to own or manage to the new version of normal in order to sustain the gains.
- Carrying on rewarding firefighting behaviours by praising heroic interventions while overlooking the disciplined process management that would prevent the fires in the first place.
The scary part is that these behaviours often come from people with the best intentions. Most of us have played the villain in someone else’s project story at some point.
The encouraging part is that once we recognise them, we can choose differently.
