The Exception-Tolerant Organization - Part 3

As explained in my introductory post on the Exception-Tolerant Organization, ETOs emphasize their strengths and compensate for weaknesses by working together and communicating openly. If the concept sounds simple, that's because it is simple. But with all of the advanced ways, means, and tools we have at our disposal to collaborate and communicate openly, we still find in today's world places and situations where these fundamentals are simply not done.

Working together involves several cultural practices within an organization:

- Total team involvement from the start
- Proactively seeking the improvement of the organization
- Staying open to new ideas and possibilities
- Shared goals without harmful personal agendas

The first point is easier done than said, but the other three involve a resistance factor to change within our organizations. ETOs have the cultural grounding to foster and promote all four points above. As discussed in Part 2, ETOs systematically implement the communication pathways and processes to support these points.

But as is often the case in life, the greater challenge in overcoming obstacles can come from within ourselves, especially on the last point above. We don't always realize that we are more in competition with ourselves than we are at odds with others, and many times we are better served improving ourselves and overcoming our own shortcomings. Instead, we often put up walls where requirements and miracle solutions are volleyed back and forth, neither ever really satisfying the concerns or goals of the parties on both sides of the wall. But when we take down the walls and mprove ourselves, our best foot is then truly placed forward for the benefit of our organizations. Our strengths become the organization's strongest capabilities to be deployed across the greatest spectrum of benefit. And our weaknesses are compensated for by our continuous self-improvement, by identifying risks early, and especially by communicating openly.

Communicating openly, at its most basic level, involves face-to-face discussion, debate, and sometimes conflict - something that people can tend to avoid, in both their personal and professional lives. But for open communication to be effective, an environment needs to be created by the organization where intense debate and disagreement are tolerated, and conflicts can be satisfying to resolve. The organization should make it clear that it is okay to disagree and debate issues, but the result of each debate should still include a clear decision to move forward along a certain path of action.

As an exercise, have everyone in your organization begin to answer these questions out loud daily. Ideally, everyone related to a project or a core business of your organization should be in the same room (or on conference if necessary):

- What did I accomplish yesterday?
- What am I working on today?
- What obstacles or problems am I facing?
- How confident am I that the current goals will be accomplished on-time?

For the last question, use some kind of rating scale. Example: have each person rate their confidence from 1 to 5, with 5 being the most confident. Any answers below a 4 should be a cause for concern and those concerns should be addressed openly. The Agile practice called Scrum advocates the daily use of these questions.

Communicating openly also involves the appropriate use of communication tools. Communications involving urgency or time sensitivity should use direct methods: direct-line phone, internet, and video calls; direct text messages/pages; and of course face-to-face conversation. The use of email and instant messaging, while becoming increasingly mobile and location-independent, should not be relied on for urgent time-sensitive communication. These communication methods often have either multiple inboxes or streams/threads of communication occurring simultaneously, have lengthy queues of messages attached to them, or depend on having your communication device successfully "subscribe" to that message stream. The number of inboxes/threads and the size of the inbox queues are things that you cannot guarantee to be small enough so that your urgent message is received timely. Eliminate this frustration up front by identifying early a reachable line of communication to use for urgent matters.

Some very simple and fantastic exercises in working together and communicating openly (many taking 10 minutes or less to complete with a noisy room full of people) can be found here. While some of these are focused on Agile principles and practices, many of these deal with the core issues of communication and collaboration, and may help to expand your thinking. My thinking was certainly expanded after participating in some of the exercises. My thanks to Michael De La Maza for bringing these to my attention.