Wasted 15 Minutes

30 MINUTES. That’s how much time I alotted the other day (“so long as nothin’ else goes sideways”) to learn as much as I could by perusing the ABOUT pages found at managementexchange.com and unstructure.org respectively. I wanted to understand the objectives of the people involved, how their interests do or don’t jibe with mine, and how their overall approaches compare one-to-the-other.

Going in, I knew that the Management Innovation eXchange (MIX) and Unstructure were online platforms for exchanging ideas having to do with ‘speeding up’ the evolution of management. And that’s about it.

What I discovered is that the two groups /projects are similar in just about every significant way: 

• ISSUE: Management is an important social technology, but one that needs a facelift – pronto.
• RESPONSE: Provide an open source, i.e., democratic, environment in which anyone can contribute to new thinking about management's evolution.
• HOPE: That actionable, helpful ideas will emerge.

There were a few differences. (One of the MIX Team Members, for example, is Gary Hamel – a rock star, as management thinkers go. The fact that discussions there are centered around his “Moonshots for Management” stands out.) But none of the differences were so earth shattering as to keep me from bookmarking both sites and thinking about participating. I was impressed.

The Rest Of The Story

My 15 minutes at unstructure.org were up, but there was one more link that had my attention. It lead me away from its ABOUT page onto one of its discussion forum pages and –

Boy, was I surprised to find out that the most recent post was well over two hundred days old! On further review, it now appears as though the whole site’s inactive. I don’t know what the deal is. Was there a merger with MIX? A stoppage? If Unstructure is no more, I’m sorry about that. Seems like a lot of effort and good intentions went into building it.

I s’pose there are many morals to the story. The first that comes to mind is this: 

I knew from the start I was taking a slight risk. I should have asked upfront: Are there tools or strategies I can deploy that'll prevent me from squandering up to 30 minutes unnecessarily? Had I done that, I would have remembered what the authors of The Power of Pull point out, that there are ways “to sort through the noise to find the signals that can guide us.”

Their advice? If you want the time and effort you invest in focusing on stuff to pay off, make return on attention a top priority. There are search and serendipity tools that can assist. Their book does a nice job of introducing some of them.

That's The Way We Do Things Around Here

In Making It All Work, David Allen makes what I think’s an interesting distinction:

“Because what I teach is actually not a system but a systematic approach, it can be adapted…”

When I first read that (in context) I thought I knew precisely what he meant. Looking at it again, though – Do I really know the difference between a system and an approach? How about a methodology? A formula?

What got me thinking about this was a visit to the SCORE (Service Corps of Retired Executives) Web site. I was following up after something I’d read last year, that Deluxe Corporation, one of the largest check printers in the U.S., was teaming up with SCORE to make its Counseling Methodology available to smaller businesses.

To my mild surprise, I discovered this time around that the words ‘counseling’ and ‘methodology’ have been chopped in favor of ‘mentoring’ and ‘program’. Hmmm. Mentoring Program strikes me as less structured, less prescriptive, less pushy…

I don’t know how much thought or debate went into the name change. But I think it matters, at least to this extent:

If you'd ask a small business owner to describe what her company does day-in and day-out in its efforts to be successful, there’s a good chance she’d end by saying something like, “That, in a nutshell, is the way we do things.” There'd likely be no references to systems, methodologies, etc. In this respect there's a disconnect...between typical small business owners and the mentors (or consultants or coaches or facilitators or advisors) who call on them.

What can be done about it? Well, if you're in that second camp and your mission is to help smaller businesses succeed, you can do 'em a favor by bridging the gap. Be clear about who you are and what you have to offer -- and learn to use their lingo. Down to the last word.

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For kicks, here's how some other thought leaders describe their offerings:

A Mind Map Of Sorts

It seems to me there are a lot of smart management thinkers saying the same thing: the old way of operating and governing businesses is no longer working (most convincingly communicated, in my opinion, by John Seely Brown and his BIG SHIFT team) but there's a promising and overarching new way that is. The questions they're asking and the solutions they're offerering are strikingly similar. 'S'far as I know, though, the smart guys I have in mind are relatively un-connected to one another. Would or could it be beneficial to bring 'em together as a group? That's what I've been wondering these days. Maybe this (below) will shed light on why: