Get in the Boat

by Pat Bodin

  Now the IT person feels threatened and justifiably so. They thought their knowledge would give them job security but watch as leaders look at outside the company to solve their problems, putting their livelihood at risk. The technologists’ protected knowledge is being questioned, so they come out ready for a fight to prove they know better. The business leader is confused by this response. All he is trying to do is attain a result but, instead, what he got back is a fight. Now the relationship is full of tension.

  Here is the fundamental misconception to which many technologists fall prey. Historically, value has been based on knowledge. That is not the case anymore. Wikipedia and YouTube alone have made loads of knowledge accessible to all. Today, value is not based on what you know but rather it is based on what you can do with what you know. We might say that the new requirement is knowledge plus experience, which equals wisdom.

  Technologists need to admit when they don’t know something, then go look for the answer. And when they do know, refusing to share is not the way to go. Sequestering knowledge, even from a desire for job security, is a losing strategy. As technologists erect a hedge of protection around their proprietary knowledge, so will others. Over time their knowledge will become less valuable and more ancient and no one will share their updated information with each other.

  Are you conscious to your fear?

  We are mostly unconscious to our fear. Thus, we make no changes to address it. Our decisions are made in a vacuum and only perpetuate the current state. We’re driftwood in a river; we’ll continue to float where the river takes us until we assert control and exert force to move in a positive direction. Unconscious fear is fate—conscious fear is risk.

  Conscious fear is not pleasant but can be counteracted by repeatedly taking steps to face and overcome it. My wife and I live in a city with a snaking river and multiple bridges. When we first moved here, she had a phobia of driving over bridges and it is nearly impossible to get anywhere in town without driving over a bridge or two. Although she has had this fear most of her life, it was something she could overlook in the past because she encountered bridges uncommonly. When we moved to Jacksonville, Florida, however, it became something she had to confront daily. Because her work with new mothers requires her to drive all over the city to visit them in their homes, she had to push through that fear in order to do the job that she loves. At first, her heart would race, her fingers would grip the steering wheel, and she would instinctively slow her driving out of fear. With repeated exposure, though, her heart wouldn’t speed up quite as much, her fingers would grip the wheel with a little less intensity, and she wouldn’t reactively slow her driving. After repeated exposure, you would now never know that bridges were ever an issue for her. She drives at the same speed, with relaxed hands, and a calm heart when driving over bridges.

  Despite her previous fear of driving over bridges, my wife does not have a fear of heights—that’s my weakness. Although I only notice it while I’m on my own feet outside (not in a car or train or inside of a building, for instance), when I’m up high, my acrophobia kicks in and I feel weak-kneed and my stomach wants to do flip-flops. And guess what my wife loves most of all? A view. So, she loves to go outside on the top of the Empire State Building or climb bell towers on vacation to look at the city. I’ve overcome my fear enough to accompany her but lack the repeated exposure to facing this particular fear (I don’t have to climb towers to do my job) means I still feel those butterflies in my stomach when I’m up high and looking down. But I’m there. I climb that tower and I share that view.

  The same principle applies to our fear at work. We fear the uncertain future, impending irrelevance, the loss of our job, the disapproval of our superiors, and we may fear interacting with others outside of our sphere. While those fears lie unknown in your unconscious, you live a driftwood life. You must make your unconscious fears conscious to stop being adrift and be in control of your life and then take steps to overcome them. It won’t happen all at once, just as my wife didn’t overcome her fear of bridges overnight, and just as I still am overcoming my fear of heights, but each step we take is a step closer to getting in the boat.

  Some organizations have cultures which are adversarial and create environments where people are looking out only for themselves despite others or even the business being hurt in the process. The interdepartmental rivalries in these organizations can be extreme and the technologist struggles to find firm ground. This is not only dangerous, but it is also complicated by our body producing a neurotransmitter called cortisol. Cortisol is responsible for the feelings of stress and anxiety and fear. It’s the first stage of our fight or flight response. It increases our heart rate, makes us paranoid, and hyper-attunes our senses to look for danger. And it spreads to those nearby: If one person is stressed, soon others will be. The problem is that our jobs often inject a steady trickle of cortisol into our bloodstream. That’s not how it’s supposed to work: Cortisol should leave after danger, as you exhale deeply with relief. But the constant stresses of our jobs keep cortisol coming.

  Cortisol counteracts the positive chemicals. It makes you less cooperative, altruistic, and generous, and more anxious, stressedout, and fearful. And you impact everyone around you.

  So, what should you do? Understand the unseen forces that are affecting your behavior and take steps to counteract them. Take steps to get more of those positive neurotransmitters by getting to know your co-workers, setting achievable goals, and praise yourself and others for a job well done. These all work against cortisol. Only when you take care of yourself will your neural transmitters work for you and not against you. Only then will you function well within the group.

  Only then will functional leaders want you in the same boat.

  Chapter 18.

  Three Steps to Elevate: How to Change Your Color

  You have learned how to understand Green strategists, and also how to communicate as a Blue operator. But how do you move yourself, or someone else, from Red to Blue? Here’s an example that walks through the process.

  You’re an IT manager in an aluminum manufacturing company. The company has been around for a long time, but recently landed a contract with a large automobile manufacturer who wants to use aluminum for its vehicles. We will say that the manufacturer is Audi in our story. As the IT manager, you want to have a Blue mindset. You aren’t trying to be Green, because you’re receiving and not giving direction. And you don’t want to be viewed as Red, because there’s no potential for advancement or job security as a tactician when operating in a Blue role. Besides, you’re a manager, so your role is clearly more than the tactical job of Red. Your frame of mind needs to be Blue.

  So, you start thinking about the structure of your organization. You want to enable its goals, such as, “Fulfill our commitment to Audi.” As you consider the last few years, you remember significant communications network failures at some of the 30 plants. You revisit those cases, study up on the problem and recommended solution, and go see the head of IT Infrastructure.

  You sit in his large office and say, “Many of our plants have multiple single points of failure in their communication networks. We’ve been aware of this for a few years, but now that we have a new customer it’s a greater challenge. We want to fulfill our commitment to Audi and avoid penalties. What kind of budget do we have to fix these single points of failure so we can deliver aluminum on time?” You hear the all-too-frequent answer, “The budget has no money set aside for that sort of project.” Now what do you do?

  You use my three-step Elevate process to help your boss think Blue instead of Red:

  • The first step is Turncoat: Show your boss why he needs to switch sides. Share the Blue mindset of enablement and service, explaining that the IT team’s goal is to enable the organization. You want your boss to become conscious to his fear so he can assess it as risk, the risk of misalignment with the strategists. Now, your boss may or may not be responsive to this approach. If not, you move on to Step
2.

  • Step 2 is Stump the Chump: Am I recommending you call your boss a chump? No, that’s just a memory aid, of course! You want to stump the chump by asking a pointed question (a type of pattern interrupt). For instance: “What

  • happens when we are not shipping aluminum to Audi?” You hear back, “I’m not sure, but I know it’s bad.” That is a quintessential Red response. Any non-precise answer is Red and your boss is not behaving like a Blue operator who knows his actions enable or disable the organization. In that case, move on to step 3.

  • Step 3, Phone a Friend: You need to find a Blue person somewhere else in your organization. Look cross-functionally, maybe to the VP of Applications, Heather. You land a meeting with her and say, “I’ve been wondering. As you know, I run the communications network here, and I’m a little worried about my team. Are we doing our job in a way that enables our company? I have some concerns, so I need to ask you a question: What happens when we’re not shipping aluminum to Audi?” Heather replies, “$10,000 a minute happens. Every minute we are not shipping to aluminum to Audi costs us $10,000.” That is a Blue answer.

  Now you have found a Blue person and gained an important piece of data. What other metrics do you need? Maybe you should ask, “How often have we had penalties this quarter?” She tells you, “Well, we’re new to this automobile contract, and we’ve been able to negotiate less severe penalties since it’s the beginning of the relationship, but this last quarter we had 48 hours of downtime. By the way, we’d love you to do a cause analysis, because we’re pretty sure the downtime has to do with our communication network.”

  You say, “Wow, you’re probably right. I’ve been looking at my own metrics and telemetry data and I saw those communication network outages in our plants. I didn’t realize what impact that had on the applications it drove, on the processes required for you to both manufacture and ship aluminum to Audi. Now I’m starting to understand.”

  “Those communications network failures are really costly. Forty-eight hours of downtime, times sixty minutes an hour, times $10,000 a minute—that’s $28.8 million in penalties this last quarter.”

  “Okay. Who else in this business would care? I think I know how to solve the problem, but I’ve been told there’s no budget for this.”

  She says, “The Chief Risk Officer owns the relationship with Audi. Let’s set up a lunch next week.” You agree, set the date, and walk back to the VP of Infrastructure’s office. You want to protect yourself and not let your boss think you’re undermining him: “Hey, I just spoke with the VP of Apps, because I’m trying to figure out the risk associated with our communications network. Do you have any issues with that, or any questions you’d like me to ask your peer?” This should relieve your boss from worries that you’ll throw him under the bus.

  Next week you go to lunch with the CRO. You know his responsibility is clearly Green. You also know that he has people coming to him all day every day with alleged problems and proposed solutions, such that he’s in a constant state of disbelief. His “reptilian” brain state is fully engaged, ready to disregard whatever you say (we will talk more on that, later). You will need to prompt him. I would recommend you say, “Thanks for meeting with me. I’ve been talking to our Red people and our Blue people.” The CRO will respond, “What are you talking about? Do I need to call HR?” “No, no, no—let me tell you what that means.”

  You just executed a successful pattern interrupt by surprising the CRO’s expectations and disturbed him into asking a question. You continue, “Red people are internally, tactically focused. They provide the support to the Blue people in the organization. The Blue people are the enablers, the engine of growth, the ones who operate the business functions. Heather here, the VP of Apps, is Blue. Her job is to ensure that our applications have the logic required for you to be successful. As for you, you’re Green. You provide the direction to our organization: vision, focus, culture.”

  The CRO replies, “Wow, I love that. That’s a great system to understand people.”

  Now you need to ask a validating question. You interrupted his pattern so he’d switch from reactive lower-order thinking to his frontal cortex—ask a question that requires higher processing. The VP of Apps gave you the validating information and you turn it into a question for the CRO. “I’ve heard from Heather, and want to validate, that every minute you’re not shipping aluminum to Audi costs $10,000. Is that correct?” “Yes, that’s correct.”

  “Okay, I have another question. Heather told me we’ve had 48 hours of outages in the last quarter. Is that correct?” “Correct.” “I did some research after Heather told me that and discovered a group cause for most of those issues: our communications network. The current state of our network is that we have multiple single points of failure in the plant networks, which sometimes causes a stoppage of the applications required for us to run the processes required to ship aluminum. My team and I have identified the root causes of these outages. We are confident we can solve the issue and create a future state with a more reliable network, fewer outages, and greater confidence in meeting our commitment to Audi.”

  The CRO says, “That sounds great.” You’ve brought him from disbelief, to interrupt, to engaged, to validating, to understanding, to current state, to future state. Now he asks the obvious question: “How much would solving the problem cost?” “Well, it’s just slightly more than our penalty cost from last quarter: $30 million.” “That’s it?” “Yeah. Our problem is that we currently don’t have that within our budget. We could try to budget that for next year or do something else.” “We can’t wait until next year. We need to move forward.”

  You ask the CRO to meet with your boss to get the go-ahead. Your boss may be surprised, perhaps even concerned, but if you have kept him in the loop he should recover quickly enough. Protect yourself from backlash by supporting your boss, trying to elevate him from Red to Blue.

  In the end, the CRO finds the needed $30 million and you carry out the change. Network reliability increases, downtime decreases, and stoppages are a thing of the past. The CRO is happy because he’s saving $28.8 million in penalties each quarter. The VP of Apps is happy because her applications are no longer crashing due to communications network issues. Your boss is happy because he gets credit for the change. And you’re happy because you have enabled the business to meet its goals.

  If you were Red before this, you are Red no longer. You’ve crossed the chasm to Blue. You played the “turncoat” card on yourself! Maybe you are still a mix of red and blue, like purple. That’s okay! There is a continuum and you can have some leeway to practice. But you took an important first step and used your tactical skills to solve a problem and enable your organization.

  You have become relevant.

  Let’s review the three steps to Elevate that we saw in the aluminum example. If you want to be Blue, you must elevate yourself using these three tools.

  Turncoat

  Turncoat means you (and your team and your leadership) must ask, “How do we become enablers?” Your job is to handle the support function of the organization. How do you support the company’s mission? That is turncoat; turning from red to blue, or perhaps purple as a midpoint.

  Stump the chump

  Second, you need to stump the chump. Start asking questions of people that you didn’t ask before. Ask questions that are pertinent to the business and pertinent to you. Ask questions that connect the dots from tactics to operations to strategy. Remember value chaining? Coffee is not just about the bean. We need to connect it to what most people care about—the flavor and aroma and wake-up properties—and we do that through the process (say, a French Press). Tacticians care so much about the beans, but beans don’t matter until you connect the dots. Ask connecting questions to stump chumps and get them to start thinking Blue.

  Phone a friend

  Phone a friend comes into play when you need help. In the Audi aluminum example, Heather the VP of Apps was the friend you needed. She
connected you with the CRO (another friend), who provided the network upgrade funding. If you can’t go straight up to your boss—because he’s Red—you have to find a Blue person somewhere else in the company.

  The cool thing about phoning a friend is that it reduces your risk. For a Red person, the primary risk is (1) being outsourced or (2) having your protector [i.e. boss] leave. By extending your network to a new friend, you reduce your risk—you have found another protector. That relationship also enables IT to ask better questions upward into the organization. Other times you can hire an outside consultant to credibly confirm your perspective, and that’s phoning a friend too.

  Those three steps are how you elevate.

  Robert Schaffner’s story:

  I once held a one-day training seminar in Nuremberg for Bechtle, a large German B2B IT provider. The whole seminar went well, with the “Elevate” session being particularly well received. At the end of the seminar, I was felt happy because the attendees were pleased. Some people came up to me, thanked me for the presentation, and promised to implement what they had learned.