Get in the Boat

by Pat Bodin

  Then I moved on to the next event in the next city. I forgot all about the Bechtle training until I returned to Bechtle a few months later to give a keynote address. (The address was titled “Learning from LEGO: Everything Is Awesome,” which should make sense if you think back to the chapter on value chaining.)

  After the keynote, a person suddenly came up to me and said, “Hi Robert! Do you remember me?” I replied, “Yes, I remember you somehow—but from where?”

  He said, “My name is Eddy; I was at your Nuremberg training. You talked about the colors and said, ‘You need to change your behavior.’ And after your training I did change my behavior. The next day, I phoned a few customers and spoke in Blue language as much as I know how to do. And it really had an impact!

  “Even more importantly, I started to communicate differently within my company. You won’t believe it, but four weeks after your training, my management asked me, ‘Eddy, you behave differently. What happened?’ I told them your training gave me new ideas and a new way to communicate. Ultimately, they offered me a new job—instead of account manager, the sales lead for our region. Now I’m managing a whole sales team, and to be honest, it never would have happened had I not attended your training. Because I learned to speak Blue, I was successful with the customers, and now I have a more enjoyable and better-paid job. I’m pushing my people to adopt the ideas and practices from your training. So, thank you— what I learned had a huge impact on me.”

  You should be encouraged by this story. What you are learning truly works. Eddy implemented the “turncoat” Elevate strategy on himself. Before, he was thinking and acting like a typical Red person. After the training, he decided to start thinking and acting like a Blue person. That decision enhanced his professional well-being. Now, the effect in your life may not be quite so rapid or dramatic—but it will come.

  Get in the Boat Whiteboard

  Chapter 19.

  Three Steps to Relevant Execution

  Call your shot

  The first step to relevance is to be willing to call your shot. In 1932 at Wrigley Field in Chicago, a baseball player for the Yankees pointed his bat toward left field. The pitcher hurled the ball toward them, he swung his bat, and then he proceeded to hit the ball out of the park. That player was Babe Ruth. He called his shot and then he executed. Like the Babe, you must call your shot, because if you don’t call your shot then when you hit your ball out of the park, you’re just lucky.

  Think about salespeople. They have a quota, and—if you haven’t been in sales you might not know this—they themselves agree to their quota. That agreement between them and the business is a form of calling their shot.

  We should do the same thing in technology. As leaders, we must predict our next action before we execute it, lest the strategists and operators think we got lucky. We don’t want to be considered lucky! We want to be definite. To do that, we must call our shot.

  You can do this in small ways, initially. Let’s imagine that you’re going to have a forklift migration, in which you completely replace an existing architecture with a new one. The first thing that you should do, is apply a change control update to whatever system your company uses and attend the meeting to discuss with confidence that your change will create a benefit and that your team has mitigated the associated risk. That is calling your shot and change control is built for it. (The other advantage of change control is that it allows you to make sure you are aligned with the rest of the organization before you act.) You need to call your shot.

  Hit your mark

  Calling your shot is not enough; you need to hit your mark. Let’s say that you are an archer at a competition and have been assigned to Lane A. You stand in your lane, pull back your bow, release, and shoot your arrow straight into the bullseye—of the target in Lane B! What’s your score? Zero. You executed, but not in the proper context.

  We have that problem in technology. We often execute as if in a vacuum, and therefore we don’t realize the context. Hitting any mark outside our lane is irrelevant. If you shoot a bullseye in the wrong target, you get zero—and that’s exactly the value you get from the operators and strategists when you miss your mark, even though you think you hit it. You must operate within the framework of what your organization does.

  Salespeople get paid by quota. They have various products and services to sell, with a quota for each, and on top of those quotas they might have accelerators. Accelerators are bonuses the company attaches to high sales for a certain product. Achieving the accelerator requires the salespeople to sell a lot of one specific thing. They could go beyond quota with every other product but still not get their accelerator. The strategists want the salespeople to be aligned with the organizational goals, so they give accelerators accordingly. As a salesperson, you must hit the mark to get your bonus. As a technologist, you must hit the mark to be trusted by the strategists.

  Measure what matters

  The last step to relevance is to measure what matters. During the first two steps, you have called your shot and executed flawlessly within the scope and context of your pledge. Now you must measure what matters—the key performance indicators (KPIs) that matter to your action. Our problem in technology is that we often measure arbitrary indicators that matter to us alone, like how fast I can bring up a virtual machine. But nobody else cares. You must measure something that matters to the business, to the mission, to whatever you’re trying to accomplish. Establish a baseline prior when you call your shot, then measure what matters afterwards, and you will see the change. The delta (change) is your impact. Strategists like data and hard facts. When you call your shot, hit your mark, and measure what matters, they learn they can trust you to contribute to the organization’s mission. That’s the kind of person they want in the lead boat.

  Now you know the three steps to relevant execution: call your shot, hit the mark, measure what matters. As you utilize these tools, you will find yourself moving towards a place of enablement. You are moving toward the lead boat, seeing the challenges ahead, understanding the strategists’ concerns. And you are serving as the engine that enables the boat to follow the strategists’ trajectory. The leaders say to “Go that direction!” and you enable the boat to obey.

  We technologists are important, but our importance is not based solely on competency. Our importance is based on our ability to prioritize, execute within context, measure what matters, and enable the organization.

  Get in the Boat Whiteboard

  SECTION VI.

  COMMUNICATE RELEVANTLY

  Chapter 20.

  Be Interested, Not Interesting

  There has always been a focus on the art of speaking or communicating. Why is it an art? Webster defines art as, “The expression or application of human creative skill and imagination...” Have you ever been in a conversation and wondered if the person you were talking to was mentally checking out what was going on elsewhere in the crowd instead of focusing on your conversation? There is a reason. Have you ever given a public speech and wondered why people were looking at their smart phones instead of paying attention to your very important words? There is a reason.

  First, there are at least two actors in every conversation; the speaker and the listener. The speaker tends to believe that everyone should have the same appreciation of the topic they are discussing as they do. That is the start of the disconnect in communication. This assumption can lead to misunderstanding and disinterest at best and total breakdown at worst. Isabel Briggs Myers, the daughter of the famous mother-daughter team, Myers-Briggs, once stated, “We cannot safely assume that other people’s minds work on the same principles as our own. All too often, others with whom we come in contact do not reason as we reason, or do not value the things we value, or are not interested in what interests us.” Rarely will the technologist find other people outside of the IT field who are interested in what they have to say because they do not value the same things. Understanding this is the start to realizing why we aren’t i
n the same boat and in making steps towards change.

  Our next challenge is biological. The concept of the triune brain was developed by neuroscientist Paul MacLean in the 1960s and popularized Carl Sagan in the 1970s, who described the inner workings of the brain as being reptilian, roughly referring to the basal ganglia; paleo-mammalian, roughly referring to the limbic system; and neo-mammalian, roughly referring to the cortex. Although the triune brain was originally conceived to explain brain origins and is now outdated from an evolutionary perspective, it is still a very useful tool to illustrate communication methods.

  The complex ideas that technologists have and which they desire to communicate are transmitted from the cortex. This is the part of the brain that controls important cognitive skills in humans, such as higher-level thinking and problem solving, emotional expression, memory, and the ability to delay reward and weigh consequences. It is the control system of our personality and our ability to communicate. This is part of the brain that is engaged when we deliver our presentation. Unfortunately, our listeners aren’t always using the same brain functions to listen and there is often a disconnect due to this.

  So much information is flowing these days that the brain just wants to discard everything. How many of your lectures from university can you remember? Probably not many. The ones that you do remember are because your professor used an interrupt to engage your brain. The brain gravitates toward the familiar while simultaneously ignoring it. If it is too familiar, we ignore it, if it is too unfamiliar, we discard it. In order to get someone’s attention, we must appeal to the familiar while interrupting the pattern of inattention. Here are some examples of interrupts:

  • In a movie trailer, the music and lack of action lull you into a sense of security before an abrupt action sequence.

  • You’re at a coffee shop when you hear breaking glass. You naturally stop your work or conversation and look toward the noise.

  • The keynote speaker at a conference abruptly pauses for a full five seconds. You come back from whatever you were thinking about and focus on the speaker’s next words.

  • A comedian makes a pun by cleverly twisting words in a way you didn’t expect. (Humor is one of the most common pattern interrupts.)

  With the reptilian brain, it looks for both the familiar and the frightening so that it can either choose to ignore it as something safe, or pay attention to it as something unfamiliar, something which needs greater attention to discern whether or not it is threatening. A pattern interrupt is the ability to prompt the “reptilian brain” to send the information to the higher brain functions for review. The most effective tools in pattern interrupts are storytelling, humor, and sometimes even slight offense (a poke in the eye) as long as it is done with respect to the person, situation, and culture so that the receiver doesn’t actually feel threatened. As an example of mild offense, I’ll share the story of a time when I was presenting to a team at a large New York financial around 10 years ago. One of the engineers told me before class that he expected me to be miming whatever the manufacturer had told me to say rather than giving accurate information and he felt like this was going to be a waste of his time. I promptly told him, “In the decade I have been representing this company, I have not lost my credibility and it’s not going to happen today! You can sit down and listen or you can get up and leave.” He loved my response, stayed, and was thoroughly engaged. This response worked with this particular gentleman in New York City. There are many other cultures and personalities that this would not be acceptable with, but it is our job as a communicator to be able to discern what is going to be culturally appropriate in each instance and gear our response toward that.

  Obviously, these interrupts should be done with nuance and understanding of the local culture. What you can say as a pattern interrupt in London may not be acceptable to say in Jakarta.

  Once I was communicating to a senior executive of a large manufacturer with whom we had done a lot of business. I came into the meeting with all of these great topics I wanted to discuss, as if I were the proverbial guy with the overcoat full of watches: “Here are many things I can sell you!” During the meeting, I told the executive all about the new projects we wanted to move forward with. Unbeknownst to me, her company had just experienced a security breach. She was hearing my ideas and thinking only about new security threats.

  Now, I knew her business intimately. I thought I understood her needs. But I didn’t really, all because I failed to sit and listen to her concerns before starting my spiel. After the security issue, she most wanted to learn more about the vulnerabilities in her organization. She wanted me to listen to her and offer solutions for that problem. To communicate more effectively, I should have focused on her concerns.

  I learned from that conversation that it’s not only important what you know—it’s more important that you engage. When I was just 15 years old, I used to sell advertising door-to-door to small businesses. I would walk into these businesses, typically of 50 people or less, and talk to the owner. As a 15-year-old, I was not important and nothing I knew was important—the only important thing I had was my interest in the owner. You can call this principle “Be interested, not interesting” (BINI) and is a tidy way to think about active listening.

  Active listening, where we are focused on being interested rather than interesting, removes the default filter we all use to filter others’ words. We normally automatically assume that others use words as we would mean them or that they see the world as we do. That is often a false assumption. Listen and ask questions to probe and understand their perspective.

  Every day we interact with people who do not reason as we reason, do not value the things we value, and are not interested in what interests us. In the world of IT, a tactician and a strategist communicate with distinct mannerisms, terminologies, and paradigms. Yes, even the words they say may have different meanings: “efficiency” to a tactician may not seem efficient to a strategist.

  Specifically, for an example, if a tactician is going to talk to a strategist, then he or she needs to follow the BINI principle: Be Interested, Not Interesting. Why? Because there is really nothing about the nuts and bolts of the tactician’s job that is interesting to a strategist. The tactician needs to be interested in them and their role, instead. The strategist’s default mode is to disbelieve and disregard and your first countermeasure is to be interested, not interesting.

  The second way you can help the strategist listen is to use a pattern interrupt. This could be a probing and insightful question, or a humorous one-liner. A person’s manner of speaking or accent can be a beneficial pattern interrupt if it’s understandable.

  Chapter 21.

  Value Mapping

  Call me MR FAB

  How does one map their value, what they know, what they do, to their company’s business needs? Robert Schaffner struggled with this for several years, mulling it over in his mind and collaborating with myself and others, before coming up with a solution that satisfied him, helped others, and had an impact. It’s called “MR FAB”.

  Now, you may be thinking, “What on earth is that? Who is Fab and why are we calling him, ‘Mr’?” Well, MR FAB is an acronym that Robert enhanced before teaching a session on business relevance in Paris. He was playing around with the letters “FAB,” which is a common acronym standing for “Feature, Advantage, Benefit”. People have been using this acronym for years, saying, “Don’t talk about features in your presentation; talk about benefits,” because a feature is meaningless if it does not provide an advantage and the advantage is meaningless if it does not provide a benefit. Ultimately, we are seeking the benefit for our company, not a fancy widget.

  Feature: So, what exactly is a feature? A feature is a functionality in a product or a service. A feature of a large, front loading washing machine, for instance, might be a depth of 5.8 cubic feet. A feature of a printer might be a print resolution of 1200 x 1200 dpi.

  Advantage: What is an advantage? Advanta
ges are noted through comparison. The product or service may be compared to itself (“New and improved!”) or compared to the way we use to do things in the past as opposed to the way we now do them today. We compare outwardly, looking at what our company’s product does with what the competitor’s product does. When we compare the difference, we should find some advantages over the other solution. So, the advantage to greater depth of 5.8 cubic feet over the average washing machine’s depth of 3.3 cubic feet would be the ability to fit more laundry in the machine at a time. The advantage to a printer with higher resolution would be the greater clarity it provides.

  Benefit: What is a benefit? A benefit is something that generates value for whomever is consuming the product or service. In our home example, the larger volume in depth, which leads to the capacity to fit in more laundry, produces the value of time savings—less time spent doing multiple loads of laundry. The benefit of higher resolution, leading to greater clarity, produces the value of visual appeal and the feeling of greater professionalism associated with that. The main consumer of technology solutions are the Blue and Green people, so you need to be asking yourself the question, “What intangible value are we providing them through our solution?” It is the intangible value that is the benefit!

  That’s FAB in a nutshell. Understanding FAB is a good starting point, but it is too generic. How so? Well, not everyone has the same values, as we discussed earlier with the different motivations of Red, Blue, and Green people, so not everyone will be incentivized by the same benefit. Robert realized, as he contemplated these things in his hotel room that night, that FAB was ready for a color extension! In doing so, he added “MR” to the front of FAB: Motivation and Risk.