Category Archives: Mentoring

When No Mentor Exists

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may i have some more

It’s easy to speak to mentoring and peer learning when there is a clear pathway to reaching out to someone. There will be times when it’s not as easy as that. You will have a situation that is so complex that describing it requires providing someone with a short-course. You will have times where you are dealing with sensitive information. While briefing someone can be a difficult task to relay all of the information fairly and effectively, it can be done. The challenge of seeking guidance on sensitive information is that you might not have access to someone within which you can confide. Sensitive information can benefit from speaking with someone in confidence, but you need to have a few degrees of separation between your confidant and the issue at hand. This becomes a huge challenge when you are working within a small community, whether a population area or the community of people within your discipline. Since you are seeking wisdom for something sensitive, it’s likely that you will look for someone who shares your background. If not many people share your background, or you are in a place where everyone knows everyone, it just might not be an option.

The realization is: there will be times within our lives where we can’t access the wisdom of other people. How to make up for this? Perhaps the two components are to ensure that we have a balanced life in order to have the ability to absorb the unknowns and difficulties of having to sort through things on our own, and/or becoming skilled at working with our networks to find the parallel wisdom that might assist us.

Let’s identify two kinds of problems. The first one is a shared problem where you can speak to someone else who can understand the whole problem, and provide you with a complete package of advice. For example, your problem is that you can’t find a really good sushi place. The odds are good that someone in your network will have discovered the best sushi, or can at least upgrade your sushi experience with something better on your way to finding perfection.

The other kind of problem is a composite problem. You can’t go to just one person, so you will need to break that problem into pieces and seek input on those pieces. You will then need to assemble them on your own as you work to solve it. Composite problems are either complex in that they have multiple variables that need specific expertise, or you are in a situation where you need to break your problem down into pieces where you can seek input without compromising the sensitivity. You are not able to draw on one source for wisdom.

Break it Down

So, going back to our original issue of having a problem where you can’t talk to someone directly about it. You will need to establish whether your problem can be broken down into component pieces that you ARE able to work on with others.

A side benefit of this approach is that to be fully intentional, you stop and take the time to assess your concern (we don’t stop and think often enough). There will be aspects of it that you will need to solve on your own, but there may be components where input from others might be sought. It is likely that you won’t find any solutions, but you will find tools.

Solutions versus Tools

At a certain age, we stop finding and applying pre-packaged solutions. We’ve solved all of the easy problems, and our value exists in the fact that we HAVE conquered the easy stuff. Our value lies in the fact that we possess a suite of tools that allows us to adapt to new situations, and that we have the skills to seek and add new tools. When we encounter new problems, the reasons we consult with other people are likely:

  1. Confirm application of the tools we have: we seek validation that our assessment of the situation is reasonable, and that we have applied our tools in an appropriate manner, and
  2. A search for new tools: consciously or subconsciously, we engage with someone else to find the tools needed to work on a problem.

So, in a complex situation the first option above is likely not available. But, the second solution provides us with the ability to find tools that we can apply to our problem. The challenge is taking the time to understand the components of our complex situation, and finding the conversations/resources where we can seek parallel guidance and the tools that they hold. We can then take these tools and adapt and apply them to our problem.

I think the summary of this #6 of 100 Conversations was a realization that there will be some problems where direct application of mentoring is just not possible. I’m lucky that my world doesn’t usually have an overlay of sensitive information where I can’t identify someone that is removed enough from the issue that I won’t compromise confidentiality. When those do crop up, I know that it involves me adapting the tools I have to a new situation. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t (learn, adapt and try again). At a certain point in your career, mentoring will no longer assist you in teasing apart the world’s problems to find clarity. At some point your problems may each be new and unique, and only for you to solve. You will be alone for brief periods of time. But… you talk to your friends to blow off steam (and read this blog?) …  and be reminded that you’re not crazy. As Run DMC said, life’s like that.

Freedom of Time

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Beat_the_Clock_1958-ed

I have a question for you: Why do you work? Think about it for a few seconds.

I’ll hypothesize that your answer includes these two components: desire and a paycheck. In an ideal world, we would be absolutely passionate about what we do and we would get paid a huge amount of money to do it. While there are those people out there, most of us seek to find the right balance between those two components. Sometimes we get paid a lot for something we’re not keen on. Sometimes we get paid little for something we love. The ideal is that we evaluate our career transactions, and we have an intentional reason to do what we do.

For this ratio of passion and cash, it represents the value that we place on our time. This balancing effort is probably subconscious for most people until they reach a certain level of experience where a desire to make intentional decisions arises [in other words, you get old enough to realize that we’re mortal, and we only get to visit each minute we experience once].  Each of us will have our own balance of this ratio, depending on our goals and needs and whether our current stage of life has convinced us to put more emphasis on one or the other.

So… this post is about the “freedom of time”… and assessing whether we own our time, or another entity does. This comes out of conversation #5 of 100 Conversations, and has grounding within numerous other interactions I’ve had with peers. [and I do have to say… choosing one topic out of these conversations is a challenge]

Since this blog is supposed to focus on the business of design, I will look at how this concept of “freedom of time” relates to what we do. The simplest parallels area: a) when we put passion first and we volunteer our skills on pro bono projects that we are passionate about, or b) when we work on a “bread and butter” project where it’s about paying the bills. One is love with no cash, and the other is cash with no love. (I’m being dramatic with this. We are lucky that we do find goodness in our bread and butter work).

The Balance

Ideally in any project, it provides us with a balance of love and cash. For project management, this is the ideal because it means that we have happiness at the project level that brings in typical income. This contributes to good morale, for us and staff.

When we examine multiple projects, it is more likely that they provide a range of levels of emphasis in the ratio. Some will provide more satisfaction, and some will provide more cash. This can start to skew morale because we open ourselves to feeling imbalanced. While morale averages out between projects, the more difficult challenges do tend to impose more mental weight than the good ones can offset.

The ‘business’ issue in this discussion is when difficult projects lose money. There is no benefit within the ratio; the good does not balance the bad. These are the projects where we say things like:

  • If I wanted to work for free, I’d do pro bono and have it be my choice.
  • Well, at least our other projects are profitable and make us happy.
  • This client will have better projects in the future. We’re getting in the door.
  • Doh! I did it again.
  • Etc…

The Bad Projects

Within your business life, you’ve probably run into the concept where people make generalizations that a small portion of your business causes you most of your pain. This is normally followed with the advice that we should fire some of our clients. I’ll bet your reaction is “while it makes sense, it wouldn’t work for me.” The theory is easy to understand, but our perception of reality complicates it. Let’s quantify a bad project as one that loses money and is more difficult than it should be. Conversely, a good project has a nice client and nice profit.

Have I ever “fired” a client? No. Have I ever had a small wish that someone might not have another future project they want me on? Yes. I’m in a small market, and my coping mechanism is that I can always try to manage the project better… but saying “No” potentially severs a relationship. In my market, the theory is that relationships lead to other relationships.

This Makes No Sense

So in effect, there are times where I know I am sacrificing my freedom of time in that I will need to expend a disproportionate amount of energy compared with the commensurate benefit of profit. This is personally a really bad decision, but I’ve somehow justified it as a long-term business strategy within my market. So… just call me the (cynical) optimist, “Maybe they’ll be better next time!! Yeay!”

How Bad Is It?

I think we develop processes to minimize the effect of these projects on our companies, and our potential to break even or maybe turn a profit. See one of my blog posts about “Managing from Behind”. While I’ve developed personal and business coping mechanisms, I’m unsure as to whether this is worth it or not. It takes a lot of energy to not only control these situations, but to also work with (and buffer) staff to guide and protect them, and their morale. BUT… the reality is that life throws us curve balls. From a mentoring perspective, difficult situations provide a fantastic way to illustrate how best to work when we’re under pressure. It puts much of what we do into a great context. The context of: the skills we’re learning now will serve us well every day, and will prepare us for when we encounter the next difficult time. In other words… if we can deal with this difficulty, the normal stuff becomes easier.

And, absorbing and redirecting these kind of things is part of my job. I own the company. I’m the guy responsible to fix things. I need these skills.

Back to Freedom of Time

The concept I introduced at the beginning of this post still holds true. We should be intentional about how we choose to spend our time. If you’re intentional about it, then the negative consequences don’t sneak up on you and surprise you. You can actively manage them. You can try to prepare.

So… I find myself within what is probably our cultural norm: freedom of time is a long-term game. I’m sacrificing some of my freedom of time now in order to increase it in the future. Is that a good idea? Do I think it’s a good idea now that I’ve thought about it? Let’s talk about that over a drink.

The alternative? Make your decision… only choose the good clients… fire clients that don’t match your freedom of time criteria. If your discipline and market supports that, you could have a good thing going.

Endnote:

This is one of those posts that focuses on trying to reassure myself that I’m not completely crazy. Maybe it will do the same for you. So many management lessons point to these absolutes that sound great, but are hard to apply. They drive us a little crazy because we can’t reach them. Let’s just learn from them and try to be a bit more intentional. The intent of the posts I’ve written (and the ones I will write) relate to managing the craziness. If all of our clients were easy, then this blog wouldn’t be needed. I want to feel like my existence is a normal one. Hug me.

The Power of “Tell Me More”

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Photograph: Ronald Grant Archive

Photograph: Ronald Grant Archive

Tell me more

Dialogue. We hear the word often, but how much consideration do we give achieving it? Dialogue is defined as a conversation between two or more people, and it also relates to discussion with the aim to resolve a conflict. When I looked up definitions, I was surprised that it didn’t quite address how I view the word. I think that a definition I would add would be “conversation with a goal of fully understanding som eone’s views and finding a common resolution.” For the sake of this blog post, please humor me and consider that as the definition.

So, conversation #4 of 100 Conversations seemed to have dialogue at its core… specifically with placing an emphasis on understanding someone else in order to find appropriate solutions.

I Don’t Have Time to Help Myself!

The beginning of the conversation started with looking inwardly, and how we get caught up in our lives. Specifically we often do not place intentional focus on where we put our energy. We wind up focusing our energy on those things which ‘seem’ pressing. These often deal with our interactions with others. Simply put, it’s easy to fall into putting a lot of energy into thinking about and addressing the negative things in our lives. A parallel I’ll draw is the statement that within the professional world, 5% of our clients take 95% of our effort (or something like that). The squeaky wheel gets the grease.

It’s difficult to stop and intentionally reprioritize our efforts to focus on the positive.  There will certainly be times where we need to focus on the negative, but it should be within a recognition that it leads someplace. If it doesn’t lie within some continuity toward an end, then it might not be worth it. [Note: have you seen the movie Inside Out? It’s worth it in how well it makes the case that we sometimes need to embrace the things we see as negative. I don’t know how well it relates to my professional life, but it does illustrate a meaningful concept.]

We Can Control Negativity

The reason I bring the above up is that in my experience, negativity in my professional life can be traced back to poor communication. This blog has presented setting expectations and other aspects of trying to achieve positive communication, but it hasn’t dealt with some of mechanics of dialogue. Setting expectations sets the groundwork for this post in that it reinforced the need to truly understand someone by verifying what they say. This is the first step in dialogue. I think that we all crave validation. The first step in validation is feeling that someone has heard you.

Tell me more

How often do we stop and ask someone to “tell me more”? These simple words illustrate that someone is listening, and that no conditions are being imposed on how the information might be delivered. The listener has shifted importance to the speaker with an open question/request. They illustrate that we have found something of such interest, that we just want to hear you speak about it. (see post: The Power of Being Heard)

I joke about facilitation being a martial art like jujitsu. Facilitators seek to engage with and direct communication energies to where they have their highest benefit. Asking someone to “tell me more” places focus on them and puts them in a space of inherent validation. They can be in a place where they tell their story. Our culture of online comments, trolls and reduced accountability (we wouldn’t say the things we write if we were face-to-face) has exacerbated our already “all too human” tendency to expect the worst and act accordingly. My reference point is a heated public meeting. My reference point is a skilled facilitator who creates a space of dialogue where before there was unidirectional anger. Most of the time, it’s about using the right tools to listen.

Tools That Say, “We want to hear you.”

Dialogue is about understanding the tools that allow us to identify with one another and ideally find common ground. In the absence of common ground, at least feeling heard and understood. These tools allow us to understand and put order to complexity. Communication can be very messy, but if we can tease apart information and its relationships, we can help to bring order to things.

Good facilitation is beyond a single post, or even a university degree. To be an effective listener, you need a suite of tools to give someone the atmosphere within which they can communicate. It’s also important to realize that facilitation can be exhausting and take it’s mental toll. Our tendency is to absorb things, even as we redirect them. It takes a special kind of person to internalize that they are merely a conduit to help people be heard. THIS is why having someone on a project who is purely a facilitator has great benefit when things are complex. If you are on the design team, it will be very difficult to separate yourselves from the fact that you may be the target for people’s concerns.

Compartmentalizing our Roles

I’d like to wrap up this post with the ‘sanity’ side of how much we invest ourselves in what we do. As designers, it’s hard to not love your work… and imbue it with pieces of yourself. There is a fine line to walk within this to ensure that your client is getting a product that is theirs (and not yours), and to ensure that you don’t suffer when your ‘vision’ is subject to whatever winds that blow. Your project is NOT you. If your project IS you, then hopefully you tend more toward the art side of things and have patrons that support you.

In our lives, all people can’t be all things to us. There will be some people that give, some that take, and some with which we find balance. We accept trade-offs. We intentionally shift a relationship to meeting the needs of others without meeting our needs. Just as others might do the same for us. Within our professional roles, we can recognize that in the end, our projects are not about us. We place our focus on our clients and stakeholders, with us merely there to help facilitate their visions. We may need to work with their anger, confusion and other feelings… without letting them reflect on our view of ourselves. I’ll reiterate that there will be times where you will NEED someone else to be facilitator… for your well-being.

This brings this post full circle. Professionally we are at our best when we subvert or eliminate our personal needs, our ego. We are there to listen to our clients and to help them achieve THEIR needs. This may not be easy, but these interactions are not about us in any way, shape or form.

If you are involved with complex communication situations, do NOT look to your work as where you get your personal validation. We need to ensure that the other parts of our lives provide us with the validation that we need. That these parts provide us with the balance we need in order to subvert ourselves in order to get done what we need to get done at work.

You can’t be all things to all people. People can’t be all things to you. We need to juggle all of our relationships so that as a whole, they allow us to stay sane and ideally happy.

So… let’s end with a simple flowchart (eye candy). This expands on the validation component of the flowchart in Managed Expectations = Success to put an emphasis on listening, validating and really hearing someone: Tell Me More.

Tell Me More

Tell Me More: Confirming We Heard You Right

Coaching, Mentoring and Metaphor

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1909 - Men Curling in Toronto

1909 – Men Curling in Toronto

Conversation #3 of my 100 Conversations effort. An underlying theme to the discussion was coaching and mentoring. Communication is certainly becoming a theme of this blog, and what I am gaining are additional tools to expand and adapt my ways of listening and communicating effectively. From this conversation, I saw a useful viewpoint that coaching has specific goals in mind, and may have a defined life span relating to achieving those goals. Mentoring is more about an individual’s growth and development over time. Another way to say it might be that coaching gives a person skills and strategies, while mentoring gives them a framework within which to use those skills and strategies. I might not have the perfect explanation (and I could be wrong), but this view serves the purpose of this blog post.

You Can’t Connect without Communication

Key to either coaching or mentoring is successful communication. This conversation #3 quickly delved into how coaching and mentoring are impossible without a very high level of communication. Our professional focus is not on ‘communication in passing’, it’s on communication that establishes successful long-term relationships. So, from here I focus on the importance of understanding how we best hear those we are in a communication relationship with… staff, client, whoever.

The Importance of Metaphor

In a previous post (Managed Expectations = Success), I mentioned the use of a kitchen renovation metaphor to communicate the challenges of a client being in a new building. They won’t have all of the benefits of the new space until they get used to it (i.e. where is the can opener?!). The purpose of the metaphor was to find a common language, with the hope that it is vivid enough to come to mind when they experience the challenges. They still may feel frustrated (and curse your name!), but they remember the overall context that it will be better in the end. Let’s take the time to discuss the power and weakness of metaphor.

According to wikipedia, “a metaphor is a figure of speech that identifies something as being the same as some unrelated thing for rhetorical effect, thus highlighting the similarities between the two.” The power in using a metaphor is to add emphasis to communication, and hopefully find clarity. I’ve stated before that clients hire us for our expertise. Expertise brings with it a different world view, a different vocabulary, and experiences specific to our specialties. Our clients will NOT have these shared experiences. We will NOT be able to us the communication shortcuts that we do with our peers or repeat clients.

Let’s say that each of us has our own unique system through which we best communicate and learn new information. This system reflects our experiences and our developed world view. If sports are integral to your experience, then the framework and subtleties of sports will likely be  a good way to communicate with you. If I am trying to communicate something to you, my challenge is to understand your system(s) in order to best communicate with you.

Without shared experience, we try to find ways to adapt our communication to our clients. At its easiest, we can find the right layman’s terms to directly communicate. It gets harder when we need to access more specific communication styles. Sports can be an immensely rich system to use for communication for how it deals with a broad spectrum of strategies to achieve individual and team accomplishment. Superficial sports references will work for almost everyone since in our culture we are generally exposed to sports. The challenge becomes knowing how far we can use sports before it gets in the way of communication, or might even be negative to successful communication. I understand the importance of being a team player in basketball, and I understand that every position has its own importance… but you’ll lose me if you discuss particular techniques or players. Sports metaphors only go so far for me (unless it’s curling… then let’s take out that rock to clear the house!)

A better approach is trying to understand our clients and the systems that they use for communication. It’s always a good idea to learn about our clients and their way of doing business. Our role is to help them in achieving their mission by applying our expertise to their goals. The more we know about them and their staff, the better equipped we will be to assist. This includes understanding their communication models. When we are at our best, we learn enough about their interests to communicate in THEIR system.

Be genuine, and have mutual agreement when we use tools like metaphor. The pitfalls of genuine can be seen in the plots of many television sitcoms: man likes girl, girl likes opera, man pretends to like opera, girl finds out he’s pretending and so on. Mutual agreement relates to an understanding that we are trying to place ourselves within someone else’s world view, and that we are doing so with some risk. The agreement is that we are trying to improve communication for the good of each other. For the sake of having a sports analogy that is obvious (admitting I’m weak on the sports front, unless you want to talk curling), someone might reference OJ Simpson (or Oscar Pistorius) as an example of something beneficial in a sports career… but I might be appalled for other reasons. Within our mutual agreement, I need to realize that your intent is good… and I should ask for clarification.

This goes back to establishing expectations. An expectation should always be to expect good intent, and that if I’m bothered by something… I should seek to confirm the information I’ve received. I’ve probably misunderstood. We can have those same conversations with clients and staff. “If I ever say something that bothers you, please check in with me. It was likely miscommunication.” [note: it is unfortunate that as humans, we often forget to assess intent within a moment of perceived offense. We go straight to being offended, versus seeking clarification.]

So to summarize this post, it is essential that we find the ways to achieve mutual understanding with those around us. There are short-cuts to a more full understanding, but every shortcut comes with accompanying risks. We minimize risks with doing our research, and with establishing a framework for dialogue and iterative refinement. It can be as simple as saying to a client, “I see value in sports metaphors with you. I’ll do my best… and I won’t be hurt when you laugh at my mistakes. Now tell me again, how many innings in a hockey game?”

How to Educate the Perfect Design Student

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ArchDaily had posted another question: What do you wish you had learned in Design School?

[And since I had first drafted this, they posted their article based on the comments they received: What Should Architecture Schools Teach Us? ArchDaily Readers Respond]

Accredited design programs really are in a tough spot when it comes to preparing professionals. They need to not only develop us as competent/skilled/artistic designers, but they also need to grow our ethical underpinnings and the knowledge and skills to meet the minimum competency requirements for the protection of public health, safety and welfare. Undergraduate programs have the benefit of a few more years to do this, but graduate level programs need to jam a whole bunch of stuff into three years or less.

It’s easy to list the most common things we wish we had learned: technology, project management, business development and a bunch of other skills. I think in some ways that these miss the point. The most successful landscape architects that I have known are successful due to their initiative and a drive to learn and apply. Their design programs provided them with a framework for one big independent study project – a design degree.

If I were to choose one thing that I wished had been stressed in school, it would be that for every class, the instructor put their information into context with how and when it would relate to me professionally. I think it was around Grade 9 during geometry when my teacher explained that our lessons actually had (or would have) real-life application. And guess what? As someone who builds things, the 3-4-5- triangle is an essential tool to me for checking how square something is. Understanding complex geometry is also essential to being able to communicate complex shapes within construction documents. Something as simple as being able to mechanically find the center of a circle is invaluable.

In a previous post (What Does Mentoring Mean?), I outlined the phases of our career and how our mentoring needs change as we grow. The same goes the knowledge and skills we possess.

So, the above addresses the one thing that I wish was presented to me in school (putting knowledge into a career context). I’d also like to offer my thoughts on another question, “What do you wish that students learned in design school?” My answers:

Initiative & Desire

How do you teach this? I think that to a large part someone will have it (or not have it) long before they make it to school. The question as an employer is how much we can foster or encourage it? I’m really unsure. I think there’s an important realization that every person is driven by something different. For some people, their career is just a career… not their life.

The point of this item is that initiative and desire are essential to a highly performing team. Each person delivers 110% (or more) of what the other people expect.

Critical Thought

My background is initially scientific. My training had me grounded within the importance of scientific method. Experimental methodology certainly made sense to me at the time (and was a favourite of mine), but it’s not until now that I appreciatehow it prepared and shaped me for my design career. During my Master of Landscape Architecture degree, my previous experience with methodology and statistics was tempered with design process (design classes) and for my thesis (graduate research seminar). Whether we recognize it or not, good design usually comes from a rigorous approach. I believe it becomes stronger when we apply critical thought explicitly, rather than the implicit (or subconscious) overlays that it normal goes through.

The point of this item is that people need to come prepared with their own framework for how they apply critical thought to a problem.

Strategic Thinking

Strategic thinking in part comes out of critical thought… or is at least a partner. We explicitly create strategic plans for organizations and businesses, but there is an implicit underlying plan for almost everything we do in our lives. We don’t need this for successfully getting a bottle of milk, but most tasks will benefit from some explicit level of: stop, analyze, synthesize and act.

The point of this item is that we need to contribute to a strategic pathway that adds value and increases the chance for success.

Communication

Well… I think you get the point…

I just realized that I’m summarizing the blog posts I’ve made to date and those I have yet to write. I’m trying to describe the qualities that make for someone who is successful at the business of design.

Summary

A challenge in programs is teaching what the majority of the students need. Business development, business planning, etc… are subjects that only a small portion of students will need within their first ten years of practice. They’re also the subjects where mentoring and being exposed to them on the job is critical. It’s not that our academic programs don’t give us what we need, it’s that our profession doesn’t seem to have been indoctrinated into life-long learning. Initiative and desire drives learning for those who understand that they need to learn at any given point. The challenge is to know what we need to know before it’s critical we know it? Senior professionals could likely be more aware of how to assist their ‘higher functioning’ staff in learning, and also those who might just need a little guidance. My experience has been that professional learning is something that we talk about, but firms are few and far between that actively assist their staff with this life-long growth.

So, I’ll be bold and say that the question at the beginning of this post doesn’t get to the core of where it needs to go. It’s the easy question. It was a good first question, because it leads to understanding the real concerns. I want to pose another question: What knowledge do you wish someone had actively offered you on the job? Education doesn’t stop with school.

In closing, the most important thing that school could teach us is how to actively engage with mentoring in order to provide what we didn’t learn in school. And, engage senior professionals into their essential role in this.

(ONLY SENIOR PROFESSIONALS READ THIS: If you don’t engage as a mentor, you decrease your odds significantly for having the right person to lead your firm when you are gone. And if cash drives you, someone who will want to buy it from you.)

Engineers Are Good With Numbers Until…

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Conversation #2 of my 100 Conversations had a structural engineer state that a focus of his ponderings related to “Engineers are good with numbers until you put a dollar sign in front of them.” This certainly doesn’t only apply to engineers. The reality is that most people who are closer to the beginning of their careers are focusing on learning their professions, rather than project management and profitability. If the proper company safety nets are in place (good fees and good project management), then the negative impacts of their ‘task delivery only focus’ is minimized. This blog post will be short, because a few years ago I had put together a mini-manual that tried to put profitability into context for staff. The main realization I had was that we miss our budget targets when unknowns are not managed properly.

It is important to state that profitability discussions need to be positive. No one WANTS to lose money. It’s just that a fully intentional approach to achieving profitability is often not in place. These posts relate to being fully intentional with how we engage our staff resources for a project.

So… conversation #2 inspired me to take that mini-manual and post it on this blog in three different parts:

Know what NOT to do – Part 1

Know what NOT to do – Part 2

Know what NOT to do – Part 3

Conversation #2 – Interviews

Another excellent part of our conversation dealt with how we subconsultants are sometimes on multiple teams. This means that sometimes we are on multiple interviews. Our lessons learned through seeing how different teams deal with the same interview lends some great lessons learned for interviewing. That will be an upcoming post. [ED: the post is here – Getting the Project: The Interview]

Know What Not To Do: Part 3

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This is the third of a series of posts that will deal with engaging with staff about profitability. The underlying theme is that we are most profitable when we are working with knowns. Unknowns are what cost us time and effort that we might not have anticipated. The previous post is at this link: Know What NOT to Do: Part 2. This post is composed of flow charts that summarize much of the previous  two posts with a visual framework for intentional decision making.

The Most Important Flow Chart

This one is pretty simple. I like to tell staff to trust their gut. When their gut makes them uncomfortable, I’m here for them to speak with.

The Most Important Flowchart

Task Scope Assessment Flowchart

Before (or after) someone’s gut starts to alert them to something… we should assess tasks in order to validate where they fit within our knowledge.

Task Scope Assessment Flowchart

Staff Delegation Flowchart

This is another way to look at the scope assessment flowchart above, with a focus on the staff who will be working on something. The most important message within this chart is that you aren’t expected to know everything! In our culture, we’re brought up to think that not knowing how to do something is a fault and is embarrassing. Well… pretending you know something is the best way to lose your company money… and to get in trouble when people find out. BUT, as this chart shows, it’s good to push yourself to learn more when the knowledge deficit is controllable.

Staff Delegation Flowchart

Summary

So after three posts… the summary of this is that we don’t need to know everything. Your company should provide you with the skill/knowledge support where you can be successful and stretched enough to learn something with each project. This allows us to minimize the negative effect of unknowns. For learning, sleep and profit… that creates a higher level of shared success.

Know What NOT to Do: Part 2

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This is the second of a few posts that will deal with engaging with staff about profitability. The underlying theme is that we are most profitable when we are working with knowns. Unknowns are what cost us time and effort that we might not have anticipated. The previous post is at this link: Know What NOT to Do: Part 1

Move quickly and strategically to refine and solve

Move quickly and strategically to refine and solve problems (unknowns)

Engaging

I’ll introduce the concept of engaging. Engaging means that we review a task and determine that we are the right fit for doing that task. For our purposes, if we choose to NOT engage, it means that we pass a task on to another person or entity. This is an intentional transfer since all tasks need to be completed, or renegotiated.

Assuming that we choose to engage. The previous post discussed that project difficulties are normally associated with unknowns. When we have unknowns, there are a few possible impacts that may have on us:

Money

When we encounter an unknown, it will result in extra effort and hence extra money. As consultants, time = money. We have several opportunities to control unknowns.

  • Budget: We try to anticipate unknowns and schedule appropriate time and effort to resolve them. As landscape architects, we are always dealing with things we haven’t done before. Much of the time we have done similar things, so we can use past knowledge to guide us. Some of the time we are doing completely new things. We do our best to manage budget unknowns. It is important to stress that sometimes we agree to the wrong budget. If we have good project management skills, we can minimize negative impacts, but the most important thing is to identify issues and plan for them.
  • Knowledge Gaps: We are all learning. We are a team. There is almost no benefit from learning something the hard way, unless it is an intentional pathway agreed to with someone who has more knowledge. As soon as something is new to you, you need to assess whether you can learn it quickly and efficiently, or whether you should check in with someone. They may encourage you to go and learn it, they may teach you, or they may give you a few pieces of the solution to help you out.
  • Skillsets: Who is the best person for the task at hand? We should all be in a place to learn, but you don’t need to learn everything today. If someone else can do what you are doing faster than you, figure out how they can assist you. This benefits the project, and means that you meet current project goals and you will be better at it next time because you interacted with them and their knowledge.

Bottom line: Budgets and project management are in our control. The only way we can evaluate success is if we have outlined goals and strategies. The only way we will achieve success is if we have goals and strategies.

Sleepless Nights

If you have a conscience and are passionate about things, you will have sleepless nights in the face of unknowns. It’s a fact. You care. Our goal is to provide the strategies, frameworks and support network to minimize their occurrence. Sleepless nights are a product of growth and upward movement. The more responsibility that you have, the more decisions and outcomes will be reliant upon your actions. The main advice for this is to look to the root of the worries, and assess what is in your control?

If it’s in your control do you have the strategies in place for a pathway to success? You still might worry a bit, but hopefully minimally since you have done your best.

If there are components that are not in your control, have they been delegated to someone that can control them? All items need to be identified and associated with delegated (and accepted) control. If that’s not the case, the unknowns that are worrying you need to be assessed again and a strategy developed. If there is no pathway to control, then disengaging needs to be examined.

Bottom line: If you don’t have control, and can’t gain control, then it needs to be someone else’s worry.

Opportunity to Learn

We include opportunity to learn within this since this is the most intentional way to look at solving unknowns, and is based within positive thinking. If the proper framework for learning is provided, then the negative impact of Money/Time and Sleepless Nights will be minimized. We have already discussed ways to minimize negative impacts above, so the key component to learning is their implementation. Underlying it all is that an intentional pathway validates actions and allows us to define and control success. For example, a project may lose money, but it was recognized as a possibility and validated through a positive result: a new client, a new skillset or another positive outcome.

Bottom line: You can’t (and shouldn’t) learn everything you need to know on your own. You are part of a team.

The Pathway to Success

Whenever a task is contracted, part of the contracting effort is taking the time to understand the required effort, and all of the components that will need to happen for success. This can merely be thinking it through and discussing with your supervisor/team, or developing a written task strategy. The underlying goal is that a pathway for success is identified and agreed upon by those involved.

Know What NOT to Do: Part 1

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This is the first of a few posts that will deal with engaging with staff about controlling unknowns. The underlying theme is that we are most profitable when we are working with knowns.

Managing Organizational Disruptions

It is a fact that positive growth requires interruptions. Growth requires innovation, and innovation happens at the face of encountering unknowns. Unknowns require an intentional strategy.

Positive Growth Punctuated by Organizational Disruptions

Positive Growth Punctuated by Organizational Disruptions

Unknowns = Cost

Any time that we encounter an unknown on a project (or life), there is a cost associated with it. We need to assess what that cost is, and intentionally plan whether we wish to expend effort or to refuse to engage. The goal is that an informed choice is made, and that a plan is put in place to minimize or eliminate negative consequences. (We will assume that our goal is to always maximize positive outcomes.)

For the sake of our work, cost can typically be viewed as:

  • Cost = Time/Money
  • Cost = Sleepless Nights
  • Cost = Opportunity to Learn

A Strategy to Minimize Costs

A key first assessment is to ask the following questions:

  • What is in my control? What is out of my control?
    • If it is out of my control, can I get it in my control? Who will help me?
    • If it is outside of ability to function, who will do it?
  • What do I know? What do I not know?
    • If it is out of my knowledge, how do I learn it? Who will help me?
    • If it is outside of ability to learn, who will do it?

These questions are the foundation for you to develop a plan, and to engage with those around you whose role is to help you succeed. Learning new information is important to growth, but expending unbalanced effort to do things that those around you can assist with is not effective. You are surrounded by a team.

Key Themes

  • You are part of a team. (you are surrounded by help)
  • Learning is a long term-effort. (you can’t go from 0 to 100 in one project)
  • Engage knowledge to meet project needs and long-term learning. (collaborate for project success and learning)
  • Delivering a quality product to our client on schedule and on budget means that we will all have jobs tomorrow. (be realistic about what and who a project really needs)

Managed Expectations = Success

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It’s All About Setting Expectations!

(*this is post#1 from my 100 Conversations mission*)

Our fundamental role as designers and project managers is to be effective translators. We need to recognize that our skills and specialties are alien to most of the people that we work with. Extra effort IS required to inform them about what we do, and how they fit into a good project process.

I will be adamant about this. Almost ALL of the pain that you and your staff (and your consultants, and your prime, and your children, and your dog) feel is due to expectations not being managed effectively. I’m not blaming you… I’m blaming the typical process that we consultants seem to keep on using over and over. Namely… no process.

This starts to get metaphysical, but probably the best discussion you could have with your client is establishing expectations for setting (and maintaining) expectations.

RULE #1: Set a Process for Expectations

Think about any friction that you have had in your life. I bet that most of them likely came down to (mis)communication, and probably could be described as being due to mismatched expectations. Mismatched expectations become conflict when we don’t have a process in place to deal with them.

Imagine a different approach to project management where we made the time at the beginning of  job to better define HOW we would manage our management process. Yes… that sounds kind of dumb when I re-read that sentence, but the intent is that we simply explain to our client that our goal is to:

  1. Establish their criteria for success and the extent of expectations that should be understood. (contracting)
  2. Take the time to confirm our mutual understanding. (confirmation)
  3. Recognize that changes will be needed, and potential conflict may arise. (anticipating)
  4. Establish a process for how we will address any need for resolving changes to expectations. (recontracting)
  5. Determine how success will be measured based on their criteria and expectations. (achievement)
  6. Validate an opportunity for lessons learned. (growth)

I think we do an okay job of numbers 1 & 2, but the rest have varying levels of success depending on our communication skills, and whether our client has someone with previous related experience or not.

If you already ‘get’ where I’m going with this, check out some of my other blog posts now. If you’d like to hear more, read on.

Flowchart: Managing Expectations

Flowchart: Managing Expectations (a work in progress)

Contracting

Our days are full of implicit contracts: I’ll pick up some milk. Sometimes they include explicit contracts like the Prime and Subconsultant Agreements I signed yesterday. We are very intentional when we are signing and dating a document, and less intentional with our implicit agreements. The latter has defined and legal ramifications if we don’t follow what we’ve agreed to do. The former doesn’t really have the same level of potential ramifications, except perhaps annoyance.

The purpose of contracting is to orchestrate the various components that need to be completed in order to achieve successful completion of a task. We can only achieve this is if we agree upon what success looks like. “We would like dessert tonight for my birthday. We need milk. I have a meeting, so you get the milk. I’m looking forward to my favourite tasty dessert.”

If you forget the milk, then we don’t even get to the point of assessing whether the dessert is tasty.

Confirmation

Communication is challenging. It’s a little easier when we have shared experience and shared vocabulary. I spoke to this a little in: Asking the Right Question . “I know you like it when we make it with whole milk, so I’ll pick up a half-gallon of whole milk. Are there any other ingredients we need?”

With that we take the first step in confirming the specific request (milk) and we do someone the favour of bringing it back to the big picture of success (the dessert and how they like it). This shows shared management and responsibility for success. We step up from being a mere errand runner, to someone with illustrated buy-in. “No. I checked the cupboard and we have everything else we need.”

Your errand is confirmed. You have helped confirm a pathway to success.

Anticipating

Stuff happens, so why not anticipate a process that builds-in an expectation that change or flexibility might be needed? “I’ll call you from the store to see if you think anything else we should get.”

Recontracting

So we have a system in place to plan for the fact that life is messy. “I’m at the store. Apparently the cows are on strike and there’s no dairy available. Can you believe that? I know you wanted that dessert, but I was thinking maybe I could bake your favourite cake instead?”

You could have simply not picked up the milk and gone home, and explained that they had no dairy. This would have illustrated that you missed the point of the whole exercise: a special dessert. Instead, you check in and develop mutual control over the situation. Not only did you check in to recontract, you also showed initiative in offering a potential solution to the situation.

Achievement

“Weird about the cows, but since you mention it, cake does sound pretty good.” You have a discussion and you revise your plans to accommodate the unknown. The pathway to success is significantly different, but you achieve the end goal of a tasty dessert.

Growth

When you have finished eating the whole thing(!), you both agree that next time contracting with a contingency plan would be helpful. “The cake was delicious. If cows ever go on strike again, cake can be a pre-approved alternative.”

Rule#2: Establishing and Managing (the right) Expectations

Let’s bring it back to consulting.

You’re probably familiar with the concept of time, quality and cost. It’s also visualized well with the saying, “Fast, cheap and good… you can only choose two.”

Since quality is normally a final assessment, we can look at scope, schedule and budget as being the main factors to achieve desired quality. Risk and resources are important as modifiers to the ‘formula’ as they can add additional stability (like more skilled workers), or instability (eliminating schedule contingencies). The more pressure that is put on any or all of scope, schedule or budget… the more likely it is that things will deviate from expectations.

So… make no promises is the best solution! (joking)

As consultants, we have great systems for establishing scope and budget expectations. Where we (and our clients) get into trouble is with management of scope. I’d like to think that we’re too nice or too naive, but regardless… the fact is that we don’t set up realistic expectations that balance scope/schedule/budget, and we certainly don’t act in anyone’s best interests when we don’t tightly manage these.

It’s really hard to say no to a client (until you have shared systems in place). That’s why pre-development delivers bloated space planning and project programming to schematic design. We waste so much time, effort and money because we don’t establish realistic expectations grounded in scope/schedule/budget. The ultimate blame for this lies with the prime consultant, but it also sits with the client. Well… us subconsultants are also guilty when we don’t speak up, but we often aren’t invited into the big picture. Most of the time the problem lies in the fact that the client doesn’t have the money for the project they WANT… and we certainly wish that we could always give people what they want!

Finding the project they NEED is essential before project expectations are set. See Trying to Avoid Work to Benefit our Clients.

The take-home message from this is to set a process for managing expectations, and this is grounded in some intensive work at the beginning of your project. During this period of expectation contracting, make sure you ask the HARD questions at the beginning of the project. If experience is worth anything, I’d say we need to talk about:

  • We will have some tough conversations. We’ll have a process in place for these conversation, and we’ll try to anticipate them to the best of our abilities.
  • We need to both have a shared understanding of what ‘perfect’ means for this project. Let’s try to visualize what success means. What are the ten things that you need to see when you are looking around at the ribbon-cutting?
  • You probably won’t have the budget for what you want. We’re going to focus first on making sure you get what you need. We don’t want to ‘value engineer’, we want to ‘value design’. (**for those that don’t know ‘value engineer’… it’s a hilarious industry term for deleting things to reduce costs***)
  • We’re going to work hard with you to make sure this project is right-sized for you. You save a tonne of money when you don’t build things!
  • Let’s have a discussion about how you will learn to use your new building/landscape… and that there will be challenges. Imagine reorganizing your kitchen for efficiency. You know you’ll spend a month or two trying to remember where something is, but in the long term it will be better for you. New buildings and sites are the same, and come with frustrations until you’ve learned them.
  • What other painful conversations did you have during a project which you could have had at the beginning? There’s nothing wrong with discussing previous challenges with your clients in order to show them that you learn, and you don’t want to revisit them again.

It’s impossible to write one blog post to cover setting and managing expectations. Remember that the take home message is not just set expectations. You also need to recognize that they will need to change, and that a process for expectation management is critical..