Conference Attending 101

We are about to enter a new year, filled with new opportunities to spend money on things that have absolutely no impact on our daily lives. One such thing will be a whole slew of conferences that we can choose to attend, get excited about, and then forget.

Just in case you are sitting there wondering if I am arguing against attending conferences let me be more clear. I think that most people who attend most conferences would be better served by taking the same time and less money and just sleeping in their hotel room or reading a good book by the pool. This has a bit to do with the conferences themselves, which are mostly attempting to accomplish things for which they were never designed. It has more to do with the way people attend conferences.

As a person who still does attend conferences (even those obscenely expensive ones) I figured I would share my thoughts on how to make the most of a conference seeing as how many leaders will choose to spend precious time and money on them.

Choose your questions before you arrive. Conferences offer a plethora of answers on any number of topics. Most of these answers are to questions you were not asking. Perhaps they are questions you should be asking, but that is something that you should deal with in a future conference. Change happens in our current reality. That means you need to answer questions you are asking right now; questions that are immediately applicable to your life and organization.

You should choose one or two questions that you want answered... three if you are feeling extremely confident or cocky. These questions should guide you as you choose which sessions you are going to attend and which people you are going to try to meet. As a side note, the people you can meet at a conference are often much more valuable to your future than the information you will hear.

Choose questions that deal with character and vision, not best practices or programs. If you are looking for ideas on how to implement a new marketing strategy then read Seth Godin's blog and buy some books. You will get a much larger return on your dollars spent that way than from any conference. The most valuable thing you can change in your organization while at a conference is you. I recommend questions along the lines of "Where should I be focusing my energies?", "Where am I currently stuck in achieving results and what can I do about it?", and "If I had to choose three people to pour into this year (in preparation for one of them to replace me), who should they be?"

You may be thinking, "But conferences are not designed to answer such questions!" Well, that is why I think most conferences are a complete waste of money for most people. Conferences are designed to transfer information and provide inspiration. What they lack any power to do is lead to transformation. That is why so many people who attend a conference and "learn" something that "inspires" them do not actually change anything in their daily routine that lasts longer than a few weeks.

Decide what it is you want to discover beforehand. Focus on what can change in you as much as in your organization. Let these things be a filter for every talk you attend and you will be amazed at how answers come to your very specific questions.

Make your action plans before you leave. If you "don't have time" to work through your questions and all of the information you gathered and make some specific action plans before you go home, then schedule more time for your conference. The money you spend for an extra day or two of lodging and food will be well worth the investment.

I am sure I could dig up impressive numbers on how many people fail to implement any of the things they learn at conferences, but the most important research is personal. Think back to the last three conferences/seminars you attended and then point to the daily, weekly, and monthly activities that are on your schedule as a result of them.

If you believe a conference will answer some questions that are crucial and immediately applicable to your life and organization, then schedule the time to work all the way through that process before you come back home. You know what is waiting for you back home, and "time to think through all that good stuff you learned while on your conference vacation" is not one of them.

There you go. Two steps to increase the impact of your next conference exponentially. If instead you decide to just skip the conference and spend a day by the pool reading a good book... I won't tell if you don't.

Green and Red

There are at least three distinct kinds of drivers on the road. I call them Green/Green, Green/Red, and Red/Red. I think these people exist in our organizations as well and are the cause of much frustration for leaders. What separates these drivers is not any skill or competency, but merely expectations and assumptions. Any successful leader will be well served to discover the expectations and assumptions of his or her followers and learn from them accordingly.

Yes, I said learn, not change or manipulate or deal with. That is always my first response when I find someone has a different outlook from my own, to figure out how I can change them so that they see things my way; the right way. I am growing to see the value in alternate viewpoints, especially when they are connected to a single vision.

Green/Green - These are people who see the green light in front of them and take off, assuming that the next light they meet will also be green.

Green/Red - These are the drivers who move slowly off the line. They recognize that the light in front of them is green, but they figure that the next light will likely be red, so there is no real reason to get in a hurry.

Red/Red - These are the drivers who refuse to recognize or realize the light in front of them is green, and they know that any future light is going to be red, so it is probably just as well to sit where they are.

Understand that I am not trying to make a case for which of these is the best or which you should aspire to, I am simply observing that each of these seem to exist. So, let us look at the inherent strengths and weaknesses of each type and how they might work together.

Green/Green - The world is full of possibilities, and only those who are ready to move will be able to realize them all. The reward always outweighs potential risk in their mind. The words "fast" and "good" are almost synonymous when it comes to decision making. They add strength to a team by opening up possibilities that others might miss and generating momentum towards movement. Their weaknesses often come in the area of recognizing "reality". The truth is reward does not always outweigh risk for every decision. Left unchecked these guys will definitely move your organization somewhere; whether it is a place you like or not is another matter.

Green/Red - The world is full of pitfalls, and those who run ahead haphazardly will fall into them. These people love the story of the turtle and the hare and recite it any time a big decision hits the table. They add strength to a team by opening up risks that others may overlook and helping fill in the plans. Their weakness often arises in very time-sensitive situations. The necessity to make quick decisions adds a great deal of stress, and given their assumption of risk in the future they will often say "no" any time they feel pressed. As such they will likely lead an organization into a safe, secure, and stable future that never quite reaches its potential.

If Green/Green people are rocket fuel, then Green/Red people are their engine housing. In general it is not a good idea to put fire to rocket fuel, but if you have it properly housed in a working engine it can propel you faster than you ever imagined. That is exactly what can happen when people with these two outlooks on life work like a team.

Red/Red - There are not any real strengths to mention about this outlook, and their weaknesses are obvious. Negativity drains energy, creativity, and momentum. The danger when dealing with these people is to assume that they have no strengths. The fact is that their outlook on life often masks their strengths. You will rarely find these people in high leadership positions in an organization, but I would speculate that you can find them quite often within the support structures of many organizations. Leaders have to decide if they are going to help move people out of this mindset or move these people out of the organization. There is no middle ground, because red/red people will drag down an entire department or even company given enough time. Think how many cars are affected by a single driver who refuses to move off the line when the light turns green. The same is true in an organization when one person consistently refuses to move to the vision.

Laura on Communication

Though I often fail miserably, my general intent is to provide content on this site on M/W/F. Every so often if I drop little bits on off-days it will be light, as is the case today.

I have a 2 year old daughter named Laura. She is incredibly bright and incredibly strong-willed. Communication is one of the things we are working on with her, and that she is working on with us. At first I was worried that she could not talk. I have slowly begun to realize that she merely chooses not to talk.

This has become clear as we will try to teach her a new word, like "Daddy" or "Juice" or such. Each time she will say the word once. Then she never says it again. It is as if she is trying to show great patience and say, "Yes, large humans, I can speak your language, it is just such a bother. My life would be better served by you continuing to run around attempting to read my mind... plus that is more entertaining for me."

At other times I get the feeling that she has consented to verbal communication, she is just not sure English is the language we should choose. I am not against new languages, but the problem is that no one in the world except Laura can understand her personal language.

Just this morning after breakfast it became clear that she wanted down from her chair. (Clear meaning she was thrashing around screaming at me... I picked up on the subtle hint.) I calmed her down and asked, "What do we say when we want down?" She answered me with a clear sentence made up of at least 7 distinct words, and then stared at me.

So, I re-phrased my question and said, "What do we say in English when we want down?", to which she answered, "All done" with her arms outstretched.

It appears that I am either winning the battle of wills, or she has decided that I am completely unteachable. Either way I am hopeful that verbal communication will continue to increase in our home.

On an organizational note this reminds me just how important and how difficult communication can be. The ability to clearly express expectations and assumptions is a highly valuable skill. The ability to hear others and perceive their expectations and assumptions is almost priceless.

Stop and Go Driving

Few things frustrate me more than gross inefficiency. One place where I am continuously amazed at the level of inefficiency we humans can achieve is in the area of driving. (Can I get an AMEN!) The other morning I was in traffic so congested that the road was like a parking lot for two miles. There were six or so stoplights along this stretch of road and traffic was such that you could barely cross the intersection of one light before running into the end of the line at the next. No, there was not a wreck or construction or weather or anything other than human inadequacy to blame it on.

I had two options. The first was to rail against the people who create our roadways and train our drivers. The second was to step back and look at the process of driving in strop and go conditions and see how it might apply to an organization.

After a few minutes of raging I felt better and my head was clear enough to bring processing. I remembered that every goes through seasons. Some are seasons of growth, others of consolidation. In effect, organizations are going to experience stop and go movement. Nothing is in “go” mode all the time.

This is a big point, because I think it is sometimes easy to look at extremely successful organizations and assume that they never experience a slow down, or even backwards movement. That is untrue. Every organization faces stop and go seasons. The key then is not in how to avoid the slow seasons but how best to use them to prepare for the go seasons.

Successful organizations are those that make the most of their Go seasons. The primary method they use to accomplish this is vision alignment.

Back to my driving experience, as I began observing what was happening I noticed a few things. First, green doesn’t mean Go. Green should mean go, but it does not happen like that for most drivers. That is because they are not as focused on the light as they are on the car in front of them. So, instead of experiencing instant movement when the light turns green you get to watch as one-by-one each car slowly begins moving. Someone might say, “What do you expect, all of the cars to begin moving at once?!?” Yes!

A simple understanding of math and physics reveals that two objects moving in the same direction at the same speed will not collide. That means that as soon as the light turns green everyone should be able to move forward at the same time, even at significant speed. Instead what you generally get is a situation in which the first few cars move off quickly with each successive care releasing more slowly. At one light this was so bad that a light went from red to green to yellow and back to red and I never moved.

This experience can be frustrating when driving. It can be devastating when leading an organization. Whereas cars are independent of each other, parts of an organization are not (or should not be). So, when some members race ahead in the Go times and leave others in Stop mode, serious consequences occur. You either have leaders racing ahead of their followers, leaving them lost, confused, and frustrated. Or you have leaders who are constantly racing off and backing up to pick up the stragglers.

This is what I see taking place in many organizations. During the stop season they do a good thing, get the lead team focused and ready to move. What they often miss is the crucial step of getting the rest of the organization ready to move. So, when the light turns green the leadership takes off, only to look back and see people creeping through the intersection behind them, or even worse, getting stuck behind the light as it turns red again. So, the leaders are left to either run off, disconnected from the organization, or stop and wait for the next light. Meanwhile those organizations that managed to move as one go racing by.

Some leaders try to fix this with clear lines of communication that travel from the top of the organization to the bottom. That helps. It is similar to what happens if everyone in a line is focused on the car in front of them (rather than those delightful people who just stare off into outer space, seemingly forgetting that the light is going to change at some point). In this model, however, you still get movement that is progressively slower the further you are from the top.

The answer lies not just in helping people focus on those in front of them, but in helping them all focus on the stoplight at the front of the line. If everyone is focused on the light then when it turns green they will all be ready to move forward together. Imagine that, a line of cars all moving forward as soon as the light turns green, going from 0-60 in mere seconds. It would revolutionize our traffic system. It does revolutionize organizations.

You see that organization that started their journey after you did and yet is miles down the road from you? It is likely not because they have had less stop lights, but because then the light turns green they are ready to move, together, at a high speed.

So, let me assume that you are following the analogy and perhaps even agree with my assessment. What now? How do we change our current reality and get our people to wake up and focus on the light? How do we make use of this Stop season, knowing that a Go season is just around the corner? Here are a few suggestions:

1) Make a clear focus. The vision has to be clear and clearly visible. If people don’t know where they should look or what they are looking for then do not get angry when they sit still. If you drive up to a busy intersection with no light and no signs, the only intelligent choice is to stop. Your people know the pain of running off and getting emotionally involved in something only to have it disappear or come crashing down. Don’t expect them to just “jump in” and invest their time, talent, and treasure without a clear picture of what they are doing and why.

2) Take advantage of the Stop seasons. Rick Warren refers to these seasons as the times where the roots grow. Use them to answer questions like “Who are we? What are we about? How do we plan to accomplish this? Why are we doing this in the first place?” Train existing leaders and recruit new ones even though you don’t “need” them right now. In a word, prepare for when the light turns.

3) Know when the light is going to turn before it does. This may sound strange, but as a leader it is your responsibility to know when the light is about to turn green and communicate that to your people. The people in the front of a traffic line are in a unique place to be able to see the cross lights. They can see when those lights turn yellow and know that their light will soon be green. As a leader it is your responsibility to be so in tune with your market and environment that you see the signs that a Go season is coming.

Imagine a perfect world where stoplights had the ability to transmit to the radio in our car. You might hear something like, “Your attention please, in 20 seconds the light will turn green. Please place your attention on the light. Prepare to move forward in 5, 4, 3, 2, 1… Go!” (I would seriously LOVE something like this!)

In organizational life this type of preparation is possible when Go seasons repeat themselves. For example many churches experience the most numerical growth in the Fall, just after the New year, and perhaps around Easter. If you know that, then there is no reason your church should not be ready move at those times of year. Smart retail business make sure they are ready for the Christmas season. They know that missing it means waiting a year to catch up… if they are still around.

Successful leaders are constantly looking for signs that the next Go season is just around the corner. Experience is one of your best tools in this search, both personal experience and that of others in your industry or market.

Questions for further diagnosis:

1) Looking at the next six months can you foresee any Go seasons on the horizon? If so list them. If not where could you look for help to identify some?

2) What would synchronized movement look like in your next Go season? If everyone was ready to move and followed your lead perfectly where would you be when it is time to slow down again? This is where questions about vision, measurement, and evaluation come into the picture. Where are we going? How far is it? How will we know when we get there? Are there any special instructions we (your followers) need? Are there any known obstacles we need to know about?

[Note that the longer your Go season is the more detailed you need to be in your vision and directions. If we are simply traveling three blocks to the next stop light then it should be easy enough to stay together. If we are taking a 200 mile trip then the chances some of the organization is going to get lost or distracted are high. Thinking along those lines we can see some of the benefits of the Stop season.]

3) Think back to your last Go season. Did your leadership move out and leave the rest of the organization behind? Look at the organization and see if you can identify the exact levels, departments, or people where the slow down occurred. Just as it only takes 1 car in a line of hundreds to slow everyone down behind them, it could be that a single area is causing your entire organization to slow down as well.

Knowing that, once you have identified the key areas, how can you focus on them during the next Stop season? What could be done to refocus each division in your organization not just on the one in “front” of it but also on the green light?

The Problem with "Perfect"

I find myself in a constant battle with destructive and debilitating mindsets. So many people spend their time talking about practices, procedures, and systems that they overlook the ways of thinking that brought all of the above to life in the first place. Change the thinking and often the rest will change quite naturally.

One such mindset is the pursuit of the perfect decision. I know I am facing this mindset when I hear people talk about needing to make the “right” decisions or being afraid of making the “wrong” ones. They look at the world and assume that the successful organizations are the ones that made a series of perfect decisions.

The truth is that most successful organizations make a series of “better” decisions, not a lucky string of perfect decisions. Instead of talking about right and wrong they talk about better or worse. The goal is not just to avoid making poor decisions, but to avoid repeating poor decisions. This means that they generally place a much higher value on measurement and evaluation than their perfectionist counter parts. They are also talk less about abstract things like "success" and "failure" and more about movement and progress. These organizations are willing to let people experiment and even “fail” as long as each decision provides a learning opportunity and helps move the organization toward its vision.

The perfect decision mindset carries a high price tag; including missed opportunities, guilt over past decisions, fear over future decisions, and loss of creativity and growth to name a few.

Missed opportunities occur because we are so consumed with making the perfect decision (or more often afraid to be blamed for the wrong decision) that we just make no decision at all. The reality is that almost every opportunity comes with a countdown clock. Whether it is the 30-second elevator sales pitch or the 3 months you have to prepare for your next growth cycle, your decision has a clock ticking.

It is very seldom that no decision is the best decision. Yet, this happens alarmingly often when people have the perfectionist mindset. Team meetings may generate any number of ideas and strategies, but none of them are actually executed, measured, and evaluated. Ideas arise, are discussed, and then fade away. The “time clock” ends up making the decision as opportunities come and go.

Guilt over past decisions exists because things like “success” and “failure” of the organization are tied to specific decisions and the people who made them. Rather than motivating better decisions in the future this leads to greater fear over future decisions. That creates hesitancy, which adds to the previous issue of missed opportunities.

If, instead, we related things like success and failure to a series of decisions then they would be something that we share. We would see the reality that no one decision made or broke us, because every decision is affected by the ones made before it and itself will affect future decisions. Instead of focusing on particular decisions made by individuals we would begin assessing the movement of the entire organization. Certainly specific decisions must be measured and evaluated, but not as if they existed in a vacuum.

The perfectionist mindset limits creativity and growth on the “front end” (before decisions are executed) because so many decisions just fade away, losing any potential for learning they may have contained. It also limits learning on the back end by labeling decisions as good and bad or right and wrong.

[I am a stickler for using words that best communicate the intended meaning. As such I attempt to get my clients to avoid using words like “right” and “wrong” in anything except areas of absolute knowledge. If it is a legal, ethical, mathematical, or theological issue then it is proper to use such terms. If the decision is more relative such as marketing, operations, or customer relations then terms like “better” or “worse” are more appropriate.]

When something is labeled wrong or bad we have a natural tendency to distance ourselves from it. In many cases a better response is to dig in and see what can be learned from the decision, especially if we do not wish to repeat it. It is amazing how many times organizations make big breakthroughs while dissecting things that did not work as intended. On the other side is it often just as unhealthy to simple repeat decisions because they were "right" the last time. Without proper measuring and evaluating we do not know why the decision was right. In many cases repeating last years decision may not be the best option.

The process of measuring and evaluating decisions allows poor decisions to be redeemed. I am not trying to say that every decision is actually valuable, merely that every decision contains value. Successful organizations have systems that reward and promote better decisions while also limiting and learning from poor decisions. In this way they allow a person to redeem poor decisions, which decreases guilt over the past and removes fear over future decisions.

Questions for further diagnosis:

1) How many “good” ideas that are generated in team meetings never move beyond the meeting and get executed?

2) How are decisions measured and evaluated in your organization?

3) When evaluating decisions (or their measured results) do you look backwards (to the supporting decisions that made this one possible) and forwards (to the systems that may need to change to either repeat positive outcomes or remove negative ones)? This is particularly helpful when looking at decisions made by other organizations. It is much too easy to attribute success or failure to single events and consequently miss the principles that are actually responsible. Such principles are only revealed over time.

· For example when evaluating a recently fired employee one might be tempted to say that the “bad” decision was the hire. In reality the hire most likely occurred because of a certain need assessment, which led to a skill set requirement, which impacted the resume search process. Understanding the entire process provides more value than just trying to “hire better” next time.

4) What happens to people who make “bad” decisions in your organization? People who make “good” decisions? What would it look like to allow people to redeem decisions in your particular context?