MY BOOKS
We Tried to Warn You: Innovations in Leadership for the Learning Organization
Published by Nimble Books, late February 2009 and available on Amazon.com.
This may be a timely case study for you and your organization. The core message of We Tried to Warn You is that massive failures happen, providing remarkable opportunities for recovery as organizational innovators. While organizational failures are perhaps rare, they are foreseeable, but the circumstances of our collective psychological dynamics prevent us from engaging the problems until they occur.
I believe most large-scale failures result from a cascade of communications problems, reinforced by a style of decision making popular in our culture that rewards the appearance of certainty. The book proposes recovery by enabling a decentralized, lateral leadership network of people working across boundaries to repair, innovate, and create resilient organizational structures.
The book title draws from the spirit of the front lines of work, where a broken strategy is often recognized long before management notices. The people working closest to the customers are able to foresee the potential for disconnects among a company and product’s strategy, design, and user adoption. What we may later call a strategic breakdown was foreseeable and perhaps repairable. Those working with users and customers are able to make sense of direct behavioral observations and connect these to the company’s future prospects.
We Tried to Warn You: Innovations in leadership for the learning organization
When an organization creates a new atmosphere that encourages shared, lateral leadership, the separation between front lines and management tends to blur and organizational communication improves, largely by virtue of the network effect and the perceived importance of sensing action occurring in the front lines or work.
The case study presents in compact form a narrative analysis of the knowledge practices that enable organizations to sense and make decisions from critical feedback received from customers and leading users in the field.
While the case presents a situation emerging from the multidisciplinary field now known as user experience design (UX), a similar story could be about the development and diffusion of other knowledge-based practices in organizations.
A core theme of We Tried to Warn You is that knowledge must be located, translated, and mobilized from the front lines back to the business in creative communications, informing product strategy and innovation. The user experience group permits a perfect case study, as in many companies it has now become a primary conduit for understanding “real users” and their needs in current organizations worldwide. The user experience group is also involved throughout all phases of product innovation, from user research, to product concept design, to final design and user testing.
In the case study, new skills and job roles were developed in this organization as a response to a systemic failure. The book shares lessons learned from a process we call socialization. Like its namesake of the new hire “onboarding” process, socialization generates communications networks from lateral relationships as a leadership style. Socialization is an organizational process that intentionally distributes leadership and skill development across boundaries and among organizational players in the formation of key strategic functions such as User Experience, Innovation, Research and Development, Market Research, or Knowledge Management. These functions all translate knowledge from original sources to the nerve centers of the business, and have unique skill sets with much to offer to all projects in a contemporary products or services firm.
BUY THIS BOOK IF:
- You are interested in improving organizational foresight, internal knowledge of customer behaviors, and the hidden talents of leadership among everyone in your company.
- You see the possibility for everyone in your company to improve communications and leadership. And you are ready to start with yourself.
- You want to nip failures in the bud in your own company. Learning to break unwanted news before it becomes really bad news later is a gift that takes courage, acuity, and wisdom.
- You have ever ever been on a large project that failed or almost failed in the marketplace, and you wondered how smart people in hard-working organizations can overlook the issues that lead to problems.
- You sense a larger vision for success is possible at all companies, from start-up to mega. This success may mean building a winning product platform, working with the best people in a winning company, and integrating product and business strategy around your actual users.
- You are willing to take responsibility for improving your organization.
Contributions are being sought for a Nimble Books series on Designing Organizations that Matter, following the themes of We Tried to Warn You.
If you are a regular author or articles of have an influential blog, consider offering a proposal for a concise, topical management book that fits this concept. Please submit proposal ideas to Peter Jones (peter at redesignresearch.com), the series editor.
This book was based on the original article published in the online professional magazine Boxes and Arrows, March 2008