A year ago it would have been difficult to imagine that remote work would become the rule rather than the exception for many of us. Going into our sixth month of the COVID-19 pandemic we are seeing those initially resistant to the idea now beginning to adapt to the inevitable. A transition that most likely would have taken another ten years happened in mere months. Now, instead of rushing to and from meetings, we are “Zoom”-ing into meetings. In fact, two months ago I attended a child adoption via web conference in a “virtual court”.

It sounds ridiculous now, but just three years ago IBM, which has embraced remote work for decades, called thousands of employees back to the office. The move stunned its employees as they were now required to either move to be able to commute to work or look for another job. Michelle Peluso, IBM’s chief marketing officer at that time and formerly CEO of fashion startup Gilt, explained that the “only one recipe I know for success includes great people, the right tools, a mission, analysis of results, and one more thing: really creative and inspiring locations.”

IBM, remote-work pioneer, is calling thousands of employees back to the office

Before, few companies would have considered working remotely, now most are entering their fifth or sixth month of remote work, and it looks as though remote work might stick around. For software companies like Twitter and Shopify, announcing their intentions to stay fully remote was relatively obvious. However, for hardware companies the decision has not been quite so simple. Few would have imagined that conservative companies from conservative countries, such as Germany, would make remote work a permanent policy. Specifically I am speaking of the momentous announcement by Siemens.

Siemens to let staff 'Work From Anywhere' permanently | SightsIn Plus

According to Reuters, the German conglomerate is going to allow employees to “work from anywhere” for two or three days a week, and focus on “outcomes” rather than time spent in the office. This was a clear signal about the revolutionary movement the pandemic has kickstarted for workers globally.

Right around the time IBM announced it would be calling employees back to the office, I had just started a new job as CEO with Nanoramic Labs in Boston, MA while maintaining my permanent residence in Boulder, CO. My board agreed to allow me to commute to Boston twice a month and the rest of the time work remote.

I had made the decision long before joining Nanoramic that where I chose to live would not be reliant on where my job was located and that I would only consider positions where this flexibility was available. Choosing to do this exposed me to the challenges of leading successful teams across different time zones and cultures. I had been preparing for this role for at least fifteen years.

I experimented with different leadership techniques and began developing a set of systems and practices that would support this remote way of managing. This eventually led me to document this under a method I call Intent Driven Management™.

The last time I stepped into my office in Boston was early February, now six months ago. Even if I had wanted to fly to Boston, visiting my office would have been impossible, as the State of Massachusetts requires fourteen days of quarantine for anybody coming in from outside of New England.

Our team was lucky. We had been practicing Intent Driven Management™ as a company since I joined over three years prior. We already had a highly functional infrastructure for remote work and organizational rituals that were enabling independent actions in line with our strategic intent. The Pandemic tested the fabric of our intent driven culture to the limit with amazing results as described in What Makes a Startup Resilient in Crisis like COVID-19.

So what makes this method so effective for remote work? In a remote work environment supervision is a difficult, if not an impossible way to manage. You cannot see from your office if people are doing their job. You need to allow people to work independently without close supervision. And you need 3 things to make this happen:

Intent Driven Management™ achieves the “focus on outcomes” that Siemens had mentioned previously. It provides a practical method to run a company, allowing people to act independently while remaining in line with the company’s strategic intent.

You can discover more about this in my book 5 to 50 to 500: How to build and run scalable organizations

Leading with intent in the age of remote work was originally published in Intent Driven Management on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Rituals are arguably a universal feature of human social existence: just as one cannot envision a society without language, one would be hard-pressed to imagine a society without ritual.

First, let us discuss what a ritual is not.

A ritual is not a habit. A habit is an unconscious pattern of behavior.

A ritual is not a routine. A routine provides structure and a logical sequence. It is the framework within which we live our lives and conduct our daily activities.

So what is a ritual? A ritual is a conscious and structured pattern of behaviour, containing symbolism and meaning. Here, I am speaking specifically about organizational rituals. To qualify as an organizational ritual, it must be a group event, be recurrent and done the same way each time. This might sound similar to a routine, but there is a big difference between the two.

A ritual is a conscious and structured pattern of behaviour with symbolic meaning.

Rituals are an integral part of an organization’s culture, as they generally contribute to the organization’s operating procedure. However, it also has a symbolic role, which embodies the values of the organization. Rituals create order and community. They can also be used to both instill new values and change the organization’s culture.

Importantly, rituals strengthen existing values through the active participation of the organization’s members. This reinforces the behaviours we desire, creates focus and a sense of belonging, and ensures any changes are adhered to. Rituals use our brain’s ability to direct our behavior on autopilot, bringing us back in focus when we’re distracted by noise.

You know you have disciplined rituals if the organization feels they are experiencing “organizational flow”. I came across the concept of flow while reading Beyond Boredom and Anxiety: Experiencing Flow in Work and Play by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.

Imagine for a moment that you are running a race. Your attention is focused on the movements of your body, the power of your muscles, the force of your lungs, and the feel of the street beneath your feet. You are living in the moment, utterly absorbed in the present activity. Time seems to fall away. You are tired, but you barely notice. According to Mihaly, what you are experiencing in that moment is known as flow, a state of complete immersion in a single activity.

Organizational flow extends this concept to an organization. People in organizations that perform rituals most often find the environment more rewarding because of this state of organizational flow.

Read more about Organizational Rituals in my book 5 to 50 to 500: How to build and run scalable organizations

Rituals and Organizational Flow was originally published in Intent Driven Management on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Intent Driven Management™ is a methodology to build and scale any organization. It was inspired by a 200 year old military leadership philosophy called Commander’s Intent. I go into more detail about Commander’s Intent and its history in Decentralized Operations.

Intent Driven Management™ has 3 disciplines:

Clarified Intent — describing the Why and What of the business, its playbook, its strategy map and its scorecard.

Optimized Talent — using Behavioral Science to build and maintain high performance teams as described in Is Your Organization Behaviorally Balanced?

Disciplined Rituals — performed to maintain organizational flow.

Intent Driven Management™ needs to be supported by a robust communication and coordination infrastructure to maintain situational awareness and a continuous learning system to build and maintain competence. This will allow people to act independently in line with the company’s strategic intent.

Intent Driven Management™ is described in the book 5 to 50 to 500: How to build and run scalable organizations by Eric Kish.

The origins of Intent Driven Management™ was originally published in Intent Driven Management on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

There is a significant difference between having a strategy, which suggests a plan (such as in a Strategic Plan) and acting strategically, which requires flexibility in response to events. This is why we utilize Strategic Intent rather than a Strategic Plan to communicate direction.

Strategic Intent allows strategy to be dynamic to engage with fast changing circumstances.

Strategy may need to be improvised under the pressure of urgent events, this is especially true during a crisis. In these scenarios intuition will play as important a role as deliberation. Maintaining situational awareness and alignment then becomes critical for this to be successful.

Crisis can either be a major threat or a huge opportunity. If it can severely affect competitors or accelerate changes in potential customer base, the opportunity in that can be massive. However, it is important to remain situationally aware during these fleeting opportunities.

If you have a decentralized organization you have a huge competitive advantage during a crisis. A decentralized organization has a culture to act independently, making decisions guided by the organization’s Strategic Intent.

Note that Strategic Intent does not act alone. For an organization to absorb these changes they will need an adaptive process. Here is an academic explanation of how the adaptive process is guided by Strategic Intent.

Business Strategy During Crisis was originally published in Intent Driven Management on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Nanoramic Labs is a mid-stage startup based in Boston, MA. Among other things, it claims a breakthrough in energy storage technology that could reduce by 20% the cost of a KWh in a Li-ion battery. Nanoramic’s main operations consist of lab work to experiment with nanomaterials and small scale manufacturing to prove that its technologies are scalable.

Nanoramic, previously known as FastCAP Systems Corp, is not new to crisis. Ironically, the company started with funding that was the result of government stimulus during The Great Recession of 2008.

FastCAP faced its first crisis in 2014 when the oil price crashed. At the time, the company focused exclusively on oil drilling technology. Therefore, it was completely exposed to oil price cycles. During that crisis, FastCAP went through a painful reorganization, the results of which made possible the level of crisis readiness it has today.

A wake up call

Conventional wisdom usually describes startups as nimble and ready to pivot to reach product market fit as soon as possible. One would have expected FastCAP to pivot quickly, appealing to different market segments as their core technology was not specific to oil drilling. But this did not happen. In the following two years, their CEO made no effort to pivot and the company ran out of cash.

This was a complete shock for employees as they were furloughed overnight. There were clues that the company was on the rocks but employees were mislead about why the company had missed payroll on multiple occasions. The lack of transparency and corporate governance made the dire financial situation unknown to employees and even senior managers. Eventually, the CEO was shown the door and a group of senior executives took the lead to convince shareholders the company was worth saving. It took a very painful 9 months to raise a bridge round to make a restart possible. They eventually convinced one shareholder and their major lender to step up and support them in turning the business around. As a pre-condition for support, they requested the hire of a new CEO. That’s when I was hired.

When I came in I was lucky. On the positive side, there was a sense of urgency in the core team and a strong belief in its technical capabilities. The organization rallied around the CTO and the IP council as they navigated the storm. They were able to preserve the knowledge through a team of loyal employees that stayed with the company despite the hardships. Also, in the bridge round, employees were given substantial stock in the company to create the right incentive.

On the negative side, the company had no revenue and a heavy balance sheet with more than $10m debt at very high interest. And a lot of skeletons in the closet.

It is hard to explain how the company operated before. I am quoting here an employee that lived through it and is still with the company today.

It was a culture of secrecy, there was no trust in the employees or encouragement of new ideas. Aside from secrecy about the business, there was a culture of paranoia and secrecy around communicating our achievements or projects with the outside world. All work happened in the office and there was no work from home allowed for any function. We were tied to working in the office by complex server systems, paper files, and on-premise storage of documents. People were shamed for leaving at 5pm …

The Key to Resilience

You cannot predict the future, let alone control it. The only thing under your control is building adaptive capacity in your organization.

Here is an article describing the concept of Adaptive Capacity

First Things First: An Infrastructure to Enable Adaptive Capacity

Cloud

Before anything, I wanted to make information available to anybody in the company. One should find any information they need in less than 60 seconds from anywhere. This was my way of making sure we have good data and transparency.

Previously, all data was stored on one server in the company office. All accounting data was on one computer used by the CFO in his office.

I decided to move EVERYTHING to the cloud in 90 days. By sheer coincidence, the server were all the technical files were stored crashed and all data was lost. It was the equivalent of Cortez burning his ships before conquering the Aztec Empire. We had to start fresh, so why not all in the cloud? Very quickly, we realized our CFO was not up to the challenge. We let him go and had accounting in the cloud in 30 days.

Since 2005, I had transformed companies to work remotely. I was well versed in virtual work across many time zones. I saw first hand what can be achieved in terms of agility and productivity if you know how to do it. I had a strong background in cloud based technologies. But this was not to be a copy-paste exercise. Nanoramic is a hardware business. My previous experience with remote work was with software companies. We had to experiment, fail fast and adapt.

Quality of Sound

In my 10 years of leading remote organizations I learned that quality of sound is the most important productivity factor in remote communication.

At Nanoramic, some of the things I faced could not have been anticipated. I discovered that our office is very noisy and very expensive to sound proof. We could not make normal audio conferencing equipment work to achieve a reasonable sound quality.

We had to improvise…In a previous life I had my own rock band and a passion for band touring and studio gear. After a couple of failed attempts with regular video conferencing equipment, I turned to stage audio solutions. We ended up with gooseneck microphones in meeting rooms and a digital mixer featuring auto-mixing.

We also purchased noise canceling wireless headsets for each desk. The standard desk would have a headset and 3 monitors.

The objective was to have anybody able to organize and/or join a video conference remote or from a meeting room with exceptionally good sound.

Pretty soon we decided to buy equipment to take home or on the road for people who would regularly join remote.

Real Time Collaboration Tools

The next thing required for distributed work are real time collaboration tools. We decided on Slack for fast tactical communication, JIRA for activity planning and tracking, Confluence for content creation and sharing, and Box and Dropbox for document storage. We eventually ended up with more than 50 apps in the cloud to support this remote collaboration way of working.

This is a short list of the most used apps today

• Google Apps
• Slack
• JIRA
• Confluence
• Dropbox
• Box.com
• odoo
• Bill.com
• Expensify
• ScreenCloud
• Wix
• Pingboard
• Zoom
• Geekbot
• Lucidchart
• Frame.io
• Breezy.hr
• ApprovalMax
• Zenefits
• OfficeVibe
• SignNow
• Office365
• Voltaiq

Disciplined Rituals

It is difficult to make a bunch of people with different schedules, time zones, and interests effectively collaborate in a virtual environment. It all starts with time awareness ( See here a blog article describing my definition of time awareness).

We have a strict interpretation and enforcement of time awareness rules:

• Meetings are scheduled in 50 or 25 minutes slots. We always start on time. We never go over the scheduled time and we prefer to end earlier.
• We always describe in the invite why are we meeting and what is the ONE thing we want from that meeting
• You are required to RSVP at least 48 hours before the meeting
• Every meeting has meeting minutes recorded in Confluence. If it is an external meeting with a customer we post the link of the minute in the CRM chatter for that particular opportunity.

We practice 3 types of rituals:

Situational Awareness rituals make sure everybody knows what is going on around them. We have daily standups, weekly syncs, monthly scorecard huddles and quarterly strategic intent clarification off sites.

Learning and Adaptation rituals allow the organization to continuously learn and adapt to a changing environment. We have retrospectives, education days and black hat planning sessions.

Maintain Readiness rituals keeps the organization ready to act at a moment’s notice by systematically reducing organizational friction and enforcement of safety and cleanliness rules

Clear Intent

At FastCAP nobody knew the company strategy and they were never asked for input. Unrealistic promises were made to customers which translated to toxic work culture and unrealistic expectations for employees.

I practice a form of management that I call Intent Driven Management . It is based on a 200 year old military command philosophy that I was exposed to while serving in the Israeli Defense Forces. The key principle of this philosophy is to create a decentralized operating environment guided by an operational intent. In other words, you get your people to take the right decisions and act on them without asking for permission. All guided by your Strategic Intent.

In 2018, we rebranded to Nanoramic Labs to communicate that we are an R&D driven company practicing a Product Leadership strategy. We are a business experimenting with nanomaterials, taking them out of the lab into industry to solve major problems in energy storage and thermal management.

A Product Leadership strategy means that we deliver innovative, cutting edge products and technologies. Essentially the customer gets the latest and the greatest. An organization delivering on this strategy needs to be focused on invention, product development, and market exploitation. It runs processes that are loosely knit and constantly shifting. It is entrepreneurial with a desire to work in unexplored territory. The culture of such an organization encourages imagination, out-of-the-box thinking with a mind-set driven by the desire to create the future. We measure and reward new product success and we don’t punish experimentation and risk. We allow and support variations that lead to innovation. This is how we describe our “playbook.”

But everything needs to start with Why. In other words, Why are we doing anything and What do we need to do to fulfill the Why?

For us is very simple:

We want to exit by 2023 for more than $1Bn by disrupting large markets in Energy Storage and Thermal Management Materials.

How we are going to achieve that is something we discover as we move forward, always testing our decisions and actions through the Why and What test. This provides a decision making framework for all our employees.

Intent driven management was designed specifically for what the military calls a VUCA environment. VUCA stands for Volatility, Uncertainty, Ambiguity and Complexity. It is hard not to notice how COVID-19 perfectly fits this definition.

Optimized Talent

We want our people to understand each other from a personality needs lens. When compared to face-to-face communication, remove interaction gives far less clues when trying to understand another’s behavioral needs. We teach people to use behavioral science to understand the needs of their colleagues in absence of face to face interaction. (See here an article on how to create a behaviorally balanced organization)

Using Slack anyone can ask for a summary of the behavioral profile for anybody in the organization:

This makes virtual interaction far more productive. You can understand the needs of people you are going to interact with BEFORE you ever interact with them and you can adapt your communication to their needs.

This is an example of a relationship guide provided by our Behavioral Assessment tool (Courtesy of Predictive Index):

Trust and a Web of Symbiotic Relationships

If you want to prepare for a crisis, you need to create a web of trusted relationships with your investors, lenders and customers. For FastCAP the journey to regain trust of our shareholders and the investment community was slow and bumpy. We started from a significant disadvantage. The key to success was constant communication and demonstration of trustworthiness every single day. We never hide bad news and we explain good news with cautious optimism. We want to under promise and overachieve.

We started with transparency towards our shareholders and lenders. We created a dedicated investor portal were we allow our shareholders to understand what is going on. We have more than 150 shareholders, so communication is not an easy task. The portal allows our shareholders to be informed in real time on critical events in the life of the company. We organize quarterly investor webinars that are recorded and available to watch on the investor portal. In times of crisis we can reach out to our investors in real time with specific messages or requests.

Nanoramic through the COVID-19 crisis

Immediately when we realized the pandemic will hit the United States, we scheduled two daily 15 minutes stand-ups for the executive team, one at 10am and one at 3:45pm followed by a company wide zoom stand-up. During this stand-up we go through all the good and bad news of the day and we allow employees to ask any question they want anonymously or not.

We took steps to protect our employees immediately, even before authorities started to shut down life as we know it to enforce social distancing.

We moved to 3 shifts and we limited presence in the office to 4 people per shift. Attendance is strictly voluntary and people sign up on a shift schedule the day before. We assumed that this is the new normal and started to experiment with ways to make this work for the next 6 months. We already had a flexible shift policy before the crisis in which you could take one or two days per week to work from home. We just made this the rule rather than the exception. Already a third of our organization was working from home before the crisis, with people scattered across 7 time zones. From their perspective nothing changed.

When the lock-down was declared in Massachusetts, we were were already operating in crisis mode for 10 days.

The next challenge was cash flow. As the world was coming to a standstill, we had no visibility on cash collections. This is where the web of trusted relationships kicked in. In the last 3 years we built relationships with industry that led to some of our customers becoming strategic shareholders. Trust was already in place when we asked them to contribute to an emergency credit line and acceleration of payments on existing contracts. During this time we maintained real time communication with our key stakeholders.

We quickly furloughed 1/3 of our workforce. Anybody that we assessed as not being able to provide meaningful contributions during the crisis for the next 6 months was furloughed.

This combination of quick action and shareholder/customer support provided us almost immediately with an additional 3 months of cash runway

How do you know you are doing what needs to be done?

Without data, you’re just another person with an opinion’, W. Edwards Deming

Three weeks into the crisis we ran a survey to learn how are we doing as a leadership team in this crisis. This is what got:

We are far from being out of the woods. As the crisis unfolds, we operate one day at a time using our intent as guidance for every decision we make and action we take. We don’t have “best practices.” We only have practices that work today and might not work tomorrow, so we are constantly validating and re-validating them (See here “The Best Practices trap” article). This crisis is a fail fast lab to experiment with new ways of operating. We are blessed with a culture that allows us to quickly learn and change course. We strive daily to take good enough decisions and actions in absence of long term information. But for us it is our natural way of operating.

More resources on intent driven management

From 5 to 50 to 500 book

Everyday Turnaround book

About the author: https://www.erickish.us/eric-kish

For Leadership needs in a crisis: https://interimexecs.org/business-survival/

What makes a startup resilient in crisis (Like COVID-19) was originally published in Intent Driven Management on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In an organization data is everywhere. It is to the point where we are practically drowning in data. Most organizations have become skilled at capturing information regarding their customers and prospects. Just take a moment to consider exactly how much customer data is collected. Marketing collects data from those who attend live or web events or download content. The sales department collects data about clients involved in the sales process. Customer support captures information regarding all verbal and written interactions. This data is then compiled and used for accounting and billing purposes, while also offering insight to enable teams to monitor customer satisfaction.

More and more organizations are attempting to simplify data collection into a single repository. This endeavor is meant to address data quality, along with the sheer volume. This effort is expensive, time-consuming, and never-ending as we continue to increasingly make more data at an incomprehensible rate. Experts have theorized that we create more data in two years (a timeframe continually decreasing) than that which has ever existed here on Earth for all of civilization.

The issue arises when we allow this flow of data to consume our minds without managing its quantity, along with its quality. The result becomes the opposite of what we hope to achieve and we end up with information overload. This is the term used to describe the situation where people become engulfed by more information than they are able to usefully use. Information that has become overwhelming or unuseful is referred to as noise.

Angelika Dimoka, the director at the Center for Neural Decision Making at Temple University, conducted a study that measured people’s brain activity while they addressed increasingly complex problems (i.e., noise). Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) she measured brain activity by detecting changes associated with blood flow. She found that as people received more information, their brain activity increased in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. This is a region behind the forehead that is responsible for making decisions and controlling emotions. However, when information became overloaded, it was as though a breaker in the brain was triggered and the prefrontal cortex suddenly shut down.[1]

Dimoka explained, “[As people reach information overload] they start making stupid mistakes and bad choices because the brain region responsible for smart decision making has essentially left the premises.”[2]

“People’s reaction to noise is usually to turn it off. This was dramatically described by Brigadier General Robin Olds, triple ace fighter pilot and Vietnam war hero, when he was flying missions in the cockpit of an F4-Phantom.”[3]

Brigadier General Robin Olds described the scenario as follows,“When crossing into North Vietnam, we started turning off things, like the detection gear for the SAMs (surface-to-air missiles)[4] because it made noises, it bothers you, and it didn’t give you the right information in the first place because if you relied on it the SAM was going to hit you. You avoided the SAMs in an entirely different way, you had to see them. So we started to turn off one by one other systems like the guard channel because there’s always somebody screaming on the emergency channel, we turned off the growler on the sidewinder missile. I would also turn off inbound com from my WSO (Weapon Systems Officer). He could hear me but I could not hear him, which is what I wanted. And I would turn off all the noise I could, so I could concentrate then on the battle at hand.”

Unnecessary noise was an issue the ubiquitous GPS was able to address. Using both visual and audio commands to communicate, the screen only displays the specific information required at any given moment. Meaning, you will not receive information overload while navigating with a modern GPS device.

However, we must also acknowledge that too much sensory stimulation is not the only time we can experience information overload. Dimoka also identified two particular sources of noise that we are not very aware of:

The first being, having an abundance of options. The more choices we are given, the more tired and less effective we become. The human brain has limited resources and energy to expend when making decisions. In the time between getting up in the morning and going to bed in the evening, an average person must make thousands of decisions. Each choice we make drains a little more from our mental reservoir.

The second is multitasking. With constant demands affecting us daily, it’s tempting to try to do as much as possible in any given moment. The truth here is that humans are not optimized for task switching. When we switch between tasks, our brains halt any processing of the current rule set and load a new rule set for the next task. This happens quickly, but halting, unloading, loading and then restarting takes a toll.

The importance of limiting noise is evident. Much like organizations learning to manage the excessive amounts of data they collect, to be successful it is imperative to filter and control the information and options you are processing and receiving all while maintaining focus.

.

Eric Kish as an author, speaker and practicing CEO. He is the author of 5 to 50 to 500: How to build and run scalable organizations and Everyday Turnaround: The art and science of daily business transformation

[1]“The Science of Making Decisions,” Sharon Begley 2/27/11 www.newsweek.com/science-making-decisions-68627

[2]“Know Your Limits, Your Brain Can Only Take So Much.” www.entrepreneur.com/article/230925

[3]PBS Nova — Top Gun and Beyond

[4]Surface-to-Air Missile

Information Overload will derail your organization was originally published in Intent Driven Management on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A true leader will walk the talk. Meaning each day you consistently stand up for the people you lead and the values of your organization. There is no substitute and no means of delegation which can achieve this. Instead of attempting to explain how to execute walking the talk, I prefer to rely on real-life examples that have inspired me.

One such leader is Gadi Eisenkot. On February 16th, 2015 Gadi became the 21st Chief of Staff (Ramatkal in Hebrew), the highest rank in the Israli Defence Forces. However, earlier in his career he was prematurely relieved from his command as a company commander, in a humiliating public event in front of his soldiers. This was due to the fact that he would not call his soldiers back from a well-deserved vacation after completing an assignment in Lebanon. As Gadi did not consider this new assignment worth bringing his troops back from a hard-earned break, he refused to participate in the operation. This man put his career on the line, as a true leader will always have the backs of his people.

However, solely standing up for your people is not enough to make a great leader. You must also be uncompromising when the values of your organization are at stake. When the situation required it, the same Gadi Eisenkot displayed just what it meant to be an uncompromising military commander while preparing his troops for battle. Having been appointed as the Golani Brigade Commander, one of the most admired units in the IDF, Gadi needed to address the lack of discipline displayed among his senior soldiers. Up until that time the senior Golani soldiers had enjoyed significant privileges and had the ability to ignore junior officers without consequences. It was a well known problem that most commanders had learned to live with. Eisenkot would not. He chose to address the issue. He sent soldiers and commanders to military jail, kicked others out of the unit, and disbanded the entire Golani company. This was something that had never been done before. By eradicating the problem, Gadi restored the values of his organization and changed the brigade forever.

The story that follows demonstrates just how great leaders will walk the talk and by doing so receive admiration and loyalty from those they lead.

“As an infantry soldier, the boots were my most important gear after my weapon. In the IDF boots are issued to soldiers by the army. I had a problem with a pair of boots; they did not fit well. I couldn’t get them replaced through the normal channels, because they were slightly worn but not enough to be considered obsolete. I wrote a letter to Rafael Eitan (Raful), which was the Israeli Chief of Staff at the time. Two weeks later I was ordered to report to the brigade’s commander. He was livid for not coming to him first. He first lectured me, then handed me a brand new pair of boots. I don’t know any other army where low-ranking soldiers have such access to their chief of staff and feel comfortable enough to ask for his intervention on such trivial matters.”

So walk the talk. This is something only you, a true leader can do.

Eric Kish as an author, speaker and practicing CEO. He is the author of 5 to 50 to 500: How to build and run scalable organizations and Everyday Turnaround: The art and science of daily business transformation

A true leader walks the talk was originally published in Intent Driven Management on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Is Your Organization Behaviorally Balanced?

A.P. Møller-Maersk is a Danish conglomerate best known for its container shipping business, Maersk Line. It’s a family controlled business that began in 1904 in Svendborg, Denmark as Dampskibsselskabet Svendborg by Captain Peter Mærsk-Møller and his son Arnold Peter Møller.

By the summer of 2017, A.P. Moeller-Maersk A/S was the world’s biggest containership operator, operating in 130 countries and employing more than 76,000 people. In 2016, Maersk Line was named the world’s #1 organization for employee development in the Association for Talent Development’s (ATD) 2016 BEST Awards — the talent development industry’s most rigorous and coveted recognition.

Why am I telling you this? Because it’s proof of how powerful behavioral science can be when used in a business context.

Claus V. Hemmingsen, Member of the Executive Board and CEO of Maersk Drilling, has made use of cognitive and behavioral assessments throughout his 30 plus years with the Group. This is what he said about the value of behavioral science and its use at Maersk.

“I have had the opportunity to use these assessment tools both in my early years as an HR coordinator in Maersk Drilling, doing hiring and crew compositions, and through many years in a wide variety of leadership roles. One thing I have come to personally treasure is the usefulness and the proven validity of these tools, providing great assistance to any leader. The tools are not only useful when one evaluates the candidate against the specific job requirements, but also when the leader is asked to compose his or her teams. Here the tools can assist the leader to create diverse teams with complementary personalities [my emphasis].”

According to internal Maersk figures, 50% of the candidates’ performance will depend on the combination between his or her personality traits and the candidate’s cognitive ability, the rest depending on other factors like leadership and context.

That’s what they’ve been doing at A.P. Moller–Maersk for nearly four decades. They decided that their main competitive advantage in a brutal industry is leadership. And, as the main job of leaders is to lead and motivate people, they needed to educate their leaders in how to use behavioral science to lead. So, it became a rule, as a condition of being promoted to lead people, to become a behavioral science practitioner.

First time I came across behavioral assessments was as a candidate for a job at Tetra Pak. Not known to me at that time, Tetra Pak was light years ahead in using assessments on a global scale. In particular, they were using behavioral assessment tools to recruit across cultures and languages. After all, human nature is the same regardless of geography. It gave them an edge in quickly assessing a very large number of candidates with consistent results.

So I go to the interview, and take a couple of assessments, one of them being two pages of words to check. The assessment took about five minutes to complete. Next thing I know, my future boss comes into the room and hands me the assessment report. Together we go over the report, which leaves me stunned because I see how accurately it describes my behavioral preferences. He then explains to me that he uses this to understand me so he can set me up for success. I failed to mention that I did not really want the job, but I went anyway out of curiosity. But after that experience, I was hooked. And I accepted the job with one condition. That I will be sent for training in behavioral science as soon as possible.

Behavioral Drives

In The Conquest of Happiness, Bertrand Russel beautifully describes how we came to become who we are:

“The source of all this in practically every case is the moral teaching which the man receives before he was six years old at the hands of his mother. To be affectionately treated by his mother was the greatest pleasure of his life, and was obtainable only when he had not been known to sin against moral code. He therefore came to associate something vaguely awful with any conduct of which his mother would disapprove. Gradually, as he grew older, he forgot where his moral code had come from and what had originally been the penalty for disobeying it, but he did not throw off the moral code or cease to feel that something dreadful was liable to happen to him if he infringed it.”

Why do we behave as we do? That question has been the preoccupation of philosophers, psychologists, and researchers for millennia.

The Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov, in a famous series of experiments today referred to as “Pavlov’s dogs” demonstrated how conditioning (also referred to as Pavlovian conditioning) could be used to cultivate a particular association between the occurrence of one event in the anticipation of another.

Like many great scientific advances, Pavlovian conditioning (aka classical conditioning) was discovered accidentally. During the 1890s Pavlov was looking at salivation in dogs in response to being fed when he noticed that his dogs would begin to salivate whenever he entered the room, even when he was not bringing them food. When he discovered that any object or event which the dogs learned to associate with food would trigger the same response, he realized that he had made an important scientific discovery.

In his experiment, Pavlov used a bell as his neutral stimulus. Whenever he gave food to his dogs, he also rang a bell. After a number of repeats of this procedure, he tried the bell on its own. As you might expect, the bell on its own now caused an increase in salivation.

Pavlov was said to belong to the Mechanistic School. The name Mechanistic was applied because it has been learned that we will respond to a given stimulus one time in the same way as we have responded before, and that the same response will lead to the same behavior or action.

In the early 1920s, William Marston, an American psychologist and inventor, developed an early prototype of the lie detector. Most people would not remember Marston as a psychologist, but he definitely achieved fame as the creator of the character Wonder Woman, writing comic books under the pen name Charles Moulton. But his most important work as a psychologist was the book he wrote in 1928 called The Emotions of Normal People. He theorized that the behavioral expression of emotions could be categorized into four types: Dominance, Influence, Steadiness, and Compliance.

In 1940, Walter V. Clarke, an industrial psychologist, was the first person to build an assessment instrument (personality profile test) using Marston’s theories, even though that was not initially his intent. In 1956 he published the Activity Vector Analysis, a checklist of adjectives on which he asked people to mark descriptors they identified as true of themselves. The tool, used by Clarke since 1948, was intended for personnel selection by businesses. The four factors in his data (aggressive, sociable, stable and avoidant) were based on Marston’s model.

However, the origins of behavioral science are much older. It begins with the elements of Fire, Earth, Air and Water. Empodocles in 444 B.C wrote about these four quadrants of personality style when he recognized that people seemed to act in four distinctly different ways, but instead of attributing it to internal factors, he believed it was external environmental factors that affected the way we would act.

Hippocrates redefined Empedocles’s four quadrants as Choleric, Sanguine, Phlegmatic and Melancholic, when he shifted from environmental factors to internal factors . He called them the 4 Temperaments.

Fast forward to 1921, Carl Gustav Jung re-examined these four quadrants and types of behavior. Carl Jung realized that while personality styles are indeed internal, Jung attributed the difference in personality styles to the way we think and process information.

His four styles were Thinking, Feeling, Sensation and Intuition, now often used in the Myers-Briggs Personality Test (MBTI).

In the same period with Marston, Louis L. Thurstone, a pioneer in the fields of psychometrics and psychophysics, proposed a technique using words as symbolic stimuli to assess and predict behavior. What Thurstone had discovered was that various people would respond positively to certain descriptive words by checking them, and negatively to others by not checking them. Whether or not the words checked accurately or truly describe the person is of no significance and has no bearing on the analysis of the results.[5] Statistically and pragmatically, Thurstone then developed what he called “clusters” of words to which persons with certain predominant personality traits will consistently respond.

In 1943, Arnold S. Daniels, a young Lieutenant and bombardier officer in the U.S. Army Air Corps, came across this body of knowledge when he was sent to learn about personality tests and talent assessments.

The Airforce at the time was already using assessments extensively to select airman. The biggest problem at the beginning of World War WII was that they needed to recruit 30,000 new pilots. Under their existing selection procedures, they would have had to screen an estimated 300,000 men, because nearly 80% of recruits would be eliminated for physical reasons, and a further 50% would be “washed out” during training. The head of the AAF’s Medical Division, General David N.W. Grant, believed that written mental tests should be administered to all recruits. This would identify those who lacked the ability to graduate from ground school and thus reduce the number of physical examinations that surgeons needed to perform.

Daniels was a bombardier, navigator, and gunnery officer. After flying over 30 missions before and after D-Day, Daniels was assigned to partner with a psychologist who had been tasked with understanding the make-up of successful bombing teams. Daniels became quite passionate about the use of assessments for better communication and team development, and was later sponsored by the military to take courses at Harvard Business School to better understand the statistical modeling necessary to develop scientifically valid assessments.This led him in 1952 to develop his own assessment, focusing on making it simple and practical for a business to predict people behavior. He called it The Predictive Index.

The Predictive Index is one of a class of objective assessment techniques based on certain fundamental assumptions of behavioral psychology, the first being that work/social behavior is primarily an expression in activity of a variety of responses to environmental stimuli, recognizable as consistently expressed personality traits. The Predictive Index adjective checklist is essentially a symbolic environment composed of a variety of stimuli associated with four primary and two resultant personality traits. Confronted with the stimuli in the Predictive Index Survey Form, the individual will respond to them, either positively or negatively, in a manner consistent with the ways in which he/she responds to the actual environmental stimuli that the words in the checklist symbolize.

In the words of Arnold Daniels: “Bear in mind that in our work with the Predictive Index, we are not concerned primarily, as are clinical psychologists, with why you have come to respond to a given stimulus as you do respond. What we are concerned with is what your response will be, and how it will cause you to behave, or to act. To put it in practical terms, we want to know how your responses will cause you to do a job. The fact that some of your responses have been developed, or conditioned by your environment, while others are the result of the particular set of nerves and glands you are born with, we can be aware of, and then forget. We want to know what you are now, and what you are capable of becoming, and these are the things that Predictive Index tells us.”

In developing the Predictive Index, Daniels used the Trait Theory. According to it, a unique combination of genetic and environmental factors contributes to the development of our personalities. Traits are best considered habits of behavior, thought patterns, and emotions. And a given trait produces a drive to behave in a certain way.

Fascinating, right? But let me translate all this academic talk to what you can do with all this stuff.

Each one of us has individual drives. These drives create a need, and you will be motivated to behave in a way that satisfies the associated need. When you’re hungry, you find something to eat. Your survival drive creates a hunger need and thus a logical behavior of ordering a hoagie from your favorite sub shop.

It’s the same when it comes to personality traits. Consider how some of your colleagues at work have a drive for social interaction known as extraversion. The chatty co-workers’ personalities have a great deal of this trait while your more reserved workmates’ personalities only have trace amounts of it.

But just observing behavior is problematic. Imagine you’re hungry and you go to the corner Starbucks to fulfill your need by eating breakfast. You find a lot of people at Starbucks that morning. But are they there because of the same need? Some of them might be there because they are meeting friends and want to fulfill their need to socialize. The problem is that if you only observe behavior, you can only guess drives.

But what if you could measure drives and thus predict behavior? As we already know, behavioral traits tend to be relatively stable over time, so knowing someone’s “behavioral patterns” provides us with a predictable range of behaviors that we can expect them to exhibit.

This is where tools like The Predictive Index (PI) behavioral assessment become extremely valuable, provided they are fast and easy to use (the PI behavioral assessment takes about five minutes to complete and has two instructions). The PI provides precise information that can be used to understand what the individual needs to be in a behavioral comfort zone.

In the case of the Predictive Index, it can measure with a high degree of precision four drives: Dominance, Extraversion, Patience, and Formality.

Cognitive Ability

The term Cognition, coming from the Latin “cognosco” (con, “with”; and gnōscō, “know,” meaning “I know, perceive”), is defined as “the mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses.”

Within the psychometrics community, it is generally accepted that a single underlying factor of cognitive abilities exists known as the general intelligence factor or, simply put, the ‘g’ factor. This factor of measurement is believed to correlate to measurements of more specific forms of cognitive abilities like reasoning, language, memory, visual perception, auditory perception, creativity and speed.

While it is possible to measure all of these factors separately, research suggests that a single measurement of ‘g’ provides a strong indication of performance in any specific ability. And since the measurement of ‘g’ is a strong indicator of how a person is likely to perform on specific ability tests, it also indicates how well they will handle job-related cognitive tasks. This insight can come in pretty handy when you’re trying to source top talent to help set your business apart from its competitors.

World War II offers an early demonstration. During a period when it had to train many thousands of pilots, the military experimented with admitting to pilot training inductees of all ability levels. Of men in the top tier of the experimental selection battery, 95% successfully completed training, whereas only 20% of those in the lowest tier did so. Subsequent military research has consistently shown that highly g-loaded measures such as the Armed Forces Qualifying Test (AFQT) and its forerunners, although not always conceptualized as measures of g, are good measures of “trainability.” More recent work, such as Army Project A, has carefully demonstrated the validity of such measures for predicting job performance itself in military specialties.

To be practical for business, what you’re looking for is a simple, quick, and cost effective assessment to measure an individual’s capacity to learn, adapt, and grasp new concepts in the workplace. And you would also want to know on the same scale what would be the required Cognitive Ability for a job.

When paired with behavioral assessments, cognitive testing can help to increase your chances of predicting on-the-job performance and strengthen talent decisions by identifying people who have a propensity to learn quickly, figure things out, process complex information, and adapt to changing work demands. They can be used earlier in the selection process to help identify the best candidates for interviewing or given later in the process to help make decisions among similarly experienced candidates.

Engagement

There is a direct correlation between employee engagement and their operating environment. If they work in an environment that addresses their behavioral needs, they will spend much less energy adapting and put more energy into the task at hand. I call this operating in one’s comfort zone.

When I try to explain comfort zone, I use the example of writing your name on a piece of paper. When you do it with your dominant hand, the result is smooth, easy, and of high quality. When you switch hands, however, the feeling is of awkwardness and discomfort, and the result is of much worse quality. Try doing it the whole day and you will end up the day exhausted.

Working in your comfort zone charges you batteries. And the results are immediately noticeable in your engagement. Moreover, you will notice that most of the value employees bring to the business is through engagement that is discretionary in nature. What I mean by that is that when you hire a person you define their responsibilities as “have to.” You have to do this and for that we pay you. But the highest value comes from “want to.” I want to go the extra mile; I want to care about what customers think. I want to take care of the company by spending my time efficiently.

Not working in the comfort zone is called “working out of preference,” and it’s what people experience when you have them in the wrong roles, ask them to do the wrong things, and have them reporting to people who don’t know what makes them tick. It’s a sure-fire way to make employees check out.

Now imagine what it feels like when you’re in a job where the things you’re being asked to do motivate you, and you have a boss and colleagues who seem to really understand you. You and your job are a great fit. In that environment, people feel passion and energy for the job they do every day. They’re giving you their discretionary effort. They’re totally engaged.

Eric Kish as an author, speaker and practicing CEO. He is the author of 5 to 50 to 500: How to build and run scalable organizations and Everyday Turnaround: The art and science of daily business transformation

Is Your Organization Behaviorally Balanced? was originally published in Intent Driven Management on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Benjamin E. Mays — American Civil Rights Leader

The generally accepted method to set targets is to set SMART goals. They need to be Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Results-Oriented, and Timely.

The issue that arises with SMART set targets is that you really just end up remaining in your comfort zone. The human mind desires certainty and is averse to ambiguity and the unknown. Psychologists refer to this as cognitive closure. A heightened sense of cognitive closure can cause a person to latch onto the easiest tasks, freeze on a path regardless of changing information, and focus exclusively on finishing a task or project rather than on the results. The satisfaction that comes from completing a task really just becomes a means to an end.

Swedish psychologist, Anders Ericsson[1], has been studying human performance and expertise for decades. He has found that practicing the same thing over and over for hours and hours, whether it be sports, music, dance, or many other fields will not achieve the highest level of performance. One must consistently push themselves away from their comfort zone (a key component of deliberate practice) and combine it with the multitude of hours required. Only then can you possibly achieve the highest level of performance.[2]

However, there is a balance between a SMART target and an ambitious target. Ambitious targets were once thought to energize an organization and create spectacular results by pushing way beyond the envelope of the comfort zone. This was seen in the emergence of “stretch” goals, which is a target that intentionally involves expectations that are difficult to achieve. The idea behind this approach is that it would require creative thinking, thereby shaking a company out of a possible rut and bringing it to unprecedented heights.

One of the most famous examples of utilizing “stretch” goals was when General Electric (GE) introduced this management concept to their company in the 1990s. In fact, their CEO at the time, Jack Welch, was one of the earlier adopters of stretch goals and is believed to have coined the term.

In 1994, James Collins and Jerry Porrars introduced the term Big Hairy Audacious Goal (BHAG) in their book, Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies. Their argument is that companies should define ambitious visionary goals in a more strategic and emotionally compelling approach to excite and motivate people.

The problem with both BHAG and the “stretch” concept is that they can actually end up being terribly demotivating. When a target is perceived as unattainable it can become overwhelming, undermining the employees’ intrinsic motivation. The enormity of the problem causes people to freeze up.

In The Folly of Stretch Goals[3], Daniel Markovitz calls them a managerial absurdity that should be dispensed of once and for all. He quotes psychologist Karl Weick from his classic article, “Small Wins” that people often become overwhelmed and discouraged when faced with massive and complex problems.

It is most executives’ dream to transform an organization by achieving seemingly impossible goals through sheer willpower. Indeed, in countless business narratives, the practice of setting such objectives has been celebrated as a monumental success. However, it is important to acknowledge that in practice, stretch goals rarely work out. This is what the authors of The Stretch Goal Paradox, Sim B. Sitkin, C. Chet Miller and Kelly E. See, show by giving the recent example of Marissa Mayer, when she took the helm of the ailing internet giant, Yahoo, in 2012.

Upon being appointed as president and CEO she announced a number of wildly ambitious targets, including the exceptionally difficult objective of achieving double-digit annual growth. Fast forward five years and she’d fallen far short on them all. Yahoo was sold to Verizon in 2017.

I utilize stretch goals differently. To me they are a supplement to a Target, being still in sight of but just outside of the comfort zone. I am a big fan of three-tier goal setting systems. A three-tier goal setting system contains a Target, a Stretch and a Threshold. The Threshold being the level under which performance would be considered a failure.

Why a three-tier goal system? We are conditioned to think in threes: small, medium, and large; gold, silver, and bronze; good, better, and best. Behavioral psychologist and bestselling author, Dan Ariely conducted an experiment where he offered three different subscriptions to The Economist.

Option #1: Online subscription to The Economist at $59

Option #2: Print subscription to The Economist at $125

Option #3: Print & online subscription to The Economist at $125

When presented with these three options, an overwhelming majority of 84% picked Option #3. As you can see there is no difference in price between Option #2 and Option #3. However, when he removed Option #2, the majority of people started picking Option #1: the cheapest option. This is called anchoring. The idea is to anchor the mind above the Target by using a Stretch, while distancing it from the Threshold.

A good rule of thumb in setting a three-tiered target is this:

To make it easy to compare performance across metrics you want to normalize all metrics to one common scale. I use a 1 to 10 scale. On this scale I will have three levels of performance. The Threshold, set at 3.3, tells me that everything under is a failure. The Target, set at 6.7, will be the commitment to deliver. The Stretch, set at 10, will be considered exceptional performance.

Metrics in utilization with targets are intended to provide vital navigational instruments that allow everyone in the organization to understand the current level of performance. Although to be clear, like everything in life, where there is light there is dark. If you’re not careful, well-intended metrics can turn toxic.

Consider this classic example of a nail factory from the Soviet Union days. When the central planners defined output targets measured in weight, the factory produced a small number of very heavy nails. Obviously, people in the Soviet Union didn’t just need massive nails so the target was changed to the number of nails the factory had to produce. As a consequence, the nail factory produced a massive amount of only tiny nails.

So in conclusion, the tricky job of setting targets ultimately comes down to a balance of utilizing a tiered system tailored to the goals of each organization.

Eric Kish as an author, speaker and practicing CEO. He is the author of 5 to 50 to 500: How to build and run scalable organizations and Everyday Turnaround: The art and science of daily business transformation

[1]K. Anders Ericsson is a Swedish psychologist and Conradi Eminent Scholar and Professor of Psychology at Florida State University. He is internationally recognized as a researcher in the psychological nature of expertise and human performance.

[2]”The Art And Science Of Goal Setting –

blogs.allari.com/the-art-and-science-of-goal-setting

[3] hbr.org/2012/04/the-folly-of-stretch-goals

The Tricky Job of Setting Targets was originally published in Intent Driven Management on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A good example is the Center for Army Lessons Learned (CALL) as a way to institutionalize learning from experience. The center was created in recognition that U.S. Army units were repeating the same mistakes over and over again.

Even more important than capturing lessons is the ability to embed them in real time in current operations. In a detailed account of how the U.S. Army became a learning organization, Janine Davidson[1] in her book Lifting the Fog of Peace, describes how “CALL methodology allows for ‘just-in-time’ learning at the tactical and operational levels, even during ongoing real-life military operations.”

In June 2003, the Israeli Army Chief of Staff invited the U.S. Army Chief of Staff to send a team to observe Israeli tactics in counter-terrorism. Their After Action Report was posted on the CALL website before the team even returned, and a little gray booklet was published within a month to be widely disseminated in training areas and on the front line.

Organizational learning is not only about retaining lessons learned inside your team or group. It is also about learning from peers. A prime example is the success of Korean companies expanding in China[2]. An analysis of the expansion of South Korean manufacturing firms into China between 1987 and 1995 showed that a key component of their success was based on formal or informal organizational mechanisms to gather information and diffuse it across the group, with the expectation that member companies would be able to learn from the foreign experiences of other firms in the same group.

Post-flight Reviews

The Israeli Air Force (IAF) is arguably one of the best Air Forces in the world. It is also known as one of the most technologically advanced. But very few know that one of the key reasons for IAF’s extraordinary performance, at a time when technology was not an advantage for the IAF, was the introduction in 1952 of post-flight reviews by Moshe Bar, a farmer turned fighter pilot.

In a paper called “How Organizations Learn: Post-flight Reviews in an F-16 Fighter Squadron”, Neta Ron, Raanan Lipshitz, and Micha Popper describe how post-flight reviews, as an organizational learning mechanism, are largely responsible for the high-performance level demonstrated by IAF’s units.

In the IAF, every move a pilot carries out in training and in battle is documented on video. Post-flight debriefing leads to an incredibly competent control system based on the theory that learning from mistakes is the best way to gain perfection.

Dan Halutz, a former IAF commander, explains how there is no prejudice in the debriefing room: “Ranks are not counted when you are flying. When you are flying, you are treated like a pilot.”

In Post Flight Reviews, pilots must be able to recall every move, admit every mistake and justify every correct decision. Integrity and honesty are essential traits of an IAF pilot. Everybody knows that debriefing is not about apologizing, it’s about learning.

The study demonstrates how five behavioral norms are critical for effective organizational learning using post-flight reviews:

1. Transparency (exposing one’s thoughts and actions to others)

2. Integrity (giving and receiving feedback without defending oneself and others)

3. Issue orientation (focusing on the relevance of information to the issues at hand, regardless of extraneous factors such as hidden agendas and the social standing of its source)

4. Inquiry (persisting in an investigation until a satisfactory understanding is achieved)

5. Accountability (assuming responsibility for learning and the implementation of lessons learned).

During the same time two psychological conditions are necessary for effective learning in the social context of post-flight reviews:

1. Psychological safety for risk taking and experimenting with new ideas and behaviors

2. Organizational commitment to motivate sharing of information and knowledge with others

The U.S. Army uses AARs (After Action Reviews). During the AAR debrief, teams question leader decisions and suggest alternatives.

General Gordon Sullivan, former Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army, said that “The AAR system was the key to turning the corner in institutionalizing organizational learning in the U.S. Army.”[3]

The basic characteristics of effective after-action reviews, as identified by the U.S. Army, are:

· Focused on few critical issues

· Done immediately after the action

· Inclusive of all those who took part in the action

· Follow a structured process, and lead back to action as soon as possible.

The practice trickled down to business with the emergence of agile software development where it has been called a Retrospective.

Eric Kish as an author, speaker and practicing CEO. He is the author of 5 to 50 to 500: How to build and run scalable organizations and Everyday Turnaround: The art and science of daily business transformation

[1]Janine Davidson is a former Under Secretary of the United States Navy,former U.S. Airforce pilot and president of MSU Denver

[2]Institutional Structures, Organizational Learning, and Sequential Foreign Expansion: South Korean Firms and Business Groups in CHINA, 1987–1995 — Mauro F. Guillén The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania

[3] Lifting the Fog of Peace, Janine Davidson The University of Michigan Press 2011

Organizational Learning was originally published in Intent Driven Management on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.