organizations : Page 2 : mackenzian

February 2, 2016 By Keisha McKenzie

Scripting Interactions Only Gets You So Far

A person writes "Ideas" in different script styles. Only their hand is visible in the top right corner of the photo. — Scripting interactions assures certainty, but restricts creativity. (Licensed image)

Scripting interactions is the quickest way to make sure everyone on a team gets on the same page about how to deal with common issues.

That’s why large tech companies like Microsoft use scripts to standardize the support they offer customers, and non-profit organizations use scripts to train fundraising phone bankers.

You might feel at a loss when your computer automatically updates and the update causes basic programs to stop working, but you can be sure that the manufacturer’s customer experience department will already have mapped out a path for you. They’ll know and have planned for the questions you’re likely to ask, where you’ll go on the company’s website to find answers, what will happen when you call for help, the questions support team members or technicians will ask you, and who in the support chain they’ll refer you to next.

Veterans’ charities, the paralympics, your local city symphony—they all caught onto the value of scripting years ago. So when cold callers ring your home or cell phone, they sound roughly the same. They’re reading from the same interaction script, they’re required to make a certain number of calls per hour, and their rote approach means you’re unlikely to hang up satisfied or feeling heard.

Interaction scripts define minimum standards of behavior for the people using them. They simplify reality into this-then-that prompts, sequences, and branching decisions: team members take specific actions in a specific order so that specific outcomes can result.

The scripts’ goal could be a satisfied client or a contributing donor. Goals could be quantitative too: how many customers or donors engage the team, which actions they take after their interaction, and how quickly the team serves the public each time.

Ultimately, scripts keep staff on topic and on target, and limit how much those team members can innovate. That’s great when questions are closed-ended. It even gives people a clear, comforting sense of what the rules are and what they can expect: Press 2 for billing and 3 for support. Say No at least three times, ask the cold-caller’s supervisor to remove you from the call list, and we will leave you in peace.

But these patterns fail miserably when problems are complex or the task requires creativity. Team members who haven’t been trained, authorized, or empowered to really resolve customer concerns flounder when confronted with real, unscripted life, especially that slice of life that takes longer than seven minutes to wrap up.

Scripted interactions may be clean, discrete, and easy to measure. But they undermine the creative, problem-solving process precisely because creating solutions means questioning the assumptions that standards and policies are based on. Creativity means perceiving more than what’s already known and accounted for. It requires us to push beyond the script.

I recently spent half an hour trapped in one of the most labyrinthine support networks I’ve ever seen. The staff shuttled me between three departments, all represented on the line by people who didn’t understand me or my issue and struggled when I asked questions that their scripts hadn’t anticipated.

As it happened, forcing me to use NATO’s phonetic alphabet didn’t help either. (YANKEE ECHO SIERRA, ROMEO ECHO ALPHA LIMA LIMA YANKEE: The phonetic alphabet.)

I wound up on hold, resolving the problem myself through research, trial, error, and improvement, all as I resolved never to call or recommend that company’s support line ever again.

In some circumstances, like when problems are well-bounded and time is short, it makes sense to limit staff’s responses in the same way you might restrict your morning routine or clothing choices to free up your willpower or mental energy.

But in overly scripted systems, that freed-up mental energy has nowhere to go. Hyper-scripted team members don’t have room to listen deeply or innovate; they can’t easily discover as life presents because they’re expected to just follow the process as given.

Yet when situations have a lot of moving parts and are uncertain, complex, or even wicked, you’ll want staff members in the right frame of mind to perceive, analyze, and design creative solutions.

You’ll want to give them space to listen, to innovate, to surprise themselves as well as each other and learn new possibilities in the process.

Because following the script won’t get them all the way there.

January 2, 2015 By Keisha McKenzie

Ask Keisha: About Church Membership

“Why do you hang in there with your denomination? I feel like I’ve lost so much staying, and I’m angry.” —H.

I hear you, H.

I read a response to one of the latest stories of church member exclusion a few weeks ago. It included this line: “We each need to journey as far as our faith will carry us, even to disfellowship status.”

Having your membership taken away isn’t the only way to separate from a denomination. Sometimes people and groups grow differently. Sometimes, as you did, we discover a new pool from the one we grew up swimming in and we jump into the new pool neck-deep: conversion and de-conversion are both real phenomena, and they can both involve a lot of self-reflection, stress, and disruption.

When I get questions about leaving or staying—and I get them a lot—I notice that many of us frame separating as the worst possible outcome. I understand the hook in that framing, but what if separation isn’t always the worst thing that could happen? What if some level of separating frees us to come together again at a different level than surface identity or group membership? Perhaps we already do this at a small scale.

Not everyone is aligned with their chosen faith community at every single level from personal identity to shared practices or from organizational policy to public rhetoric. Sometimes people who share core values with an organization are completely repelled by the outer vehicle that those values express through.

We can vary from each other and still relate with respect and in solidarity from however close or far we find fits best at a given time. Relationship can be dynamic, and maybe it already is; we just don’t have a common language to describe it in our culture. Our culture says we’re either in or out; you’re either for me or against me. Ultimately, however, I don’t think gaining, having, or dropping voting membership status is the real point here.

So here’s a different way to look at this. If a faith community is like a train, then you need to know where you are going, you need to know when to get on, when to get off, how to do both safely, and why it is not necessary to derail the train in order to get to your destination.

If a faith community is like a family, then you need to know who you are, what structures your family set up for you before you were born, which elements in those structures are plastic and which are fixed, how these structures advantage and disadvantage you, how you can uniquely and healthily contribute to that family, and how you can maximize its advantages for yourself while transmuting the disadvantages it’s bundled with.

I don’t define my faith of origin as a millstone around my neck: there are many ways in which it set me up for a low-drama adult life and I’m grateful for that. I’m sure it inclined me to education and holism in ways I don’t think I would’ve developed without it. It also ended my athletic career much earlier than it would’ve ended otherwise: I couldn’t leap into basketball training I was invited to because the scheduling clashed with church.

So, yes, affiliating with this specific denomination foreclosed some options for me. Maybe in a parallel universe I was never Adventist but still went to Texas Tech and became that world’s Sheryl Swoopes.

West Churchman was a systems scientist who worked in the first half of the 20th Century just as traditional social systems began to break down. Once asked about progress, he wrote this:

“The individuation process, as the way of development and maturation of the psyche, does not follow a straight line, nor does it always lead onwards and upwards. The course it follows is rather ‘stadial,’ consisting of progress and regress, flux and stagnation in alternating sequence. Only when we glance back over a long stretch of the way can we notice the development. If we wish to mark out the way somehow or other, it can equally well be considered a ‘spiral,’ the same problems and motifs occurring again and again on different levels.”

So figure out what’s true in your case. Where are you going? What’s the nature of your family? What if your relationship to your faith group is less about the mechanics of membership and more about intentionally adopting a space where you can hone your unique contributions?

What if the group is at first an incubator and then later on a practice zone for you to train in? And what if you are meant to outgrow your early coaches and training gear; what if you also find other spaces to grow in, contribute to, and learn from?

Must all your spaces be mutually exclusive?

Take some time this month to reflect on what your denomination has been for you historically. And then take twice as much time to imagine—wildly—how you might engage that space differently.

My bet is that there are many more possible answers for you than Participate Begrudgingly or Dump The Lot. And I’m looking forward to hearing more from you as you shape those possibilities and choose the ones you want to live in.

October 22, 2014 By Keisha McKenzie

Wheatley on Learning Organizations

Let me know if you know who designed this graphic. Thanks! — Please let me know if you know who designed this graphic.

“The Army is an incredibly literate organization. They have internal journals that they use to correspond with one another. They study history carefully. They have a center for Army lessons learned. They document everything. And they have this wonderful process of learning from direct experience called “After Action Review,” in which everyone who was involved sits down and the three questions are: What happened? Why do you think it happened? And what can we learn from it?

“If you were in a good American organization and were able to get those three questions as part of your process, you could become a learning organization. What I observe in our business organizations — even in our public institutions — is that after a crisis or breakdown, or after something worked really well, we don’t get together and say, “Okay, what do we each think happened, and what can we learn from it?” We either take credit for it, or, if it’s an error, we try to bury it as fast as we can and move on.

“We’re not in cultures which support learning; we’re in cultures that give us the message consistently: “Don’t mess up, don’t make mistakes, don’t make the boss look bad, don’t give us any surprises.” So we’re asking for a kind of predictability, control, respect and compliance that has nothing to do with learning.

“So I don’t know how any of these large organizations, both public and private, have a prayer to become a true learning organization, until they move away from these cultures of status and protection and fear of one another. That came real clear to me in the Army.” —Dr. Meg Wheatley with Scott London

Guide the teams you work with through those three questions:

1. What happened?
2. Why do you think it happened?
3. What can we learn from it?

Track what happens over the next six months.

July 11, 2013 By Keisha McKenzie

On Understanding

Convenience of conceptual analogies is no substitute for usefulness or rigour. —R. Brennan & S. Henneberg

One understands a phenomenon only when one has a holistic view of [it], a view that integrates all of its known components and all of its known manifestations. —T. Bouldin & L. Odell

Image of atom | via Citra's Chemistry — Image of atom | via Citra’s Chemistry

Pulling a mechanical thing apart to see how it works is easy. Observing a living system in progress is not. Humans have predictable biological components, but we are more than the sum of parts and so are the living systems we create. We can miss worlds by only examining predictable bio-molecules and chemical interactions for insights into the world around us.

One of the programs that I work with teaches students and educators how to recognize and navigate ten levels of reality:

the bio-atom
the bio-molecule
the cell
the organ
the organism
the family
the neighborhood
the profession
the nation
Earth

Each level has fixed laws, and at increasing levels there’s both increasing complexity and increasing fluidity.
Research that fails to account for anything other than linear laws won’t adequately represent reality beyond level 4. Humans (Level 5) are not reducible to biochemicals, and neither are their cultural networks or systems.

What people think is real also becomes “real” by mutual consent, because our consciousness gives us the capacity to build rules and structures on delusions as well as on sound premises. So a study of What’s Really Going On has to include the individual and community mental maps we generate in our relationships, with families, neighborhoods, professions, nations, and as a species.

If you were to design a study of people’s mental maps, what would you be looking for? What would you ignore? What would you compare? How would you assess what you noticed?