Employing Differences

Employing Differences, Episode 79: Can we do this? Now?

November 16, 2021 Karen Gimnig & Paul Tevis
Employing Differences
Employing Differences, Episode 79: Can we do this? Now?
Show Notes Transcript

"We don't always think of challenging work as learning space. We're like, 'Oh, that's just a hard project.' Well, it's hard because we don't know how to do it yet. If we were good at it, and didn't have anything to learn from it, it wouldn't be hard."

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Paul:

Welcome to Employing Differences, a conversation about exploring the collaborative space between individuals.

Karen:

I'm Karen Gimnig.

Paul:

And I'm Paul Tevis.

Karen:

Each episode, we start with a question and see where it takes us. This week's question is, "Can we do this? Now?"

Paul:

One of the situations that Karen and I run into moderately often is people looking at a group or a team or an organization and trying to figure out, "Can we do this particular thing?" Can we run this project? Can we learn this skill? Can we make this particular change? And the answer is usually, yes, the group can. Sometimes it's actually no, we don't have the capability of doing that right now. But actually, the harder question to answer is, do we have the capacity to do it, at this moment, given all of the other things that are going on? And I think this is a place where I see a lot of organizations and a lot of teams get caught. They look at all of the things that they're trying to do. Any one of them in isolation is pretty straightforward. And then they try to do them all at the same time and things go very wrong. So So I think one of the things we want to explore a little bit here today is where do we get a sense for whether or not now is the time we could actually do this thing? And when is it that we are over capacity, that we couldn't do it right now?

Karen:

Yeah, and I think we're maybe pretty good at thinking in terms of, do we have enough time? Do we have enough person-hours? That kind of thing. Is this the time to take on a big project, something like that? We're maybe moderately good at doing that. I think we're probably even less good

at:

do we have emotional energy for it? Do we have cognitive space for it? Because we tend to forget that those things are also limited. So I want to give it a little attention, the time question, both is there a time for another big project or however big this project is will it take away from other things if we try to do it? Is it just going to be competing all the time? Like, yeah, we can fit it in, but it's just going to be constantly competing. Do we need to clear out some sludge? Is there just sort of ongoing routine stuff that we do that we actually don't need to do? And, you know, so all of those things, I think feed into the time question. And having named them, I'm going to suggest that that's probably as much as we need to do with that. But I'm going to let you start, Paul, with the cognitive emotional capacity question,

Paul:

I'm going not quite go there yet, because they will say the one thing we do tend to forget, is that doing more things at the same time makes all of them slower. And this is a thing we work with a lot in the Agile space, and we talk about a lot in Lean and Flow and Kanban principles sorts of things. The idea is that when you have more work in progress, all of those things get slower. They all get delivered later, and that's even if there's perfect context switching between them. Which getting to that whole thing about cognitive load and emotional load is never true. Even if it were true, if we could perfectly switch, it would still make things take longer. And so that's a thing that we often overlook. So I couldn't go by that topic without saying that. But to your point, the cognitive/emotional piece. So for example, I'm doing a bunch of different client work right now. And one of the things that I've noticed about the types of work that I do is I actually have to have the right mix of different types of work. Specifically, there's work that I love to do, which is right on my growing edge, where it's like, "Ooh, this is a big challenge." I understand roughly how this is supposed to work, but I don't have exactly experience in this particular context. Or it's a new client, I've not worked with them before, I'm gonna have to do a lot of learning and discovery. I really love doing those things. Where I get into trouble is when every one of my client engagements is like that at the same time. What actually need is a mix of that, and then also, this is the work that I do all the time. This is my bread and butter. I've got this. I don't have to think about it. I'm not engaged in that sort of learning, growing, discovery. I'm still learning stuff from it, but there's enough of a solid foundation to stand on. And so even if, from a calendar standpoint, all of those things could fit at the same time and that would all work, if I filled it all up with that intense emotional cognitive piece, I would fall over. I'm going through a little bit of that right now with some my current work. But it's a learning thing for me that just because there's room on the calendar doesn't mean that this type of work will fit there.

Karen:

Yeah, I'm reminded of a Montessori philosophy that if you watch children and Montessori is that classroom space where children work largely independently, they pick their work the cycle that they see in those children is that they come in and they kind of get settled for the day, they do something familiar, they get kind of in the environment, and all that kind of thing. And then they will gradually migrate to something that's new and challenging. They will be right on their growth edge doing that new harder lesson, whatever that thing is for them. And then they do as much of that as that they're up for that day, and they put it away. And they go and pick something that's really easy, several levels lighter. Because what they're doing with that easy stuff is their brain is processing and recording and engaging the learning from the challenging stuff. And while I do think children are master learners, I don't think we actually change very much over time. In fact, if we're in learning kind of space and this is the cognitive load part that having parts of our day, or our workweek, or our work cycle, that are routine and familiar and where and this isn't the same as going on vacation and disconnecting. This is the "I am still in work" mode, I am still functioning in that kind of space, but my brain can integrate the learning and the the work that was challenging. And I think we don't always think of challenging work as learning space. Like, "Oh, that's just a hard project." Well, it's hard because we don't know how to do it yet. If we were good at it, and didn't have anything to learn from it, it wouldn't be hard. So I think that just that sort of tracking that you're bringing up makes a lot of sense. So how much learning edge work is happening as a team, and how much learning edge work is happening for an individual. And I want to name with this, if you have a new member of your team, their learning edge work that week or month is, "How does the team function?" Which computer do I use? Where's the coffee machine? Their on the learning edge of lots of things. So that's probably not the time to say, "Hey, do this really tough project." At least not, you know, too much of it. And then there's some balance with that. But I think that's the cognitive piece of, you can only do so much learning edge work at a time. And if you overdo that, what will happen is either overwhelm and exhaustion will come in, or quality of everything will drop, probably even the things that you theoretically can do well. That's the now part of the question.

Paul:

Yeah. That that gets to something that we've talked about before, which is this idea of saturation. That that we can kind of absorb learning up to a point and then we're full, like a sponge. And I think there's a similar thing that happens learning is also a response to change. And I think this is a similar thing, and I see this a lot in organizations with change saturation, where they've got all these different change projects going on, any one of which would be fine. But they aren't necessarily and I think about this visually that they're not looking atwhere are the impacts of these changes landing? And are all those landing on the same three teams, the same five groups? Because the people making the decisions about what changes we're gonna make, it doesn't have the same impact on them. And so they don't realize, and then they go,"Oh, well, these people are just resisting change." It's like,"No, they're change saturated." There's too much change going on. They're in this swirl of I no longer can predict and our brains actually have a very specific response to this where I used to know how the world worked, and I don't anymore. And that puts me into a heightened state of anxiety, and we get the sympathetic nervous system activates and all these other things happen. And that's the thing that happens when we're trying to take on too much change at any given time where it looks like on paper, we could totally do this. And that's again, coming back to the now. This change might be a really good idea, but does the organization, does the team, do the people who are involved, do they have the capacity to absorb that change right now? Or is it just gonna bounce off of them?

Karen:

Another word for change in my mind is transition. And one of the things I think about is that transitions are always stressful for all the reasons you've just said. Even if it's a good thing, even if it's leaving an abusive spouse, or getting your dream job. It doesn't have to be a bad thing to be true to be a transition and stressful. Transitions are stressful. And in fact, you learn to this actually growing up. If you think about any kind of family, home life situation, where did things get ugly and fall apart? Around transitions. Transition from bed to wake. From home to out, so on the way out the door. Transition coming back in as everyone's arriving. Transitions around bedtime. These are all stress points for families, and pretty predictably, if you're looking for where do things get uncomfortable and loud, and difficult, almost always, you can trace it to transition points. And so even those things like maybe you don't want to introduce the new project, as everyone arrives at work at 8am. Could we do it? Not now. We can do it at 10, or whatever your timeframe is.

Paul:

To use a very concrete example of what's going on with an organization that I'm part of right now, with a nonprofit volunteer organization. This branch was given the ability by the larger structure to make some changes to their COVID protocols and policies. They were given the permission to do that directly before a big event the biggest event of the year that they were going to be runn ng ten days or probabl a week out. And so they s id, "We are not going to make or announce a decision about wh t we're going to do until after that event." Because they rea ized that that was bad change anagement to go, "We're go na announce a new policy that on't be in effect for this hing, because there's no wa we could change everything in t e last in the last five days." And we aren't even going to con use people by giving them this ew information. Of course, not everybody was happy about t is. They all wanted to know, "W at are we going to do?" But i was really the the people at he head of this part of the org ealizing like, we just had too m ch stuff going on right now t announce a new policy. We neede to put a new policy in pla e, but that was not the moment where the organization could bsorb it, where they actuall could do something. And so t ey chose to defer it, which as not the most popular thing, ut I think actually a pretty goo choice.

Karen:

It makes a lot of sense to me. And it especially makes sense to me in light of the emotion around COVID policy. And how much people really get you know, that one in particular has a lot of emotion attached to it. And we tend not to pay attention to that. We tend to figure you know, "Well, they won't like it, but they'll deal with it" or, you know, "They're not gonna like it anyway," or fill in the blank. And I think that we need to really pay attention to what's going on emotionally, both in terms of what can we predict within our organization so you know, I work a lot with cohousing communities. With COVID, there were a lot of price increases, for example. So if we've just named a price increase, let's not take on the parking policy tomorrow. We've got that emotional stress and parking, believe it or not, is an emotional topic so let's not do those emotionally loaded things on top of each other. Let's let one process and then think about when is there the emotional capacity for the other. And I just want to name here that the emotional hits are not always from within the organization. And I was at a meeting recently where someone's cat had they found it by a car, and for a couple of days, like, she's not going to do a lot of heavy lifting anything because the emotional load is not there. I think the community had a good sense not to do that to her. But if they had, that's the moment when things are going to come off the rails. And sometimes it's an event like that. And sometimes it's an ongoing, you know, someone's caring for an older parent, and that is a huge emotional load. Or, you know, I've just blended a family and we've got kids we're working with and there's a huge emotional load. That doesn't mean they aren't good workers or aren't good co-workers, but you just want to be thoughtful of where are people emotionally, and what's the likely emotional impact? Because even if you need to do it, you can be thoughtful about timing.

Paul:

Yeah, I think where we've been talking has really been around any particular project or change or other sort of big thing were thinking about doing it's important to look at it not just in isolation, by itself. We actually need to look at the context that that's happening in. What are all the other things that we have in flight? What's coming up? Where are all those? So when we try to be sort of reductionistic about it and go like, "Will it fit by itself?" that's actually not the only question we should be asking. We also need to be looking at at least three angles on whether or not we have capacity. One of them is time. Do we have time, money, space, like all of that, which you would think we'd be good at, but lots of individuals and organizations are still bad at that. But even if we've got that part figured out, we need to think about about the cognitive load that this is going to take from whoever is going to need to take this on or be impacted by it. And also the emotional aspect of it. What is our emotional capacity for actually working through this? And again how it relates to all of the other things that are going on, both inside the group, and then also the forces that are affecting it from the outside. Because any one of those things we can be saturated with. We might not have the capacity, even if we could do it on its own, by itself. Maybe we could have done it last year. We don't have the capacity now. Maybe we will in six months. So it's really about thinking about, can we really do this thing not in the abstract but really right here and right now.

Karen:

Hey, that's gonna do it for us today. Until next time, I'm Karen Gimnig.

Paul:

And I'm Paul Tevis. This has been Employing Differences.