One of the joys of my move to Columbus for a new job has been an unexpected friendship with a young family who I met through my church. The friendship started when they invited my husband and me to the zoo with their two young children.

We loved being with them and their children and that trip blossomed into a deep friendship with many shared meals and outings. They both just graduated, and their beautiful family is leaving to go back home to Idaho. We will miss them so much.

It would have been so easy for any one of us to not take the energy or time to connect. We all have very busy lives and we all knew that they were leaving at the end of the school year. But the friendship enriched all of our lives and I am so grateful that our paths crossed and we took the opportunity to deeply connect.

My experience is that these deep connections are rare and wonderful and don’t happen very often because they require openness, authenticity and time.

We all crave deep connections. How do you invite them into your life? How do you create them at work?

One of the most difficult things for me is saying no. This is true both personally and professionally. The volume of work, the desire to please others, and the number of interesting and great ideas makes it difficult to decide what should be done first and what should not be done at all.

DevOps has a principle that has helped me understand the cost of doing too many things simultaneously. The principle states that to get things done faster and with higher quality, you must limit your work in progress (WIP).

To illustrate why this is true, it is useful to play a simple game. I have played this game with my team and at conferences and it is highly effective way to learn this concept.

The Name Game

Each person playing the game needs to have five crayons/markers in different colors and this worksheet with 5 customer names. The goal of the game is to write the five customer names as quickly as possible after the timekeeper starts the clock.

• Round 1
  • Each player estimates how long it will take to write the five names and records their estimate at the top of the page.
  • Before starting, gather requirements:
    • Each customer wants their name in a different color.
    • Mark the desired color next to each customer’s name.
    • You must handle all customers’ expectations to their satisfaction.
    • Never keep a customer waiting because that is bad business.
    • The earlier you start something, the earlier you finish.
  • In this round:
    • As soon as the stopwatch starts, begin all customers’ projects.
    • Write the first letter of the first customer in their desired color, then write the first letter of the second customer in their desired color, etc.
    • When the first letter of each customer is written, go back and start writing the second letter of each customer in their desired color, etc.
    • Keep writing all customers’ letters one at a time in the desired color until all customers have received their name.
    • Once you are finished, check your work! Fix any names that are incorrect.
    • If all names are complete and correct, look at the stopwatch and write down your time on your paper.
  • Round 2
    • Before starting, gather requirements:
      • Each customer wants their name in a different color.
      • Mark the desired color next to each customer’s name.
      • Your organization has implemented a DevOps practice and limited the WIP to 1.
      • You are only allowed to work on one customer name at a time.
    • In this round:
      • As soon as the clock starts, you start the first customer’s project.
      • Write the customers’ name in their desired color.
      • After writing the first customer’s name, check your work. Make corrections as necessary.
      • You can only start on the next customer’s name when the previous customer’s name is complete and correct.
      • Once all names are complete and correct, look at the stopwatch and write down your time on your paper.

• Reflection
  • After playing the game, talk about the experience and examine what you learned and how you can apply what you learned to your work environment.

Whenever I do this game, people acknowledge that the ground rules in Round 1 are much closer to our normal work environment, and it is very stressful. The biggest revelation is that no one has a better outcome in Round 1 over Round 2. Round 1 takes 4 to 5 times longer for every customer, produces sloppier outcomes, and stresses out the person doing the work.

The name game shows the effect of switching when performing a simple task. The projects we ask our teams to do are much more complex with high cognitive switching costs.

I would encourage you to do the exercise with your team and ask, “How can I limit the work in progress for me and my team?”

Technology has long promised to make our lives better. While in some ways it has, we can all relate to yelling at our computer or cell phone as we try to do something that we can’t figure out how to do it. I have certainly been there.

One of my favorite thought leaders in how we can work differently to deliver on the promise of technology is Richard Sheridan. He cofounded Menlo Innovations and wrote the book, Joy, Inc.: How We Built a Workplace People Love.His premise, which I completely agree with, is that how we work makes all the difference in the experience for our teams and outcomes for our customers. You can sign up for a virtual tour describing Menlo Innovations’ culture here.

One aspect of Menlo’s approach is something called High-Tech Anthropology where they go out into the world to study the people they intend to design and build software for, learn what their goals, habits and workflows are, and make sure that whatever they are designing will delight the people that one day will use the software they deliver.

I love this philosophy and would invite you to consider the following questions:

• What could you do to make the interactions with our team and technology delightful?
• How do we make it easy to use our systems?

Technology is embedded into every part of our lives, both professionally and personally. New technology and features, increasing regulations, cybersecurity threats, and evolving processes combine to create a river of change. This means that, as IT professionals, we are constantly asking others to adapt and change.

In my 30+ years of working in IT, I have had a lot of opportunities to try different ways of approaching change and “we invite, we don’t demand” is a mantra that I repeat often and is shorthand for an approach to change that I have found to be both effective and enjoyable.

1. Invite stakeholders to help evaluate and select the solution as early as possible
2. Do a small experiment or pilot to test the solution
3. Broadly communicate what is happening and why it is happening
4. Give as much choice as possible in the situation
5. Make is easy
6. Provide training to support people making the change

I will share an personal experience that used this approach.

When I first started at Temple University as the CIO, we needed to select a modern Learning Management System because our LMS vendor had announced they were ending the development of the product we had been using for over a decade. I had many faculty and staff come into my office advocating for moving to a new learning management system (LMS). The issue was that there were two competing solutions with strong advocates for both.

We created a selection committee that was split evenly between the two solutions. The committee included faculty, technologists, instructional designers and students. That committee worked to identify and prioritize the requirements for the new system and arranged to do pilots of the two options. This allowed us to work with the systems and vendors before we committed.

We invited faculty to participate in the pilot of the two solutions. As we did all the necessary integrations and testing to prepare to pilot both solutions, one of the solutions failed technically. I viewed that failure as a success of the process. We continued with the pilot of the remaining solution, Canvas, for the spring semester with over 1000 students and almost 30 faculty participating. The selection committee designed surveys and focus groups to get feedback from the faculty and students and the feedback was incredibly positive.

After the end of the pilot, the selection committee unanimously recommended moving forward with Canvas. Our next challenge was to figure out a way to support faculty to move the almost 30,000 existing courses in 12 months to minimize the amount of time our students had to navigate two systems. We announced in June that we were moving to Canvas and why we were moving. We told faculty they could move anytime they wanted in the next year.

The IT team made it easy for faculty to decide course-by-course whether to teach in the old LMS or move that course to Canvas. The Center for the Advancement of Teaching (CAT) designed workshops to teach faculty how to use Canvas and the easiest way to move their course content.

Because we announced the change in June and the fall semester started in August, we hoped we would get 20% of the classes taught in Canvas in the fall. It became clear quickly that the faculty were engaging. The transition faculty workshops kept filling and CAT kept scheduling more. In the fall, 40% of the classes were being taught in Canvas. Many faculty members chose to teach one course in Canvas in the fall and the pilot faculty participants were champions for the change and incredibly helpful to their faculty colleagues. By spring semester, that number of courses being taught in Canvas had jumped to 80%.

By inviting broadly, we created advocates across campus for a change that mostly needed to be done by faculty. We assisted faculty in the change by giving them the choice of when they moved their courses, making it extremely easy to create a class in Canvas and providing training and support so they had the information and skills they needed to make the change.

The team and committee were energized through the project and the relationships between the committee members and the teams across campus who were involved were strengthened. “We invite, we don’t demand” is more than a change management checklist, it is a mindset that tries to create engagement, not compliance.

How does this resonate with you?

As part of my onboarding at Ohio State, I am embarking on a listening tour and getting to meet leaders from across campus. It is so much fun and inspiring to meet so many committed and talented people. This approach, outlined in The First 90 Days(link is external) by Michael Watkins, is an excellent way to understand an organization, even if you are not new to it. 

The format for each interaction is generally the same. I ask whoever I am meeting with to describe their role and what their team does. I continue by asking them to discuss their strategic goals and what they are concerned about. Many people are surprised that I don’t want them to focus on technology needs, but talk more broadly about what they are trying to accomplish and understand the impact they are trying to make. I also try to minimize the time that I spend talking about me. I end each interview asking the following questions from the book. 

1. What are the biggest challenges the organization is facing (or will face in the near future)? 

1. Why is the organization facing (or going to face) these challenges? 

1. What are the most promising unexploited opportunities for growth? 

1. What would need to happen for the organization to exploit the potential of these opportunities? 

1. If you were me, what would you focus attention on? 

I am only partially through the listening tour, but the insights that I have already gained are really helpful and the interactions are energizing. I have appreciated the graciousness of individuals who are open to being my friend in addition to my colleague as I adjust to a new job and home. I have also loved some unexpected perks, like the squash and honey from my tour of the Waterman Farm Complex(link is external). 

When is the last time that your primary focus in a meeting was to listen and learn? 

Photo from Boston University: https://www.bu.edu/sph/profile/david-jones

Grow from accidents rather than place blame

This wasn’t the first week blog I had intended to write. But that’s the thing about loss, you can’t plan for it. The emotions that come from loss mix with everything else happening in your life. So, as I embark on the next chapter of my life and career, I do so by honoring a friend whose last chapter came too soon.

I got the news of David’s fatal accident while I was shopping. My son looked on in concern as I started muttering, “no, no, no, no….” and thinking, not David and what about his wife, Sarah, and their three beautiful children. David was an incredible person and wonderful husband and father. He was so alive and vibrant and good.

David had been training for a marathon and his training run had ended in his death as a subway staircase collapsed under him. The stairway had been closed for several months because it needed repair. But David went on the stairs, and they collapsed.

When I was younger, I would have wanted to assign blame to convince myself that there were things I could do to assure that something similar didn’t happen to me. The city was to blame for not repairing the stairs sooner, someone must have removed the barrier, so David wasn’t even aware of the danger, or David didn’t think that he by himself was enough stress on the stairs, so he ignored the warning.

But the truth is that it could have just as easily been me. Accidents happen. I regularly ignore barriers on my bike and ride across bridges that are closed to traffic. Assigning blame won’t bring David back or make me feel better.

My deep sadness is for Sarah and their children. They are going to miss David so much and his loss will shape them and will be part of their journey and growth.

After the tragic death of my niece and nephew, my sister-in-law struggled for years and is now a grief coach(link is external). She wrote about her journey back to joyfully living in her book, Miracles in the Darkness: Building a Life After Loss(link is external).

I have been so sad this last week whenever I think about David and his family. The best tribute that I can think of to honor David is to try to live like he lived.

• Love fiercely
• Care deeply
• Give generously
• Live joyfully

David, you will be missed!