Month: December 2020

As I try to do at the end of every year, I’m taking some time to reflect this week.

 

There’s a lot to reflect on.

 

Whatever you thought you would be working on in 2020, the universe had a different path charted. In addition to the economic and physical suffering caused by the coronavirus, this year has been an example of large-scale systems breakdowns, and one of the things I’m interested in is the particular ways in which people have adapted to them.

 

One of the most powerful ways to adapt to changing conditions is by setting goals.

 

If you listened to the podcast this week, you heard me talk about how to balance focus with the desire to set ambitious goals.

 

I work with a number of clients (both individuals and teams) on this. I teach that there are three pillars of goal setting: feelings, focus and control, and reflection.

 

Have a listen to the episode for more details, but, in the meantime, I wanted to share a little more about the power of reflection, the third pillar of goal setting.

 

I don’t see goals as static. Things change—in the external environment, in what I’m working on, and in the market. (The goals I started 2020 with stopped being relevant pretty quickly.) As things change, you can change your goals.

 

Beyond updating the content of your goals, you can also look at your process, examining what’s working (and what’s not).

 

For my team and me, one thing that wasn’t working this year was the breadth of the goals we were going after.

One of my superpowers is that I’m voracious. I move fast, and my brain often arrives at fully formed ideas—for things like marketing plans and products.

 

But my voraciousness can also limit me. It’s hard to do everything at once. What I realized is that my set of ambitious “everything” goals ended up distracting my team and slowing us down. So, I’m making changes to keep the superpower while mitigating the challenges it causes.

 

Everyone’s challenges are unique. But when you reflect on what went well and what you want to try, you can improve your process, an effort whose benefits will compound.

 

Thanks for being part of 2020 with me.

 

P.S. I’ve put together some resources around goal setting that are specific to attorneys.

 

If you’re an attorney—or if you know one that might be interested—head over here for my free workbook on why understanding your feelings can help you achieve ambitious goals.

 

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Warm refreshments, winter fun, and social media.

 

What could capture the holidays better?

 

One of my favorite stories from Meltdown is about a Starbucks social media disaster that arrived just in time for the holidays. We’re providing an excerpt here to get you in the holiday spirit.

 

In the winter of 2012, Starbucks launched a social media campaign to get coffee lovers in the holiday spirit. It asked its customers to post festive messages on Twitter using the hashtag #SpreadTheCheer. The company also sponsored an ice rink at the Natural History Museum in London, which featured a giant screen to display all the tweets that included the hashtag.

 

It was a smart marketing idea. Customers would generate free content for Starbucks and flood the internet with warm and fuzzy messages about the upcoming holidays and their favorite Starbucks drinks. The messages wouldn’t just appear online but also on a big screen visible to many ice skaters, coffee drinkers at the ice rink café, museumgoers, and passersby. And inappropriate messages would be weeded out by a moderation filter, so the holiday spirit—and its association with warm Starbucks drinks—would prevail.

 

It was a Saturday evening in mid-December, and everything at the ice rink was going well—for a while. Then, unbeknownst to Starbucks, the content filter broke, and messages like these began to appear on the giant screen:

The messages were referring to a recent controversy that involved the use of legal tax-avoidance tactics by Starbucks.

 

Kate Talbot, a community organizer in her early twenties, took a photo of the screen with her phone and tweeted it with these words: “Oh dear, Starbucks have a screen showing their #spreadthecheer tweets at the National History Museum.” Soon enough Talbot’s own tweet showed up on the screen. So she sent another one: “Omg now they are showing my tweet! Someone PR should be on this . . . #spreadthecheer #Starbucks #payyourtaxes.”News of the ongoing fiasco spread quickly over Twitter and encouraged even more people to get involved. “Turns out a Starbucks in London is displaying on a screen any tweet with the #spreadthecheer hashtag,” one man tweeted. “Oh this will be fun.”

The avalanche of tweets was unstoppable.Starbucks found itself in Chick Perrow’s world.

Social media is a complex system. It’s made up of countless people with many different views and motives. It’s hard to know who they are and what they will make of a particular campaign. And it’s hard to predict how they might react to a mistake like the glitch of Starbucks’ moderation filter. Kate Talbot responded by taking a photo of the screen and sharing it. Others then reacted to the news that any tweet using the right hashtag would be displayed at a prominent location. And then traditional media outlets reacted to the blizzard of tweets. They published reports of how the PR stunt backfired, so the botched campaign became mainstream news and reached even more people. These were unintended interactions between the glitch in the content filter, Talbot’s photo, other Twitter users’ reactions, and the resulting media coverage.

 

When the content filter broke, it increased tight coupling because the screen now pulled in any tweet automatically. And the news that Starbucks had a PR disaster in the making spread rapidly on Twitter—a tightly coupled system by design. At first, just a few people shared the information, then some of their followers shared it, too, and then the followers of those followers, and so on. Even after the moderation filter was fixed, the slew of negative tweets continued. And there was nothing Starbucks could do to stop them.

 

From Meltdown by Chris Clearfield and András Tilcsik. Used with the permission of the publisher, Penguin Press. Copyright © 2018 by Chris Clearfield and András Tilcsik.

 

*If you’re looking for the perfect gift for your friends and family, why not buy them a copy of Meltdown? It’s the perfect book to cozy up with as we bring 2020, a banner year for catastrophe, to a close.

 

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What’s your niche?

 

My friend Oscar Velasco-Schmitz owns and runs Dockside Cannabis, a retail cannabis establishment. We had a fascinating conversation on my podcast.

 

Though Dockside is licensed and legal in Seattle, Oscar and his partners run a business that is, from a federal perspective, engaged in “an industrial act of civil disobedience.”

 

Despite that, they still have to think about all the things that normal businesses think about: branding, supply chain, health and safety, salaries, store design, and one of the most important considerations for any business: niche.

 

Dockside’s mission is to provide a delightful cannabis retail experience for the NPR listener.

 

Understanding that niche helps Dockside make decisions that cascade through their business. Their stores are rustic and airy. Their staff mirror their diverse customer demographic. And, by concentrating on a niche, Dockside continually expands their understanding of what their customers want.

 

The power of a niche shouldn’t be understated—but many firm owners (myself included!) struggle to embrace one. It feels downright scary to decline work. After all, doesn’t it make sense to keep our options open?

 

In short: no.

 

Consider a family law practitioner that I work with. She runs a thriving practice that focuses on collaborative divorce. Focus like that allows her to put all of her energies into understanding and serving her ideal customer. She still receives inquiries from clients who want litigated divorces, but she knows that saying yes to litigated cases drains her energy and moves her away from a process that she embraces and believes in.

 

For years, I struggled to articulate my niche. “I work with curious people?” “I help leaders build the capacity to manage complexity?”

 

That still describes what I do, but now I do it in a specific context: I help law firms and legal departments embrace uncertainty to change for the better.

 

For me, that doesn’t mean that I won’t do other kinds of work. Meltdown resonates with a lot of folks with engineering brains, so I still get really exciting opportunities to work with engineering and technology leaders.

 

But it does mean that I invest my efforts in understanding and connecting with my ideal customer—from solo law offices to Fortune 100 firms. I generate content specifically for these practitioners (on organizational change and goal setting, for example). And I grow my skills in ways that solve the kinds of problems that attorneys and innovators in this space have.

 

In many ways, it’s been scary for me to niche down. Curiosity is one of my superpowers—but it also dilutes my focus. I’ve had anxiety around closing doors. Will I, for example, still have “standing” (whatever that means) to write another book that appeals to a larger audience?

 

But my experience (and those of many professionals that I’ve worked with) is just the opposite. Niching down provides focus and the ability to grow faster because I’m encountering more of clients’ real problems (and getting more concentrated experience solving them).

 

Finally, I think that finding a niche is something that applies to professionals who work for someone else, too. Committing to sharpening a valuable skill set (whether that’s data science or management) will give you the ability to work on problems of increasing import. And, in many ways, the corporate world offers more flexibility to apply those skills to different kinds of problems. But the deep expertise is portable.

 

So… what’s your niche?

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What do you get when you think in systems?

 

I recently interviewed my friend and mentor Roger Martin for my podcast. One of the things that we talked about—and a subject at the heart of Meltdown—was how thinking in systems can benefit anyone managing a complex problem.

 

Or, as MIT’s John Sterman puts it, “there are no side-effects—just effects.” Everything we do has consequences. It’s up to us to understand what those consequences are.

 

Much of Roger’s writing is about how businesses (and, with his latest book, society writ large) think too narrowly about their actions.

 

We see this in science a lot. Take kudzu. Introduced to stop erosion, it ended up outcompeting other ground cover plants with its stronger root systems, worsening the problem. Or how the use of antibiotics—practically a modern miracle—creates resistant bacteria.

 

By thinking in systems—and recognizing that many “side” effects are delayed—we can gain the ability to better understand what may come.

 

Take a professional services firm that I worked with recently. Wanting to increase revenue, they bolstered their sales team with a set of capable, lateral hires designed to surface more high-value opportunities for the firm.

 

Their strategy worked… sort of. The additional sales capabilities generated more highly qualified leads. But the firm hadn’t invested in the business development group that structured and priced engagements. As a result, that team was backlogged, overworked, and on the road to burnout.

 

If you can think in systems, you can avoid these kinds of mistakes. You can figure out how your changes will cascade through your system, so that you anticipate future consequences like bottlenecks.

 

As a result, you’ll be able to better capitalize on opportunities.

 

What’s an unexpected effect that you’ve seen unfold in your work?

 

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