Notes for Keine Sinnfragen, Bitte
Kernpunkt zu Permanent Note — siehe Abschnitte unten.
Source: Keine Sinnfragen bitte! - Gunter Dueck
Research with early results get abandoned and leads to inertia
Research is done at an early stage and leads to insights that cannot be leveraged immediately because it in addition will need infrastructure and market forming. For example solar panels years ago where cost intense in production and companies abandoned it.
Companies who experience that often resignate and don't touch this area again. 1
Danger
The wrong learning in companies - Don’t touch that topic again. We already failed last time.
Connection with About Wardley Maps through:
- Inertia as a main Climatic Pattern
- Stages of evolution for products, services, data,…
Excellence leading to blindness
Important
Do you know (all) the startups around you that can kill your business?
And do you seriously consider their approach? Companies must avoid positioning as superior based on their current success 2.
Jeering about Tesla in 2017 and this links well to Only the Paranoid Survive (connection point - discovering Strategic Inflection Points early on).
About meetings
Tip
Just don’t go to meetings where you don’t know the value provided. 3
As simple as this sounds, still most join meaningless meetings where purpose it unclear, no value is created and life time is wasted. Dare to do not go there and better spent your time valuable.
- Use Liberating Structures for creating meaningful working sessions
- Make meetings optional (connection withScrum 3.0)
- Schwarmdumm
Hint
When there is no real own interest in a topic by meeting attendees a discussion can drag on (for months). 4
It needs trained facilitators also among the leadership team to steer meetings properly and detect nonsense discussions and deep dives.
I can help you with:
About presentations
Attention
Presentations are a waste of time & effort and create marginal outcomes, if at all 5
- Presentation must be tailored to the culture, sub-culture of the audience. It does not matter that much to follow best practices for good presentations but one needs to match the cultural expectations
- Time invested in preparing a presentation often exceeds time spent with the audience.
- especially with distracting incentives like airtime, status lead to blown presentations.
Be aware of your Lighthouse Projects
The shiny new tool, the shiny new project, the shiny new approach. By looking at how others are doing it, companies copy approaches. Eg. working with a “Turn-Agile-Tiger-Team”. New approaches create some fresh air, bring some new ideas but as soon as it needs the real work to scale and create value it is not longer that interesting and is stopped.
Warning
Misleading behavior: Instead of now tackling it and really creating value, let’s think about what else might be something new to try out next
Important
One needs to consider that the costs of scaling it to production ready are often 10-100 times higher than the first “promising” prototype. 6
Systemic underdelegation
Quote
The person who joins a therapy is often the one who can stand a situation the least. 7
Important to notice and raise awareness on a topic. These anchoring people are important to work with and realise a need for change early on.
In tough times highly paid professionals start taking on lower level work to prove the need for them. Work starts to travel up the hierarchy ladder. This contradicts that:
Quote
It is economical nonsense to highly paid professionals doing easy and lower paid tasks. 8
Process guerilla
Process empathy helps to detect when it is a good time to address and push a topic and get an easy and fast approval. And one needs to know about the pressure points.9
Performance Shaming
Danger
Setting high expectations & performances measurements on others leads to inferiority complex.
Still strong leadership problem shown since years via Gallup Engagement Index (DE)
- 15% inner resignation
- 15% strong
- remaining is indifferent and not highly engaged
About Flow, focus and problematic side effects
Important
When fully focussed only our brain should work! An additionally offended body is not helpful. 10
Different Brain Waves
- Delta waves (very low frequency) - Deep Sleep
- Theta waves (low frequency) - Creativity, Focus, Meditation, Learning
- Alpha waves (normal frequency) - relaxed, more inner focussed, learning also unconscious
- low beta waves - relaxed outward focussed attention, learning, high awareness
- medium beta waves - alerted, high outward focussed attention, high analytical intelligence efforts
- high beta waves - stress, too high activity, jumping thoughts (e.g. exams, high engaged conversations)
So based on waves:
- Creativity needs alpha, theta
- customer get togethers needs customers in low beta
- manager meeting often in beta alert
Tip
When in beta waves, better stop arguing and sleep over a decision.
Connection to Flow - der Weg zum Glück - Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
About Trust
trustworthiness = (credibility + reliability + familiarity) / selfishness [^13]
Connects well to The SPEED of Trust
Neurotic Leadership Programming
It is important to be aware of neurotic patterns especially in leadership positions. It challenges the assumption of Homo Oeconomicus. 11
- Direkt-Karriere - Gunter Dueck
- Abschied vom Homo Oeconomicus - Gunter Dueck
- Study Disordered Personalities at work (captured a copy below from Research Gate)
Some further quotes
Quote
Wenn der Chef nicht weiterweiß, kauf er sich Beraterscheiß 12
Quote
The art of content free communication 13
Linking
- Where Good Ideas Come From - Steven Johnson and at Blinkist
- Strategy and the Fat Smoker - David Maister
- The Trusted Advisor - David H Maister Robert Galford Charles Green
- The Character of Organizations - William Bridges
Footnotes
Footnotes
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Great example from Tesla outperforming competition within some years -Keine Sinnfragen bitte! - Gunter Dueck (p58) ↩
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Keine Sinnfragen bitte! - Gunter Dueck - Bore out in meetings? Just don’t go there (p71) ↩
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Keine Sinnfragen bitte! - Gunter Dueck - Das Elend der Präsentationen (p95) ↩
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Keine Sinnfragen bitte! - Gunter Dueck - Leuchtturmprojekte - wir sind schon am Anfang (p98) ↩