My Main Focus for 2012: Still Scaling-Up Excellence

I thought I would provide an update about what I am working on these days, and use it to get some ideas and advice from folks who read this blog.

2011 was a year of learning and thinking for me, which was necessary because 2010 was simply wild.  I had open heart surgery in April, Good Boss, Bad Boss was published in September, as was the paperback version of The No Asshole Rule -- both of which became New York Times bestsellers.   I spent 2011 doing a lot of talking, reading, and thinking about two future projects -- they are moving along, but it is always a slow process.  I am lucky to have a job where I don't have to rush to get things out before I am proud of them.

The first project remains in the early stages.  It follows from my focus on the intersection of humanity and performance in the workplace.  I would tell you more, but it is so ill-formed that I changed my mind about the exact focus several times last year and will likely do so several more times. The one thing I can say at this point is that, when I go back to all the stories people have told me about being a boss, working for bosses, and dealing with assholes, two themes come up over and over: 1. How crucial it is for people to feel as if they are treated with dignity and respect and  2. How important it is for people to be able to stand-up for themselves and others, to create conditions that enable dignity and respect, but to do so without being an asshole.   This first project may take years to reach fruition as my main focus now is on the second project -- which fits with my other work on innovation and organizational change.

My Stanford colleague Huggy Rao and I have been reading about, talking about and studying "scaling" for several years now -- the challenge of spreading and sustaining actions and mindsets across organizations and networks of people -- of spreading excellence or goodness from the few to the many.  This was my primary focus last year and will continue to be in 2012.  Huggy and I are now making serious progress on a book that digs into the topic.

Every book has a life of its own. This one took awhile to get moving, but it is now dominating our lives.  We seem to be in constant conversation with managers and executives from all kinds of industries about the topic (e.g., in recent weeks we've talked to executives from high tech firms, banks, and the hotel industry; administrators who run prisons; leaders of a big beer company; and school administrators -- this week we are swimming in founders of start-ups), we are teaching a fun and somewhat crazy class with 60 MBA and engineers on scaling-up excellence this term (I will blog more about this in the coming weeks), and the text for the book is now pouring out of our computers slowly but steadily.

Last year, HBR provided summaries of projects that a host of of business and management leaders would be taking on in 2011 -- including me.  The perspective Huggy and I are developing has become more refined and our ideas are now much sharper.  But the  "agenda" piece I wrote about a year ago still captures what we are trying to do pretty well. 

I said our goal was to finish the book in 2011. That didn't happen, but I am optimistic it will this year as we are moving along at a healthy clip. I repeat that description of our project completely (along with comments from the earlier version of this post, published here last year).  We would love any additional comments, suggestions, examples, or other ideas you have:

My Stanford Business School colleague Hayagreeva Rao and I are absorbed by why behavior spreads—within and between organizations, across networks of people, and in the marketplace. We've been reviewing academic research and theory on everything from the psychology of influence to social movements to how and why insects and fish swarm.

We are also doing case studies. We're documenting Mozilla's methods for spreading Firefox (its open-source web browser); the Institute for Healthcare Improvement's "100,000 Lives" campaign (an apparently successful effort to eliminate 100,000 preventable deaths in U.S. hospitals); the spread of microbrewing in the United States; an organizational change and efficiency movement within Wyeth Pharmaceuticals (now part of Pfizer); and the scaling of employee engagement at JetBlue Airways. And we're examining case studies by others, including the failure of the Segway to scale and the challenges faced by Starbucks as a result of scaling too fast and too far.

Our goal is to write a book in 2011 that provides useful principles for managers, entrepreneurs, and anyone else who wants to scale constructive behavior. Because we are in the messy middle, I can't tell how the story will end. But we believe we're making progress, and we're excited about a few lines of thought.

The first is the link between beliefs and behavior. A truism of organizational change is that if you change people's minds, their behavior will follow. Psychological research on attitude change shows this is a half-truth (albeit a useful one); there is a lot of evidence that if you get people to change their actions, their hearts and minds will follow.

The second theme is "hot emotions and cool solutions." As Rao shows in his research on social movements, a hallmark of ideas that scale is that leaders first create "hot" emotions to fire up attention, motivation, and often righteous anger. Then they provide "cool," rational solutions for people to implement. In the 100,000 Lives campaign, for example, hot emotions were stirred up by a heart-wrenching speech at the kickoff conference. The patient-safety activist Sorrel King described how her 18-month-old daughter, Josie, had died at Johns Hopkins Hospital as the result of a series of preventable medical errors. Her speech set the stage for IHI staffers to press hospitals to implement six sets of simple, evidence-based practices that would prevent deaths.

The third is what we call the ergonomics of scaling—the notion that when behaviors scale, it is partly because they've been made easy, with the bother of engaging in them removed. In developing Firefox in the early days, Mozilla's 15 or so employees were able to compete against monstrous Microsoft (and produce a browser with fewer bugs than Internet Explorer) by dividing up the chores and using a technology that made it easy for more than 10,000 emotionally committed volunteers to do "bug catching" in the code. Mozilla now has more than 500 employees, but it is still minuscule compared with Microsoft, and those bug catchers are still hard at work every night.

Again, we would love to hear your ideas:  Cases we should dig into, research on scaling and organizational change we should know about, and methods you've used in your organization to scale good behavior and descale bad. We would love to hear it all.

Comments

[MadsenMary]

I've always been fascinated with how to understand social interaction. In my opinion people absolutely change their hearts and minds when their actions change. Isn't that the whole idea behind developing habits? Research says that habits can be formed over a period of time by repeating a process. In this case employees repeating an action can make them start to internalize it and stick with it.
http://www.bellevue.edu/

[davidburkus]

Looking forward to the new book whenever it comes out. Keep shipping.

[Dr. Bob (FP)]

I'm in the health IT field & this well regarded chief medical information officer's (Ed Marx) recent blog post on HIStalk leads me to think he is either a disciple of yours or a great example of parallel evolution - "The Bad Boss" - http://histalk2.com/2012/02/01/cio-unplugged-2112/

[Benjamin]

I think this is a great project. I particularly like Ddebow's idea of looking into how the research around memes may apply. Looking forward to reading the results.

[BryanB]

FYI, more evidence of the importance of bosses as well as the process of behavior spread: http://bit.ly/ffeSJV

[Amy Wilson]

Hi Bob,
I would be interested to see how a mindset of inclusivity vs. exclusivity affects scale. My theory is that inclusivity scales good behavior and exclusivity inhibits it. Sounds like a fun 2011!

[Flavian]

Bob

Scaling and how people change their behaviour...

You need to look into the Transition Movement in the UK. Transition Town movement is primarily focused on energy decent, how we live in a post peak oil world. The biggest single challenge facing the western world.

How the Transition movement is going about presenting the case of Peak Oil as a way of understanding Climate Change and our roles in it. The totally inclusive nature of the movement, it sees all parts of society as critical in the energy decent.

The way they are combining such massive and complicated problems of peak oil and climate change with what people can do at the local level to create local resilience is inspiring. They are trying to create a vision for a better low energy future.

Have a look at Transition Town Totnes.

Rob Hopkins is a key person in this movement he has a book out called "The Transition Handbook - Creating local sustainable communities beyond oil dependency."

Some web sites:

http://transitionculture.org/

http://www.transitionnetwork.org/

[career descriptions]

Thanks a ton Bob...this seems like a fantastic project...

[Kate Nasser, The People-Skills Coach]

I am very interested in your 2011 project Bob "the challenge of spreading and sustaining actions and mindsets across networks of people."

My consulting work, especially with technology departments, in major corporations puts me right in this zone.

Looking forward to your posts and books on it.
Thanks,
Kate

[Nick McLeroy]

I like this topic particularly because I work in a hectic business environment that leverages IT tools to communicate with business customers. To over simplify I see that everyone has the same goals when it comes to specific projects but when it comes to executing theses goals it seems we all get stuck viewing and implementing things from our own views. This tells me that when it comes to change driving a common vision and communicating that common vision appropriately is important. I also believe that allowing people to do things their way even if it is not my way provides people a level of empowerment that is important to the process, it fosters ownership, albeit false and encourages commitment. When or management controls too much even with best intentions they not only give themselves a headache but lose a lot of non-tangle benefits.

Another component is more subconscious and it involves fostering an environment that is conducive to the work you want done. For example if you want people to come to work early then provide coffee, in a break room. If you want people to interact and share ideas more then provide areas where people can congregate. If you want more team work then facilitate going out to lunch with each other or team building exercises. Have people put name tags on the outside of their cubes with a simple note about themselves.

It is like planting a garden once you get it going it will take on a life of it's own and then you will have to deal with new challenges.

[David Wakelyn]

Bob: This is a HUGE issue in the education sector and you might want to think about a case on a charter school network like KIPP that's trying to grow from 2 schools to 100+.

There's also a worthwhile article by Cynthia Coburn you might want to consult. She finds that scaling up has to be more than numbers. Part of what helps is local ownership-- in schools, that translates to: can you take a research-based curriculum, break pieces apart and make it your own?

Here's the cite: Rethinking Scale:Moving Beyond Numbers to Deep and Lasting Change
by Cynthia E. Coburn Educational Researcher, Vol. 32, No. 6, pp. 3–12

[Philip Viola]

The study of scaling is needed in this period of difficult change. I've taught an organizational behavior course for many years and, from what I've found, there is the circular dependency described but there seems to be a slight bias toward changing behavior having a more positive correlation to actual change than changing the mind. Humans tend to find it easier to develop reasons to explain changes in behavior than to actually do the things they know they should do but do not do.

[davidburkus]

I would love to see the results. Please keep us all informed as you're writing.

[Heidi Grant Halvorson]

Hi Bob! What a great book idea. The first thing that popped into my mind reading this was work on goal contagion - how just observing another person pursuing a goal leads you to non-consciously adopt it, under the right circumstances. There's a great 2004 JPSP paper by Aarts, Hassin & Gollwitzer on contagious goals.

Good luck!

[The_earplug]

I've recommended it to you in a tweet, but I'll repeat: The Checklist Manifesto presents a really straightforward manner for creating easily scalable best practices in situations where a) precision matters and b) it's easy to forget something crucial. For example, the safe surgery checklist (http://www.who.int/patientsafety/safesurgery/en/) is improving surgical care around the world, with different versions that are specific to regions, countries, and even individual hospitals.

Regarding Humanity in the Workplace, it sounds similar to what's espoused in Bury My Heart at Conference Room B.

[Denise Lai]

Thank you Bob. This is exactly what we need: codified concepts that support a cultural shift so that we can all start expected respect when we behave good. Being embarrassed for doing the right thing, not being embarrassed for doing the wrong thing...we need this shift that values good behavior and rewards it.

[Ddebow]

Bob - sounds like a great project.

A few thoughts:

1. The Hot/Cold emotion sounds similar to the Elephant/Rider metaphor that the Heath's wrote about in Switch. Great book. http://www.amazon.com/Switch-Change-Things-When-Hard/dp/0385528752

2. If you have not already (you probably have), the one book I'd suggest checking out is "Diffusion of Innovations" by Everett Rogers. Thinking about "good behavior" as an innovation - a meme that has to spread - and seeing if there are parallels to the work Roger's did. http://www.amazon.com/Diffusion-Innovations-5th-Everett-Rogers/dp/0743222091/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1294157736&sr=1-1

3. I love the point about "ergonomics of scaling". I know software can't change everything, but in this area, well designed software can change cultures. i wrote a bit about this here... hope it helps. http://blog.rypple.com/2010/10/software-can-change-cultures/

Let us know if we can help with some case studies... I have a few ideas.

[k.sol]

"...if you change people's minds, their behavior will follow ... there is a lot of evidence that if you get people to change their actions, their hearts and minds will follow."

Also known as Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, and quite effective for depression. Change thoughts, change behavior -- upward cycle.

[BryanB]

In terms of organizations, I think there is a meaningful differentiation between driving change and change that occurs organically. Driving change more often than not involves forcing people to confront an issue or accept a solution--people don't like to change and usually need to be uprooted. On the other hand, some changes (e.g., a new technology) "catch on" in a unexpected and somewhat random way, and these changes spread due to their popularity. This is somewhat reflective of the top-down versus bottom-up approach to change, and there is likely several hybrids.

I view the psychology of sustaining in a similar fashion: people choose to continue behaving in a certain way either because systems/procedures are in place to ensure that they do, or because they obtain satisfaction from behaving that way.

Can't wait to see how this turns out!

[Matthew Wong]

Can't wait to see your new book, specially on Hot emotion and cool solution, since I like Naomi Klein's work alot too.