Dave's Whiteboard

I’m not a fan of catchy for the sake of catchy, which probably explains why “celebrity” is not a word that appeals to me.  I am a fan of titles, invitations, or openings that are succinct, intriguing, and mnemonic.

One example comes in the first paragraph of Unhappy Meals, Michael Pollan’s January 2007 essay in The New York Times Magazine:

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

Definitely succinct.  To me, intriguing–well, of course you should eat food.  (Pollan advocates avoiding processed and manufactured food. He points out that produce doesn’t usually come with a label shouting “healthy!”)  As for mnemonic (in the sense of assisting memory), his three phrases epitomize the three main arguments in his essay.

I’ve written about weight management (here and here and here) and tried to explain effective, evidence-based approaches as a form of performance management.  Perhaps that’s made me all the more receptive to an item in Obesity Panacea. Part of the PLoS (Public Library of Science) blog network, OP examines “the science (or lack thereof) behind popular weight loss products,” as well as discussing other items related to weight.

The item? Can you limit your sitting and sleeping to just 23.5 hours a day?

Peter Janiszewski, who writes the blog along with Travis Saunders, highlights a video by Dr. Mike Evans of the Health Design Lab at the University of Toronto.  Evans effectively poses his question in a succinct, intriguing way, and then offering a summary of evidence to support the treatment he recommends.

I find myself wondering how much practical information I could share like this, together with evidence, in less than 10 minutes.  (Personally, I’d leave out the sketching-on-a-whiteboard–the images are engaging, but for me the sped-up drawing lost its charm quickly.  That’s nitpicking, though.)  In terms of mnemonic effect, the title and the recommendation definitely stay with me.

I’ve been thinking about the less-than-obvious struggle we (meaning “I”) have with behavior and accomplishment.  Behavior is what you do; accomplishment is what gets done.  In the workplace, people go on a lot about accomplishment. They want results: closed sales, increased share, service delivered at lower cost, and so on.  But people also tend to praise and reinforce behavior, even when its connection to accomplishment is tenuous.

Let’s get something to eat

Think about what you see as critical to quality for your workday lunchtime experience.  For me, at least in part, that involves:

• Acceptable food (Bombay Bistro is great; I don’t demand two Michelin stars)
• A space that’s clean (I don’t want to clean a table)
• Room to eat without bumping other people
• A wait time that’s less than 10% of total time

I think many managers of cafeterias, coffee shops, and similar faster-food places would sign up for those as performance standards for their business.  That’s one reason they often have the touch-screen cash registers: the cashier can punch in items, and the machine does the pricing.  The idea is to produce a worthwhile accomplishment: fast, accurate billing.

In her new book, Design for How People Learn, Julie Dirksen talks about fast-food drink dispensers.  Sometimes, she says, you get a really skillful food worker:

She can start a drink pouring a the soda machine, turn to ring a customer, and know exactly how long she has before she needs to turn around and keep the cup from overfilling.  That’s the sign of an expert who really knows their job, and has internalized that knowledge over time.

That kind of skill is expensive to acquire, which explains the drink dispensers with size buttons. A worker can press “large” and move on to another part of the order.  The dispenser isn’t (usually) going to overfill the cup, and so it helps him produce a high-quality result–a fast, accurate meal–with less deliberate investment in skill development.

We presume accomplishment; we notice behavior

We tend to disparage that button-pushing, though. We like interacting with high-skill behavior.  It’s enjoyable and maybe reassuring to have our order handled by someone who’s clearly expert in her work.   Even if we get our order just as quickly from the press-the-size worker, we almost feel as if he’s cheating.  It’s the on-the-job equivalent of “he had to look it up.”

If you disagree, how do you feel about cashiers who have trouble making change on their own?  Admit it–it drives you nuts, because people ought to be able to make change.  And how hard can it be?

I tend to agree.  Making change seems like a straightforward application of match.  But I worked for years in a job where I had to make change, often. And I’ve had to teach people to make change accurately, for the sake of the customer and the sake of the business. If someone isn’t fluent at making change, it takes time to develop that fluency.

You know the project-management nostrum: things can be fast, good, and cheap.  Pick the two you want.

In the context of a fast(er) food business, it makes sense to have a cash register that does the change-computing task.  Otherwise, you have to hire people with more skill, or else devote time and energy to helping them acquire that skill.  (At the end of this post, I’ve written up one method for counting change.)

Change and accomplishment

You’d think that any fast-food place would want employees who can count change.  And maybe that’s true–the place wants them, but can’t always find them.  So it needs to hone in more on what the real accomplishment is: is it accurate change that’s handed to the customer quickly?  Do you need to crank in the behavior involved ( “employee calculates” versus “employee uses a tool” )?

Figuring out what results matter, so you can work on delivering them, is ultimately what work is about.  It’s easy to latch onto behavior, because it’s usually observable and seems obvious.  As Robert Mager says, people really oughta wanna do this.  I think accomplishment is a better guide, though it does require you to question assumptions and perhaps discard predispositions.

Change–it isn’t easy.  Take it from a guy who once said to a customer, “I’m sorry, I don’t have change for a ten, but I do have change for a twelve.”

Bonus Feature: the Count Up Twice method for making change

This example uses a small cash purchase, such as a fast-food meal, for which the customer is paying in cash, with one or more bills totaling more than the price of the meal.

1. State the amount of the sale.  (“That comes to $7.32.”)
2. Accept the customer’s payment.
3. Check the payment and state the amount.   (“Out of twenty dollars.”)
4. Set the payment down without putting it into the individual register spaces.
5. Make change by counting up to yourself from the amount of the sale as you remove money from the register.
• That’s $7.32… 33… 34… 35…
• 7.40… 45… 50…
• 7.75… 8…
• 9… 10…
• $20.00.
6. Count the change again for the customer, starting with the amount of the sale. Give the customer each coin and bill as you work toward the amount tendered.  Say the amounts out loud.
• That’s $7.32… 33… 34… 35…
• 7.40… 45… 50...
• 7.75… 8 …
• 9… 10…
• $20.00.
7. Thank the customer.
8. As the customer leaves, put the payment into the proper cash register spaces.

Note that I haven’t spelled out the rule of thumb that you should move to the next coin or bill size when the total so far allows you to. And I haven’t addressed complications like what to do if the customer offers bills and coins as payment ($10.50 for that $7.32 meal).  Nor have I address cash-register use, underpayment, or attempts by tricksters to trip up the cashier in mid-count.

CC-licensed images:
Cash register keys by zizzybaloobah.
Generic text by Yongho Kim.

About a year and a half ago, I decided to try losing weight by following the Weight Watchers program that my wife had enrolled in. After a few months, I began to view weight management as a kind of performance improvement project (see this post and this one).

(Here on my Whiteboard, I focus mainly on topics like workplace learning and performance improvement, areas I’ve worked in for decades.  No one in his right mind would pay me for advice on cardiovascular health, weight-change dynamics, or the physiology of nutrition and exercise.  I’m extrapolating from my experience to make a point about accomplishments at work, not telling people they should eat less or exercise more.)

I’m no longer such big deal

Although I didn’t say so at the time, my ultimate goal was to lose 60 pounds, 50 of them in the first year. Some 20 months after I started, I’ve lost 43. 

You could say “that’s great!”  Or you could argue I’ve fallen short of my goal.  I’ve felt especially frustrated by months-long stretches where I didn’t seem to lose any weight at all.  This in spite of what I think of as the bank-account approach to weight: there are 3,500 calories in a pound, so reducing your daily intake by 500 calories should have you losing a pound a week, give or take.

The New York Times recently ran Why Even Resolute Dieters often Fail, in which Jane E. Brody reported on a study by Dr. Kevin D. Hall and his associates. The study, which appeared in the August 27 issue of The Lancet, makes a number of striking points.  (By the way, that link to The Lancet leads to a summary of the study.  For the complete study, use the free registration option at the bottom of the summary.)

Among those points:

• That 3,500-calorie model leads to “drastically overestimated expectations for weight loss.” Overestimated, as in predicting “about 100% greater weight loss” than the model that Hall and his colleagues set forth.
• Weight loss requires much more time than many people expect (and more time than many diet-plan promotions imply). 

Although my 60-pound goal is reasonable for me, Hall’s study suggests I’ll see only ”half of the [desired] weight change being achieved in about 1 year, and 95%…in about 3 years.”

I’ve read Brody’s article several times, and gone over the Hall study in detail; they helped me understand my own situation.  More to the point here, they offer me an opportunity to compare weight management with improving performance at work.

Training is like dieting: not a bad way to start

When I say “training,” I’m usually thinking of a deliberate effort to close an existing, important gap between current skills and those required for a newcomer to achieve acceptable results in the workplace.  I’ve worked on lots of projects where such training made sense for people like reservation agents, field salespeople, and health-claims adjustors. 

What I think these projects have in common is that it was possible to help people gain new skills so they could produe acceptable performance in a relatively short time.  They aren’t going to be master performers right away, but they’ll be good enough for now.  And they’ll be more likely to improve in the future, because they’ll no longer be complete novices.

What such workers tend to have in common is that they have lots in common: they do similar work,  they have similar job-relevant experience, they have similar skills, and they lack similar skills.  Often they’re in a few physical locations (like, say, central offices or reservation centers), or the organization can assemble them for training (classrooms, workshops) or assemble training for them (online learning).

As for the skills they need to acquire, those are predominantly procedural: how to check availability, how to manage customer accounts, how to conduct intake interviews.

How is this like dieting?  If you’re overweight (e.g., have a BMI over 25) or obese (over 30) and you’d rather not be, there are lots of approaches you can take at the outset.  Noting your caloric intake and decreasing it, so that you’re not taking in as many as you expend, is one approach that may be good enough for starters.  If you don’t have other serious health issues, and if a principal cause of your current weight is a caloric imbalance, then a deliberate reduction in overall calories–a diet–will likely produce results.

Don’t just take my word for it.  “All reduced energy diets have a smiliar effect on body-fat loss in the short run,” Hall’s study says.  “The assumption that a ‘calorie is a calorie’ is a reasonable first estimation…over short-time periods.”

Even in that short term, you have choices that are more effective and choices that are less so.   For example, the real-world Mayo Clinic Diet (as opposed to the “miraculous,” grapefruit-laden one) for example, will likely produce better results than the kind of “diet” that has you eating nothing but rutabaga and rockfish. 

To me, that’s analagous to the difference between “any training is better than no training” and training based on task analysis, needs analysis, and effective ways to help people learn.

From apprentice to journeyman (Deterline was right)

Thus far it seems that Brody, Hall, and I are in agreement, which is pretty classy company for me.  It doesn’t seem to matter much how you start on weight management.  Many different paths will produce results that are good enough in the short term. 

In the workplace, though, short-term thinking rarely pays off long term.  Likewise with job-related skill: good enough for a novice, after a while, isn’t good enough.  If you think of the newcomer to a job as an apprentice, you want him or her to eventually move to the journeyman level: more skilled, able to deal with a wider range of problems, and competent in skills that are not simply procedural.

That’s not easy.  As Bill Deterline once observed, “Things take longer than they do.”  Part of the path from apprentice to journeyman is learning to recognize and deal with complexity.  In the weight-management world, here’s some of the complexity revealed by Hall’s study:

• When an overweight person begins consuming fewer calories than he expends, he loses weight–but the rate of loss slows as the ratio of fat to lean in his body changes.  (Weight loss is not linear; steady progress is unlikely.)
• The same increase in caloric intake will result in more weight gain for an overweight person than for someone not overweight–and for the overweight person, more of the gain will be body fat.  (You risk regaining, and you’ll regain quickly.)

Here’s how Hall’s study suggests you think about goals for weight loss:

We propose an approximate rule of thumb for an average overweight adult: every change of energy intake of 100 kJ per day will lead to an eventual bodyweight chage of about 1 kg (equivalently, 10 kcal per day per pound of weight change) with half of the weight change being achieved in about 1 year and 95% of the weight change in about 3 years.

How does that rule applies to my original goal?  Let’s assume I was consuming just enough calories to maintain my starting weight.  Yeah, let’s assume that.  To lose 60 pounds would mean:

• Reducing my intake by 600 calories a day (a kilocalorie is the scientific term for what dieters call a calorie), thus…
• Losing 30 of those pounds in the first year, and in theory…
• Losing 58 pounds–by the end of the third year.

From Hall’s viewpoint, I’m on track–I’m more than halfway to my goal, and I’ve managed to maintain that loss.  In a sense, I’m no longer a weight-management apprentice.  

What happens after a good start

I said that training is like dieting.  But I’ve implied (and I’m now stating outright) that most of the time neither one is sufficient for long-term results.  “Diet” in the traditional sense is a short-term planned restriction on caloric intake in order to produce weight loss.  “Training” in the traditional organizational sense tends to be a group-focused, short-term effort to provide people with mainly procedural skills that they currently lack, in order to produce acceptable results on the job.

Just in case it’s unclear, I keep harping on “acceptable results” because if training doesn’t relate to on-the-job accomplishment, I don’t quite get why the organization bothers.  I keep harping on a lack of skill because if people already have the skill needed but the organization is “training” them anyway, mostly what people learn is that the organization isn’t all that bright.

The Brody article and the Hall study reinforce what I think of as a movement from losing weight to maintaining health.  On the job front, it’s like the difference between a hotel employee’s using the hotel reservation system correctly and that same person successfully resolving a customer service problem.

Even entry-level positions involve some judgment, some decision-making, some degree of tacit knowledge.  You can’t train for these things specifically; you need to develop models, offer examples, offer opportunities to practice and reflect.

Thus Hall’s 3-year timeframe is one tool that an individual can use to set his or her own expectations regarding the rate of weight loss and the likelihood of plateaus, along with similar research-based principles like these:

• We can’t estimate a person’s “initial energy requirements” (daily caloric need) without an uncertainty of 5% or even greater.  (Your reduced-calorie target is only an estimate.)
• People are often inaccurate in describing or recording their food intake, either before or during a weight-loss program.  (Your munchage may vary.)

As Brody points out in her New York Times article:

Studies of the more than 5,000 participatns in the National Weight Control Registry have shows that those who lost a significant amount of weight and kept it off for many years relied primarily on two tactics: continuing physical activity and regular checks on body weight.

How about that?  Behavioral change, the specifics of which vary, the results of which are higher levels of caloric consumption.  And a monitoring system to track data and assist in further analysis. 

(I weigh myself at the same time every day that I’m home, and have done so for 20 months.  Not only does the momentum of the practice itself carry me along, but I have a good sense for what the typical variation is.  Of course, if I’ve gained weight, that’s just a fluctuation, but if I’ve lost weight, that’s progress.  You go with the evaluation system that makes the most sense.)

I do think there’s a role for formal organizational learning (in my mind, a much better term than “training”)–though it’s a narrow role, in the same way that diet-as-restriction has a narrow role in managing overall health.  Both may in certain circumstances be good enough to start with, but both are likely to fall short over time.

In other words, I believe that letting new hires figure out the inventory-management system for themselves is probably a suboptimal approach.  You’re deluding yourself, though, if you think you can procedurize your way to workplace mastery .  If you’re trying to increase your organization’s effectiveness, you have to do better than telling people to eat more grapefruit.

CC-licensed images:
Balance-beam scale by wader.
Car-hire image by Send Chocolate (Tina Cruz).
Nighttime road by Axel Schwenke.

I’ve been trying to get better control over the projects I work on and the data related to those projects.  So this isn’t me avoiding work; this is me reprocessing by talking about the challenges I felt and then about how I’ve tried to address them.

What I had wanted to do was:

• Reduce my paper clutter
• Reduce my digital clutter, which felt nearly as heavy
• Reclaim my workspace, both physical and virtual
• Seize more of the potential of electronic notes than I had so far

That sounds like mainly organization and housekeeping, but if you rise above the roadway, it’s managing.  I wanted to do better at managing both work and non-work projects.  I figured if I could accomplish any of those things in the list, and especially more than one at once, I’d be far more likely to get a project done.   Or at least get it moving.

What would matter?

At GE, we talked about CTQs: the critical-to-quality items that represent a customer’s view about what’s most important for a product or service.  My own CTQs for doing better included:

• Retention–whatever’s in the system is ultimately in my own custody, not solely a wisp in someone else’s cloud bank.
• Ubiquity–a system that I could use in my office, on a client site, or somewhere else.
• Dwell time–an increased ability for me to stay with the task at hand.

Was that a wrong note?

For some time, I’ve used Evernote, which modestly says you can capture anything, access it anywhere, and find things fast.  (Optional side trip: Evernote’s 90-second intro: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQP0gkPnEcY .)

Evernote lets you create individual notes, store them in virtual notebooks, and access them on your own computer, from any computer, or through a smartphone–hey, ubiquity!  The database with your notes is stored not only on their servers (which you don’t own) but also on your PC, with automatic synchronization. You can cloudify if you like, but having a local copy of the database helps satisfy my CTQ for retention.

I’ve used Evernote for more than two years, mainly in that unfocused, plunge-right-in, that’s-kind-of-cool way. (A particular favorite: because I sketch a lot of ideas on flipcharts, I love being able to snap a picture, transfer it to Evernote, and later search for text in the image.)

Most of the time, though, I was also making multiple notebooks and creating a myriad of tags.  When it comes to tagging, some people believe that enough is enough and too much is plenty, but for me there’s a real problem with diminishing returns.  (We’ll skip over the issue of typos, as well as the pluralization dilemma: Is the tag finance or finances?)

I’d been cruising a predictable arc, from an initial everything-fits enthusiasm to a distressing suspicion that I’d reinvented the junk drawer.

To be is to be done?

On a separate track, I’d been reading David Allen’s Getting Things Done.  I approached this book with hesitation, or more accurately evangeloskepticism, because of the… well, let’s say, the ardor of some GTD adherents.  The people who always say “GTD.” If they were Apple users, they’d be the ones who care about the code name for the next operating system.

Messy and distractable I may be, but I appreciate the advantages of a system, even if I sometimes appreciate it from afar.  Allen’s approach is more about thinking systematically than about particular tools–though you can, if you desire, buy a set of 43 plastic file folders for only $39.95 (plus shipping).  So I’ve been applying elements of that system, and adjusting the way I work with my paper files and with Evernote, and I’m happy with how the results look so far.

Different ways to see your project

Two useful, intertwined concepts: first, a task is something you can complete in a single chunk of time. ”Peel the carrots” is a task.  If you’re like me, “do the grocery shopping” is also a task; I may have a big list of items, but I get them in one trip.

At my house, we have a cluster of grocery-related tasks: plan dinner  for the week, check the ingredients we need, build a grocery list, shop (ideally, with the list).  Getting Things Done calls such a cluster a project: “any desired result that requires more than one action step.”

Which leads to the second useful concept: you don’t do a project, you do the next step.  From a manage-your-work perspective, think of the project as the goal you want to achieve (groceries purchased, workshop delivered, kitchen remodeled).  You revisit the project to generate thoughts about what the next steps might be.  When you don’t have any more steps, the project’s done.

So I create what I call a project page, which is a highfalutin name for a note on which I put a short description of the goal of the project, along with a timeframe (however nebulous) and the tag I’ve chose for that project.  I’ll also use the project page to jot notes about ideas related to the project.  That means the project page becomes a kind of greenhouse where idea seedlings can germinate until they turn into action steps.

Action steps (things I can do) become separate notes, each tagged as part of the project.  So do reference items, like email that I forward to Evernote, making the contents of the email more readily searchable.  So do things like PDF documents, which can be dragged into their own note.

Now I have a Projects notebook.  I use Evernote’s filtering tools to control what I see when I click the Projects notebook, like this:

Previously, I had more than a dozen project-specific notebooks in that sidebar. And if I create a new notebook for any multi-step effort I have (even small one with long duration, like “get a digital copy of the LP that Mom has no turntable for”), I could easy have three or four dozen.

This works better.  And I can do the same sort of selective display across multiple notebooks.

If it’s not a step, it might be a reference

David Allen suggests putting all your project-support material (things that don’t require an action but that you want to retain) into a reference file.  He leaves the form of that file up to you, though he’s quite the fan of a single, alphabetical-order, paper filing system.  I have those, but I prefer keeping digital (i.e., searchable) copies, which now go into a Reference notebook.

Allen might be less in favor of a separate location for the work-specific diaries that I call project logs, so if you see him, don’t tell him that’s what I have.  I tend to make the logs for large projects; for small ones, I’ll jot ongoing notes on the project page.  Not necessarily consistent, but, oh, well.

More than a third of my Evernote items are in the REFERENCE notebook.  To me, this makes sense.  For active projects, a lot of the relevant material isn’t a trigger for action; it’s project support.  It’s reference material.

If an item appears useful to more than one project, I apply multiple project tags.  That way it’ll show up in project-specific searches.

I also have a Project Archive notebook.  When I complete a project, I select all its items from the Projects notebook and move them to the archive.  Why?  Because that’s what I’ve always done.

In my corporate, cubicle-based days, the bottom of my four-drawer file was labeled Attic. It became a combination of historical record, reference room, and security blanket.  (I’m no hoarder, though;  every year or two, when it got full, I’d weed it back by a third or so.)

The Projects notebook and the Project Archive account for another 20% of my notes, which means that together with Reference, half of what I keep in Evernote is in just three notebooks.

Not that there’s a prize for Fewest Notebooks Used–though if there were, Ruud Hein would be a real contender.  He wrote an Evernote GTD How To that inspired me to experiment and adapt.  (I also like his tone and his pragmatism.)

Speaking of pragmatism, this post is long enough.  I have a follow-up underway with some more examples of what I’ve tried and what results I’ve gotten.

Evernote examples are my own.
CC-licensed images: dwell time by Owen Blacker.
Junk drawer by windsordi / Di Bédard.
Archive of papers by Ben McLeod.

A discussion on lrnchat included lots of comments and questions about data collected about people’s performance, particularly in training, testing, or learning situations.

I’m always inclined to say you can’t do evaluation if you don’t measure, which means I quickly exasperate people who think evaluating is measuring.  For them, perhaps it is.  For me, measurement is a kind of quantification (Conor weighs 187 pounds, Raylene booked $4.7 million in  sales last year), while evaluation is your comparison of the measurement with some standard (Conor is overweight, Raylene made 125% of quota).

That seems straightforward, except for a depressing tendency to assume we’re all using the same standard–and that tendency’s sidekick, the assumption that our measures take in the right requirements.  In that lrnchat discussion, Jane Bozarth mentioned an online course where the instructor based his evaluation in part on the number of comments a student posted.  Naturally, someone set out to put up 100 meaningless posts.

What to do?  Well, you could turn to Tom Gilbert, who mused about what he called the dimensions of performance measuring back in 1978 (and probably long before that).  He saw three classes (or requirements) for measurement: quality, quantity, and cost.

“When we measure an accomplishment, any one or more of these requirements may be relevant, and one of our principle tasks is to identify them.”  In other words: figure out what’s important about the desired performance, which will help you determine what to measure and the standard to use.

Gilbert saw three possible aspects to each of these dimensions.

Quality, for instance, can involve:

• Accuracy–how well does the accomplishment match a model without errors?
• Class–is the accomplishment superior to most in some way beyond accuracy?
• Novelty–does the accomplishment demonstrate originality?  Does it embody features or aspects that distinguish it favorably in particular dimensions?

Quantity or productivity can involve:

• Rate –accomplishments per unit of time.
• Timeliness–accomplishment by some end point.
• Volume–accomplishment when time is not a significant factor (e.g., sales per month).

Cost:

• Labor–the amount spent for the labor and associated items directly related to the accomplishment.
• Material–supplies, tools, equipment, and so on.
• Management–the cost of supervision, administration, and support related to the accomplishment.

As Gilbert points out, the requirements are relevant only when people’s accomplishments vary based on the requirements.  So running a 10K doesn’t normally involve accuracy.

Framing a custom home involves timeliness, and could possibly involve rate, but most often novelty wouldn’t be a requirement. However, class as a quality measure might apply, if the craftsman needs to adapt quickly and successfully to changing conditions: “Leo, this suite needs to be wheelchair-accessible.  Can we move the doorway?”

I think it’s useful to have these categories in mind regardless of the type of work you’re considering.  But don’t take my work for it.  Here’s Gilbert:

…Jobs which seem unmeasurable are actually mesurable once we identify their accomplishments and relevant requirements.  Many jobs that people say cannot be measures (“you can’t measure show-horse breeding–it’s an art”) seem that way only because we are thinking of behavior rather than accomplishment.

How would we measure the behavior required in selecting good breeding stock?  I haven’t the faintest idea.  But we can measure results…

There’s more to say on this topic, but this will do for a start.

CC-licensed photos:
Measurement (of coffee) by flyzipper / Steve Michos.
Evaluation (of accomplishment) by afternoon / Ben Godfrey.