Fissure eNewsletter
Volume 9
Jan 2006

Welcome
Out of the Mouth of Babes
"Are We Having Fun Yet?" by Geof Lory
"Applying Cross-cultural Concepts in Project Management"
Fissure News

Public Workshops:
Curriculum


Public Workshops by location:

  - Chicago
  - Minneapolis
  - Raleigh


Visit the Fissure Website:
www.fissure.com
Dear Fissure Friends,

It has been a very hectic year end and year beginning for Fissure. 2005 was a very good year with a lot of very important accomplishments and changes. Read the "Fissure News" for more detail on some of these changes. One especially significant change became official at the end of the year and is related to what I will talk about here.

The Fissure ownership and management team since incorporation has included my long-time friend, mentor and "boss", Ed Tilford Sr. With Ed "moving on" I thought it would be a good time to reflect on some of the things I learned from Ed over the years.

When I was first hired by Sperry Univac (many years ago) Ed was my first supervisor and soon after became our site manager and soon after that became my golf partner, friend and mentor. For most of the 17 years I worked at Sperry/Unisys Ed was my boss, but he was always my friend and mentor. It is the mentoring part of our relationship I want to talk about. I feel very strongly that having a mentor is extremely important to a person's development, probably because I have had such a good one. I learned how to lead and manage a team from Ed. Not so much because he told me what to do, but because he showed great confidence and trust in me and because he "lead by example". Let me give you an example. I was hired with a group of about 10 very capable 22-23 year old college graduates. I didn't have any leadership experience up to that point (I had been a Boy Scout patrol leader, but always believed it was because no one else wanted the job and I was the oldest) and was completely surprised when Ed and the other managers made me the leader of our "new-hire" team on a project we were assigned to help us learn the development and operational systems we would be using on our real projects. He saw something in me and gave me the opportunity and the trust to test and grow my leadership capability. As a result of that experience, within a year I was attending an MBA program and my career was heading in a management direction.

Over the years, Ed guided me in career development and in career decisions. He encouraged me to take on challenging assignments, knowing that the more challenging the assignment, the more the learning. That is why there was no other answer for me 17 years ago when Ed and his son visited with me one Sunday and asked me to join them in Fissure. I have learned more and changed more in the last 17 years than at any other time in my life as a result of that challenge. It is with the same learning expectation that I now take on the challenge of leading Fissure without the assistance of my original partners. I know I will be successful and I know I have a lot to learn, but I also know my mentor will be there if I need him.

Susan Heidorn, one of our guides and a current Ph.D. student has her computer up and working again and our benefit is her article on "Applying Cross-Cultural Concepts to Project Management. As we are well aware, project managers deal in a world of people. People who act, think, and feel differently from one another, often because of their cultural values. She makes the point that success as a project manager may depend on ones ability to apply cross-cultural concepts in analyzing, understanding, and influencing both a team's culture and an organization's culture.

Geof Lory's article talks about two of my most favorite personal and project management techniques - reflection and the positive 3-step approach to improvement. I have personally used these techniques at work and at home. If you are serious about learning and improving yourself and/or your team or family read Geof's article. Of course he uses his daughters and a family vacation to help us understand and relate to the techniques.

Our upcoming public workshops are in the left hand panel - our computer simulation based workshops are an effective and fun way to learn AND EARN PDUs. Make sure you also check out what's happening at Fissure (Fissure News).

Thanks for reading and have a great quarter,

Jesse Freese

Fissure, President



Are We Having Fun Yet?

by Geof Lory

This article is about closure. Bringing things full circle. Finally being done. Punishing the innocent and promoting the guilty. However it works at your organization, success or failure, something can be celebrated and learned from every project. To miss this opportunity would compound the failure or minimize the success. Yet I am surprised at how few organizations deliberately perform some sort of retrospective after major milestones or at least the completion of a project. It is an essential part of a learning organization to be deliberate about learning. Building the time into schedules and processes to learn is the evidence you are serious about improving.

I wonder if there is an assumption that learning happens as a by-product of experience and doesn't require careful examination or consideration. Certainly, some amount of individual learning does take place with each experience. It may even contribute to the sixth sense some intuitive project managers have. However, endowing the rest of the organization with that ad hoc hunch learning will not happen without explicitly attending to what was learned in the experience.

Last December the girls spent their Christmas vacation at their mother's on the east coast. Traveling over the holiday was an anxious event for them . It was further complicated by the increased travel restrictions for unaccompanied minors due to the September 11th disaster. I had flown several times since then and was accustomed to the longer lines and additional security, but they were not. They had some learning to experience.

As they prepared for the trip, I explained the additional wait times, which are never comfortable for kids, or for parents when they are with kids. I suggested we allow additional time for these complications, which would only be further exacerbated by the number of holiday travelers. (I re-read my article on risk management as a refresher.) Unfortunately, this idea fell on deaf ears as they balked at the thought of spending two hours at the airport with Dad doing nothing.

After parking the car and getting into a long ticketing line (unaccompanied minors were not allowed to use e-ticketing), we still had an hour before take off. As the line inched slowly forward, their urgency level and anxiety began to rise. We began to discuss options, none of which were feasible or affordable. They were even praying that the flight would get delayed. We got our tickets and seats with only 15 minutes before take-off, but still had to go through the security checkpoint. With only minutes to go, they passed the detectors but, as luck would have it, I got stopped for a search. I threw them a kiss and told them to go to the gate without me. I arrived at the gate out of breath only to yell "good-bye" as they were closing the ramp door behind them.

Needless to say, even though they did make the flight, this was not how any of us wanted to start the holiday vacation. That night, when their plane landed safely at Boston's Logan airport, they called to let me know they were safely there, but their luggage was not. They would have to return to the airport tomorrow, a two-hour drive, to retrieve their luggage on the next flight.

I wanted to issue the proverbial "I told you so!" but bit my tongue instead. It seemed pretty obvious to me that the lesson was learned, but just to be sure I asked them:
"What do you think went well at the airport today?"
"What do you think did not go well at the airport today?" and
"What would it have looked like if it had gone ideally?"

This quick postmortem confirmed the lesson was learned and that the next trip would allow for ample time to avoid a missed flight.

I suspect an additional element contributes to our neglect of project retrospectives ; the discomfort of facing our own shortcomings. Few people look for opportunities to put their inadequacies on display in front of their peers or, worse, supervisors. If everything went absolutely perfectly on a project, I'm pretty sure we would be tripping over each other to organize the mutual admiration event to celebrate our excellence. What we would learn was what we did well. While that is good to acknowledge and it's great to consciously reinforce successful behaviors, it is only the most comfortable portion of the learning.

Setting the stage for safe learning, where actions -- not people-- are examined and improved, is key to eliciting quality ideas for learning and improvement. Asking the team to invent a future-oriented scenario eliminating or minimizing the shortcomings , causes two things: Team members take a personal interest in creating the solutions to their problems, side-stepping resistance from the "not-invented-here" mindset; and their energy is channeled forward by acknowledging past deficiencies as learning experiences that add value to overall development.

Every year since Beth and I have known each other, we have spent a week in August at a resort in northern Minnesota with her family. This past year we decided to try a new resort in Wisconsin. After the second day it was apparent that the amenities available to the kids were not what they had been used to at the other resort, and their attitude reflected their boredom. They insisted that the old resort was better.

So I told them that if they were interested in having a better experience next year at a resort that met more of their expectations, I would need them to conduct a postmortem on this year's vacation. I simply asked them to list the things they liked and the things they didn't like about each resort on a separate sheet. And then on a third sheet, write down the features of the ideal vacation spot.

I was impressed by their level of detail and candor, stating things they liked and disliked about each place. I was even more interested to see the items on their list that made up their ideal vacation spot and the excitement it created as they thought about next year. When we got home, I asked Erika to type up their results and send them to me so I could share them with their aunts and uncles as part of the select of next year's vacation.

There is one necessary caution when you do a forward-focused retrospective: Expectations that the team's voice will be heard and change will take place need to be managed effectively. One of the items on the girls' list for their ideal vacation spot was that it has lots of cute guys their age. I was quick to point out that while this may be one of their desires, it was not within my control, or interest, to meet that expectation. As such it would not be considered when selecting next year's spot.

Unfortunately, that change is inevitable, but I have managed to delay it a little.

[This is the final article in the series. If you would like to read the other articles in the series; Just Do It!, A Man with a Plan, Conscious Parenting Mindset, Are We There Yet?, and Go With the Flow, just click on the title.]



Applying Cross-cultural Concepts in Project Management



Without mutual knowledge, there can be no mutual understanding; without understanding, there can be no trust and respect; without trust, there can be no peace, only the danger of conflict. This means we have to be willing and able to familiarize ourselves with the way people of other cultures think and perceive the world around them, but without losing our own standpoint in the process. Roman Herzog, President of Germany (Heistad, 2005, 1).

Culture provides a "filter" or "mental map" by which we perceive and understand our world. Culture is not something we have at birth, but is a result of our birth into a specific environment. For example, we are born into a family, a region and a nation. We learn our culture from the environment in which we grew up, through our life experiences, and from those people around us. In most cases, we are not even aware of our culture until we enter into another culture and notice the differences. According to Trompenaars and Hampden-Turner (1998, p. 6), "culture is the way in which a group of people solves problems and reconciles dilemmas." It becomes the stabilizing force that makes things meaningful and predictable (Schein, 2004). It provides a shared way for people to understand and interpret their world. Culture affects our life in many different arenas. Each region, nation, organization, and profession creates its own unique culture that allows people to work together in a common way to solve problems and reconcile dilemmas (Schein, 2004).

Given the move to globalization, many U.S. companies have partners, branches, or subsidiaries overseas. In turn, many foreign companies have partners, branches, or subsidiaries in the United States. Add to that, the increase of foreign personnel working in the United States and you will find that project teams and work teams are frequently cross-cultural in their membership. As Roman Herzog stated in the above quote, there must be mutual understanding and respect or many teams will be in danger of conflict.

So, what does this mean to the project manager who has to lead cross-cultural project teams that are either co-located or virtual, spanning across the globe. I would like to suggest that success as a project manager may depend on our ability to apply cross-cultural concepts in analyzing, understanding, and influencing both a team's culture and an organization's culture. Project managers deal in a world of people. People who act, think, and feel differently from one another, often because of their cultural values. When we work with project teams, we have at least two or more cultural levels to take into consideration. Trompenaars and Hampden-Turner (1998) identified three different cultural levels that may be in play in an organization: national or regional culture, corporate culture, and professional culture. National or regional cultures provide each team member with a set of personal values, while professional culture provides the team member with a set of behaviors that may be unique to their profession (e.g. developer, project manager, sales and marketing person). Add to these two cultures, the corporate or organizational culture and a project manager may find himself / herself juggling various opposing cultures when working with their project teams. As a result, conflict and frustration, due to mixed expectations, may sabotage the team's performance.

When we experience conflict in project teams, or feel they are not performing as well as we would like, we often try various team interventions or techniques to help our team be successful. Our interventions may range anywhere from talking to various team members, to team building, to in-depth team interventions with a facilitator. Sometimes these interventions work, but often they only touch the surface and the underlying issues remain. Hofstede and Hofstede (2005) suggest that one of the reasons why so many of our interventions do not work is because we have ignored the cultural differences among team members. To be credible, we need to assess the culture to ensure we select the best intervention to fit the cultural makeup of the team and the organization in order to be successful (Hofstede & Hofstede, 2005). This means that we may need to understand their beliefs about sickness, health, crime and punishment, religious matters, relation to authority, concept of self, interpersonal relationships, and ways of dealing with conflict and feelings. If the intervention goes against some of the cultural values of its members, the intervention is likely to fail, or at the very least frustrate most of the members.

It is also important to note, that as project managers, we also carry our own unique culture with us. Understanding various cross-cultural concepts and cultural models will enable us to see our own biases, values, and assumptions that we bring to the table. We need to understand ourselves in order to maximize our ability to lead our teams and be instruments of change. If we do not consider our own biases, and regard our cultural background as truth rather then perception, we could be applying the wrong intervention to the situation and provide further conflict within the team.

In addition to an understanding of our own national cultural bias and the impact it may have on our team interventions, we also have to understand our professional culture. As competent project managers, many of us have a background in management, team development, and various organizational theories. Unfortunately, western thought forms the basis of most of these theories. Hofstede and Hofstede (2005) suggest that a theory is "only valid in the cultural environment in which it was conceived" (p. 265). We need to remember that any theory we use was culturally constrained by the researcher or writer, reflecting the environment in which he or she grew up and conducted their work. Thus, as a project manager, we need to challenge ourselves to identify and understand both the national and organizational cultural influences on the theories and research we use with our clients.

Finally, I believe that understanding cross-cultural concepts will allow us to educate and promote cultural awareness within our teams and organizations. Trompenaars and Hampden-Turner (1998) pointed out that people set up organizations in a form that is familiar to them, and they use models they have used successfully in the past. As we have more organizations going "global", we may need to assist our teams and perhaps even others in the organization to get past the models that will no longer work for them. Further, Schein (2004) said, "It is only when cultural assumptions get in the way that the culture change issue arises" (p. 365). As there are more and more intercultural teams, these types of issues will continue to arise. Armed with an understanding of cross-cultural concepts and tools, we can assist organizations and team members to become aware of the various cultural dimensions affecting their communication, relationships, leadership, and teamwork.

Writers note: As a seasoned project manager with over 20 years of experience, and a consultant for over 10 years, I often found that most of the project issues did not have to do with the project tasks, but with the relationships and communication among the team members and within the organization. I wrote this article to provide some "food for thought" on the potential impact of culture on team relationships and communication. I am currently working on my doctorate degree in organization development at the University of St. Thomas and have recently completed a class on multicultural aspects of organization development. Although the class came from the perspective of an organization development practitioner, I found that much of the information would also be useful to project managers. If any of you are interested in more information on understanding various national cultures that may impact your team, I would suggest either reading Trompenaars book, Riding the Waves of Culture: Understanding Diversity in Global Business or Hofstede and Hofstede's book on Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind. Both highlight the differences between the various national cultures from a global perspective and you can quickly see where your own culture and those of others may part company. Shein's book on Organizational Culture and Leadership is also a good book on understanding organizational culture, which, as most of you know, is where project managers live and breathe.

Best wishes to as you move forward with your project teams.

References

Deal, T. E., & Kennedy, A. A. (1982). Corporate cultures: The rites and rituals of corporate life. New York: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company.

Heistad, K. (2005). Cultural quotes. Retrieved December 17, 2005, from http://www.culturecoach.biz/culturalquotes.html

Hofstede, G., & Hofstede, G. J. (2005). Cultures and organizations: Software of the mind (2nd). New York: McGraw-Hill.

Schein, E. H. (2004). Organizational culture and leadership. San Francisco: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Trompenaars, F., & Hampden-Turner, C. (1998). Riding the waves of culture: Understanding diversity in global business (2nd). New York: McGraw-Hill.





Fissure News 1/06



Fissure is definitely on the move (literally) - we moved our offices to a new space in our current building that doubles our square footage. The best part of the move is that we were able to keep our existing address so you won't have to update your address book.

Fissure, the next chapter - you may or may not know that since incorporation, Fissure has been own and run by Ed Tilford Sr., Barbara Tilford, Ed Tilford, Jr., and Jesse Freese. Ed Tilford Jr., our simulation developer, has been spending less and less time with Fissure and pursuing other opportunities. Ed Tilford Sr. retired two years ago from employment but remained on the board and involved in the company. Barbara, our CFO, HR consultant and accountant, decided last year to scale back her participation and together with her husband (Ed Sr.) and son (Ed Jr.) all three decided it was a good time to sell their interest in the company back to the company. By process of elimination, that leaves Jesse as the only remaining owner.

Nothing much will change as Jesse has been the CEO and President for the last 6 years and will remain in those positions. A new board has been put in place consisting of Dave Kolling (CFO), Brian Toren (Secretary), Tim Firnstahl (VP Sales and Marketing and minority owner), Mike Wold (Guide) and Geof Lory (Guide). Most have been involved in the company as guides both in the classroom and outside of the classroom since the early days of the company. All but one has been with Fissure more than six years.

We have a new simulation support team, David and Lori Tillery, who have been providing excellent support since last summer. We also have a new accountant, Kindra Craig, who has taken over most of Barbara's responsibilities.

We all look forward to taking Fissure into the future and writing and reading that next chapter.

What's the next step in Project Management? A joint certification between the Center for the Development of Technological Leadership (CDTL) at the University of Minnesota and Fissure aims to provide just that. Stay tuned for its introduction in the Spring of 2006.

Central IL & Sioux Falls S.D, have joined the ranks of Chicago, Raleigh & Minneapolis as sites for Fissure public classes. Seattle WA will be joining us later in the year. The new locations offer our Basic and Advanced Simulation Workshops and our Project Management Professional (PMP) Prep courses. Check out our website for class schedules www.fissure.com.