Leader Tools — Models, Frameworks, Maps

If you want to achieve different results than before, you have to start doing something different. If you want to do something differently, you have to start thinking about it differently.

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Models, frameworks, maps are used for new views of the world. A well-used model at the right moment saves me time, opens up new perspectives, allows the debate to move forward or change priorities. I would like to share with you four models that are useful to me:

• Cynefin creates space for better decision-making
• Enneagram Enables better collaboration
• Wardley Maps brings better orientation
• NVC It helps to have more productive conversations

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I have no ambition to convince you that they will be useful to you as well — you have to consider that and try it yourself.

All models are wrong, but some are useful.

-- George Box

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Cynefin

Many people talk about how something is complex. But what does that actually mean? Cynefin describes five types of environments in which we can move and that need a significantly different approach to effective decision-making and action.

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• Obvious — environment bound by fixed processes. The correct solution to the situation is clear, best practices, checklists and waterfall work. There is a clear cause and effect. When you're driving a car or working on a production line, you're in an obvious environment and there's a manual for everything.
• It's complicated--an expert environment built to analyze things. To find a solution, I need an expert who will analyze the situation and choose one of the possible solutions. There is still a clear cause and effect, but there is no clear best practice. When I want to design the information architecture of a web, I'm in a complicated environment.
• It's complex — this environment is changing and evolving. To find the right solution, I need to experiment to see what works and subsequently support beneficial formulas. Cause and effect can only be traced in retrospect (although in retrospect it seems that everything was clear from the beginning). When you create a new digital application, you are in a complex environment.
• It's chaotic — a haphazard and dynamic environment in which you need to act quickly. When your house is on fire, there is no point in putting together a committee of experts to suggest the best solution.
• It's untidy -- here you are at a moment when you do not know which of the other four environments you are in -- whether you are in it purposefully or through your own ignorance.

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Four Cynefin environments on the example of organizing a children's party. Hyperbole:

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As an entrepreneur, I constantly encounter all Cynefin environments. He is obviousthat you have to submit a tax return every year. Accounting itself is in complicated environment — the expert must, for example, correctly classify expenses in individual boxes according to the current legislation (the word box illustrates my relationship with accounting).

When I create a new product or service, I am complex environment and it is convenient to devise parallel experiments and find formulas that work. Well, if a key customer ends cooperation from day to day, then I can drop out of the original obvious environment to chaos.

This all sounds like an absolutely clear-cut thing until we get into practice. It is no exception that the manager has just one favorite management style and applies it all the time. Maybe he gives a precise assignment instead of creating a field in which his team finds out cheaply and quickly what works and what doesn't make sense.

Example from life: Public administration. Everything needs to be specified in advance to the point exactly, which is not the essence of the matter in a complex environment. So billions are wasted on pointless IT projects that couldn't turn out well from the start. The response to project failure is a new attempt to create an even better assignment (sometimes with a different manager).

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What to take away

• There is no one management and decision-making methodology that works everywhere.
• Be aware of which environment you are in at the moment and act accordingly.
• Checklists are cool just for obvious environments. Analysis only makes sense in a complicated environment. The basic strategies in complex environments are parallel experiments.

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Author

• Dave Snowden

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Where to go next

• Video about Cynefin
• Dave Snowden's blog

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Enneagram

The Enneagram is a psychological system that describes nine types of emotional-mental habits, on the basis of which people subconsciously behave and react to situations in their lives. According to the enneagram, one such habit prevails in each of us, which we unconsciously reinforce in the course of life.

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Emotional and mental habits according to the enneagram

• A's want a perfect world and work to improve themselves and others
• Twos want to be loved and try to satisfy the needs of others
• Threesomes want to achieve their goals and gain the respect of others
• and then there are six other types...

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When you understand why people do what they do, then it's much easier to work with them and lead them. When you know why you are doing what you are doing and notice it, it is possible to move forward in personality. Moving forward means higher levels of self-awareness, self-control, empathy and social agility.

This may sound somewhat esoteric to some, since we are socially focused on shifting our own competencies and not increasing the maturity of our own personality. It's quite possible that your personality is holding you back much more than competence.

Do you have the experience of working with a mature empathetic person? But you probably have a lot more experience working with immature people without empathy. It makes a huge difference, at least for me. And through the enneagram system, it is possible to begin to work on oneself and strengthen one's own empathy and self-awareness.

Example from life: when lecturing, someone often rates me as arrogant. I didn't get it for a long time. Sure, I'm a little sharper at times, but no strings attached, right? Thanks to the enneagram, I realized that when lecturing, I lose contact with myself (I don't feel myself), so logically I don't even have contact with the audience and I just let more intensity into the lecture. And that bothers me — I want people to discover new things, and I defend them with my speech. Until I noticed it, I couldn't logically do anything about it. Now I can and I do.

I'm not going to elaborate on the enneagram system itself. Personal experience is an order of magnitude more rewarding than studying the basics on the internet. If the enneagram intrigues you, take the course. I was on the course from Shine Leadership and it was beneficial.

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What to take away

• People focus on strengthening their competencies (knowledge, skills) and not their character.
• Strengthening your character (emotional intelligence) will, among other things, allow you to use your competencies much better.
• I know from my own experience that there is nothing more destructive to a business than the personality immature reactions of the boss.

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Author

• Georgy Ivanovich Gurdzhiev, Oscar Ichazo, Claudio Naranjo and others

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Where to go next

• Human Leadership and Personal Development Course with Enneagram
• Emotional Leadership Course
• Skeptics Club claims that the enneagram is pseudoscientific nonsense comparable to the zodiac. The same applies here as with the other models — you either find the enneagram useful for you or not.

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Wardley Maps

Have you ever been involved in strategy making? Then you know you need to clarify your why, stipulate vision and corresponding targets. Sometimes they fill SWOTky other times BMC. It is defined nucleus business and what about the organization does not do. Everything is written down in a document. Uff, the strategy is behind us and we can work again for some time. This is a condition I've always had a problem with.

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• How do I know if my vision makes sense?
• What is the most effective direction for my company?
• Why this right now?
• Aren't we riding a dead horse?

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The fact that the entire company agrees on the direction of the company does not mean that this is the best possible step. At House of Cutter we had many discussions over strategy. Several times we have dealt with our why. It didn't lead anywhere. It was my problem -- the CEO's own strategy.

Last year, by a happy coincidence, I came across Wardley's maps, which pushed my business thinking into another universe, and I've been using them daily ever since.

Right now your company has 21st century [Internet] -enabled business processes, mid-20th century management processes, all built on 19th century management principles.

-- Gary Hamel

If you want to move into the 21st century when creating a strategy, you need to build a very good awareness of the situation and its expected future development before choosing a specific move. Simon Wardley argues that, like a warlord before a battle, you simply need a map.

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Wardley maps are a tool and methodology for visualizing the environment of your business. It will allow you to describe how you approach solving the needs of your customers and choose the appropriate path to the future.

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Possible benefits of mapping

• Building awareness of the situation
• Finding new opportunities
• Finding potential for cost reduction
• Anticipating the future and changes
• Finding leverage points to influence the environment

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A map is the first thing you need if you want to move your own business, service or product. After creating a map, it can be followed by SWotKa, Business Model Canvas, Lean Canvas or other tools.

Wardley maps consist of the needs of the customer, the value chain through which we fulfill this need and the evolution of the individual elements of the chain. The moment you get the job done and learn how to map, it makes communication across the company easier and helps you make strategic decisions.

One of Simon Wardley's many lectures on mapping:

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Honza walked me through the mapping process we did for the WebExpo conference. Thanks to this, I realized what to focus on, and on the contrary, what is actually not important at all. It's a really useful way to remind yourself of priorities.

‍— Šárka Štrossová, CEO of WebExpo

Mapping made me think completely differently than I have so far. We mapped out our own services. We mapped out web design. We chose the path. And we will continue with the next iteration. Mapping is such an interesting tool that we began to map their business with clients before we embark on the project.

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What to take away

• You will get a springboard for creating a strategy. Simon made his maps available to everyone for free.
• Wardley's maps will understand management, IT, manufacturing and HR. On the other hand, it's sometimes easier to make a map and then tell it off as a story.
• I've never experienced such productive conversations over strategy as with Wardley's map. But that doesn't mean they were easy. The strategy is not simple.
• To create a map, you need knowledge of mapping and domain knowledge. Knowledge of mapping can be outsourced in the first phase of work, domain knowledge cannot. Consultants don't think of a strategy for you -- but they can help you look at your environment from a different angle.
• Without any form of maps, the manager is dependent on stories, SWotka and copying others, thus the approach “this year is like last year, but 5% better”.

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Author

• Simon Wardley

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Where to go next

• Mapping Book Online
• Internal Strategic Mapping Workshop

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Non-Violent Communication (NVC)

We can't not communicate. We communicate all our lives verbally and non-verbally. But what kind of conversations do we really want to have? Are they supposed to push us forward? Our internal settings have a big impact on whether our communication will be beneficial or, on the contrary, it will close doors for us and burn bridges.

When people have a conflict, they often oppose and deal with:

• Who among us is spoiled?
• Who's right?
• Who started you?

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The NVC looks at the conflict from a completely different angle — trying to find a path that is acceptable to both sides:

• What am I experiencing?
• What are you going through?
• What are we going to do about it?

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Communication in conflict situations (NVC) is a set of communication habits through which you get more productive conversation results. NVC's goal is to build compliance and find solutions that work for all stakeholders. NVC is based on empathy for oneself, awareness of the context of the situation, expressing emotions and needs, and empathy for others.

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When something is already being trained in communication, they are external manifestations, the quality of the slides or the ability to impress the audience. NVC focuses on Building Inner Empathic Capacitythat allows you to hear unpleasant things and at the same time not feel attacked.

NVC has enriched me not only as a boss and CEO, but also as a researcher -- without understanding people's emotions and needs, it's very hard to get to the real heart of the matter. As in the case of the enneagram, NVC needs to be experienced, so I will not elaborate on specific principles or methods here. NVC is a set of skills and habits -- in the beginning, it can sound pretty unnatural, by the way. This will only get better with time.

Example from life: my standard emotions before understanding the basics of NVC were: “I'm fine, I'm sick and I'm hungry”. Thanks to my experience with NVC, I now have a much more extensive vocabulary for naming emotions... sometimes even “I feel bitterness”.

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What to take away

• We communicate all the time, but we've never learned it systematically.
• People focus on the outward signs of communication -- how to present better, how to look like I'm listening. This can work for presentations, but not for conflict resolution.
• Just because someone says something unacceptable to you doesn't mean you have to automatically flip out like the devil out of a box.

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Author

• Marshall Rosenberg

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Where to go next

• Ondráš Přibyl: KOKS — initial NVC training
• Ondráš Přibyl: Leadership in Communication — NVC training and facilitation for leaders (Brno, start 1 October)

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In conclusion...

As a leader, I constantly find myself in situations where something needs to be solved. I have to make the right choices, resolve conflicts, get along with many types of people and think where to go next. The tools presented in this article have helped me many times in recent years, and I am grateful to their authors, as well as to the people who showed them to me. I believe they can help you too, and I am very interested to see what other tools you are using today.

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