Faster Now, Faster Forever: An Iterate? Accelerator FAQ

I’ve been talking with a lot of people lately about the Iterate? Accelerator and I find the same questions always arise, so I decided to create this FAQ for two reasons: First, if you’re contemplating any approach to making your culture quicker, more adaptable, more collaborative, and/or better at decision-making, these issues will come into play. Second, if you’re interested in the Iterate? approach specifically, this may help you understand how I do something which conventional HR/OD wisdom considers impossible .

See what you think…

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Q: Changing culture in a single quarter sounds impossibly idealistic. Is that what you’re claiming to do?

A: Yes and no. Culture is a set of habituated group behaviors , based on assumptions formed in previous cycles of work – things various elements of the system do automatically based upon prior conditioning. (If the entire organization were a single person, we might say culture is unconscious or subconscious habits.)? In the organization, those habits manifest behaviorally; many of them around how work gets done, how decisions get made, how problems get handled, and the like. You can’t talk someone out of habits they don’t know they have – and that’s true for individuals and collections of them. So, I’d argue nobody directly changes culture ever, in any time frame. ?Behaviors, on the other hand, can change quickly. And when new behaviors produce a better result in group work than old ones, smart people replicate what works and the new approaches ultimately move into the domain of culture. So, behavior changes in a quarter, culture change follows later, automatically.? Fortunately, you start getting the benefit at the moment the behavior changes.

Is this training or facilitation?

A little of both, but mostly neither. I understand why one of those labels seems like it should be right. During the group sessions (which represent only one part of the process), people are in a live or virtual room together and I’m the “leader” or “presenter” – so it looks like training or facilitation. ?The thing is, training would imply I’m trying to teach people new skills, and facilitation would imply I’m guiding people in their conversations.? Both do happen, of course: I do offer tangible approaches (though nothing at the level of “skill building”), and I do help frame up some conversations. But neither is my primary function.

What’s really happening is the management team is running their organization, as themselves, while I help support a framework or container for that to happen. For the most part, this looks like a few minutes of me talking and recommending action every so often, interspersed among a whole lot of the group doing their own work in real time. I guide them to try new behaviors, collectively. They try them, they adapt them, they see what sticks, they incorporate what works.? My clients are often surprised at just how little I talk and present, and how much work they do. Many a person has left the session saying something along the lines of “I worried this would be slow and boring, but it was fast and productive , and I could barely catch my breath.”

The most accurate way to describe the process is as a development opportunity for the system, which is not the same as facilitating or training the individuals. Consider how you change a habit, like quitting smoking or starting a new exercise regimen.? Someone can teach you some routines or provide some tools. Someone can recommend actions. But none of that changes your habit. You do that. Someone can support the system, but the system changes itself. ?I support the organizational system while it changes itself, which is a very different role (both practically and egoically) from training or facilitation.

What happens outside of group sessions?

I do some observations of various meetings. I observe the most senior staff meeting for a period of time to make recommendations to the leader and occasionally share information with the group. I meet with the leader and with other individuals periodically to learn what’s going on and what needs attention. I monitor patterns and artifacts of system shift easily missed by those who don't know what to look for.

Just as important is what I don’t do. I don’t tell anyone what they should do. I don’t require anyone to do anything. I don’t put up posters with my model on them. I don’t relay messages from leaders to employees or vice versa. And, I don’t do most of the other things that many consultants do to further embed themselves in the organization. I am not attempting to embed my model, myself, or my continued support. At all times, from day 1, I am working myself out of a job, not into one .

What do you say to people who tell you they don’t have time to do the group sessions?

I deeply understand the sentiment. Nearly all of what goes on under the heading of “training,” “facilitation,” or the like takes time and effort away from day-to-day work in the short term. The hope is that it has long-term benefit. (In too many cases it does not.) But even in the best of all worlds, it’s a “slow down now to speed up later” equation that sends people back to a pile of backlog – backlog the organization already wasn’t accomplishing fast enough.

Accelerator sessions do just the opposite – nobody is “gone” and the sessions speed up the work. People often go into the sessions worried about what won’t get done while they’re there, but they come out saying they accomplished more than they would have otherwise. I get that feedback informally every time, and whenever we’ve formally polled that question, the answer has been 100% in the affirmative.

This is important because you can’t get an organization to look further forward and be more strategic when it’s not even moving fast enough to solve the immediate problems of today. The conventional wisdom that you must somehow ignore those problems and “be strategic anyway” is na?ve at best and dangerous at worst. The only practical way to get further ahead is to get caught up; the way to do that is to start going faster now and keep going faster from now on.

Doesn’t this add bureaucracy?

It adds predictability, accountability, and coordination with the lightest possible amount of process, the most efficient oversight, and the least potential slowdown that we know of in 70 years of research and experience.

Much of the conventional wisdom in this space suggests that there is a sort of seesaw tradeoff where you have speed and agility on one side, and accountability and predictability on the other.? From that view, the bigger you get, the slower you get, and there’s just nothing you can do about it. Fortunately for the 10-20% of organizations that know better, that’s not actually true. There’s a reason big, even huge organizations often wallop their smaller counterparts in speed and agility, and it’s because adding people adds computing power.? Being bigger doesn’t have to slow you down, a fact which is the basis for all things Iterate?.

Now let’s be clear: If you mainly need your managers to be individually and ultimately free to do whatever they want at all times – if you don’t require any predictability or cooperation – then the type of consistent, coordinated behavior Iterate? provides is not appropriate. But if you have investors, shareholders, bosses, customers, or any other group that the broader system is accountable to, and if you need to be able to promise and deliver complex outputs that require action aligned across the teams in your enterprise, then Iterate? and the Accelerator don’t add bureaucracy. They add a light, scalable set of consistent habits which enable people to run fast, use their smarts, make adjustments, and learn and change things more readily than any other approach we’re aware of in the history of organizations - without the kinds of oversight and hierarchical politics that slow things down.

The crazy part is, this isn’t hard to do. It doesn’t even require new skills. But it does require people to let go of the idea of the seesaw tradeoff between agility and predictability. The only question for anyone considering it is whether that would be a useful result.

Like this and want more? You can explore the Iterate? Accelerator’s process and results , watch Ed Muzio’s new TV Series, “One Small Step ” from C-Suite Network TV, or Visit the Group Harmonics Industry Intelligence Archive for ideas, whitepapers, and case studies about changing culture and how management culture impacts so many facets of the organization.