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Adaptive Kids: Strategy vs Luck

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This is part of a new column/series called Adaptive Kids. How can parents, coaches, school teachers, and other mentors help small children grow their own inner adaptability? 

Can boardgames and card games be used to teach or develop adaptability? 
First off, I want to specifically separate games that are based entirely on chance or luck from those requiring judgement, discretion, and strategy. Take a look at these games:
CandylandWarSnakes & Ladders (or as I knew it...Chutes & Ladders!) HiHo Cherry-OAs the wikipedia page for Candyland reads:
Due to the design of the game, there is no strategy involved:players are never required to make choices, just follow directions.What a perfectly-worded description for these sorts of games. There are no choices; only a slavish obedience to the roll of the dice, the draw of the cards, or the spin of the needle. 

These are perfect entry games for small children. They learn process, rules, boundaries, and...how to accept defeat at the hands of La…
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Presentation Hack: All Those Great Books?

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When you get readers together into a room, they inevitably talk about the great books that have shaped their thinking.

This seems to be especially true when the setting is more formal, such as workplace or industry training event. (Academics take this to an extreme...and might find this blogpost especially useful! haha)

Imagine you're the presenter or coordinator of such an event:

When the titles and authors of recommended books are mentioned, your audience will be scrambling to jot down that title and author name. Inevitably they're going to misspell the author's name, right? Good luck finding it on Amazon tomorrow...

Instead, maybe they'll turn straight to Google to find it. They pick up their phones and zone out of your workshop long enough so that when they return...they're a bit lost.

Citing on slides themselves can be useful, but can also be distracting. Plus, this only helps when the citation is planned by the presenter. It doesn't allow for surprise sugges…
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Adaptive Kids: Introduction

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I'm going to try my hand at a new column/series called Adaptive Kids. How can parents, coaches, school teachers, and other mentors help small children grow their own inner adaptability? 

My ER/trauma nurse wife came home from work. Our young kids overheard us talking about her day's assignment in Triage, and they became curious. 

"Mom...what's triage mean?"

She and I tag-teamed the answer.

"On a summer day, if the ice cream parlor was busy, you might have to stand in line, right? It would be OK if the people who got there before you to got their ice cream before you got yours, right? You'd also expect that the people who got there after you to have to wait until you got your ice cream, right?

"A hospital emergency room doesn't work like that. It doesn't really matter when someone arrives. It depends on how sick or how badly they're hurt. The more sick and more badly injured people get helped before other less sick or less injured patients, …
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A Whole Systems Approach, Part 14/14: A Whole Systems Approach Vision

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NOTE: This is a fourteen (14) part series written by Ed Brimmer. I'm reposting his series here, with his permission. For all posts in the series, click here. Thanks for visiting! Lou Hayes, Jr. 




After flying all 14 Parts of the series out to be shot at for feedback & improvement we've finally reached the end. I will share the whole series with a link to the open-source publication. You may take this work and do as you wish with it as I treat it more like a TED Talk concept of "Ideas worth spreading". You can cut & paste the words/images to any format or artifacts you'd like. You don't have to credit me or show the Sway Minds logo. Great ideas are those which Meme across time after their gestalt moments occurred. I did not gestalt these findings, I'm simply a fellow walker like yourselves. This last image really hits home what a personal friend/coach/mentor Cliff Kimber said to me:
"Excellence beyond metrics"So many businesses get wra…
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A Whole Systems Approach, Part 13/14: Foundations to Create Happy Employees

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NOTE: This is a fourteen (14) part series written by Ed Brimmer. I'm reposting his series here, with his permission. For all posts in the series, click here. Thanks for visiting! Lou Hayes, Jr. 



Part 13 continues Part 10's post which states customers can never be happier than your employees. In traditional Western management we break down systems into parts & then clearly define what each person is going to be held accountable to through metrics. This holy trinity of clarity, accountability, and metrics from a centralized team of executives who hold all the power & control over others has a huge problem. The world of business is far more dynamic than what any static set of boarding school rules can survive. In order to meet the dynamic nature of reality we must push power & control to the edges of the company. It is 100% how you make employees happy!

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LINK: "Give Your Team the Freedom to Do the Work They Think Matters Most"
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To begin at Part 01 of …
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A Whole Systems Approach, Part 12/14: How to Create Happy Employees

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NOTE: This is a fourteen (14) part series written by Ed Brimmer. I'm reposting his series here, with his permission. For all posts in the series, click here. Thanks for visiting! Lou Hayes, Jr. 






Part 12 of the series is a continuation of Part 10's Culture of Excellence. Changing the focus of your company from internal bureaucracies by spending more time with your customers are a good starting point but what outcome are we after? The best outcome you can desire from customers is to elicit a true behavioral based feeling of happiness with your company. The challenge is customers can never be happier than your own employees.
If your employees are unhappy it is unrealistic to expect your customers will be happier. Shooting for outcomes which measure a true behavior change of happiness in your customers requires you start with your employees first.

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To begin at Part 01 of the series, click here. 

To advance to the next Part 13, click here.

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Author:
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A Whole Systems Approach, Part 11/14: How Excellent Companies Can Be Really Close to Customers

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NOTE: This is a fourteen (14) part series written by Ed Brimmer. I'm reposting his series here, with his permission. For all posts in the series, click here. Thanks for visiting! Lou Hayes, Jr. 





Part 11 lays out the initial values & conditions of a Stochastic Process which aims to keep you close with customers. Since every company varies in the level of their current bureaucracy their is no way to determine the outcomes with certainty. The way you deal with uncertain scenarios is to do less of one thing & more of another to see what emerges. While you can't say for sure how this process will play out their are probable outcomes we can predict. When you interact with more people together externally you build an implicit knowledge together which enables speed & harmony of the organization to react to a variety of needs for your customers.

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To begin at Part 01 of the series, click here. 

To advance to the next Part 12, click here.

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Author: Ed Brimmer. Biography c…
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A Whole Systems Approach, Part 10/14: "The Culture of Excellence"

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NOTE: This is a fourteen (14) part series written by Ed Brimmer. I'm reposting his series here, with his permission. For all posts in the series, click here. Thanks for visiting! Lou Hayes, Jr. 





Part 10 is about building a desired culture which supports the whole system instead of harming it. In the example culture below there are two major stochastic process themes we are after. 1. Staying open & connected to customers instead of letting internal bureaucracies close the organization off from its customers.
2. Staying focused on the fact that your customers can never be happier than your employees. The key to understanding stochastic processes is that each organization has variable degrees of bureaucracy & employee morales in them. Every organization will be quite unique in both of these matters. This randomness in organizations & its people means we cannot determine exactly what outcomes will occur but we can identify possible outcomes for heightened performance.

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A Whole Systems Approach, Part 09/14: " Culture Eats Strategy for Breakfast"

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NOTE: This is a fourteen (14) part series written by Ed Brimmer. I'm reposting his series here, with his permission. For all posts in the series, click here. Thanks for visiting! Lou Hayes, Jr. 





Part 9 is about addressing a truth head on that every process framework like SAFe, Lean, Agile, and Waterfall only give lip service to & then complain in the end about their failed implementations. No matter how good the first 8 pages are from a Whole Systems Approach it will fail miserably unless the culture changes first. If you only do the first 8 parts of the series you will be doing the right thing wrong! Your strategy will be eaten by the culture unless you clearly define what culture is needed in the whole system and not just expect improving other parts without improving culture will get you anywhere. Jamshid's quote reflects a whole systems awareness which is mostly lost upon process frameworks which try to improve parts only. The rest of the Series addresses culture.

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A Whole Systems Approach, Part 08/14: A Digital Kanban Board...

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NOTE: This is a fourteen (14) part series written by Ed Brimmer. I'm reposting his series here, with his permission. For all posts in the series, click here. Thanks for visiting! Lou Hayes, Jr. 





Part 8 is to help fill the gap for companies who don't have adequate workflow systems to provide the Statistics needed to generate Control Charts. In my experiences even if organizations have a workflow system the effort it takes to modify the system to get adequate statistics would take a lot of time to simply get a pilot case out for review. When I was at both Microsoft and the State of Washington I asked for permission to start using a digital kanban board to help build pilot examples. In both places the image below is what I followed to get something in their hands which reflected their own environment. The 5 steps of The Kanban Method are a good starting point to get the pilot programs built out. Control Charts can be built in other ways, but for piloting it is a good tool.

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