MOR Insight

It's the day after Christmas and many of you are still on holiday.  However, I thought I'd send a quick note along.

We have all learned about the importance of asking the "right" questions, questions that help us get at underlying issues, questions that help us think, and questions that help others move issues forward.  In this piece Rick Brenner suggests that too often when we are in groups we focus on being the first one to provide the answer when a better focus would be on asking the right question.

Today, we welcome the participants in Group VI of the IT Leaders Program who are starting their first workshop.  Welcome to the Tuesday Readings, gleanings from my readings that I hope you might find interesting, provocative, and otherwise useful.

Today's two-part reading takes the once-common practice of communal barn-raising where everyone in a community worked together to benefit a single farm family.  Given the right task, good planning and organization you may find a community approach gets the right result and has the benefit of generating new relationships that represent a real added value.

Many people have observed that journaling will change the way that you go about your work and your life.  In today's reading, Rick Brenner of Chaco Canyon Consulting observes that you record what you did and why you did it.  And, you record what you didn't do and why you didn't do it.  You record what you saw and what you only thought you saw; and later, upon reflection, what you didn't see.  You separate out facts from what you only assumed.  And, most important, when you go back to earlier entries, you see patterns you may have never noticed if you were not writing the words down.

Most of the time we interact with others -- fellow members of a team, colleagues assembled for a particular issue, individuals we meet by happenstance -- to get work done.  In "We Are All People," Rick Brenner of Chaco Canyon Consulting reminds us that we are all people, different people, and that we have one common objective, getting results.  He provides nine guidelines you may find helpful:

    1.  Assume that you still don't understand the problem.

    2.  No one measures status accurately. 

Who's Sorry Now?

http://www.technologyreview.com/read_article.aspx?id=16816&ch=infotech

Today, I turn to Rick Brenner's Chaco Canyon Newsletter for a piece -- If Only I Had Known -- that spans two issues:

1.    http://www.chacocanyon.com/pointlookout/060531.shtml

2.    http://www.chacocanyon.com/pointlookout/060607.shtml

Most of us, I suspect, don't pay much attention to "trust" until we get smacked in the face because there is an absence of trust and that absence of trust is stopping progress towards our goal dead in its tracks.  Rick Brenner, in two April issues of his newsletter Point Lookout focuses on the costs of low or no trust.

    -    Part I  http://www.chacocanyon.com/pointlookout/060419.shtml