- How do teams (organizations) create focus, maintain focus, and sometimes lose focus?
- Does focus equally impact knowledge work organizations (e.g. software development companies) as it does physical work organizations (e.g. professional athletes and teams)?
- How much does focus actually relate to the success of the team (as oppose to skills, experience, and other traits)?
Creating Focus
Back to professional sports, you can see athletes creating focus. A pitcher will let out a deep breath prior to his pitch. A golfer will often wiggle for up to 30 seconds in preparation of hitting a ball. These forms of preparation are removing the physical tension in the athlete’s body. Releasing physical tension allows an athlete to focus.
In their book Artful Making, Rob Austin and Lee Devin discuss how “actors release physical tension to gain power and increase flexibility of their physical instrument” -referring to their body. They also introduce the mental equivalent of physical tension as inhibition. Inhibition prevents us from making a fool of ourselves, but also prevents us from truly expressing ourselves. Mental inhibition must be released to allow for exploration, creativity and innovation required in knowledge work.
They continue in Artful Making by indicating that “Release requires focus”. I believe that release and focus are co-dependent. To achieve true focus, you must also release your physical tensions and mental inhibitions. Beyond creating a shared vision and purpose, what can you, as an agile executive, do to release physical and mental tensions in your organizations to allow focus to occur?
Create a safe workplace where ideas are encourages and there are “no bad ideas”. Empower team members to explore and create outrageous thoughts without fear of embarrassment or retribution. This freedom allows for your team members to open up and go beyond just following direction to being part of the creative solution. This environment releases the mental inhibitions that prevent focus and innovation.
Increasing time pressures to create focus and productivity is an often used play in business today. However, there is a negative relationship between time pressure and creativity. In a recent Harvard Business School paper by Teresa Amabile on Time Pressures and Creativity in Organizations, she concludes that there is a direct correlation between time pressures and creative cognitive processing. A person’s ability to create is reduced relative to increased external time pressures. While productivity may be higher in the short term, innovation and creativity are reduced. She further concludes that there is a lasting effect of time pressures leading to burnout and hampered progress in the long run. Leaders should take steps to protect time for their employees who engage in creative processing.
Losing Focus
Again, for the athlete, losing focus can be a simple as a shout from the crowd on a quiet golf course. It can be the football opponent running some unexpected plays that throws off the focus of your game plan. We cannot avoid losing focus, our external environments will always find ways to disengage us. We must limit focus inhibitors and increase our ability to adapt and regain focus quickly.
Interruptions are a primary reason for losing focus. Just as the shout from the crowd distracts a golfer, an issue from technical support or manager distracts an engineer. Major interruptions (e.g. crises) distract focus from entire teams from their primary goal. James Coplien and Neil Harrison in Organizational Patterns of Agile Software Development introduce patterns such as Unity of Purpose, Task Per Team, Firewalls, and Gatekeeper to handle organizational distractions while maintaining team focus and productivity toward their primary goal.
We have to be careful not to completely isolate interruptions. Some interruptions create positive changes toward the goals of the organization. In Artful Making they indicate that interruptions are better thought of as the introduction of new material and gives the actor more to think about and more interesting problems to solve. This fuels innovation. Thus, rather than trying to avoid interruptions, actors acquire the ability to shift their focus rapidly to important matters.
In the case of the unexpected competitor (or opponent) play, we must build organizational structures and implement processes that allow for agility, adapting to the ever changing competitive marketplace. Just as the football team opponent will often find a new way to attack, our competitors find ways to innovate that catch us off guard. If we have not developed agile structures and methods within our organization and use them to adapt our strategy in real-time, we will lose the game. See more on maintaining focus.
Maintaining Focus
No ordinary human can maintain a pure focus for more than about 12 seconds. Focus is hard for individuals, but it is even harder for organizations. What can you, as the leader of your organization, to enable focus over time?
Create cross-functional teams across typical organizational boundaries of product management, engineering, test, support, and documentation. In more predictive development methods – requirements, design, development, test and documentation are created by different resources at different times. The delays between the various teams working on the same work item reduces collaboration and focus. When a work item is in test, the analyst who wrote the requirements and the developer who designed and developed the work item are no longer in that mindset, they are working on another work item. It will be an interruption for them to return to point at which they understand the context of that work item before being productive at resolving the issue. In a cross-functional team, where those processes are occurring simultaneously, each resource is in the same mindset at the same time and can quickly evaluate and resolve issues.
Limit the size and number of work items at any one time and increase the number of resources working on those work items. By reducing the amount of work items at any one time, you increase the number of resources focused on those work items assuming you keep resources constant. This does not mean that you are being less productive, actually overall throughput will be increased as indicated by queuing theory in Mary Poppendieck’s Lean Software Development. Team collaboration working on shared work items create positive feedback loops increasing depth, speed and quality of work items.
In Agile Software Development with Scrum, Ken Schwaber indicates a key role of leadership in an agile environment is to remove impediments from the organization or team. By removing road blocks from a team, we are allowing the team to focus on their goals and objectives and increase their speed of delivery. Roadblocks may include limited resources of computers, tools, access to a product owner, etc.; the physical environment such as cubicles, whiteboards, meeting rooms, etc.; or organizational items such as outside distractions, meetings, etc.
Other elements of agile software development are daily meetings and posted status. A quick meeting each day where the team can share their work and issues will re-enforce focus across the team. Software development is a human process and people will tend to wander. A daily meeting will help ground people in the goals and objectives and increase their focus on contributing to the success of the team. A status report showing the goal and current state of a team posted on the wall is a constant reminder to stay focused.
Summary
Just as focus is critical to a professional athlete to win, focus is critical to an organization to succeed. As an organizational leader, you can create an environment that promotes innovation and focus. You can deploy methods in your organization that will help you create and maintain focus. You can also create organizational structures and practices that help you avoid losing focus and quickly regain focus when changes or distractions occur.
Focus is the primary means by which a leader influences efforts in an organization. A leader cannot necessarily know what workers are doing, they cannot tell them what to do. But often, they can influence the focus for them. In a healthy organization, focus is organic, maintained in the process itself.