RECENT POSTS

In the midst of the recent drama in Chile, in which 33 miners were successfully rescued, many radio and television commentators described the back story, in which international efforts were marshaled to keep the men as healthy and sane as possible during their extended ordeal in the dark cold depths of the earth.

We were happy with our first Six Boxes webinar done for the Training Magazine Network last week. The title Break Out of the Training Box is intended to emphasize the value of the Six Boxes Approach for moving from learning-only to performance, and from being held in place by our clients and stakeholders to being able to engage in productive discussions with them about non-training factors that influence performance. You can still listen here .

I had the great pleasure of working with a team of serious, but fun, senior HR professionals at GS Caltex -- the Korean joint venture with Chevron --  for 2.5 days at the Company's beautiful training center in the mountains on a man-made lake, in Chung Pyung.  We used Six Boxes Performance Thinking to address both both cultural and operational applications, with a constant awareness of the interrelations between those two parts of any organization. Led by Jae Young Lee, Executive Vice President, the group included experienced Six Sigma practitioners and black belts with diverse backgrounds in engineering, finance, human resources, training, leadership, and technology management, among other areas of expertise.

Why do we call our way of helping to improve human performance and results in organizations an "approach?"  Isn't it a methodology, or a tool kit, or a model, or...?  Let me see if I can explain.

I continue to come back to a theme that I and Dr. Donald Tosti addressed in a session at the 2009 annual conference of ISPI, the difference between a problem-solving orientation to performance improvement and what we called a design engineering approach. Don has been an informal mentor of mine, and an inspiration for decades, in many different ways. In this instance we found that we are in "violent agreement" and have continued the dialog over time.  Don says that before the quality movement, performance improvement wasn't so focused on finding the cause of problems, but rather it was about getting the best possible performance as efficiently as possible. Today it seems more tilted toward problem-solving.

After exploring various social media options, we decided to use LinkedIn to create a forum for dialog among our colleagues, users, and friends. Actually, we set up the group as an experiment and started getting requests to join the next day! So we're off, and we'd like to invite you to join us. Ask a question to the group, post a story or an example, share your insights. Here's the link to sign up. We hope to meet you there.

Having just read yet another discussion group thread about HR/HRD having a "seat at the table" with senior management in organizations, I thought I'd take a minute to share our way of making this happen.

Well, actually, it was the Six Boxes Summer Institute, held two weeks ago at Islandwood, a sustainable education center on several hundred acres of forest a few miles from our offices on Bainbridge Island near Seattle.

We learned a lot of things, but one of them is that we will definitely do this again. And we might add some other events to our annual calendar as a result, too. Here's what one participant wrote:

"Six Boxes Camp has been added to my 'short list' of extraordinary life experiences.
I expect like the others, it will have a major impact on my future. Thank you."

Now let me share some of what we learned.

After the larger group of participants in our Six Boxes Institute departed, we spent an intense and fun two days with the small group whom we fondly refer to as our Six Boxes Accelerators – those who chose to dive more deeply into the tools and their applications on the path toward certification.

Day 2 of the Six Boxes Summer Institute was a demonstration of Managing and Leading with The Six Boxes® Approach, our newest program for developing “people managers” in organizations who can connect the day-to-day activities of their people to business results.  Normally broken into two half days with on-the-job homework in between, we  did a “run through” to demonstrate the lean, flexible program for enabling managers to actively develop their people.  We finished the program with 45 minutes of presentation and discussion among participants with Julie Capsambelis, Organizational Development Specialists at Syniverse Technologies, who has spearheaded implementation of the program at her company, garnering strong support from the CEO on down and integrating training with coaching and accountability in the Company’s performance management system to take management practices and processes to a new level.