Month: January 2023

Knowledge work is not a production line. Don’t expect linearity of time and output. Working flexibly can have surprising benefits for productivity.

Most people equate work time with progress. That’s not always the case

Rick Rubin, Tim Ferris Podcast

Through my career, I’ve found one extraordinary thing. When I apply ‘work to rule’, I am more productive. ‘Work to rule’ in this context isn’t the traditional union process of strict compliance and bureaucracy often for leverage and to point out the discretionary work. My version of ‘work to rule’ is focusing on only the absolute minimum demands of work and only the necessary meetings. It is strict compliance with performance outcomes and elimination of discretionary efforts. All the other time soaks and stress makers are ignored or deferred. Only the most essential work remains to be tackled in a surprisingly leisurely way.

The benefits of this version of ‘work to rule’ are many:

• perspective: so often when I step away from stressed out busy work I find a better path to achieve my goals. I see things that I hadn’t when I was so tied up on the dance floor.
• focus: choosing what matters most and what is necessary is an act of focus.
• thinking time: creativity requires room to explore and iterate that can be lost in continuous work pressures
• other influences: mixing influences can be powerful and provocative. You don’t get that in the same meetings with the same people all the time.
• collaboration: deep collaboration needs time, space and the right mood. You need to get beyond transactional relationships and simple quid pro quo to be transformative.
• risk taking: when our lives are full we play safe, after all surely all this work is enough. When we step away, we see bigger bets to make.
• mood: ignoring the urgent but unimportant can feel cheeky, rude or even like wagging. Plus the space allows time for self-care. All act as little fillips to the mood every time.

Knowledge work is not a simple linear function of time. It involves complex interplays of relationships, information and inspiration. You need to foster a work pattern that allows for the space to benefit from those interplays. ‘Working to rule’ might just provide that space.

Everyone is busy all the time. We have made busyness performative, an impression of success and an entertainment for busy minds. Because our busy often involves others we have made busy virally engaging. We are trapped in an infinite scroll.

Infinite scroll has been a boon for engagement in social and other apps. Our desire for entertainment and activity is satisfied by an endless algorithm of content to consume and share. We can feel satisfied with our use of time even if nothing meaningful or even pleasurable happens. We are up to date. We are engaged.

Our workplaces are full of many similar infinite scrolls. Email is treated as work and email warriors spend hours battling towards inbox zero by turning each email into multiple more. Chat products now offer the same infinite scrolling options and lots of dopamine hits. You can consume hours pinging away in Microsoft Teams, Slack, Whatsapp and more.

This is a day when I covered no ground.

Just pushed and shuffled my papers around,

Margaret Fishback, Busy Day at the Office

Meeting calendars are another infinite scroll. I am busy if my day is full of meetings even if nothing is achieved in those meetings but more work and more emails. Seeing people doing their emails in meetings is the ultimate crossover. I’m so busy I don’t have time to do anything properly.

Conversations full of status updates are another infinite scroll. Look I am so busy I will tell you how good I am. We won’t actually interact, ask questions, solve problems, we will just report busyness. How many one-on-one meetings and team meetings are lost to the performance of busy.

As productive and as important as all this activity feels, like infinite scroll, it gets in the way of the real work and the real engagement. Customers are frustrated. So many people complain that the real work only happens when the meeting and emails stop in the evenings, at lunch or on weekends, taking away from valuable living time.

Turn off the email and the chat. Abandon inbox zero. Leave status to reports. Walk out of the meeting when the work is done. Pick up the phone and have a real conversation. Escape the infinite scroll.

To perform it repeatedly, to perform it each time

as if the first, to walk the dim corridor believing that

the conference it leads to might change everything,

to adhere to a possibility of reward, of betterment,

Timothy Donnelly, The Cloud Corporation

PS: I understand the irony of adding one more thing to your infinite scroll with this post. Now do the work.

The strategy for manipulation of media used to be simple ‘flood the information landscape’ with your message. Manipulate the news cycle and place your disinformation in the centre of the media conversation and you will shape opinion in your favour.

During 2022 there were hopeful signs that this model is starting to breakdown or at least be open to countering strategies. In various elections, in Ukraine, and in lots of clumsy government propaganda efforts, countering voices closer to the truth held up their end of the debate.

For corporate communication professionals there is a lesson in these failures. Many of the techniques of corporate communication have depended on their control of the information landscape. It was easy for corporate communicators to ‘flood the landscape’ and hard for other voices to compete, especially when combined with cultural pressures against speaking up. Put together a fancy video, email from leaders, post on the intranet and add in some posters and you will be no longer be fine.

What is changing to weaken the power of the flooding strategy?

• Fragmentation and Distrust of Mainstream Media: the continuing collapse of media’s influence and its fragmentation weakens the ability to dominate discussion. Is there really a 24 hour media cycle to win now that much is online? Who believes an email or press release as a source of truth?
• Manipulation savvy: We are more savvier to the more blatant efforts at manipulation, especially in younger generations who are the consumers of the media most susceptible to influence. We are learning to recognise and loathe spin. Even the real ‘fake news’ of false images and videos are now deconstructed quickly by online sources.
• Countering Voices: The bar on producing countering voices is so low that any phone is a capable production video suite. Manipulative messaging can be easily undone with video, podcast discussion and other deconstruction.

The challenge for corporate communicators as these trends enter the corporate information landscape is to find new strategies to share messages and influence debate.

• Conversation: No communication is once and done. Allow for and plan for discussion and conversation. Invite it as a learning exercise and foster the fact checking and understanding that will ensure that countering views are subject to the same scrutiny.
• Avoid Explanation through Engagement: The old adage of ‘if you are explaining you are losing’ also comes from a model where solutions are presented complete. Co-design helps employees engage with the changes and the compromises in the process
• Leverage all the tools: use social communication from a wide range of voices, use your social collaboration platform, use video in multiple ways, particularly to share the voice of your employees discussing the changes.
• Be Genuine: Trust in 2023 is fragile. Be consistently genuine and real in your communications. Call out the weaknesses and trade offs.

Organisations want capable employees who can make the most of their information to do great work. No organisation wants drones who blindly follow propaganda. Take that into account in how you plan corporate communication and help your employees to learn.

When generous, she gave a look that told a lesson,

taught me how to read the world in what goes unsaid.

Kyrsten Hill, A White Man in the Audience Said I Owed Him

The System doesn’t owe you anything. Odds are the system is actually working its hardest against you. So, do the work until you get what you want

We all have the feeling we are owed something from time to time. We have worked hard, struggled and put in the time. Maybe it feels like you have done the work. Maybe it feels like it is time. Maybe it feels like we are owed a reward for our efforts.

Sadly, life doesn’t work that way. Even if you have been explicitly told that you are owed, don’t count on it. Things change. Surprises happen. Entitlement hurts hopes.

Do the work to get what you want. Keep pushing and working to remind yourself and others that you deserve it. Success comes from your efforts or dumb luck. The best way to have luck is for it to ‘find you working’ to paraphrase.

It’s never time. Keep working.

   I stood in a crowded street that was live with people,

   and no one spoke a word, and the morning shone.

Everyone silent, moving. . . . Take my hand. Speak to me.

Mariel Rukeyser, Effort at Speech Between Two People

In 2022, I set out with an intention of exploring Flow. That intent did not last. There were parts of the year where from exhaustion or desperation I went along with the flow, but for much of the year the graceful transitions or the purposeful rewards of flow were beyond me. Too much of 2022 was hanging on with grim determination.

What we remember of love is starlight

W.S. Merwin, To the Parting Year

As I pondered a theme for 2023, my first thought was Choose. However, my inspirations crumbled, not a good sign for a year long theme, and as a theme, choose felt too insistent and consumerist. For a while, I considered ‘Get Real’, a reminder to base myself securely in reality, avoid propaganda and to turn away from the unnecessary and overly demanding. A year in which I could let those with unreal expectations have a dose of 1980s teen repartee.

However, something more creative and generative appealed to me as a theme. If you’ve followed this blog, poetry has been a theme since 2020. Poetry will weave itself into the year no matter what. My job is to find more cause to experience and share it. As Poetry is here it is not the theme but might lead on to it.

I love a novel take. There no value in repeating what everyone else is doing or saying. What I value more is the twist, the surprising insight, the people who don’t follow the flow but turn away to find something magical that was hidden there all along underneath. That turn takes an ability to see something different and special and the choice to bring it about.

That turn is also a key part of a knot. Take a cable turn it upon itself and find something new. Knot bring together the all the many threads we have been carrying. Knots that tie us together and connect us in a community.

At a time when tired patterns are repeating themselves, it is time to make ‘hope and history rhyme’. We need to break out and go another cleverer and better way before the end. In a world obsessing with the power of large language model driven pattern recognition, it is time to embrace the novel twist.

But then, once in a lifetime
The longed for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up
And hope and history rhyme.

Seamus Heaney, The Cure at Troy

But hang on here while we make the turn

into the final six where all will be resolved,

where longing and heartache will find an end,

Billy Collins, Sonnet

So borrowing from a sonnet, we flip in the end to another message, my theme of 2023 is Volta.

Volta: Italian word for “turn.” In a sonnet, the volta is the turn of thought or argument

Poetry Foundation

The volta marks a shift from the main narrative or idea of the poem and awakens readers to a different meaning or to a reveal in the conclusion of the poem.

Poets.org, Volta

And now—unwittingly, you’ve made me dream

Of violets, and my soul’s forgotten gleam.

Alice Moore Dunbar-Nelson, Sonnet

May you have a happy, prosperous and productive 2023. If it’s anything like the last three years we can expect a twist in the end.