Author: simongterry

Beyond Adoption to Value Creation

Posted on by simongterry in Collaboration

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A great deal of attention in enterprise social networking has gone into ‘driving adoption’. A focus on adoption can distract organisations from the real challenge of any business activity, creating value in fulfilment of the organisation’s strategy.

Adoption is an intermediate goal

Adoption is a means to an end. Adoption is a tool of value creation. It is not the result. The desired outcome is the value created by an engaged community that allows for the fulfilment of a strategic goal through outcomes like better alignment, innovation, adaptation, better customer & community focus, greater agility or improved efficiency.

The desire to move beyond adoption is growing. Luis Suarez recently argued that the language of driving adoption is missing the mark. Joachim Stroh has also highlighted ways in which we need to move beyond traditional adoption.

The logical next step from adoption is the end goal of work. Business and people work to create value in line with a strategy. We need our use of enterprise social networking to create value for each users and for the business as a whole.

Adoption as a goal alone can lead us astray

Our focus on adoption is often reflected with concerns from our traditional hierarchical ways of working. For example I have been asked the following questions about adoption that indicate something is going astray:

  • If we don’t have universal adoption, how will people get our messages?: If you are focused on one-way communication, there’s a good chance they don’t listen to your messages already.
  • Can’t we just mandate adoption? You can, but it rarely works to create an engaged & valuable community. Incentives may be a transitional tool to help people engage with the solution but take care that they don’t make participation an end in itself.
  • Won’t our people resist adopting this new solution? If the solution offers no value or is seen as a distraction from real work, they should resist. If it creates value for users and they see its value to the organisational strategy then this is an issue that we will overcome.
  • What’s the right number of users to adopt a social network? There is no magic number. The right answer is enough of the organisation to create enough valuable conversations for users and the organisation. That can be a surprisingly small percentage of the organisation, provided they are well connected into the larger organisation.
  • We have lots of users. Nobody knows what to use it for. What do we do now? You have users but it is likely you don’t have a community that understands how to do things together to create value for your strategy.

Most importantly of all, enterprise social networks are infrastructure, not tools. Employees need to make sense of a new enterprise social network and integrate it into their work. There is no pre-ordained usage that people can adopt like many other technology systems. Adopting a network as another conversation tool may be interesting but rapidly loses relevance in a busy workplace with many high volume channels for communication. The best guide to employees is to direct their sense-making into how it will create value for their work and strategic value for the organisation.

Often adoption drives demand a lot of overhead and effort. They are pushing something into a community. Where this effort goes to creating niche use cases with easy adoption, selling a uniqueness event in an enterprise social network or investing all the time in unusual campaign activities it can backfire. Employees who come to think of the enterprise social network as being used only for a special activities may not consider the opportunities for every day value creation. In these networks, there is a dramatic difference in utilisation between when adoption is being driven and every day use limiting the potential of the platform. Use caution that your efforts to drive use reinforce the connection to value in daily work and strategy.

Importantly adoption is rarely a goal that makes sense to the managers and leaders whose support is needed to foster a collaborative culture and role model usage. Conversations advocating adoption of social collaboration and other future of work practices can seem abstract and a side issue to the work of the organisation to many managers. Managers are looking for how enterprise social networks contribute to value creation.

Personal and Strategic Value

Value is different for every organisation as organisation’s purpose, strategies and goals differ. Value need not be a hard dollar return on investment. ROI can rarely be calculated in the abstract for infrastructure. From an organisation’s perspective defining a contribution to a strategic goal is often more effective.

Value is different for each individual depending on their goals, their role, their work preferences and their needs. Individuals will need to change their work practices in ways that make sense to them. Role modelling and storytelling will assist this journey but they will make their own sense of value.

There are 5 key elements of the work to moving the focus of enterprise social networking to value creation:

  • Create Strategic Alignment: Make explicit the connection between social collaboration and the strategic goals of the organisation. At a minimum, these conversations will educate your employees on the purpose, strategy and goals.
  • Guide Personal Value Creation: Guide employees to understand how the enterprise social network creates value in their work. In my work with organisations, I use a Value Maturity Methodology based on users maturity through 4 stages Connect>Share>Solve>Innovate.
  • Experiment & Learn: Create an environment for employees and the organisation where the enterprise social network fosters experimentation to create new forms of value in work. Encourage sharing and solving challenges.
  • Foster A Learning Community: An engaged and aligned community of employees working together for business goals is the greatest opportunity for value creation in organisations. Focus on how community accelerates value creation and the key roles required in any community. Understanding the roles of champions and leaders is critical.
  • Discuss Value Creation: Social networking accelerates double loop learning. Discuss value creation in the network as the work conversations occur. Celebrate lessons and successes. Back innovations with corporate muscle. Use these new learning conversation to foster alignment with strategic goals and encourage people to find new personal value.

If you would like to create greater value in your enterprise social network or discuss how the Value Maturity Model applies to assist your organisation to create strategic value, please get in contact. I am available through @simongterry or Linkedin or www.simonterry.com

When Circumstances Change, Change Your Approach

Posted on by simongterry in Change, Uncategorized

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Changing circumstances demand changes in approach. Clinging to the old ways can be dangerous.

The Praying Mantis in the Schoolyard

When confronted with a threat, a praying mantis has a set program of responses to take advantage of the advantages of excellent camouflage: freeze & blend in, sway like a leaf, run to the nearest tree. All these strategies work well in the normal circumstances of a praying mantis, the leafy greenery of trees.

However when the wind is blowing strongly and a praying mantis finds itself blown to the unfamiliar circumstances of schoolyard asphalt, none of these strategies work. It can’t blend in. Freezing exposes it to risk of being stomped. What it runs towards is not a tree. It is the leg of a small curious boy. In the end, it need a generous young girl to carry it back to the bushes to escape the growing crowd.

Change Your Approach

A praying mantis can’t change its approach immediately. Evolution will take a while to catch up with asphalt. It will eventually adapt as a species, but that doesn’t help any individual insect.

Your organisation isn’t programmed by genetics. When circumstances change, your organisation and its people can adopt new approaches, experiment to find new ways and learn how to succeed in the new environment. If your organisation is still responding to the new network economy with the same approaches and practices that worked in the industrial era, it can be as dangerous as outdated practices were to the mantis. Nobody will be generous enough to return your organisation to its preferred environment.

There is No Formula – Just Learning

Many managers find this discussion deeply unsettling. Advocates of the future of work are calling for change, but they are often either highly conceptual or discussing concepts that seem very alien to the circumstances in an organisation.

The abstraction has a reason. The future of work is being driven by a network economy where the right strategies are often emergent and adaptive. Adopting a new fixed formula is as dangerous as the last one. While we would like a formula (and many offer to sell one), the future strategies need to be learned for each organisation in its own circumstances in the network.  Change can’t be imposed it needs to be led one conversation at a time.

Creating a responsive organisation that can leverage the human potential to learn and experiment a way forward will take new techniques and new ways of organising.  Many of these techniques that are rising to the fore in discussion of the future of work and responsive organisations are ways to foster the emergence of a new better approaches for organisation using networks, rather than fighting them.  That’s why much of the conversation comes back to enabling people to learn and act in new ways:

  • Leadership: fostering the leadership capabilities of each person to leverage their insights and their potential to lead change from their unique position
  • Experimentation: Moving from exercising the power and expertise of a few to experimenting to learn together
  • Learning: improving the ability to understand the environment by focusing on tools to better seek out, share and make sense of information.
  • Work out Loud: aligning the organisation and bringing out latent human capabilities using techniques like ‘working out loud’
  • Collaboration & Community: Networks route around barriers. Therefore you need to bring down the barriers within and around your organisation. Isolation is not a winning strategy in a period of rapid change.

Accelerating Trust

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

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At the recent DoLectures Australia, many of the attendees remarked on the high levels of trust that had been built between the attendees over the four days. The high trust environment was such that speakers rewrote their talks to share more and some big dreams and surprising admissions were shared on both the stage and around the campfire.

A few key factors helped foster that environment of high trust:

Share a goal: Everyone attended the event to learn and to share in stories of actions that are changing the world. People wanted to become more effective at driving change and often to find a new path in the world. Those common goals fostered connections and trust.

Select for behaviour – especially giving: The event selected for people who were action oriented, passionate and interested in others. These are not abstract values. They come out in action, especially giving. There were a lot of givers in the community. Adam Grant’s Give and Take was a fitting gift for all the speakers (a unexpected gesture by Andy Hedges of Westfield, an event sponsor). From the first night people were sharing ideas and sharing networks in an effort to enable others to move forward. Nothing builds trust like the gift of help.

Strip away the status: when you are camping, sharing communal activities and it gets cold, it is hard to hold on to the trappings of status. Nobody looked their best and everyone’s warm clothes looked alike levelling status that might hold back conversation and connection. 

Build connections: Like any group there were some networks present among the group, but no exclusive cliques. Open networks became a way to accelerate connections as people introduced others and referred people to those who shared an interest or an ability to help. The sense that everyone could talk and understand each other fostered trust. The group left the event deeply connected as a result.

Be present: When nobody has internet or a phone connection, everyone is more present. When almost everyone is staying the whole event, including the speakers, there is time for deeper conversations. People gave themselves over to the event and the company. That presence and the mindfulness it brings gave everyone the chance to truly listen and engage in the event and the activities.

Share stories: Storytelling is a way to learn of others’ experiences, capabilities, goals and actions. Telling stories whether on stage or around a fire enables people to get a richer understanding of the other person.

An environment of trust and concern: Payne’s Hut where the event was held is a place of beauty but more than that it has been constructed and run with a concern to create a wonderful experience. The hosts of Do Lectures added to that experience by taking care to design for the little moments of the event. Trust is reciprocal and reciprocated. When you feel others trust you and show concern for you, you are inclined to follow the role model.

Trust is a critical capability for the future of increasing agile networked organisations. Fostering trust with techniques like these above is critical for the future of work in our organisations.

This post was inspired by a conversation at the event with Col Duthie, the insightful MC of Do Lectures Australia

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

How can an organization encourage innovative ideas and allow them to move through the system? The answer is that you need to create little pockets of chaos within the larger organization.

Ori Brafman (via stoweboyd)

You need a little chaos to create room to move.

Growing Crystals of Change

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

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When we confront large scale transformation, the scope and beauty of the outcomes we seek can be overwhelming. Crystals grow molecule by molecule.  Bring about your large scale change action by action.

Big Change is Daunting

Discussing large transformative change you will often hear people refer to how daunting it is to consider the entire idea of the change. Richard Martin has eloquently described the work of building our future responsive organisations as like the construction of a cathedral that will be completed beyond our lifetime. Mary Freer wants to change health and social care for the better through Change Day. Eddie Harran seeks to understand the role of nomadism in shaping the lives of digital nomads. These are but a few of the large scale ideas that challenge our understanding of how to move forward.

Just conceiving of a perfect endpoint for the change can be a barrier to getting started. The pressure for perfection of this final vision can come from many sources. We want our goals to as well as ordered as a crystal and with a fine gemlike finish as well. Too many people spend their time polishing the gem of an idea and never get started.

To lead large scale change, we need to unlearn the desire to know the exact shape of the endpoint. Instead of focusing our attention on the perfect gem of an end goal, we need to focus the process by which the crystal of change gets formed.

A Crystal Grows Molecule by Molecule

The crystals that we later polish to create gems are formed when a seed attracts molecules from a saturated solution or gas to form a solid structure. There are a number of parts of this crystallisation process that apply in change as well:

Seed – First Action: There needs to be a first point for a crystal to attach. Somebody needs to begin the process of change and create the first action. This action can be as simple as declaring a need to change or organising the first connections.

Saturated solution – Ready Network: Super saturation of the solution with molecules drives the formation of a crystal. Change needs networks that are connected and rich enough in change agents to sustain connection and action. If that saturation falls between minimum levels, change stops. Action is one key way to keep change agents engaged.

Nucleation – Small Experiments: Before crystals form, the molecules connect in solution. Consider this the experimental efforts to form a crystal. Only when conditions are right to achieve stability do they connect to form a crystal. Every successful change initiative finds that there have been previous unsuccessful attempts to achieve stable change and that others are working on change in parallel. Don’t see these are barriers or disappointments. Recognise that the key is helping these experiments connect together at scale.

Crystal growth – Open Structure: Crystals form in structures because there are clear points and structures for new molecules to attach. Large scale change needs an open structure that allows those who are ‘transformation curious’ to connect and engage with the change in their own way.

Impurities – Embrace a little chaos: The dynamic nature of the process and environmental conditions when forming crystals attracts minor impurities and irregularities. These are just part of the process. Large scale change is never perfect. Accept that things will have a few rough edges, but keep working to grow the change around them.

Time: Most crystals grow gradually molecule by molecule. This gradual process reflects the process of change where people make new sense of their world and add new actions slowly step by step.

The Lesson from Crystals

Start acting now with the first experiments in a connected network of change agents and allow others to connect and shape the work as it moves forward. 

Thanks to Eddie Harran for the conversation that gave the idea of crystallisation somewhere to connect

Now vs Later

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

Now is when you thought of it.
Now is when you want to do it.
Now has energy, passion and surprise.
Now is spontaneous and infectious.
Now lets you solve for the real problems of now.
Now means momentum.
Now isn’t easy or sure of success.
Now lets you do.

Later is when you must remember it.
Later is when you will need to remember why.
Later has doubts, processes and predictability.
Later is ambiguous and vague.
Later lets you solve for the imagined problems of later.
Later means delay.
Later isn’t easy or sure of success.
Later lets you wait.

Your call.

Policies are Tools. They are not the Result.

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

Organisations often treat compliance with policy as an outcome. This approach confuses the tool and the result. Policy is guidance, should allow for exceptions and should change to deliver the best results.

When I began my career as a banker, an experience colleague introduced me to Lending Policy 100. Numbered to sit at the beginning of a long list of lending and credit policies, the purpose of Lending Policy 100 was to remind bankers that policy is merely a guideline for action and people should always exercise judgement.  To put it in simple terms, Lending Policy 100 was a policy to explain that policies are only policies.  

This was bureaucratic absurdity but a useful tool. Lending Policy 100 came in handy when you needed to ask someone to exercise judgement.  Appealing to another policy gave people the wriggle room to escape the strictures of another policy that would otherwise be poorly applied. Lending Policy 100 enabled you to turn the conversation away from the tool and back to the result.

Policies are just tools. They are guidelines to help people do their job in an efficient and compliant way. Tools require application to specific circumstances and employees need to make judgement calls to interpret and apply the policy in each circumstance. No tool is always effective. What matters is how it is applied.

When organisations mandate policy compliance they have confused the tool and the result. Organisations fail to achieve their outcomes when they refuse to acknowledge that you can’t anticipate every circumstance, that things change and that employees need to be trusted to exercise discretion in cases to get the right outcome.

Focusing on perfection in policy compliance leads directly to your employees saying “But that is our policy” the next time they need to explain a bad decision to a customer, employee or other stakeholder. Zero tolerance for exceptions is zero tolerance for the reality of your customer’s world. There is no better way to show indifference to customers.

Responsive organisations accept that policy must work to achieve the desired outcomes. They focus on employees commitment and capability to achieve these outcomes, not compliance with policy. They allow for exceptions and they allow for people to ask for changes in policies when required. Policies can be a useful tool in organisations (even if only for legal reasons), but they must be applied as an agile and responsive tool.

99 Posts and the Pitch Ain’t One

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized
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Working out loud is an important practice to escape the sense of social media as a challenging exercise of pitching yourself.

Many people struggle with the feeling that blogging and other forms of social media is self-promotion, bragging or a claim to expertise. Reluctant to pitch themselves publicly these people sit on the sidelines. As a result they and their networks miss the value of their contributions.

John Stepper has made the point that everybody works so working out loud is accessible to all of us. There is a humility that is essential to joining in the process of sharing partially completed work. There is no need to pitch when the process is a simple as: 

Working Out Loud = Narrating your work + Observable work

The work need not be perfect. It should not be finished. Working out loud is a process of learning and collaboration. The idea that you would share work in progress to invite discussion presupposes you don’t know everything and don’t have all the answers. 

The benefits of working out loud don’t always arise from a single post. However, working out loud is an application of the the Formula for Awesome. Working out loud supplies the humility, generosity and collaboration.  

All you need to add is some purpose, urgency and persistence. Your daily work challenges should give you more than enough for these three. If you sustain the practice of working out loud, you will learn more approaches to working out loud, you will gain comfort in social collaboration and you will build trust with your colleagues.  

A side benefit of working out loud is that you will develop an authentic reputation for both the work you do and the generosity of your collaborative style. That’s far more powerful than a sell job that everyone views cynically. Build a reputation for doing, not talking.

So here’s your next challenge. Work out loud each day for 99 days. Don’t worry about the Pitch. Just share and reap the rewards of collaboration.

PS With apologies to Jay-Z. Thanks to Ross Hill and the many Do Lectures conversations about social collaboration for the inspiration.