Author: simongterry

Stop Magical Thinking

Posted on by simongterry in Collaboration, Leadership

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Magical thinking is any attempt to bend reality to the will or hopes of an individual. Whether by sleight of hand or genuine higher powers, magical thinking leads people into flights of fancy.

Many will remember the Magical Realist school of literature that delivered some extraordinarily captivating novels. Novels would move along telling an engaging story. Then suddenly they would swerve free of reality while magic transformed the world.

Sadly many business plans follow this swerving course at exactly the moment value needs to be created. Instead of exploring the human changes required they swerve into magical thinking. Magical thinking makes for engaging stories, but it makes for terrible plans for the future of work.

Stop Magical Thinking at Work

Let’s leave the magical thinking to creative arts and stop it in the future of work. Value in the future of work is hard work and we will need to create it together.

A really good indicator that magical thinking is creeping in to plans in business is the use of the passive voice. The human contribution to change slips away and magic takes over. Nobody need do anything because great stuff is about to happen suddenly entirely on its own.

The following things are all examples of magical thinking:

  • Adoption will be driven by the right launch, right features, etc.
  • Value will be created by adoption of the terminology, features, systems or processes.
  • Culture will be changed
  • Leaders will be changed 
  • Ideas, changes and new practices will be understood and adopted easily
  • Hierarchy, command and control, micromanagement, etc will be eliminated
  • The desired outcome will be delivered by new policies, processes, measures or systems.
  • More social/analytical/collaborative/cooperative/community-oriented/engaged/innovative work will occur and will be valued by management
  • New forms of value will be created
  • Great new jobs will be created
  • New efficiencies will happen
  • New performance metrics will be adopted

Change is not Magical. Change takes work

None of those things happen without the hard work of leading changes in the attitudes, behaviours and outcomes of the way people work. A real person needs to make that change happen. That special someone has to help others to:

  • Change attitudes about work so as to
  • Change behaviours at work so as to
  • Change the outcomes from work

Only those changes in outcomes create value. Value creation is critical because value creation determines what businesses do and keep doing. Sadly, value does not magically appear.

Before we see any value, at least one leader has to experience those changes in attitudes, behaviours and outcomes themselves. Then that special leader get to work hard to create the value for others through effort, influence and experimentation.

There is no passive voice in leadership. Let your actions speak louder than words.

So when do you start?

Working Out Loud is the Lean Start-up of Knowledge

Posted on by simongterry in Working out loud

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Working out loud enables early validation and engagement of others in ideas. By putting ideas to the test early when formed only to a minimum viable level wasted effort is avoided and the ideas move to fruition quicker. In this way working out loud reflects the value creation approaches of lean start-up.

Working out loud on Minimum Viable Ideas

One of the exercises in Harold Jarche’s PKM in 40 days program is around Narration of your work. I am a huge fan of working out loud and initially I wasn’t sure that I had much to learn. However, I took a risk and learned something new.

My experiment was to apply some lean start-up thinking to a concept that I am developing and put it out in a minimum viable form and seek feedback on how to develop that idea further in a relevant community. In this case, the idea was represented in minimum viable form as a single diagram and a story of where I was headed. Minimum viability in this case is just enough information to convey the information and test the key hypotheses that I wished to explore. 

We are used to fully thinking things through before sharing them. I am especially cautious around this. We are told that sharing something incomplete might be dangerous as people might form an incorrect impression or might copy the idea. I’d hate to miss an opportunity around something that seems important to my work. We are not use to putting minimum viable ideas forward for debate. 

However, perfecting ideas beyond that point in the quiet of our own workplace often means that when they are delivered they fall flat, miss the mark or need further work. How often have you worked long and hard on an idea that you believe in to have the “is that all?” response? I know it too well.

Working out loud brings Validation

My experience of narration was really powerful validation.  The diagram has drawn a great deal of support and feedback.  People have encouraged me to flesh out the tools behind the work.  They have suggested next steps, connections and applications that I can leverage further.  I have even had volunteers offer to work with me and someone offering to coach me in the lean start-up of this concept.

Working out loud clarifies Hypotheses

The other aspect of this experience was that working out loud enabled me to better understand the hypotheses that were a part of the work that I was doing. Had I gone on alone, I would have just buried these assumptions in the work.

Framing up my engagement of others as a test of the ideas pushed me to understand what were the key hypotheses that I needed others to confirm. Testing the assumptions reduces the risk of investing more time in the idea.

Working out loud reinforces Learning (Permanently Beta)

Because I and others know the idea is in development, improvement is part and parcel of sharing the work out loud. I don’t feel obliged to defend the work as I have less invested. I can be more dispassionate about the feedback of others as to how to improve the work. I learn more faster.

Work out loud to create value

Working out Loud with a Lean Start-up mindset can deliver powerful value in the creation and sharing of knowledge. As knowledge work becomes more important in the future of work, we need to be more effective and faster in our creation and sharing of knowledge. Practices like working out loud will drive real value the productivity, effectiveness and engagement of knowledge workers.

The Purpose Economy: How Your Desire for Impact, Personal Growth and Community Is Changing the World | Stanford Social Innovation Review

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

Purpose, leadership and exponential potential.
An extract from The Purpose Economy by Aaron Hurst.

Via Celine Schillinger and Kenneth Mikkelson

The Purpose Economy: How Your Desire for Impact, Personal Growth and Community Is Changing the World | Stanford Social Innovation Review

The Firehose, the Bucket & The Sieve: Information & Value in the Network Era

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

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The new network era quite evidently brings us a firehose of information, the ability to draw buckets of relevant insight and the need to sieve out relevant and quality knowledge. When we turn to value, we know it is rushing by but often we feel like we are holding an empty sieve. We need to rethink how we gain value in the network era.

Information: The Firehose, the Bucket and the Sieve

We are already aware of the impact of the network era on our access to information:

  • The Firehose: We are all experiencing information overload. The flow of data, information and knowledge is to great for anyone to follow in a meaningful way. The pace of change of that information in networks also stretches traditional techniques of gathering and using information. The hype around ‘Big Data" is a attempt to say ‘hey point the firehose here and we will find meaning in the volume’. Many big data initiatives will fail because the volume outweighs the value without clear goals and uses.
  • The Bucket: Most people cannot consume the flow from the Firehose so they resort to a Bucket. We search. We follow. We join communities. We turn the hose on and off to fill a bucket we can manage. All of these are personal knowledge management techniques to narrow our focus and draw a more useful amount of information.
  • The Sieve: Even with our Bucket, we need a Sieve to find the real insights, the actionable information that becomes knowledge and can develop into wisdom. Quantity is huge. Quality is variable. Significance can be scarce. The more efficient we are at recognising it the better. The value of working out loud is we can leverage others ability to find the significance with us.

Value: The Sieve

When individuals and organisations turn to look at value creation in the network era, it often feels like they are holding an empty sieve.  

Networks route around blockages and inefficiencies. Our traditional ways of capturing value from information often create exactly this. The information and media industries have led the way in this disruption of traditional value gates like copyright, access, etc. Getty images recent decision to let their photos be used for free in certain cases is a simple recognition that their content is already being used, reused and shared.

This disruption is already moving beyond the information industries as people use the opportunities of networks, information and analytics to route around other the methods of value creation in other industries.

Value: The Firehose

The huge valuations of a number of information sharing platforms in the network era shows the value that can be created and the speed with which revenue will shift from one industry to another. This is the firehose of value.  

However firehoses are hard to control and flick around. Some of these major players are already seen their world disrupted as the next wave of innovations arrive. The largest players need to be constantly evolving and acquiring to stay relevant in a rapidly changing environment. Like the railroads of the industrial era, some will fall behind and be over taken by better paths or entirely different approaches.

Value: The Bucket & The Sieve

Scale was the principle source of value creation in the industrial era.  Big data is an echo of the view that we should get big to reach big markets and make big value. The network may not agree.

Lean startups focus on a small bucket first. Draw a little water. Run some experiments and sieve out the insight and the value. Some of those experiments prove to scale. Many don’t.

Drawing a bucket takes clarity of purpose, an understanding of strengths and focused and aligned efforts at creativity and insight from everyone in the organisation. These are the first steps to create value in the network era.

If we stand with a sieve in the firehose and expect value we will be sore, disappointed and very wet. The test for each of us and our organisations is to understand what bucket of value we are seeking to draw and to experiment relentlessly to sieve out the new and better ways of working. We need to rethink our organisations so that they have the ability to act this way, to be responsive to the information and market opportunities around them. Scaled command and control won’t cope.

Responsive organisations that leverage human capabilities, networks and experiments are the starting place. The value creation of railroads in the industrial era was overtaken by value creation of those who used their networks to develop and distribute new products and services. The next phase of growth of the network era will see similar opportunities for value and job creation. 

People: The Firehose, The Bucket and the Sieve

Networks open up to us the exponential potential of people. We now have access to the talents of many more people than ever and the potential to create a firehose of value from collaboration.  Leadership is required to help those individuals to find purposeful domains, a bucket in which for people to collaborate to realise value.  Leaders also need to reinforce the direction, celebrate successes and help to discard the failures, creating a sieve for specific potential from all the possibility.

The transition will take leadership. Leaders will need to give up the apparent safety of scale and power to shift to a new more dynamic and empowering model. We will need new ways of working and organising people and the boundaries of organisations will be more fluid. Leaders will need to shift some focus from efficiency to effectiveness and start leveraging human potential to create value in networks.  

That is the work that will make work more human.

I am currently doing Harold Jarche’s PKM in 40 days program. This is the first post inspired by the activities in that program. I recommend it to anyone.

The Hamster Wheel is a Choice

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

Working in a hamster wheel is a choice. The first step to a different work life is an awareness of the choices you make.

We work to throw away

Yesterday was hard rubbish collection in my suburb. I saw a truck taking away discarded televisions and computer screens. It is a striking thing to see two men loading screen after screen in to a truck be recycled or thrown away.

A screen was once an investment of hundreds if not thousands of dollars. Now like many of the products of our consumer society it is discarded regularly.  Somebody works hard to make the money for all this rubbish. I hope they enjoyed the work:

How many hours of work in the hamster wheel are stacked on the back of this truck?

Less can be more

More than a dozen years ago I read a small book by Elaine St James called “Simplify Your Life”. The central thesis of the book is that much of the complexity of our life is because we need to buy and manage things we barely need. The cost of supporting these things means we need to work harder than we want and give up the things we would rather do.

The book didn’t cause immediate change. I still can’t say I have achieved a simple life. However, the idea from the book has stayed with me. Over time I started to make small different choices on what mattered most:

  • I spent less time rushing to have the latest gadget only to then discard it for the next one
  • I cut back my discretionary purchases to the areas that gave me greatest joy
  • I started letting go of and not buying the stuff I never used or was keeping just in case.
  • I started to make more choices to do the things I wanted rather than the things everyone else did. 
  • I kept a notebook to write down the things that I saw that I wanted to buy.  I bought surprisingly few of them once I had achieved the endorphin rush of writing it down.
  • In short, I became more aware of the difference between need, desire and enjoyment.

Work will always be hard

Work will always be hard, because it involves choices to sacrifice time spent on other things like family, friends and passion. We begrudge these choices at times, especially when the sacrifice is made only for money.

Small choices over time can help at the margins to reduce the pressure to make big sacrifices. They can help declutter your decisions and get you closer to what matters. Choice doesn’t get easier, but it can be clearer.

Most importantly of all, being more aware of your choices is at the heart of finding ways to work better, to spend time more valuably and to increase the time that you spend working on purpose.

Choices are hard. Make yours.

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

Leadership is changing. Leadership in networks is the future of work.

A 1 minute video to provoke some thought on how we best use leadership to realise human potential in the network era.

Transcript:

Leadership used to look like this: powerful grey haired men, standing atop a pyramid.
Now our pyramids look like this.
Leadership in networks is the future of work
And we are slowly realising that anyone can lead, anyone can help make their work better, do more for their customers or their communities
Leadership is how we turn community into opportunity, the opportunity to enable others to create exponential value in networks of human relationships 
Leadership is the art of realising human potential. 
It is time to leave pyramids to the pharaohs and make work more human. 
(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)

Do you Lead People or Fiddle with Structures?

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

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The problem with hierarchy is that it validates the illusion that restructures are valuable management work. Let’s lead people to create potential and better ways of work instead.

Restructures are a Joke

An old joke about management hints at the role of restructures in management life, an opportunity to avoid leadership. In the joke, a CEO is left three numbered envelopes by a predecessor. Each envelope is only to be opened only when the CEO’s job is threatened by a crisis.

At the first crisis the CEO opens the first envelope and it says ‘Blame your predecessor’ and it works. At the second crisis, the second envelope says “Announce a restructure’ and it works.  At the third crisis, the CEO eagerly tears open the envelope to see it says “Fill out three envelopes…”

Time for New Options

Leadership is how we realise human potential in real people. Leadership is not the management of the ideal hierarchical structure of fungible full-time-employee equivalents (FTE). The latter is avoiding the real work of leadership of people.

No human potential has ever been realised in an organisation by a restructure. Restructures may create short term value by reducing the cost of people in an organisation, but without leadership no value is created. Without a change in processes or the patterns of interaction that create culture, the structure change amounts to little. The old culture will take over the new structure. Either cost drifts back because the work processes have not changed or worse the reduced workforce has impacts internally on people and externally on customers. 

Sadly leadership often disappears in restructures. Mostly restructures involve an evident loss of human potential. Because many managers view their people as a fungible resource, the costs of human and social capital lost in restructures can be missed. The loss of tacit knowledge and capability is often evident immediately after a restructure as people struggle to make processes work and newly clarified roles fail to cover the inevitable areas of whitespace. The loss of social capital can be seen as new jobs in new structures force people to build new relationships of trust and collaboration internally and externally. Engagement and trust both need to recover. 

A focus on structures of fungible people lets managers avoid the hard work of leadership. Poor managers use restructures to force people to “remove resources”. They hope that with less people, the remaining staff will find creative ways to improve, often without any support from leadership. Poor managers also use restructures to address the lack of skills and underperformance of their people that they have been avoiding. In both cases would we not create more performance, more potential and less anxiety if we took on the leadership work to engage people directly?

Don’t Restructure. Become Responsive.

The pace of change requires organisations to be more agile with their processes and organisation than a traditional restructuring process allows. One of the reasons traditional organisations now feel like they are in a process of continual restructure is the need to keep up with external change. No organisation can afford to stand still to sort out its structure while more agile competitors continue to move forward.

Leaders need to create organisations, teams and processes where change in work is responsive to the demands of customers and the external market. Large scale shifts in hierarchies are irrelevant when the organisation learns to continuously adapt to the needs of work, supported by leaders focused on creating the right culture and realising more performance through helping people to realise more human potential.

A continuous process of small adaptations in agile teams across the organisation is far safer and far more productive than large restructuring efforts. This process will best leverage the networks in the organisation and employees understanding and engagement. Each of those adaptations brings the organisation closer to better performance for its customers and gives the people a say in how to make their work better and how they can contribute more.

The cost of this change in approach is that the work and power of leadership must change. Adopting a responsive culture requires leaders to step away from their power to periodically fiddle with organisational charts. A responsive culture requires leaders to step up to engage, enable and empower their people to change they way the organisation works every day. The new work of leadership is to create the responsive culture and an organisation that supports individuals to make their work better for customers, employees and the community. 

When More Talk is More Action

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

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‘Less Talk More Action’ is a common refrain in management. The best next step may involve more talk and more action.

A bias to action in management is a good way to overcome the inertia of bureaucracy. It helps foster change by requiring that we find ways to move forward. Like all good things a preference for action can be overdone. The traditional engineering mindset of management can come to view talk as a wasteful distraction. In management conversations in all kinds of organisation it is not uncommon to hear,

“This talk is too complicated and going on too long. Let’s do this”

In complicated and complex scenarios that involve systemic issues like culture, the best next step at times may involve more talk and more action. Realising the potential of people as a leader can often mean having to step back from one’s own action orientation to discuss the way forward with others, to gather inputs and to allow others to shape the path through collaboration. We need to recognise in leading the network complexity of the new ways of work that action alone may not be the wisest path.

The Time for Action

The Cynefin framework offers us a useful model to see where we need to demonstrate a bias for action over talk.  If the situation falls in the Simple domain, where cause and effect is clear, then action is straightforward once the position is known. We should have a strong bias for More Action and Less Talk. 

If the situation is truly in a Chaotic domain, where cause and effect are unrelated, then action offers the best chance to move somewhere else. talk may add some value after we act to help understand the environment is chaotic.  However it is action first that will get us out.

Much of our work in organisations is spent in the Complicated or Complex domains of the Cynefin model where launching straight into Action may not be all that is required.

When The Action includes Talk – Sense Making

Each domain of the model requires decision makers to make sense of what is going on in the environment. That sense making process may need discussion with other participants, particularly in the complicated and complex domains where patterns of cause and effect are unclear. For example discovery and analysis are both tasks that need not be purely data-driven exercises. People may need to debate the situation and the work collaboratively to determine the relationships in place. Action have a collaborative element too, requiring discussion as the action progresses to implementation.

Making collective sense of an environment where cause and effect is not straightforward is essential to winning people’s engagement in action and especially action that creates change. The more complex the environment  the more important this engagement will be. Without an ability to make sense of the environment and the strategy to be put into place, people will be at best disengaged and at worst actively oppose the approach.

When Action and Talk Go Together – Working Out Loud

In a Complex domain, the recommended course of action is to probe. A probe is an action done with an intent to learn. In other words, it is an experiment.

To maximises the value of the learning and the effectiveness of the experiment, we often need to communicate that experimental intent. A strategy of probing, sensing and responding can appear confusing to others without a declared intent. Leaders who are trying to take their team on a series of experiments need to be clear on the nature and learning goals of the experiments.

Leverage others to design the experiment and keep you true to your goal of learning. Too many experiments get converted into actions by the management mindset of showing progress at any cost. Think of all the pilots that slid into full-scale launch because nobody wanted to declare them a failure. Working out loud can also help with accountability and also leverage the contributions and learnings of others to develop the collective sense of a complex domain.

Why Talk Matters – Realising Potential in the Future of Work

As Harold Jarche explains in his description of the Cynefin model for the future of work, a key role for leadership in the changing workplace is to help employees use capacity that is released.  That capacity can be used to transition employees from the domains most susceptible to automation, the simple and complicated, to working in those where human contributions are most valuable.

“Less talk, more action” is what we expect of machines. As we see our world of work move into networks and more complex domains, leaders must remember the value and human potential in communication. 

Perhaps we should choose to lead with “More Action and More Talk”.

Everything Meaningful Happens in a Network

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

Leaders need to realise human potential in networks.

In our pursuit of efficiency in an industrial management mindset, we can become very linear in our thinking. Inputs create outputs. People have a job to make things happen. People are therefore production inputs with variable quality and productivity. These inputs can be automated away to reduce waste, deliver better consistency and improve efficiency.

This linear thinking runs the risk of unintended consequences and a massive loss of human potential.  Human potential properly engaged with leadership offers exponential opportunities.

More importantly, nothing significant in our organisations happens in a linear process.  Everything meaningful that we do in our organisations happens in a network.

Performance Incentives: An example of the significance of networks

The most straight forward example of linear thinking in organisations is performance incentives.  Organisation after organisation has invested huge effort and dollars in design of performance incentives as a linear process. More incentive should generate more of the desired outputs and more engaged people.

Oddly the outcomes of linear performance incentives are often mixed. Extrinsic motivation doesn’t always work as intended. Intrinsic motivations often matter more to people and those intrinsic motivations are more often concepts that related to our human place in networks, like status, impact on others or sense of belonging in a group.

Some times your linear incentive program is even counterproductive. If you want to find the flaws in any incentive program give it to a group of employees who can share their insights and intelligence. They will quickly identify and exploit any flaws as a collective and enforce group norms on individuals who don’t follow along.

Incentive programs are a key issue disrupting group working behaviours like collaboration destroying value & output. People don’t deliver their performance as an atomised input.  They act and share as part of larger groups.

Our Brains are Networks

As we better understand our human brains, we start to see that their function is less the outcome of linear processes and more the result of networks of neural processes. We don’t evaluate decisions simply on purely financial criteria. In addition to financial benefits, humans consider issues like status, certainty, autonomy, relationships and fairness.

These concepts which come from the network in our brain also reflect our need to function and place ourselves in networks in society.  Mechanistic management processes leave these network functions in our brains out to their detriment.  They are leaving out the meaning that makes for human potential. 

Our Organisations are Networks

Thinking of our organisations as atomised individuals acting in linear processes simplifies our management challenges.  However, our leadership challenge remains to engage the network to realise its human potential.

No matter what the process the official process is in your organisation, you know that networks are the way to influence decisions and get stuff done.  Hierarchies are just a part of the network in the organisation and people are more likely to use the human network than the process hierarchy.

Why else would meetings about meetings even happen? They are never required by the process; they meet the needs of the human network, needs such as increasing certainty, reducing threats to status or increasing relationships with others. If you want to get rid of these wasteful occurrences in corporate life, the answer is not tighter compliance with the process. The answer is better engaging the human meaning in the network in the organisation. Working out loud in a social network is a great alternative to meetings about meetings. People can build their comfort by learning about and engaging a leader working out loud informally before the decision point.

Our Network Relationships Create Value and Meaning

The networks that leaders must manage to create value go well beyond the organisation. The only real value in our organisation is created in external networks.  We only create meaning and value when we interact with customers, partners, suppliers and the community.  Everything else is internal accounting.

As organisations now increasingly can see, these relationships are no longer linear. A salesforce can no longer view as a sales funnel as a series of linear outward pushes to convert a customer. In a social & networked world, it is more evident than ever that the network of influences is what pulls a customer into a sale.  The customer’s every interaction with the organisation, its competitors and influencers is a part of that decision.  The value and the meaning created with customers comes from the network, not your linear sales process.

Community engagement is an even richer network conversation that depends deeply on human engagement, real conversation and the purpose and values that your organisation lives.  Whatever your process for a community sponsorship, it creates no value without the human network effects. 

Choose Human Potential. Look to the Network

Simplifying people to a fungible input measure like number of full time employees (FTE) and treating FTE as inputs in a linear process may be of value for the measurement and control of management. However, the challenge of leadership is to enable our organisations to realise human potential in a network. Whether with employees, customers or the community, the real value and meaning of an organisation happens in the network.