Author: simongterry

What are you working to achieve?

Posted on by simongterry in Collaboration, Working out loud

‘What are you working to achieve?’

Working out loud is not a common enough experience yet.  Many people are still reticent to share their goals, their challenges and their work.  

That makes a question about what people are working to achieve a very powerful one, because it:

  • helps people clarify their purpose and goals
  • separates wishes from tangible action
  • moves beyond appearances, titles and surface issues to form the basis for a deeper context, connection and conversation
  • enables you to identify how you or others can contribute to help

I ask this kind of question a lot.  I find it is incredibly valuable for simply building rapport.  You have a lot more to discuss when you know where someone is devoting their efforts.  

However, it also enables further action to help.  Just this morning I asked the question of somebody that I did not know well.  Turns out I have networks that will assist them to achieve their goals more quickly. That makes the question a powerful engine of collaboration. You can’t help if you don’t know.

If others are not sharing their work, ask them what it is that they are working to achieve.

Conflict – Don’t Panic. Engage.

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

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Many organisations are fine with collaboration and change as long as there is no conflict.  Once the conflict arises, everyone panics. Panic creates the worst reactions because it often leads to these strategies:

  • Freeze: pretending there is no conflict and hoping it fades away
  • Fight: Wading in to the conflict to impose the ‘right’ answer
  • Flight: Shutting down the conversation or even the whole change or collaboration

A panicked response is particularly likely if the conflict arises around one of the long threatening fault lines in the organisation e.g. between sales and marketing, between business and IT, between frontline employees and management, etc. Every organisation has its undiscussables and they are where leadership, change and collaboration begins to fail.

Don’t panic.  Celebrate and engage to shape the conflict into its most constructive form – deep engagement.

Conflict is the first sign of real engagement.  Until conflict occurs, everyone is assuming the collaboration or change is not worth the effort of a fight.

Conflict is also how you learn.  Well managed conflict helps share context between groups.  It will surface feedback and learnings. It helps you find the people to whom the activity really matters. Conflict is where you get to the real questions to be answered.  There is a good chance the real issue lies somewhere in that organisational fault line that everybody knows and nobody wants to discuss.

Any scriptwriter will tell you that every screenplay is driven by conflict.  Humans crave conflict.  Our stories are full of conflict.  We devote a huge amount of our attention to it. All the gossip in your office will relate to stories of conflict and their meaning for the behaviour of others or the culture of the organisation.  Successful change and collaboration needs this energy for human engagement.

So next time conflict breaks out around a change or a collaboration, recognise it as a good sign.  Engage to make it a constructive conversation:

  • Show genuine & deep interest in people’s views as to how to learn and improve
  • Tease out people’s purposes, concerns and context
  • Shift the discussion from opinions toward facts
  • Look for common ground and agreed actions. 
  • Accept that you can’t make every one happy.
  • Demonstrate change in your approach based on what you learn

We need shared context

Posted on by simongterry in Collaboration, Working out loud

If you are struggling to get your message across it might not be the message, it might be the context.

You are an expert.  You might be an universally recognised expert, have some special qualifications or you just might be the person who best understands your job, your customers or a problem.  That better understanding of some context, however narrow, makes you an expert.

Any form of work or collaboration will require you to use your expertise. That expertise can also be a barrier to communication and collaboration.  Your challenge is that others don’t share your unique context.  

Unless you share a context, others won’t be able to understand what you are doing or what you want to share.  If we don’t share enough context, we can’t see things, trust or understand what experts tell us.

Here’s a simple example.  Start working with a new group of people and you will find people are speaking incomprehensible new acronyms or using buzz phrases you don’t know. The group knows their history and you don’t. That group has a context and you are not part of it. Until you learn enough of their context and share enough of your own, you won’t be able to follow conversations or contribute.  The friction and surprises will undermine your confidence and potentially your trust in the group.

So how do you make sure others share your context & your expertise?

  • Work aloud: Sharing what you are seeing and doing with your connections enables them to pick up your context.  You don’t need to push it on them, but they can pull what you share when needed
  • Ask questions: The questions that you ask will be some new ones and obvious ones.  The fact that you are asking will enable you to explain a little of your context in response.
  • Be curious and generous: There is no right or wrong context.  Explore the context others have. Ask them to tell your their stories and share your own in reply.  Learn more in the process about what you may not have seen and also how your expertise can help others

Ask obvious questions

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

Recently I have posted on the benefits of asking different questions for strategy and innovation.  We also need to ask the obvious questions too.

Most of the time we are so busy doing that we skip over the obvious questions.  We need to ask more questions about how we work better and how we interact better.  

Obvious? Yes.  Done? Rarely.

We are at a point where changes in the way we work are surfacing all around us.  To better leverage these new approaches, we need to question assumptions and approaches that we have inherited. We need to relentlessly reflect on improvements in how we work.

That means asking questions that seem to have obvious answers:

  • Why is this important?
  • Who is the customer?
  • What is the problem?
  • Who is doing this task? Who is not?
  • What are we not doing?
  • Who do we engage? How do we engage better?
  • How do we better organise ourselves?
  • What would make the process better?
  • How do we go faster?
  • How do we make decisions better?
  • How do we learn together?
  • What does success look like?

The list of potential obvious questions is long.  Make a habit of quickly reflecting on the key ones together. You will be surprised what changes in approach and new benefits surface when you push against business as usual.

Asking these questions enables people to maximise their human potential in the work ahead.

5 Big Shifts – Chaos is Human

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

When you connect many people, you are reminded of a very human form of chaos. Things just cease to happen in the orderly way that you might expect. It is human nature:

  • to seek purpose,
  • to connect and share knowledge with others
  • to seek to make a difference.

Once we are connected, these natural human needs begin to take over reshaping efforts to structure relationships. 

Efforts to Control Chaos are Failing

So many of the ideologies and management approaches of human history have been efforts to control and shape these three natural human behaviours. They have been concerned to restrict their potential to drive change and create chaos. These ideologies rely on asymmetries of power and information to enforce their approaches.

Still solving problems of a pre-modern era, we still try to work against the grain of human behaviour:  

  • We seek to structure out the mess of human communication through silos, tools, meetings, formats which leads to a focus on the process over the conversation
  • We define teams, roles, hierarchies, discretion and decision rights with exacting detail down to the exact titles people can use to describe themselves and the social indicators in each role.
  • We specific processes in exacting detail in the hope that we can dictate exactly how that process will be best executed by each person in every case without discretion
  • We motivate people with top-down orders, objectives, rules, measurement, financial incentives and threats of exclusion  

Complexity, uncertainty and disruption are on the rise despite our best efforts. These techniques are increasingly seen to stifle innovation, to waste human potential and to frustrate motivation of vital talent.

Working with the Chaos

Human nature is not changing any time soon. Our technologies will continue to enhance our connection and opportunities for expression and collaboration. The potential for failure of traditional techniques will worsen with time.  

We need to work with human nature. Working with our human nature requires us to accept some fundamental shifts: 

  • Knowing to Learning:  We need to move from a view that experts have the stock of knowledge that they require. The model of knowing everything never worked. We need to embrace knowledge as a flow, constantly being enhanced, made relevant again and a part of a constant exercise of learning. 
  • Motivating to Inspiring: We need to engage around purpose and help people to see how they realise their goals and potential as part of collective activities and group goals.
  • Supervising to Enabling: Build people’s capability for more complex tasks rather than trying to simplify the tasks to make supervision, direction and measurement easier. Engage people in developing the ability to produce better outcomes that take them where they want to go.
  • Controlling to Engaging:  The role of leaders is not to direct but to shape the conversations to provide context for good decisions and ensure that all the stakeholders are appropriately engaged. Leaders also help the community agree the level of urgency for change and overcome change and collaboration barriers.
  • Inside-out to Outside-in: Understand the environment, community customer and other stakeholder views as you form your own. Create an organisation and people that engage with their communities. Be responsive.

No Island. Connected.

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

No man is an island,
Entire of itself,
Every man is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manor of thy friend’s
Or of thine own were:
Any man’s death diminishes me,
Because I am involved in mankind,
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; 
It tolls for thee. 

John Donne
Recently, discussing corporate culture and disruption, I was asked how is it that organisations cling to old views in the face of disruptive change.  How do people whose businesses are threatened still deny the need for fundamental change.  Many of these organisations cling to the past even when their performance has already begun to change for the worse.
As we talked familiar patterns of conversations in these organisations came to mind:
  • fad spotters who declare the inconvenient trend will is temporary or suits only marginal customers or competitors
  • past successes who can’t move beyond what worked before
  • boiled frogs that never don’t jump out until too late
  • safety first who fear loss and demand certainty, less risk, better proof or ROI
  • ostriches who see only what is convenient and celebrate variation as reversals of the trend
  • the wiser who know better than their colleagues, customers and competitors
  • premium providers who forget premium means more valuable and more relevant
  • technicians who see the great unravelling of the trend ahead because of a better technical solution or a flaw in the new technology
  • underlying performers who adjust away the difficulties to show sunshine underneath
  • tried & failed who know that their organisation’s failures define the limits of all future success…

I could go on this way.

One thing is common in all of these patterns: the individuals in the organisation have ceased to take inputs from their external environment. The organisation has become an echo chamber for business as usual views and any inconsistent information is discounted. 

The problem is easily rectified: engage people in the accountabilities of the real world –

  • start listening to customers and the community
  • start engaging with people beyond your own industry
  • start reading things you have not read before and 
  • start talking with people you don’t usually meet

No organisation can survive as an island.  An organisation that opens up to even the smallest amount of genuine engagement with its community discovers new insights.  This immersion and engagement will also drive to embrace new accountabilities for change.

Nobody can be an island.  We all need to be engaged in our communities.  Listening and engaging in the world outside the organisation is the surest first step to avoid the toll of disruption’s bell. 

Pulling the chain of knowledge

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

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I am lucky at the moment that I am participating in a number of fantastic collaborations with really talented experts, especially in the domain of social business and the future of work.  A few of these collaborations are international so I get this extraordinary experience:

When you are collaborating like this, what becomes so evident is that knowledge is not a stock, it is a flow, like the constant motion of a chain. If the only progress was from my efforts, nothing will happen when I sleep.  When others can take up the chain and improve things overnight, I am far better off and can learn from their insight and effort.

A network of others like this can help you learn more faster by accelerating the little improvements in the knowledge that you have.  Success comes as you accumulate and accelerate those learnings together. The community also helps you stay engaged and provides support.

If you are trying to address a major complex challenge, it is unlikely the answer will come to you in an inspired flash or through your hard work alone.  Solving big challenges, like curing a major disease, addressing social issues or solving a complex & dynamic business challenge, involves engaging with what is known, engaging with others working in the space and putting your effort into pulling the chain of knowledge further along together. Not every idea works but lots of experiments and insight contributed in parallel and discussed together sifts out the progress.

We all move our knowledge forward together because we contribute our share to pulling on the chain of knowledge.

Relentless

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

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Success often isn’t complicated. It is just hard.

Why is it hard?

It requires relentless pursuit of improvement.

Many of us only have a passing interest in doing better. We like comfortable patterns and a minimum of stress and effort.  The quick hit that delivers a quick win appeals as a way to get there easily.  

Others might learn, but do they keep applying that learning to do better next time?

Success takes a huge and consistent learning effort (10,000 hours, anyone?). Learning, applying learnings and constantly moving forward is what creates the best chances of success.

What does a relentless pursuit of success take?

  • Know why you want to do better – purpose motivates effort and helps you set clear goals that take you where you want to go
  • Have a short term goal to achieve – achievements give focus and satisfaction
  • Do – practice matters most
  • Measure progress to your goal – measurement enables learning
  • Learn – take time to reflect on how to do more, better, different or less
  • Do more next time

Simple steps. A simple process to do once. Hard to do relentlessly.

Simple things become hard when they must be done over and over again, better and better each time.  

That relentless process of focused attention on learning and improvement is what drives the best performance.