Author: simongterry

How to start a movement

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

Change movements fascinate me.  People coming together to create change that is beyond the power of one individual, is how all of our greatest social accomplishments have been made.  I have started a few myself, both successfully and unsuccessfully.  I have studied lots of others hunting for ideas that can be reused.  

I have learned that there is no perfect formula. However, these things help movements to success:

Purpose:  Defining why the movement exists matters most.  This is the reason people will give up their time and effort to be involved.  Failure to agree on common purpose will result in factions, disruption and failure later

Engaged champions: A few engaged champions is worth thousands of passive members.  Find your champions and treasure them.  Finding them is usually as simple as letting them approach you.  The ones you want will have a bias to act.  You are often better cutting the freeriders and focusing only on the engaged users in the early stages.  Exclusivity, a strong sense of the other and deep personal relationships helps build energy and resilience in the movement.

A small secretariat: A movement usually needs some group accountable for shaping and maintaining direction.  A small secretariat of the most engaged champions can play that role.  The secretariates does not need to be hierarchical but they do need to play a role as custodian of the purpose and a node for actions across the network.

Cellular structure: Networks are more resilient & more engaging than hierarchies.  Small group structures engage people and build personal connections within the network. The groups also provide local support, back-up for missed communication and solve issues locally where required.  Action by small groups requires less coordination.

Stories: Successful movements have rich storytelling traditions. Myths, tales and anecdotes help share their messages and make purpose tangible to the community and others. Stories share abstract ideas in tangible ways making them more human and personal.

Continuous communication: Driving change is only one element in people’s lives.  You cannot overcommunicate.  Share stories, successes and challenges.  Make sure there is a vibrant connection across your network.

Sense of community:  Great movements build strong senses of community.  That is usually evident in the support and sharing that occurs within the community beyond its core purpose.

Symbols of change: To understand the movements vision, you need defining symbols that people can understand and relate to their own world. A few common values can be part of a powerful symbol of the change.  The more human, personal and individual the symbols are the easier they are to live and share.

Consistent action & confrontation: Action builds movements.  Action inevitably involves confrontation with opponents.  A regular cycle of action and confrontation is required to keep engagement of the movement.  Action and confrontaction creates new stories to share and can bring the movement’s symbols and purpose to life for a wider audience. Progress may be slow but action must be continuous.

Reflection & adaptation: Successful movements adapt to changing circumstances, responses and to the needs of the system in which they operate.  Processes to foster reflection and development of new adaptations matter to enable this.

Gathering: Human beings are tribal.  We like to gather.  Whether it is gatherings of the cells or gatherings of the whole movement, the people involved need to come together and feel part of the tribe from time to time.  Gatherings are where the informal story sharing occurs.  It is where trust and connection is built, knowlede is exchanged and new innovations are started.

This list is a starting point on my studies and experience.  What are your ideas?  What have a left out?  What of the above is wrong?

Change begins when you start

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

Today I saw a conversation on twitter between two people who inspire me with their passion and ability to make change, Maria Ogneva and Susan Scrupski.  I also saw a moment in that conversation that represented an insight into change leadership I see again and again.  I paraphrased that moment in this tweet.

Here’s what struck me about this tweet and what makes it a template for all change leadership:

  • A person, our change agent, sees a need for change and forms an intention to make it
  • The intention for change is not fleeting and our change agent reflects on the need for change over time
  • Our change agent has doubts they are ready to make change happen
  • The change agent is very aware of the challenges ahead
  • The change agent decides to act regardless.

Almost everyone can see changes that they want in the world.  Many many people don’t think that they are ready to lead change and have doubts.  Everyone knows change is hard.

Change still gets made.  Why?  

Because people with passion and energy, just start.  They find the way forward and find their purpose in the hard work.

When you look at the lives of great change leaders, again and again you find the same comment.  They weren’t the best placed.  They weren’t the most powerful or most capable.  They weren’t given authority.

Change agents are the ones who see a need, challenges and take action anyway.  Everything else comes with solving problems, drawing others to help and having success.

Great change leaders are the ones who start work regardless.

So when are you starting? Today?

Today you will change the world

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

Lay hold of today’s task – Seneca

Today’s task is to change the world. Is anything less worthy of your unique talents?

You have a purpose. It describes how you want to change the world. Your actions everyday to fulfil that purpose will change the future. Just by doing what you do each day explicitly including that purpose you are starting the process of change.

Start today

You can’t start yesterday. Who knows what will happen tomorrow? Better start today. It is the safest and only choice. End of argument.

How?

Changing the world starts small and grows. Everyone can make a contribution to bringing about the changes that they want to see in the world. The less hierarchical power you have the closer you are to and the more influence you have on the problem. Almost nobody, including those in power, can make all of a change on their own. We need to work together. Make one small change today that makes things better – a different conversation, a different way of doing things or engaging a different person. Small changes accumulate building momentum to the ultimate goal.

Addressing doubts

Everyone has doubts. That niggling feeling of awareness that the world can be better is a doubt. It likes company. Doubts only grow as you move into action. The only way to remove doubt is to address them in action. Otherwise all you will have is a hollow sense of purpose and a bucket of doubt.

Failure?

Failure will happen. It won’t always be dramatic. However, it will happen. A lot. If changing the world was easy then you wouldn’t be required to do it. Every failure will make your ultimate change better. Be resilient & persist. After all your changes & your purpose are critical. (If to nobody else, they are critical to you).

Reflect on your impact

At the end of the day, as you pull off your shoes, ask yourself “what impact did I have on the world today?”. Ask yourself “what am I going to different tomorrow?”. Ask yourself “how do I feel now?” If you have done anything or spoken to anyone in the day, you have answers to these questions.

Today’s task is to change the world. You are already changing something. Do you want to change it accidentally or on purpose? Make your changes count.

Are you sure you are going the right way? What could you do more, better or differently?

Assembly Line of Knowledge Revisited: More Human & More Social

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

The future is here.

We are at a time of innovation in the future of work. We have choices as to the criteria by which we judge success. Let’s make the future of work more human and more social.

Some time ago, I suggested that we were approaching innovation in the way we work with knowledge (‘knowledge work’) that was of equivalent significance to the introduction of the innovation of the assembly line for industrial work. Roger Martin in HBR recently described changes at Proctor and Gamble that begin to treat knowledge work as a ‘decision factory’: focusing on project management of knowledge workers and leveraging algorithms to guide decisions.  To paraphrase William Gibson, the future of knowledge work is here, it is just not widely distributed yet.

Many knowledge workers recoil when you suggest the future of their work may resemble that of industrial work, even by analogy. Often they dispute that the work can be the subject of these kinds of innovation. However, we know dedicated entrepreneurs will find a way and that this disruptive innovation has begun already.  

At the heart of many of these objections is a concern that a focus on innovation will shift the focus of knowledge work from effectiveness into a focus on efficiency. In that change, people perceive real risks to the financial and social rewards of knowledge work, to the skills that will be demanded in future and the potential for change to wider society.  Many knowledge workers have benefited from traditional characteristics of human motivation, like autonomy, mastery and purpose. Losing those roles solely for efficiency may well be a great loss.

Assembly lines – more human and more social

Curiously enough, when Henry Ford introduced the assembly line innovations to his plants the changes were not solely about manufacturing process. Henry Ford realised that for the assembly line process to succeed he needed wider social change.  At the same time as Ford introduced the assembly line, he introduced a suite of social changes that were an attempt to build more complex social system around his organisation. There are arguments today as to what Ford’s purpose was in these changes, whether they were truly implemented or effective and the extent to which they may have just been clever marketing. Still, Ford introduced to its workers:

  • a $5 day a day wage that was a huge lift in income potential for workers and shared a small part of the profits of the new processes
  • a sociological department that explicitly sought to assess employee fitness across a range of social characteristics including family, thrift & home life and address social ills, like gambling and drinking.
  • a newspaper, education & language classes, medical treatment, parks and playgrounds and even a band
  • new workspaces that were models of light and open space at the time
  • a vision of buying the product that they made as Ford disrupted the luxury car market by making cheaper cars at scale

Today, we struggle to understand the Victorian values of these social changes. We would not want Ford’s near feudal power over his team. Also, we can lack context and understanding of the diverse nature of industrial workplaces before the birth of the modern factory system. However, Ford was seeking to make social changes an explicit part of the system of changes in his production system. Those changes were as radical then as many of the working models proposed by start-ups and other innovative companies are today. Ford’s wider social innovations, whether successful or not, suggested that he understood and saw the need to engage with the wider social role of work.  

Work plays a larger social role than a source of income and a source of profit.  Work sustains communities and families. Work provides personal satisfaction, gives rewards for our time and underpins our complex webs of relationships.  Lack of satisfying work correlates with all kinds of social ills. Each of these effects flows back to the workplace and influences outcomes.

The future of knowledge work – more human and more social

Knowledge work is going to get more efficient. Even today there is still too much drudgery that can be innovated, automated or analysed away. Some organisations will focus solely on the efficiency opportunity of innovation in knowledge work. They will reduce their knowledge worker populations and streamline processes to realise profit.  

These same organisations will likely find that they will struggle to recruit and retain talented people. Designing and maintaining their new systems will require even more expensive knowledge workers.  The lack of engagement and innovation in their businesses will require expensive external consultants. More importantly, the broader society outside of the organisation will continue to question the relentless focus on efficiency and profit, query the negative externalities on society and demand a social dividend. Solving this issue transactionally will mean even more expensive marketing and corporate social responsibility activity.

We get to choose the success criteria for our innovations in the future of knowledge work. Profit does not have to be the sole motive.  

We have the opportunity to ask of our innovators in work that they design for social changes and consider the broader social aspects of work. We can ask that work is more social.  We can ask that it take account of criteria like sustainability, natural value, social value and ability to deliver benefits for a wider community of stakeholders. We can ask that work is more human and that better delivers autonomy, mastery and purpose for all workers. My experience is that innovations improve when we take this broader systemic frame and when we are more demanding in our measures of success.  Great innovations involve constraints and stretch.  We will only deliver significant social benefits from this innovation if we leverage design thinking and adaptive innovation to deliver changes in work.

An assembly line or decision factory for knowledge work does not have to be a race to the bottom. Employees in workplaces across the globe will get to shape and debate the changes being made inside and outside their organisations. As community members, they are a part of a public debate on the standards that organisations should meet.  We all can leave organisations that do not respond well and entrepreneurs will start organisations to leverage the best innovations and new opportunities to realise value.  

Potentially, it could be the birth of a new golden age of human and social growth.  

We get to choose.  

PS: Obviously, innovation and consideration of a broader social frame is something that will benefit industrial work too.  However, because industrial organisations are much more competitive and more directly impacted by social pressures around environment, many leading industrial employers have already begun to look into new models that leverage wider social value and engage and empowering their employees to add new value.  Toyota’s work on waste and the Toyota Management System are examples.

Notes:  my limited understanding of Henry Ford comes largely from Steven Watt’s ‘The People’s Tycoon’, wikipedia and The Henry Ford Museum.

Assembly Line of Knowledge Revisited: More Human & More Social

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

The future is here.

We are at a time of innovation in the future of work. We have choices as to the criteria by which we judge success. Let’s make the future of work more human and more social.

Some time ago, I suggested that we were approaching innovation in the way we work with knowledge (‘knowledge work’) that was of equivalent significance to the introduction of the innovation of the assembly line for industrial work. Roger Martin in HBR recently described changes at Proctor and Gamble that begin to treat knowledge work as a ‘decision factory’: focusing on project management of knowledge workers and leveraging algorithms to guide decisions.  To paraphrase William Gibson, the future of knowledge work is here, it is just not widely distributed yet.

Many knowledge workers recoil when you suggest the future of their work may resemble that of industrial work, even by analogy. Often they dispute that the work can be the subject of these kinds of innovation. However, we know dedicated entrepreneurs will find a way and that this disruptive innovation has begun already.  

At the heart of many of these objections is a concern that a focus on innovation will shift the focus of knowledge work from effectiveness into a focus on efficiency. In that change, people perceive real risks to the financial and social rewards of knowledge work, to the skills that will be demanded in future and the potential for change to wider society.  Many knowledge workers have benefited from traditional characteristics of human motivation, like autonomy, mastery and purpose. Losing those roles solely for efficiency may well be a great loss.

Assembly lines – more human and more social

Curiously enough, when Henry Ford introduced the assembly line innovations to his plants the changes were not solely about manufacturing process. Henry Ford realised that for the assembly line process to succeed he needed wider social change.  At the same time as Ford introduced the assembly line, he introduced a suite of social changes that were an attempt to build more complex social system around his organisation. There are arguments today as to what Ford’s purpose was in these changes, whether they were truly implemented or effective and the extent to which they may have just been clever marketing. Still, Ford introduced to its workers:

  • a $5 day a day wage that was a huge lift in income potential for workers and shared a small part of the profits of the new processes
  • a sociological department that explicitly sought to assess employee fitness across a range of social characteristics including family, thrift & home life and address social ills, like gambling and drinking.
  • a newspaper, education & language classes, medical treatment, parks and playgrounds and even a band
  • new workspaces that were models of light and open space at the time
  • a vision of buying the product that they made as Ford disrupted the luxury car market by making cheaper cars at scale

Today, we struggle to understand the Victorian values of these social changes. We would not want Ford’s near feudal power over his team. Also, we can lack context and understanding of the diverse nature of industrial workplaces before the birth of the modern factory system. However, Ford was seeking to make social changes an explicit part of the system of changes in his production system. Those changes were as radical then as many of the working models proposed by start-ups and other innovative companies are today. Ford’s wider social innovations, whether successful or not, suggested that he understood and saw the need to engage with the wider social role of work.  

Work plays a larger social role than a source of income and a source of profit.  Work sustains communities and families. Work provides personal satisfaction, gives rewards for our time and underpins our complex webs of relationships.  Lack of satisfying work correlates with all kinds of social ills. Each of these effects flows back to the workplace and influences outcomes.

The future of knowledge work – more human and more social

Knowledge work is going to get more efficient. Even today there is still too much drudgery that can be innovated, automated or analysed away. Some organisations will focus solely on the efficiency opportunity of innovation in knowledge work. They will reduce their knowledge worker populations and streamline processes to realise profit.  

These same organisations will likely find that they will struggle to recruit and retain talented people. Designing and maintaining their new systems will require even more expensive knowledge workers.  The lack of engagement and innovation in their businesses will require expensive external consultants. More importantly, the broader society outside of the organisation will continue to question the relentless focus on efficiency and profit, query the negative externalities on society and demand a social dividend. Solving this issue transactionally will mean even more expensive marketing and corporate social responsibility activity.

We get to choose the success criteria for our innovations in the future of knowledge work. Profit does not have to be the sole motive.  

We have the opportunity to ask of our innovators in work that they design for social changes and consider the broader social aspects of work. We can ask that work is more social.  We can ask that it take account of criteria like sustainability, natural value, social value and ability to deliver benefits for a wider community of stakeholders. We can ask that work is more human and that better delivers autonomy, mastery and purpose for all workers. My experience is that innovations improve when we take this broader systemic frame and when we are more demanding in our measures of success.  Great innovations involve constraints and stretch.  We will only deliver significant social benefits from this innovation if we leverage design thinking and adaptive innovation to deliver changes in work.

An assembly line or decision factory for knowledge work does not have to be a race to the bottom. Employees in workplaces across the globe will get to shape and debate the changes being made inside and outside their organisations. As community members, they are a part of a public debate on the standards that organisations should meet.  We all can leave organisations that do not respond well and entrepreneurs will start organisations to leverage the best innovations and new opportunities to realise value.  

Potentially, it could be the birth of a new golden age of human and social growth.  

We get to choose.  

PS: Obviously, innovation and consideration of a broader social frame is something that will benefit industrial work too.  However, because industrial organisations are much more competitive and more directly impacted by social pressures around environment, many leading industrial employers have already begun to look into new models that leverage wider social value and engage and empowering their employees to add new value.  Toyota’s work on waste and the Toyota Management System are examples.

Notes:  my limited understanding of Henry Ford comes largely from Steven Watt’s ‘The People’s Tycoon’, wikipedia and The Henry Ford Museum.

A meditation on craft & success

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

I began baking bread over a year ago as a creative outlet, a way to relax and to have bread for a busy family. A hobby that leaves your house full with the scent of a warm loaf has its own rewards. Over time, I have become passionate about learning more through continued practice. Bread banking has become a meditation on a craft.

Many of the lessons of that meditation contribute to success in any discipline:

Hands on: The best results are when you get hands on. Recipes and other guides don’t adjust for the exact circumstances of your work. Machines might cut some of the effort but you will need to get hands on before you are done. The best judge of how you are going is the feedback from your hands in the work.

Success takes time: If the dough takes an hour to rise, it takes an hour to rise. You can do other things in the meantime, but you can’t hurry it without changing the result.

The right ingredients: Not the best. Definitely not the cheapest. Right for the task.

Timing matters: If you want fresh bread for breakfast, start the night before. Getting your preparation and timing right to act is much more important than the perfect loaf an hour after the meal finishes.

Practice matters: My first loaves weren’t much to write about. Each failure helped refine a skill or teach a lesson that moved closer to a better loaf.

Take the advice of masters: I went on a great sourdough class from Brasserie Bread and came away with a much better appreciation of how techniques work in action. A little bit of 18 yo sourdough starter also helped.

Be observant: I have learned a great deal by watching other at work with dough from local bakeries to my local pizza place.

Pursue perfection: no two recipes for the same bread are identical. Everyone is trying to get closer to a perfect ideal. Everyone does not agree on what that is.

Experiment: Try variations. Learn from the outcomes. Try again. You will discover new opportunities to improve. You can still eat most of your failures.