The pattern repeats. The barrier to organisations leveraging new technology is not the technology’s performance or their people’s ability to learn; it’s investment in adoption, the change management to help people with transition.
The frustration of one more thing
The technology looks great. The vendor has promised it works right out of the box and that it is so simple to use everyone can take it up. Your organisation invested a fortune to buy it and integrate it. After the fanfare of launch day, nothing happens. Nobody is using the fancy new kit. Executives begin to mumble about the vendor or the project team or both. The CIO waves his hands and says the tech works. The CPO invests more communications to promote the tech. Nothing changes.
Your people work hard. They have invested a lot in their current work practices, they work and they know their performance will be measured. Any form of change usually involves a productivity cost where employees go from expert in one system to a beginner in another. Resistance to an experience of loss of productivity at first is rational. For some systems, like CRM, data, or collaboration systems, the payoff in benefits may be some time down the path or payoff to others further weakening the rewards of take-up.
New technologies can also face rational resistance because they cut across organisational values that are deeply entrenched. If knowledge is power in your organisation, sharing knowledge will take culture change. If expertise is how people are promoted, don’t expect enthusiasm for technology like AI that scrambles the path to better jobs. These cultural barriers can be subtle but deeply entrenched. They need a change program to address the fears and communicate that the organisation will value and reward new behaviours.
Adoption can also play a key role in realising the larger benefits of technology. Too often given new technology we consider it only incrementally, squeezing it in at the edges, looking for incremental gains and growing frustrated that it is one more thing to do. Taking the time to have deep adoption conversations with your employees will identify the areas where work can be transformed by new technology, where the benefits can be larger than increments of productivity, potentially even new revenue and lines of business Those rewards just don’t happen. They need to be wrung out and supported.
So next time you are implementing new technology of any kind, invest a little more into your support for employee’s adoption. You will see far better results.
Technology is often sold with a phrase that with the innovation ‘anyone can..[complete the job the tech supports]’. Do you really want anyone doing the task? Success is about focus and leveraging unique talents.
Rob Castaneda Founder/CEO of Service Rocket recently said on Linkedin:
I want my sales people vibe-coding as much as I want my engineers vibe-selling.
Rob’s witticism digs at a greater truth: Success in business depends on focus. Engineers are expensive resources. The should support sales efforts but it’s not their focus. The greatest challenge in sales is that it is hard and demanding interpersonal work. Most people would much rather do sales related admin than sell. Creating the focus for sales success involves taking tasks away to allow teams to specialise, learn and improve their customer conversations.
Ignore the party tricks. Focus
Technology companies promising miracle transformations commonly say that using there technology ‘anyone can do anything’. Technology can be a great enabler and undoubtedly changes the skillset required for tasks. Far too many of these promises aren’t exactly that user friendly and actually need people to specialise (Microsoft SharePoint anyone?). However, even if the newer AI enabled tech does enable anyone, do we want that?
At University studying Economics, we were introduced to the concept of comparative advantage in trade. The lecturer pointed out that though he may be better at all the skills of economic research than a research associate it is still advantageous for him to hire one to help with basic research because his unique advantages were in the more complex areas and he could devote more time to his advantages if he did so. We are rarely better off if anyone can do something. We are better off when those who are best placed to do work focus.
Technology offers all kinds of temptations of distraction and lack of focus. Anyone can code. Anyone can produce images. Anyone can produce marketing materials or pitch decks and so on. The technology products can be built up with dedicated governance, data sets, insights, guardrails and approval processes that manage the risks of anyone doing anything. The only question is do you want that?
If it is a choice between no resource at all, then you will want to empower people to do incremental and often discretionary work through technology. At the margins, technology can be very powerful in realising more productivity.
You may have opportunities to totally transform processes to remove expertise or people. Well designed you may be able to make this work but it’s unlikely to be the outcome of dabbling by anyone. Delivering productivity through transformation takes careful design, great engagement with all stakeholders and impeccable delivery.
Anyone is not always a great option. As attractive as it might sound that rarely pays out as a successful course in business. Success takes focus, skills and graft. Do you want your highly valuable resources distracted and unfocused on things that they could do? I doubt it. You want them doing more of the core things you hired them to do. Use AI to take away their distractions, not add to them.
So next time someone sells technology on the basis that ‘anyone can’ ask instead ‘who should and how?’
habits which collapse on every block like a tidal wave of Hokusai’s sketches Forest Gander, Kata: Bus Stop
Life is full of curious coincidences. Late last week, I discovered that I had missed publication last November of the report by AIDH and Oracle on drivers of change in the Future of Digital Health. That report was the outcome of facilitation work I did with my colleague Mirinda O’Gorman in mid 2024. This week, I was lucky to be able to participate in a discussion with Adam Kahane on his new book, Everyday Habits For Transforming Systems. Two deep conversations about the drivers of transformational change resonated deeply. I wish now I had Adam Kahane’s book as we summarised the discussions in the report, but I thought in this blog with 20/20 hindsight I would draw out the connections and how Kahane’s work might contribute to Australian digital health practices.
Everyday Habits
And they call again, "It's simple," they say, "and you too have come into the world to do this, to go easy, to be filled with light, and to shine." Mary Oliver - When I am among the trees
I read Every Day Habits for Transforming Systems over the last month since its publication. My initial reaction was one of validation. The Every Day Habits felt like old friends that I have worked with often. It was powerful to have them called out explicitly and drawn together in conversation. Like many longstanding relationships, the discussion in the book also prompted me to reconsider the application and use of each. I realised my practice of the habits can improve if I take each at greater depth and also consider them more as a system of practice.
With a long discussion of transforming the Australian healthcare system at the forefront of my mind I realised I had a case study with which to review the book in practice. The book describes seven habits that facilitate transformation in systems. I will look at the relationships of the seven habits in the context of the ongoing transformations described in the Future of Digital Health work. Adam Kahane’s habits are:
Habit 1: Acting Responsibly
Habit 2: Relating in 3-Dimensions
Habit 3: Looking for What is Unseen
Habit 4: Working with Cracks
Habit 5: Experimenting a way forward
Habit 6: Collaborating with Unlike Others
Habit 7: Persevering and Resting
The workshops in 2024 were interactive thought leadership discussions with a wide range of practitioners and participants across the Australian healthcare systems. Habit 1 of understanding and leveraging your role in systems was at the forefront of the participants in the workshop as they were all chosen for their active engagement and contributions in digital health. The rooms of high powered system-oriented change-makers represented healthcare practitioners, institutions, government, vendors, academics and more and put that representation into their work driving change.
Many people in the room naturally understood and practised elements of Habit 2, particularly balancing the system as a whole and self-interest in relationships. Extensive discussion of the importance of user-centred design, consumer preferences, capability and social equity began to draw in the other elements of Habit 2, in the capability to understand wider and more nuanced relationships across the system, those that Kahane refers to as relations of kin, drawing on First Nations perspectives.
Habits 3, 4 & 5 were the bread and butter practices that had much of the discussion in the rooms through the facilitation. As learning oriented leaders, the AIDH guests were used to looking deeply at systems and taking new perspectives in pursuit of their changes. The report calls out some of these whether it is understanding the oft-ignored implications for system users and consumers of healthcare systems, focus on risks, regulation and the critical role of trust. We discussed at length the kinds of painpoints that drive tension in the system and are insights for future transformation leverage – conservatism, safety regulation, bureaucracy, funding models, adoption issues, unnecessary hierarchy or power structures.
Habit 5 of experimentation was a key refrain. A lot of the discussion was also about taking experiments forward beyond their test bed and generalising them across the system. In healthcare this can be surprisingly slow and hard to achieve. Some of the simplest experiments, like a NZ experiment in paying specialists differently around GP referrals delivered huge benefits in wait times, abandoned appointments, patient outcomes, cost and system outcomes but were struggling to be adopted more widely given the changes required in technology, practitioner and payment systems to accomodate it.
A key frustration in the room was around the many agendas in healthcare, its regulators and funders. Habit 6 of Collaborating with Unlike Others was an essential part of many of the changes being pursued in the room. Adoption of AI solutions involved technology, regulation, privacy, safety and even the capabilities to appropriately leverage both the data and the outcomes of such a process. One technology that everyone in the room was pursuing for value demanded almost all the participants of the system to realise value and came with huge cost and complexity as a result. Separating simple experiments like producing patient guides to be reviewed by expert specialists were practical but large scale projects like application of AI in imaging demanded much more significant investments of time and expertise across the healthcare system.
I have already touched on the frustration in the room that things were not going faster. Habit 7 of persevering and resting was a theme. Change makers can’t do everything that they want to do. Many people in the room were already wearing multiple hats as practitioner, administrator, educator and more. That is exhausting, demands perseverance and careful husbandry of resources. In an environment where talent is scarce and budgets are inadequate we all need to take care of our projects and people.
Gathering the Friends
One day, I will write you a letter after I have gathered enough words and enough courage Maria Luisa Arroyo Cruzado, gathering words
Elements of all seven habits were present in this facilitation work across the Australian healthcare system. I suspect any healthcare change maker could point to such old friends in their work. In hindsight what was not as consistent was the breadth of application of all seven habits and the depth of work.
Habits that are simple to describe are deceptively hard to do. Some of the habits fully adopted like Habit 2 and Habit 6 overturn existing relationships, power structures and understandings. They demand change at a fundamental level to the point, purpose and process of the systems in question. Truly great digital transformation that tackles the needs and opportunities in Australian healthcare demands this level of work and willingness to be overthrown.
Improving any everyday habit is an exercise in mastery. Kahane’s book gives us the simple steps to start this journey, but also highlights how far we have to go and how long change truly takes. As the old adage goes, “the best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago and the next best time is today”. While the habits can be challenging, their consistent and integrated practice helps us with tools to break logjams in our work in transformation and reflecting on the system of the habits brings new insights to shape the next phase of our work.
As we move beyond arguments about data and integration in Australian healthcare, we start to tackle real challenges of equity, capability, and sustainability. Addressing these issues will demand coordinated collaboration across government, industry, practitioners and consumers as we seek to leverage new digital technologies, particularly AI, without deepening social divides and breaking the system financially. That’s where the value lies and it will demand us to implement the recommendations of the report but also to tackle the consistent everyday practice of Kahane’s Seven Habits on a wider scale across the system.
And thus, with you believing me, I made My prophecies, rebellious, unafraid . . . . And that was foolish, wasn’t it, my dear? Sterling A Brown, Challenge
The Lord insists: “You are the one who chooses to live this way. I build cities where things are human. I make Tuscany and you go to live with rock and silence.”
The most dangerous ideas are those ideas that are intuitive, reassuring, and wrong. These are the ideas that lead us down Tuscan garden paths away from our goals and they are also ideas that are stubbornly hard to erase from human conversations. Even when proven wrong these ideas revived because they are so intuitive and reassuring.
Many of the most pernicious of these ideas are those from the world of health or politics and many are malicious creations. Those that are influential in business and management are often just misguided efforts to simplify. A few examples are the focus on extrinsic motivations to drive effort, the machine as a metaphor for the company, and the computer as a metaphor for human intelligence.
We may have a newer candidate. I had blithely accepted a new idea without depth of thought and it is widely cited. When we have concerns about the risks and challenges of our current wave of Artificial Intelligence, it seems obviously a good idea to ‘have a human in the loop’. This has become so generalised as a mantra when it comes to AI, I never stopped to consider it. When I did this week, I saw the ‘human in the loop’ may be intuitive, reassuring and also ultimately wrong.
Already Human
Better by far to embrace the hard truth than a reassuring fable. Modern science has been a voyage into the unknown, with a lesson in humility waiting at every stop. Our common sense intuitions can be mistaken.
Carl Sagan
Why do we accept the idea we have to put a human in the loop? Isn’t that the point of all our working efforts. Whatever we do is for colleagues, for customers or for the community. Humans are inherently the beneficiaries of all our working efforts. They should be the beginning, middle and end of all work. We aren’t using AI for its own sake.
Even if you imagine an organisation comprised entirely of AI agents, won’t its customers and community be human. The human is not included in the loop. The human is the point of human endeavour
Critically humans design the technology and its deployment. Even the Open AI hype reel for their acqusition of IO, highlights that the values of the humans creating this technology shape its future. Shoving a human widget into the flow of output of AI after the fact is at best a stopgap and at worst useless.
Will it actually work?
This will never happen again. This keeps happening.
We talk of putting humans in the loop of AI processes because we lack confidence in the quality of AI and its ability to deliver a relevant empathetic experience to consumers and employees. We expect humans to pick moments of flawed inference. We expect humans to bring context, exception handling, and aiding with the complexity of real human edge cases at the edge of the broad probabilities of inference.
The wish that one human in a loop is going to solve all of the issues places a robust confidence in human’s ability to fight the system. People adapt and rely on systems. Look at our phone dependence. We rely on technology, especially anthropomorphised back boxes with renowned intelligence. It will take a brave human to challenge that loop of AI process.
The human in the loop is the latest example of treating humans as widgets in mechanical processes. In this case an unqualified quality control and an emotion widget to soften the machine. Are these humans in an increasingly fast and sophisticated AI loop just a better way to explain ‘the computer says no’? If we don’t give the human in the loop power to overrule, ability to manage exceptions and the agency to redesign the AI and the process we have gained nothing.
Yet again the human in the loop is an expression of management’s fixation with the machine metaphor of all work. The first human in the loop may have the flexibility required to be productive. However in our push for efficiency and for the greater adoption of technology we are just as likely to reduce rhetoric human’s role and influence over time.
So the next time someone blithely indicates they need a human in the AI loop ask the questions:
for what reason?
for whose benefit?
how will it actually work?
When things are moving fast, we must stop and reflect on the ideas that race up at us. We don’t want to be swept away by new ideas that are intuitive, reassuring and wrong.
But when I do the obligatory double take And glance behind me into the dark green future All I see stretching out are vast Arizona republics of more
Humans master the dynamics of responsive change. We can leverage human agency to easily drive change in your tired goals, roles and processes. Before we embrace Agentic-AI should we try giving our employees the agency to surprise us and to truly enjoy their work? Instead of going to war with talented employees who want to make change how can we better leverage their talents?
Storytelling Purpose
Steam-cleaning or smoke-screen at work?
I lived my passions like a fire, and afterwards saw them and even though I had escaped from danger, I wept for this ending that exists in everything. I gave myself up to the greatest ideals, then denied them afterwards, and gave myself to them again even more impetuously.
I haven’t read all of Amy Wrzesniewski’s research to validate the story. I don’t need to as the story in any form is powerful, whether true or fable. Anyone who takes care of cleaning to allow others to excel is a special contributor. Stay back and talk to those who clean in your workplace and you will meet remarkable people working for lives, family and more. I agree wholeheartedly that purpose comes from our desire to contribute to others. Mindsets matter and we can change ours at will. The story however intrigued me in a different way.
Stuck in the Work
he’s like a rock a general sense of fatal paralysis stuck in the mind a whale of a guy
What struck me most in the telling of that story was what the cleaners thought they couldn’t change – what they did and how they did it. When I did research Amy Wrzesniewski’s job crafting, the research describes the ability to change all three things about work, with or without organisational permission. Job crafting is ultimately an employee’s ultimate act of agency. It may even be one of rebellion to the extent that change is not authorised by the organisation.
Agency of employees seems to be a topic fading from discussion in this particular phase of late-stage capitalism. Many of the scaremongering tactics around work from home relate to the flexibility enabled in job crafting beyond the real or imagined panopticon of the office. Digital transformation and efficiency for legacy organisations is often couched in the ability to codify practices and experiences – ‘one system, one process, one way, the same way’ – which constrains an employees capacity to adapt their work to customers, situations or their own needs. Surveillance, security, efficiency and compliance are consistent themes that crush agency.
Whither Agency?
When I started focusing on management theory in the late nineties and early aughts, much of the leading management theory revolved around leveraging employee agency, particularly for productivity, customer experience, change, and innovation. Our focus on employee engagement was to win discretionary efforts. The talk of teams involved delegating work choices and control to teams of employees who then worked with increased autonomy. The Toyota Management System’s focus on improvement was led by empowerment at the frontline, even to stop the entire production line. Even the theory of Net Promoter Scores from Bain & Company was paired with a now long forgotten internal empowerment of teams. I could go on because there are so many examples from the leading management thinkers of the day.
We have become stuck in our view of the employee’s role as a widget in the process of work. Now Agentic-AI threatens to take even our now compliance-oriented pre-ordained process-centric work from us. The generative potential of human agency needs new advocates. From job-crafting to agile teams to employee-led change, we need to embrace a new model of how employees shape their work.
How crushed I am with having you at rest Heavy upon my life. I love you so You bind my freedom from its rightful quest. In mercy lift your drooping wings and go.
A decade ago, I did some work for clients on the future of HR. The thesis, tied to the Hero’s Journey, that resulted was around how the standard Ulrich HR model would need to evolve in a world of change agents, communities, and rapid transformation. Many elements have come true but like most forecasting I was mostly wrong or at least too early.
In an age of agentic-AI, rapid change, and volatility, the untapped potential is to manage the agency of employees before it is lost forever to the Borg. Creative employees aligned to strategy can produce exponentially better outcomes when allowed the agency to make changes. How are you leveraging the discretionary efforts your engagement score gives you before it is wasted? How are you working with your employees desire to be alive and make change before they leave?
Something will change every day.
It may be hard to process but I won’t lose my way.
There’s nothing quite so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all
attributed to Peter Drucker
Curating a Mountain of AI output
We are on the verge of a creative explosion as AI reduces the barriers to creation in all fields of the arts. These tools could enable a democratisation of artistic endeavours or they could bury us in crud. Let’s learn the lessons of social media’s impact on transmission of media and proceed with care.
AI is a Tool, not a Partner
Kai Riemer, a professor at the University of Sydney oft quoted on this blog, shared a post on Linkedin this weekend reminding us:
AI is a tool, a stateless system used by humans. It does not collaborate. But it is mighty useful in the hand of skilled humans. There are no hybrid human-AI teams, just AI-enabled ones.
The key point from Kai’s quote is ‘skilled humans’ and I would add working to a purpose. We cannot expect AI to add value, meaning and purpose to our creations. We must bring that to the use of the tools. Without that contribution we are doing efficiently pointless things.
I also saw a post from Glynis Ross that pointed out the dull unrelenting uniformity of many of the AI trends. You can’t differentiate if all you are doing is using AI to blindly follow others. Again AI needs a human to bring value, meaning and purpose to the tools.
Songs arise out of suffering, by which I mean they are predicated upon the complex, internal human struggle of creation and, well, as far as I know, algorithms don’t feel. Data doesn’t suffer. ChatGPT has no inner being, it has been nowhere, it has endured nothing, it has not had the audacity to reach beyond its limitations, and hence it doesn’t have the capacity for a shared transcendent experience, as it has no limitations from which to transcend. ChatGPT’s melancholy role is that it is destined to imitate and can never have an authentic human experience, no matter how devalued and inconsequential the human experience may in time become.
Democratising Media
We have watched the internet and then social media lower the cost of distribution of information, work, art, and creation. This has undoubtedly allowed many more people to participate in creative careers and work than when the distribution of media involved professional control of narrow channels. Those artists and songwriters who can now be discovered without professional endorsement have benefited but they must also fight with their talent through a global long tail of production. Not everyone who publishes a podcast does credit to their microphone.
A poem should improve upon a blank page
Nicanor Parra
What has come with a new economy of distribution is a morass of crud, misinformation, and outright fraud. Where once we could not get enough information, we now must filter too much and test what we receive against standards of accuracy and value. The work of the media arbiter shifted to the user and so has much of the value. Media empires that were once lauded for their advertising ‘rivers of gold’ struggle, so too do the music, TV and film production businesses who leveraged distribution. Our political systems are still adjusting to the opportunities and threats that democratised media presents to democracy itself. The traditional elite gatekeepers are gone.
And some of our men just in from the border say
there are no barbarians any longer.
Now what’s going to happen to us without barbarians?
AI is going to rapidly accelerate the production of creative output. Want AI to generate a new rock opera on your life? There will be a tool that will enable it whether or not it deserves an audience. We will be able to produce and ship creative output to the world faster than before. We have the potential to make the flood of crud, misleading and deceptive materials much worse. AI will not stop us from this future as it will only continue to get better and better at creative production in volume and quality of appearance. As a tool, AI and its owners only interest is to be used (& through use attract more data for future inferences) What does not change is the quality of purpose, intent and meaning in any activity.
If we want to improve upon a blank page and to make a meaningful impact with our AI assisted work, then a human is going to need to bring that purpose and meaning. Most likely they will also need to bring all the other human virtues too, like empathy, consideration, respect, charity, generosity and more. We can’t be sure always what the AI has trained itself on in forming its inferences.
We will not be re-bottling the AI genie. Like social media the path is not back but how to make these tools work better and more meaningfully for us. The race is well and truly underway. As the tools continue their exponential race to perfection, we need to shift our focus to how we use them better and more purposefully. We also need to plan the governance and the critical thinking to weed out the crud and the calamitous.
As Mark Britz notes on Linkedin we need to shift our approaches from capability building, where AI is increasingly democratising the skills, to capacity building. There will be more, not less, demand for the extraordinary potential of human purpose, meaning, critical thinking and ability to navigate ambiguity.
Our last and most important question is how we ensure that there are rewarding careers for the changemakers, artists, musicians, filmmakers, authors and other creatives. AI can replicate the look of Studio Gibli when a lifetime of work is given as training materials. The ability of AI to meaningfully reach beyond inference is much less certain. We are going to need purposeful and creative humans to share their work and guide the way into the human opportunities and challenges ahead.
God made everything out of nothing, but the nothingness shows through
Fiction is a good home for the reach of the human mind
Deborah Levy
Listen. Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony. – Monty Python and The Holy Grail
I read another made-up story on Linkedin recently. You know the common kind of fiction, a saintly manager rescuing someone from homelessness and then feels the need to share the story of the good works. Am I a cynic? Homelessness is a real issue and people need help to break the cycle. Possibly. I am being cynical because of the self-promotion involved, but I also suspect that all good and true stories are more complicated than as told in a Linkedin post. We aren’t ever all as good as our social media makes out.
The story prompted me to reflect on the myths and illusions that infiltrate our working lives. Some are well known. Stephen Covey’s insight is that we judge others by their actions but we judge ourselves by our intentions. We embrace the myth of our best intents, overlooking our shortcomings even as we hold others to theirs.
Sadly, we turn the page to right our hearts, knowing our lives too well
Stories are important. Human community is powered by the story. Stories connect us and share values in groups. Stories inspire us to action to tackle the difficult and the challenging issues of our society. The creative power of humanity includes the extraordinary ability to make up and share compelling stories that are more than just true.
The best and most powerful stories have a grounding in truth, but they may also fly far into the realm of make-believe. Those who work with entrepreneurs are often torn by the tensions between visionary leadership and ‘the reality distortion field’ that can exist when people believe without adequate grounding. Entrepreneurship is often a heroic story that ignores the real challenges of the process of creation, the luck and the collective efforts involved in success.
Today he rides through a distant wood, To answer a question, or question an answer Which once he thought he understood. Soon, he thinks, I will know the answer.
The challenge we face with many heroic stories is that they fail to point the way to repeatable solutions. Homelessness is a complex socio-economic issue. It is tied to a range of social systems and individual issues. As important as individual actions are to create change, the enduring solution is likely to be one that is systemic and collective. Our heroic myths ignore that while individuals helping one person makes a difference the problem demands change from a lot of others to do much more complex work to improve many systems. Our heroic myths mislead us.
In the heroic myths of entrepreneurship, this is evident too. These myths so commonly describe a genius who solves a problem with a product and finds success. The collective and systemic reality of these stories is lost to genius. Rarely do these stories include the work that success takes like the slog of funding, the grind of the teams managing and solving for production, operations and service and the long battle for distribution. This misleading myth is one reason entrepreneurs fail. They don’t understand all that it takes to succeed.
Myths play a role in forging community. The ancient myths were rich emotional tales of success and failure. Let’s make sure our storytelling has a strong and more complex foundation to guide others
What becomes of the people I have abandoned in fiction … the brides left at the altar, the heroes whose quests are never accomplished? I like to think about them,
“Keep awake, alive, new. Perform the paradox of being hard and yet soft. Survive without calcification of the tender membranes. Be a poet. Be alive.”
– Tennessee Williams
We can all get lost in poorly run large organisations. The flurry of people, process, policy and performance management can suck all the life and ambition from work. If we let all those constraints overwhelm our sense of purpose, our agency, and our empathy we can calcify over time.
Organisations spend fortunes on leadership, creativity and innovation programs only to deny people the agency to implement the change those skills demand. That denial is rarely explicit, it results from an accumulation of minor barriers, social disapproval, and lack of psychological safety to try to make change. Put enough discouragement around your organisational change agents and people’s natural instincts to make things better and more human will calcify.
Ambition withers if not encouraged and rewarded. Effort erodes when the challenge is too hard, giving extra is discouraged and the penalties for failure are high.
In this short Life
That only lasts an hour
How much – how little — is
Within our power
– Emily Dickinson
Being alive involves embracing our agency to realise personal and organisational purposes. Being alive involves practising our values and our empathy in our relationships with customers, partners and colleagues. Being alive means people having the freedom to either make things better in their work or to campaign for others to make those changes.
These are capabilities inherent in every person. Outside of work people do these things with ease. These are not capabilities that we need to teach. What is missing is practice. That practice is missing because people have settled into a narrow range of work due to real or perceived restraints on their freedom to make a difference.
To be alive: not just the carcass But the spark. That’s crudely put, but… If we’re not supposed to dance, Why all this music?
Gregory Orr
People surrender their lives and their agency to the machinery of organisations around them unless rescued by leaders who encourage them back to life.
To help people to be more alive, leaders need to remove the barriers and restrictions, real or self-imposed. Leaders need to create an environment where people feel confident and supported to make positive change in their work for customers, partners and colleagues. People will drive change to make work better given the chance, the systems, and the encouragement. We need to give people the opportunity and get out of their way.
People given the opportunity to be truly alive see performance and engagement skyrocket. They weed out the stupidity, the lack of empathy and the process nonsense that breeds in organisations. These high-agency individuals become focused on delivering improvements at speed. They love their work and can see the rewards for themselves and for stakeholders.
Be Alive. Never let yourself or others calcify. It’s never too late to help others to find the spark of life in their work and make work better for all.
Don’t bend; don’t water it down; don’t try to make it logical;
don’t edit your own soul according to the fashion.
Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.
– Franz Kafka
a return to the strange idea of continuous living despite the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then, I’ll take it
What if the answer to your organisation’s challenges is to focus and go faster?
One target and a faster horse
Attend any leadership program and they will talk about the importance of leaders work in vision, alignment and accountability. Large organisations expend huge amounts of management time and effort on inspiring and communicating shared vision, managing alignment and creating accountability. Often all this work results in a multitude of projects and overlapping systems pulling against each other for energy and attention of teams.
Visions without execution are often sprawling delusions that demotivate employees and generate confusion rather than effort. Alignment for its own sake can turn into mindless politics and in large complex organisations it can be very unclear which of the many number one priorities, mandatories and diverging divisional goals people are aligning around. Accountability can become a culture of fear with continuous performance monitoring rather than a focus on learning and improvement for progress.
Working in startup cultures, I have had the experience of seeing the power of leadership that concentrates on two other challenges:
Focus: Are the resources of the organisation focused well enough on the few actions that will deliver success?
Velocity: Are we making progress fast enough?
Creating an organisational conversation and practice around enhancing focus and velocity delivers step changes in performance. Critically that leadership practice will resolve many of the issues that management theory sought to resolve with vision, alignment and accountability.
Focus to the work of the team is a far more tangible and near term way to engage people in what is important. Focus gives something on which people can pull into alignment, rather than alignment being a constant task of leaders to push. Lastly focus, doing more of fewer things, reduces the conflicts and confusion across the organisation. Success is clearer and it is easier to take the organisation towards it when it is pursuing focused activities and goals.
Velocity recognises that performance in organisations is often systemic. Leaders who enable the teams to move faster will be clearing blockages and impediments and enabling the next level of achievement. Teams focused on velocity will have a mindset of continuous improvement towards their goals. Velocity also pulls people into alignment as focused teams get on with their work and other race to catch up and support that work. The tangible delivery that comes from velocity is much more engaging than any fancy vision or performance rating.
Vision, alignment snd accountability describe outcomes. As a result there is a temptation for leaders to see these as things to be set up and the outcome follows. Focus and velocity aren’t outcomes. They are ways of doing the work.
Critically for leaders, the work of focus and velocity is never done. You can’t just announce and walk away. Complexity creeps into work in many ways and there will need to be constant pruning to maintain focus. Better velocity takes continuing effort from everyone. New barriers are always being discovered just as the new ways to get work done.
Here are two questions to ask often:
are we spending enough of our time and efforts on the few things that really matter for success?
what can we do to deliver more faster?
Rather than discussing a distant future, fighting over resources or performance ratings concentrate your efforts into a few goals and help people to get there faster. Concentrate your team’s energy and enthusiasm on the speed of real progress. The outcomes of focus and velocity will surprise you.
AI tools can only leverage what they can see. For far too long, business has poorly measured and understood human behaviour in the workplace. We are likely to need to better understand the human activity, motivations and drivers to get sustainable value from AI.
In a recent post on the Stratechery blog by Ben Thompson on Open AI’s new Deepseek research capability, he concludes with a discussion of where the tool failed badly, an industry analysis with one large private party. Deepseek couldn’t see that business’ information so produced a misleading industry structure without it. For a reader without knowledge, there’s no clue something is missing. It is a Rumsfeld ‘unknown unknown’ as Ben Thompson notes. He goes on to make a powerful point about new value in secrecy in strategy in a world of AI research.
This blindness raised for me another critical question. What else is often invisible in organisations and might mislead business decisions made by AI? The most obvious answer is data on people. For too long, understanding people, performance, motivations and decision making in organisations has been at best random and sporadic. Avoiding the danger of unknown unknowns is going to demand more than faith in AI, it is going to take a new model of how we understand people and surface performance. Productivity measures alone will leave too many blackspots.
HR’s blank screen
When you consider the HR data that most organizations have it is the information collected on joining, changes in roles or benefits that force updates, list of titles, performance grades, some engagement survey questions and productivity data. Much of this is not a system of human data, it is the output of other systems.
When supermarkets like Tesco started to look at leveraging data for loyalty, marketing and digital engagement of consumers, they found their data on products was all driven by their merchandising systems. It was detailed SKU supply chain and logistics data required to procure and stock items. Unfortunately engaging customers more effectively required different data like whether items were low fat, low sugar, feel good, healthy, suitable for lifestyle choices, treats, ingredients or meals. All the inputs to human food decision making. We don’t decide what we want eat in a logistics process. They had reams of product data and were blind to what consumers wanted to know and the key elements of consumer decisions.
Organisations are going to have to bring this same analytics into their organisations because when you consider it most organisations don’t have the data today. Some examples:
who works on what office on what day of the week?
the informal networks of exchange of information resources and power between roles
capabilities, skills and talents from previous roles and organisations.
individual motivations and goals
non-work challenges and opportunities that may be driving employee behaviour
Until organisations start to leverage different richer kinds of HR data, there is a real danger the human elements of performance are overlooked entirely. That will have devastating effect on people, the value of AI and performance.
