Author: simongterry

“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” – quote  attributed to Martin Luther King Jnr but with a long history

There is no natural arc to the history of morality in communities. The ‘arc of the moral universe’ changes when people change values and those new values scale up to influence community expectations. Those changes can be influenced by ongoing processes of economic and demographic changes within communities, but is often the work of leaders work to help communities to make sense of the need for change, to understand the new values in action and work to achieve better ways forward together. The way to ensure we don’t end up on the wrong side of history is to lead change for the better. That change is unlikely to be a smooth populist transition. It is a journey of conflict and rebellion.

No Inevitability

Things are getting better. Long term trends of the safety, economic and social security of people on this planet are positive. When we step out of the distorting mire of daily political conflict and shock news, we can see that there is a long term trend in human relationships that has been unquestionably positive. By simply casting our minds back 200 years we can find a range of social values that have radically changed and shaped a transformation of human political, social and economic relations.  Much of the digital transformation we have come to expect is founded on values that are fundamentally alien to society just two centuries ago.

Economic and technological change has enabled these shifts in values, but it does not ensure them. Social researchers from Marx to Fukuyama have found disappointment in a reliance on an inevitable course to history. There are too many signals across history that a determined group of people can take a society hostage and lead it by force, dogma, charisma or other means in a different direction. Many of the economic and technological changes are capable of being used to support and reinforce these other directions in social culture.  We already can see the risk of rotating groups of true believers in many social contexts.  The twentieth century to today shows that in many societies that use of technology and economic growth can exist along side inequalities that last for generations.

Leadership is Unsafe

The changes in society that we have seen to create the favourable conditions did not come about because of smooth inexorable shifts in public opinion. Leaders fought for that change. People had to rebel, march, campaign and fight for a better society. There’s no safety in a conflict of values. The action for change in society demands leaders who will step into this unsafe domain.

Let’s be clear when Martin Luther King Jnr spoke the words above he was inspiring his movement to keep up the protest and the fight.  He did not say these words to encourage people to wait for a shift in public opinion that would make it safe to change the nature of society. He said these words to make the change he was advocating seem inevitable and to rally people to his cause. He led that change. Fifty years later we still need leadership to sustain and grow those same civil rights.

We have a world where leaders can hear all of public opinion and where those who lose with change can often speak the loudest. In this climate, it can be tempting as a politician or CEO to play safe, to follow the community and rely on inevitable change in public opinion. The voices of those who feel they lose by change will make clear that this is the safest path. It may be easy and safe now but it is the path to the wrong side of history. Shifts in values when they occur don’t look kindly on those who acquiesced or enabled the continuation of injustice.

Leaders don’t follow communities. Leaders help communities to act on change. Leaders seek to influence changes in values and action and their success depends on the outcomes achieved. Leadership is not a story of power. It is a story of influence to make change for the better. A leader who plays safe and ignores an opportunity to push history for the better is not worthy of the title.

“Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty” – attributed to Thomas Jefferson and many others

In exploring the API Economy on this blog, I have explored the challenge of resolving tensions of purpose and also the critical role of trust. A recent story on gaming by Uber drivers of the Uber driver management algorithms highlighted another challenge of API Economy businesses.  In an economy of standardised API-driven interactions, exit is the only remaining option to signal dissatisfaction.

APIs Everywhere

Business models like Uber can encourage a line of thinking that soon in the future all transactions & interactions will be seamlessly managed by standardised interactions across APIs. We will lose the cost and complexity of human service interactions as we fit all of our interaction needs into code that can exchange information between systems. Everything in this API Economy runs incredibly smoothly, until it doesn’t.  The problems that I explored in previous posts above are the thin end of the wedge of examples of what happens when people and interactions fall outside the standard patterns of an increasingly locked-down platform economy.

As an aside, it is worth noting that classical economics has explored many of the implications of this algorithmic, API-driven utopia. The assumptions inherent in the futures being forecast increasingly start to align with the traditional models of economics. The API Economy is seeking to bring about (or also assuming) perfect transparency of information, frictionless transactions, rational maximisation of self-interest and a reduction of all interactions to transactions in universal markets.  At its extreme in the exploration of perfect competition and general equilibrium under the Arrow-Debreu model, economists effectively conceived of a global economy that exists for only a single moment in which all present and future transactions are completed. All work thereafter is fulfilling previously agreed futures and insurance contracts. The limitations that have been research at length of such traditional models would be worthy considerations for the advocates of an API Economy future. As examples, Behavioural Economics has explored the extent to which we are not rational maximisers and we much better understanding the issues of uncertainty of information in a complex world.

Exit and Voice in the API Economy

I ready Albert O Hirschman’s book Exit, Voice and Loyalty many years ago and it helped me see that the traditional economic model ignores our ability to create and exchange new information.  Hirschman points out that traditional economics only has one option for a dissatisfied consumer. They have to not purchase, exiting the market. The dissatisfied consumer has to hope that their signal will be picked up and correctly interpreted. For example, Uber Drivers frustrated with returns have to withdraw their services.  Unfortunately, instead of helping drivers to improve returns, Uber may respond by tightening the system rules to prevent driver exit or seeking to automate drivers away. Uber hopes that it can force any remaining drivers into voiceless Loyalty, where they take no action. For drivers, exit is a blunt tool of improvement. It is also a path to social and economic exclusion. 

Hirschman points out that through history consumers have an alternative, complain, collaborate and work with others to improve matters. Voice is an important input in our current economic system. Hirschman highlights in some examples there are even potential policy benefits to restricting market exit to encourage voice. Engagement matters and community is where we express our voice whether inside organisations or across boundaries. The losses of disappearing community are more than economic. With increases in inequality forecast, building exclusion deeper into the system of economics could have profound social ramifications. 

Voice is in danger of being lost if everything is an API. APIs don’t allow for a counterpart’s voice. Organisations that increasingly leverage APIs will need to be aware of the loss and carefully manage their engagement with counterparts to foster open discussion and the opportunities for learning. Community leadership will be an ongoing responsibility to ensure the luddites do not feel tempted to smash the machines in frustration at their economic exclusion. An API is the foundation of a more seamless and frictionless economy, but need not be a replacement for all human interaction. We may work for money but we also work to fulfil messy complex and changing human needs too. 

I was honoured this week to have the opportunity to help launch my Change Agent Worldwide colleague Jennifer Frahm’s book, Conversations of Change.  The book was launched along with Lena Ross’s book, Hacking for Agile Change.

I contributed an introduction and an interview to Jen’s book and I think it is an important practical guide to change for any manager. I read Lena’s book too and I have already applied some of the hacks in my work.

Email is not the place to start. Stop hanging the case for the future of work all only on email. Meetings are a far better place for changing work behaviours.

Email is Bad But It Isn’t Going Soon

The way email is used in business now is terrible and mostly unnecessary. Many people have demonstrated that there are better ways to manage than email. Luis Suarez has has demonstrated his ‘no email’ approach to work that it is both possible to remove email and more effective. However, his example is unlikely to be widely followed soon.

Email practices continue and are tolerated by organisations and workers.  It is hard to see email disappearing because email meets some simple work that remain in the culture of most workplaces. These practices relate largely to the way organisations manage accountability and tasks. We might not endorse the following practices for many reasons but they aren’t going away until we first change the accountability and performance cultures in our organizations:

• Expectation of delivery (though not of reading or understanding or action)
• Allocation of responsibility to others (though usually badly or for the wrong reasons)
• A production line experience to create the satisfaction of a sense of work and the distraction of the new (not always a positive and a source of much of the overwhelming feeling of email)
• A form of authentication, confirmation or notice (also subject to abuse and the target of many hacking schemes)
• A low-touch asynchronous form of interaction that does not necessarily demand attention or a response (not always an ideal interaction pattern to choose)

We can keep up the fight to improve email practices, but it is holding change back to make the change in email practices the starting point for new ways of working.

Start Fixing Meetings Instead

We spend hours a day doing pointless email, but mostly we do email alone.  Even greater productive potential is wasted in bad meetings. Every diary has them. Many people live in back to back meetings with no time for preparation, reflection or more importantly action. Worse still, their presence in those meetings traps others into feeling like they need to attend too.

We can rebuild the meeting culture of an organisation quickly and with the active support of workers. Aaron Dignan has described the value of starting with a clean slate in building a new organizational tempo around meetings.  We can use the chats, conversations and collaborations concepts to rethink the purposes and work of our meetings and choose better tools to manage those interactions instead. Even a little exposure to better formats of meetings and better tools for interactions is likely to generate converts and a groundswell of support as people feel more productive, have better interactions and importantly gain back time.

Many of the bad habits that drive use of email above are driven by ineffective conversations in organizations.  They are created by bad meetings that don’t achieve anything or advance the work of the organizations.  Bad meetings leave the inevitable conflicts of performance to seethe and remain unresolved. You don’t need ‘CYA’ emails when the meetings and interactions of the organization are working effectively, you are working and managing tasks transparently and when the focus of performance is on accountability to achieve purpose.

The email culture of organisations will change in time. We can each work to improve our individual email practices.  If we want to show the collective benefits of new work practices, start by changing meetings.

On the weekend I came across multiple pieces of ‘thought leadership‘ describing the ideal time to wake up for a successful life. One even prompted an absurd thread where people were bidding their ever earlier waking times like the ‘Four Yorkshiremen’ of Monty Python. In a recent discussion of this phenomenon, Harold Jarche highlighted that the evidence on the work practices of successful people is so varied that you can say “Everyone is different”.  The discussion prompted this response in me:

The phenomenon of personal practice masquerading as thought leadership is widespread, particularly from the rich, famous and successful. So why do we see so many successful thought leaders come up with this kind of advice:

• Conventional Wisdom: If you want your advice to be popular and widely shared, it helps if it aligns to conventional wisdom. Nobody wants to be seen to be lazy and the ‘early bird gets the worm’. So, of course, success ‘must’ be driven by rising early.
• Generalising the Specific: Some people benefit from an early start. If you do and you succeeded, it can be easy to assume everyone just needs to copy your methods. You may even be quite judgmental about those who don’t follow your lead. Diversity means what works for you doesn’t work for everyone else.
• A Passion for Proxies: Discipline, mastery and practice are keys to success but they don’t sound easy or simple. For a thought leader, it’s far easier to advocate a simple hack as a proxy. Rising early to get to work is a good proxy for discipline and practice as it is one time of day to practice with little interruption. Focus on the discipline, mastery and practice, not the proxy of rising time.
• Small Commitments: Success takes focus and commitment. Psychological experimentation has shown that small commitments can have wide impacts on people’s perceptions of themselves. Small commitments can be a great place to start building focus and discipline. Waking at a particular time of day is a commitment but anything that signals a meaningful ongoing change could substitute.
• After-the-Fact Rationalisation: For many who succeed in life, success can be a mystery or even a source of ongoing self-doubt. When asked to explain a record of success, it is often easier, and more modest, to settle on some simple practice like a waking time.
• Ego over Relationships: ‘My networks helped me to succeed’ is rarely considered a heroic story of success. Many successful people actively or inadvertently downplay the role that their networks and supporters play in their success.  A mentor may fit in the heroes journey but there is rarely a cast of thousands helping the hero along. A heroic individual action like waking up in the cold dawn hours seems a more fitting contribution to the story than thousands of hours of conversation.
• Confusing Chance and Strategy: Much of success is luck or timing (or privilege). Successful people can find it hard to accept that they just happened to be in ‘the right place at the right time”. There is a temptation to have a set of rules of advice that explains their success and suggests others can replicate the outcomes.
• Talking over Doing: Only your family knows what time you really get up. Only they should care. Stop talking about it. Success depends on what you do with your waking hours.  Focus your efforts there.

Last night I was part of a rich conversation about the changing nature of work and the societal implications that was convened by the Catalyst Circle. There were many rich themes to explore in that conversation but one struck me with force:

How do we reconcile tensions of purpose in an API Economy?

The API Economy

As transactional costs decline on platforms and there is an increasing integration of the global economy, the Application Protocol Interface (‘API’) becomes the default form of interaction. APIs standardize the interactions with and between platforms to reduce the friction at interfaces. Not all APIs need be technology driven. Throughout history, temporary labour and gig economy platforms of all kinds standardize work, interactions, and labour to make transactions easier, supply greater, and workers comparable and fungible.

As the API Economy grows, smaller companies can operate as larger organizations by pulling on demand labour from these platforms.  Interactions and work that used to be managed within organizations boundaries are now managed by the API. Relationships can become more transactional and less bespoke. If you fail to fit the API, you won’t proceed further, an experience many are already encountering as job applicant management systems take over candidate screening.

Owning Our Purpose

We have always owned our own unique personal purpose.  However, large organizations and their culture of compliance have meant many people have left the management of collective purpose to others.  They have gone along with the needs of the organizational purpose and failed to consider their own.  Many employees have left considering the everyday tensions within purpose to other leaders to consider and resolve.

In an API economy, purpose is not part of the transaction dynamics. The hirer has theirs. You need to manage your own.  Conflicts or tensions of purpose don’t enter into the equation. You take work that fulfills your personal purpose as you see it and you let the rest go. Conflicts and tensions of purpose are friction and will likely fall out of the system. The API does not care for your opinion of a better way to work.

We can protect our own execution of our personal purpose in this environment. Everyone is clearly accountable to manage themselves in a transactional market that operates in this way. What is at risk is the creative leadership of collective purpose. An API Economy will produce optimal outcomes if the forces of individual purpose create an optimal collective outcome as people pursue their own agendas. The ‘invisible hand’ can do much, but it is also clear from history that we have had to supplement market outcomes with other structures to address uncertainty and manage market breakdowns.

Creative Tensions of Purpose

Every personal purpose has its own uncertainties and tensions. Scale these up at a collective level in an organization and one of the key roles of a leader is to keep a vibrant conversation and action going on the tensions between individual and collective purpose. Leaders help communities of people reconcile the tensions of purpose in creative ways.

An API excludes these tensions. Instead of the voice of employees discussing their opinions, an API supplies supply for a particular purpose. An absence of an adequate supply is a signal but it is a blunt one. Recent history of platform models suggests that these signals can be obscured by many factors: growth, hype, new labour market entrants, organizational culture or other dynamics.

As we move into these transactional models of work in an API Economy, the role of leaders will increasingly to be exploring these creative tensions of purpose beyond the boundaries of the organization.  The conversations you had with employees will now be had with your labour market community on the platform.  You can choose to treat these individuals as a transactional market, but you will surrender rich information and new levers of motivation. Engage these workers as a community and you will have new opportunities. Leaders will need to convene, navigate and engage these communities to learn and to adapt the business to new value opportunities that are revealed by the creative tensions of purpose within that external community.  These tensions will expose organizations to even wider communities of stakeholders. Treat all of these communities transactionally, relying only on your APIs, and you will miss business & social opportunities to create value.

 

Six months ago, I wrote a post that both focused and previewed of the work that I planned to do for 2017 with clients. This post reviews this work plan, gathers some lessons from the last 7 months of work and highlights some additional themes that have arisen as I have worked through these challenges. For those disinclined to read the prior post, this infographic summarizes the major themes:

Lessons from 7 Months of Practice:

• This story still holds: Working Out Loud is bigger than I expected with John Stepper’s continued success in Germany leading a global movement. Personal Knowledge Mastery is smaller than it should be but Harold Jarche’s work continues to grow. Agile is discussed everywhere and people are experiencing the role of learning by doing as a result. New models of leadership are key to sustaining change and I would rank this as an area that needs greater priority of investment & practice in organizations. If one thing is holding organizations back in the digital workplace, it is not employee engagement, it is the executive leadership of digital change.
• A tighter story of the digital transformation of work: The last post highlighted the history and future of digital to set some context for how work is changing. I’ve found that too much context for the busy executives who shape digital workplace strategy. This simpler single image captures the major themes and resonates quickly.
  
• Focusing on the Future of HR: In working with organizations on these themes, it has become clear that the Human Resources teams need help to shape their new role both in leading this work and in the ongoing function of HR as work is changing. The Ulrich model of HR remains dominant but it is designed for an area of stable industrial processes. Working with a number of clients, I have found that helping to set a strategy for HR and refocus the capabilities of HR for a new more agile operating model is an important part of any transformation.
• From Employee Experience to People Experience:  This work on the Future of HR has prompted some deeper dives into the work underway as Employee Experience becomes People Experience. People Experience is on the rise as the term and its strong focus on the digital transformation of HR spreads out from Silicon Valley start-ups. Much of the focus on the People Experience theme to date revolves around automation and design of people journeys. These are important areas of work (and lucrative consulting gigs) but I have seen a similar pattern before in the early days of Customer Experience in the 1990s. Without clear strategies, use cases and a focus on operational and financial sustainability of the new experiences, the new experiences will fade away having failed to achieve their outcomes. Today some People Experience is just outsourcing & other projects are pretty window dressing. People experience needs to balance business, operational and design goals for sustained success. Not just a story of digital automation, real innovation is required.
• The Return of the ESN: Enterprise Social Networks are back. Workplace by Facebook’s launch has reinvented the role of the category and organizations are more clearly seeing the distinction between chat, enterprise conversations, and collaboration. Yammer is growing strongly and both platforms continue to produce great case studies. Organizations are increasingly understanding the need to be able to leverage their wirearchies and ESNs are a key digital workplace tool for greater collaboration and strategic value.
• Analytics: Business runs on measurement. If you are not measuring your transformation you are missing out. Measurement and data analytics across the realm of digital transformation continue to be of importance in shaping the capture of value. Swoop Analytics launched a great e-book on measuring the Collaboration Value Maturity Model.

The New Work Ahead

The Roadmap set for 2017 was an ambitious one. For a solo consultant, even with the support of my colleagues in Change Agents Worldwide, this is more like a 5-year plan than a one-year work plan. However, I think of it as a product backlog and I remain keen to work and learn in each of the areas on that backlog.

Here’s what I am adding to that backlog now as new challenges:

• Degrees of Freedom: There is a range of practices and cultural expectations that are enablers for ongoing digital transformation. These ‘degrees of freedom’ are how traditional organizations can be included in and benefit from the new models of work that are often seen as being constrained to start-ups and new green fields ventures. More to come on this theme.
• Cross-Discipline Collaboration: HR disciplines are full of silos: Employee Communications, Collaboration, Culture, Leadership, Learning and so on. The digital disciplines are equally in danger of becoming siloed as digital customer service, digital marketing, design, agile project management, agile change and so on grow throughout organizations. Successful organizations work at the intersections of these disciplines and create their own vibrant culture of collaboration. There is no one discipline to unite them all and we need to avoid the religious wars of doctrinal disciples. We need neo-generalist practitioners to lead us forward to mastery.
• Storytelling: Social learning is critical to the future of digital workplaces. Can you discuss social learning with busy executives and get meaningful traction? Rarely. We need new models of advocacy for much of the future of work agenda and it begins not with thought leadership but with the hard yards of practice and new stories to tell.
• Resilience, Purpose, and Grit: Changing Work is Hard. We need our champions to stay in the fight when they may prefer to surrender to the antibodies of culture. Building resilience, purpose, and grit at an individual and a collective level in organizations matters.

 

 

Politely trash thought leadership and you get a big reaction of support. You will also discover a lot of similar frustration. However, these responses highlight how closely the message skirts the line of being merely entertaining thought leadership (a TEDX talk awaits me somewhere). If we are to stay true to the message of that post, we move beyond thought leadership when we share stories of the benefits of the real practice of change to inspire others. This is critically important in the domain of my work, helping organizations change the way they work.

Selling New Work Practices

Much of the advocacy for new work practices is awful. This advocacy for future of work practices comes in three main forms today:

• Theory: There’s a theoretically better way to work
• Criticism: The way you are working now is awful: Stop and change
• Threat: The end of the world is coming and you need to change your work

I recognize these three arguments because I have used variations of them at length in the blog.  Much of this advocacy has been ineffective in arguing for new approaches to collaboration, learning, innovation, and leadership.

David Wilkinson has written an elegant argument on the value of storytelling to help people understand the value of Evidence-Based Practice in Healthcare. The simple message of his post is that when we want to create change in practices we need to engage people with the challenges that matter to them, share stories of success and engage them to consider experiencing a change. Storytelling captures the human imagination and can make abstract change conversations credible, tangible and clear.

Let’s reconsider the three usual rationales in the light of David’s post:

• Theory:  The average busy worker responds to theory with a quick dismissal. The theory seems remote from their daily challenges. Their current work practices work well enough and who has time for the risk or the conscious incompetence of a new way.
• Criticism: Nobody responds well to criticism, express or implied. That’s, even more, the case when the criticism is based on an approach or view of the world that is not shared. If working entirely in email is all I know, all my peers do and my boss expects, how can it be wrong.
• Threat: Abstract threats don’t change behaviour. I don’t believe my way of working can save the company. I’m more concerned with the very real and immediate threat my boss will pose if I stand out and try to be different.

Tell A Real Story Instead

Instead of threatening, demeaning and bamboozling others, it is time for the advocates of change to take on more effective work of change. We need to build the practical stories of better ways of working and spread those widely to inspire new action in others.

Why does WOLWeek work? It is a time to share stories of working out loud. I’m not half as credible an advocate as the team at Bosch when they share their experience of working out loud.

How can we learn from David Wilkinson in advocating for new work practices:

Do the work of change: A great idea is not a story until it has been put into action. Be rightly sceptical of the stage and the usual suspects. Start with the work. Build case studies. Run experiments. Gather heroes and heroines of your future stories. Measure the real benefits.  This is the work that turns theory into story.

Recruit your cast: Stories have real people in them. Find communities that are doing the work. Get to know these people and work with them to spread the word.

Focus on outcomes, not the practice: The focus of your advocacy and the story needs to be the business and personal outcomes. Go on and on about a new practice and people will see you as a salesperson. Focus instead on what others need or want. Focus on the biggest end of the funnel. Business people are trained to care about outcomes.

Describe the experience: We don’t need 3 easy steps. To agree to change we need to hear a description of the detail of the experience from beginning to end. It has to make credible what work needs to be done, how hard it will be and most importantly what outcomes we can expect. Keep it real. Most importantly, don’t promise a rocket to the moon, if your story is really about a long hard slog through dark woods.

Set up the conflict: Include all the challenges and the opposition in your story. Listeners will recognise these difficulties. More importantly the conflict is what attracts human attention. Your story of a new experience will be better for the challenges.

Connect the story to today’s work:  A great story depends on a ‘willing suspension of disbelief”.  That relies on your story connecting in some way to something tangible about work today or more boldly the human condition. If the actors in your story, sound like they are superheroes or that they live in a sci-fi organization you aren’t changing anyone.