Author: simongterry

Your hierarchy doesn’t work. It is. No value has ever been created down your hierarchy. Nothing of value occurs because of the flow of resources, information or power up and down a hierarchy. All the money invested in perfecting hierarchies through restructures are a massive exercise in waste. Much of the money in perfecting the flow of information up the hierarchy suffers the same fate. The focus on the hierarchy is a focus on status relationships, not the relationships of work.

The real engine of value in your organisation is the interactions and collaborations in and through the hierarchy. These collaborative relationships are where the work gets done and where the formal hierarchical decisions are shaped, influenced or frustrated.

The value that is created in any organisation comes from the wirearchy. Jon Husband’s working definition of wirearchy is

a dynamic two-way flow of  power and authority, based on knowledge, trust, credibility and a focus on results, enabled by interconnected people and technology

Speak to any sane chief executive and they are frustrated with the limits of their information, their power and their influence. The constraints that they experience are the outcome of the two-way dynamic of the wirearchy that wraps in and through their hierarchy:

• The ability to order an outcome is not the ability to achieve an outcome. Humans intervene to assess a careful two-way dynamic of trust, credibility and purpose before they yield to raw exercises of power.  In many situations the cost of an order to information, trust and credibility may overcome the value of achieving any result.
• The vertical relationships in organisations are often far more tangential and remote than the everyday demands of other horizontal or external relationships. Money, rewards and status can matter less than personal relationships or fit within a group.
• Information is not a standardised input into decision making. Our view of information is shaped by context, by relationships, credibility and trust that come from relationships. Decisions are not made on the papers but through a complex web of relationships and influences.
• Because central planning and control is inherently unreliable, it is the cooperation and collaboration in the hierarchy that reorders work, resources and information to enable critical outcomes to be achieved. The tighter the hierarchy seeks to control these the more poorly the system performs.
• In the absence of trust, the wirearchy fills the vacuum with rumour, gossip and investigative research. Human networks find a way to bring partial transparency to secrets, by routing around the barriers.
• Most dangerous of all hierarchical power with its one-way flows is slow and unresponsive. Remote from the ever-changing interface with customers and the market, the hierarchy is a barrier to innovation, experimentation and adaptation.  The change agents who navigate the wirearchies in and around hierarchies are those who remedy this danger.

Our organisations invest heavily in perfecting the hierarchy often at the expense of investment in the elements of this two-way dynamic. Learning, knowledge, trust and collaboration are after thoughts in many organisations plans for the digital world. What would be possible if instead of the perfect hierarchy we invested to develop knowledge, trust, credibility and results in our interconnected world?

When your goals are big, uncertain & scary, leave the worry to one side & move one conversation at a time closer to success. #life

— Simon Terry (@simongterry) September 6, 2016

When we are starting something new, we put pressure on ourselves for that one big action that will make everything right.

“Don’t Just Talk. Do Something”

We look to leap directly to our goal. The current culture of entrepreneurship and business values action over talk.  We place greater pressure to do the right things to succeed. However great action is driven by great understanding. Understanding takes conversations and support.

Success is rarely direct. Success is best facilitated by many conversations with your network.

“But, I don’t like to network”

I hear this complaint all the time. The constant self-help refrain of the need for networking puts people off. They see networking as foot in the door introductions demanding assistance from strangers.

There is no doubt that approach can work for the charismatic and persuasive, but for most of us it is a low return strategy. You can hand out hundreds of business cards with a winning pitch but you won’t make as much progress as one deep conversation with a friend.

Don’t network. Converse. 

Start a conversation with someone you know well. Just one conversation today will help you move closer to your goal. Instead of ‘networking’ engage your existing networks through one conversation at a time.

Discuss their goals. Explore how you can help them. Don’t ask for help. Focus instead on how you can help. Steps towards your goal and further conversations will materialise as these conversations progress.

As these conversations progress, you will build your confidence to starting the same conversations with people further out in your networks.  Powered by understanding and the challenges of others, you will see new paths for conversation and action that are invisible today.

Yesterday’s post on the overwhelming nature of modern work pressures and the need to focus on the effectiveness of work has triggered a lot of discussion. It might be a signal of an issue. Here are some of the additional ideas to help make work more effective that have risen from that discussion.

Grounded

Abraham Lincoln was once asked how long a man’s legs should be. He replied “Long enough to reach the ground.”

Feeling overwhelmed is a loss of perspective. The best response is to ensure that you are well grounded in an understanding of your position. Too narrow a perspective can enlarge issues and problems. Trying to solve for too much can put success out of reach.

Focus on the now. Let go of the baggage of the past. Hold of the expectation of the future. Do now what you need to do now based on your real circumstances and the needs of this moment.

Symptoms and Systems Awareness

“The system is not broken. It is working perfectly as intended”

Are you sure the issues you are addressing in your work aren’t just symptoms of the way the system works? You can waste a lot of time working to put bandaids on symptoms when the root cause is the need for a larger change. Take the time to understand the how and why of the systems that surround your work. Perhaps there might be a different systemic change that can remove a whole category of work.

The Danger of Volatility

System performance is volatile. There are external and internal factors we can’t control. Laurie Hibbs reminded me yesterday that one of the factors driving the overwhelming feeling at work is when underperformance panics arise.  We ignore volatility that results in outperformance, but any failure to make target triggers a whole set of initiatives and actions to address the perceived crisis. A red performance metric sets off a five alarm fire response from management fire fighters. Some times we are just chasing the shadows of system volatility.

We also need to dig beneath averages. Many times the work we are set is to address and average problem. This average may reflect be no real situation. Addressing the average with work can create even bigger problems that need to be addressed.

80:20: Filter for Effectiveness

A simple example of the danger of averages is the Pareto Principle: 80% of an output in a system is derived from 20% of the input. When we are overwhelmed, we are often trying to deliver 120% of the inputs and we are deep into the territory of declining returns, if not counterproductive effort. Focusing first on the 20% that delivers an outsize return is a key filter for personal effectiveness of our work.

Your Personal Filters: Personal Knowledge Mastery

Jon Husband highlighted that Harold Jarche’s Personal Knowledge Mastery is a key set of practices to help individuals to better manage the flow of information across the networks. I have listed PKM as one of the four key future of work practices and I could not agree more. If you want to get specific on how to better respond to filter failure, you cannot go past Harold’s work.

Agile Backlogs

Kylie Long pointed out that the table story from the last post reflects an Agile product management backlog. That’s exactly right. Agile backlogs work because they leverage a Kanban model. We can only do so much at a time and we need the ability to adapt the plan to what is the best in the circumstances now. Put your to do list in a table or a tool like Trello and treat it like a backlog for the satisfaction of seeing the progress and the clarity of what you need to do today. Adapting the demands of work to the needs of the situation is far easier when you have the clarity of a backlog.

Reflection and discussion of better way of working is a key part of helping make your work more effective. A day’s worth of conversation and reflection has highlighted even more ways to help your work be more effective.  What would happen if you did that every day?

Every few days I have that sinking feeling of being overwhelmed. I realise that something somewhere has slipped through the cracks. Perhaps it is a message that I forgot to get back to promptly enough. Perhaps it is an offer of a meeting that has not yet been agreed. Perhaps it is an idea that I wanted to explore but I haven’t had the time to progress. Maybe it is that book that I was going to write. What is worrying is that I’m not even close to a full workload. I look around me and everyone seems in a similar situation.

There is a lot going on. If you don’t take care it is overwhelming. Our connected global world means we can see more and interact a lot more frequently. News stories, research, blogposts, new books, emails, messages, meeting requests, offers of work, collaboration opportunities, calls and more arrive in number each day.  Those stimuli need to be managed carefully or the volume will overwhelm. The commonest answer to “Have you seen this?” is usually no.

When you move beyond communication, we are truly overwhelmed. Organisations are doing more with less. The focus on efficiency means many organisations are missing effectiveness of processes or work. Cross-silo, outward facing or outsourced processes break with the strain but we expect work must still get done for customers. As fewer people do more to less outcomes, the daily pressures only mount. Organisations demand collaboration, engagement and customer focus as additional layers on top, rather than an inherent part of work. Then we overlay the need for transformational change and something needs to give.

Filter Failure

“It’s not information overload. It’s filter failure” – Clay Shirky

Stop blaming the external forces. Start to focus on your decision making. What filters do you have in place? A quick no saves an awful lot of work. Deferring work or conversations is better than scraping by and doing a bad job. Excluding distractions to focus on what matters most improves both sanity and effectiveness.

Filter out the ineffective forms of work and communication. That’s a key step to making work more effective.  Importantly, the first sign your filters are failing is a loss of time to reflect. Bake empty space into your day to allow the time to reflect on your effectiveness and how you can improve your work.

Important Over Urgent

“Anything less than a conscious commitment to the important is an unconscious commitment to the unimportant” – Stephen R. Covey, A. Roger Merrill & Rebecca R. Merrill

When you can’t do everything, stop trying. To focus on what is most effective, focus on purpose. Spend more time fulfilling your purpose and you will feel more satisfied.

The greatest distraction from purposeful work is the urgent interruption of the notification. “Urgent” is easy to write or say, but as we all know it is harder to reply and often not the most important work. Manage out the urgent but unimportant work and distractions.

Don’t Focus on Should

“We struggle with insecurity because we compare our behind-the-scenes with everyone else’s highlight reel.” – Steven Furtick

“Should” is always overwhelming. We look around us and see what our entire networks are doing today. We can easily confuse the highlights of the output of that entire network with what we need to achieve to keep up. We start adding items to the list of what we should do.

Other people succeed because they do what is most effective for them to do. That is not always what will make you effective. Organisations are particularly bad at this. They create strategies by copying others, adding more and more to do, not by choosing what they need do to fulfil their purpose.

We need to do the work that we need to do today. We can solve the problems of the entire world tomorrow. Add up all the listicles and helpful advice and you will have far too many things you should do today. Do what matters instead.

Don’t Do It Alone

“A problem shared is a problem halved” – Proverb

Carrying everything on our own narrow shoulders is overwhelming. We need to engage our networks to share the burden.

At one point in my career I was asked to manage three roles at the same time. The lack of opportunity to backfill missing people had created the problem.  Doing three jobs simultaneously was impossible. Faced with the challenge I created a table of all the responsibilities across the three roles. I allocated my time to each of the jobs. I ranked each of the columns by their importance and then I cut off each column at what I could achieve with the time available. Anything below that line either needed to be delegated to others or stopped. That was a filtering process. I filtered by effectiveness. I ignored what I should have done in each role and focused on what could be best done.

The power of that document was that I made it available to my teams and to all my stakeholders. People could see as I worked out loud on my priorities where their work sat and could estimate where their new request would fit. Transparency allowed my networks to become part of my filtering process. My teams stepped up and took items off the list. Stakeholders volunteered to change timelines given the issues or to deal directly with someone else.

Don’t make change, innovation, collaboration, engagement or customer focus, extra work. Build these activities into the work to reduce the effort. Ask others transparently to help you better manage your challenges. Use the tools available to leverage the inputs and assistance of others.

Work and life are overwhelming. That’s because you live in an age of a surfeit of opportunity and challenge. Focus on what you need to do to be more effective in your work and your life.

Update: Part 2 with more tips based on discussions inspired by this post.

Improving the effectiveness of work is the biggest strategic challenge leaders face in a rapidly changing competitive work environment

Cancel Ineffective Meetings

Meetings are the real productivity challenge in organisations. We have too many and we have the wrong kinds of meetings. Break the hour long paradigm. Focus on quick interactions and the value of each minute of meeting time.

Every hour not in a meeting is hours of preparation,  meeting and follow-up time that can be reused for actual work. Fewer meetings means fewer long powerpoint documents that need to be prepared, circulated by email and then filed away (nobody really reads all of them anyway).

Stop Collective Decision Making

If your organisational design is right, somebody is responsible for every decision being made. That doesn’t mean that they have to make it alone but they are responsible for the process reaching an outcome. Make sure that decisions are not constrained by group decision making processes and the ambiguity that they create. Whatever you do, do not try to make collective decisions by email.

Hold people to account to make decisions; to gather the facts through research and experimentation; and to have conducted the right level of engagement. Too much time is wasted when many decisions have to be made collectively. Consultation is advisable. Collective decision making is not. If a decision is truly hard, authorise someone to experiment instead. If you must, put time limits on decisions to ensure that they can’t be dragged out by the debate, vetos and other confusion of collective processes. If you can’t trust people to make decisions, then get better people or change your processes to eliminate the decisions entirely.

Pick up the phone

A quick phone call will always beat a message for time, urgency and clarity of communication. With all the voicemail, phone and videoconference options available, there is no excuse for not making a quick call and saving everyone the back and forth of emails or other messages. If you can’t think how you would say what you want to say in a phone call, then seriously question why you would say it in an email. The accountability of having the other person on the line cuts out a lot of the snarkiness and silly self-preservation that we see in an email. Nobody should ever be bcc’d on a phonecall.

Work Out Loud

Purposefully sharing work in progress helps drive collaboration in your organisation. Collaboration will dramatically improve the effectiveness of work. Transparency of the work underway will help identify duplication, eliminate waste, maximise reuse and foster learning. Drawing out expertise and surfacing feedback is one of the fastest ways to drive the effectiveness of your work. Working out loud helps surface the networks that are most effective to your work.  You may even discover more effective organisational designs and processes as you start to see the real work of the organisation be surfaced.

Experiment. Change. Learn.

Create a culture of continuous experimentation in better ways of working. Encourage people to challenge each other and traditions to find better ways. Coach and support people through their efforts to experiment, to change the culture of work and to learn the ever changing new approaches. Keep what works and stop doing what is ineffective.  Leaders who guide a process of change to long term value will ensure that your organisation is continuously improving and not just chasing the technology fads. An employee experience or workplace technologies team can provide important governance to this process of experimentation but they cannot replace the creative potential of your entire network of employees.

The challenge in life is to be the best YOU YOU can be. That’s something you should expound with ALLCAPS passion.

A trusted colleague used the phrase ‘the passionate ALLCAPS YOU’ in conversation yesterday. The moment I heard the phrase it resonated deeply with me.

We are rightly reluctant to use ALLCAPS. Our shouty outdoor voice is kept quiet to meet with social expectations of politeness and decorum. In most contexts, this makes a lot of sense. Read any political comments thread and you will realise why we prefer discussion to be conducted without ALLCAPS passion. Shouting at others is neither persuasive nor conducive to relationships.

However, external social pressures can have a terrible influence on YOU, your internal passions, purpose and identity. Lots of people from supportive bosses, to helpful peers, to well-meaning family and friends will tell YOU to tone YOU down. They prefer the quieter, safer, more socially acceptable version of YOU. This well-meaning advice can be a source of doubt, frustration and ultimately a discouragement to share your passion and your purpose in action.

If there is one part of your life where YOU are entitled to go CAPSLOCK, it is YOU. When YOU express yourself with this passion, the audience is not the world, it is a reminder to YOU to live up to your potential. The passionate ALLCAPS YOU is more persuasive, more engaging and more effective. It is the version of YOU that attracted the bosses, peers, family and friends in the first place. Passion and integrity are precious commodities in this world. Let out the loud and then chase it out into the world with passion.

YOU ARE CHANGING YOUR COMPANY & THE WORLD. There I said it aloud in a shouty voice for YOU. Maybe at this point nobody, not even YOU, realises this. However, YOU are doing what YOU do for a really good reason. YOU thought a lot about the choices you have made. Your everyday efforts to battle frustration, dullness and administrivia are signs YOU care.  YOU make a bigger impact are because it matters to YOU. YOU are in a unique position and you bring your capabilities, ideas and networks. YOU aren’t your work. YOU are your much bigger purpose and your extraordinary potential to learn, to grow and to make change. Your purpose is in the work. If YOU are not sure, go digging with passion and YOU will find it hidden there.

Maybe the rest of the world does not want it yet, but that doesn’t stop that passion being a fundamental part of the passionate ALLCAPS YOU. What the world wants really doesn’t matter when it’s WHO YOU ARE. The only way to express your purpose and potential is IN YOUR FACE ALOUD.

Be the passionate ALLCAPS YOU. It is ALL YOU CAN BE. YOU won’t be YOU otherwise