Author: simongterry

‘This Quotidian Act of Forgiveness’ Richard Roxburgh

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‘This quotidian act of forgiveness’ Richard Roxburgh referring to twilight in the Namibian Desert. 

Quotidian – adjective ordinary or everyday especially when mundane.

In any journey of change, the past is a problem and the future is bright. Today sits between those extremes. 

Today is just mundane. Today is the hack work, the obstacles and the effort. There’s little glory possible today. Today it can feel like we are not worthy of the future. 

No other day exists to make change. We can’t engage with the past or the future. We can only work through the mundane day at hand, Today. Nobody else will do our work for us. Worthy or not, we have work to do today. 

Forgive the day for its lack of immediate reward. Dive into the work. Stack the the small achievements of each forgiven day upon another. Forgive yourself too and celebrate your achievement each day when done. 

We need daily forgiveness to stay sane as we quest for change. Remember the glorious future will feel as mundane as today because we will be on route somewhere better. 

Adaptation over Precision.

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One of the consequences of scientific management is the view that if we could just specify everything exactly then we can achieve better and more efficient outcomes. We have seen this mindset play out in reengineering, continuous improvement, big data & now blockchain. The complexity of a globally connected world means that precision is not always the only answer. There is also a corollary of precision which is that it enables financial speculation. When precision leads to financial speculation as the cure all, it may be precisely the wrong answer.

Smart Contracts

As a former lawyer, I have been following the discussion of blockchain’s potential to deliver smart contracts with interest. There are plenty of opportunities to disrupt the practice of law and improve its efficiency.

However smart contracts are an engineering solution to the problems of legal agreement. Attributing inefficiency to uncertainty, blockchain smart contracts are specific lists of steps with self-executing value. Financial transactions are an example of where the basis of value exchange can usually be specifically identified and self-executing contracts may well replace the many standard agreements that underpin financial market transactions like ISDAs.

Not all agreements are better when the steps are precisely specified. Most legal agreements aren’t a value exchange. They are a risk exchange. One party specifies a desired outcome and the value attached and leaves the method of achieving that outcome mostly open. The purchaser allocates the risk of delivery for a fixed cost to the person who wants that risk and is usually better placed to manage changing circumstances. More specification usually gets in the way of efficient delivery because it prevents adaptation and the ability to leverage new information. Most legal disputes occur when the parties specified the wrong future scenarios or they began from diverging understandings of the outcomes.

Distributed Autonomous Organisations.

Currently there is a buzz about the idea of using blockchain to form and manage a Distributed Autonomous Organisation. Essentially people trade claims on the blockchain for units in the DAO. Those units come with voting rights and a share of the outcomes of the DAO. Examples so far look like cooperative investment funds not unlike historical mutuals.

The challenge ahead for DAOs is to step beyond the precision of financial transactions. Corporations manage uncertainty through agency. Self-executing value tied to precise actions needs an ability to be precise. How will DAOs adapt to changing circumstances and methods of execution? Intriguingly some of the non-financial discussions of DAOs are drawn back to financial speculation given the strength of our precision mindset and the financial speculation opportunities it presents.

Complexity not Precision.

The challenge for the future of work is to better manage complexity not deliver greater precision. We are in the early days of the blockchain revolution and more innovations will come. We need those innovations to move beyond precision and financial transactions to more complex domains of uncertainty, learning and risk allocation.

Consideration

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Human behaviour at scale can be daunting. Drive in any traffic and you will see people trying dangerously to get a personal advantage at the expense of others. Spend time in a crowded place and you will be pushed, passed and jostled as others seek to achieve their own goals at your expense. Crowds driven by transactional self-interest can be unruly and dangerous. Some organisations forget this as they seek to leverage self-interest for higher performance.

Surprisingly these moments are rarities in much of our life. These moments depend on anonymity and lack of community for self-interest to overcome the common consideration that underpins society. Only when community breaks down such as in failed states, war zones or pure market transactions, does this become the norm. Even in the worst of these crowds you will still see people letting others past, helping others and standing up for the rules of common decency. Anonymous transactional self-interest bends to consideration of human relationships.

I was reminded by Henry Mintzberg’s post on community & commons that our relationships are part of the shared commons of a community. Trust, consideration and thoughtfulness are all shared in community and used daily in our work and our relationships. Like any commons over-exploitation leads to depletion. To preserve the difference between anonymous transactions and relationships, we need the continued contributions of the considerate to restore the commons and show us the way.

Thank God It’s Friday

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We can go into the weekend fulfilled.

We look back on a week that is a celebration of purpose and meaningful achievement to benefit others.

We know we cannot have done better this week and that our efforts were well directed to effectiveness.

We have enjoyed a week of the freedom to do the best work we can supported by our peers.

We can rest tonight comforted by the fact that all our work is up to date and the open issues are next week’s work.

We aren’t waiting for decisions and we have made all the decisions that we needed to resolve this week. 

We are excited about the opportunities to learn, to experiment, to create and grow next week.

We have the transparency of our performance, our peers’ performance and our organisation’s outcomes to be confident on what is ahead and ready for the new challenges that the next week will bring.

We know that our accountabilities are clear and that the culture of accountability means colleagues won’t send a flurry of last minute emails dumping problems on others.

Our week will finish with the thanks and congratulations of a team and an organisation that understands, respects and values our commitment and efforts.

We know this is not a dream. We know this is possible. We will make it happen. Thank God it is Friday.

Relationship Sabotage

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Trust is a reciprocal commodity in the future of work. Trust powers collaboration and facilitates exchange in networks. Trust is also reciprocal. Make sure your levels of trust of others are not sabotaging your relationships.

Part of any decision to trust another is an assessment of how they treat us. Trust is reciprocal. We can make finely tuned assessments on how much trust others put in us by simply examining how we interact, how well their goals are aligned to ours and how much reciprocity of trust we experience.

If you start from the assumption that your employees and customers are incipient criminals, it will show itself in your policies and processes. The levels of security and inconvenience that result will be a constant reminder to customers and employees that you don’t trust them.  Even if your levels of protection are in line with your industry peers, you will still bear the consequences of that action in the way your customers and your employees interact with you. Transactions will be more costly, loyalty will be lower and complaints & errors will be harder to resolve because you won’t have the benefit of trust to fall back on.

Are your levels of trust set for the real risks and opportunities in your relationships? Make sure you are not penalising everyone for one individual’s error. Remember if you distrust employees that will flow on to customers and if you distrust customers you employees will experience the consequences. Your customer and employee experience are one experience.

Too many organisations with persistent challenges in lifting engagement or customer advocacy continue to sabotage their key relationship. Make sure you are different. Trust a little more.

The Vast Abundance of Space

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Yesterday I had a three hour gap between my two meetings in the city. For once, I had resisted the temptation to fill that space with a third meeting. Given a little time to stop and reflect, I discovered again things that I had forgotten in my blur of commitments:

  • projects I had conceived but never started
  • conversations I had started but never finished
  • opportunities that I had not given time
  • creative endeavours that needed room for reflection and practice
  • lessons of the last few months work

Productivity is not an outcome of the use of every moment of time. Productivity is an outcome of using time in the most effective ways possible. Using time to advantage means making choices and working on the most valuable tasks. You cannot use time to advantage if you do not have the space to reflect, to create and to learn.

Rethinking work is part of the vast abundance of opportunity in space.  Give yourself a little more.

Command and Control Won’t Cut It #futureofwork #leadership

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As your organisation adapts to the future of work, your models of leadership need to change. Leadership needs to be as adaptive as the the organisation you are seeking to create. Otherwise the potential of your people and the business will be lost.

You can’t command experiments. You can’t control networks. You can’t command customer collaborations. You can’t command engagement or purpose. You can’t control transparency. You can’t command autonomy.

Organisations that implement new agile ways of working need new leadership models. Activity based working, digital workplace tools, collaboration solutions, innovation hubs, agile projects and product management and lean continuous improvement all require leaders to work in ways that build the capability of people, manage the whole system and value the contributions of others over a leader’s rank and expertise.

As you change to the future of work, change what leadership means in your organisation. Build the leadership capabilities in leaders and the whole team to prosper in new ways of working. Make your leadership as adaptive as your organisation.

The Privilege of Working Out Loud

Posted on by simongterry in Working out loud
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Not everyone is allowed to work out loud. Those who can must value their opportunities and seek to help others to share.

I was reading an article in the newspaper on the weekend about a new book by Tara Moss on “Speaking Out: A 21st Century Handbook for Women and Girls”. The discussion in the book of barriers to women speaking up and the techniques that can assist caused me to reflect on the barriers many people face in sharing their work out loud.

Not everyone can work out loud. The real pressures that hold people back can be social, gender, hierarchy or the culture of their organisation. For many people, the expectation in their organisation is that someone with their position, role or work will keep silent, do what they are told and just deliver. Something as simple as talking out loud about your work with others is a privilege.

As a privilege, working out loud is something that needs to be used with respect. I have always stressed that working out loud is a choice. We cannot mandate it, because that choice will not suit many and may not be available to all.

As a privilege, working out loud should be used to benefit others. If you can work out loud, you have a contribution to make. Those who can speak out have an opportunity to help others to be heard. Those who can speak out can support others who may face barriers or abuse. Those who can speak out have an opportunity to role model better ways and to fight for changes that give voices to others in their organisation and their society.

If you can work out loud, use that privilege to help others.

Build Real Relationships

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I received an email today from the CEO of a large networking organisation. The well crafted message pointed out he had noticed that I hadn’t registered for their latest event and offered me a discount. At the end of the email he politely invited me to connect on LinkedIn.

One small flaw in this carefully crafted piece of relationship marketing. The event is in Chicago. I live in Melbourne, Australia. I have never heard of the CEO, his organisation and I’ve never given them my email.

A piece of lovely copywriting goes to waste because its premise defeats it. The CEO wanted to convey he had considered me specifically. He wanted to build a relationship so that he can sell me services and events. However, because they bought a dodgy email list and didn’t do any research into the list all that work is an evident waste.

You can’t fake a relationship. You can’t turn a transaction into a relationship by declaring it one or by good intentions. Relationships take work. A relationship is not about what you want. Copywriting won’t save you from your lack of interest in your customers & prospects. The transparency of the global economy makes old marketing methods more dangerous than ever.

If you want a relationship, build one for both parties. If you run a networking organisation, start with relationships, not unsubscribe marketing.

Whatever you do, if you don’t want to put in the effort in a relationship, don’t pretend.