Chair and Non-Executive Director, Advisor, and CEO helping healthcare, finance, and educational organisations drive growth, leverage technology innovation, and realise the strategic value of transformation
Meetings are rarely ever doing. Constraining the daily meetings forces choice and improves effectiveness.
When I started as a consultant I carried over practices from corporate life. I wanted to fill my days with meetings. I had a need to network and to build my business. I needed to tell my story and win work. I took a lot of meetings and spent days running around town.
I was soon reminded how unproductive the meeting circuit was. Taking every meeting chewed up lots of time, created lots of activity and spent energy. The commutes between meetings alone took hours. However it delivered few results.
Reflecting on my lack of productivity I implemented a daily rule of no more than 3 meetings. Limiting meetings had an immediate benefit in creating time to think, to do work and to make choices. A limit also made me much more focused on which meetings to take. I also found that many other meetings could be swapped for a quick phone call, a video chat or an exchange of information.
Any arbitrary rule should always be honoured in the breach. I occasionally take another meeting but now I do so reflecting on the value of that meeting and its cost in my time. Overall my productivity has risen as I look for other ways to get work done.
I was turning left in my car on a rainy night in the centre of Melbourne waiting for a pedestrian. An oncoming car was turning right towards me except they seemed to be coming too fast and dangerously close. It was disconcerting to look across and see the driver turning right and looking down his face lit by the phone in his lap. We avoided a collision but I had to wonder what message could be so important it needs to be read in the middle of a right hand turn.
I once worked in an organisation with a zero inbox culture. Emails pinged around at rapid speed. Every idea was on the move somewhere else. Every email was less than three lines. Velocity mattered more than value. Everyone was overwhelmed by the flood of messages and few emails created the actions they intended as they were either in transit elsewhere or lacked the information required to move forward.
I watch the politician on the television say the same vaguely reassuring phrases over and again. With masterful skill they pivot each question back to their set phrases. Challenges and doubts are dismissed or simply ignored. Short of time and well aware that the answers form a pattern the interviewer surrenders and moves on.
The legal documents were long and fell with a heavy thud on the table. The goal of the reams of paper was to cover every eventuality in a complex transaction. There were dozens of lawyers in the room and they had been negotiating for days already. Discussion fell into a quick routine as points were hammered out. I looked at the document waiting for someone to point out the small error that reversed the impact of a clause to nobody’s benefit. The conversation was moving on. Rather than paying attention everyone was relying on the amount of discussion to have caught the issues.
‘But how can our employees not know, the policy is quite clearly explained on our intranet’
‘I’m calling to follow up the text about the email on the link in the post’
As he pushed submit on his blogpost he wondered ‘Am I just adding to the excess?’
Design your organisation for the potential of its people and their capabilities, not the limits of an expertise.
I recently noticed that Capability or Competency? Mindsets matter was the second most read post on this blog. Part of the appeal of that post is that it addresses a critical shift in mindset for those grappling with the new dynamics of the future of work. We stand facing an organisational version of the personal insight Marshall Goldsmith described succinctly as “What Got Me Here Won’t Get Me There”
Competency-led Organisations
The Core Competency concept introduced by Prahalad and Hamel refined a concept that had been strong in management for decades. It is undoubtedly true that organisations compete by being better, more competent, at something than their competitors. However the mindset of being more competent differs from a competency. This subtlety was often lost as core competency flowed into the mainstream of management thinking.
The focus on core competencies created a mindset that organisation gets to choose its competencies as part of a strategic planning process and should set targets for competencies to fulfil its strategy. While Prahalad and Hamel spoke of the need for organisations to look forward to assess and build their competencies, much of the focus in organisations has been historical. The biggest outcome of the discussion of core competency has been a narrowing of organisational ambition and a focusing of activity on historical strengths. “That’s not our core competency” is more common than “We can leverage core competencies”.
Influenced by themes that go back to the beginning of scientific management, we have turned core competencies into rigid processes, standards and policies. We have judged these competencies by what sustained competitive advantage in past markets. We have spent less time on the changing customer perceptions of value and the ongoing dynamics of the future marketplace driven by new competitors. The list is long of disrupted organisations who felt safe because a new entrant lacked their core competencies. In many cases the infrastructure to reinforce and sustain these core competencies became a burden in their ability to adapt and survive.
Capability-led Organisations
The Big Learning mindset that pervades the future of work highlights that competitive advantage in the next century is based on the ability to build the capabilities required to compete in an environment of uncertainty. Rather than specifying a fixed goal of competency, we seek to build an open capability to fulfil our strategic intent and our customers’ needs as they arise.
Adapting organisations to foster autonomy, learning and change is what enables people to build the practical capabilities necessary to learn, grow and execute. The process you inherit is less important than the customer insight you gain in working to meet your customer needs. Prahalad and Hamel reinforced that in Competing for the Future their update of the core competencies discussion. The discussion on the need for organisations to build open capabilities that can help manage and drive adaptation. These capabilities include openness to their networks and environment, collaboration, ability to learn, share and drive change. Critical too is the development of purpose as the new focus for organisational activity and the inherent rationale for groups of people to come together in work to benefit others.
Design for Capabilities
Responsive Organisations need to design for a capability-led response to a uncertain future. They need to develop core Big Learning practices like working out loud, personal knowledge management, adaptive leadership and experimentation. They need to design their organisations to allow individuals and the collective to focus on the realisation of purpose.
This organisational design will leverage networks, transparency, autonomy, experimentation and the inherent motivation of employees in ways that we have not yet seen. Developing a new competency in holocracy, agile, lean product development, design thinking, big data or any other single practice is not enough. An organisation must build the capability to continuously adapt to customer needs in a changing market.
Ultimately, it will also focus organisations more strongly on realising the potential of people, customers and other stakeholders. We need to design our organisations to build the capabilities that realise human potential. That can only help make work more human.
Elite sporting teams build a development culture because they know their performance can be dramatically influenced by the bottom third of players.
Discussing the many upsets and surprises in the 2016 AFL season with friends I was reminded that the performance of an elite team can be heavily influenced by the bottom third of its players. A champion forward is of little value if the ball never gets there due to errors on the way. A champion midfielder loses value when their disposals are wasted. Even the best backs in the world can’t stop a consistent flood of attack due to the weakness of their peers.
Teams over Stars
Everyone has stars. Great stars will take you a long way. However exceptional talent is hard to come by and harder to retain. When it comes to the games that matter, great talents are also likely to be matched by great talent in the opposing teams. Everyone focuses on recruiting, rewarding and developing their stars.
When you get to the games that matter, team performance will win you the game. Team performance is about collaboration, people playing their role and outperforming the entire other team, not one or two individuals. In that scenario, where star power is usually closely matched, consistently high performance is about the performance of all players. The game can be shaped by the relative performance of the two bottom thirds in how well they execute, learn and collaborate.
Now many use this rationale to adopt ruthlessness to drive performance edge, cut poor performers and replace them with new talent. At GE, Jack Welch was famous for recommending the bottom 10% of performers be cut, a practice that is widely copied. Accountability through choice of who is on the team is required in any high performance environment.
Develop the Team
However, teams come together from groups of individuals working in concert. The stars need to work alongside everyone else. Stars need support. More importantly, better performances come when everyone lifts their performance together. The collective effort determines the outcome.
There is not always enough top talent available. The attraction of your organisation to top talent often depends on the team culture and particularly how you invest to develop everyone. Even Jack Welch and the successful GE organisation he led recognised that a development culture was important. Lifting the middle and bottom third through work on the development of people’s capabilities and by creating a great team culture is critical to sustained high performance.
Your Bottom Third
At an individual level, elite athletes recognise that there are good days and bad days of performance. Making sure that the bottom third of performance is better through mastery, practice and experience is critical to their ongoing careers. The bad moments are those where you fall back on elite disciplines and experience to see you through.
When you are good, you are good. How good are you when you are awful? How you use the least effective third of your time plays a key role in ongoing performance.
Talent matters. Investing in a team culture and the development of all individuals including the bottom third will matter to sustained performance.
Value in collaboration is created by individual actions.
In building value for organisations through social collaboration we often resort to discussing the group, the team, the community and the network. There is lots of literature that references these terms and makes recommendations at these levels. Applying traditional business thinking we can lose sight of the individual and focus only on aggregates.
Networks don’t connect. Individuals take advantage of a network to connect with other individuals. Networks don’t share. Individuals share information in networks. The further we move into working, solving and innovating in networks the clearer it is that the value is created by individual actions multiplied by the power of a network.
Focusing on these individual actions is important because it reminds us to study individual motivations, mindsets and behaviours in the creation of effective collaboration. A culture of collaboration exists only in the expectations and behaviours of individuals. More importantly it enables us to talk to individuals about the value & practices of collaboration in language they understand. Nobody says to themselves ‘I need to engage transparently and collaboratively with an enterprise community’. People are looking to advance their work and their personal goals in tangible ways. People articulate often abstract concepts like generosity, authority, reciprocity, enagagement and trust in terms of very tangible actions in everyday work.
Aggregates give us opportunities to talk in lofty terms. Abstract capitalised bound abound. Many of these nouns seduce us with appeals to ideals not everyday actions. Real value is created with change driven using the language of individual users. If you value the individual, they will return the favour.
Organisations tie themselves in knots about whether a focus on innovation will distract from execution. Innovation is the execution challenge for all organisations. The same is no longer good enough. Better takes innovation.
Innovation is not a distraction
Innovation comes in many forms in the modern organisation. Not all innovation is the hard and often uncertain work of taking novel technology and applying it in the organisation.
Innovation can and should include continuous improvements in service delivery, service redesign, new product development, expansion to adjacent markets, changing management approaches, redesign of infrastructure, support and other processes. Led by customer insight and delivering clear strategic value, this innovation is at the heart of the execution of any strategic plan. Every strategy calls for the work to improve and it will take innovations to make that happen.
Organisations need to master the execution of these forms of innovation to build the capabilities to tackle larger challenges like technology or business model innovation. The skills learned executing continuously on small daily challenges build the organisational capability for larger change.
Innovation is the challenge
We operate in an environment where your competitors are looking to be more agile, more responsive to customer need and more effective. Like it or not, their execution focus is building foundational skills for innovation. On top new competitors are eyeing your business with entirely new mindsets & capabilities.
With this competitive environment it is harder to outperform with just a few percentage points of growth and a few percentage points of cost cutting in an otherwise stable business. Organisations need to be responsive and enable all their employees to create customer led change to drive strategic value. Innovation is not an execution challenge off to the side. Innovation is the lifeblood of competitive advantage.
Innovation drives effectiveness. That makes innovation the execution challenge.
Avoid work substitutes and improve your personal productivity.
Working for yourself you soon discover a change in your work practices. You become acutely aware of what is work, when time is your income and personal productivity your only mode of delivery. In our busy work lives, it is too easy to be fooled by things that feel like work.
Travel: Today is a travel day for me with transit to the airport, checkin, waiting and flights to another city. All big grown up activities but none of it actual work. The only work in this time is this blogpost written from my seat. The daily commute can also feel like work but it rarely adds any value.
Meetings: meetings are the commonest work substitute. Discuss status. Make personal connections. Drink coffee. Push ideas round in circles. Mute the call. Decide others need to do something. Play a little politics. All these activities are great work substitutes.
Research: whenever I am particularly anxious about work, I feel the need to research. It is a great form of work avoidance. Rather than tackling the actual topic, you accumulate useless information, muddy the waters and waste time on distractions. Research gives the illusion of progress without requiring output.
PowerPoint: What other application offers every business person the opportunity to fiddle with a message, bury it in distracting graphics and tweaks pages of bullet points and data tables. PowerPoint provides useless work for the recipients who must sort through the pages, print the deck and carry it to the meeting where they will be handed another carefully collated copy. Then they sit and listen to someone read the slides to them.
Conferences, offsites and training: done well these events create connections, foster learning and coalesce actions for individuals and teams. Done badly they are work substitutes of the highest order. Distracting PowerPoint fests with no consequence far from the pressures of work. Worse still, like travel, this is a highly expensive work substitute.
Email: every down moment we check if another message has arrived and furiously respond. Surely that’s progress? All that email creates less value than an open share of the same information or a quick phone call. Email has the illusion of work because it is a digital production line for memos. However what we gained in speed and response has caused a loss in thought and value.
Self-assessment: we spend a lot of time judging our own performance. Self-awareness has value. However too much of the self-assessment we do is not work. Either we assess ourselves against our intentions, not performance or we assess ourselves without action. The best assessment is in work and leads to new actions. All the rest is just an elaborate form of self-doubt or egotism.
Work is hard. Adding things that feel like work to the calendar make it only more difficult.
“We struggle with insecurity because we compare our behind-the-scenes with everyone else’s highlight reel.” – Steven Furtick
We see only outcomes. Worse still, we see mostly successful outcomes because the other outcomes are hidden from view or disappear quickly. No matter what we tell ourselves, it can be hard not to take the highlights reels around us as a measure of our own shortcomings.
We don’t see the hours of craft. For every magical moment there are hours of creation, rehearsal, tweaking and learning again. Every overnight success is a long time coming. There are hours and hours of outright failure. Great craft comes from great practice. As we struggle in our practice, we compare ourselves to the great and we wonder if the gap will ever close.
Forget the comparisons. Devote yourself to your craft. Put in the time and the effort. Share your craft openly, connect with others working the craft and learn from their efforts too. Focus on the 99% of perspiration and the rest will follow.
“Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working” Picasso
‘Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.’ Attributed to Daniel Patrick Moynihan
Once debate was a contest of opinions. There may have been disputes around the edges about the facts but the common ground was clearly agreed.
Increasingly we see the facts themselves as the subject of a debate. Each side girds itself with its own view of the world and the facts. Read the paper, listen to the radio, watch the television or study social media and you will see people put forward the facts that justify their position and deny all others. Without common context, any hope of agreement or resolution is slim.
The growing availability of data in our world and the increasing ability to connect a niche audience for your data is only likely to make this an increasing challenge. Even if we put aside the patently false, selective use of data can tell almost any story. Fact checking can only go so far before it meets differing references periods, unclear definitions, crossed purposes and misinterpretation.
Our focus on science, political science, economics and scientific management has been part of creating an intense focus on the idea that the answer is in the data. However, data confirms hypotheses and arguments. We cling to data as the trump card in debate. A wide choice of data enables many competing approaches to be confirmed. As we deal with ever more complex and more global systems, we are reaching a point where a single data story can no longer be the simple answer.
“I would not give a fig for the simplicity this side of complexity, But I would give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity.” Attributed to Oliver Wendell Holmes Snr
We need to accept that no argument will be won with a data point or a trend, however appealing that simple approach may be. As reassuring as they are our own facts are useless in society. Allowing ourselves to be divided into tribes with their own facts is far too unproductive and dangerous to our future. Civil debate begins by finding the common ground and creating a growing shared context. That takes leaders who can explore what is shared rather than focus on differences of facts.
We also need to embrace a greater share of the complexity of life in our global interconnected world. We can no longer rely on the simple answers. That trend may lead only to a local maximum or miss some wider ramifications of the decision. We need to go hunting together in the complexity, experimenting and genuinely debating the paths forward together. Continuing open dialogue that builds a shared common ground is the path to a new contest of ideas on the other side of complexity.
Intranet projects are still popular these days. There is great new technology platforms & many new features available. Internet designs have moved on a lot so your old intranet is starting to look a little tired. Now your employees have new devices so your intranet needs to be mobile first and responsive. Think of the opportunities for new branding, a new name, better search and a refresh of all the content. Finally the intranet could be at the heart of the knowledge management and collaboration in the organisation. Delivering a new intranet is a signature career achievement.
Stop. Are you sure you need that new intranet?
New intranets don’t come cheap. Even after the technology solutions is acquired, the expenditure has only just begun. All that wonderful new design is going to cost money. You will need personas, card sorts and then branding advice. Getting the information architecture right can make all the difference so you will need a lot of time spent on the taxonomy of content, hierarchies of information, businesses and users. Glossaries and other reference materials will need to be reviewed and updated. Search will need to be tuned to make sure that it delivers the right options. All your existing content will need to be reviewed to fit into the new design. Throw in a policy and product information refresh and the costs and time skyrocket. Then there is the maintenance costs of all that content. Add in personalisation, collaboration and social features and the work never ends.
What is the Intranet really for?
To senior managers, an employee communications or HR team, an intranet is a showcase of the organisation, its business strategy and its knowledge. It is the one source of truth. It is the hub of collaboration and a critical place to share messages with all employees. This perception can create a whole lot of politics that disrupts the effectiveness of your new intranet. People become focused about the need to control the design and the content. User focus is swapped for the desire to meet the needs of the hierarchy. That control has real consequences when it disengages users. Worse still it can force one template on everyone and make everyone into ‘content providers’. The costs of this control are in content that gets out of date and grey market sites that spring up to break the shackles. Soon the efforts to get around the intranet are drawing investment, effort and attention away from the platform. Confusion escalates and the intranet site is on its way back to being a stale reservoir of knowledge.
To an employee an intranet is where all the links in corporate distribution emails go. Usually the intranet is the last place they go to look when they and their colleagues don’t have the answer to hand and local searches have turned up no relevant ideas. Often the intranet is the place where knowledge is tied up in clunky processes & policy that don’t reflect their day job. Everything is anonymous. The context and authority that comes from human connection is lost. An employee does not care about single sources of truth or showcases of corporate messages. They care about findability and usefulness. Nobody browses an intranet willingly.
I know many organisations who have built elegant product sites on their intranet to explain all the features, process and policy relating to their products. Too often they discover that their teams use the customer facing website for product information. The structure of customer facing product information is usually better suited to employee’s roles in explaining that information to customers. It is indexed for Google search. Legal requirements ensure that product teams keep the external information that matters up to date. Also the employee can send the customer a link if they need to explain lots of detail. The pretty intranet is a showcase but the internet is the workhorse. How much of your intranet site could you do away with by directing employees to external sites?
Are the behaviours going to change?
In our work, we create value through our actions. If the behaviours aren’t going to change, then don’t change the intranet. Changing only the technology alone, will foster only cost and confusion.
If you do want to get better at collaboration, communication and knowledge management, start with a clear understanding of the value to the organisation and the value to the user. Look for ways to achieve your goals that involved changed behaviours and community, not technology. When you are clear on the value of changed behaviours, you will be clearer on what your technology needs to look like to support that work. Now you won’t be forcing an intranet as a solution and you will be able to look at the breadth of options from social collaboration, to working out loud more, to using external internet sites and other tools of helping employees to find what matters most to help them do their job.
You will also have built a case for the whole organisation to align to working in new and better ways.
