Author: simongterry
Algorithms Work Out Loud
Whether we like it or not, working out loud is coming as a work trend. The benefits for productivity, learning and effectiveness from working out loud make greater transparency and connection in our work inevitable. If we do not work out loud, it will be our tools that work out loud for us.
Algorithms Ascendant
If you have any interest in digital trends you will have noted the news that software beat the world’s best Go player 4-1. I’ve played a little Go and even at a much smaller scale than a competition board it is a mind-bendingly tricky game that relies on intuition as well as logic. Software being able to beat a Go master so comprehensively is a significant development because analysts had forecast it could be up to a decade before Go fell. Go is too complex for a simple brute force strategy of computation of possible paths.
The breakthrough occurred because the Google team developing AlphaGo didn’t just rely on one source of technical expertise or one strategy to beat a Go Master. AlphaGo improved itself by testing multiple strategies in machine learning, specifically learning better models of play each time it watched or played a game of Go. AlphaGo’s success reflected a key benefit of working out loud – learning through observation and experience of not just one’s own practice but also the practice of other Go algorithms and Go masters.
Algorithmic Insight
Whether we practice working out loud or not, the software around us is already beginning to leverage our work to learn and enhance its effectiveness. Social media sites are all moving to algorithmic display because they can leverage our behaviour and relationships to better meet our needs (& their own business models). I remember my resistance when Yammer first implemented an algorithmic feed and moved away from following. I thought there was no way that I would value the algorithms choice of messages over my own curation of content through following strategies. These concerns passed quickly in use and it has been a long time since I reflected on the need for a better following model. Incidentally, Yammer moved to this change as a result of analytics and A/B testing, leveraging the work of thousands of customers to find better ways to build its product.
These algorithms are coming deeper into our work. I recently had a demonstration of Microsoft Office’s Delve and Delve Analytics. My takeaway was here was that I was looking at the potential for algorithms and analytics to turbocharge the value by leveraging a form of passive automation of working out loud. Clearly tools like Delve can help by reducing search, however they can also deliver further benefits for learning, collaboration and business value by helping make working out loud a default practice in the future of work.
Delve offers a key way to address the concerns many critics of working out loud raise. Today working out loud requires an individual to push their work out visibly so that others can pull the work for the purpose of learning or collaboration. That first push upsets some critics as it is seen as contributing to noise, raising the possibility of unconstructive distraction or requiring incremental effort from the worker. My experience is that the benefits far outweigh this minor inconvenience. However, algorithms and analytics like Delve, change this game by leveraging our working behaviours to pull information and insights from the work of others and make them available to enable us to better learn or to find better practice.
Solutions like Delve enable all of our working out loud practice to rest on a pull model. If Delve can surface a document that I need to see or I can use from the work of my peers then it doesn’t rely on any more effort from my peer that to enable this sharing and configure privacy and security settings. If Delve Analytics can help me to learn how better to use Microsoft’s productivity tools by supplying insights on my use and that of my peers, then again it does not require my colleagues to measure, document and share their approaches. A similar example is that Swoop Analytics have now released Swoop personas to enable each user of an enterprise social network like Yammer to understand their personal style and effectiveness in the use of the platform.
The trajectory of innovation is that these algorithms will be increasingly effective and increasingly deeply integrated into our products.
Is that it?
If algorithms are the answer, it that it? Do we no longer need the human practice of working out loud? Why don’t we just wait?
There is an adoption challenge of sorts with the coming algorithms. Algorithms can help with insight, but they cannot address the human side of openness to learn, willingness to experiment and ability to handle the social elements of working out loud. We all need to learn to be able to manage new practices and to have mindsets to be able to benefit from the change. These mindsets stretch from an attitude of generosity, desire for connection, a move from reliance on personal expertise and through to the ability to handle odd moment of embarrassment. If we do not get the mindsets right, then we will miss the benefits of new ways of working.
The value of the practice of working out loud now is that it enables each of us to learn important social skills in the network era: building connections, reciprocity, generosity and how to create and sustain the creation of value in networks. The networks and the algorithms are not going away. The challenge for all those seeking to be ready for the future of work is to learn how best to leverage these new models.
Just like AlphaGo, those who are already working out loud are discovering new practices and approaches to work through their own work and through watching the practices of others. You can wait for an algorithm to arrive to make the change for you or you can get ahead of the curve and enhance your practice of working out loud.
Factlets
Factlets aren’t facts. Factlets are far more useful. Factlets are the fragments we keep to reassure ourselves we are right. They are the parts of facts that suit your argument.
Truth is irrelevant to a Factlets. All that matters is your argument.
Factlets are quotes from sources we have never checked. Factlets are theories we picked up in conversation. Factlets are opinions that ‘sound right.’ Factlets are that phrase everyone thinks they know without reading the book. Factlets are reassuring statistics devoid of source, method or context. Factlets are history that now has new meaning because new stories suit us better. Factlets are trends from a single data point. Factlets are the simple answer in a complex world. Factlets are easy, comfortable and quick.
Reality is hard, uncomfortable and slow.
Every time you see an argument that depends on one piece of information you will find a factlet. Factlets are bias, distortion and deceit. They dominate our thinking but thrive on a lack of attention. Factlets avoid the effort and inconvenience of real facts and actual knowledge.
Factlets couldn’t be more dangerous to our health, wealth and wellbeing.
Small Changes Accumulate
1 – Make a small change today.
2 – Do it again tomorrow. You have doubled your influence.
4 (2 to the power 2)- The next day invite 3 people to join with you in the next change. You have doubled your influence again.
8 (2 to the power of 3)- The following day ask everyone to bring 1 people to make the next day’s change.
16 (to the power of 4) – From day five ask everyone to keep adding one person each time you make a change. Spread the message far and wide in your network.
…
1,073, 741, 824 (2 to the power of 30) – If you can double your influence for 31 days, only one month, you will have over a billion people carrying out that change.
Most changes you want to make don’t need that many people or that cumulative power for change. You might not get to double every day for a month, but the further you get down the path of small changes powered by a network, the greater your influence.
Of course, you have no influence until you start making change. Today.
Obstacles are the Work
Obstacles are not constraints. Obstacles are not limits to possibility. Obstacles aren’t disappointments.
Obstacles are the work.
Obstacles are a creative challenge. Obstacles are an opportunity to learn. Obstacles are a reminder to improve.
Obstacles are the work.
Obstacles are the reason they need you. Obstacles are the best test of your potential. Obstacles are the challenge.
Obstacles are the work.
Obstacles are why you need others. Obstacles are where process breaks down. Obstacles demand purposeful change.
Obstacles are the work.
Ranting doesn’t remove obstacles. Hope doesn’t remove obstacles. Work removes obstacles.
Obstacles are the work.
The Leverage of the Change Agent
Give me a lever and a place to stand and I shall move the earth – Archimedes
There’s a tiny thing on the edge of a rudder called a trim tab. Just moving that little trim tab creates a low pressure that pulls the rudder around. It takes almost no effort at all – Buckminster Fuller
Change Agents move the world to change because they understand the importance of leverage. Small actions can be leveraged into larger outcomes through their work.
The Leverage of Purpose
Change agents take grievances, disappointments and frustrations and turn them into purposeful action. Crowds can easily share a grievance. However someone needs to help the group to turn abstract frustration into a shared purpose. Discovering that shared purpose in a group is a lever of influence and motivation that scales rapidly.
The Leverage of Networks
Change agents understand that networks are extraordinary ways to scale their influence. They can connect with likeminded individuals, share information, solve challenges and develop new ways of working. The network expands the influence of the change agent across their organisation and across the world.
The Leverage of Role Modelling
Change agents do. Change agents understand that the most effective way to lead change is to show others change is possible through action. For every role model there are thousands of eyes in networks who can be influenced to magnify the scale of the change.
The Leverage of Experimentation
Change agents take advantage of the leverage that comes with experimentation. If you do more often, you have had a greater impact. Rather than wait for the perfect information, change agents experiment to learn and create an example for others. Experimentation enables networks to scale beyond individual expertise and accelerate learning and change.
The Leverage of Tension
Change agents create tension. For many organisations, the existence of people pushing for change creates tension that focuses new attention on the need to change. Creating and shaping tensions in the organisation is a role that change agents play to create the ‘low pressure’ pull through the resulting focus, discomfort and action.
The Leverage of Generosity
Change agents give because a culture of giving expands influence. Working out loud with a generous intent, giving of their time and effort to help others or focusing on the needs of others are highly effective ways to move change forward and set an example that encourages others to do the same.
Unsubscribe Marketing
We are in the era of unsubscribe marketing. Lazy marketing behaviours favour activity over outcomes.
Seth Godin wrote permission marketing 17 years ago. He and others have regularly returned to the reminder that the best relationships are built on consent to a conversation.
Mostly, marketers and marketing platforms haven’t listened. LinkedIn connections add you to their mailing lists. DM messages blast marketing at you. Every day messages and calls come in sellIng regardless of your preferences and settings.
When you complain, you are politely directed to unsubscribe. Of course, even unsubscribing is not straight forward. One conference organiser uses a unique list for every email so you unsubscribe only to the email you just received. Spammers use unsubscribe as confirmation of a valid email. Social media sites and others change preferences and hide unsubscribe options to retain and re-enroll users. We have shifted from permission marketing to unsubscribe marketing without considering the impacts.
All this unsubscribe marketing It is all pointless and counterproductive. These campaigns in many cases generate additional sales. In a digital era when costs of an email or social message are low, people may be lured into thinking that they are ahead. They are not when the cost is fully considered.
Let’s consider the costs. On many of these campaigns unsubscribe rates exceed conversion rates. Being told by your prospects to never contact them again can’t be the outcome of a great brand experience. Worse still, these campaigns are so ineffective that at best they fail in the heights of the 90th percentile. Many marketers see the only cost of this mammoth failure as the unsubscribe rate. In fact, they risk creating a negative impression on the far larger group who note the campaign and form a negative impression. An economic analysis of spam estimated the externality caused by these messages was 100 times the value created. Every time a marketer sends an unsubscribe marketing campaign they are destroying time and money for their potential prospects. Last time I checked the best way to do business is create value for customers, not destroy it.
Unsubscribe marketing isn’t be a sustainable way to do business. Marketers who put their faith in unsubscribe need to look at the bigger picture and understand the damage they do to their brand, their business and their target market.
The Value of Collaboration is Changed Work, Not Answers
Read the literature on enterprise social networking, chat applications and collaboration and you could easily fall into believing that all that matters for a vibrant and valuable community is generating good answers to employee questions. The value of collaboration is not in answers. The value of collaboration is in changing the way work gets done.
Answers to questions are an early signal of the maturity of a network. Suddenly, it feels like the organisation has a Genius Bar of its own. Once people start to share their expertise, their knowledge and their ideas you have the platform for further development of the way your organisation works. However, many people focus on these answers as the point of collaboration. They become diverted by the need for more participation in answering questions and generating faster or more accurate answers. Some of the paths to achieve a better answer can have negative consequences to the further maturity of the network.
Placing the pressure of social support on a few champions alone can threaten the participation of a group critical to the success of the entire community. Badgering leaders to answer questions without any personal rationale leaves them seeing enterprise social as just another inbox. Gamification, badges and other recognition will increase participation but can also make participation, less purposeful, less flexible and more a numbers game.
The appeal of many of the new chat applications is that for a small engaged teams, such as a development team, project team or consulting team, they can provide a ready access to answers and a forum for sharing. However, a dynamic of answering can lead to the community descending into a ‘groundhog day’ experience of the same questions asked repeatedly. When people expect quick answers why search the community to see if your question has been asked before.
Solving work problems and innovating in an work community is about more than answers. Faster answers is an example of reducing the cost of knowledge work in your organisation. The greater value creation opportunity comes from step changes in products, processes and ways of working generated by employee interactions in your enterprise social network. This value creation impacts your entire organisation, not just its knowledge workers.
The bigger opportunity is to bring people together, to share their insights, to address problems and to create new ways of working. Answers play a dominant role in only the first two stages of that problem. The latter two stages require people to give and take, to debate, to test and to make business decisions to see new opportunities, change products, processes and reallocate resources. The best outcomes from the Solve and Innovate phase are outcomes of the group dynamic, not an individual contributor’s answer. This generative process is far harder to gamify because small infrequent contributions can play a critical role in moving a group forward, for example making available access to a critical resource. It is in this process that we move beyond Sharing Out Loud to genuinely purposeful Working Out Loud.
Moving the maturity of collaboration in your organisation beyond just answers is more than a technology or incentive challenge. Creating real collaboration in work depends on having a strong value case for the organisation and the individual. It also requires the engagement of wider organisations systems to support the changes in work. Lastly, community management can play a critical role in fostering the development of work communities and the wider organisation transformation.
If you would like to discuss how Simon Terry and the Value Maturity Model can help your organisation to get greater value from collaboration on any platform, please get in touch through Twitter, Linkedin or https://cotap.me/simonterry.
Hustle, WOL & Flow
The toughest thing about working for yourself is the lack of perspective. Three practices will keep you at the edge, learning and pushing forward.
A Singular Perspective
The biggest danger in working for yourself, particularly as a consultant, is talking to yourself. Without perspectives from others that self-talk can swing quickly from entrepreneurial delusion (Everything’s fantastic) to pessimistic catastrophe (Never Gonna Work). When you are absorbed in a single project or worse with nothing to do between projects, it is easy to lose connection to others and the perspective (& learning opportunities) that interaction provides.
In my experience, three practices can help you with much needed perspective. Put together, these practices not only help you to remain in touch with the commercial opportunities and needs of your clients, they also stretch you to find new opportunities for your business.
Hustle
Always be Hustling. Write it down. Say it to yourself. Do it.
Some people don’t like the word hustle because it can connote the con and the swindle. What I like about the hustle is it demands street smarts and effort. The hustle isn’t passive. You have to be out building networks, connecting with new and existing people, finding their current problems and working to solve them.
The hustle reminds you that the solution you will deliver is the one that the client wants to buy, not the one you walked in to sell. The hustle keeps you open to new ideas, new opportunities and new solutions. The hustle takes creativity, innovation and nous.
The hustle is one more call, one more meeting and the right amount of never say die. The hustle treats ‘no’ as a signal to learn more and work harder. The hustle is the best antidote to both delusion and catastrophe. Whichever you are in, there is still need for the hustle.
Work Out Loud
Working out loud in your networks is a great way to build your business. Closed intellectual property atrophies. You can’t test the product fit or market fit of a secret.
Working out loud is not just sharing. Much of what I do, I share here. That has value to enable people to see my work and to judge my ability to contribute to solutions. I rarely get calls about what I blog. I get calls because I blog and people see my capabilities and think that they might help.
More valuable than sharing out loud are the situations when I actually work to solve my problems or client problems out loud with peers. Working out loud has developed my practice areas, reshaped my products, introduced me to collaborators and extended my networks to new clients. Working out loud on my solutions with trusted peers and referral partners has sharpened my efforts and ensured I am delivering what clients need. I have saved so much time and effort by avoiding reinventing the wheel and developing to a market need as a result.
Flow
The concept of flow developed by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi describes a state of optimal experience. In flow, you work as if time stands still and you have deep focus on the work at hand. It occurs when the rising challenge of our work matches to our rising ability. Flow comes when we push ourselves to work at the edge of our capabilities.
Some one once told me ‘If you don’t reach for the edge, you will never know where it is’. When your work depends on selling your expertise, there is a temptation to sit in the comfort zone. We are tempted to sell only what we are 110% capable of delivering. We sell what we sold yesterday.
Flow pushes you to use your client’s problem and your client’s constraints as an opportunity to do more, to do better and to learn. Pushing yourself to this edge gives you valuable feedback from the real world beyond your bubble.
We can all benefit in our work from stepping outside the bubble of our usual experience. The three practices of hustle, working out loud and flow help us build the capabilities and the information we need for success in our work.