Author: simongterry

Speak out and Remove Doubt #wol

Posted on by simongterry in Working out loud

“Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt.” Abraham Lincoln

Eloquence can be the enemy of sense. This witty Lincoln quote is an example of the kind of thinking holding people back from working out loud. Why should anyone choose to remain ignorant simply to manage other’s perceptions? Negative perceptions may impede opportunities and relationships but ignorance is far more devastating.

In his defence, when Abraham Lincoln made this comment the cost of access to information was far higher than today. There was a real cost to learning and much lower level of general education.

Today we have the opportunity to learn and share so much more. We have the chance to be open about our process of learning and development as it occurs. Without testing our ideas, we will never come to know our limits and our potential.

Perhaps we would all be better following this advice of Lincoln as others work out loud: ‘He has a right to criticize, who has a heart to help.’

The Value of Extra

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

Many organisations performance management values only more. When your organisation values extra outcomes, you lay the foundation for collaboration and innovation.

I meet organisations whose performance management schemes are so tightly managed that the only outcomes that are valued are those planned at the start of the year. Not surprisingly the narrow focus on more of one or two outcomes limits the potential of people and the organisation to change. Their efforts on new ideas or new collaborations will not be counted.

This focus solely on more value is another example of the Golden Goose School of Management. Specifying performance of people like widgets is only a localised maximum. The most obvious consequence of managing performance in this way is getting more of things you no longer need when circumstances change.

I have generally chosen to work where people value both more and extra value. The simple addition of extra value enables people to step beyond the box of their role. They can pursue new ideas, projects and collaborations without the need to seek approvals or changes to performance scorecards. This enables people to respond to changes and do what needs to be done. If that means a CEO of a small healthcare payments business sponsors the parent group’s enterprise social network, it happens and it is valued.

Make sure you value the extra contributions of your people whatever they are. The future of work will demand the flexibility in value and performance.

Inconceivable

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

The idea that you discount is the innovation someone will use to disrupt you.

[Vizzini has just cut the rope The Dread Pirate Roberts is climbing up] 

Vizzini: HE DIDN’T FALL? INCONCEIVABLE. 

Inigo Montoya: You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means

From the movie The Princess Bride

Many organisations feel comfortable that the prospects of disruptive innovation are limited. They view their history, their client relationships, their propositions and their position in the market. With a view back into history, they cannot conceive how anyone could do better. They discount the threats and the opportunities of innovation.

Ernst & Young estimated that in the fourth quarter of 2014, global venture capital investment was $86.7bn. That money is exploring opportunity in many sectors previously regarded as too difficult for startups like health, government or financial sectors.  For example, the funding for startups targeting financial technology (or fintech) has grown exponentially in the last 3 years.  That’s a lot of enterpreneurial dreams that are being backed with capital. The goal of those startups is to do what is inconceivable to other organisations.

Innovators don’t look backward as to what can be expected from the past. Innovators create their own path through difficulties and challenges in the pursuit of new & different ways. They know there is competitive advantage in being the first through into a new concept and that the doubts will hold others back. They also know that the surprise of a new innovation will often paralyse the incumbent players who go through a grief-like cycle of denial, anger, delay, bargaining and finally acceptance that a response is required.

Explore the inconceivable, ridiculous and stupid ideas.  Break the bounds of your organisations traditional ways of seeing and doing as you explore innovation. You will discover you can conceive a lot more than you expect.

The Reverberating Yes

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

Say Yes
Yes to the legacy
Yes to the process
Yes to the doubts
Yes to the fears
Yes to the challenges
Yes to the risks
Yes to the passionate fire of the opponents

Say Yes
Yes to the future
Yes to the chaos
Yes to the purpose
Yes to the hopes
Yes to the opportunities
Yes to the strengths
Yes to the occasional efforts of supporters

Say yes to the ongoing grind to bring great things to be

Say yes to reality. Say yes to dreams.

Say yes

Until it echoes

(Even if only in you.)

Focus

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

The human brain sees through attention. Focused effort improves mastery. Managing attention shapes success. Where’s your focus?

We see that to which we are paying attention. Our brain screens out things that aren’t changing and can ignore the raft of elements irrelevant to our focus. We are programmed for confirmation bias. This also means that focus often brings us that we seek. Shifting focus enables us to see things we missed before.

Focus also creates the positive sensation of flow. When we concentrate on matching our rising skill to rising challenge we become absorbed in the task. We enjoy the timeless feeling of growing mastery in that focus. Sustaining focus is essential to continued development over time. Focus and you create your own unique expertise.

In coaching, you often find people can’t see the opportunities and the strengths that they have. They are so focused on barriers, issues and threats that the opportunities surprise them. That has been my personal experience of taking the leap from corporate life to consulting. I was so worried by the risks that I was surprised by the opportunities. I needed to retrain my attention to the opportunities.

Where’s your focus? How is your focus helping you achieve your purpose?

Ignoring Complexity

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

We like business to be simple. Many of our management practices ignore complexity. Time to re-embrace reality.

At a recent Responsive Org event in Melbourne led by Julian Waters-Lynch we were discussing the Cynefin Model. The Cynefin model is a very useful model for understanding responses to differing levels of complexity of the environment.  However what surfaced in that conversation was how badly most businesses perceive their whole system and environment.

Our businesses are deliberately dumb. They exclude information to make our execution of a sustainable business model simple and efficient.

Let’s take pricing as an example. Traditional business make pricing a simple equation of cost, margin and volume to maximise shareholder return. They ignore loss growth, customer engagement, customer retention, reputation, supply chain impacts, sustainability, purpose or other systemic impacts related to changing prices.

When management began a century ago with high transportation and information costs, excluding information often had limited consequences. The competitor or customer in the next market who used that information had real barriers to overcome to make you pay for a bad decision. Pretending complex or complicated environments were simple had less impact on your business

Moving to today the global connection of customers, competitors and the universe has changed those barriers. Businesses who pretend that a complex or complicated scenario is simple will feel the effects back through their networks. It is becoming harder and harder to ignore complexity and simple strategies in complex and complicated scenarios are increasingly threatened by responses from customers, employees or other stakeholders who see the world as it is.

Harold Jarche has argued simple work will be automated and merely complicated work done cheaply.  For innovation, purposeful work and creative potential our organisations need to re-embrace the complexity that surrounds them. Only by genuinely exploring emergent practice will organisations challenge themselves and their people to create sustainable value. Dumb won’t cut it anymore.

The Future of Work: Future Focused

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

Traditional organisation models sustain the past. A responsive organisation is focused on the future.

Time Capsules

Traditional hierarchical models of organisation are about sustaining history. They are designed to ensure consistency of execution of an established business model. Because that model worked in the past, it is preserved and tweaked moving forward. The focus on process, policy and compliance drag history with them as they attempt to grapple with a changing world.

The time capsule of ideas, information, policy and process that each traditional organisations carries with it distracts from the present reality of the organisations solution. Employees must learn the history encoded into the organisation rather than deal with the surrounding reality of customer needs and changing competitive environment. Employee’s ability to respond is constrained by legacies of history. Intent on sustaining a legacy of a historical innovation, these organisations find themselves incapable of making the key changes to embrace present needs or future opportunities. They fail in their task of sustaining the past because they find it increasingly hard to make it relevant to today.

Future Focused

The best way to prepare for the future is to create in the present moment. That demands organisations try to understand the conditions outside their organisational time capsule. They need to allow their employees the freedom to learn externally and to change their approach in response to their learnings. Decision making must be unencumbered by the legacies of past history. The organisation must be ready to shed its history if the future demands a new model.

This is a Responsive Organisation. Transparency & Networks help these organisations connect externally and internally to accelerate learning and build trust. Experimentation accelerates learning and keeps decision making grounded in the opportunities of now. Autonomy for employees helps shed the legacies of the past. Importantly a focus on a Purpose externally to the organisations pushes the organisation to reach forward for larger impact, rather than reach inward for greater return on a historical model.

We don’t enjoy living in time capsules. It is time for our organisation to be more future focused and responsive