Author: simongterry

The Self-aware Self

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

A key part of the value of the quantified self is awareness. We know how to coach ourself when we give ourselves enough purposeful attention.

I’ve been travelling for work recently. Being away from home has put out my usual diet. I just didn’t have my usual options or as much ability to cook. Feeling the effects, I decided recently to start tracking my meals using the Fitbit app. I wanted to know what I was eating.

There were three quick lessons from this experience:
– the Hawthorne effect works: just being aware I was recording my meals ( with no cheating) helped me make better choices.
– after a few days I realised I didn’t need to know the data. If I concentrated on what my body was telling me, I knew whether I was hungry, when I had enough and what I shouldn’t eat. If I listened closely to those messages I could make better decisions without data.
– I enjoyed eating more, because I noticed what I was eating.

A big part of the value of the quantified self is helping us become more self-aware. We all benefit when we step out of busy distracted mode. There can be great value in novel insights from data. Usually, our problems are much simpler. We don’t need machines to tell us things we know but don’t do. We need to learn how to be more present and how to better coach ourselves.

Expertise in the Way

Posted on by simongterry in Learning

Clients often say something to me along the lines of ‘I don’t want to offend you, after all, you’re the expert, but I think we might need to change this recommendation’. I am not offended. I am relieved. I can’t possibly know everything about their problem and circumstances.

Their ideas and knowledge improve mine. I am learning. We are learning together. We can’t let expertise get in the way of mastery.

The advantage of Big Learning approaches in organisations is that they break down the barriers that form around expertise. When an expert says no, trying to move forward can be hard because of both the reactions of other less expert stakeholders and because the expert has now invested ego in blocking.

Shifting the focus to gaining new external perspectives, testing ideas in practice, learning more or experimentation can be a great way to validate all opinions but judge on results. The learning from the tests will move everyone forward. Momentum is your friend.

An expert who doesn’t want to pursue mastery used to be an expert. Never let expertise get in the way of learning more through work.

The Mindfulness of Working Out Loud

Posted on by simongterry in Working out loud

‘Pay attention in a particular way – on purpose in the present moment and non-judgementally’ – Jon Kabat-Zinn 

Reinforcing loop

Mindfulness and working out loud go hand in hand. John Kabat-Zinn’s definition of mindfulness echoes many discussions of working out loud. We need to be purposeful. We suspend judgement. We focus on what we are doing now. Working out loud is one practice that helps bring a mindful approach to work. 

Working out loud can bring many of the same benefits of mindfulness practices too. In addition to helping us to learn, working out loud improves our openness, generosity, acceptance and curiosity by keeping us in this moment and asking us to practice these very challenges. 

Working Out Loud to Be More Mindful

 
Challenging ourselves to be purposeful in work and to share that purpose with others can help our mindfulness as we go about work. 

Being present in the moment through working out loud helps us to see new opportunities. We begin to see limits to our expertise. We see the value of others. We are guided to see the doors we fly past in the busy challenges of work.  

Sharing that which is incomplete takes a willingness to surrender judgement. We need to turn off all our past issues and our future concerns and share now. Focusing on being present without judgement in our work offers powerful opportunities to learn, to adapt and also to connect to others with new depth.

In busy work lives, mindfulness that can keep us present, open and connected is important to our health and success. The habit of Working out loud can be a part of that practice.

Execution is a Big Learning challenge

Posted on by simongterry in future of work, Learning, Strategy

‘Vision without execution is just hallucination’ Thomas Edison

Vision & strategy is nothing without execution. Execution is often presented as a challenge of discipline. However the discipline at the heart of great execution is learning. Organisations need to use Big Learning systems to adaptive lay execute their strategy

Vision & Strategy are Hypotheses

The PowerPoint deck might land on the desk with a reassuring thud. The tables of data, the charts and the pictures explaining the vision and strategy are impressive. No matter how excited your strategy team is their plan is just still a guess.

Competitors don’t sit still. Customers are fickle. You underestimated the effort. You over estimated the upside. Reality is always different when you execute a strategy. Local leaders need to adapt the strategy to the reality they must tackle.

Organisations have tried to enforce stronger execution discipline to prevent this adaptation. They worry that the fragmentation of approach will cause issues. However a disciplined execution of a strategy that is not fit doesn’t add any value and can be disastrous. The learning opportunities for the organisation are lost.

Learning and adapting in coordinated ways throughout the organisation is the art of Big Learning. If your vision and strategy can’t adapt to reality, it is still a hallucination, no matter how widely it is shared. Organisations need to focus less on the discipline and more of the coordination of learning throughout the organisation. Finding effective adaptations and proofs of the strategy at work, changing to align and sharing them widely is what brings a vision to life.

Break Patterns

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

Humans are a pattern making species. Give us a chance to do something twice and we will make a pattern of it. These patterns influence how we see the world. Rote pattern following causes us to miss opportunities and insights. 

Break your patterns. You will discover a new world. 

Walk a different way. Reorder your icons. Adopt a new habit. Change your diet. Start from a different perspective. Ask a new question. Change the order of steps or drop one. 

Break patterns can be disconcerting and uncomfortable. That feeling is called learning. 

The biggest threats and opportunities are in the grey where the patterns no longer apply. Test yourself there it is where you add most value. 

The Four Capabilities of a Social leader

Posted on by simongterry in Collaboration, future of work, Leadership

Senior executives need new mindsets and new capabilities to be effective in the networked work of the future. Four capabilities will help e executives make the most of their networks:

Personal Knowledge Management: Personal Knowledge Management gives executives the personal learning skills to manage the flow of information and to deepen their personal networks. As executives personally learn to Seek>Sense>Share they develop critical digital skills for network leadership.

Working Out Loud: Working out loud is a practice that helps surface the value of work and learning in networks. Leaders are already the focus of attention. Making their work in progress visible to others is a highly valuable step because it accelerates trust and learning.

Leading in Networks: Network leadership requires leaders to surface shared purpose, build trust and influence and enable collaboration. Expertise, rank and orders are replaced with adaptive leadership techniques that manage learning, tension & alignment.

Creating Value in Networks: Leaders need to be able to set a strategy for their and their team’s engagement with networks. They need to be able to accelerate the maturity of value creation in those networks as they develop through Connect>Share>Solve>Innovate.

Developing leader’s practice of these key capabilities will enhance their effectiveness in enterprise social networks and the future of work.

The audience for working out loud

Posted on by simongterry in Working out loud

The audience for working out loud is another worker trying to learn just like you. The audience is not the entire world.

Adopting a minimum in viable post is one way that people can overcome the barriers to working out loud. Another is to focus on the audience for your working out loud.

Many people are reluctant to work out loud because they assume their audience is the entire world. They are concerned their work in progress won’t we be appreciated by everyone.

The audience for working out loud is another struggling worker just like you. By sharing your work process, your lessons and challenges, you can significantly help an earlier version of yourself. You can also benefit from the advice of the version of you that’s a little ahead in expertise. If a post adds value to your understanding of your work, there’s a good chance it suits this audience.

There are a number of reasons why focusing on a specific audience for working out loud makes sense:
– all writing is better when the audience is clearer. What you’d write to look good for the whole world won’t be as powerful or helpful a learning opportunity for someone struggling with work challenges like you.
– clarity of the audience will help you determine where to share your work. Share where your audience is. Out loud doesn’t have to be the whole world.
– Even when you share on public social media, you are unlikely to reach a global audience. You are likely to reach people who share your interests. The clearer you are on that audience the better you will be able to attract them. Write for an audience. Write for your network. *
– Clarity of who you are writing for will help your generosity and the clarity of the contributions you want to make in your working out loud. At a minimum, Knowing what mattered to you in your work will help you know what to share to help others

Focus on the audience for your working out loud. It will help you to share and learn effectively.

*Always remember the basic advice of respect, relevance and safety in sharing on social media. These can easily be met with a genuine focus on sharing your learning.

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

By definition to be exceptional, you have to be the exception, not the rule – Dharmesh Shah in Inc Magazine

Traditional organisations push people to fit in, to fit boxes and processes. The future of work organisations push people to realise their human potential.

Boxes and processes can be automated, copied and commoditised. Unique value is in the grey space of exceptions, obstacles and other human forms of mess. Insights, innovations and incremental value aren’t mechanistic process outcomes. They are human flashes of brightness in the grey.

Those flashes take work and new capabilities. Find the exceptions and exploit them. Push yourself to work into these grey spaces around your role, your customers and your organisation. Be led by purpose. Leverage your potential and the potential of others. Learn and build systems to learn together. Purpose, practice and mastery of working in the grey spaces are underpinnings of the new work.

Micromanagement & Autonomy

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

One consequence of better communication is little discussed. Better communication has enabled the school of management that micromanages employees. We would do better to use our communication technologies to enable our employees to realise their potential.

Management in the Dark

We are starting to forget what the world was like before pervasive communication. Read about the beginnings of our modern organisations in the 19th century and you are always surprised to consider the barriers communication presented. 

The flipside of the barriers to communication also meant that managers had autonomy. Before the railroad and the telegraph, you didn’t need to be very far away at all to be required to manage your branch, factory or location with complete autonomy. All the decisions required to run a business like hiring, sourcing, pricing, distribution, financing and distributing profits, were managed by local managers. There were no alternatives. There was simply no way to seek guidance in time for most of the decisions required to succeed in the market. The need to trust a manager in these circumstances meant that many corporations relied on family members, trusted associates or had real limits to their scale.

Global Micromanagement

Enhanced communication technology has enabled organisations to manage their business on a global scale. The two-way flow of information has enabled trust to develop in the use of cadres of independent managers. It has also allowed those with less trust in their managers to micromanage on a scale that has never before been possible.

Look at the marketing materials for big data and HR analytics offerings. Many of these solutions are promoted as ways to know more about your business and the actions of your employees than ever before. The ‘golden goose’ school of management then dictates that you tightly manage your employees leveraging the rivers of data, the ability to adjust process controls and to communicate in real time. These communications are increasingly mechanistic and some even claiming value in automating them. Increased efficiency of your employees is the goal. However, that efficiency represents a massive trade-off in effectiveness of employees and the organisation.

Better Understanding, Alignment and Trust

Once again organisations are facing the need to drive autonomy of employees. Because of the pace of our economies driven by modern communication technology, we have arrived again at a point where autonomy is required. In the past, communication was too slow to meet a competitive local market. Now communication in the competitive global market is too fast. Employees can’t anymore wait for advice from head-office or be constrained by a policy that no longer refects circumstances.

We need to recognise that the alternate opportunity of better communication is better understanding, better trust and better alignment. With better connection, we can enable people to achieve exponentially better performance because we have the foundations of trust. If we chose a human approach over a mechanistic one, we can leverage the many human talents of our people. That diversity has far greater value than relying on only the decisions of an all-powerful all-seeing management team.

Global communication technologies have made learning the competitive advantage in the modern organisations. Now that they also allow a massive scale increase in understanding and trust, why wouldn’t we want to involve all our people in leveraging their insights, talents and knowledge?

The future of work is not better micromanagement. The future of work is how we better realising human potential. That will take trust and human connection.