Author: simongterry

Enable Employee Careers through Learning

Posted on by simongterry in Learning

There is no organisational strategy without the capability to execute it. The demands of a disruptive economy mean organisations need to create systemic approaches that scale learning through every role, Big Learning. However, organisations need to build employee capability in their interests and not just for the sake of the organisation.

Holding on to a Wooden Box

Imagine you asked a friend to hold a wooden box for you.  If they are a good friend, they might hold it for an hour or so. Some will give up and take it home to return it later.  A great friend might put it down and stay by for a little longer. Very few would bother with the box for more than that without some further instructions, some value to them or some better proof of the worth of the exercise. 

Yet organisations continue to ask employees to learn knowledge and skills for the sake of the organisation. Worse still, these approaches to learning are often rolled out with little communication as to the value of the learning for the organisation, let alone the employee. 

Consider mandatory role and compliance learning. To employees it is as mysterious as the box request and it is cannot be escaped. The signals sent remind employees that it is designed to protect the organisation as part of a compliance system, rather than helping the achievement of employee goals. 

The employee is left to complete the learning for the organisation and then forget it. There’s little surprise that much learning is wasted and is not applied to help organisations achieve strategic goals.

Enable Employee Careers & Purpose

Imagine you had a friend who shared that they wanted to develop a career as a public speaker. You might explain that practice & feedback is a critical part of developing as a public speaker and you could help them see that a wooden box would let them speak at a speaker’s corner whenever they want. There’s a far greater chance your friend is going to make an effort to carry their own box. 

Organisations can do more to make their key strategic learning a part of a process of creating greater career options for employees. Learning that advances employee goals first is more engaging, more effective and more likely to endure. Very few people will seek mastery in a skill that is imposed on them. Mastery requires purpose.

Working in this way begins with employees goals and enabling the employee learning journey through all their work. Learning in this approach means thinking beyond tasks & roles to lifetime needs and career lattices.  In addition to specific technical skills, learning must develop portable skills that increase the diversity of an employee’s career options. 

Designing first for the employee journey while still achieving the organisations strategic needs will improve the effectiveness of learning. Importantly it is a key part of creating an Big Learning environment where every employee contributes to the ability of the organisation to learn and improve. 

Management Overgrown: Time for Regrowth

Posted on by simongterry in Future of Work, Learning
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Bureaucracy has become the definition of the kind of management organisations are seeking to avoid. However, bureaucracy started as a significant step forward in management systems. As we design the future management practices we need to ensure we do not see the same overgrowth.

Fixing Management History: Bureaucracy

Bureaucracy was created to fix problems with the previous systems of management. Bureaucracy has its strengths relative to the inconsistent, corrupt and ineffective regimes that preceded it. However, any strength overdone creates a new weakness.

Here are some of the positive changes that came with bureaucracy. Without continued innovation, these practices took on a logic of their own and became overused:

  • Incompetence, influence and nepotism were addressed by a hiring and promotion on managerial competence and expertise. Overdone this expertise focus led to an unwillingness to learn, internal focus and new forms of abuse of power.
  • Inconsistency and unpredictable management decisions were addressed by leveraging policy and hierarchical review. Overdone this led to stasis and disempowered managers who couldn’t address exceptions
  • Ineffectiveness was addressed by the clarity of division of labour bringing clear accountabilities and measurement of work. Overdone this led to breakdowns in coordination, ability to deliver and waste.

Emergent Management Practice

The reason bureaucracy resulted in these issues is that its design allowed little room for checks on its use. The focus on predictability meant bureaucracy was not generative. It had little or any capacity for new management approaches to emerge. The only approach to issues was the application of more bureaucracy.

As we design the future of work, we must take care that the changes we make address the right issues and do not become equally overgrown:

  • Solve the right problems in management today: Is hierarchy really the problem? It is human nature to obsess about power and the role of hierarchy in life. Hierarchal power is only one part of how decisions get made. Many of the approaches that ‘rid organisations of hierarchy’ can’t achieve that. There is a good argument that the issues above with bureaucracy are more about learning, use of knowledge, speed and decision making than they are about power.
  • Simplicity over complexity: Simple practices are more likely to remain transparent. When it is easier for people to understand the practice as a whole and keep its goals in mind, it is harder for people to take individual aspects of the management practice as their own end. Bureaucracy has been bedevilled by people taking means as ends. I suspect one reason Holacracy has found most implementations are ‘Holacracy lite’ is due to the complexity of its original proprietary formulation.
  • Generative practice: Management practices that challenge users to look for improvements in the practice have inbuilt protection against overgrowth. I focus on the generative capability of Big Learning because the two core elements of learning and enabling work and learning keep a focus & accountability on all in the management system on how to improve the work and its outcomes.

The only way to prevent the overgrowth of new management practice is to be constantly pruning and reshaping our work in the efforts to learn and improve.

The Problem is Everywhere

Posted on by simongterry in Change, Collaboration, Future of Work, Innovation

The peculiar character of the problem of a rational economic order is determined precisely by the fact that the knowledge of the circumstances of which we must make use never exists in concentrated or integrated form but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess. The economic problem of society is thus not merely a problem of how to allocate “given” resources—if “given” is taken to mean given to a single mind which deliberately solves the problem set by these “data.” It is rather a problem of how to secure the best use of resources known to any of the members of society, for ends whose relative importance only these individuals know. Or, to put it briefly, it is a problem of the utilization of knowledge which is not given to anyone in its totality. – Friedrich A Hayek “The Use of Knowledge in Society”

Yesterday I met with an organisation that wanted some of my help as they sought to solve a problem. The organisation was developing a new knowledge sharing system to enable is staff to be better informed about products and processes. There was one slight issue with this problem. The organisation already had multiple systems to enable its staff to be better informed about products and processes: intranets, social networks, training, help & support tools, automation, etc.

Problems Everywhere

As we asked why these other systems didn’t work it became clearer that the project team’s issue was that it was solving a problem for others, rather than with others. The explanations for needing a new system did’t stack up and suggested there was more that needed to be learned from the users:

  • ‘Most of the learning is peer to peer. We need to give them better options’: Why do they prefer to learn from peers who might be inaccurate or unavailable? Why will they change this if you offer a new system? 
  • ‘They won’t use a collaboration system because they say they don’t have the time’ : if time is a question of priority, why isn’t it a priority? To what extent is the culture, leadership and performance management of the team driving this lack of priority? If they won’t collaborate why will they have the time to use something else? What is there time actually spent on? What do they do instead?
  • ‘Those system don’t give them the answers they need so we are building a new one’: If the last system didn’t understand what was required, how do you? What does relevance look like to each user? What does relevance look like to their customers?
  • ‘They want help with process X, but we are building something innovative for all processes’: Why do they want help with that process? What’s innovative about ignoring the demand?

The Answer is Everywhere

The answers to these questions are dispersed in a wide range of people beyond the project team. They draw in questions of culture, of practice, or rational and irrational behaviour by real human beings doing real work under the daily pressures of customers and a large organisation. There’s a lot of learning to do.

We have the tools to solve this dispersion and gather insights into what needs to be done in the practices of Big Learning:

  • we can actively collaborate with the users and other participants in the system to get under the pat answers and explore the deeper reasons and problems
  • we can use the practices of design thinking to better understand and shape employee behaviour & the systems involved in action
  • we can analyse data to understand in greater detail what is going on
  • we can experiment and iterate to ensure that proposed changes work the way that we expect
  • we can enable and empower the users to create changes to their work
  • we can accelerate the interactions and the cycles of learning to move faster to better solutions

These aren’t parallel techniques to be applied independently. The practices of Big Learning work best as an integrated system that draws together the insights from all of these approaches to help organisations learn and work. Big Learning enables organisation to work with and through its employees to deliver change. Change does not have to be done to them.

The reason organisations need to develop systems to facilitate Big Learning is elegantly described by Hayek in the conclusion to his essay “The Use of Knowledge in Society”.  Hayek was critiquing the schools of economists who thought that centrally planned interventions designed by experts would be effective. The context may differ but organisations still use forms of central planning by experts to create change. These changes fall short for a fundamental reason – experts can’t know enough alone:

The practical problem, however, arises precisely because these facts are never so given to a single mind, and because, in consequence, it is necessary that in the solution of the problem knowledge should be used that is dispersed among many people

The practices of Big Learning help bring people together to share insights, learn and work as one.

Break the Management Spiral

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized
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Some days I wonder how much of what we call management theory is piling on new practices to treat the symptoms of the last practice we implemented. Let’s break the management spiral.

The Management Spiral

Let’s assume we are a traditional organisation run in line with prevailing management practices.  Here’s one example of what we might experience:

  • We hire to match fixed definitions of expertise and because we don’t help our people to learn & adapt so we don’t trust them to deliver alone. 
  • Because we don’t trust our employees to be able to work unguided, we have a strict processes & policies. 
  • The policies and processes don’t cover all situations or all decisions, so we have hierarchy to lead, sort issues & coordinate. 
  • Our hierarchy doesn’t do that work because human nature means hierarchical leaders become invested in their power and expertise which disengages people, so we run a complicated scheme of performance management and incentives. 
  • The performance system isn’t perfect and worsens performance by creating conflict, waste and misalignment so we need to resort to layoffs, restructures, outsourcing and automation in an effort to restore performance. 
  • Now that we are letting expert people go, it’s clear that we can’t trust anyone and there’s no point investing in people so we are back at the beginning again and need better compliance with policies and process, more effective hierarchy and a new performance management system.

This is a simple linear story.  Even small organisations are far more complex than this example with interplay between each of these factors and a range of personal, political and human issues influencing performance. For example, there’s a reason engagement is low across many industries and countries as every one of the bullets above affects engagement.

We can’t go on adding bandaids to the symptoms of our previous management practices.

Breaking the Spiral

To break this spiral we need to change two key elements of the modern management paradigm:

  • From knowing to learning: Expertise won’t cut it anymore. We need to embrace the pace of knowledge in a connected economy and focus on flows of knowledge, not stocks. Organisations need to ensure that they have Big Learning, where every role is building capability and contributing to the potential of the organisation. It also means means change & growth is inherent in every role and each role has a responsibility to fix, to improve and to share. 
  • From controlling to enabling: If the world is dynamic, we can’t specify in advance. We can’t dictate the process at the detail required. We can’t anticipate every customer need or every community demand. We need to focus instead on enabling the person best placed to make the call and realising value through enabling those outside the organisation. We need to manage to realise and enable our collective potential, the potential of employees, customers and community. 

These two concepts seem to be at the heart of many of the new practices developed to help enhance the future of work. Let’s hope better practices will help us to better manage the system and break the spiral.

The Status Quo Requires Conflict

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

The status quo isn’t predetermined. It is just where we go back when the conflict of change ends. The status quo doesn’t exist without the conflict of change and doesn’t end until the change succeeds. 

The etymology of phrases can be an arid occupation but it can also deliver up the odd insight. The Latin phrase ‘In statu quo res errant ante bellum’ was the source of our phrase ‘status quo’. It means ‘in the state in which things were before the war’ and was used through history as a way of restoring the pre-existing order of things in treaties following conflict.

There’s two points of significance there:

  • you need conflict to have a status quo
  • you go back until you go forward

These days we often use the phrase status quo loosely as if it is somehow a pre-derermined state. It isn’t. The status quo is defined by the attempted change. The conflict of change creates “the way things were before”. That way is simply an aggregation of all the previous changes.

There’s no point worrying about why the status quo in the systems we are seeking to change resists change or why there may be conflict. The status quo is just a status. It doesn’t have any ideas, a say or any actions. Those belong to the people in the system. Once a change in the system is started by some of those people, that conflict continues until there is no return by everyone to the status quo.

Embrace the conflict as part of the change process, use it to learn how the change needs to be improved and recognise that conflct will be there until the changes become the “way things are”. The desire of change agents to bring about a better system will ensure that.

Change agents deprive the status quo of its power and status.

Guest Post: The Dizziness of Freedom by Diana Renner

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

Diana Renner and I were discussing working out loud this week when Diana mentioned that she had an unpublished blog post in development that I recognised as the feeling of the ‘trembling finger’ when I am about to work out loud. This guest post is a result of that conversation. It is too good not to be widely shared.

–

The Dizziness of Freedom

“…creating, actualising one’s
possibilities, always involves negative as well as positive aspects. It always
involves destroying the status quo, destroying all patterns with oneself,
progressively destroying what one has clung to from childhood on, and creating
new and original forms and ways of living”
Rollo May

 It has been almost two years since I stepped
into the unknown and became an independent consultant. Looking back, it feels
less like a step and more like a leap. In a single gesture of defiance, I
traded security for freedom, leaving behind a relatively comfortable,
predictable role in a large organisation. I had never expected to end up
working on my own. But the promise of freedom was alluring. It still is. At the
same time freedom opens up possibilities that are terrifying.

In his book The Concept of Anxiety,
Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard explores
the immense feelings of dread that accompany that moment when we find ourselves
at a crossroads in life. The moment when the choice to do something hangs in
perfect balance with the choice to do nothing. Kierkegaard uses the example of
a man standing on the edge of a tall building or cliff, from where he can see
all the possibilities of life. As he looks over the edge, he experiences both a
fear of falling and at the same time a terrifying impulse to throw himself
intentionally off the edge.

Every edge I have stood on has provoked
feelings of dread and excitement. Whether going into a first meeting with a new
client, writing a few pages in my book, or facing a bored and unmotivated
group, I have struggled with what Kierkegaard calls our dizziness of freedom.
Just like Kierkegaard’s protagonist,
staring into the space below, I have contemplated many times whether to throw
myself off or to stay put.

However, what seemed risky and largely unknown
two years ago rapidly has become part of a familiar landscape. It would be
natural to relax and enjoy the view… Yet I have
learned that it is at this very point that I need to become more vigilant than
ever and exercise my freedom to choose in three key ways:

  • To rally against the safe but numbing comfort of the status
    quo    . I need to keep reminding myself that the
    greatest learning is just outside of my comfort zone. I need to keep stretching
    myself to keep growing.
  • To resist the strong
    pull of the crowd    . I have found perspective on the
    margins, not looking to the outside for approval or acceptance, not following a
    trend just because everyone else is following it.
  • To interrogate the
    world    ’s criteria for what is good or successful. I am suspicious when I am being offered a formula to quick success
    or many riches. It is powerful to be able to question mainstream expectations,
    and carve my own path with courage and purpose.

The responsibility that comes with the freedom
to choose is terrifying. But the cost of not choosing is even more so.

We need to welcome this dizziness of
freedom as a sign that we are, in fact, just where we need to be. A sign
that we need to slow down and reflect on the risk, then step off the edge
anyway.

Diana Renner – Leadership consultant, facilitator, author of ‘Not Knowing – the art of turning uncertainty into opportunity’, Chartered Management Institute Book of the Year 2015, UK.

www.notknowingbook.com
www.notknowinglab.com
Twitter: @NotKnowingLab

Big Learning

Posted on by simongterry in Learning

Organisations need to rethink their approach to learning. It is no longer a function and an oft-neglected subset of the role of HR. Now it is clearer than ever that learning and the realisation of human capability is the function of organisations.

Why do we come together?

Organisational models are changing. There is much discussion of the potential of new ways of working and organising work. We are thinking about the post-work economy, the Uber-economy, holacracy, responsive organisations, the human-to-human economy or many other forms of the debate on the role and shape of organisations.

What is clear is that in an era where the friction of information, interaction and collaboration is reducing is that organisations to survive must enable people to be and do better together than they can be on their own. Realising the human potential of individuals and teams becomes a critical part of the rationale of organisations, whether that simple rationale is in turn justified in lower transactional costs, trust, scale, access to funding, need for community, collective security or some other rationale.

From Execution of Processes to Learning

When we focus on our organisations existing to better realise human potential we shift the focus of organisations away from the traditional rationale of efficient execution of stable business models. We must recognise that as our people’s knowledge, skills and capabilities grow so can the ways we work, we engage others and we create value. Highly competitive markets and fast followers will compete away value that is not based on organisations continuing to improve their ways of working, their value for customers and that takes collectively learning.

Start-ups are just one example of organisations designed for the purpose of learning. First a start-up seeks to learn what problems need solving. Then it starts to build business models that more effectively address these problems and create value.  All the way through this journey, the people in the organisation are challenged to work in better ways, to learn more and to realise their potential.  Start-up organisations have become innovators in the ways of working as they have found ways that better enable the potential of their lean teams to be realised. Many of these work practices are now becoming commonplace e.g. agile delivery, lean, customer centred design approaches, experimentation, data analytics, holacracy, collaboration, etc. 

From Learning to Big Learning

Increasingly large organisations are seeking to apply these skills to their work to compete and to grow. Slowly learning is being seen as it should have been seen all along, as a critical capability to enable the delivery of strategy and ensure organisational survival against disruption and entropy. 

However, learning in this context is no longer a function of HR. Learning becomes a function of every role, every process and every action in the organisation. We are not applying 70:20:10 with the goal of making learning programs better. Now the entire organisation seeks to use the capability of every individual to learn and improve to better achieve its goals and better create value. Organisations will succeed on the extent to which its group of individual learners outperforms the learning going on at competitors. This is Big Learning. 

Individual practices like lean thinking, agile, design, experimentation, analytics etc are not implemented to perfect a practice or make work more efficient. Each of these practices are part of creating step changes in performance through learning, a mindset of Big Learning. These practices are developed to enable the organisation to realise its purpose of enabling its people to realise their potential faster and more effectively than competitors.

Big Learning takes a new System

Big Learning takes a new systemic approach to the development of people’s potential and the processes of work in the organisation. Declaring your organisation a learning organisation or increasing funding your learning team won’t cut it. There is no one product or service to purchase. Every organisation needs to develop its own Big Learning system. The changes will involve every role, process and function. The approach will depend on its customers, its strategy, its people and its culture. The answer will depend on what best realises its ability to create increasing value over time.

A New System Takes Change Agents

New approaches to help organisations and their people to learn and share their capabilities, and work in new ways are being created every day. Managers and workers already have a wide range of tools and approaches available to begin their experimentation. Change agents need to be enabled to start to make this change happen. Organisations need to start challenging themselves today whether they are realising the potential of their people to create value for customers and the community.

“Work is learning and learning is the work” – Harold Jarche

From Bucket List to Purpose

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

I am beginning to have a problem with the bucket list. A bucket list is a list of experiences or achievements to have fulfilled by the time you die. My problem with bucket lists is that they are too often laundry lists of notable achievements, socially recognised moments and exotic travel destinations. It is rare to see a bucket list with an internal logic.

If a bucket list takes this form, then it is simply another manifestation of the overhang of expectations.  The image of the grim reaper cutting short bucket lists creates an unnatural urgency.  That urgency can be used to create consumer demand. Promoting experiences as ‘bucket list-worthy’ have become a way to market experiences from the mundane to the sublime. The bucket list is the latest manifestation of consumer marketing, the experience you have to have. There is no end to things that we just have to have on our bucket lists.

Life isn’t determined by what we have to have. There is precious little that we have to have. Once we move beyond meeting the needs of living standards, quality of life is determined by more than what we have. Quality of life is determined by the impact we choose to have on the world.  

Those choices arise as you make each decision on work, on relationships and on living. Many of these choices are the mundane, everyday living choices that are a far remove from the exotic one-off experiences of the bucket list.  However, over time what these choices will share in common is your personal sense of purpose.  Realising a personal inner purpose over the many obstacles is how each of us can help realise our potential. That is far more important than the fleeting experience of ticking off a random list.

A fully ticked bucket list will keep you busy but won’t necessarily let you die happy. A life of fulfilling purpose will.

I am and I do

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

Birthdays come around once a year. They are a repeating milestone. This year I have a small gift for myself – an absence of expectations. Instead I am focusing on what I am and what I do.

There is much discussion these days on the unrealistic expectations we place on ourselves. Every day’s to do list is a reminder to me that I fall easily for creating these expectations. Much of my life’s experience has taught me that most of the time we are neither quite as bad or as good as we think.

So this birthday, I am changing my expectations. I am.

On previous birthdays I have reflected on what I wanted to be. I set myself all kinds of milestones. I challenged myself to do more. Some I achieved but far too many became part of the overhang of what might have been. That overhang was mine alone, an unreal fiction and entirely unconstructive. Nothing more gets done because I once thought that I would have done more by now.

The last two years of working for myself has been a wonderful lesson in the importance of being & doing. I wondered what I might become when I began this process. I didn’t become anything. I am and I do. However, along the way I discovered:

  • I am helping people & organisations with collaboration, leadership, learning and the future of work, because it interests me and I work at improving my capabilities & connections every day
  • I am a baker because I bake whenever I can and I learn new techniques and approaches
  • I am a writer because I write whenever I have something important to say and I seek to get better with feedback.
  • I am enjoying a different life, because every day I am making new and better choices
  • I have a sense of purpose, because the purpose is in the work
  • I am happy. I just am. If I wasn’t, I would do something about it.

When other people want to hire your expertise, it is a solid reminder you are growing more every day.  When people admire your baking, or your writing or some other activity, it is a reminder that those skills are growing too. If nobody else notices, then you still know you are growing. When you ask yourself what made you happy today and there is always an answer, you are happy.

What you are now doesn’t matter. It just is. 

What you want to be doesn’t matter now. What matters is what you do today. 

Live and work your way forward day by day. I am.