Author: simongterry

The Pack Called Sentiment

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Are you running with the pack called sentiment?

Zappos is an amazing exemplar of new styles of organisations. Zappos is implementing Holocracy. Holocracy is the future. Zappos is losing staff over Holocracy. Holocracy isn’t what you think it is. Zappos is damaging its culture. New organisational models are flaky and cultish. New organisational models can’t deliver. – 3 months of recent opinions.

Sentiments in a networked world change quickly. In our reinforcing bubbles of information, we can see views accelerate rapidly down directions and reverse direction quickly on the slimmest pieces of news.

Who knows?

I am not sure what is going on with Zappos. If I had been to their offices I could claim to be an expert. No matter how many visits people have had to Zappos’ offices I am not sure many of the commentators know a lot more about their current transition. Given the changes going on and the implementation of a very different way of working, I am not sure Zappos do either. What I do know is that I would like to give them room to experiment and solve the obstacles of change for their sake (and our sake). We know there can be upsides in the downsides of change.

Running Against

The pack called sentiment can make it very hard to experiment. No manager likes to engage their stakeholders in an environment of negative sentiment. Staying the course and making big choices is hard when you are behind. Disappointments are rarely learning experiences in the maelstrom of public opinion. Even successes can burn you when outcomes fail to meet expectations that have raced ahead. When everyone has to stake a view and when many build on collective opinion for support and distribution, it can intimidate everyone from taking a chance.

Because Zappos has been lionised as the one big transformation, many others seeking to make change have become dependant on its success. Just think of the change agents in organisations who shared Zappos’ example with their colleagues who are now fielding the push back. We need a diversity of examples, opinions and approaches to help change happen and to ensure that the ecosystem of change survives adverse outcomes. We need lots of people to leverage others but also go their own way.

Of course, managers and organisations need to manage their communities when change is high profile. Emails will leak. The commentariat you leverage on the way up needs to be fed all the time, even when news isn’t as comforting. However, the level of engagement is ultimately a choice for each manager and organisation. People outside the system of the organisation can find it hard to judge the needs of changes in process. We can’t always require people to disclose more of hard change simply through shifting sentiment.

Diversity helps

We need people to take different choices. We need people to state different views. We need people to go a different way. Some will work. Some won’t. Lets judge the outcomes when there are outcomes to judge, not by the pack called sentiment. Our ecosystem of innovation in ways of organising will be richer for the diversity.

The Obstacles are the Work

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The bigger the barrier the more value you can create. Tackle obstacles with glee. They are the work.

Our Perfect Role Descriptions

Role Descriptions are a innocuous act of fantasy. They leave out the real work. Describing the ideal practice of a neatly described role in an ideal organisation, they focus on the known processes and relationships. They are read once on taking the job. Role descriptions rarely influence anything after because the actual work differs.

The real value in any work is the ability to handle the unknown and the unpredictable. Increasing complexity and uncertainty surrounds us. Obstacles to the smooth progress of business life are everywhere. The work is to solve them and keep moving.

The obstacle might take the form of a customer whose circumstances doesn’t fit. The obstacle might be an exception or a process breakdown. The obstacle might be a missing piece of data or a lost network connection. Fixing these things is not a distraction from the real job. It is the job. After all if a predictable process could run itself you wouldn’t be required.

Bigger Obstacles

The challenge in work is to hunt for bigger obstacles. Solving these barriers creates ever greater value.

Big obstacles might take the form of an ability to improve a process, to redesign a system to make it more effective or to find a way to something new. Fixing Big obstacles often clears away the small day to day issues that are their symptoms. Even harder big obstacles might involve persuading your colleagues or community to change, asking them to take on new mindset and behaviours to better their work.

Don’t worry if obstacles are getting in the way of ‘real work’. Obstacles are the work. They are an opportunity to lead change, to learn and to improve. Solve them and create value for yourself and others.

Passing By

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‘What a leader walks past, they endorse’ – leadership maxim

Every day we pass by situations. Do we take the time to understand? Do we take the time to make the changes necessary? Great Change Agents do.

Don’t Let Life Pass By

The busyness of our lives presents a common threat that we let life pass us. There is always a meeting to attend. There is always another message on our phone. There is always work to help you to avoid the real work of life.  

If you want to look away or even not be there, there are plenty of opportunities to avoid the work of leadership and change. At the same time in a networked world, we have far greater awareness of what is going on and a far better chance to engage with others.

Change starts when you engage. Change begins when you make an effort to understand and start a real dialogue about what is going on. You can’t do this on a pass through. You can’t do this holding your phone up to check a message.

Time is a one-way street. Every moment of potential engagement you let go is not coming back. That moment becomes a lost moment of influence. Worst of all others may interpret you failure to engage to mean that you either don’t care or actively endorse the very things you would like to change.

Impact the Small Moments

Many leaders let things pass because they are small, insignificant or uncommon. After all, we can’t expect a leader with an important agenda to spend their time over the trivial. However, it is the smallest things that send the loud signals of importance. Surprising effort is the clearest signal of change.

Engage on every moment that can help influence your change. Shift your attention to those passing moments and give them the whole of your capabilities. Discuss with others why change matters and how it can be made whenever you can.

Many of these moments will be messy, uncertain and failures. Others will scare you. Every one of them will teach you something about your influence and your potential.

Life is an aggregation of small moments. Influence builds. Capability grows. Trust grows. If you wait patiently for the perfect moment you will find in that moment you lack the influence and the capability to make the changes you need.

All of Life

Practise engaging at work. Practise engaging at home. Reach out and engage with friends, connections and strangers. Your small acts can make a big difference to the lives of others. Don’t let the people most important to your potential pass by.

Save yourself 20+ hours a week

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Print out a view of this week in your diary.

Circle every meeting that is about solving one specific objective that needs the input of others to be achieved this week. Strike out the rest of the meetings.

Now look at the meetings that are circled. Can any of these collaborations be achieved another way, another week or in less time?

Strike any that are simply to share information, gather ideas or could be delegated to one person to manage. Strike out the meetings to make decisions and delegate or run an experiment with these decisions instead. Shrink any meeting that runs longer than the conversation needed.

Many of the meetings that got struck out will be imposed by others or are just part of a routine in your organisation. Have a hard conversation with the convenor of these meetings about how to manage them differently. The other people in these meetings will thank you for saving them wasted time.

What remains in your diary will be your high value collaboration. Meetings should be just for collaboration with others that create value. You can better use the time otherwise.

Focusing meetings on creating the maximum amount of value from your time releases a huge amount of wasted time. One of the biggest advantages of my independent life is the time released from ineffective meetings and the ability to focus my time on meetings that matter.

Releasing time is the most effective way to create potential to do more. Strike out a meeting or two today. Use your time wisely.

Now you have the time go have a coffee with someone and get to know them better.

Dialogue Flows

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Why does the CEO of a major bank want to ban powerpoint? Why are our traditional approaches to leadership, management, marketing, sales and PR less effective? Why don’t employees get more engaged when we explain why they should be? Why do political pitches get shorter and simpler but no more effective? Why do fixed knowledge management hierarchies disappoint users? Why don’t our customers or community understand us better?

Talking at

We talk at people. We don’t talk with them.

Our traditional methods of communication and exchange of knowledge talk at people. We have been taught to see communication as:

Who

Says What

To Whom

In What Channel

To What Effect?

– Laswell’s model of communication

This model of communication sees communication as a single transaction moving my stock of knowledge to you. That’s not a dynamic flow or a two-way exchange of information. It is the one-time relocation of a given stock of information, whether you want it or not. Because the transfer is one way there’s no chance to improve the knowledge or the process.

We can’t blame the failure of this approach on bad luck when it has little regard for whether someone wasn’t paying attention, didn’t need that information or doesn’t understand it.

Talking with

In a connected world we no longer have the luxury of talking at people and ignoring their understanding or replies. We may design our organisations to ignore their responses but failure to discuss now has consequences. Someone will be prepared to listen to the replies of your employees, customers and community, even if it is only the other members of that group. Over time others will listen better, learn faster and new competitors will be born.

Dialogue has far more power. Working together to share and use knowledge in flight builds community and deepens understanding. Critically, the conversations that build a shared understanding also create a rich shared context on the knowledge. In many cases, the context proves more valuable than the information exchanged. If these conversations occur out loud, everyone’s understanding benefits.

Begin a new Dialogue

Start a new conversation today on a project that matters to you.  Start with someone else’s purposes, concerns and circumstances. Talk with them and learn. Your turn to share will come and it will be richer for the dialogue.

What do you need to discuss?

Authenticity

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‘Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.’ – Philip K. Dick

If you didn’t work for the organisation, would you believe the same things? What happens when you stop asking people to believe what you say? What would be different if you pitched what is? 

The connected modern world puts a premium on authenticity. There are too many alternate sources of information to provide reasons to stop believing the traditional corporate groupthink and our own personal illusions. 

Employees, customers and the community can get through the careful crafted illusions. Reality will intrude. 

Don’t fear the new information. Embrace it. Use these new challenges as a basis for authentic conversation. Turn the doubts of your current illusions into enlightening conversations that help everyone learn where things really stand. Responsive organisations enable people to use reality to create value. That’s far more effective than a carefully crafted corporate or personal illusion. 

We need trust more than ever to work in collaboration and communities. Authenticity is the surest foundation for trust. With growing trust, you can realise the phenomenal potential of community. 

‘If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything’ – Mark Twain.

Community is Two-Sided

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‘Build it and they won’t come’ – Internet maxim

Organisation everywhere are seeking to leverage the benefits of connecting. In embracing community organisations need to recognise that the needs of the community matter too.

Community is always two sided. Participants in a community expect give and take. Community members come together for a common purpose but they also seek to achieve their own.

Community is not a channel for your messages. Community is not a platform that you can make others use in a way that suits you. Behave that way and you may get engagement but you won’t build community. This is why so many enterprise social networks disappoint and why so many social communities have little engagement. They have been built for the needs of one side only.

If you want the depth of connection, richness of contribution and creative potential of community, then you will need to participate as a member of that community, not its owner. Critically that means taking the needs of others into account in your plans.

Information Shapes Responsive Action

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Traditional organisations aren’t inactive. The difference with a Responsive Organisation is how information is used. Responsive Organisations create and share information to guide action greater effectiveness of purpose.

Every organisation is busy. Management’s focus on efficiency ensures that activity is everywhere. Many organisations excuse their inability to be more responsive on the grounds they have so much going on. They just don’t have the budget or people to do more.

Responsiveness is not about doing more. ResponsiveOrgs do better. Focusing on effectiveness at delivering purpose changes their decisions.

In a focus on efficient execution traditional organisations choose to exclude information from decisions and limit decision making. They limit the sources of learning and potential. Efficiency can work on an internal logic. Effectiveness demands external orientation.

The challenge for a traditional organisation looking to become more responsive is not how to do more. The challenge is how to use information differently and how to shape different actions. Ultimately an organisation might get more done with less but that comes from greater effectiveness and better decisions.

Responsive Organisations learn. Better use of information helps shape more effective decisions. That is responsiveness in action.

Why Hierarchal Management Survives – Institutional Filter Failure

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We like to believe hierarchical management survives because those in power won’t surrender it. More likely it survives because we have not yet developed better management practices for handling excess of information. Our hierarchies make us intentionally dumb to avoid the challenges of networked information flows. We rely on hierarchy to remain unresponsive.

The Power but No Glory

Ask most frustrated change agents about why management is not changing faster to new ways of working and conversation eventually turns to the lack of incentive for managers to surrender their power.  After all when the rewards, power and prestige of senior management is so great, why would any organisational leader jeopardise these benefits by moving to new models of management.  In this view a senior management cartel stands in the path of change.

Ask senior managers about the needed changes in organisations and they will list the same issues as the change agents – too many meetings, too many emails, not agile and responsive enough, bad decision making, not enough innovation, and poor execution. Senior managers recognise that power is not what it once was. Fiat power is declining, engagement is low and threats must give way to influence.

However, when you ask about moving to new network and self-organising ways of working, the first response is usually not about a loss of power. The first response is some form of “I barely manage my emails. How would I cope if everyone could contact me directly?”  This complaint may take the form of social channels as a new method of two way communication, the need to respond to new issues from customer or community networks, new performance measures, managing autonomous experimentation or the being exposed to incomplete work in progress through working out loud.

Institutional Filter Failure

Consider for a minute the shared list of the sins of a hierarchical organisation: meetings, email, narrow internal views, partial data, bad decision making and limited ability to act.  These aspects of the system are not symptoms of the hierarchy.  They are its reason for being.  They are the system.

In an age of an increasing overload of information, management more than ever needs filters. Clay Shirky famously said: 

‘There’s no such thing as information overload – only filter failure’

Our management systems are full of these ways to reduce and control the spread of information to make management life more manageable. They aren’t flaws, filtering is the system. The system is working perfectly as we designed it.  We have these process to make our organisations less responsive. We want to exclude lots of information to make managers’ lives easier.

Managers resist giving up these flaws of the hierarchy because we have not yet offered them alternative filters in which they can have confidence.

Responsive Organisations Use Information

Responsive Organisations don’t exclude information. They work it. Instead of trying to pass it around through series of filters, these organisations seek to enable people to make use of the information they have, to share it on a pull basis and to create new and valuable information to assist their work.

Think for a minute of the key elements of responsive organisations:

  • External orientation: Opening up the organisation to its environment and orienting it this way pushes the traditional hierarchical approach of information management to breaking point. When the ‘facts are outside’ to quote Steve Blank, management must embrace different ways of managing information.
  • Transparent Network structures: Network models of working are pull structures unlike hierarchies traditional push models of communication. In a network people have the ability to find the information that they need.  We don’t need to push it around we just need to make it findable through approaches like working out loud. This transparency contributes to trust and shared context, critical elements to reduce the decision making overhead.
  • Autonomy to employees: If employees have autonomy they don’t need to share their context and rationale with their boss to get a decision.  They just make the one that they think best.
  • Experimentation: Experimentation further shifts the burden of information and decision making. When the right answer is the one that survives a test, we don’t need meetings up the chain to get an OK.
  • Purpose: As most managers know communicating strategic intent down a hierarchy is hard work. Either the strategy doesn’t survive translation or the application in a different frontline context is a challenge, particularly balanced with the rules and regulations that must come with it.  Purpose is easier to get. Purpose comes from within an employee and can be a richer and stronger guide to their action.  Purpose reinforces autonomy.

Responsive Organisations adopt new approaches to filter and use information. Instead of relying on the decision making of a few overwhelmed managers in the hub of the network. Responsive Organisations enable every node to filter and to act on the information. That approach accelerates both learning and action.

Don’t Know, Learn

Hierarchical management is obsessed with what is known. (This is both the appeal and the failure of ‘big data’) Managing what is known is the objective of the system. Instead of knowledge the system becomes an information filtering system and critical insights are lost. However, you don’t need to know as much if you can learn.

Knowledge is not worth much as a stock. It value comes from use in a flow. Insightful analysts like Dion Hinchcliffe and John Hagel are already describing a new information platform view of the next phase of our connected lives. 

Responsive Organisations will be those that develop the approaches and practices to best use information in new ways to achieve the purposes of the organisation and realise the potential of its people. That’s called learning.

Dream Big and Dream Fierce

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In life and in work, we need to aim high and we need to work hard to these goals. Even the best disappoint others occasionally. Failures and missteps are part of the process of learning. Others will forgive in time. However on any journey to a big goal, the toughest critic is most likely you. Don’t disappoint yourself. Be fierce in your own interests instead.

Dream Big and Dream Fierce

At the recent Logie awards, actress Miranda Tapsell spoke of her journey from a 17 year old Larrakia woman to winning awards in her chosen profession.  She called for more diversity in television because of its potential to inspire and unite us. Importantly, she also encouraged other young girls to “Dream big and dream fierce”. 

Dreaming big is important.  We have more potential than we know.  However, the latter part of that advice is well considered. Fierce pursuit of your goals is required for any form of success. Too many disappoint themselves by partial effort.

Stop Being Your Own Critic

Fierce pursuit of your dreams also demands that you stop the inner voices holding you back. Don’t let your own high expectations be a source of disappointment. You will be far more aware of your failings than others. Hold this in balance. Too many disappoint themselves by accepting the imposter syndrome that makes achievement feel unworthy.

Be Real

Success comes from being real in the world and improving every day. Big dreams aren’t achieved by dream boats. They are achieved by fierce agents of change.

Being real does not mean embracing others’ views of what are ‘realistic expectations’.  Fierce pursuit of your dreams means you must be real and engaged in the world. That means you need to have a real view of your status, your relationships and your capabilities. The need to understand these clearly is not because these are limits but because you must know what you need to change. Being real is the first step to learning, growing and getting where you want to go.

Being really also extends to accepting that there will be mistakes and challenges on your fierce journey to your goals.  Embrace these mistakes too as part of a real journey. Forgive yourself a lot and learn a little.

Stick to your values

The mistakes you will struggle to forgive are those where you don’t live up to your own expectations on how to behave. We all need a fierce focus on living to our values, especially when it is easy, attractive or convenient to take another path. Our influence comes from our actions and our integrity and we must fight to defend that against paths of convenience. 

Making the right decisions and saying the right things isn’t easy. Most of us aren’t perfect, but we need to have a fierce dedication to the values that make us who we are.  Big dreams are achieved through integrity.

Wherever your success journey is going, Miranda Tapsell’s advice is more succinctly and more elegantly than this explanation so as you go forward remember her words and share them with others:

“Dream big and dream fierce”