Author: simongterry

Work takes Community

Posted on by simongterry in Working out loud

No employee is an island. Everyone is surrounded by relationships and the need to share goals, context, information and skills. Focus on the community.

Collaboration is Human not Technological

Dion Hinchcliffe made an important point about #wolweek in his list of key events in the evolution of collaboration.  Dion pointed out that #wolweek celebrates collaboration agnostic of the choice of technology. Working out loud can work as well on post-it notes as it does on an enterprise social network. Working out loud works when it enables an individual to find ways to engage a community.

The rise of Slack has fostered a debate as to whether the answer is small scale collaboration or enterprise collaboration. This debate confuses the technology with the community. Vibrant communities require both small and large scale collaboration. There is no such thing as a Slack community. Slack simply connects (The same is true of an enterprise social network or any other tool). People form the community. That community comes from the users and reflects their connections across the whole of their lives. The community may well, and probably should, reach far beyond the walls of the organisation.

If small scale collaboration doesn’t reach enough people or share widely enough, then people will add tools to achieve the necessary community. That may not always be the efficient way to work. However, we can trust a community to find the effective way to work.

Community is also fractal. Any large scale community is made up of smaller groups working around shared challenges. Don’t force the scale or the groupings for your communities. Allow people to find and shape the scale that works for them. Community management and social network analysis tools can assist communities to connect where there are gaps but they cannot make people into communities.

A vibrant community will use the tools that it takes to collaborate. Members of Change Agents Worldwide collaborate across a bewildering range of tools, as expert users. The collaborate from face to face conversations over coffee (often tagged as Change Agents in the Wild!) through an enterprise social network, through messaging applications, in other networks whereever we come together and in various forms of collaborative document tools. I can never predict where the next useful message will appear but I know it will come from my community. We collaborate where we need to go to bring the benefits of the community to the work.  

Build Collaborative Communities

The work I do with clients using the Value Maturity Model approach is about helping clients to identify and understand the communities that are a part of their work.  For many organisations this is the first time they have started to look at the real human interactions, rather than the formal hierarchies and process charts.

When organisations foster and support these communities across all channels, they discover the exponential potential of their people. Instead of managing people for efficiency like machines, they see that connected people, sharing purpose and working out loud can be dramatically more effective. The value creation through revenue, cost and risk benefits are clear.  The added benefit is building an organisation that is more human, learns better, is more trusting and more connected as a community.

There are now so many ways to connect that the issue is not whether you can bring the communities in your organisation together. Most organisations are struggling to keep up with the new ways that their employees have to connect. You can be sure your competitors are currently seeking these benefits by learning the new ways to bring their communities together. 

The key questions are what you are doing that stops your people benefiting from new and effective ways of working and what could you be doing to enable more communities. How are you enabling your people to achieve the benefits of community in their work?

Responsive Retail Experiences Required

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

Retail stores must be as responsive as their digital competitors. The days of excuses are over.

I needed to buy a specific item today at a retail store in Hong Kong. I looked up the store address online and confirmed its opening hours. I went to the store at opening to be told it was closed for 30 minutes more. When I returned 30 minutes later I was told they wouldn’t open for 10 minutes. The staff were casually cleaning the store and decided to let me in anyway.

When I was finally admitted they were out of stock, their stock ordering system was down for its second day and there was no chance of them getting stock this week. The staff in store were full of excuses and very apologetic.

I ordered what I wanted online walking out of the store on my phone. I bought it from a digital retailer. It will be delivered to my hotel same day.

This experience was in a luxury goods retailer. Their store for out is incredibly expensive. Their rent is high. There were lots of staff waiting around. However all the money invested is wasted when the systems and employees are not responsive to customers.

The store lost any opportunity to add more to my basket. Worse, I’m unlikely to shop that brand of stores again.

If a retail store is not organised to be as responsive as its digital competitors, then it will lose more than business. Unresponsive retail stores inconvenience customers and lose their support.

Choose enthusiasm

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

I am often told by others that I am so positive and enthusiastic. My concern is that enthusiasm and positivity shouldn’t be remarkable.

My enthusiasm for life and work comes from knowing my circumstances come from the choices I make. I choose to do what brings me the opportunity to be positive. I choose to work with those that I trust, value and with whom I genuinely enjoy the work. If these circumstances change, I change either fix things or choose to change what I’m doing to ensure I can spend my time making a positive contribution. I embrace my choices wholeheartedly, even the bad ones.

I don’t always choose to do the fun stuff. Life doesn’t work that way. Life need to be purposeful and fulfilling purpose takes effort and setbacks. My enthusiasm is because I know these challenges are part of the work. I just need to keep going and get past them.

I take care to balance enthusiasm with reality. I don’t want to be positive about the rose coloured view. I want to be positive about now as it really is. However that realism extends to being realistic about making change. Many fears never eventuate.

Making choices is never free of consequences. There’s money, fun, relationships and opportunities lost at every turn. Some choices disappoint. However living a life is not free of consequences. We have choice so use it and move on without regret.

Embrace your choices with positivity and enthusiasm. If you can’t do that, make a change. There’s nothing more powerful than to approach this moment with positivity and enthusiasm.

Real Conversations Influence

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

People with a modicum of social adjustment don’t start conversations by describing what they want from others. However many times in influence conversations (like marketing, sales, leadership or collaboration) we do exactly that. Make sure your marketing, leadership and collaboration conversations consider others as humans.

Today I received an email from a connection that was a poor attempt to hide an email marketing piece. I replied pointing out it had no relevance to me, wasn’t interested in my issues and asked to be removed from the list. The opportunity for further influence has been damaged.

Everyday we ask others to listen to us as people seeking to influence our networks. In verbal conversation, we recognise the need to build rapport, to explain context and to understand the other’s situation first. We know influence comes from a relationship.

However put us in a stage or in some form of digital communication and we often forget these critical niceties. We see influence as a transaction. I ask. You do ( even if the response rate is only 1%). We excuse our approach to ourselves on the grounds of urgency, efficiency, need or authority. None of these matter much to the other person dealing with our insistent demands.

More human conversations build relationships in all channels. Understanding and relevance are foundations for influence. There’s no excuse for shouting about your needs if you want influence.

Shouting your needs simply doesn’t work. Have a human conversation instead.

What’s your minimum scale?

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

What’s your minimum scale of operation? Disruption means businesses often have to survive declines in revenue as they change business model. Are you able to adapt to the future disruptions or will your business model be a barrier to change? Remember that the capabilities of your people will be a key element of any transformation.

Focusing on Minimum Scale of Operations

Clay Shirky wrote a telling account of the challenges facing printed media in the NY Times The insight is that inherent in any business model is a minimum scale of operations.  We are used to thinking of overhead.  However, Shirky points out that falling volumes can turn the infrastructure of operations into overhead. At a given scale, there’s no point continuing. The need to operate above that scale becomes a barrier to responsiveness and even survival in times of disruptive change.

We don’t pay much attention to the minimum scale when we are growing. We look for investments to make to grow the business. Our myopia only becomes an issue when we need to make changes to our business models.

Turning Growth Investments into Overheads

Often the investments in growth we make on the way up are the overheads we struggle with as we change the business model to respond to disruption:

  • Need national sales offices or store network to grow? It will be overhead as you shrink. Ask any bank about the challenges of keeping branches economic as transactions, sales and advice move elsewhere. 
  • Need a custom built IT system? It will be overhead when competitors adopt agile solutions in the cloud. 
  • Need a warehousing, distribution or manufacturing operation to cater to growth? It will determine the minimum number of units your need to sell. 
  • Need a fancy office for your growing workforce? At least you can probably sublet this overhead as your workforce shrinks or works from home.

The business cases for each of these investments would be based on steady business volumes and predictable growth. These assumption mean that the business has ruled out the ability to handle exponential growth or any significant decline in activity. Few investment plans consider the need for agility or the impact of the investment on future changes in business model. Requiring greater consideration of optionality in an organisations approach to growth would change the business model to a more responsive one at the outset.

Investing in the Agility of People 

Many organisations respond to their failure to create a responsive business model by aggressively cutting their personnel costs. Undoubtedly, disruptive change will mean a loss of jobs as business models change. In this process organisations need to take care that they don’t lose the human capital critical to the potential to respond to change.

People can be cut far more quickly than writing off one of the growth investments above. Announcing a personnel cut, often has a far more acceptable hit to the profit and loss statement for the share market. Cutting personnel can become a substitute for a strategy to respond to change in the market.

To avoid this outcome organisations need to consider on the way up that talented people can be redeployed more easily than an investment in infrastructure. Instead of investing to deskill people with infrastructure that become overhead in times of disruption, we can invest in agility and the capability of our people. Organisations also need to chose their activities to maximise the value that their people create. People can learn, adapt and create new ways to work and create value for customers. A responsive business will have at its heart a team of people working both in the business and on the business model, constantly learning new ways to be more effective, to respond to customers and to grow.

Struggling to maintain their growth, businesses facing disruption can face surprising new challenges in their scale of operations. Organisations need to plan for optionality as they develop a more responsive business model. They also need to consider the role of our employees as the engine of responsiveness. 

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

Simple thinking is good. Clear thinking is great. Occam’s razor works. 

Simplistic thinking takes simplicity too far. There is too much of a good thing.

Simplistic cuts down the complexity, averages out the uniqueness and narrows the debate. What gets left out are the insights, the opportunities to grow and the potential to do differently.

You are bothered.

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

Boldly going #mambo

A photo posted by Michelle Williams (@mia_will) on Apr 7, 2015 at 2:25am PDT

//platform.instagram.com/en_US/embeds.js

Change doesn’t just happen. Your leadership opportunity is that things bother you enough to make change. Make change happen.

There is an insight in the image above from Michelle Williams. Most people simply can’t be bothered. These are the people who say ‘surely someone is responsible for fixing that’ or ‘I am sure that change would be too hard’.

Of the few who do start to act, many abandon action at the first difficulties.

The responsibility to lead change often falls to those who chose to act differently. People want change but they can’t be bothered. When they see someone who acts, they can get on board or at least not get in the way. Authority to lead is given to those who chose to act. 

Change is hard. It doesn’t just happen. Take what is bothering you. Find more people who are bothered too. Turn your collective concern into action. Persist.

That annoying bother won’t be fixed any other way.

A whole person

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

I have a family. I have friends. I have a community. I have networks of acquaintances and a fair few who dislike me. I also have colleagues at work.

I have purpose. I have dreams & passions. I have interests. I even get distracted. I have ambition. I also have work to do.

I have a history. I have experiences. I have learned and done a lot. I have had success, achievements and failures. I also have a resume.

I have strengths. I have talents. I have my weaknesses and I have potential. I have many roles, responsibilities and jobs at work and in life.

I perform better as a whole person. Don’t narrow my contributions.

Share the Rules, Not the Outcome, & Realise Potential

Posted on by simongterry in Working out loud

One of the remarkable discoveries of the field of study called complex systems is how order, or what physicists call a lack of entropy, can be created out of seeming randomness by individuals or agents following a small number of very simple local rules. Such systems are said to be self-organising or self-assembling, and often have so-called emergent properties that were not part of any of the rules. The study of these emergent properties teaches us that it is the local rules themselves, not the finished product, that natural selection or some other selective products sculpted to make the finished product. – Mark Paget, Wired for Culture

Management loves order.  That desire for order translates to efforts to plan and specify all the outcomes in the system. Instead, we need to leverage the potential of our organisations by allowing autonomy with simple rules.

The Deadly Entropy of Specifications

Specifying everything in a complex system calcifies the ability of the system to adapt to change. This is when management becomes bureaucracy. If there is only one predetermined process and one predetermined outcome, then individual employees are just cogs in a machine of work to achieve that outcome. However, we rarely find the expected efficiency in that machine. To start, the complexity of the machine prevents us from specifying our outcomes as clearly as we would like. 

In addition, people are not machines and the world is not static or predictable. People can do more. They want to help and they want to respond to their environment. They learn more, change things, interpret, and reorganise things locally. However, our fixed system of outcomes won’t allow it. We find other people and a changing environment rarely enable us to execute the outcomes as simply as we believed.

All our effort to impose order accelerate chaos. Disconnected employees, disconnected processes, silos, poor design and mismatches to the environment accelerate entropy. Our system is not broken. It is working exactly as we intended it just doesn’t prove to be effective enough for a changing competitive environment.

The chaos of disruption is just the force of our environment selecting another organisation that is more effective. The chaos of decay sets in as our predetermined outcomes fall short of the require effectiveness of those who make the selection decisions: 

  • our employees who can work elsewhere
  • our customers who can buy elsewhere
  • our communities who can support other businesses (with infrastructure, regulation, licenses to operate and valuable reputation); and 
  • our investors who can seek better returns elsewhere.

An Alternative: Share Simple Rules & More Potential

Most managers use a few simple pragmatic rules (or heuristics) to do their job. The challenge in organisations is that these heuristic rules aren’t discussed. Manager’s rules are all slightly different in their effectiveness. Some of these rules will survive by promotion and be shared by role modelling, but many won’t surface, simply becoming the mystery of high performance. If nobody shares their rules, there is little ability to learn from more effective rules.

Managers should focus on fostering discussion around these simple rules and encouraging people to adopt the more effective ones.  Working out loud is a great vehicle to foster these discussions as it surfaces the how of work in progress.  More formally, organisations are experimenting with approaches like holocracy that force the organisation to surface these conversations about the effectiveness of rules, responsibilities and approaches.  In time, as these experiments continue we will discover better ways to work and to manage.

Allowing people to operate within the bounds of simple rules enables them to exercise their potential, their local information and the judgment to make the organisation more effective. Simple rules tested for effectiveness are a great bureaucracy killer. For years, Nordstrom had an enviable reputation for customer service by having the simple guideline of “Use your good judgement in all situations.” 

Importantly, focusing on simple local rules allows each part of a system to play its role as it sees fit without needing to align to a fixed objective or a higher set of instructions. Employees are challenged to bring their best potential and to be more human, not cogs in a machine.

The focus of this approach is to create enduring effectiveness and a competitive advantage in the organisation based in some simple expectations of the local rules of behaviour. Culture like that represents a critical competitive advantage.