Author: simongterry

Friends Don’t Let Friends Get Replaced By Algorithms

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Automation has widespread implications for the future of work. However we get to make choices on how we work. The best way to start is to ensure you practice the skills to work beyond simple routines.

The Office 365 network had a YamJam today on the future of work led by Bob Crozier and Naomi Moneypenny. The discussion was a rich and vibrant conversation about aspects of the future of work. The concluding conversation was about the prospects of the automation of management.

Your Future Robot Overlords

Many managers design their lives for the maximum predictability. The execute simple repeatable routines.  Over the years those routines are refined to maximise efficiency of management outcomes.

Gone to the robots.

I once knew a senior manager who insisted all financial information be presented in one common format. Why? The manager knew how to interpret that format, even though the numbers could never be reconciled to financial systems. Teams of analysts were required to produce the results in the required format and then explain the inevitable discrepancies and queries.

Gone to robots with the analysts too!

I’ve known managers who manage people according to formulas. For example a performance review might sound like an automated script that could be delivered to you by a robot iPad on wheels:

So what is it that makes you think that your performance has been above average? What is it about those outcomes that enables them to be rated above average? I still don’t understand. Perhaps if you were better able to identify how you have contributed above expectations we could record the rating. Let’s agree an average rating for now.

Gone to the robots!

We could go on listing examples of managers executing routines, but selecting similar items and building lists from large sample sizes is a task best left to automation.

Be a Human Manager

The best chance of avoiding the fate of robot replacement is to ensure that you are learning to adapt and change your management practices to make them more effective.  Move out of the simple and routine realms that will be relatively easy to automate.

We can focus on management that improves the effectiveness of people and realises human potential. This is the attraction of the ResponsiveOrg. We can encourage managers and workers to move from the routine to seek step changes in effectiveness. We can harness the potential of the technology to aid managers to handle creativity, complexity and chaotic situations.

We can also recognise that automation is still a developing process. There may yet be needs for humans to help with the processes like trust, relationships, fairness, empathy and engagement that have not yet been easily replicated. One only needs to see Uber’s issues with the fairness of surge pricing to see that algorithms are still learning in this space. On relationships, it seems Uber’s passion for robot cars doesn’t take account of the lack of loyalty in robot car return management algorithms.  

We can’t predict how far automation will reach. We may yet find ourselves as managers of the very human issues that our robots will encounter in purpose, free will and coordination of autonomous agents. We can be sure it will go further than we expect.  However, we have the choice to determine how we work and the practices we learn now to help us to adapt to a changing future. We can choose human effectiveness over eliminating human workers in the name of efficiency. We might yet be surprised by the extent to which the future of work is human.

The alternative is a little bleak.

The Engagement Organisation

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Want to create engagement? Make engagement in a common purpose the only thing holding your company together. Let people choose to stay. People who choose to engage are always more committed. Importantly, opening that choice will keep you accountable to creating a great team and place to work.

Make People Choose

In traditional organisations, hiring is a marketing function. The difference is well summarised by an old joke that highlights the difference between the treatment of candidates and staff.  The objective is to make the job look good so that candidates will join the organisation and submit to its constraints.

Zappos is famous for its offer to pay new hires to leave. The expressed logic is that anyone who will take a small amount of money to leave is not that committed. Psychology tells us the commitment to stay is potentially more valuable to Zappos than losing a few uncommitted people. All the staff that stay chose their jobs over money and psychology tells us that we make decisions to be consistent with our earlier decisions.

Discuss purpose openly in your recruiting. Highlight the difficulties, challenges and work involved. Discuss these things more than status, money or the likelihood of success. People who choose purpose over money or status will be more engaged. Would you rather have someone who joined for the mission or the money?

How do start-ups ever have high engagement when the work is hard, the pay is poor and success unlikely? They make the choice to work in these conditions explicit. People are engaged because they sign up for hardship to be part of the extraordinary. People participate for experiences and learning not available elsewhere.

The approach is not new. This advertisement is a mock-up and the story of Shackleton’s ad may be apocryphal. However, throughout history people have been choosing to commit to purposeful work over money and comfort.

Remove Barriers

Remove the barriers to your talented people leaving the organisation.  They will value you more when they can’t see restraints.

Traditional organisations are full of all sorts of explicit to subtle restraints on employees. Non-competes, non-solicitation clauses, no-part time work, requirements other projects or other positions must be approved are just some of the explicit restrictions. The subtler forms are the design of bonus schemes, long term incentives, career paths, etc that reward those who respect the invisible handcuffs. Then there is the policy guidelines: discouragement of networking; media, speaking and communication policies; and guidelines on interactions with competitors or the community – requirements that employees remain isolated, invisible, anonymous and silent. I have even known organisations that celebrate their employees taking car leases or large mortgages because they believe that they will need to stay around for financial reasons.

Encourage people to network. Connect them with each other, your customers, your competitors and anyone who might be of help in the success of your business. Make sure they know everyone that they should know (It will help later in your succession planning). Your business will benefit as they know more. If networking alone will see them leave, then they will leave anyway in a modern networked economy.

Encourage people to share. Help your team to build reputations as leaders in your industry. They will thank you for the profile and the recognition of your contributions. They will bring back clients, amazing connections and insights from their engagements. If sharing their insights leads your team members to leave, then it is a signal that you are missing an opportunity to better use their talents.

Foster the career development of people. Make them the most attractive and best connected talent in the market. As another joke goes:

“If it is dangerous to invest in our people because they might leave, what is the danger if we don’t invest in them and they stay”
Make them the heroes and heroines of your organisation. Like Zappos, you will lose a few but your will gain far more from those who remain and understand the value you place on their development and their success. Many more will be attracted to work for you.

Let people go and you will encourage them to return. The ultimate recognition of people’s autonomy is the recognition that they are always free to leave.

Purely Engaged.

I am participating in an experiment of a pure engagement organisation at the moment with the Change Agents Worldwide network. As a network of independent agents, Change Agents Worldwide has no requirements of its members other than they commit to its purpose and they participate occasionally in the community.

Members come and go without restraint, based on their needs and their choices. There is no ability to require people to work or to do any particular thing. Everyone is independent and their choices are respected. People participate in activities because they chose to do so. The challenge for Change Agents Worldwide is to make activities attractive enough that people stay around and the work valuable enough that people collaborate to deliver it.

There is no exclusivity. When we are trying to learn more about the practices that foster the future of work, exclusivity would be counter-productive. All members do the same work under their own names or for the organisations where they work. Members participate and even lead other networks, communities and conversations on similar topics.

Still the members are the only way Change Agents Worldwide does anything. Any client consulting or other opportunities in Change Agents Worldwide are referred to members to realise together.

Because of the freedom, what the members of Change Agents Worldwide do best is that they gather in conversations, swarms and pods to work and learn together. The heart of a pure engagement organisation is collaboration for a purpose. When people choose to work together, they choose to be engaged.

Respect Choices

Most importantly, always respect the choices and the commitment of those who work with you. The sad part of all the subtle restraints in the traditional organisation is that it leads to a mindset that “we can do what we want, they can’t go anywhere”.  When you don’t respect and support the commitment of others you will surrender their support. It is little surprise that engagement is so low in organisations with all those restraints and a mechanistic view of employees.

By letting people go when their needs are not being met, you will be more accountable to create a great organisation, great team and great individual contributors. You will be forced to treat each person as an individual, to respect their goals and to focus on realising their potential. The future of work is human.

Stop the Machine. Engagement is Human

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Employee engagement is a human psychological process. Stop treating it like an industrial machine.

Introduce a target into a modern management workplace and you will introduce a standard set of mechanical efficiency models to achieve that target. Employee engagement is a classic example.

Engagement is human

When we stop and reflect, it is obvious that employee engagement is a human process. Our engagement with our work is the psychological outcome of complex series of elements, including purpose, the work we do, its rewards both monetary and psychological, our relationships with others and much more. Everyone’s engagement outcomes are driven by their unique psychological and social needs. Our engagement is influenced by opportunities offered to us to experience states that people desire across all the domains of their lives like autonomy, purpose and mastery. Engagement is an integral outcome of our connection to others in the workplace and in the surrounding community.

Stop the Engagement Machine

Except that is not how the industrial engagement machine works. Search the internet for ‘engagement drivers’ and you will find lots of great advice on how to treat people as machines for generating engagement as an end in itself. The focus on drivers leads to a focus on top-down engagement plans. These plans measure and relentlessly focus on transactionally moving the drivers. The failure of these plans to shift engagement begins with the disconnect from the daily leadership interactions in the organisation.  

Further, the plans fail to take a systemic view of what influences engagement.  Clarifying the connection of my work to strategy (a substitute for purpose in many engagement models) will only worsen my engagement if the rest of the system frustrates my efforts to achieve these now more important strategic outcomes. When my leader then dismisses those strategic outcomes to foster their own agenda, all improvement in engagement is lost.

Because we have an industrial mindset we can become more focused on the measures than the actual process. Consider the averaging that is built into most engagement surveys. Does it allow for the fact that individual outcomes matter and that a few highly engaged employees can deliver an enormous impact for the organisation? Averages also foster initiatives tackling the averages, over individual conversations.  

Industrialising a psychological process weakens the focus on engagement. I have seen senior managers sit around discussing their engagement scores as if the black box of engagement is a mystery. These leaders expressed aloud the wish that it was a more transparent machine. However, their scores were transparent if they looked away from the report. Their scores were an outcome, not of their engagement improvement plans, but of their daily leadership actions and the culture that they fostered in their teams.

Changing engagement outcomes to improve the responsiveness of a business and to better leverage the talent of its people, requires a focus on those people. We need to leave the engagement machine behind and begin work on the human side of the challenge: an individual employees experience of the purposes, interactions, the connection and the experience of work in the organisation. That will lead us to the changes in the system that will sustain growing engagement.

Confusion is the absence of Design

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Yesterday I had to deal with an unnecessarily confusing customer experience.  All I wanted to do was pay for my parking.  It was a great reminder that in the absence of design you generate confusion.

Here are some observations on what happens when you forget to design:

  • The insides of this parking machine would fit in a shoebox, but it’s a big machine.  That means that it is actually very hard to keep all the machine in sight at one time. When the interface is confusing, having to scan the whole thing repeatedly to find your next step is hard work.
  • The screen draws your attention but it is not where the action happens. In fact the screen, tells you little of interest and mostly distracts from where the action happens.
  • Every function has a light or a sign which adds to the confusion. The signs look like later additions to improve the usability but the signage is neither consistent nor supports the process the machine requires users to follow.  The range of different coloured lights is distracting.
  • The blue P lit up is prominent, but purely decorative. 
  • The red laser light top left is for museum membership card discounts, a second process step for a small proportion of users, but it is by far the brightest light.
  • The slot for inserting a ticket to pay, the first process step, is a solid yellow light at bottom left. This is the last place anyone looks, especially when the screen shows the slot and you assume that the image shown must be near the screen.
  • The screen is below normal eye height. As there is no shade on the screen, the lights above make it unreadable unless you crouch.  This matters if you want to know what you need to pay or want a receipt and need to push a button below the screen to confirm your request.
  • The paypass reader doesn’t work though it appears to all intents that it does with a shining light. After several failed attempts, I realised that I needed to insert my card.

The odd functional arrangement and the lights create a sense that four separate divisions of Skidata all said ‘we want a bright flashing light and a sign. We want to be prominent’. Politics and engineering determined where the various bits went on the machine rather than any designed order of a customer experience.

For a simple process this is an unnecessarily confusing customer experience. That says to me Skidata and those who installed the machine weren’t designing a customer experience, they just installed a parking payment machine.

Practice and Persistence

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Developing mastery of new future of work practices is essential to individuals being able to leverage the networked economy and also organisations ability to adapt to become Responsive Organisations. However, new practices don’t develop overnight they take persistent repetition and gradual mastery.

Your way to Carnegie Hall

There is an old joke that an out-of-town violinist is walking through New York and stops a passerby to ask for directions to Carnegie Hall, the site of many famous concerts and recitals. The answer from a wiser old New Yorker is “Practice. Practice. Practice”

We have a current example of this insight in the hacker quest to demonstrate you can become an expert in a year through consistent practice.  For example, this man’s effort to reach the top table tennis players in the UK.

The key points here are that:

  • the practice is voluntary
  • the practice persists
  • the practice develops in mastery with a determined intent on improvement 
  • the challenge of the practice raises over time

Allow Time. Design for Flow.

In our rush to implement new practices in organisations, we can miss these characteristics of growing mastery. We choose target state behaviours. We impose them transactionally through short change management programs. We are often disappointed by the results.  Not surprisingly they rarely develop into consistent practice, let alone mastery. Alien behaviours can take time to make sense, to practice with confidence and to learn new capabilities required.

The ideal programs to the introduction of new behaviours leverage the concept of Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Individuals need to be presented with purposeful activities where the challenge raises over time as their practice grows in capability.  Keeping the developing practice in the zone of flow provides personal rewards to sustain the development of mastery.

The development of individual practice in this way may not fit within our traditional management timeframes.  This is not a 90 day challenge. Developing new mindsets and behaviours will occur on a human timescale.

The Double Loop Learning of Working Out Loud

Posted on by simongterry in Collaboration, Innovation, Learning, Working out loud

Today I presented a case study at Learning Assembly Australia (#learnaus) on my personal practice of working out loud.  Like many such presentations, we were soon discussing the value of working out loud on the practice of working out loud. We needed the help of my #wolweek colleague, Jonathan Anthony, the master of meta when it comes to working out loud. 

However, there is an important reason working out loud commonly creates this experience. Working out loud fosters double loop learning.

The Double Loop

The concept of double loop learning is expounded in Chris Argyris’ classic article ’Teaching Smart People How to Learn’. Argyris contrast double loop learning with the single loop of every day problem solving.  He expresses double loop learning this way:

if learning is to persist, managers and employees must also look inward. They need to reflect critically on their own behavior, identify the ways they often inadvertently contribute to the organization’s problems, and then change how they act. In particular, they must learn how the very way they go about defining and solving problems can be a source of problems in its own right.

Working Out Loud Facilitates Double Loop Learning

When you narrate work in progress and do so visibly, you expose to others the single loop in process. Suddenly your behaviours, context, assumptions and approaches are open for review.  When you begin to answer questions or respond to suggestions of others on your work, you are prompted to reflect on the approach you have chosen. This process of reflection on how you are working opens up double loop learning.

Many people discover the presence of others is not even required for double loop learning to occur.  The process of getting your work visible and shareable can help you to realise new and better ways of achieving your goals. This process can also cause you to reflect on your role in the wider system with whom you are about to share your work. There is nothing quite like the challenge of expressing your thoughts to straighten out your thinking.

The power of double loop learning is that it can help realise breakthrough change in your personal effectiveness. By clearing the blockages, assumptions and other constraints that you have imposed on yourself, your work effectiveness increases. New avenues for learning open up.  Importantly, learning accelerates because the work & the reflection accelerate.  The faster you move around both single and double learning loops the greater the progress towards mastery.

Working Out Loud is a reflective practice. Use it to develop your double loop learning. Working Out Loud is a practice to help ‘learn how to learn’.

Away or Towards

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Success is not avoiding an outcome that you fear. Success is moving towards fulfilment of your purpose.

I caught myself this week defining success on a challenge as avoiding an outcome that I feared. I had tricked myself and hidden the fear in layers of other goals. I knew immediately that I needed to change the way I approached the challenge.  

Running away from a fear is no guide. If all you are doing is running away how will you get where you want to go?

This is a common enough approach to work. For many people, the measures of success have a strong avoidance flavour:

  • achieving their targets to avoid losing their job
  • making enough money to avoid financial difficulty
  • comfortable relationships to avoid loneliness and conflict
  • keeping up with peers to avoiding embarrassment
  • minimising risk to avoid failure

Avoidance is a poor guide to what to do. Targeting safety and security often creates the exact outcome that you feared. 

Avoidance is not particularly fulfilling. The absence of a risk having been realised still leaves the fear.

Having found the hidden fear, my challenge was to redefine success in terms of my purpose. When I know that I am moving towards my purpose I am more engaged. I know that I will have measurable progress somewhere that matters to me. All of a sudden the vicissitudes of the journey matter less.

Challenge your goals to ensure that they are really moving towards purpose. There are lots of places to escape fear, but you don’t want to be in most of them.

Accenture Digital Double Down & Responsive Organisation

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I recently shared a statistic on twitter on the need for digital transformation from a new piece of Accenture strategy and was queried by Ragnar Heil on the comparison of the Accenture recommendations to the Responsive Organisation.

In this post, I compare the two approaches.

Similar Rationale: Both the Accenture Digital Double Down paper and the Responsive Organisation are framed around a fundamental change in business circumstances with the rise of digital technology and particularly its ability to enable disruption, transparency of information and rapid growth. Accenture specifically challenge organisations to recognise that digital transformer’s

‘aspirations and investment plans set the pace, and the actions of these organisations should become the core assumptions of any future business strategy’

A Game Change: Accenture explicitly frame their paper around the difference between growth and efficiency orientation. This reflects broadly the characterisation of efficiency as the traditional model of management thinking in the Responsive Organisation focus. However, effectiveness and growth are not identical concepts.

Purpose vs Growth: Growth in the Accenture context is revenue growth with customers. Responsive Organisation generally discusses effectiveness in a more systemic and purposeful way. Effectiveness is an organisations ability to create new and better ways to fulfil purpose and new and better ways to manage its stakeholder relationships, including employee engagement, leveraging employee potential and engaging community.

Customer-led: Both approaches rightly highlight that digital transformation is customer-led.  Accenture focuses on the customer channel transformation occurring and only briefly references new markets and value migration.  Responsive Organisation is more specific on how experimentation and value creation will occur through better customer orientation across the organisation.

Recognition of Changing Organisation: The Accenture Strategy paper explicitly recognises that change will be required to the organisation though this message is carefully phrased and not a major theme of the document. In its strategic questions, the Accenture paper notes:

‘How should we organize, measure, recruit and reward in a digital world?’

Company vs Network: Accenture recognises that partnerships, external relationships and new customer engagement are important, but their model for the entity leading digital transformation is a traditional hierarchical organisation. Responsive Organisation asks organisations to look more closely at the networks within and around the organisation and how different models of value creation and working might better fulfil purpose. Accenture do not emphasize the need for innovation in management approaches as heavily as discussion of Responsive Organisation.

Planning vs Experimentation: Accenture are explicitly providing guidance to senior managers as to where investment should be allocated and what should go in strategic plans. There is no reference to experimentation, learning or other similar concepts in the recommendations of the strategy document. Increasing the autonomy of employees to collaborate, experiment and innovate is not an explicit recommendation.

Need for Change Management: Both approaches recognise that organisations face significant change to adapt to new digital transformation and new ways of working. The Accenture focus is on which senior executives should lead the transformation and how to manage senior executive support. Responsive Organisation focuses on the challenge of engaging all employees and distribution of the transformation through a more autonomous organisation.

Communicate vs Transparency: Accenture highlight that digital changes the transparency of information in and around organisations. However, their model is still one where the organisation must choose what it wishes to communicate to partners, suppliers and others.

Summary: The two approaches are very similar and reflect efforts to address the same root cause and opportunity. Accenture’s approach is perhaps better targeted to engage senior managers looking to start incremental change to digital transformation now. After all, this strategy document is a summary of their approach and content as part of a consulting sales program. As organisations move deeper into digital transformation, I expect that the two approaches may draw closer together, assuming the opportunity to move to new ways of working and greater autonomy in the organisation is not precluded by the organisational culture.