Category: Change

Made-up Stories

Posted on by simongterry in Change, Leadership, Life & Career

Fiction is a good home for the reach of the human mind

Deborah Levy


Listen. Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.
– Monty Python and The Holy Grail

I read another made-up story on Linkedin recently. You know the common kind of fiction, a saintly manager rescuing someone from homelessness and then feels the need to share the story of the good works. Am I a cynic? Homelessness is a real issue and people need help to break the cycle. Possibly. I am being cynical because of the self-promotion involved, but I also suspect that all good and true stories are more complicated than as told in a Linkedin post. We aren’t ever all as good as our social media makes out.

The story prompted me to reflect on the myths and illusions that infiltrate our working lives. Some are well known. Stephen Covey’s insight is that we judge others by their actions but we judge ourselves by our intentions. We embrace the myth of our best intents, overlooking our shortcomings even as we hold others to theirs.

Sadly, we turn the page to right our hearts,
knowing our lives too well

Julia Alvarez, Heroics

Stories are important. Human community is powered by the story. Stories connect us and share values in groups. Stories inspire us to action to tackle the difficult and the challenging issues of our society. The creative power of humanity includes the extraordinary ability to make up and share compelling stories that are more than just true.

The best and most powerful stories have a grounding in truth, but they may also fly far into the realm of make-believe. Those who work with entrepreneurs are often torn by the tensions between visionary leadership and ‘the reality distortion field’ that can exist when people believe without adequate grounding. Entrepreneurship is often a heroic story that ignores the real challenges of the process of creation, the luck and the collective efforts involved in success.

Today he rides through a distant wood, To answer a question, or question an answer
Which once he thought he understood.
Soon, he thinks, I will know the answer.

Charles Martin, Heroic Attitudes

The challenge we face with many heroic stories is that they fail to point the way to repeatable solutions. Homelessness is a complex socio-economic issue. It is tied to a range of social systems and individual issues. As important as individual actions are to create change, the enduring solution is likely to be one that is systemic and collective. Our heroic myths ignore that while individuals helping one person makes a difference the problem demands change from a lot of others to do much more complex work to improve many systems. Our heroic myths mislead us.

In the heroic myths of entrepreneurship, this is evident too. These myths so commonly describe a genius who solves a problem with a product and finds success. The collective and systemic reality of these stories is lost to genius. Rarely do these stories include the work that success takes like the slog of funding, the grind of the teams managing and solving for production, operations and service and the long battle for distribution. This misleading myth is one reason entrepreneurs fail. They don’t understand all that it takes to succeed.

Myths play a role in forging community. The ancient myths were rich emotional tales of success and failure. Let’s make sure our storytelling has a strong and more complex foundation to guide others

What becomes of the people I have abandoned in fiction … the brides left at the altar, the heroes whose quests are never
accomplished? I like to think about them,

Catherine Essenger, Life after Fiction

Community Management As Facilitation

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

As organisations adjust to more flexible ways of working they are rediscovering the need to actively work on fostering a sense of community. Working from home can create new isolation and new silos without the connection that employees created in and around our workplaces. Tools exist to foster community but tools alone are not the answer. Organisations that want to develop the sense of community in their employees need to invest in community managers to facilitate interactions on the platforms that are available.

Photo by ThisIsEngineering on Pexels.com

A Group Is Not A Community

Before we go further, it is important to note that community is not a synonym for team or group or organisation. You can’t just anoint a gathering of humans a community. If you do so, you will still have a collection of humans. Communities need to share something – goals, resources, values, beliefs or a sense of belonging. That sharing is by necessity voluntary. You can’t make people share and people need the ability to opt out. The community needs the ability to ostracise too, whether to remove violators of rules or to set boundaries. You can’t make everyone a community and you needn’t try.

When you bring together groups of humans to bond in meetings, workshops and conferences, you will nominate a facilitator a productive connection and ensure the group works towards the goals of the session. When you bring together a group of employees on a technology platform like Yammer or another community platform, you can’t expect the platform to do the heavy lifting. Technology no more makes a community than pens, projectors, sticky notes, butcher’s paper and whiteboards make workshops.

Photo by Kelly L on Pexels.com

Facilitating the Human Bits

Facilitators play important roles in human interactions around our work because they play essential roles in helping humans to address the human questions of community:

  • Is this place for me and is it safe to be involved?
  • Who is here and what can I learn?
  • How can I help and how can others help me?
  • Where are we going together? What’s next?

We need community management to lead the work that enables humans to go beyond their fears and conservative habits:

  • Connect: Making the space, helping make sense of new work & making it safe
  • Share: Creating shared context. encouraging participation & sharing towards goals
  • Solve: Exploring options and fostering creative problem solving
  • Innovate: Pushing boundaries, taking the group further and translating discussion into action

Some groups are small enough to manage the process of managing this evolution themselves. Some groups have leaders who take on the role of facilitator naturally seeing the potential in the team and the technology and helping others to make sense of the opportunity to work together in a richer and more valuable way. Beyond these rare cases, the value of community, particularly in larger groups, needs to be facilitated by professionals dedicated to the task. We ask people to chair our meetings, why wouldn’t you expect a community of employees to be facilitated by community managers?

The context of our work is rapidly changing and we are expecting employees to do more in different ways every day. The human parts of the process around all this demanding change requires continuous sense-making, alignment, creativity and change. Investing in community management will help facilitate employees to find new and better value in their day-to-day work.

What Matters in Digital Health Now

Posted on by simongterry in Change, Innovation, Strategy

Australia’s Healthcare industry players are not wasting a crisis in the goal of achieving much needed digital transformation & systemic change.

On the LanternPay blog, Simon Terry, Chief Growth Officer of LanternPay summarises the key implications of recent conversations on key digital health trends from a series sponsored by AIDH and Cerner on topics including:

  • Clinical data exchange
  • Value-based healthcare
  • Patient engagement and consumer experiences

Notice

Posted on by simongterry in Change, Innovation, Life & Career
What do you notice?

There’s a big wide world out there. It is time to notice it and those living around us. The more we deal with the separation of hybrid work and hybrid lives the more important it is to notice others and react to what we are noticing.

Notice

Whether because of writing, consulting, my work in innovation or customer experience, I have learned the power of time paying attention to my environment and what is going on around me. When was the last time you looked up? Over the years, I realised that noticing is a habit. We need to step out of our self-absoption and pay attention to others, to our environment and to all the little things that might otherwise slip below our focused attention. Without the consistency of explicit attention, we will fail to notice.

Some times the clues that we need to notice are tiny – a person’s silence, an odd choice of words, the things that they are not saying or not doing. Because many of life’s issues, problems and challenges cause us to stop, withdraw or be silent, it can be harder for us to notice that people are depressed, fatigued or languishing. We can’t all retreat to the isolation of Walden pond even if it is tempting in our busy digital lives. In a world of exponential change curves, many changes start small until they are suddenly not. The sooner you notice, the sooner you can act.

Many times our busy rush means we don’t pick up on the clues or cries for help that others are offering. If we don’t notice, we can inadvertently brush away the first tentative reach out for help or for support. We can make it appear that others aren’t caring simply by not paying enough attention as we go about our lives.

A question I often ask myself “what story does this thing I notice tell me?’ Looking for a narrative, a pattern or a rationale behind the little things can help you to go beyond observation and develop ways that you might engage to learn more. Those narratives can help you pick up on incipient trends and inspire your own creative thinking about what is possible or what might be to come.

Engage

We are ever more dependent on our ability to notice when the bandwidth of our relationships is so reduced by hybrid working relationships. Checking-in, checking-up and reaching out become very important activities to support those who matter to us to continue with all their work and life activities. Related is the practice of thanking those who have helped and supported us. We need to notice those who are helping us to get by so that we can remember to encourage that activity and also to know who we need to call on in times of challenge.

Noticing is not enough. We may not perceive the situation correctly. We may not understand at all. We need to engage to better our understanding of what we see and also act to make change or help those who need it. Nobody who is struggling needs to be told that everyone notices that they are struggling and how tough that struggle may be. Much of the discussion around issues such as Black Lives Matter, Indigenous inequality, racism, gender equality or sexual harassment is a frustrating repeated pattern of the wider community saying ‘I noticed this (usually at last). It is bad’ and the directly affected individuals saying ‘I’m glad you noticed. I know it too well. What are you going to do?’

Challenging times increase our need to notice others, notice situations and notice changes. With a better habit of attention we can work to make life better for others through engagement and action.

So what do you notice and what will you do about it?

Yammer as a Strategic Talent and Capability Coordination Tool – #M365May

Posted on by simongterry in Change, Collaboration, Future of Work, Learning, Strategy

I recently spoke at the Microsoft 365 May event building on the themes of how organisations adapt to uncertainty and looking at how organisations can leverage Yammer to engage in open discovery and coordinate known and unknown talents and capabilities.

More on the Value Maturity Model of Collaboration.

More on the Drivers of Strategic Value

More on the Playing to Win Strategy model from Lafley and Martin.

Society, We Need to Talk

Posted on by simongterry in Change, Future of Work

‘The worst thing is that we live in a contaminated moral environment. We fell morally ill because we became used to saying something different from what we thought. We learned not to believe in anything, to ignore one another, to care only about ourselves. Concepts such as love, friendship, compassion, humility or forgiveness lost their depth and dimension, and for many of us they represented only psychological peculiarities, or they resembled gone- astray greetings from ancient times, a little ridiculous in the era of computers and spaceships. Only a few of us were able to cry out loudly that the powers that be should not be all-powerful‘ Vaclav Havel

A conversation about China’s social credit score and its danger of bureaucratic absurdities, this week reminded me of this quote from Vaclav Havel’s New Year address in just first year as President of Czechoslovakia. Havel became President of Czechslovakia after the collapse of its communist regime in the Velvet Revolution. The contaminated moral environment he describes is a consequence of the totalitarian state and its pressures on citizens to believe falsehoods and to act in compliance with its rules.

We are seeing the threat of this contaminated moral environment widely in civil society. Our political systems are grappling with the challenges of fake news and media that acts as a tool of propaganda channelling information into media bubbles to reinforce opinions. Social media has become less about engagement and more about brand and image resulting in people portraying fake lifestyles on Instagram and acting as thought leaders across a range of channels by expressing uncontroversial platitudes in pursuit of followers and the satisfaction of acceptance.

At the same time, the recent revelations on the role of data in social media have highlighted the extent to which these platforms and all of digital society is creating a data-based surveillance machinery. In Australia the Banking Royal Commission, has highlighted the extent to which organisations espouse one set of values while acting in pursuit of the financial interests of another set of values.

The only path forward to unwind this threat is for us to engage in the real hard conversations of civil society. We need to resist the calls for cheap and easy solutions offered by demagogues. We need to resist the calls for division and pursuit of the one ideologically true way coming from many quarters. We have to discuss real issues in a meaningful and human way. When trust has broken down and people don’t share fundamental context, we can’t start by shouting at each other.

We can create domains to listen, to share, to understand and to begin to explore the connections that make a civil society. Social media can play a role in creating new connections and new conversations but only if we use it not as media, but as the foundation of community. We will have to widen circles, invite different views, encourage others to speak up and then agree on action. The path forward is not one of loyalty and alignment.  The path forward in a civil society must always be participation and inclusion. Only on this foundation will we find the way to come together and act on the changes necessary to reform our moral environment and support the vibrant civil societies we need to succeed into the future.

Part 4 – Leading Discomfort

Posted on by simongterry in Change, Collaboration, Future of Work, Leadership, Learning

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That uncomfortable moment when we both wonder ‘who is leading this? I hope it is not me’

The transformation of organisations to adapt to new digital networked economy and to leverage future of work behaviours creates new discomfort for leaders. Leadership is not the art of making things good or having the right answers. Leadership is the art of enabling others to work together through discomfort.

We have examined the role of discomfort in the future of work. We have looked at the personal implications of discomfort and our need to engage with reality. Now let’s look at what this enduring discomfort means for leadership.

Leaders Aren’t Magicians

We can’t expect leaders to be magicians. The world is too complex and too fast paced for hierarchal or any leaders to have all the answers. Our work is increasingly intertwined in systems, stakeholders and interpersonal dynamics. Each of these brings complexity that makes the work of leaders hard and prevents quick fixes and simple patterns of action.

Worse still many employees and many organisations have an outdated expectation that the role of leader is to make a team safe, to make work simple and easy and to provide security and protection. Those expectations are unable to be met in the modern environment of work. Connections to the outside world cannot be cut without imperilling performance. Once we let the network world in to our work it brings change, risk and complexity. For many leaders, the greatest source of discomfort is that the expectations of their power far outweigh their actual influence on people, work and outcomes.

Embrace Discomfort & Enable Others

Leaders need to embrace their own discomfort and help their teams to productively navigate the environment and their emotional states in work. A key first step is for leaders to have honest conversations about the expectations around work, to understand the challenges and to callout that discomfort, like change, is not only likely but inevitable.

When managed in this way, discomfort can be a productive source of energy for change and a unifier of teams and stakeholders. Rather than suppress discomfort, people can leverage discomfort as a trigger for change, as a rationale for action and as pressure for sustaining the work. Focusing attention on the accountability for improvement in a group and helping the group engage with that work is a leader’s work, far more than providing answers.

Leaders need to work to make discomfort feel safe for action and interaction. Creating psychological safety despite the discomfort of work is essential to team performance. Leaders need to encourage employees to embrace a more human approach to work that includes not just their technical expertise but their social and emotional expertise as well.

Great leaders create others who can inspire and enable action and share that capability widely across their organisations and communities. One of the greatest drivers of performance is increasing the number of people who can help others to work through discomfort.

Work Together

When we are uncomfortable, it can seem easier to withdraw to safety. People will pull back into their own domains as if that offers safety. The nature of modern work requires connection and collaboration. Leaders are critical to role model this behaviour and help others see the benefits of working together. Building new capabilities and new practices for connection, sharing and collaboration is essential.

Often we need to work together across the reach of a leader’s authority. Great leaders are those who can find shared interests and help facilitate this wider stretch collaboration. This work is how we gain a shared context and learn together how we address the big problems of our organisations and our societies.

Lastly, leaders can help teams achieve enduring change in their work by changing their relationships across the organisation. Those relationships might be long settled or tied up in cultural expectations that are difficult to adapt. Everyone needs to be encouraged to reflect on these human relationships and how they contribute to better interactions, performance and outcomes.

This post is part of a multi-part series exploring discomfort in the future of work. Future posts will examine how organisations, leaders and individuals can manage this discomfort. These posts are part of a process of working out loud to explore these uncomfortable concepts so feedback is welcome.

Part 1: The Role of Discomfort.

Part 2: The Personal Discomfort

Part 3: Engaging with Reality

Part 3: The Discomfort of Working with Reality

Posted on by simongterry in Change, Collaboration, Future of Work, Leadership, Learning, Working out loud

Learning is a common source of discomfort in the future of work. A related source of discomfort is that many future of work practices force us to focus on reality – whether that is the reality inside our organisations, the world of our customers and communities or wider society. We cannot learn to sit with discomfort until we embrace the fact that discomfort is a part of that reality.

Hope is not a Strategy

Embracing discomfort demands we stop the delusion of wishing for change and waiting for something better to come along. We can’t rely on a hope for an improvement. We can’t wish discomfort away. We can’t rely on the actions of others. We can’t wait and see.

Wishful thinking prevent us from being present with our discomfort. Wishful thinking prevents us from learning. It mitigates the prod of discomfort we need to learn and to act differently.

Too often inside the comfortable confines of an organisation, you will hear discussions that reflect wishful thinking that ignores the demands of the uncomfortable reality outside:

  • our customers are different to those of our low-cost digital competitors and will continue to pay a premium for our service
  • our brand, distribution channels, product or approach is unique
  • our strategy is not showing results now but has always delivered in the long run
  • our employees are loyal
  • millennial employees will help us…
  • the customer dissatisfaction or employee disengagement is a flaw in the methodology or a lack of accurate representation of reality
  • community concerns are the work of a vocal minority
  • they just don’t understand and their views will improve if we communicate more

If we are to engage with the reality of the situation we need to start to to address the needs of our organisation, our employees and our communities in a realistic way. Today.

The Passion for Packaged Solutions

Leaders love a quick fix to discomfort. They are often willing to ignore reality to have the sensation of having acted to address the discomfort. Prodded by discomfort, they want to wish it away by immediate action. These actions include:

  • Buy a new piece of technology
  • Launch a program or initiative
  • Hire a new team
  • Implement a new process or methodology; or worse
  • Seek quick wins, which are usually neither quick nor wins but are merely comforting activity for its own sake

In our digital networked world, many of the issues causing discomfort in organisations are systemic or human issues. Pre-packaged solutions may help ameliorate these human or systemic issues at the edges or temporarily, but they do not help create enduring solutions. Organisations and their leaders need to engage in the reality of change over time to tackle this kind of discomfort through building new human capabilities, improving the system through adaptation and through engagement of the participants in the system. If they don’t, we have an ever rotating menu of quick fixes being implemented and failing.

Learning from Inclusion and Diversity

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The value of working out loud is it can help reveal to you blindspot. In the classic 2×2 of a Johari window, a blindspot is those things that are not known to you but a are clearly known to others. Yesterday on twitter, Rachel Happe helped me highlight a blindspot in this discussion of discomfort.

https://twitter.com/rhappe/status/983811186474078208

Presenting discomfort as a permanent experience is no surprise to Rachel’s list of those who we have ignored as leaders. There is real capability to lead and influence change in those who have been marginalised by the reality of power structures. I have seen this in my work with Change Agents Worldwide.

My blindspot was I had planned this post from the perspective of an advocate for diversity and inclusion but had not included the perspective of these other voices.  I wanted to write in this post about the importance of diversity and inclusion for organisations as a way to engage with the reality of their world and the reality of the communities around the organisation.

The research is clear that diversity and inclusion improves performance. One potential reason is that it brings new perspectives, new capabilities and new conversations into the organisation to improve learning and adaptation to the world. Those conversations can be uncomfortable. That discomfort is one of the barriers to diversity and inclusion as leaders fall for the illusion that comfort and ‘cultural fit’ in teams improve effectiveness by removing these difficult and at times uncomfortable conversations.

The insight of Rachel’s tweet is that the productive discomfort of diversity and inclusion is not created. That discomfort is a sharing of the existing experience of marginalised who struggle to find authority and to make positive change to better fit the organisation to society. Genuine community engagement is not easy and should not be. A strong civil society or a strong organisation includes all views and manages debate and conflict. Inclusion requires a real sharing of power, voice and agency. Our organisations and our society will be better if we engage with that reality.

The next post will be on the role of leaders in discomfort.

This post is part of a multi-part series exploring discomfort in the future of work. Future posts will examine how organisations, leaders and individuals can manage this discomfort. These posts are part of a process of working out loud to explore these uncomfortable concepts so feedback is welcome.

Part 1: The Role of Discomfort.

Part 2: The Personal Discomfort

Part 2: Personal Discomfort in the #FutureofWork

Posted on by simongterry in Change, Collaboration, Future of Work, Leadership, Learning, Working out loud

The Organisation Man, and it was mostly a man, wore a suit, travelled to work each day in the same organisation, had a boss who he looked up to, had meetings, made telephone calls, and pursued the individual task of moving paper from the in-tray to the out-tray. At the end of the day around 5pm the Organisation Man went home. Our vision of this stereotypical 1950s style experience of work is a vision of a comfortable and predictable existence with a steady career escalator to provide the gradual rewards. Many still long for this level of certainty and safety in work, even if they don’t long for the gendered roles.

Our Future of Work Worker isn’t just an employee. They juggle a portfolio career as employee, parent, volunteer, consultant, contractor, entrepreneur, and director. They wake to a flurry of overnight messages, emails and updates. Before breakfast they are taking calls from colleagues and customers. The plan for the day is shattered by the 9am standup and he or she struggles to learn what they need to, know just in time to do what needs to be done all day. Meetings, agendas, locations and more are reshuffled on the run and instant messaging and video calls pepper the interludes. When others leave and the calls and emails start to slow, the worker catches up on missed messages, prepares for the next day, has a late video call, prepares another presentation, solves a crisis or two and juggles a late change. After family and dinner, another part of the portfolio demands attention. Late in the day with a sense that there is more to do, more to know and that progress is elusive, the worker collapses into bed ready to begin again. From bed to bed, comfort is not even a thought.

We have embraced change, complexity and uncertainty as the heart of human work. We have to embrace the discomfort that comes with it.

The Work of Learning

Harold Jarche uses the phrase “Work is learning and learning is the work”. We have optimised so many aspects of work to emphasise the continuous and networked nature of learning. The practices we have embraced as future of work practices all have a shared core of not just learning, but networked collaborative learning: agile, lean startup, design thinking, collaboration, flat organisation structures, transparency and more.

We learn when we are out of our comfort zone. We must accept that the nature of work as we move forwards is primarily outside the comfort zone, in the zone of discomfort where learning is paramount. The comfortable predictable repetitive work is that which is being consumed by lower priced competition – outsourcing, offshoring, and automation.

At a personal level, we must embrace the discomfort and focus on the opportunity to learn and to grow rapidly. As noted in Part 1, we also need to look for work and learning opportunities that deliver the positive characteristics of Flow. The discomfort is not going away. We must at least gather the benefits of learning, growing capabilities and the richness of our new networked interactions with others. Working out loud can play a key role in helping us to manage this transition to a more uncomfortable mode of work and learning.

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Consciously Incompetent

People embracing Working Out Loud like many future of work practices must battle with discomfort. Whatever our level of expertise or the stage of our career, there is a good chance we are competent for the process centred expectations of our work. Recruitment, selection and talent management processes are usually highly effective in delivering process competence. Induction, on boarding and experience in a role tailors this individual capability into unconscious competence in the process of each role.

Adoption of new future of work practices forces a return to conscious incompetence. The practice feels alien. Work seems harder, slower and ineffective at first when the skills in these practices are new. Conscious incompetence is deeply uncomfortable in organisations that place a high emphasis on competence and performance. For many people, this discomfort or the associated fear and distrust become too great a barrier to persist with a new practice. Adaptation is lost when discomfort is avoided.

Worse still most future of work skills come in practices, not processes. The learning process has no end point. Mastery remains a quest. There is no moment when endless comfort returns. We need recognise that in a rapidly changing, complex and uncertain world we will always be a little incompetent. We always have more to learn.

Being Present with Discomfort

Our Future of Work worker must learn to be present with discomfort. Discomfort is not going away. It cannot be stopped. Discomfort can be embraced, leveraged and mitigated.

Managing one’s own discomfort requires the courage to face and accept that discomfort for the benefits it will deliver in learning. Managing discomfort requires some compassion for yourself and for others who are experiencing their own discomfort, because increasing there’s will only increase yours in a networked collaborative world. Compassion also requires you to know your tolerances and when to retreat, relax or protect yourself and others. Managing discomfort requires hope or at least acceptance. Most importantly of all managing discomfort requires a community.

To tackle the continual challenges of learning in the future of work, we need to embrace the reality of our situation and explore the potential of learning, mastery and connection to others to provide the rewards of growth and achievement.  The next post in the series will look at the need to embrace the reality of discomfort individually and collectively.

This post is part of a multi-part series exploring discomfort in the future of work. Future posts will examine how organisations, leaders and individuals can manage this discomfort. These posts are part of a process of working out loud to explore these uncomfortable concepts so feedback is welcome.

Part 1: The Role of Discomfort.