Category: Change

Empower Your People

Posted on by simongterry in Change, Leadership, Strategy

One of the greatest dangers of the age of artificial intelligence is that it may unintentionally exacerbate one of the worst sins of modern customer experiences – disempowered people. Never put people in front of a customer without the power to help. If you see a problem or ask for feedback, let people address it immediately. We can’t let bad processes or AI downgrade our people’s skills or empowerment in favour of remote and distant online processes that are not accountable to customers.

This post begins in a rant. My dishwasher died. I ordered a new one to be delivered and installed a global white goods manafacturer. On the day of delivery their team member said ‘The inlet is too close to the wall. It’s a known problem. Happens a lot. I can’t install today. You need a plumber to fix that first.’

Insight 1: If a problem is common enough to get this reaction then either enable your team to solve it or warn the customer to prepare for it. Dont just leave it be. Also it would be helpful if you had information online for the customer and their plumber to understand the specifications required.

Anyway, a plumber implemented a fix. As per the email confirming the cancellation of the delivery, I rang the call centre to rebook delivery. In this fifteenth minute call to an offshore call centre, I was transferred once and twice put on hold. Ultimately, I was told I couldn’t book, but they would send an email to another team to trigger a booking process by email over the next 48 hours. I assume this is to have the efficiency of online booking and automated workflows, but having worked with two of their people for fifteen minutes already, it is a false efficiency for them and useless for me. The first agent should have been able to solve my job in less than two minutes.

Insight 2: If you ask a customer to take a step make sure the team has the ability to solve the issue. I really felt for the agents who worked hard to make the call a great experience, but couldn’t do anything which made it a waste of all of our time. Also why does issuing a trigger email take 48 hours in this age? This is a failure of systems, not people.

At the end of my call, I was transferred to a customer satisfaction survey. In anger, I hung up. I was immediately texted a customer satisfaction survey. I told them to fix their processes and empower their people. Then I started writing this post.

Insight 3: If you ask a customer for feedback, pay attention to the answer and empower your people to address the feedback raised. The numbers are meaningless when you could be improving the process and aren’t. Asking for feedback that you ignore makes matters worse.

Whatever this organisation thinks its processes are, they aren’t paying attention to impact of their processes. They have also not given the people in the system the power they need to solve issues or prevent recurring problems.

People want their work to be productive. Give them the capabilities to solve the issues that come up and especially any that you direct customers to call them about. Look at processes end-to-end and push the opportunity to resolve issue as far to the front of the process as possible.

Use the powers of AI to identify these issues that recur and flag them for resolution. Use AI to enable people to work across silos and processes to get customer’s needs met quickly. Don’t put humans in the loop without giving them the power to override the systems or the process.

Somewhere in a distant headquarters, an executive is wondering why customer satisfaction is so poor given the great product quality and all the work on automation. The answer is clear to their own teams. They need empowerment.

Insight 4: If you aren’t going to use the data you have, then at least talk to your teams in the process. Ask them. They know what’s wrong and needs fixing. It might be a good idea to let them fix it. Also it’s useful once in a while to follow some of the instructions you give customers and test that they work.

My experience could have been avoided or improved in multiple ways and by any person involved in the process. Instead I wait for time to elapse to begin a digital booking process with a real risk I need to go through this all over again. We need individuals in the process and those overseeeing the system of processes empowered to change the system to make it better.

Postscript: The email issued the same afternoon. At first the link failed security testing on a work computer. When I got through on my phone, it asked for a customer number that was nowhere in the order. When I searched up my order, I was told I had to call to book my order. I called with some reluctance. Again I completed the IVE yet had to be transferred to another team. This time the agent booked my delivery right away. She couldn’t explain why the previous agent had not been able to do it or why I couldn’t book online.

Last Insight: The online booking process is clearly flawed from its security to its effectiveness. Variation in agent skills is impacting the experience. These are issues that need to be fixed.

Don’t expect thanks

Posted on by simongterry in Change, Future of Work, Leadership, Life & Career

It ought to be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things. Because the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under the old conditions, and lukewarm defenders in those who may do well under the new. This coolness arises partly from fear of the opponents, who have the laws on their side, and partly from the incredulity of men, who do not readily believe in new things until they have had a long experience of them.

Niccolo Machievelli, The Prince

The first experience of institutional push back on change is always discovered by accident. You are young and naive. You see a better way to do things. You start to push for the most obvious change to make the world better. Instead of thanks you receive a fierce response from simple rejection to harsh criticism. You have upset the order of things and punishment follows, not thanks.

Welcome to the work of the change agent. You have just discovered Machievelli’s insight – there are always forces invested in doing things the way they are done today. Some of those forces are powerful enough to hurt you.

Don’t expect thanks for making the world a better place. You will be lucky to win any support even though your change obviously makes things better. To succeed you need to convince those who benefit from the current way to change, especially the powerful ones. That process is not easy and it is not smooth. Few people thank you for showing them there is a better way or for taking away their privileges in the current order of things.

I neither know nor care at length 

Where drives the storm about; 

Only I summon all my strength 

And swear to ride it out.

Robert Nichols, Thanksgiving

Remember as you make change that even the people better off are inconvenienced. They have to break habits. They have to learn new skills and may feel less competent for a time. Power dynamics changing can be socially and psychologically uncomfortable for people. Even though they end up better off, even this group may not thank you for the inconvenience of the experience.

Even if you succeed, you will not be thanked. At best decades later when you change has become its own institution a few of your loyal supporters and advocates might acknowledge the role you played and the pain that you suffered. Even then it’s unlikely you will be thanked as successes ‘have many fathers’. Everyone will claim the change was their idea or their work. Such is the nature of success.

Success has many fathers. Defeat is an orphan

Count Galeazzo Ciano

Thank those who inspire you. Thank those who help you. Thank those how believe in you and encourage you. Thank those who make change on your behalf profusely. You know what they are going through. Don’t expect thanks.

Of all the rewards of change after the hard bit is done, thanks is not one of them.

in the faces of the officials and the rich

and of all who will never change

we go on saying thank you thank you

WS Merwin, Thanks

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