Category: Future of Work

Our fears creep.

They linger in shadows.

They grow as we feed them, practising their pouncing, unsettling our nerves.

These monsters won’t hurt us

As much as the hopes we ignore.

I have to admit it was a rant. I saw yet another post from a familiar self-help thought leader inviting me to ‘crush it’. Inspired by the rants that are common in that genre, I tweeted my own:

The tweet even has the typo that signals a rant. This tweet has got a far greater reaction than anything else I have shared. Why? People don’t want to ‘crush it’ – whatever that bro-speak means. The commonest comment is thanking me for being real and speaking a widely shared truth. People want to be real. They want real connection. The commodity that is most missed in this era of hype and instant fame is the simplest & potentially the easiest to achieve- purposeful work in respectful relationships with people from whom we can learn.

Purposeful Work

What the thought leader crowd don’t get is that achievement is fleeting. It is why they are so needy. If you have to be number one or if you have to monetise there is always a threat to your success. It cannot endure. Someone will always crush it better than you eventually.

Help someone else and they stay helped. Nobody can take away your impact. It’s not a race or a competition. It is a human contribution that helps make a rich human life.

Respectful Relationships

There is a shortage of both respect and genuine relationships at the moment. Both are deeply needed for our souls and our sanity. When shouting is the way to get attention, we all appreciate the quiet voice of respect.

Relationships are more than transactions. They are based in deep understanding and they endure. They are rich with human qualities like trust and generosity. It doesn’t matter whether these respectful relationships are online or offline, at home or at work, in business or in civil society. We need more in all arenas.

A Chance to Learn.

Nobody is born perfect. Nobody has realised their full human potential. Realising potential is a shared human endeavour.

We need to learn and grow in communities. We need the support and collaboration of others to achieve anything close to our potential.

We need less crushing it and empty noise. We need to focus our efforts on our purpose, our relationships and realising our human potential. It’s as simple and as complex as that. The response to my tweet suggests that the desire to do that work is widespread.

One of the challenges in traditional management processes is that goal setting is a one-way process. The cascade of goals down through the silos of an organisation without feedback and adaptation inevitably results in misalignment.

Consider the implementation of a collaboration solution. The overall business goals that justify the project are likely to be high level, ranging from supporting cultural change to specific improvements in customer experience, innovation and efficiency. However in designing a project for implementation these goals end up becoming soloed. Technology has a launch date and costs. Employee communications end up with a goal of user adoption. All the other goals are either cascaded to people too busy to care or are assumed to flow. Not long after users start to wonder why all technology wants is to give them the solution and all employee communications seems to want is for them to use it. By defining the goals in terms of the technology, the business loses its original outcomes and users lose reasons to use the system.

The approach of division of outcomes mean that the business has little opportunity to adapt to change or new opportunities. Budgets are set. Goals are fixed and tied to employee performance. This often results in the situation where the goals of one silo, say a launch date & costs, conflict with the goals of another, say adoption. Because these goals are baked into unchangeable and undiscussable plans, people push ahead knowing they are doing the wrong thing. The strategy becomes ‘we’ll fix it later’, but the next plan rarely allows that.

Roger L Martin, a leading strategist and a former business school dean, has highlighted in a series of books that the best strategies are adaptive. They allow for conversations up and down the chain from goals to actions and adaptation based on the lessons from conversations and action. If you want to prevent your business strategy turning into soloed nonsense then allow two-way conversations about goals and approaches. Better yet, use your collaboration platform as a hub of this learning and adaptation.

Scrolling through social threads today, I came across a criticism than an action was virtue-signalling. At first the phrase slipped by without reflection. Virtue-signalling is one of those phrases that gets thrown around in politics, particularly the subdivision of politics that is the culture wars. In those dialogues, it lives with a range of phrases from the left and right of politics, like political correctness, cultural appropriation and so on, that often had a specific meaning, but are now widely used as criticisms with loose, if any definition. I was about to go on reading but then I stopped and asked myself “What does that mean? What is wrong with signalling virtues?”.

Virtues are demonstrations of high moral standards.  Those standards are only standards and recognised as positives if they are shared in community.  An effective civil society needs some foundation of shared virtues. Virtues aren’t virtues in theory. You might source your virtues from a religious text, an ancient philosopher or lived experience. They become societal virtues when they are shared with others. A society comes to share virtues as a result of actions in line with those virtues. Actions that help those virtues become shared may be demonstrations of those virtues publicly or they may be creating signals that the virtues are required and will be rewarded. Of course, as with anything human, this is not a perfect process. Some of those signals may be false, flawed or hypocritical. The signals still contribute to creating the community standard that underpins the virtue. In fact, some of the strongest signals are when people suffer consequences for false, flawed or hypocritical demonstration of virtues. The problem with the problem of virtue signalling is you don’t have virtues without signalling.

Even if we accept that virtue-signalling is problematic, are we next going to suggest that evil-condemnation is also morally complex? If people can be unworthy to signal virtue, surely they can be unworthy to condemn evil. While I haven’t yet seen anyone explicitly throw that term as a pejorative, there are plenty of examples in our discourse as a society where people have cast doubt on (a) someone’s right to condemn evil (b) whether the way evil was condemned is adequate, (c) whether the evil is truly evil in some narrower or broader context and finally (d) whether evil is truly evil if it there is doubt as to intent, to means or to consequence. When we look the criticism of virtue-signalling, we see the intent is often not to address the issue of how best to promote virtue or suppress evil. The issue is a desire to silence others. Nobody is perfect. We know that. If we demand perfection as the standard for comment or action. Nobody gets to meet the mark. Only those with the power to speak anyway will get to discuss the issue.

One thing we learn from totalitarianism and other systems that leverage propaganda is that they master the art of taking phrases emptying them of their actual meaning and then twisting them to the purposes of control and power. We have to continue to question any phrases, subject them to discussion and query their role as criticisms and barriers to people to engage in civil society. Civil society needs more real debate, not less.

“Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.” – George Orwell, 1984

Our organisations learn how to manage human behaviour to productive ends from many aspects of society. The history of management shows many examples where it has borrowed from coercive human relationships, such as the organisational structures of military, the practices of slavery or the corrections system, because of the shared themes of control and coping with the complexities of human relationships at scale. If we are to create workplaces that have the necessary degrees of freedom to enable people to address the complex challenges of digital networks and realise their human potential, we need to be aware of these influences and to challenge control for its own sake.

This post examines an example of how the influence runs in both directions.  The tide in business press is running against the supposed productivity of open plan offices. At the same time we welcome an open plan prison.

Your Cubicle For Life

If anyone doubted the parallels between the modern office environment and a security state, the NSW Government just opened a new high security prison in Cessnock in the Hunter Valley. The facility has 400 beds in dormitory pods. The radical innovation of the new facility, which has been borrowed from Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, is that it has done away with cell walls and with privacy. Anyone will recognise the formats of those pods as cubicle arrays in an open plan office.

Photo Credit: ABC News

As with any open plan office, the facility has no privacy and a focus on monitoring of behaviour.

Correctional officers monitor inmates around the clock from first-floor corridors overlooking the pods and with infra-red cameras for night monitoring; and Immediate Action Team officers are stationed within the facility to provide a 24/7 response to critical incidents. – Cessnock Advertiser

A key focus of the new facility is to use the new openness and flexible spaces to foster interaction and relationships between inmates.  From sensory deprivation, the inmates will now need deal with an excess of human interaction

“For many that is culture change. The previous thinking has been minimal interaction with inmates.” – Newcastle Herald

The pitch is not that different from co-working giant, WeWork’s own residential facilities, WeLive. Of course, WeLive facilities have a colour scheme that includes colours other than grey.

From mailrooms and laundry rooms that double as bars and event spaces to communal kitchens, roof decks, and hot tubs, WeLive challenges traditional apartment living through physical spaces that foster meaningful relationships. Life is better when we are part of something greater than ourselves. Whether short term or long term, WeLive has flexible options designed to meet your needs.

Employee Engagement is the focus of the new office. Productive use of time will be carefully managed in this new open plan environment.  Employees will be guaranteed 5 hours of productive work, which is more than most open plan environments:

The inmates’ days have been carefully structured in a way that focuses on intense participation and access to education, employment, programs and activities. – Cessnock Advertiser

Recruitment processes for this new office will also be intensive to ensure an appropriate cultural fit and to sustain the desired levels of engagement in a vibrant collaborative culture. Like any good employee fit process, those who fail the test are subject to exile but we won’t discuss where.

Mr Severin said inmates will be carefully screened – and if they don’t fit the profile, will be placed elsewhere. – Cessnock Advertiser

The real rationale for the new office appears to be its low cost and rapid construction. Never let real human relationships interfere with a low cost property strategy.

It is only a matter of time before the innovations in Cessnock cross back into our living and working. Expect to see technology giants leading the way removing flexible working, requiring their employees to use their working for greater productivity and to restore human relationships.  Is it such a distant step to living facilities in a subtle elegant shade of metallic grey? or to WeWork’s laundry room bars? We will just need to remember that privacy terms and conditions apply and this lifestyle will be available to only approved applicants.

Simon Terry will be speaking at Disrupt Sydney 2018 to elaborate on these themes in his talk “If your company was a country, would you live there?”

Slow down to ensure your productivity. There is such a thing as being too fast to be effective. There is also a danger that speed will mean you miss more important relationship signals.

Unsafe at Speed

I started a conversation on twitter this week with a reflection on how productivity is being sapped by a culture of continuous activity and the relentless pace of business.

As Harold Jarche points out reflection and learning are the first things to go as we get busy. I also find many people don’t have the time to do their jobs, engage with others or move projects forward because they are so tied to a daily schedule of meetings and activities.

The power of working in more agile ways is that it forces us to understand what done means for a piece of work. There are lots of meetings, documents and other busy activities that don’t advance a piece of work towards done. Going faster and doing more of these things is just destroying productivity.

Unsafe at Any Speed

Working without time for learning and reflection, is dangerous because it threatens our relationships, our productivity and the effectiveness of others. We don’t work alone. Lack of learning and reflection impacts those around us.

After that twitter post, I received a call in the middle of a busy day. I dove into discussing the presumed topic of the call. I was enthusiastic, keen to get the call done and talking quickly. After about 5 minutes of chatter, I paused for breath and that pause helped me to realise that the other person wasn’t particularly engaged. My enthusiasm seemed to be draining them. Worse still, I realised their tone of voice suggested something else was on their mind. I had been prattling on when clearly they had called to discuss a more difficult topic.

Reflection is one thing. The next step is also making the time to do something different with that insight. If we are too busy, we can put off implementing the insight until later, if ever.

When I stopped prattling, I asked then and there if they were OK.  That simple question led to a much more meaningful and valuable conversation. We ended up discussing the challenges of modern work life, career struggles, motivation and the need to talk to others when you are struggling with symptoms of depression. If I hadn’t stopped my self-absorbed activity and reflected on the other participant in the conversation, then a valuable opportunity for us to help each other would have been missed.

Make the time in every interaction to check that others are OK

We need time for reflection and learning because we don’t work in networks of transactions with widgets. We work in networks of relationships with real complex and highly adaptive human beings. Being alert and allowing space for those relationships to develop enables our productivity and collective success.

Digital transformation in health, care and disability is delivering new customer and provider experiences. A focus on design of customer experiences is important, but equally important is leveraging the digital potential of provider platforms. Government and private schemes need to consider both portals and platforms in designing their claim and payment approach for providers.

Designing Experiences for all Stakeholders

Design thinking is now a standard part of any digital transformation project, especially in health and care. We now understand the value of taking the stakeholder’s perspective as we shape new digital interactions. These insights can deliver significant benefits from new, more flexible processes and interactions.

Choice and control requires three parties to collaborate. While schemes are focused on delivering choice and control to consumers by designing new customer experiences, enabling providers to support choice and control in health and care is equally important to achieve the policy outcomes. A design that does not cater to providers by delivering easy and certain claim and payment, will fail to deliver its goals.

Choice and control for consumers = Creating new customer experiences + Enabling providers

Many payers use portals for consumers and providers to manage transparency of their funding and payment of their claims. Portals force everyone through a dedicated app, website or digital channels. The payer has full control of the experience and can design it to suit its needs and preferred experiences, but they have lost the flexibility consumers and providers need.

At LanternPay we see an open multi-scheme platform is a better way to deliver choice and control in health and care. A multi-scheme platform like LanternPay offers simplicity that reduces costs for all participants and integration with the wider ecosystem of health and care solutions.

A platform approach also means providers and consumers can interact in the ways that best suit them. LanternPay does not dictate a single channel and seeks to integrate with a range of customer and provider solutions. This way the choice extends to where each party prefers to transact. For example, there is a rich and vibrant market of consumer search and booking applications, a scheme that is looking to bring transparency and choice to the market can launch its own to compete and gain a share of the market or it can leverage a platform to deliver an experience to its customers wherever they are.

Bringing Provider Focus to Consumer Experience

Design thinking challenges us to put ourselves in the shoes of each stakeholder and that means making choices to suit the breadth of consumer and provider needs. The best digital experience is not always the one that fits in a single channel. This is particularly the case for providers, whose needs are often given less attention.

When we put ourselves in the shoes of a consumer or a provider, we see the hidden costs of portals. Consider a physiotherapist starting their day by delivering care to a Transport Accident Commission of Victoria client at 9am. Their appointments that include a mix of private patients, worker’s compensation patients and several other government schemes. Given a typical health or care provider can deal with many schemes in a single day, adapting invoicing to each scheme’s unique payment approach can be costly, complex and filled with uncertainty. In addition, providers often must bear the challenge of explaining the payment processes to the consumer, which can mean they bear the brunt of customer frustrations.

The scheme controls its interactions to suit its needs. Consumers and providers need to go to the portal and manage the process for that scheme. This results in inconvenience and cost. Also, winning adoption for new processes can be challenging. Scheme portals need to invest in marketing and communication activities to win provider adoption. Given the many demands on provider system vendors for integration, scheme portals often fail to deliver integrated solutions that fit into providers’ standard business processes.

Providers are in the business of providing care, not adapting to multiple claiming portals. If the complexity or cost to the provider is too great, providers will either stop providing services to that scheme or increase charges to cover the extra costs. Many government schemes already see the costs of small pools of providers and high service costs. Consumer choice and control is meant to help address these issues. Imposing costs and complexity on providers in the claiming process will directly impact the benefits of consumer choice and control.

Platforms bring a diversity and volume of ready-to-transact providers to a scheme. Providers are familiar with the standard claiming processes and integrations in place make that an easier part of their business. At LanternPay, we have been able to work with schemes to deliver rapid provider claiming pilots with schemes. These pilots easily demonstrate the value of bringing providers to payers and enabling consumers to take control of their care in new ways.

The market for health and care is complex. No one solution is likely to meet the needs of all consumers, providers and payers. At LanternPay, we believe a focus on design thinking requires payers to consider the value of both portals and platforms. In the next post, I will look at the added value that platforms can bring in enabling access for payers to an ecosystem of innovation.

Simon Terry is the Head of Markets of LanternPay. LanternPay is an open cloud-based claim payment platform designed to standardise claim payments across the health, care, disability, insurance and ageing sectors.