Category: future of work

Context

Posted on by simongterry in Collaboration, future of work, Leadership

The dysfunction in organisations is often a lack of shared context.

Part of any community is a shared context. That context is a common set of facts and understanding of the world. At its best that context includes shared goals and purposes. This context enables people to see the world in enough of a shared way that trust and collaboration is possible.

Civil society breaks down when people stop sharing enough context to collaborate and reach consensus. Much of the dysfunction of politics globally is influenced by the breakdown of shared context. We can find our own media that reinforces our own worldview. Politicians actively reinforce this to strengthen their following and influence. The vitriol and political dysfunction is an outcome of a lack of shared context.

We’ve all experienced the moment where the same action takes on a different meaning in a different context. The car that wants to cut into your lane on a day you are late and stressed creates a different reaction to the same action on a peaceful day of vacation. Context can literally change how we see and react to the world.

In organisations there are many ways that shared context breaks down. At its most dangerous, an organisation can lack a shared context with the customers and other stakeholders that provide its reason for being. Look at any customer service breakdown and there will be a lack of shared context. Organisations lose track of their customer’s context when they stop listening to feedback and stop changing with their customers. Success builds ego and hubris that builds barriers to understanding.

Within organisations, shared context is absent when there are misalignments of purpose or information. The silos that brought us efficiency now promote division and lack of mutual understanding. No two teams can collaborate comfortably when they have their own sets of metrics and differing goals.

A key role for all in organisations but particularly for leaders is to create a shared context. Help people understand the whole system through transparency, understanding and engagement. When there is conflict and dysfunction, start building new understanding.

The New Role of Managers: Increase Variation

Posted on by simongterry in future of work, Leadership

So much of what we call management consists in making it difficult for people to work – Peter Drucker

For 100 years, the role of managers has been to increase consistency of performance. Executing a proven business model in times of stable growth demands a focus on consistency, simplicity and efficiency. Managers have prospered through a focus on command, process and centralized decision making.  In an era of global networks, we have entered a new domain.  The role of managers in the future of work must be to increase effectiveness through leveraging the potential of their people and the learning opportunities in complex networks & systems.

Beyond Efficient Simplicity to Effectiveness

Management has a bias to the simplicity because simple actions can be executed efficiently and consistently. From before Adam Smith described the pin factory, managers have been breaking down tasks and processes in pursuit of an ever simpler and more efficienct mode of execution. Great strides in performance and productivity have been made in the use of this model. We have extended it further through global outsourcing, global supply chains and increasing automation.

However, as we have extended this model we have encounter an increasing realization that efficiency in a process is not always correlated with effectiveness of the outcome. Customer experiences are delivered by entire business systems. Societies are complex interrelationships of many systems not just simple business processes scaled up. At a global level we can increasingly see the disconnect between the simple and the needs of the system. Personal purpose and the purpose of our organizations calls us to look to the effectiveness of the system, not the efficiency of a process.

As many innovators have demonstrated embracing the complex systemic view can achieve a step change in effectiveness for both consumers and the business.  Embracing systems thinking, complexity and variation, creates new ways to disrupt business and meet consumer needs. Variation is not a cost. It is a signal of a new potential for effectiveness.

Beyond Predictability to Experimentation

The central planning model of most organizations driven by strict budget processes placed a heavy emphasis on predictability of outcomes. Managers were valued for their ability to consistently deliver outcomes, even if that merely represented a consistent ability to game the system. A focus on predictability drove a concentration of decision making in the hands of those with the most expertise and information to make decision.

Innovation is not predictable. Innovation recognizes that there is now too much information for any one person’s knowledge or expertise. Organizations need to embrace learning through experimentation. This process of learning by experimentation in complex systems can be hypothesis driven but it is not predictable. The test is no longer how one manager decides but how the entire system of an organization experiments and learns. The pace of adaptation driven by experimentation will be what drives an organizations effectiveness and competitive position.

Beyond Automatons to Autonomy

An expert manager focused on consistency seeks to replicate best practice in simple processes to be executed with minimum variation by automatons. If they can’t be robots, then they should be people with the greatest consistency of skill and the minimum discretion. Individual talents and ideas are sacrificed to scaling consistency of performance. Command and control is a path only to scaled consistency of performance, ask any traditional military structure.

In complex networks & systems, agents need autonomy to react to the variation circumstances that confront them. For all the focus on command and control, even the military recognizes that in battle the ‘plans rarely survive first contact with the enemy’. To achieve effectiveness, our organizations need to enable employees to respond to the circumstances that face them, to experiment, to learn and to adapt.  Great managers need to become coaches of this agility. they need to foster the variation of autonomy to find new paths to effectiveness in the system.  The key role of a manager is no longer direction. The role of a manager is alignment of the autonomous agents to realize the purposes of the organization and the team.

Beyond Competency to Capability

Consistent processes demand a focus on known competency levels. In an ideal case for a manager focused on consistency, this competency was so low that people could either be recruited with the skills or they were quickly acquired. Development of people in this environment by managers involves lifting an individual to the required proficiency and reskilling where processes change.

Managers in the future of work are now leaders of a continuous process of capability development of which human capability is only one part

Beyond Assessment to Empathy

Traditional managers role was to assess performance against a predetermined standard of consistency. The tails of a bell curve of performance were either rewarded or cut. The focus of management was a continuous process of objective assessment. This experience of assessment through performance assessment processes became the most alienating experience of management. Performance was a transactional experience focused on consistency without consideration of systems, relationships, diversity or effectiveness.

Great managers in the future of work understand that effectiveness is the scaling of personal effectiveness. They begin with empathy, not objective rationality. Discovering an individual’s personal purpose and objectives, developing their individual talents where ever they may lead and staying connected to an individual’s human experience and potential are key points of effective performance. At the heart of this approach is embracing the diversity and variation inherent in any group of people.  The transformation of performance through this approach is a step change compared to the plus or minus 10% model of traditional consistency performance management.

Variation is the Key to Value Creation

Risk and return are correlated. As much as management science has pretended to break this axiom, it has largely shifted risks elsewhere in the pursuit of higher return. Value creation opportunities come from exploring the variation in human society and its networks. We need managers who can embrace and foster variation in the future of work. Too many managers can be replaced with robots because of the predictable nature of the algorithm at the heart of their work.  Worse, those who suppress variation in their teams will be left behind in the disruptive economies ahead.

If you would like help to improve the effectiveness of your managers and teams, please get in contact for a conversation about how this applies in your business.

Thanks very much to Luis Suarez, Jonathan Champ and Janet Fouts for their contributions to the Twitter conversation about yesterday’s blog post on email and meetings. This post is inspired by that chat.  We learn through debate and discussion in the future of work.

Email is A Problem, But Meetings Are the Collaboration Issue.

Posted on by simongterry in future of work

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“Has everyone got a drink, lots of paper, a pen and a device? Good, Dave is still not here, but let’s start the meeting anyway.”

Future of work experts like to focus on email as a source of ills. There are many cases where emails can be avoided by more social forms of communication. Undoubtedly, there is much information in email that would be better shared other ways. Email takes up a lot of time, but there is far greater danger to productivity and effectiveness in our organisations: meetings.

The Cost of Meeting Culture

The real challenge in organisations is the meeting culture.  Efforts to become more collaborative, inclusive, decisive and to mitigate risks have results in a marathon series of pointless meetings. There is no research suggesting that our current level of meetings are a great idea. Research from Verizon and Atlasssian suggests between 25-50% of meetings are wasted. 45% of people admit to being stressed by how many meetings that they have.  We spend hours preparing documents for meetings that don’t scratch the surface of the discussion required. In a world in which all other forms of management are subjected to performance scrutiny meetings escape attention because they are where managers try to create performance scrutiny.

Reflect on your last 24 hours of meetings. How many of those meetings were:

  • required to be held at that time, started on time and finished when the work was done?
  • had exactly the right people in the room and the right pre-work had been done?
  • effectively chaired to stay on topic, engage all participants and achieve an outcome in the minimum time required?
  • had a clear purpose, sufficient information for the conversation and a defined outcome with clear next steps?
  • kept a record for later review of the information considered, the relevant discussion and any decisions or actions required?
  • were back-to-back with another meeting that allowed no time for personal reflection or preparation?

Running great meetings is an art, but these basic needs are just the tools of a great meeting. Too many meetings are called without regard for these basic needs. Nothing in that list above is meeting rocket science. These are the fundamentals of thinking through purpose, timing, audience, pre-work, agendas and outcomes.  In most organisations you need approval to spend $500 but you can waste thousands of dollars of salary costs by calling a meeting without any of the above basic preparation even considered.

Replace Meetings

We use meetings for five main purposes:

  • Gathering Information
  • Sharing Information
  • Discussing Issues
  • Making Decisions as A Group
  • Building personal rapport

The first two purposes are almost always better done using other ways outside of meetings. How many hours would you save by removing these meeting from your diary? Move the gathering and sharing of information to tools designed for this purpose. At least this step will at least halve the length of your meetings.

There are alternative, and often better, ways of managing the next two of these purposes than a meeting. Requiring everyone to have been seen in the same room or teleconference for a decision to be made or for work to count suggests work needs to be done on an organisations culture of personal accountability and trust.

Even for building rapport, extensive experience with social tools shows rapport can be built without a meeting when people have seen each others style of interaction and understand their positions, talents and contributions.

Bad meetings are the reason most executives doubt the effectiveness of collaboration. Managers who have experienced bad meetings struggle to see how collaborative work is not time-wasting, indecisive or lacking in accountability. The way to fix the collaboration problem in organisations is not more meetings. It is to replace meetings with ways of working that are far more effective at achieving value.

An awful lot of the wasteful emails are setting up, sharing documents or following up on bad meetings. Let’s fix the collaboration problem at its source. Make meetings the last resort as a way of working.

If you’d like to improve the effectiveness of the meetings, collaboration and work in your organisation, get in touch with Simon Terry.

Tool vs Result: Reflections

Posted on by simongterry in future of work

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Remember there is a difference between the tool and the result.  Keep your eyes & efforts on the outcomes that matter.

This morning, I was prompted to ask why it is that some of the worst users of Linkedin are Linkedin marketing service providers. I had to report a user yesterday who was from a Linkedin marketing organisation, had a poorly constructed profile that looked like a fake and responded to my decline of their invitation by immediately sending a second vanilla invitation. If your goal is to show people how well you use Linkedin, sending spam is hardly the best showcase of the service. Yes spam will get you a lot of hits on Linkedin, but it won’t win you the business or the reputation you need to grow.

Last week, I was discussing with friends the number of salespeople who pitch their product in the first conversation. These are specialists at building relationships who have confused the pitch with the sale and the relationship that follows. We have seen Glengarry Glen Ross and we know our ABCs. However, real relationship building is not that hard. If you want to build a relationship with someone, build a relationship first about something valuable to them. Make a contribution eg ‘I saw you asking about this topic and I thought you’d be interested in this study/post/thread. Happy to discuss’ It takes five minutes of study here to find that topic & value in our connected social world. If you have to mention your product in the first contact then, then a relationship is not going to happen unless they happen to be searching for your product at that moment (less than 0.5% of cases). Who wants to send 200 spam messages in an hour to get one reply & a lot of aggravated connections, when ten thoughtful notes in a hour will build five connections.

A week ago there were furious debates in the Microsoft Office365 Customer Community about this article from Laurence Lock Lee on the need to ensure that adoption measures aren’t distorting the outcomes of an enterprise social network community. When the confusion cleared from that debate we all saw the need to continue to remind people that adoption measures are a tool of strategic value creation. Yes adoption measures are measurable and actionable.  They may help a community manager to know that there is an issue. However, they are not the outcome that businesses seek.

In a world that values actionable data as a tool, we must remember that data at best is a clue that something is going on. Correlation is not always causation. The simple and obvious may not always be so. Some times the biggest mysteries are also the biggest gains in value. We often need to dig deeper to understand exactly what is going on and what response is required to make our businesses perform better and to realise our purpose.

Management is a tough challenge in a competitive market. Don’t make it harder by confusing the tool and the result.

Read a Change Agent’s Biography

Posted on by simongterry in future of work

I recommend everyone reads a quality biography of a social, political of business change agent that they admire. A good biography will highlight both the achievements and the extent to which much admired figure fell short.

Getting to know our heroes and heroines as real people matters to make change more accessible. The vast majority of admirable change agents are not exceptional people for their talents or virtues. In some cases, on closer inspection they lack the talents and virtues one would think necessary for success in leading change.

Change Agents are exceptional for their actions. They acted differently when others did not or would not act. They led when it was dangerous. They spoke up when it was unappreciated. They connected others to change when change was thought pointless.

We don’t need to be personally exceptional to act to lead change. Many change agents were surprised that their small first actions made them into opponents of a system that they were trying to help with a small fix. The response of the system made them change agents and gave them a focus for further change.

The path to change begins with action. We see a need to change the world and we start to do something about it. Don’t worry about whether you are the right person to lead the change. The fact that you have seen it and are prepared to act is start enough. Don’t worry about whether you will succeed or whether others agree. Often change agents lay the ground work for others or a larger coalition. If you see the need for change, your actions are needed.

Work Changes Culture

Posted on by simongterry in Collaboration, future of work

Sharing Out Loud

Work changes culture, not words. The future of work needs action to create new ways of working together. Creating new value requires people to do more than communicate. They must work in new ways.

With management of enterprise collaboration often falling in the Employee Communications function in organisations it can be tempting to see the challenges as primarily challenges of communication. How do we get people to use a new communication tool? What information do we want people to share in our new communication tool? Which communication tool should we use when?

The bigger and more valuable opportunity is to change the very nature of work. Changing work behaviours runs directly into the challenges of changing the culture of the organisation.  After all, culture is the expectation of future behaviours in any organisation. What ways of working are expected, what work is valued and how others will support your work is all wrapped up in a rich tapestry of cultural expectations born of past behaviours, some going back as far as the origins of the organisation.

As we have seen from communication campaigns around values in organisations, message can temporarily influence expectations. However, what confirms a change in expectations is when people see new behaviours being practiced consistently, rewarded and ultimately expected by others.

Sharing information in enterprise social networks is a start but the real value of working out loud is created when people begin to change the very nature of their work process to respond to expectations that they be more agile, more transparent, more collaborative, more trusting and more open to the expertise of others.  When this occurs they get the benefits of the input of others in greater speed, productivity and effectiveness. The changing nature of work and the changing culture of the organisation will develop hand in hand in this case and be supported by increasing personal and organisation value to justify the ongoing change.

Organisations that want to realise the true value of enterprise collaboration need to create an expectation that work will change to be more open. The best way to start that change is not with talk but by fostering the action that role models it to all in the organisation.

#intranets2016 Day 1: human work inside and outside

Posted on by simongterry in Collaboration, future of work

Three themes came through strongly on Day 1 of Intranets2016:
– focus on the work, not the technology
– consider your intranet in conjunction with your external internet presence because work stretches outside the organisation
– your organisation is human so engage them and help them with change to new ways of working

Work, not Technology

No intranet should exist as a cool piece of technology. No intranet should exist solely as a channel of communication.

We come together to work. We want out tools at work to help us to do what we need. We need to connect, share, solve or innovate together. These use cases should be the focus and the source of value of any work tools.

Work goes Outside

Intranets need to connect with Internet assets because work goes outside and involves external communities. Examples were everywhere consistent navigation between internet sites and intranet to encourage architects to update the external status of projects, Australia Post using a public intranet to engage all its communities and the integration of external social content and other content into intranet experiences.

Our work involves stakeholders inside and outside the organisation. We need to have consistent conversations and share the same information to work effectively in a transparently connected world. Importantly, it makes no sense to be recreating materials and managing distinct solutions with the same information. Transparency in this way is a great way to address remote working and mobile worker needs.

Changing Work

Great tools need to be used. We need to help people to adopt the tools and use them in their work. Importantly change starts before the tools are designed. Using collaborative design and deep data analysis we should understand the work, the challenges and how use cases can align to business needs.

Organisations then need to invest in ongoing support for leaders, champions and users. New ways of work are not launched they are fostered, role modelled and rewarded.

Risk Management in Responsive Organisations

Posted on by simongterry in future of work

Leaders of traditional organisations often look at the discussion of Responsive Organistions with horror. Confronted with transparency, autonomy, less process and experimentation they exclaim ‘where’s the risk management?’ Responsive Organisations can have highly effective risk management but they leverage adaptation not compliance in managing risk. 

Traditional Risk Management. 

Traditional risk management is an elegant science. Determine the risks, their frequency and their consequences. Choose your appetite to take risk informed by this assessment and the cost and outcomes of mitigation. We mitigate or accept risks driven by the risk appetite. This process is straight forward in organisations where the focus is scaling a proven process or business model. Risks and their mitigants are reasonably well understood. 

We often focus on the compliance, policies and processes as risk management. They are simply the mitigation, an outcome of what should be a considered decision of what risks to take and which risks to avoid. Many businesses go wrong when they forget to set a risk appetite and seek to mitigate all risk. We have seen organisations where risk appetite declines and processes are tightened with every bad outcome. 

Responsive Risk Management

Responsive Organisations approach risk with the same fundamentally commercial logic. However they tackle the risk assessment and mitigation in a more adaptive and systemic way. 

If the risks of activity are unclear, hard to assess or changing quickly more dynamic risk management will be required. We step out of the domain of setting a fixed policy or process and move into learning in a distributed way. We apply the same process but we learn and mitigate risk using other methods. 

Better understanding by leveraging the insights of entire network of the organisation and its stakeholders is a risk mitigation strategy. So is a continuous process of experimentation to ensure losses are small until greater confidence is achieved. Autonomy shifts the locus of accountability closer to every day risk decisions and accelerates the responsiveness to bad outcomes. Most importantly of all motivating people through purpose and a focus on outcomes mitigates the incentive mismatches which create many risks for traditional organisations. 

The best risk management strategy is responsible, engaged and responsive people. People help drive the adaptation and response to a changing environment of risks. Responsive Organisations manage risk using this distributed capability to adapt.

Do You Really Need That New Intranet?

Posted on by simongterry in Collaboration, future of work

Intranet projects are still popular these days. There is great new technology platforms & many new features available. Internet designs have moved on a lot so your old intranet is starting to look a little tired. Now your employees have new devices so your intranet needs to be mobile first and responsive. Think of the opportunities for new branding, a new name, better search and a refresh of all the content. Finally the intranet could be at the heart of the knowledge management and collaboration in the organisation. Delivering a new intranet is a signature career achievement.

Stop. Are you sure you need that new intranet?

New intranets don’t come cheap. Even after the technology solutions is acquired, the expenditure has only just begun. All that wonderful new design is going to cost money. You will need personas, card sorts and then branding advice. Getting the information architecture right can make all the difference so you will need a lot of time spent on the taxonomy of content, hierarchies of information, businesses and users. Glossaries and other reference materials will need to be reviewed and updated. Search will need to be tuned to make sure that it delivers the right options. All your existing content will need to be reviewed to fit into the new design. Throw in a policy and product information refresh and the costs and time skyrocket. Then there is the maintenance costs of all that content. Add in personalisation, collaboration and social features and the work never ends.

What is the Intranet really for?

To senior managers, an employee communications or HR team, an intranet is a showcase of the organisation, its business strategy and its knowledge. It is the one source of truth. It is the hub of collaboration and a critical place to share messages with all employees. This perception can create a whole lot of politics that disrupts the effectiveness of your new intranet. People become focused about the need to control the design and the content. User focus is swapped for the desire to meet the needs of the hierarchy. That control has real consequences when it disengages users. Worse still it can force one template on everyone and make everyone into ‘content providers’. The costs of this control are in content that gets out of date and grey market sites that spring up to break the shackles.  Soon the efforts to get around the intranet are drawing investment, effort and attention away from the platform. Confusion escalates and the intranet site is on its way back to being a stale reservoir of knowledge.

To an employee an intranet is where all the links in corporate distribution emails go. Usually the intranet is the last place they go to look when they and their colleagues don’t have the answer to hand and local searches have turned up no relevant ideas. Often the intranet is the place where knowledge is tied up in clunky processes & policy that don’t reflect their day job. Everything is anonymous. The context and authority that comes from human connection is lost. An employee does not care about single sources of truth or showcases of corporate messages. They care about findability and usefulness. Nobody browses an intranet willingly.

I know many organisations who have built elegant product sites on their intranet to explain all the features, process and policy relating to their products. Too often they discover that their teams use the customer facing website for product information. The structure of customer facing product information is usually better suited to employee’s roles in explaining that information to customers. It is indexed for Google search. Legal requirements ensure that product teams keep the external information that matters up to date. Also the employee can send the customer a link if they need to explain lots of detail. The pretty intranet is a showcase but the internet is the workhorse. How much of your intranet site could you do away with by directing employees to external sites?

Are the behaviours going to change?

In our work, we create value through our actions. If the behaviours aren’t going to change, then don’t change the intranet.  Changing only the technology alone, will foster only cost and confusion.

If you do want to get better at collaboration, communication and knowledge management, start with a clear understanding of the value to the organisation and the value to the user. Look for ways to achieve your goals that involved changed behaviours and community, not technology. When you are clear on the value of changed behaviours, you will be clearer on what your technology needs to look like to support that work. Now you won’t be forcing an intranet as a solution and you will be able to look at the breadth of options from social collaboration, to working out loud more, to using external internet sites and other tools of helping employees to find what matters most to help them do their job.

You will also have built a case for the whole organisation to align to working in new and better ways.