Innovation, Collaboration, Learning & Leadership
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:
Vision is a word that abused a lot in leadership. Creating a shared vision is very different to imposing a vision. Most importantly of all the vision in a group needs to be practical, backed by execution and kept alive as circumstances change. Visions aren’t films that play and are done. They evolve over years.
The Fleeting Feeble Vision
Vision without execution is hallucination
Leadership proverb
Leadership books and leadership thought leaders rave about vision. Leaders must have vision, preferably big vision. It is what they bring to the team. The vision a leader brings is what unites a team in common purpose to achieve extraordinary performance. All of which is nonsense.
Most visions handed down on high are fleeting and feeble. They don’t make sense because the team that receives them after the executive offsite lacks the context to make sense of the vision. Follow through and execution on such pronouncements are weak. Many are little more than the collective sticky note hallucinations of executives overfed, over caffeinated, and fired up on Mentos.
A vision is not inspiring words, or a pretty picture of the future, or even some fancy graphic recording of a road off to a summit capped with a flag. A vision is a meaningful end point that each individual in a team can embrace and use to guide their work towards a shared goal. A vision needs to endure longer than the post offsite debrief or this next 90 day plan. There’s no excellence in performance when the team is confused by an ever shifting set of goals and big words handed down and never implemented.
A Shared Vision of the Possible
If I have seen further, it is because I stood on the shoulders of giants
Isaac Newton
So who are the giants? In Newton’s case, it was those he learned from, his predecessors, teachers and peers. The giants in any organisational vision are not the visionaries in the executive leadership offsite. The giants whose shoulders are so essential to any truly great achievement are the team doing the work. A meaningful vision is one that a team creates and sustains for themselves of where they want to go together. Members of the team can help facilitate that process but they cannot just hand it over.
A vision like this won’t necessarily be as elegant or high flying as the one from a fancy consultant but it will be grounded in the practical experinece of the team, their understanding of what is possible and be built with an eye to implementation and the issues for stakeholders. Powerpoint slides are great for presentations but they are terrible roadmaps for a business to execute on. Teams who share a vision don’t talk in Powerpoint. They understand the stories of what the future looks like and the milestones that come on the road there.
Most importantly this practical vision of a shared future is one that recognises that visions aren’t announceable. Having visions is easy. Organisations are full of empty and abandoned visions. Just open any filing cabinet. Bringing them to life is a whole other thing. They aren’t done when the strategy session ends.
Truly great and empowering visions take time and effort and grit and setbacks. Truly great visions are an endlessly iterative experience across the team as people learn and evolve and see what is possible next. Most overnight successes are an outcome of a nearly decade of work to construct that vision within a team and to fight like hell to bring it to life.
So the next time someone claiming to be a leader offers you a vision offer to work with them to create a shared one with your peers. You will be the one in that process doing the work of leadership
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.
Wishing all the readers of this blog seasons greetings and best wishes for 2020. Thank you for continuing to follow along.
I have had a regular practice on reflecting on the year of work at the end of each year. That reflection is also an opportunity to set some goals for the year ahead. I missed last year’s opportunity in the rush. Here is this year’s reflection and some plans for 2020.
Reflections on The Year that Was
Innovation is Work. Hard Work.
Across a number of work, board and other advisory roles this year I have been working on innovation in its many forms. None of it has been easy. All of it has been hard work with ups and downs, setbacks and real need for persistence. Much of it reflects the adage that ‘most overnight successes are a decade’s work.’
Above all, this year has reiterated the need to be clear on the problems that innovation is seeking to solve. Those problems shouldn’t be assumptions. They should come from listing and engaging the market and also from ongoing testing in the market. The path to success is not paved by genius or talent. The path to success is hard work, persistence and iteration.
Persistence includes the need to push through in face of failure. Let the doubters and the critics have their say, but focus, set goals and keep pushing for change.
Transformation isn’t the work of a Hero. It is a Community effort
We often see transformation expressed as the work of a hero (my choice of gendered language is deliberate). Transformation is the opposite of an individual effort. Transformation is the work of a community coming together to scale change and to build something new that leverages their collective talents and fulfils their collective potential. That work must include everyone and leverage their many diverse contributions.
You can never forget that your work exists in, for and depends on a community. I had doubts this year on whether another International Working Out Loud week was needed. However, the response of the global WOL community to taking the inspiration of a WOLWeek and making it their own showed me that I was wrong. Sometimes you don’t understand the value of your own work until you see it in the community context.
The organisational design challenge at present is scaling change. We are iterating towards new solutions that leverage accountability, transparency and alignment to accelerate adaptation. Encouraging and enabling communities to come together to lead their own transformation in relation to the opportunities they see and the talents that they have. The skills of community management and agile change will be critical in the decade to come.
Collaboration
Collaboration matters more than ever to the strategy and success of organisations. All organisations need to be leveraging the collective potential of their people to create new value.
More effective and more valuable collaboration is the key ingredient in organisations addressing their challenges with speed and effectiveness. I recently posted an overview of my learnings from the last decade of collaboration. If I would add anything to those insights, it is the importance of taking a relationship view over a transactional one and keeping clear the differences between chat, conversation and collaboration which is more important with the rise of new work apps.
Earlier this year, I shared some insights into the drivers of value. Keeping value at the centre of our work remains key.
Personal Leadership
The pressures of the work this year made it clearer to me that personal leadership is a key part of success in the modern era of work. The pressures will not grow less. We need to make choices and take action on our work and our lives to give ourselves back control. Those choices most importantly involve saying no and setting boundaries.
Those boundaries include setting digital boundaries in an era where there are more addictive demands on our attention. Unplugging, meeting face to face, finding time to read, converse and relax became ever so important in 2019. Trust and understanding come from shared context and deep relationships and that take time, effort and engagement. Rapid digital conversation can give us chat, but conversation and collaboration require us to give and to invest more.
The Work Ahead in 2020
I sat down on Monday night and mapped my 2020 workload. 2020 promises to be a year that is busy with activity, projects, deliverables, learning and commitments. Across my work, consulting, advisory and board roles, I will be stepping up to the next level of activity.
At the same time I am also planning to take on some additional creative challenges and set some boundaries so there will be great demand for creative solutions and a real continuing to learn the lessons of mindful choices, personal purpose and productivity. Busy isn’t an answer or an excuse. Busy is a challenge we must all beat. I will be stretched in the year ahead.
I will continue to focus throughout the year on the future of work, the power of community and accelerating the value of collaboration. As noted above, this is core capability to underpin all of the activity and opportunity ahead. Excitingly, we are increasingly seeing organisations all around the world focus on the potential of collaboration and working out loud. Stay tuned as I will share the lessons of this work on this blog.
Reviewing my 2017 reflections and the update for 2018, the elements highlighted still hold as areas of work. In 2020 two additional areas, seem urgently in need of work: enabling the continuity of a functional civil society in a global economy going through transformative change and addressing our sustainable future. In 2020, two challenges will be on the forefront of the work that I do:
Moving to a more digital organisation is about choosing the ways of working that will fulfil your strategy. As tempting as it may seem, there’s little to be gained copying the structures or models you have found elsewhere.
On Friday, I had a conversation with leading HR professionals about their organisations transformation towards more digital ways of working. The conversation was focused on what steps HR professionals can take to help assist this transformation. A key first step was to understand what we meant by a more digital organisation. Digital maturity is an ongoing process.
What are your goals?
Different organisations are competing in different markets and facing a wide range of challenges and opportunities. Becoming a more digital organisation can mean a lot of things: radically transforming to digital only, becoming digital first, adopting services approaches, improving customer focus, speed and agility or even just managing a digital channel team more effectively.
The goals of any change should be to help accelerate or make more effective the organisations creation of value towards its strategic goals. Each organisation has its own strategy and goals.
What does digital mean to you?
An outcome of that strategy will be where the organisation sees digital ways of working:
The model chosen will shape any changes to ways of working.
What are the dimensions of change?
Structure is the most obvious lever that HR can pull to make change in organisations. The temptation is to see the change to digital ways of working as a decision about structure.
While structure may be important for other reasons, particularly signalling changes in power or other elements of culture, there are a wide range of other dimensions that need to be considered in any change to digital organisation models. These dimensions commonly include:
What’s the best model? Your Own
Many HR teams see the transformation to new digital ways of working as finding a different model that has been successful in an organisation and copying that. The broken photocopier model doesn’t work because both:
Instead of moving from model A to a totally distinct model B. The challenge for HR teams is to start to iterate from model A to model A1.
HR must start to think digital in its ways of working too. HR can run a series of agile experiments to loosen the degrees of freedom on the dimensions above in pursuit of the organisation’s goals. Small iterative steps will deliver a new model that is consistent with the organisations purpose, allows employees to have agency in the changes and evolves the culture in constructive ways. The outcome of the successful experiments will build the organisations own future model.
For over five years, I have been talking about the potential for organisations to create value everyday using collaboration. Through the Value Maturity Model, and its application in the Collaboration Value Canvas, I have discussed repeatedly the importance of an understanding of value to users and to the organisation.
Until now, I have left the definition of value entirely to the imaginations of readers. One reason for resisting defining value was to avoid an immediate reduction of value to an ROI calculation, which is both notoriously ambiguous and beside the point. The role of value in this discussion is not to justify investment accounting. The role of value is to shape the adoption actions, the use cases and the norms of the community that an organisation is seeking to create. The second reason for my reluctance is that value means something different to almost every organisation at every time. How an organisation and its people need to create additional value is highly dependent on their context.
In this post, I want to share my key drivers of value creation, which I find useful tools for anyone seeking to guide collaboration adoption in a wide range of contexts. Ability to leverage the drivers of collaboration will help you to identify the opportunities for value creation from collaboration, shape use cases and communicate to individual users about value in a simple way. To explain the path to these drivers, we must talk about what value and break it down to everyday topics of business conversation.
Understanding What We Mean by Value
Value is in economics is a measure of the benefit to be gained from any activity. Vibrant and sustainable organisations create a surplus of value, using their resources in a strategic way to create more benefits than the value of their intial resources. Value add is the difference between the benefits generated and the resources consumed. The goal of most strategy is to sustain and increase the value added by an organisation.
At an individual level employees also want to experience purpose and meaning in their work. They want to deliver greater benefits to themselves and others than simply the time value of their work.
Value can be monetary but it can also come in wider non-economic forms. Therefore as we think about value for individuals and organisations we need to keep in mind:
If we break down how both economic value add is created and non-economic value we will find some common drivers. If you are short of time or not interested in the background to my approach, you can skip to the answer in the section entitled Four Drivers of Value Creation below.
Economic Value Added
Economic value add can be defined for an organisation as the excess of the net operating profit after tax of an organisation over its cost of capital. An organisation deploys financial capital in its operating activities, that capital has a cost and the activities need to generate more operating profit to be sustaining.
A value driver tree enables us to break these concepts down to more everyday topics of business strategy, activity and conversation in green in the table below. Sales, Cost of Sales, Other Organisational Costs, investment in assets and working capital are key elements of how much economic value added a business creates. If the adoption activities in your organisation are not changing these sources of value in some way, then they are unlikely to be creating economic value, especially after the cost of adoption is taken into account.
Non Economic Value
We can similarly breakdown some major categories of non-economic value, such as Social, Environmental, Governance and Generational value considerations. Because non-economic value is ‘in the eye of the beholder’ to some extent, this list is inevitably a partial one. There are likely more categories that are omitted, such is the richness of human life as expressed by individuals in organisational communities.
Economists will argue that some or all of these can be captured in or flow through to economic value, but the average person sees many of these sources of value as richer for lacking a direct monetary equation. Many of the sources of value in green are key elements of creating an organisation or living a life that is rich in human potential.
The green categories of non-economic value listed below are those most commonly discussed in any project of adoption of collaboration. These may be the starting points for any project. Non-economic value add is usually critical in the ultimate user and organisation success of any collaboration project. There is however a danger if this value is defined only in terms of these Capitalised nouns and they are not translated into specific measures of success and intiatives that users and the organisation can embrace. Projects that set out after the mystery of ‘Culture’ or ‘Engagement’ without further support or without considering other categories of value, especially economic value, will likely fail because users rightly question their point.
The Four Sources of Collaboration Value
At the beginning of my career in financial services we had a simple mental model, derived from the Cohen Brown Sales framework, of how we delivered value to customers from the vast array of products and services that a large diversified financial services organisation offered in banking and wealth management. That model was “Save Money, Make Money, Save Time or Protect Money”. Reducing the complexity to these four options guided bankers and other advisors through a great deal of complexity.
As similar guiding structure can be used for value creation generally. When we look at how collaboration can deliver value to each of the green elements of value in both economic and non-economic value we find that value is created by four key drivers. In simplest terms those drivers are:
As you can see in the tables above, I have highlighted in amber, how each of these drivers commonly creates value for the elements of value in driver. For example costs and working capital can create value if they are used more effectively or with greater velocity.
Here’s a little more detail on what these drivers each mean in organisational terms:
One of the advantages of framing adoption conversations in these terms, is that it helps make the value of activities clear to users and senior leaders in simple terms. The key benefits that they are likely to see are:
We Create Value Because We Are Human
If we are to make work more human and more rewarding through shared leverage of human potential in collaboration, then these key drivers should guide our projects and guide our value conversations with stakeholders. We should set our metrics and our use cases around these drivers so that we have the widest impact on value creation. If we need to increase value creation we can come back to these drivers to search for a way forward for users and the organisation.
Every organisation and every user needs to define the value of collaboration to see effective adoption. Understanding value is critical for anyone seeking to accelerate adoption of collaboration in organisations. The four drivers of value can help us to keep conversations and the actions focused on how collaboration can have its greatest impact on value.
Appendix: Recapping All Value Creation Together
When an entrepreneur dreams up a new product opportunity and launches their start-up, they are surrounded with advice on the steps to follow:
While these steps are relevant and useful, they can create an unduly linear view of the path to success.
Discussing start-up and new product success in this way creates the impression that the path to market looks a little like this:
A relatively direct relationship between product and market might work for some simple product solutions, particularly those involved in offering a new product direct to consumers. However, lean start-up has reminded us that success takes loops of learning and iteration to find that match between product and market.
When you start to work on more complex solutions that involve systemic change or large changes in buyer behaviour, buyers can acknowledge the need and the value of the solution but still offer resistance. These buyers cannot simply buy the product. They must also decide to embrace disruptive change to long established ways of working. Disruptive business-to-business products require changes to systems, processes or jobs and have other implications for their target customers. Strong institutional forces will exist that are opposed to change. To realise the benefits, the customer needs to be prepared for a wider and more significant change.
The Berkana Institute has a theory of change in large scale systems highlighting resistance will prevent straight-line adoption of new change. If the change threatens the current way things work, you won’t get direct adoption. Change under this approach may happen when the current system declines, giving way to a better system that will replace it. That new, better system is developed outside the current system as a small group of innovators name the need for change, connect in networks, nourish the new change and bring it forward as a new approach.
The Berkana Two Loops model of change gives us a new way to look at the path for disruptive products that bring about major changes in organisational systems. If we consider the introduction of cloud computing technologies as the introduction of an alternative systemic approach to technology, we can map it against this model.
This approach of creating a new market for a new solution is why we commonly see disruptive technologies suddenly race into prominence. They have been long fostered by the communities of early innovators and have built the networks of partners, ecosystems and systems to propel rapid growth. They are examples of ‘seven-year overnight successes’.
At LanternPay, we have seen this scenario playing out. We have had strong support from our work with innovative early customers in plan management in the NDIS and in government payments with the Transport Accident Commission of Victoria and Lifetime Support Authority of South Australia. These relationships have helped us to develop strong growth in provider partnerships. Importantly, we have focused all along on the potential of an ecosystem of relationships to accelerate innovative change well beyond payments in our target systems of health care, aged care and disability. This approach has delivered us a rapidly growing pipeline of new payer relationships, a growing suite of integrations and a product roadmap across all our target markets. Each element helps make the change decision for a provider or a payer that much easier to make.
Simon Terry is consultant, speaker and start-up advisor who focuses on developing the strategy, leadership and collaboration to deliver complex innovation in organisations. He also puts these skills into practice delivering growth strategy for LanternPay, a claim payment platform for health care, aged care, disability and government payments.
As the end of November approaches, that time has come again when we must consider whether we have the right initiatives in place for ourselves and our organisations as we get ready for 2017. How are you transforming the capabilities and work practices in your organisation to make sure that your teams are more effective in their work?
The way we work is fundamentally changing under the influence of five main drivers:
We have already seen great change in digital transformation.
Further dramatic changes in the nature of work are here but ‘not yet widely distributed’ to borrow the phrase of William Gibson..
With these pressures on the way we work, every business should have a focus on how it is changing the way its people work and the practices that will support ongoing transformation of work. Here are my recommendations on what work you should have on your backlog for the new year:
These five are in place in your organisation today. However, they may not be well understood, managed or serving your purpose. As you look to 2017 it is always worthwhile to ensure that the foundations are sound and well aligned.
Purpose: Be clear on your personal purpose. Look for that purpose in the work you do. Clarify the shared purpose in your organisation. Don’t impose a purpose designed around the leadership table. Discover the purpose through the stories and the work that bring your organisation together.
Strategic Value: What value are you trying to create to fulfil your purpose? What kinds of value matter most to your stakeholders? When do they know you are creating value? What measures tell you that you are achieving your goals?
Networks: To compete in the network era, your organisation must be networked. How are you bringing people together to connect, to share, to solve problems and to respond to the networks around your organisation? The technology matters less than the connection, the behaviours and the shared purpose. Are you clear on the strategic value of your communities, are they well supported with sponsorship, investment and community management so as to accelerate their value creation?
Culture: Move beyond words on a poster. Move beyond generic platitudes. Move beyond an agglomeration of individual team cultures. What specific values are shared across your organisation? Why do these help fulfil your purpose? How do those values translate to expectations about behaviours in and across your teams? Is the culture in your organisation effective for your purpose and the value you are seeking to create? How do you personal role model the behaviours you expect from others?
Employee Experience: Are you working somewhere that values the employee experience and is adapting it to changing work and changing roles in the organisation? How have you aligned your employee experience to your desired customer experience? Does your workplace create rich value for employees and enable them to express their potential in fulfilment of purpose? Does your employee experience work as well for the one-hour temporary contract worker as the long term employee? Does it work equally well for all levels of the hierarchy and all corners of your network?
These four personal practices are enablers of the future of work. They enable an individual employee to deliver greater value in their work by responding to the opportunities and information in their environment. Agile and adaptive they empower employees to continuously improve and innovate.
Working Out Loud: Sharing work in progress in a purposeful way with relevant communities will accelerate learning, sharing and feedback cycles. Start working out loud now.
Personal Knowledge Management: Learn how to turn the personal information flood into effective sense making, learning and sharing. A critical skill to make sense of complexity and to leverage networks for learning.
Adaptive Leadership: Enabling the rebel and the change agent to lead more effectively in any system. Improving understanding, influence and the increasing the breadth of leadership techniques to create collective change in any system.
Experimentation: Move beyond the limits of your expertise. Learn by doing. Resolve uncertainty through action. Shorten cycles of decision making and feedback to increase personal effectiveness.
Organisations are made up individuals. These four practices of organisational effectiveness scale and accelerate the personal practices through a focus on design of systems for connection, learning and adaptation.
Open Collaborative Management: Middle managers are often those who find a change to digital ways of working most threatening and disrupting. Open up the work of management. Move management from planning, allocation and control to facilitation, alignment and coaching. Shorten cycles and improve the performance value of feedback. Foster the role of managers as network navigators and brokers. Management can be a critical point of leverage in achieving more open, more collaborative and more effective work.
Scalable Capability Development: Turn each employee’s learning into a contribution to scalable system for delivering strategic value. Create Big Learning systems that scale learning around strategic capabilities for the organisation’s success. Coordinate your learning agenda as an agile change program. Curate the capability building of your teams, leveraging learning from peer communities and leverage social learning to bring 70:20:10 and a performance-oriented approach to learning to life at scale and in the workplace.
Effective Networked Organisations: Take advantage of the networks in and around your organisation to rethink your business model and organisational design choices. Break the centralised/decentralised binary and move beyond hierarchy. Enable autonomy, foster alignment and improve effectiveness for purpose. Skill your teams to achieve effectiveness in the wirearchy. You don’t need to purchase a new management system. You need to adapt your approach to managing knowledge, trust, credibility and results to your purpose, culture and community.
Agile Innovation & Change: Adapt to the changing needs of the environment and stakeholders to deliver new value. Accelerate innovation and change through new approaches and by putting in place the systemic support for employee-led innovation, change and transformation to a more responsive organisation.
Simon Terry provides consulting, advice, speaking and thought leadership to global clients through his own consulting practice, and as a Charter Member of Change Agents Worldwide, a network of progressive and passionate professionals, specializing in Future of Work technologies and practices. The focus of Simon’s practice is assisting organizations to transform innovation, collaboration, learning and leadership.