Innovation, Collaboration, Learning & Leadership
Your organisation already is a network.
Your organisation already is a community.
You have a purpose and work.
You work together.
You have conversations.
You connect, share, solve and innovate.
You are already there.
Now how can you do better?
I stood at the traffic lights this morning beside a toddler in a pram. As the gathered adults stared blankly ahead absorbed in their thoughts or their phones, the toddler intently studied the traffic passing. Every car and truck got intense focus. The toddler was trying to learn something about its strange loud and colourful new world. The adults were elsewhere.
If you want to start small and start now, you need to pay attention to the little things. Small problems, small opportunities, small conversations and small moods all need to be noticed and acted on.
Here’s a question: do you know the shoe colour of the five people nearest you? Shoe colour is not that important but the act of paying better attention is. Paying better attention leads to other insights. For example, if all five are wearing black shoes, perhaps you might want to move somewhere more diverse.
Attention is a sign of respect. Attention is the foundation of learning. Attention drives the opportunity to change.
What small things can you notice today that can lead to a small action of change?
In the spirit of paying better attention, RU OK Day is 11 September. Find out more about how a little attention and a little conversation can make a difference at https://www.ruok.org.au
Each journey of a thousand miles, begins with a single step – Lao Tsu
If you have time to email, then you have time to work out loud. Find one email to reply out loud instead. Repeat.
If you have time to talk, then you have time to lead. Find one person to influence. Repeat.
If you have time to do, then you have time to experiment. Find one hypothesis to test in action. Repeat.
If you have time for a meeting, then you have time to start a movement. Find a group to engage in a purpose and action. Repeat
If you have time for a coffee, then you have time to learn. Find one moment to reflect on how to do better. Repeat.
If you have time to fix, then you have time to make change. Find one way to make the system better. Repeat.
Small scale changes accumulate given the time. Small interactions reinforce change and build community.
You have the time and the work. Start now. Start small. Repeat.
Be stressed when it matters.
I’m late. Fog has closed in on my destination and the plane won’t take off for a few hours. I hate being late because I believe timeliness is a sign of respect. Timeliness contributes to better productivity of all.
I hate being late but now I am not stressed about the long delay.
Constructive stress
I feel stress about being late up until I begin my journey. That is constructive stress. Stress makes sure I am doing all I can to start on time. Good stress is a motivator to make change, to act and to get going.
Pointless stress
However, once I begin a journey I know it will take the time it takes, especially if it involves planes, trains or automobiles beyond my control. Sitting at an airport waiting for a flight, stress is not a constructive experience. Nothing I can do will change how soon I arrive. Once I mitigate the consequences of my lateness, I can rest in peace. For the next few hours I will get some work done instead of worrying about travel.
Take control
Bearing stress you can do nothing about is terrible for your health. It is deviating for motivation and performance too. If you experience this, change your circumstances, mindset or find a way to do something constructive.
Remember stress is a consequence of your own thoughts. You are anticipating future bad outcomes. Choose your stress wisely. Be stressed when it matters to your ability to act.
In working with organisations who are implementing enterprise social networking I often hear the same kind of complaint: ‘we wanted to use our network to [insert use case], but that has failed here. How do we fix it?’
One of the dangers of a use case approach is that it engenders a transactional mindset. There is a big difference in a human interaction that is framed to ‘get information’ vs one that is framed to ‘ask politely, learn and acknowledge help’. Often the failed use cases are where the network participant are taking a transactional mindset and not considering the needs of the other person involved. Without interactions that benefit all participants the community, the benefits of the use cases fall away.
A network has transactions. Communities have human interactions. Community creates greater business value. A community has interactions that build long term relationships of trust, learning and collaboration. That’s far more valuable and much more human.
Hierarchy likes order. Networks manage complexity.
Hierarchy walks in an orderly procession. Networks hustle.
Hierarchy wants projects to go from a through to z. Networks experiment across the alphabet.
Hierarchy wants a clean status. Networks solve for problems & mess.
Hierarchy reinforces status. Networks value results
Hierarchy manages stocks. Networks manage flows.
Hierarchy likes secrets. Networks share.
Hierarchy approves, authorises and allocates. Networks learn, enable and do
You can wait for your spot in the orderly procession. However the orderly procession might never reach you or might pass you by blind to your talents to walk in lockstep.
Join the network of doers instead.
Stuck at the lights next to this car insurance billboard I had occasion to read the fine print. The fine print, which is illegible in the photo, explained:
Lawyers will have demanded these disclaimers to make the messages safe and to rule out risk. No marketer ever wanted a disclaimer on an ad. As a result of this legally required list of disclaimers the proposition of the billboard is solidly undermined, if anyone ever reads them. No wonder the print is hard to read from a distance.
Don’t Rely on Fine Print in Leadership
Noble intentions in leadership are often undermined by the safety of fine print. Some leaders communicate with hidden disclaimers:
Like the ad above, these disclaimers undermine if not subvert the message of the leader. Many of these leaders genuinely mean these statements when they are made. Their intentions and desire to change are noble. For others, these are just the kinds of statements that leaders make. They are leadership platitudes.
However change takes more than the safety of good intentions or platitudes. Change needs people to stick out the hard times. Leaders who opt for disclaimers take the safe route. Often, they just failed to think their comments through and were surprised by the hard decisions that they entail. By failing to reconcile their statements with likely eventualities or their own personal reactions when particular situations arise, they end up escaping through the silent disclaimer when things get tough.
Leaders need to understand that their public statements are seen by their teams as commitments. There is no division of ‘core and non-core’ promises. These are not indications of present intent subject to disclaimers. They are commitments to other people who need to rely on them to manage their uncertainty, trust & support to go through change. With this focus, it pays to think through the commitments and to accept that delivering against those commitments made will be hard and involve challenges.
If you are going to say it, be prepared to back it up. Leadership is hard work and means taking risk. Leave the safety of disclaimers to the lawyers.
Rationing of resources through budgeting processes impedes organisations ability to respond to disruption. Is it time to become a Responsive Organisation instead?
Reading Austin Kleon’s Show Your Work for insight into working out loud, I came across the concept of a scenius coined by Brian Eno. The idea of a scenius is that great talents arise from scenes that foster them. Great talent arises from interactions in an ecology of talent.
What really happened was that there was sometimes very fertile scenes involving lots and lots of people – some of them artists, some of them collectors, some of them curators, thinkers, theorists, people who were fashionable and knew what the hip things were – all sorts of people who created a kind of ecology of talent. And out of that ecology arose some wonderful work. – Brian Eno
There isn’t a War for Talent
Talent isn’t oil. We haven’t yet reached peak talent. There is plenty of untapped wells of talent left.
The concept of a War for Talent has motivated organisational HR departments and executives ever since a McKinsey Quarterly article coined the phrase in 1998. The article related to changing demographics of people entering the workforce that lasts to 2015.
McKinsey’s original war has almost run its race (& even been made more redundant by the forces of a changing economy). We might have arguments about new Wars for Talent now, but the competitive and hoarding nature of the concept has inspired managers ever since. Why wouldn’t you want to hoard the largest stock of talent? Why wouldn’t you want to win in the competition for a scarce resource?
The War for Talent also had another unintended consequence in organisations. Because acquisition was easy to measure, it focused organisations on the battle for talent external to the organisation. Internal talent was often inadvertently devalued in comparison to the battle to win new talent. Internal talent was rated on potential and regularly decimated. The focus on those rated high potential talent was retention. For the middle range there was little focus on deployment, development or growth in potential.
The scenius idea highlights why so many organisations that have pursued a stock oriented approach to talent have discovered that it fails to deliver. Talent is not a stock to be possessed. It is a flow that grows through connection, purposeful work and community.
Talent needs a Community
Organisations that have tried to hoard talented people generally find that their talent decays or departs quickly. The half-life of a stock hoarded talent is short.
The surest way to lose talented people is to disconnect them from inspirations, deprive them of purpose and underemploy their skills and expertise. The hoarding mindset encouraged organisations to do exactly this. Organisations wanted to disconnect their talent from others who might poach them. They wanted to have more talent than they needed ‘just in case’ and sought to deploy talented people in roles that weren’t stretching them to have a pipeline of future talent ready.
In contrast, a community of talented people grows in number and skills. Talented people grow through the interactions in a scenius, their networks or other learning communities. They grow by reaching out to the example of others, by stretching the use of their skills and by learning against great challenges, not by sitting on a shelf waiting to be deployed.
Once you see the flow of network interactions within which talented people operate it becomes clearer that all the talent need not be inside your organisation. Organisations need to foster value in their talented people by purposefully networking your organisation.
Organisations need to recognise that talent will be active participants in the flow of knowledge and learning experiences outside the organisation too. All employees should be encouraged to reach out into networks because it develops the talent of everyone in the organisation and gives your organisation greater access to the real strategic benefit of those networks.
Talents grow when they are deployed against challenges. Make sure your people have the opportunity to realise their potential in the flow of interactions around them. Give all your employees the chance to grow and leverage their talents in networks.
Success = (Do Next Purposeful Action + Learn + Do Better) x Repeat Often