Category: Uncategorized

The One Success Secret to Social Collaboration in the Future of Work

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

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There is a lot of advice out there for organisations trying to achieve success in social collaboration and new ways of working. The future of work is very popular now so there is a lot of effort to sell the newness, the complexity and its special nature. Much of that advice makes efforts at social collaboration sound difficult to achieve or alien, if you are working today in a traditional organisation.

Despite all that discussion, there is one practice that helps make initiatives in social collaboration successful and increases the value that is created in the future of work. That practice is simply:

Treat it as just work

We work collaboratively every day

Every day people collaborate at work. Mostly they don’t call it collaboration. Instead, it is seen as having a conversation, sending an email, persuading someone, getting advice, getting help or working together on a task or project.

Social collaboration extends the opportunities of who can engage in this collaboration. Social collaboration tools enable this kind of work to be done with more people, faster and with better ability to leverage the knowledge created. If social collaboration tools don’t make it easier or better to do this kind of work, then users won’t and shouldn’t use them.

Treating social collaboration as a special activity distinct from work confuses people. They debate when they should use this special collaboration. They question the value of collaboration. They can’t see the point. And each time they go back to their work and start collaborating with others again.

Work is why we share information

Many people can immediately see the value of social collaboration as a way to share information. Your enterprise social network looks like Facebook. Your corporate blogs look like the ones in the public domain. Your wikis and knowledge management systems may even be familiar too.

However, this familiarity makes people uncomfortable at work. Clearly we don’t usually share the same information at work as we do in Facebook.  Many people ask: What should I share? What do I have that is worthwhile to share? What will happen if I share the wrong thing?

However in any organisation the best reason to share information is to work. People share information to do work together and to create value. Connecting with work colleagues, working out loud, solving work problems collaboratively and innovating with others are the reasons we share information at work.

Work isn’t special

Treating social collaboration as work addresses other issues that organisations face as they move into the future of work.

You have the policies, processes or campaigns to do your work. You don’t need special approaches to start social collaboration. Your normal work rules and processes should cover your social collaboration too, including rules on privacy & confidentiality, behaviours and performance processes.  If these approaches break, constrain or prevent new forms of social collaboration, there is a good chance they don’t work for other forms of collaborative work and should be changed. Don’t create special rules.

Do you gamify your daily work processes? If you don’t gamify everyday work, don’t gamify engagement with a social platform. Remember it is the work that creates the value, not the adoption. Don’t confuse the tool with the result.

Don’t start with special things. Start by helping your people to do their work better. If your organisation has never ever sought any input to its product development processes, doing a special product ideation session can be valuable, but it is a terrible way to start a social collaboration journey (especially if you fail to follow through on the ideas). You don’t want people building an idea that a social collaboration tool as something for special, rare & unique events. You want people realising its potential to do work and solve work problems each day.

Treating social collaboration as work also addresses why senior executives and other leaders should participate. This is not a special domain. This is where the work gets done. If you want to lead, lead here too. 

Work Creates Value

Most importantly, considering social collaboration as work drives our attention to the question of the value that the work adds.  When we work, we know we need to work more efficiently and find ways to make our work add value. That is part of the deal with work.

Focusing on social collaboration as work also reminds us that we should work to realise our strategy as an organisation. The collaboration must realise the organisation’s goals and the goals of the individuals who need to work.  Collaboration for its own sake is a waste.

Start Working to Work Better.

Social collaboration is the same. We shouldn’t focus on the tools. We should focus on the value of the work we do and how we can do better.

If you want to create value from social collaboration and new ways of working, start by treating it as work. Then ask people to improve their work. Experiment and make changes to make work more productive and effective each day. You will need to change processes, policies and organisational structures over time, but you will be guided by the collaboration of your people. That is the way to realise the human potential in your organisation.

The journey won’t be easy. There will be setbacks and lessons to be learned. People will need to learn new ways and adapt to change but an engaged group of people working together will create greater value for your organisation over time.  

That sounds just like work too.

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The Connect>Share>Solve>Innovate maturity model assists organisations to accelerate the value of the work their people do in social collaboration tools in practical ways.  Accelerating the progress of collaborative work from Connection to Innovation significantly increases the returns to individuals and the organisation from new ways of work.  Importantly it also engages people in shaping the future of work in their organisation. If you would like to learn more, please get in touch.

Leaders and their Tools

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

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Leadership is the technology of realising human potential. In practice, leaders need to use different tools in different contexts. The use of a new tool does not change who they are.

Many leaders use the same approaches to leadership in every context. They either call it a best practice or their best style. They define themselves by their leadership tools. These leaders repeat phrases to themselves like ‘I am collaborative’, “I create accountability’, ‘I am powerful’, or ‘I am inspiring’. These phrases become constraints on their freedom of action. When the situation demands a different style of leadership, they find it hard to work against their self-created identity. These leaders have confused the tool with the result.

Leadership depends on context. The needs of others are different in every situation. Leaders need to adapt their styles to the needs of their situation and their people if they are to realise the potential of others. That means leaders need to choose different tools and have different conversations.  If it is time to demonstrate power, then a leader must demonstrate power regardless of their natural style. Importantly, they still choose the values that they show in their use of power.

The best leaders have a dynamic toolkit of styles that they apply as the situation demands. They don’t define themselves by anyone one tool. What matters to the best leaders is the purpose they are seeking to achieve and the values that shape how they use a leadership tool.

Don’t define your leadership by a tool. Define your leadership by your purpose, your values and your impact.

Why I am excited by Do Lectures Australia

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

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Photo: Do Lectures Australia – Write change across anything and it looks good to me.

Do Lectures Australia is almost here

When I first heard about Do Lectures Australia. I went and looked at the Do Lectures website and found stories that resonated deeply. I found:

  • The idea which is put simply this way:

The idea is a simple one. That people who Do things, can inspire the rest of us to go and Do things too. So each year, we invite a set of people to come and tell us what they Do.

I immediately wanted to be a part of the event. I am so excited that after some luck and a great deal of generosity from Yammer. I am going to be a part of the experience later this month.

Why Do I Want to Do?

There are 3 things that are at the heart of why I am excited about the first Do Lectures in Australia

  • The Community: Do Lectures is not a huge conference. The scale is human. The goal is connection, interaction, learning and inspiration in a community atmosphere. The speakers which you can find on the blog are diverse and have achieved great things.  However, the list of attendees is just as remarkable. This is a community that I want to join.
  • The Purpose: In a world that can feel disconnected, apathetic and alien at times, we need people setting out to share their personal purpose, connect with others over purpose and bring great things to life to further purpose.  From what I have seen and know, there is a rare depth of purpose among the attendees at this event. I have already heard some extraordinary stories of what people have done, want to do and why. I want to hear, learn and engage to help more of these purposes come to action.
  • The Do: Conferences that are full of beautiful talking about talking are everywhere. Twitter was invented so that you don’t have to attend them, just read along or watch the videos later. I want to do, not talk. I want to be inspired to do extraordinary things. I want to meet people doing extraordinary things. I want to help others do. Purpose is in the work.

I look forward to sharing more on my return from this extraordinary event. I have had enough luck to date to tell this is going to be a great learning experience.  I will share more of my adventures and insights after I return from Payne’s Hut. I am sure I will be raving even about the ‘Purpose is the Work’ and the ‘Community is the How’. I might even slip in the odd mumbling about leadership in communities, networks and the future of work.

Special Thanks:  I would like to thank the Do Lectures team for keeping the pressure on for me to attend the event. There is nothing like an idea and the support of a community to produce results.

Most of all I would like to thank Yammer for the partnering with Do Lectures Australia to help bring this extraordinary event to life and for giving me the opportunity to attend as their guest, competition winner & Do-er. If any organisation has shown me the power of a community to reinforce purpose, to inspire and to do more, it is Yammer. Thanks for one more proof point.

Collaboration Fast & Slow

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

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Christoph Hewett asked this great question attending the #2014FOW conference.  The question set off a huge discussion as people debated the need to move faster in a disruptive economy with an increasing emphasis on collaboration because of the networked nature of that economy.

Much of the discussion was about whether collaboration is really slower. The slowness of collaboration is the common perception. In traditional management terms of clear decision makers and control of resources, collaboration is often perceived as slower and more difficult.

I recognise the concerns raised. I have heard it often. My experience differs in that I have seen collaboration deliver accelerated results. I attribute that concern to the view that collaboration is a ‘softer way’ of management. 

Separate Collaboration from Consensus

Collaboration and consensus are often used as synonyms. They are not.  The involvement in other people in collaborative work does not mean that there need be large numbers, everyone has to have universal agreement or that the work is directionless.

Successful collaborative projects have strong leadership and direction at their core.  This leadership helps them to find and leverage the common direction of the competing agendas of those involved. For example, Linus Torvalds remains the ultimate authority on what gets included in Linux despite its open source collaborative model.

Slow Collaboration – Collaboration as the What

We need to start to distinguish between slow collaboration and fast collaboration. When people see the slowness of collaboration, they often are looking at abstract exercises of stakeholder engagement or consensus. Talk oriented, this approach is the practice of engaging a rolling group of people seeking consensus for its own sake (or in the absence of any other plan).  These forms of activity are rarely satisfying for anyone.  The stakeholders engaged usually end up frustrated at the lack of action and the unwillingness to make a decision.

In this meaning of slow collaboration, collaboration is the point of the exercise (what). Consensus or other collaborative activities that have this approach are where traditional management develops the sense that collaboration is soft and ineffective.

Fast Collaboration – Collaboration as the How

“Collaboration – the action of working with someone to produce something” – Oxford English dictionary

We collaborate every day with other people to do our work.  We just don’t call it collaboration. We call it getting help or using expertise or completing a project together. These small acts of collaboration are not seen as difficult because we understand the work, we understand the goals and who gets to make decisions.

Fast collaboration, at any scale, focuses on collaboration as a means (the how) to achieve a goal (the why) with clear roles for the participants which include decision rights (the who).   

Collaboration is not the point of the exercise. The point of fast collaboration is getting work done better. If things drift, everyone can be reminded that there is a goal to be achieved and one or many leaders responsible for ensuring that the exercise gets to the goal. 

The benefits of fast collaboration can be huge:  

  • Reduced search time for information and resources.
  • Faster and more flexible access to the collective skills, capabilities and experience of other people.
  • Increased passion and engagement leading to more discretionary effort, more creativity and better influence.
  • Reduced time learning, selling change or educating stakeholders because they are part of the journey

With increasing leverage of networks and increasing complexity in our goals,  how we do our work and how we structure our organisations, collaboration is increasingly unavoidable.  The challenge for organisations is not how to avoid collaboration but how to effectively leverage it to gain the benefits of the network era. Those who don’t leverage collaboration will be at a significant disadvantage to those who can reap the benefits above.

Fast Collaboration is Hard

Reaping the benefits of collaboration is not easy. For traditional management focused on power, control and ownership, it can be a radical challenge.

Fast and effective collaboration is hard precise because the investment upfront and ongoing to align people.  Alignment takes tough conversations traditional management often ignores in commands and one-way communication.  In larger groups, these conversations challenge leaders to demonstrate adaptive leadership skills and focus not on their agenda but what realises the potential of the group.

Having hard alignment conversations upfront and ongoing around purpose and decision rights flushes out the real issues that are otherwise ignored and avoids learning, rework, duplication, conflict and waste later. To move fast, this kind of collaboration must manage the conflict in people’s agendas early and it must have ongoing mechanisms to drive accountability and resolve conflicts.

The Purpose Economy: How Your Desire for Impact, Personal Growth and Community Is Changing the World | Stanford Social Innovation Review

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

Purpose, leadership and exponential potential.
An extract from The Purpose Economy by Aaron Hurst.

Via Celine Schillinger and Kenneth Mikkelson

The Purpose Economy: How Your Desire for Impact, Personal Growth and Community Is Changing the World | Stanford Social Innovation Review

The Firehose, the Bucket & The Sieve: Information & Value in the Network Era

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

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The new network era quite evidently brings us a firehose of information, the ability to draw buckets of relevant insight and the need to sieve out relevant and quality knowledge. When we turn to value, we know it is rushing by but often we feel like we are holding an empty sieve. We need to rethink how we gain value in the network era.

Information: The Firehose, the Bucket and the Sieve

We are already aware of the impact of the network era on our access to information:

  • The Firehose: We are all experiencing information overload. The flow of data, information and knowledge is to great for anyone to follow in a meaningful way. The pace of change of that information in networks also stretches traditional techniques of gathering and using information. The hype around ‘Big Data" is a attempt to say ‘hey point the firehose here and we will find meaning in the volume’. Many big data initiatives will fail because the volume outweighs the value without clear goals and uses.
  • The Bucket: Most people cannot consume the flow from the Firehose so they resort to a Bucket. We search. We follow. We join communities. We turn the hose on and off to fill a bucket we can manage. All of these are personal knowledge management techniques to narrow our focus and draw a more useful amount of information.
  • The Sieve: Even with our Bucket, we need a Sieve to find the real insights, the actionable information that becomes knowledge and can develop into wisdom. Quantity is huge. Quality is variable. Significance can be scarce. The more efficient we are at recognising it the better. The value of working out loud is we can leverage others ability to find the significance with us.

Value: The Sieve

When individuals and organisations turn to look at value creation in the network era, it often feels like they are holding an empty sieve.  

Networks route around blockages and inefficiencies. Our traditional ways of capturing value from information often create exactly this. The information and media industries have led the way in this disruption of traditional value gates like copyright, access, etc. Getty images recent decision to let their photos be used for free in certain cases is a simple recognition that their content is already being used, reused and shared.

This disruption is already moving beyond the information industries as people use the opportunities of networks, information and analytics to route around other the methods of value creation in other industries.

Value: The Firehose

The huge valuations of a number of information sharing platforms in the network era shows the value that can be created and the speed with which revenue will shift from one industry to another. This is the firehose of value.  

However firehoses are hard to control and flick around. Some of these major players are already seen their world disrupted as the next wave of innovations arrive. The largest players need to be constantly evolving and acquiring to stay relevant in a rapidly changing environment. Like the railroads of the industrial era, some will fall behind and be over taken by better paths or entirely different approaches.

Value: The Bucket & The Sieve

Scale was the principle source of value creation in the industrial era.  Big data is an echo of the view that we should get big to reach big markets and make big value. The network may not agree.

Lean startups focus on a small bucket first. Draw a little water. Run some experiments and sieve out the insight and the value. Some of those experiments prove to scale. Many don’t.

Drawing a bucket takes clarity of purpose, an understanding of strengths and focused and aligned efforts at creativity and insight from everyone in the organisation. These are the first steps to create value in the network era.

If we stand with a sieve in the firehose and expect value we will be sore, disappointed and very wet. The test for each of us and our organisations is to understand what bucket of value we are seeking to draw and to experiment relentlessly to sieve out the new and better ways of working. We need to rethink our organisations so that they have the ability to act this way, to be responsive to the information and market opportunities around them. Scaled command and control won’t cope.

Responsive organisations that leverage human capabilities, networks and experiments are the starting place. The value creation of railroads in the industrial era was overtaken by value creation of those who used their networks to develop and distribute new products and services. The next phase of growth of the network era will see similar opportunities for value and job creation. 

People: The Firehose, The Bucket and the Sieve

Networks open up to us the exponential potential of people. We now have access to the talents of many more people than ever and the potential to create a firehose of value from collaboration.  Leadership is required to help those individuals to find purposeful domains, a bucket in which for people to collaborate to realise value.  Leaders also need to reinforce the direction, celebrate successes and help to discard the failures, creating a sieve for specific potential from all the possibility.

The transition will take leadership. Leaders will need to give up the apparent safety of scale and power to shift to a new more dynamic and empowering model. We will need new ways of working and organising people and the boundaries of organisations will be more fluid. Leaders will need to shift some focus from efficiency to effectiveness and start leveraging human potential to create value in networks.  

That is the work that will make work more human.

I am currently doing Harold Jarche’s PKM in 40 days program. This is the first post inspired by the activities in that program. I recommend it to anyone.

The Hamster Wheel is a Choice

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

Working in a hamster wheel is a choice. The first step to a different work life is an awareness of the choices you make.

We work to throw away

Yesterday was hard rubbish collection in my suburb. I saw a truck taking away discarded televisions and computer screens. It is a striking thing to see two men loading screen after screen in to a truck be recycled or thrown away.

A screen was once an investment of hundreds if not thousands of dollars. Now like many of the products of our consumer society it is discarded regularly.  Somebody works hard to make the money for all this rubbish. I hope they enjoyed the work:

How many hours of work in the hamster wheel are stacked on the back of this truck?

Less can be more

More than a dozen years ago I read a small book by Elaine St James called “Simplify Your Life”. The central thesis of the book is that much of the complexity of our life is because we need to buy and manage things we barely need. The cost of supporting these things means we need to work harder than we want and give up the things we would rather do.

The book didn’t cause immediate change. I still can’t say I have achieved a simple life. However, the idea from the book has stayed with me. Over time I started to make small different choices on what mattered most:

  • I spent less time rushing to have the latest gadget only to then discard it for the next one
  • I cut back my discretionary purchases to the areas that gave me greatest joy
  • I started letting go of and not buying the stuff I never used or was keeping just in case.
  • I started to make more choices to do the things I wanted rather than the things everyone else did. 
  • I kept a notebook to write down the things that I saw that I wanted to buy.  I bought surprisingly few of them once I had achieved the endorphin rush of writing it down.
  • In short, I became more aware of the difference between need, desire and enjoyment.

Work will always be hard

Work will always be hard, because it involves choices to sacrifice time spent on other things like family, friends and passion. We begrudge these choices at times, especially when the sacrifice is made only for money.

Small choices over time can help at the margins to reduce the pressure to make big sacrifices. They can help declutter your decisions and get you closer to what matters. Choice doesn’t get easier, but it can be clearer.

Most importantly of all, being more aware of your choices is at the heart of finding ways to work better, to spend time more valuably and to increase the time that you spend working on purpose.

Choices are hard. Make yours.

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

Leadership is changing. Leadership in networks is the future of work.

A 1 minute video to provoke some thought on how we best use leadership to realise human potential in the network era.

Transcript:

Leadership used to look like this: powerful grey haired men, standing atop a pyramid.
Now our pyramids look like this.
Leadership in networks is the future of work
And we are slowly realising that anyone can lead, anyone can help make their work better, do more for their customers or their communities
Leadership is how we turn community into opportunity, the opportunity to enable others to create exponential value in networks of human relationships 
Leadership is the art of realising human potential. 
It is time to leave pyramids to the pharaohs and make work more human. 
(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)