Category: Uncategorized

Your Organisation. Your Movement.

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

One of the busiest posts on this blog is How to Start a Change Movement. People are increasingly recognising and preparing to adjust to the increasing pace of change in the world.

However, there is a bigger issue that is also surfaces when we reflect on the need for people to collaborate to bring about change:

Our organisations only exist to drive change.

Organisations exist to fulfil a purpose, to make a difference, to better meet a need, to help customers and communities and to make more from less. These are all change.

There is no successful product or service that does not deliver change for the customer. The bigger the changes created for customers and the community the more likely the organisation will succeed.

We can lose the change focus of our organisations in the complexity of our goals, processes, structures, budgets and day-to-day challenges. We can assume that doing our job, doing the same things and surviving to the weekend is the point of the organisation.

Every organisation must be a change movement. We need to use the elements of great change movements to make our organisations more responsive. Without continuously creating some better form of change for its customers and community, an organisation quickly loses its reason to exist.

Next time someone suggests that an organisation doesn’t need to change, ask them to reflect on what it is that the organisation does in the world.

Don’t just describe the problem

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

Describing the problem is a beginning

Most people believe change begins when you describe the problem. Describing the problem clearly is the beginning. David Whyte described it well:

See, even if you’re stuck in life, if you can describe just exactly the way you’re stuck, then you will immediately recognise that you can’t go on that way anymore. So, just saying precisely, writing precisely how you’re stuck, or how you’re alienated, opens up a door of freedom for you.- David Whyte

Beginnings aren’t endings

Then again, there is Dilbert.

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Scott Adam’s strip has been ruthlessly skewering corporate life for years. We see these moments and recognise them immediately.  We share them and discuss them. The appeal of the scenarios are that we know they still happen every day in organisations just like our own. In fact, Adams is overwhelmed with suggestions by email for new strips.

So we look at Dilbert, know change is needed in our organisations and do what exactly?

Describing the problem, gossiping about it quietly or complaining to one’s friends over a beer is a small start.  Too many small starts become false starts, repeated over and over with no progress.

From false starts to progress

Once you have described the problem, you need to act to make it different. Act. Make one little thing different. Today.

Don’t do it alone. Start or join a movement.

Having social fun (at work)

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

Remember fun?

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Those little activities that bring a smile to your face and connect you more deeply with colleagues over a laugh or a giggle.

It is not too late. You too can be responsible for bringing the fun back to your workplace. The perfect place to start is your organisation’s enterprise social network. Everyone’s there. Waiting for fun to break out. Your audience is crying out for something a little more engaging than the latest link to a compliance policy update.

I recently saw this call for help

Here’s a few ideas that I shared with Jakkii and a few more to pad out the list. They just might help get you started with your own fun. Be inspired:

  1. Offer free steak knives: Marketers do it for a reason. People go silly for steak knives. Start a fun competition today with steak knives as a prize. Your local supermarket has really cheap steak knives. 
  2. Do introductions: Ask everyone to introduce themselves in 140 characters or less. Ask people to describe their worst job, most embarrassing moment, best day, etc.  Offer prizes (see steak knives above) for the most likes, most creative, funniest, etc
  3. Memes: They work on the web for a reason. Search for a meme generator. Send your next serious message in an amusing meme image. You will be surprised how much attention it gets. You might even start a trend of posting more memes, gifs, cat pictures, etc.
  4. Pictures: The sillier the better. Yes, including cat pictures.
  5. Baking competitions:  If two people in your office bake, then have a competition. If you don’t have two, make someone senior bake as a challenge. You might inspire a few more cupcake makers. Who doesn’t like fun that you also get to eat for morning tea?  Photos & reviews go on the network
  6. Event themes: Does your ESN dress up for cup carnival, sporting events or the holiday season? If not, why not? 
  7. Create groups for water cooler conversations, movies, television programs, jokes or any other topic that might engage people.  Most radically of all, let people create their own groups. To have fun (at work)
  8. Set challenges: A quiz, a treasure hunt, a challenge, a target, a quest, etc. Design activities that engage with a smile and preferably generate photos and stories.
  9. Recruit champions of fun: If someone has previously created a smile, invite them to an offline meeting of funsters. Plan your next attacks.
  10. Lists: I got to ten. So can you. I could go on, but where’s the fun in that?

The power of social networking at work is the opportunity for people to engage socially while working. Rapport building involves the little stuff as well as the serious stuff.  If you take the lead, others will follow. Post in line with your company’s culture and you will be fine. Don’t try to do standup. Start small and it will grow.

If your organisation will not allow any fun: Then absolutely make sure that you don’t have any. Deprive others of fun (and try not to have fun doing that). Most importantly ask yourself how long you will last.

The point of all this fun: Aside from the obvious, you will engage a lot more people and give them an opportunity to try their first post or first like.

PS: Forgot this when writing the original post. Don’t forget #funhashtags. #needisaymore ?

On Sound Bites

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

Complexity is increasing. People demand simpler messages. How can leaders deliver?

Jacob Burckhardt, a Swiss historian of the 19th century, described the paradox that as material conditions improve, complexity increases, but so does that demand for simplicity. Increasing complexity creates a growing social appeal of simple messages and solutions.  Society is exposed to the risk of increasing appeal in the messages of demagogues who promise simplicity often at the cost of tyranny, ‘terrible simplifiers’. We need only look to the ideologies of last century or our current politics and media to see the pull of overly simple messages.

Modern leaders face this challenge daily. Easy jobs get done. The challenges leaders face are complex, networked and moving rapidly. All stakeholders want simple easy solutions. Deliver a sound bite and the leader’s work is done.

We should all communicate as simply and concisely as possible. We also know overly simple messages can mislead, be disengaging or be counterproductive. When simplicity does not deliver solutions or when the stakeholders craves a simplicity that is not yet possible, how does a leader progress?

Converse, Don’t Communicate: Politicians speak in sound bites to fit a traditional media broadcast mentality. Leaders can use a range of tools to foster a richer and ongoing conversation. Encourage questions, debate and engagement. Conversations cover complexity more efficiently than any prepared speech.

Talk Purpose, Not Plan: A purpose can and should be simpler than a plan of action. A key role of a leader is to connect stakeholders in a common & worthwhile purpose. People united in purpose are more engaged and more collaborative. Purpose helps people work through complexity. Use your leadership communication to engage people in a simple common purpose.  Better to let the group build a plan together and address the many complexities when united around a simple purpose.

Use Immersion, Not Information: Complex scenarios can be hard to express and share.  Resist the temptation to cut the problem down to a soundbite of fact or a single measure to improve. Show people the situation and let them immerse themselves in the experience. The action is simple but people’s takeaways will be far more complex.

Offer Confidence, Not Certainty: Confidence and certainty are often confused. Leaders can be confident in the capabilities of a group, but uncertain as to the path or the outcome. Offering certainty where it cannot exist is a path of disappointment and deceit. If you cannot express confidence, then the first task is to do what is necessary to do so.

Be Credible, Not Consistent: Complex systems change. Solutions and conversations need to iterate. Conversations should involve learning. Holding to a consistent position in the light of changing facts is likely to be inflexible at best and damaging to credibility at worst. Building trust by building your credibility & capability as a leader is more important than holding to a consistent position for the sake of simplicity. Bear in mind that if you have engaged others in conversation, they will understand the rationale for the change in position for they will have experienced the debate.

We can all communicate more simply. We should. However, we must not trade simplicity for effectiveness as leaders. Even these simple approaches are likely to fail in some circumstances. Leaders must continue the challenge of finding simple ways to engage people in solving the most complex problems.

Trust

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

Trust is critical to successful organizations. While it may be an example of our ability to acquiesce in functional stupidity, trust accelerates decision making and reduces transaction costs in teams and organisations. Arguably the boundaries of trust shape the size and structure of our organisations. Without trust there can be no effective engagement of employees, the community or other stakeholders.

A recent insightful analysis on trust in organisations highlights three elements of internal trust in organisations:
– vertical interpersonal trust – trust in direct superiors
– lateral interpersonal trust – trust in peers
– impersonal trust – trust in processes and systems

As we consider changes to the shape of our organisations and their systems to leverage disruption and create more responsive organisations, we must remember to balance the demands of each of these forms of trust. A shift from hierarchical autocratic management may reduce the demand for vertical interpersonal trust, but it will increase the need for the other two forms. Agile team based work can increase lateral interpersonal trust, but will also place demands on impersonal trust through changes required in systems and processes.

Changing the way we work will require us to strike a new balance between these three forms of trust with all the participants in the system. It will have ramifications for trust externally as these three models are reflected in our relations externally as well. Trust can’t be imposed. It must be earned in action, capability and credible intent.

As we adjust our organisation models, we will need to take our whole system into a new balance of trust. Impersonal trust, trust in the systems and processes we use, will be the critical component to that process of engagement and adjustment.

Be human

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

Last week I attended the excellent Products are Hard conference. As excited as I was that a San Francisco event had chosen to run their first event in Melbourne, the day exceeded my expectations with the quality of the local and international speakers and the enthusiastic participation of the audience. After some reflection, here are lessons that I took away from the day:

Success is human: This was the biggest lesson of the day. We often lose the human factors in success in our focus on process, methodology, tools, organisation and technology. Again and again in the day, it was clear human factors are more important to product and startup success. Life is not as easy as a formula, because every team and group of customers differ. If products are hard, it is because people are unpredictable to satisfy, coordinate and influence.

Start with the team: Great products come from great teams. The first idea will be adapted by experimentation, feedback, competition and pivots. Only, a great team will embrace the chaos, have the agility and collaboration required.

CX+Engineering+Product: A great team has the best diverse skills that they can assemble- customer insight and design skills, technical skills to deliver and a broad business skill set to distribute and manage operations for the product. The team should be small (ideally start and stay at teams of 3), have great transparent open communication and not let their role define their contribution or structure of their collaboration.

Assign a customer problem: The best path to success is clarity and engagement. Give the team the autonomy to tackle a whole customer problem. Define value as widely as possible and allow your teams to focus on the whole of the customer problem

Ship, test and learn: Success can’t be predicted. Nobody has a perfect decision making track record. Great products are an evolution from test and learn experiments. You need to embrace this chaos and not cling to fixed ideas. Keep the tests small but gain the advantage of testing often with real customers. Real meaningful data from shipping to customers can focus decisions.

Don’t play safe: Amazing no-fail ideas fail. Tests fail. Teams fail. Businesses fail. The issue is not whether you fail; it is what you learn and how you do differently next time. Playing safe is slow. Protecting against failure builds overhead which slows delivery. The pace of attempts should be high.

Focus on value: Ideas don’t matter. Technology, tools & methodology don’t matter. Not all of the data matters. The best teams focus on results by focusing on the customer actions that create value. That means only doing things that drive value and not being confused by expectations or past patterns of success.

Most of all: If you have the passion of purpose and can share it with others, you don’t need to settle for a compromise existence or other proxies. It won’t become easy, but you will learn much and it will be fulfilling.

Ozymandias – Making Change Endure

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

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Change in large organisations is frustrating. Leaps forward are followed by periods when change is either gradually or dramatically undone. Here’s how to ensure you are making progress & stay sane.

I met a traveller from an antique land

Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,

Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown

And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.

And on the pedestal these words appear:

`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:

Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!’

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,

The lone and level sands stretch far away”.

Ozymandias – Percy Bysse Shelley

A Story of Change Unwound

I know the feeling. No outcomes of change projects endure. The world moves too fast.  There’s too much uncertainty. Iteration is required. Change overtakes change. Always.

Launch a product and it will be shuttered sooner or later. Put in a new process, policy or system and the need for further changes begins to rise. Change behaviours or culture and more change will be required.

I remember earlier in my career taking on a role with an agenda and  personal purpose to create a specific set of changes in that organisation. For the first 18 months, great progress was made. Then things changed. I watched as most of the change we had created was unwound. Why it unwound matters little. It was eroded piece by piece.

The Slinky of Change

Not surprisingly, I was disappointed. It seemed so much progress had been lost. It had felt like we were close to the end. I did not relish starting again. 

Change takes determination and commitment. I started pushing again for the needed changes. To my surprise, I discovered what I had seen as a rollback was actually a spiral. We rolled back, around and up. The new efforts to drive change began further back than we achieved.  However we had made progress.  We began again higher up as if we had ascended a spiral, a slinky of change.  

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Why were we higher? The stakeholders had now experienced the first change.  Some things worked. Somethings didn’t. We all learned from the experience. New language and experiences had been created that were the basis for the next effort.  Moving forward again built on the experience of the first change.  We did better this time.  We moved a little further forward. We lost a little less but we still circled up the slinky again.

From that moment on my expectations of change progress changed. A few times you will have the joy of a straight line. Most of the time you are circling up a slinky. Iteration is part of the process for sustainable change.

Keeping on the tension

So how do you maintain your sanity and keep spiralling up a slinky? Make sure you are stretching the slinky with tension.

Keep tension with purpose: Give up your determination to drive change and you are going to go round and round on the spot.  Keep your purpose clear and use that to push on with change. The effort ensures you go higher and forward.

Keep tension with new conversations: The signal you have gone higher is that you are having new conversations and new ideas are in play. Complacency and been here before are the enemies. When you are pushing into new issues and better ideas of progress, then learning is taking place. The tension of that learning is the platform for your next progress.  If this tension is not in your conversations, then you need to bring it.

Keep tension with speed: The faster you go around the cycle the higher you will rise. Accept some iteration.  Learning is part of the process and you don’t know all the answers.  Accelerating the cycle, speeds your learning and that of your stakeholders.

Keep tension by stretching for more: Continuous improvement has to be the goal.  There is no summit.  When you get close to your goal, stretch it further forward again. Your stakeholders will now be more ready to go further. If you started trying for customer focus, make your next play for customer experience management, then holistic design thinking, then…learn and move up. You might be surprised how far this leads in time.

Keep tension by sharing work and lessons: The more people are paying attention as the change and rollback happens, the more learning occurs. If sharing creates a little conflict or discussion it helps. You will get attention. The more people watching the bigger the potential movement for the next change. Work out loud and spread any new ideas and lessons as widely as possible.  You are seeding the tension that will help create the next lift.

If you are lucky enough to have a straight line of continuous progress to your goal that is great.  If you despair at the process of rollback and iteration, look at it differently. The only enduring changes are the ideas and human potential created by the change process. Every thing else is going to be thrown away someday anyway.

Scripture. Traditions. Reason. Experience

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

At the Products are Hard conference yesterday, Abie Hadjitarkhani, a founder of the conference and a Partner of the Hotel Delta team, presented lessons from his experience consulting teams working on project management.

Abie introduced the Methodist Quadrilateral of John Wesley as a framework that teams needed to jointly consider as they do their work:

  • Scripture: what we believe and follow
  • Traditions: the way we have done things
  • Reason: our thinking
  • Experience: what happens to us

Abie’s message was that there are few universal right answers in each of these elements for teams. Each team needs to apply its own balance and assess each of these elements. Abie argued for flexibility of dogmas and methods, avoidance of over reliance on data and more consideration of human experience in the application of approaches.

What struck me as I considered these elements was an image

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Across many contexts of how organisations operate, we are seeing a shift from a heavy reliance on dogma and traditional approaches to a more reality-driven, flexible, iterative test and learn approach as disruptive technology gives us new tools and approaches. Scripture and tradition do not go away. The weighting they hold in team culture simply changes and they are more lean and focused on value rather than extensive prescription.

This language is appearing in all sorts of veins of discussion such as product management, lean startups, efficiency, organisational design, testing, customer experience design, change management, leadership and culture.

This concept of a more networked, iterative, agile and fact-based approach, like that argued for in The Responsive Organisation Manifesto, is one we all need to consider as we take forward our challenges. There seem to be big benefits in a shift of thinking to a far more human and grounded approach.

Conventional wisdom is not so wise

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The enemy of the conventional wisdom is not ideas but the march of events. – John Kenneth Galbraith

In life we are given lots of advice by well meaning friends and colleagues. Rarely is this advice formed from reflection, experience or debate.  This common advice is the conventional wisdom passed on to us.  

Conventional wisdom is usually a distillation of the way things used to be or how people think it should be. Conventional wisdom tells us how the system wants us to behave. Advice like this is full of platitudes and an implicit message not to rock the boat:

  • Look after yourself first
  • Do what your boss wants
  • Don’t draw attention to yourself
  • Knowledge is power
  • Make sure you don’t fail
  • Make things perfect before you share them
  • Take the credit
  • You only get one shot
  • Never admit you don’t know
  • Appear strong. Always grow your power

Conventional wisdom is rarely wise. Here’s why:

Don’t Judge the Future on the Past:  Change is happening faster than ever. Look around. There is extensive discussion of how rules are changing and the future requires different behaviours. Basing your behaviour on advice from the last century may not be much value.

Great Advice is Tested by Conflict, Reflection and Experience: Ask people why they are giving you the advice.  If the answer is ‘I heard it somewhere’ or ‘everyone knows’ then take it with a grain of salt. Conventional opinions rarely get challenged. They live long beyond their expiry date. Great advice is the result of personal experience and insight, usually where it has been tested against opposing views in conflict. Conflict, reflection and experience keeps advice relevant. Make sure you are not someone else’s guinea pig.

Conventional Wisdom Conflicts: Should I ‘Not draw attention to myself’ or ‘Take the Credit’?  Conventional wisdom reflects the complexity and conflicts of the system.  This advice can be used to support any personal opinion.  It has not been reconciled for your circumstances.

What Reflects the Average, Does not Reflect You: You circumstances are different to that of the average. You may well be trying to make yourself even more unique. Advice that reflects your unique purpose, strengths and opportunity will rarely be conventional wisdom.

Value the people who give you unconventional wisdom.  Go gain some yourself in debate, reflection and experience.