Category: Uncategorized

Your next career network

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

Your next career is about your networks as much if not more than your expertise. 

Jon Husband made an insightful comment on my post asking ‘What’s your next career?’ Jon noted your next network is an important question too. 

I meet many talented people who haven’t had the success that they deserve. They have great expertise & potential. What they lack are the networks to grow or share their expertise. Without the support of networks to remain current and to offer new edge opportunities the expertise goes wasted. 

Today global networks power expertise in ways that change the game. In Moses Naim’s End of Power he highlights that there are more chess grandmasters than ever because there are more opportunities than ever for people to connect, learn and play. With access to global experts powered by global connection you can’t assume opportunities will find you if you are not engaged in building and sharing your expertise. 

Your step into your next career is going to ask people to take a chance on someone unproven. Whatever your expertise, people will make that decision based on their relationship with you or your relationship with people that they trust. Network connections enable career change. 

We have all heard about the 10,000 hours to build mastery. What is less discussed is the deep network connections required to support mastery. As you commit 10,000 hours to developing your next career spend half that on the network and you will get exponential results. Thick networks of connection help with any transformation.  

Stay in

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

“The guys in the white hats win in the second half of the movie” – Anonymous

We have two responsibilities: to stay in the quest for change and to draw others to join us.

Stay in

Change is hard. We all get disappointed and consider bailing on change. That can be the right move when it is required for personal preservation or when we need time to create a totally new approach after a big failure.

However, the bigger need is to give change time. Our instant success culture sees many people seeking to bail when the momentum towards success is around the corner. We need to stay engaged and keep pushing for change. Finding the right path and the right experiments takes time and effort.

Cynicism is easy and ever so tempting. Cynicism doesn’t get anyone anywhere. Worse abandoning change or turning cynical sends a message to others to stay out. Bailing puts change back because others get the message that change can’t be done.

Something made you believe change is needed. If that still stands, then stay the course of change.

Bring Others in

Change succeeds when people are moving towards it, not away.  We all need to help others to engage with our changes.

Global connection has made it easier to find people who share your views and to define sharply the other.  We see increasing polarisation in many debates and stereotypes and generalisations to demean or denigrate opponents. A little sense of the other helps to define a movement. Too much is counterproductive.

Change does not happen from within the safe community of your supporters. Change happens when others join in and opponents finally meet you in the middle ground to move forward together. We have to find ways to bring others in. We have to find others who see the need for change.

Stay the course and when you are in your darkest times seek to find others to join you and help you sustain the change.

What’s your next career?

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

A simple question that shocks people.

In my twenties I hard worked really hard to get into my chosen career. I looked around the organisations I worked in and I noticed something. All the grey haired people were being pushed out. A few successful ones got to stay but most were gone with their potential ahead of them. I realised I needed a second career for later.

I have only a little grey hair left today and I’m still not as old as the people I saw leaving. My life today is more like a sixth career but it had its foundations in asking myself the question ‘what’s your next career?’ I still have more options to go.

Too many people have no answer or haven’t even considered the question. They are just lucky the question has not yet been forced on them.

We may not be able to predict the average number of careers easily but it is more than one. When we add robots, automation and new career options, there is a good chance that we need to be at least considering future options. There’s an opportunity cost to every decision to stay put.

Understand your options. Grow your skills and capabilities. Build networks for careers beyond your first one. Experiment with different things to discover your purpose and to gain experience for next steps. You will find these things make it more likely you get to stay in your current career too.

This career won’t be your last so plan an answer to the question. Then when you have that plan start bringing it to life. If nothing else, prepare yourself that you might need to stop defining yourself by your current role.

Opportunity Cost

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

The value of your time is not what you are doing now. The value is what you could be doing.

In economics, the opportunity cost is the value of the best option forgone in making a choice. The option given up may well be more valuable than the option chosen.

We don’t consider opportunity cost of our time quite as often as we should. Time is scarce. Time comes only once and expires every minute. We either allocate time well or we miss out on the value it can create. Realising the value of time is about choices. If we don’t consider our options or don’t chose, we waste time.

The value of time need not be measured in money. Often the opportunity cost of our current great income is a far larger sense of satisfaction, happiness and better relationships with others in our lives.

The opportunity cost may also be our learning, growth and new options. We often discount the value of options and uncertainty. We can’t find out the uncertain value of an opportunity if we never try. The comedian Jim Carrey shared a little wisdom about options when he said ‘You can fail at what you don’t want, so you might as well do what you love’.

Ask yourself ‘what’s the best use of my time now?’ Make choices taking account of the opportunity cost of your time. Realise the value you might otherwise be missing.

The Normative Billiards called Culture

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

Roll one billiard ball at another across a smooth carpet and they will collide. The outcome will be determined by Newtonian laws of motion. As a result, billiards is a game of control.

Ask a person to walk towards another across a carpet and no matter how narrow the passage they will make efforts to pass each other, wordlessly navigating the changes in course to prevent collision through glances and body language. Human interaction is a game of influence, not control.

The difference in those two scenarios is that billiard balls operate in the grip of immutable physical laws. Human being operate in line with dynamic social norms. One simple norm is that you don’t collide with another if you can avoid it. 

Whenever someone offers you recommendations based on immutable human behaviour make the social norms explicit and consider how they might interplay. When you need to change behaviour remember that changing the carefully regimented process might be less important than changing the social norms. Any organisation will be composed of the interplay of many social norms, some explicit but many deeply implicit. 

Awareness of norms will help your effectiveness in change. We are human. We are not billiard balls. 

Social Capital

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

As long as humans have existed, people have sought to disrupt society with terror. Niccolo Machivelli outlined the importance of terror in The Prince seeing it as a means to ensure social stability. Dictators, revolutionaries, terrorists and criminal organisations have resorted to terror to market themselves and project an appearance of power. They cause horrendous carnage and spread sadness with a sole objective of fracturing social capital in their opponents and strengthening their own. Their success or failure in this effort is the secret to their ability to create, grow or sustain their power.

In the essay “Striking at the heart of the state?”, Umberto Eco once pointed out that the Brigado Rossi’s pronouncements on its Italian terror campaigns revealed its lack of understanding of power in society. While you may disagreed with his view of politics, Eco rightly pointed out that ‘the system displays an incredible capacity for restabilising itself and its boundaries’ following an attack. We grieve. We unite. We rebuild. We add security rituals and we go on. These responses are all part of our efforts to unite and restore social capital following an attack. Psychological research reminds us that social capital mitigates the psychological impact of terror. There is strength in unity as more than one politician has claimed in history.

Real power is does not “grow from the barrel of a gun” as Mao remarked. The power and potential of society lies in social capital. Mao’s successors in China know this as they work feverishly to create economic prosperity. Their greatest fear seems to be loss of social stability in society. Organisations that use terror know this too. These organisations invest in social services to replace absent or unaccountable states. They invite conflict and retribution because the ongoing battle unites their supporters and disrupts social capital of other forces in their societies. No doubt they will find the violence that they seek.

At the same time we must recognise, we have better connection, capabilities and tools than ever before to connect people, to develop community relationships and to build social capital. Sustaining and growing social capital is key to our future and of our societies. Let’s not be beaten in the creation and leverage of social capital by any of the forces of violence and darkness.

Practices vs Procedures

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

I have been asked by a few people who have seen the slides only whether the audience at The Change Management Institute found my talk practical. At first the question made no sense to me. How could a talk recommending four well documented practices not be practical?

Some of the issue is missing the text of the talk. You don’t get the whole story through pictures without the accompanying stories and discussion.

Then I realised the point of the question. In the presentation I talked about moving away from rigid process to adaptive learning. It would have been inconsistent with that theme to outline a 5-8 step procedure. The practices I recommended are about fostering mastery. The involve choices and learning. They are not procedures to be executed.

We are so used to the process mindset that a process is seen as the only practical option. I am very pleased the members of the Change Management Institute embraced new practices and saw the potential to learn and adapt through practice.

Learning and adaptation is the only practical way forward.

Talk, Ask & Learn

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

If we don’t discus & ask questions, we don’t learn.

At a recent social event, I heard a husband expressing his mystery as to what his wife was thinking. The more he talked the more obvious it was that they had never discussed the issue in any depth. He continued to wonder when the obvious solution was to ask.

One of the most powerful questions I ask in my consulting is ‘Why are we solving this problem?’ The first answers I get are often a variant of ‘I have been told to solve this problem’. That’s an order not an answer. Taking time to drill into the real rationale reveals richness that improves the project outcomes.

I meet many employees who want to improve their organisations but never discuss their ideas. They want to understand and do better but think it is not their place to ask. Without necessarily wanting to do so, their organisation frustrates the simplest act of autonomy, asking a question.

Without a rich and vibrant conversation about the issues that matter we fail to learn.