Tag: Caww

Leadership in Transformation

Posted on by simongterry in Change, Future of Work, Leadership

A common topic of debate in the Responsive Organization movement is whether an organization can become responsive or it must be born that way.

Undoubtedly many of the leading case studies of future of work organizations are organizations created or rebirthed from near death by charismatic founders. Some use this as evidence that the elements of a responsive organization must be present from the beginning. In a previous post, I pointed out that we cannot rely on transparency alone to make change occur for us. The power structures in a traditional organisation will prevent most radical change.

I am unambiguously in the optimist camp. I am not alone and the company in the optimist camp inspires me. I have seen organizations change enough to not recognise their former selves. Change to more responsive ways of working is possible. The question is how.

What gets in the way

Chris Argyris’ classic article Teaching Smart People to Learn is a rich source of observations of what gets in the way of a Responsive Organization transformation.  In particular, Argyris notes that:

… There seems to be a universal human tendency to design one’s actions consistently according to four basic values:

1. To remain in unilateral control;

2. To maximize “winning” and minimize “losing”;

3. To suppress negative feelings; and

4. To be as “rational” as possible—by which people mean defining clear objectives and evaluating their behavior in terms of whether or not they have achieved them.

The purpose of all these values is to avoid embarrassment or threat, feeling vulnerable or incompetent. In this respect, the master program that most people use is profoundly defensive. Defensive reasoning encourages individuals to keep private the premises, inferences, and conclusions that shape their behavior and to avoid testing them in a truly independent, objective fashion.

These hidden values in most organisation get in the way of the transparency-led transformation that many hope to see. The Responsive Organization poses a threat to control, a threat of losing and negative feelings. Importantly the delegation of authority in a Responsive Organization may cause people anxiety as to objectives and rationale for action.

The role of leadership is to act as a counterbalance these natural human values and shift the behaviours to that of a Responsive Organization. We need to create rationales for action more powerful than embarrassment. We need to create community to generate trust, support and connection. We need to enable learning through conflict and experimentation. 

Purpose:

Leaders must create a strong rationale for the transformation. In cases of crisis, startup or near death of organizations, this rationale can often be imposed by a charismatic individual. The external circumstances enable a threat based narrative to bind people together in a defensive rationale for change.

However, most organizations are successful to their own terms. As Argyris notes, we want to feel successful even if our results don’t pass external muster.  

Leaders need to leverage two elements to create a strong rationale for change in this context:  

  • The Purpose of the organization: a purpose is the ultimate rationale for why people come together in an endeavour. It defines the common impact the group of people wish to have on the world.  As a higher agenda, it is the perfect rationale for change for even the most successful organisations.  Purpose is a mastery quest. Very few organizations have the capability to completely fulfil their purpose. They can however strive to better realise it.
  • External orientation: No closed system will find a rationale for change. External orientation is where organizations find the challenges and opportunities that define the purpose into specific improvement opportunities. Leaders need to relentlessly focus the organization on its customers and community to see transparently the challenges and opportunities that exist for change. Well defined external impacts in this community will be what can drive the autonomy of teams in the organization.  Using customer and community data in line with Purpose, also enables change agents to overcome embarrassment-based resistance in the organization.

Community:

Individuals will need support to take on the risks of a Responsive Organization. The role of leaders is to create the sense of community that will support an individual through that change. At the heart of that community will be engagement with others and a growing sense of mutual trust.  Leaders set the tone for any community. They must also work hard to reinforce these key community behaviours

  • Engagement: Engagement begins with transparency and connection. I cannot truly care about the others in my community until I know who they are and understand their purposes, concerns and circumstances. Leaders need to create the conditions to enable people to be more social, to connect, to solve and to share their work challenges together.
  • Trust: Engagement will build trust as it builds understanding. Transparency will reinforce trust. However, leaders need to take on the role of fostering responsibility and accountability as engines of growing trust in the organization.  When people see that individuals and teams are accountable for driving change then they will have greater trust in the change agenda.

Learning:

This post is deliberately not titled like a listicle e.g. ’The 3 or 6 things to transform an organisation’. Even a basic familiarity with change highlights that formulas will work only up to a point. Leadership needs to be adaptive to enable any system to change in a sustainable way.

To be true to their purpose and stakeholders, to leverage the potential of their community, each organization will take an unique path through change.  The role of leaders is facilitate the individual and organizational learning required:

  • Experimentation: creating a culture of rapid iteration to address challenges and opportunities will accelerate the cycle of learning in the organization. Leaders must help this experimentation culture to overcome the resistance identified by Argyris and also to spread and have a wider influence in the organization. Lessons learned must become new truths which will take a sense-making role for leaders in the wider organization and mean leaders must champion new ways of working when they arise, whatever the personal costs.
  • Conflict: The biggest reason that organizational transformations fail is an unwillingness of the leadership of the organisation to allow uncertainty and conflict. Conflict will happen. The uncertainty associated with conflict is inevitable. Efforts to suppress this will either undermine transparency, the rationale for change, engagement or learning. Failure to embrace conflict takes many names: politeness, bureaucracy, politics, corporate speak, history, culture, etc. Failure to embrace conflict is an unwillingness to learn and improve. There will always be resistance when change comes and it must be addressed. Leaders need to create and sustain the right kinds of constructive conflict – driven by purpose, based in facts from an external orientation & experimentation, mediated through an engaged community. 

Change is Coming. Lead.

I have seen the potential of purpose, external orientation, engagement, trust experimentation and conflict to drive change. Supported by leadership these are the elements of each organization’s transformation. These elements are critical to a Responsive Organization.

Throughout this post I have referred to leaders and leadership. This need not be hierarchical leadership. Clearly it helps if leadership and power are aligned in an organization in reinforcing the need for change. However, the changes described above are not capable of being implemented by top-down edicts. These changes must come as individuals and groups discover their power and are influenced as a result, This kind of leadership relies on influence and can begin bottom up or even from the middle management so often scorned in organizations.

Change is possible. Change is coming. Smart people can learn. Your people and your organisation can better realise their potential and their purpose. A Responsive Organization transformation will occur if you are prepared to lead the change.

Lead.

Running or dancing?

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

We talk about how companies run. We rarely discuss how they dance.

Our machine metaphor for the organisation leads us to talk of how companies run. Running was an apt metaphor for the industrial organisation with hierarchical management, process orientation, and efficiency as its goal.

Running is domination of a single dimension, distance. Runners maximise efficiency to get the best speed over the distance for their effort. Running is ultimately an individual effort. Running together involves parallel tasks. Running is about individual performance.

The network economy demands Responsive Organisations. We are starting to challenge organisations to be more human, to be more agile, to be more innovative, to learn and ultimately to be more effective. We start to sound like we need an organisation to dance.

Dancing involves exploration of three dimensions. Dancers explore those dimensions for the beauty of the experience. Dancing is a response to changing external stimuli, particularly the movements of others and the music. Dancing is far more interactive and collaborative. Dancing is a performance for the individual and the collective.

We run machines. Humans dance.

What would be different if you asked how well your company danced?

Who says elephants can’t dance? – Lou V Gerstner Jnr

Truth, Persuasion & the Future of Work

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

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We often slip into use the language of force to describe transformation of our organisations in the future of work: rebels, revolution, vanguard, etc. In so doing, we inadvertently romanticise the force & power dynamics that are at the heart of traditional organisations. Using the language of persuasion is more aligned to the changes advocated by the future of work.

Managers will transform to a new way of working when they are persuaded it is truly a better way. The future of work needs the employee’s engagement. We are transforming work to make it more human. Let’s use more human means in that transformation.

Satyagraha

Satyagraha is the term used to describe Mahamatma Gandhi’s approach to nonviolence. This approach has inspired non-violent change since. Focused on ‘insistence in truth’ it sought to focus on action that would bring forth persuasion of the opponents of change and strength in those arguing for change:

pursuit of truth did not admit of violence being inflicted on one’s opponent but that he must be weaned from error by patience and compassion. For what appears to be truth to the one may appear to be error to the other.

Gandhi also said:

Satygraha is a weapon of the strong; it admits of no violence under any circumstance whatsoever; and it ever insists upon truth.

Critical to Gandhi’s approach was the recognition that arguing for a new truth is an act of strength and that the means matter. Adopting the means of the oppressor to justify change weakens the cause.

Changing to the Future of Work

The future of work will not arrive in a revolution. As tempting as it may be to declare that there will be a moment of radical transformation, the changes that will come to the way we work will arrive as one by one managers change to new and better practices.  If they fail to change, it will come as their organisations are replaced by those who work in better ways.

The critical challenge for those advocating change is to endure and persuade. Those managers clinging to old ways genuinely believe that they are better. Use of these means is often a ‘self evident truth’ or ‘what management means’. Change agents must continue to advocate, to seek new arguments to demonstrate the truth of better practices and to take their arguments to those who need to hear change. Most of all they must retain compassion.

There will be no storming of corporate barricades. No new flag will be raised to herald a new era. There will be victories one person at a time as persuasion wins managers over from old models of management. 

Change Agents Must Endure, Prove their Truth and Persuade

Advocating for this change will take endurance. Old models of management are not beyond using force, punishment and exile to preserve their turf. The change agent must understand and embrace the setbacks and difficulties of the challenge.

Change agents must be humble enough to put their truth to the test. Managers will not be convinced by speeches and hype. They are convinced by value and results and when they are comfortable against the risks and emotions of change from the very practices that have founded their success and identity. Their minds will change when they accept a better truth.

If we are to make work more human, more driven by human purpose and human relationships, we must accept the means of change matter. Persuasion is the acceptable means. We must demonstrate better ways, prove the value of experiments and argue the case for change until it is accepted. Our new networks run best on integrity, influence and trust. Let’s make these core to our transformation to the future of work.

To Shape Change, Start Leading Change

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

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“If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.” (spoken by Tancredi) from ‘The Leopard’ by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa

Times of disruptive change are difficult for those in power and those who benefit most from the current way of things. Many of these people prefer to ignore the rising changes in society. In effect, they abandon their leadership role in shaping change in the system.

Enduring disruptive change demands an engaged form of leadership. The future in disruption is not written. Leaders should seek to engage, lead and shape change to the benefit of their organisations. 

The Networked Economy is Here to Stay.

Many leaders of organisations have a lot of power, status and wealth tied up in the way things are now.  They are the masters of the current system, adept in its ways and confident in managing the current model of work and the organisation.  They have both personal and professional reasons for hoping that nothing changes.

Change doesn’t work that way. We are now part of a global ecosystem of actors connected in digital networks.  Access, visibility and transparency have increased driven by the new connectivity.  Change that enters this new system is magnified, spread and developed by the action of agents all around the world.

Lead or Let others Decide The Future

The connected digital networks of global actors means the future of work won’t be ignored, stopped or reversed. Others will go on to develop better ways of working whether you and your organisation participate or not. The less you participate, the more you appear a candidate for disruption by one of these actors.

Organisations face a leadership challenge in this environment.  Effective leadership, continuous learning and a vibrant culture is required to take effect of the advantages of the new approaches.  Senior managers need to play a critical role helping organisations adjust and maximise the benefits from these changes.

However, managers face changes in the future of work that change their power, status and potentially their financial position.  Networks can operate with less layers of management and roles that were once managements prerogative are being delegated to frontline employees or automated in systems. New two-way conversations with engaged and enabled employees, customers and other staked holders can require leaders to deal with new complexity. In this case, it can be tempting for a senior leader to sit on the sidelines hoping the changes are a fad or that they might pass over the organisation.

You Can’t Lead a Community if You are Not Engaged

A simple case study of this mindset comes when you consider the level of management attention to stakeholder activism in social and digital media. Because this activism is now more visible and empowered by digital and social networks, management can see resentment that once was hidden. Bear in mind the resentment is not new.  It just has a bigger audience and influence than before.

Many of these social activist activities have large impacts on organisations because the activist have a community and the organisation has only a network.  

The critical difference between a network and a community is how engaged the participants are. That engagement arises as a result of acts of leadership to create common purpose, to shape an agenda of action and to influence others to act. Leaders who ignore the burgeoning networks around the organisation allow others to shape the communities, their purposes and their influence.

Senior leaders of organisations need to engage with the networks around their organisation.  The opportunity to create productive communities far exceeds the risks. Listening and acting on feedback of networks of stakeholders is one of the better mitigants of risk. Failure to engage and to understand the needs of the networks creates an opportunity for others to lead. 

Who Helps Creates Value in Your Organisation?

Posted on by simongterry in Change, Collaboration, Leadership

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The difference between a network and community is a culture of collaboration. Collaboration doesn’t just happen. It is grown through the action of leaders.

Markets are Value Networks

The markets we use when we exchange financial value today are networks. Networks of connected agents exchange value in our stock exchanges, banks and risk markets. These networks did not arise simply because people connected. Financial markets are facilitated by practices that help transform connection into valuable interactions.

When the networks of merchants in coffee houses became stock exchanges, they relied on the role of brokers and market makers to help build a valuable marketplace. These roles helped people:

  • to build trust in the new market,
  • to create liquidity that enabled activity when demand and supply from participants was not perfectly matched,
  • to share information,
  • to develop new ways of working
  • to help the new markets to enforce the rules and standards of the exchange.

The same leadership work to build value, trust and new ways of working is found in the history of banking, insurance or other exchanges.  

The value created in these networks did not occur because the network existed. It occurred because of the work of people to build a collaborative culture in the network. People need to build a sense of how to use these new exchanges and to build trust in that they would deliver more value than risk.

Your Network Needs Market Makers

Any collaborative network will need leaders to help facilitate the creation of value in the network.  This leadership will be a combination of technical support from community managers and change leadership support from change champions in the organisation and the organisation’s senior management.

The Value Maturity Model highlights the way that collaboration’s market makers need to work to facilitate the value creation in your network:

  • Connecting relevant people to the network and into groups
  • Sharing information that may not have reached its necessary audience
  • Helping to solve issues by matching needs and capabilities, finding other resources or information and even holding a problem or information until there is a match of demand or supply.
  • Providing the systems and support to enable innovation experiments to be fostered until they are proven or fail.
  • Experiment and lead adoption of new ways of working
  • Helping lead the change in the culture of the organisation to allow the development of further cultural change.

To maximise the value of the networks in your organisation, you will need to develop the leadership capabilities that can take advantage of networks.

If you would like to create greater value in your enterprise social network or discuss how the Value Maturity Model applies to assist your organisation to create strategic value, please get in contact. I am available through @simongterry or Linkedin or www.simonterry.com

Are You Leading for the Quarter or the Future?

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

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No rational person would jeopardise their future to meet an arbitrary 90 day milestone. Too many corporate incentives are structured exactly this way.

There are many eloquent complaints about the danger of the short term focus of corporations, especially publicly listed ones. My concern is that this short term focus stands in the way of more human and more responsive organisations. This short term focus divides accountability.

Time is short

One force driving the pathology of traditional management approaches is short time frames & arbitrary division of time. Results are fragmented down to hourly, daily, weekly, monthly and quarterly targets. We engage in the division of time as much as we divide work.

Incentives and management processes are tied to these short term results. Dividing time in this way values values the present quarter or time period to the exclusion of almost all else. As a consequence the arbitrariness of the short time frame becomes an invitation to treat the entire process as a game and to push the future far from consideration.  

Getting the number

When a decision is made with the sole objective of delivering a number, we enter a realm of dangerous ethics and considerable risk to the future. Purpose, customer relationships, employee engagement and community reputation are immediately in jeopardy, as everyone focuses to deliver the certainty of the financial outcome required.

The pressure of a short time frame immediately eliminates activities:

  • that may require upfront investment, time or effort
  • that may involve uncertain returns like experimentation, new product development, enabling customers, employees or other stakeholders, etc
  • that involve thought, analysis, research, input or consultation
  • that deliver large benefits beyond the time period
  • that have any form of initial dip in performance

This remaining options usually come down to one or more of the following:

  • bringing forward returns, usually at a significant discount
  • grabbing more value in the relationship with another stakeholder without regard to longer term consequences in the relationship (for example by raising prices without regard to impacts on loyalty or market position, demanding rebates from suppliers, etc)
  • arbitrary cost cutting, especially employees or ‘discretionary expenses’ like marketing, training, maintenance, support, etc where effects are not immediate 
  • accounting treatments, particularly relating to the recognition or allocation of revenue or costs and the valuation or recognition of assets and liabilities
  • outright fraud and deception

Waste

Some of these changes may cut waste or realise value, largely by accident. In many cases, the organisation responds to the changes with innovations that ameliorate the longer term impact or at a minimum defer them for another quarter. Pressure can inspire creativity and efficiency. The negative future effects and ongoing pressure can also generate a treadmill of even greater pressure.

We must be clear that this activity is waste. Playing the numbers game is wasteful effort. It risks the future and compromises the core value creating relationships in the business. The demands of the ‘numbers game’ work to unravel any efforts to become a more responsive organisation. The ask to meet numbers always pushes for planned outcomes, maximum control and a lack of transparency in decision making.

No Division of Accountability

Accountability for outcomes is core to the future of any organisation. Ending number games does not mean an end to accountability. It means greater accountability.

  • Let’s be accountable to make every decisions in line with purpose and values.
  • Let’s ensure all employees are accountable to deliver now, for a better future and to realise people’s potential.
  • Let’s ensure that the accountability is an accountability to all stakeholders.
  • Let’s also work to deliver each day in a realistic manner to our long term goals, not just scrabble to manage an arbitrary day that we choose to report.

We need to end the division of accountability.

A Little Bit of Rebel

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

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Most rebels start small.

At the end of Richard Martin’s wonderful discussion of the power of rebel within organisations there is a reference to starting small. It reminded me that ‘from little things, big things grow’  

Many change agents start out in a small and quite compliant way. They only want to make a little change for the better. They see something that needs fixing and try to fix it. These rebels start out making change for the system. They want to make the system work just a little better.

Systems don’t like little changes. Systems push back. Small fixes are crushed.

At this point, many people seeking change stop discouraged. The rebels go on. Rebels move from a small change to making bigger changes to the system. They start to see that their small problem is a symptom and that changing the system is part of the solution. Now they want to make changes to the system.

Systems don’t like changing. Systems push back. Big changes are opposed.

Many first-time rebels stop at this point. They don’t like the ostracism, the opposition and the risk. Only the dedicated rebels go on. Now the rebels want to fundamentally change the way that the systems in the organisation handles change. They want their organisations to have a better culture, to be more responsive, to be more human and to pursue bigger and more important purposes than purely financial return. These rebels are working for a change of system.

Systems don’t like change. Systems push back. Transformative change is fought. 

The few remaining rebels just keep aiming bigger. Now they step outside the system and connect with others from other systems trying to make similar change. They start to work across organisations, industries and society to learn how to be more effective and more influential in creating responsive and human organisations.

These rebels are changing the world.

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How do you help your rare and precious rebels grow faster?

  • Do you have a culture of continuous improvement based on external performance measures that helps your people start the journey of change?
  • Do you have the room for experimentation to try new approaches?
  • Do you have a culture that fosters challenge to the big systems and processes and that supports and rewards the rebels?
  • Do you take time to discuss the culture and systems that lie behind the symptomatic problems that you face repeatedly?
  • How do you connect and engage your rebels, internally and externally, to help them stay the distance in the face of opposition?