Tag: Change

Leading change with #wol: #wolweek

Posted on by simongterry in Change, Working out loud

Working out loud can be an agent of change. Leaders can leverage working out loud to make change.

Here’s a story I heard last week of a leader using working out loud for change. Unfortunately I need to make the story anonymous which robs it of a little detail.

A new leader took over a team with average performance. Halfway through his first conversation with the team he realised they weren’t receptive to his introduction of the changes of a new leader’s agenda.

So midway through the first team talk, his strategy changed. The leader transparently outlined the team’s strengths and weaknesses and how they contributed to performance. Importantly he led with his own performance pointing out how he needed the help of other’s in the team to address gaps in his own skills and approaches. The team was paired up to balance out strengths and weaknesses and enable shared learning.

In the first year, using this approach, results doubled. Suddenly an average team was performing well. After four years of openness, collaboration and shared learning, the team has energy, new approaches and on track for best in industry performance within five years.

The results that have been achieved engaged the team in the value of new approaches. Because people felt supported to change, they came up with a new vision for the team, new ways of working and new energy. Working and sharing learning together helped accelerate change.

Leaders can use working out loud to drive change. They need to start by being transparent and open on their own needs to learn, to grow and to collaborate. The results and engagement from working out loud are worth the effort.

#EductechAU Workplace Learning – Building Strategic Capability for Change

Posted on by simongterry in Learning, Strategy

Photo: Shannon Tipton (@stipton) votes to change the status quo at #EdutechAU.

As our organisations look to adapt to a connected world, learning will need to play a far more strategic role. Learning functions need to move from being order takers to change agents in the transformation of leadership, culture, work and organisational structures. After all, we won’t achieve our strategic goals if people don’t have the capabilities we need.

Changing the Learning Game

Change was at the forefront of the agenda of the EdutechAU workplace learning congress this week. There wasn’t a speaker or a panel that did not seek to address how organisations were using learning to manage change. These changes were hardly minor. For example, in the case studies alone we had examples of:

  • Medibank building capability for workplace culture and wellness issues in an activity based workplace through experiential & mobile learning
  • the Australian Electoral Commission rethinking its entire employee development cycle between elections with a goal of focusing more on the why and how than the what.
  • Coca Cola Amatil building the capability of its operations teams to learn for themselves and from each other without training
  • AT&T using the scale of MOOCs to retrain its global workforce into strategic capabilities and out of declining roles
  • using learning and the learning function to change culture at Northern Lights

In all the talks were the key drivers of transformation for businesses and that learning is seeking to better leverage.  All our work is becoming:

  • more connected and social
  • more open and transparent
  • more automated
  • more flexible
  • more complex
  • more knowledge based
  • more dependant on culture
  • more demanding in terms of speed, quality, efficiency, effectiveness, etc

These changes present an opportunity and a threat to learning function everywhere. Learning has opportunities to be more strategically valuable, reach more people than every and in far more engaging ways. Learning has the potential to do and control less but achieve far more by moving from design and delivery to facilitating learners to pull what they need. At the same time, the threat to learning is that both learners and management has far more available from social channels external to the organisation and the participatory culture available in those networks often more agile and even more engaging.

To leverage these challenges for opportunity, learning needs to move from an order taker for training programs to a strategic agent of change. The new challenge for learning is to rethink how they set about enabling the network of people in the organisation to build key capabilities, to help people build constructive culture and to change the way managers manage and leaders lead. The answer will be less about control and specific training programs and tools and more about how learning works in a system of capability building that reinforces the organisation’s goals and uses the best of what is available in learning, in the social capital of the organisation and its networks.

Becoming More Human

Speaker after speaker highlighted another key element of this transformation.  As work becomes more personal and more human, there is also a need for learning to lead that change too. Learning functions need to consider how they design human experiences, faciltitate human networks and realise human potential, even anticipate human emotions. The future of work puts a greater demand on design mindsets, systemic approaches and the ability to weave together networks of experiences and people in support of capability building in the organisation.

This human approach extends also to how learning works. These kinds of programs need experimentation, learning from failure and adaptation over time as the people and the organisation changes.  Learning will need to role model and shape leadership as a vehicle for realising the human potential of each individual, organisation and each network.

The Obstacles are The Work

EdutechAU was not an event where people walked away with only a technique to try on a new project. There were undoubtedly many such ideas and examples from social learning, to MOOCs, to experience design & gamification, to networked business models, to simulations and other tools. However, the speakers also challenged the audience to consider the whole learning system in and around their people. That presents immediate challenges of the capability of the learning team and their support to work in new ways.  However, those very challenges are part of helping the system in their organisation to learn and adapt. The obstacles are the work.

Thanks to Harold Jarche, Alec Couros, Marigo Raftopoulos, David Price, Ryan Tracey, Shannon Tipton, Emma Deutrom, Joyce Seitzinger, Con Ongarezos, Peter Baines, Amy Rouse, Mark L Sheppard and Michelle Ockers for their contributions to a great event.

Change didn’t work? Work the system consistently

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

The industrial era left management thinking with a fervent belief in the value of transactional interventions. If a linear process needs a different outcome, make a change. The impact should be immediately visible and then you can move on to the next change.

When you start to talk about systemic change, especially involving people, matters get more complex. The future of work is one such example. Change in the future of work often involves many people and systems in organisations. Make a transactional intervention in this situation and nothing can happen or perhaps something happens for a while and then fades as the system reasserts itself. Our work systems are designed to consistently absorb transactional shocks and then stabilise. Remember the system is not broken; it is working exactly as intended.

Culture is one example of these stabilising forces in the system of organisations, particularly for future of work behaviours. Culture is an expectation of how people will behave. That expectation shapes the way we work and does not change on one transactional intervention. Culture does not change until the individuals in the organisation form a new expectation. New sense making won’t happen until there has been persistence, leadership and reinforcing changes elsewhere in the system.

Instead of a linear process where transactional change leads directly to a measurable change in work we have a situation where interventions lead to new practice and to new sense making and that sense making drives new behaviours and better mastery of the practice that sustains different ways of work. The delays, the sense making, the need to learn and master new practice and other forces in the system all make the impact of a transactional change to culture difficult to measure & unlikely to be effective. At best, the relationship is complicated. At worst, it can be hard to draw any relationship at all.

Work on the system consistently

To foster accelerated change in the kind of complex systems faced by those changing work practices, you need help the system participants to form a new sense of the way forward:

  • don’t be wedded to your change. Ask those in the system to define, design and do the work. 
  • do you have enough system participants engaged in your changes? Those you leave out may hold you back or be key to wider complementary changes. 
  • help the system participants move from changing things transactionally to working on the whole system. Help them to see a bigger picture. Ask them to own and work the bigger change themselves and to draw others in.
  • reinforce change and work with the participants to ensure that the work on the system ensures beyond a transaction. Find the other influences in the system that impact change and include them in the work. 
  • be consistent and allow the time for issues to surface and communities to mature. Unrealistic expectations can lead to counterproductive perceptions of failure or at least difficulty.

Champions play a critical role in this kind of systemic change because they are inside the system. This position gives them impetus, influence and insight to help build an enduring new sense of the change. Champions can work in and on the system consistently.

Practice is Habit – Make This Your Year

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

“We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, and never to be undone. Every smallest stroke of virtue or of vice leaves its never so little scar.” – William James

Complex changes like realising the Responsive Organisation and developing the future of work need people to connect in communities and along networks of practice. Forming new habits will be essentially to developing the richness of practice required.

Habits are required in Practice

How are those New Year Resolutions tracking? A week into the new year and many people are already struggling with new practices that look like failed intentions. New practices struggle to embed unless we turn them into habits.

I was planning to write today about the need for habits to reinforce practice when tumblr served up the William James quote above thanks to the Explore blog and the work of Maria Popova. The article on William James says many wise words on the value of habit in reinforcing habit. 

However I can point out the serendipity.  Maria’s relentless and excellent curation is a habit. My practice of writing this blog is a habit.  Without these habits and many more the coincidence would not be possible.  Similar serendipity is found in the practice of working out loud.  These moments of encouragement extend the practice further. 

To create change we need to start developing suites of new future of work practices and turning them first into experiments and then embedding the successes as habits.  Through the long practice of habit will come innovations, solutions to problems and a richer connection with others pushing the practice forward. We need to create the habits and connections that enable the serendipity to power change for Responsive Organisations.

Habits bring time to Practice

Habits bring the gift of time to practice.  They ensure that our feeble new practices are not killed by lack of attention or effort. Habits sustain us through the hard days and the days we would rather not. We all love quick wins but focusing on new practices reminds us that not everything transforms immediately. There are obstacles, new skills and lessons to be learned in practice.

Successful practice takes time and learning. Habits are the key to winning that time.

This is Your Year

This year is definitely my year. I would like it to be yours too. That will take some new habits.

This poster first featured on this blog a year ago when its claims were decidedly uncertain. The poster celebrated that the obstacles are the work. It sits in my office in my eye line as a reminder that it is relentless practice and good habits that will deliver me the year that I seek. There are many ways I can ensure it will be my year:

  • If I practice what I preach consistently
  • If I experiment, to learn and to build new good habits
  • If I keep focus and avoid the distractions of the bright and shiny things
  • If I keep looking for ways to move forward, overcome the obstacles and achieve my purpose; but most of all
  • If I keep translating the believe that ‘This is My Year’ into action

image

This year is your year too. Like it or not, it will pass with every action and omission you make. The choice is yours to make it a year to remember. Create the habits required to own your year. The resulting practice will deliver great rewards.

Habits don’t have to be big things. Small steps accumulate. Small steps that can be consistently repeated in a process of learning accelerate success.

What would make it really your year? What do you need to do consistently to make it happen? What is your new habit?

The Poetry of Change

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

image

What is poetry? How can I explain it? And how do I explain it to you in prose? At moments like these prose is a brick through the poet’s window. The fate of the poet is to ignore the broken window and make good use of the brick, and of the draft. A broken window lets in a stranger world, not a familiar outside into a familiar inside, that’s gone to ruin, but rather a type of new encounter of the mind and its art—the air is welcome, the air is unwelcome. And still there’s the poet’s conductor, the cosmic madman in the mind, urging it all to poem. – Rowan Ricardo Phillips

Driving change in organisations can feel at times a little like describing the work of poetry in prose. The change agent speaks a different language and sees a different future. You are inclined to be treated as a madman. The art and poetry of change is embrace the discomfort and to leverage the opposition and disruption to creative ends.

Ignore the Broken Window

Change means breaking things. Many things will need and deserve to be broken. Some will be the things that you don’t want to lose. Many of the most difficult breakages will come from the pressure change puts on personal relationships.

Accept this breakage or jeopardise the change.

There is real personal discomfort for a change agent in this breakage. They can see different ways and want change urgently. Often it takes a long time for others to come on the journey and to ignore the damage of the path to a new future. Things might need to feel more broken before the new ways of working are embedded and effective.  If the people who aren’t coming on change are close friends or powerful players it can be quite uncomfortable.

Accept this discomfort or jeopardise the change.

A change agent understands that there is a greater purpose and benefits from better ways of working. They need to continue to act and share despite the discomfort because only conversation and example will create the path to new change. They need to communicate the change in language others can understand.

Make Good Use of the Brick and the Draft

The disruption of change will draw attention and conflict. The temptation is to seek to minimise this conflict in the approach to change. Attention is a scarce commodity. Conflict will help people focus on the changes and encourage them to understand. Don’t minimise the conflict and focus. Leverage it. Engage people in their own terms. Discuss the issues that people want to address.

Use the brick and accelerate the change.

The conflict of change is also an opportunity to leverage additional external perspective. Invite people to look outside the organisation. Let a draft of new ideas enter the organisation as people seek to understand and engage with the change. Encourage people to look to the networks outside the newly broken windows. Some of these ideas will create new conflict and new opportunities. There will be ideas there to foster and to develop new ways of working.  There will be evidence and case studies that help with the arguments for change

Use the draft and accelerate the change.

Urge it all to poem

Great change takes creativity. Great change finds a new and better ways of engaging others. Change Agents need to leverage creativity in their circumstances to make a poem of their change to a world speaking prose.

We are Us

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

We are Us.

We lose this simple truth too often. We see groups of people as having inherent characteristics that create forces external to the individuals involved. From time to time, we begin to believe that our companies, groups and organisations make us into something we don’t want to be. These forces in groups are those we choose to accept. Power, history, culture, ideologies, politics, values and the way we do things around here only persist because we are not working to change them.

We are Us.

If we want our organisation to care for us, we need to care for each other. If we want our organisations to be more aware, we must be more self-aware and share what we see. If we want to find the purpose of an organisation, we must start looking at our own purposes and how they are shared with others. If we want an organisation to learn better, faster or more, then we must change our own approaches to learning and work. If we want an organisation to change, it begins with changes in our actions.

We are Us.

If we don’t change our organisations when needed, they will fail. We will no longer be a group that shares a future together. The impacts of that failure will fall not on some abstract organisation but on each the individuals involved.

We are Us.

Every individual has a role to play to help the group change. Every individual has a right to shape the group through their participation. The influences in a group are a sum of individual interactions. There is nobody else to do the work of change.

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.

Action Changes Culture

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

It’s easier to act your way into a new way of thinking than to think your way into a new way of acting – Millard Fuller. 

To many in management, culture seems like a soft topic best left to Human Resources or Communications . To this mindset, culture is a matter of getting the words right, saying the right things and having the right tools & programs to change culture. Culture change is a communications issue. Often this results in culture change programs dictated by senior management with a goal of uniformity of culture in the organisation. These approaches at best fail quickly and at worst are counterproductive, generating employee cynicism.

Culture doesn’t work this way. Culture arises in a group of people when there is an expected pattern to interactions. The expectation forms from a consistent and predictable pattern of actions. Rituals are a classic example of how culture is transmitted. Words may help us to notice a change and tools may enable new actions but only the actions done consistently create the new mindsets.

The focus on expectations and actions also highlights how unlikely uniformity is. With consistent behaviour to shape expectations groups may develop a commonality of expectation. However uniformity of expectations remains unlikely. There will always be local variations for good reason. A good reason may be that a different pattern of action is better at fulfilling the organisation’s purpose or customer needs in this context. The heart of embracing diversity as an organisation is understanding these variations and leveraging them too

Expectations cannot be imposed. Begin with discovery of the expectations and the actions that really exist. Be honest. Failure to accept reality won’t help. Creating change then becomes a matter of understanding how to change actions to consistently deliver new patterns and to shape different expectations.

I am often asked ‘how does an enterprise social network change culture?’ There is no universal answer to that question. There are no guaranteed changes in expectations and actions in an enterprise social network just as there is no universal culture. Enterprise social networks in the right circumstances enable transparency, leadership, learning, problem solving, innovation and enablement of people. Where the culture is hostile to these things they do not, without significant investment in changing the way people act and interact.

Better questions are ‘what actions and interactions in our culture will be facilitated by an enterprise social network? How can we encourage these actions to become more consistent? What would these actions do for the expectations of our people as to how we behave here?’ These questions focus attention on the hard work of creating consistency in a community of new and different actions.

The impact of culture on the actions and interactions in the organisation is ultimately why Peter Drucker famously said ‘Culture eats strategy for breakfast’. Strategy that hopes for action inconsistent with the culture’s expectations will fail.

Start new and different actions now. Start small. Build new habits. Experiment with new ways of working. Action matters

Action creates culture. Focus on the actions, not the words or the tools.

Pay better attention

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

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