Tag: Change

Change the World. Why? Because it is You.

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

Nobody escapes being a change agent. Every day every thing that we do makes some change to the world. Cumulatively these changes are our legacy, whether from indifference, for good or for bad. The best change agents are intentional – focusing their efforts on their personal purpose.  

At the intersection of your many daily activities, you will find a common point of your personal purpose. That purpose is the urgency at the heart of the changes that you want to make in the world. That purpose determines the impact you will have and how others know and remember you

What do the following have in common?

  • customer experience, sales & marketing
  • leadership & change
  • design thinking, innovation & strategy
  • knowledge, learning, capability and careers
  • purpose & potential
  • social change, social value, & community
  • communication, interaction & social networking
  • digital transformation
  • the future of work

This list is a selection of the recurrent themes of my work and my blog. So why have I spent my career working in these areas? Why do I keep coming back to these topics? 

My personal answer lies in this commonality:

Doing well in these fields demands that you respect others, work constantly to better understand others and your work must help create a world that is a little more human

This insight drives me and focuses my interest and activities. This insight help shapes what I do next and the impact I seek to have on the world. Knowing why is powerful.

Understand the insights into your purpose found at your own personal intersection.  That critical insight is invaluable to guide your future actions. That insight will help provide energy, motivation and resilience for what you do.

When you understand why, you will want even more to change the world in your own unique way. You will want to take control of your impacts. Why is the engine of how.

Why? Because changing the world your way is realising the best potential you have.

How Do You Support the Health System?

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

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I recently posted about How to Start a Change Movement. That post was picked up in the UK by the team working on change and transformation in the NHS. I have a strong interest in healthcare given my last role leading the HICAPS payments business here in Australia. I saw first hand the efforts to drive change and improve healthcare in Australia and the opportunities to do more.

Through these interactions, I became aware of the NHS’s fantastic initiative NHS Change Day and its Australian counterpart, Change Day. Both initiatives ask people to make a simple pledge of one thing that they can do to help improve the quality of health care, aged care or disability services.  

The goal is accumulate a huge volume of all those small changes to deliver large scale improvements in the health systems.

Why does it involve me?

Many people might be tempted to view improving health care as somebody else’s job, even if they work in the healthcare system. After all, the government plays a major role and there are lots of big institutions, like hospitals, healthcare businesses and large corporates. Healthcare is a large and complicated industry with real expertise and deep technical knowhow.  Why isn’t making it better a job for others?

However we have seen examples all around the world that experts find healthcare hard to improve.  

Healthcare is a system. In other words, it is a complex network. A network cannot be changed by a hierarchy flicking a change switch.  Networks need the influence of all the participants to drive change.

The members of the Healthcare network include:

Payers: Private individuals, Government, Health insurers and other social insurance schemes. Political decisions, regulatory rules and a raft of other policy considerations play a large role in the money available, way care is delivered and costs of care that is provided

Providers: These are the people we usually think of as the healthcare system but they aren’t one agent. A hospital is a large network of people working together to provide care and provide all the supporting services. When you extend to all the other forms of care required to treat well a huge range people operating in all sorts of ways collaborate as a network to provide care.

Patients & their communities: Healthcare outcomes are influenced by the life an individual leads and the people who support an individual before, during and after their care.

You:  You will likely fall into one of the above categories today or in the future. At some point you will need to engage with the healthcare network.  Even if your own health is perfect, you have others in your community to consider. 

For great care to be provided all members of that network have to work in concert to produce better outcomes. Every member in a network can contribute to better outcomes. As we see again and again, efforts to work on one part of a network, can have complex ramifications across the whole system. For example:

  • access to basic primary care services like General Practitioners can reduce stress on emergency care
  • failure to invest in preventative care, the right support during treatment or support for recovery can drive poorer lifetime health outcomes
  • funding decisions in one part of the system can shape patient and practitioner behaviour in other areas as money and activity changes
  • something as simple as having someone to talk to or getting a chance for some extra happiness can improve health outcomes

Improving healthcare is difficult, but it can be done. The complexity means we need to extend the conversation and engage a broader range of people in the change. That change benefits us all. Because it is a network, we all need to play our role to see benefits flow.

Get involved – Make a Pledge

Take the time to consider the ask of either the Australian or the UK Change Day programs. They are targeting 50,000 and 50,000 pledges respectively.  

They need your help. All they want is for you to choose to play a small role in the healthcare network. One little commitment will be a start.

Join in the movement for change for the better in healthcare. Be an active member of your part of the healthcare network. Join in the action.

Do what you can do best. The healthcare network will be better for it.

And because networks need good communication and great stories, spread the word. Tell others about Change Day and why they need to get involved in improving the network for all of us.

That is one part of my pledge.

Change Starts One Step Forward

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

Every journey of 10,000 miles begins with a single step – Lao Tsu

The vision of the future is dazzling. It arrives from on high as if delivered by parcel delivery drones, endorsed by gurus and acclaimed by cheerleaders of the future.

Everyone is captivated by the insight of the strategy, the incredible new technology, the uplifting rhetoric of the new corporate behaviours and the breathtaking audacity of the new organisational structure.

Then you stop. Reality hits. The vision needs to be executed.

You turn around. Oddly all the drones, the gurus and the cheerleaders have disappeared.  The new plan still needs to be implemented. You turn over a few rocks and it appears nobody has done what you need to do before. You need new capabilities that nobody has. A grumbling begins that people never believed in the high flown vision in the first place. Senior management are disappointed at the progress made on the ideas that they only just dreamed up.

The greatest breakdown in management is between thought and action.

You could start action for action’s sake. Announce a radical transformation, a wrenching restructure or a bold acquisition if you have that kind of power. Even if radical changes were possible, those kinds of change fail more often than not.  All that boldness might just be a distraction from real action to create change.

If you are somewhere in the middle, there is only one choice:

Take one step forward.  

Pick the step that makes most sense to move closer to the vision.  Something you can do. Something practical and possible. Something that builds capability to do more. There is always something. Do it.

After that step you do another.  You gain momentum.  Might not be exciting at first, but it is progress.  Eventually you will meet the drones, the cheerleaders and the gurus down the path.  They might just be surprised to see you because they understand the difference between thought and action.

Take the advice of an ancient Chinese master. Move forward into change one step at a time.

The best first step is the one right in front of you.

Susan Scrupski, Harold Jarche and I will be discussing the practical steps to move forward with collaboration in the first Change Agents Worldwide webinar, in partnership with Socialcast VMware

Obstacles are the work

Posted on by simongterry in Change, Leadership, Learning, Life & Career

Is it really December?  Businesses and schools are winding down for the summer break. The cricket has started. Christmas is rapidly approaching.  With that comes a quick close to 2013.

2013 has been a year of adventures, obstacles and challenges. More than anything else it has been a year of new momentum. I could not be more excited by the incredible opportunities that have arisen this year:

Embrace the Chaos and all its Obstacles

I was reflecting on all that has happened this year when Dany DeGrave tweeted yesterday about the need to maintain momentum in the face of obstacles:

Obstacles are the work. They show you have chosen to have an impact. They help us see our purpose. They provide the challenge and interest.

Obstacles are proof that your work matters to others. These challenges remind us that change is human and social. They encourage us to share knowledge with our networks, to work aloud and to pay attention to the knowledge moving around us.

Obstacles help us reflect on what matters. Pushback make us ask new or obvious questions.  An orderly progression of success can be quite tedious and generate its own doubts.  If success is that easy, are we missing something?

If there weren’t obstacles, our talents would not be required, we would not learn and not grow in the work. If there weren’t obstacles, we would not get the rewards of overcoming them.  If there weren’t obstacles, we would not have the joys of collaborating with others to move forward around over, under or through.

Your Obstacles. Your Momentum. Your Year.

So next time you are considering a year of obstacles, remember the hard work proves that you are on the right track. Obstacles are proof of your momentum.

I bought this poster at the midpoint of this year. It has been a reminder ever since that every year is my year.

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Every year is your year too. Move past challenges. Reflect on the successes.

Maintain momentum in doing whatever you need to do to make it your year. Your impact is up to you.

If you would like your own or other great posters, the source is The Poster List. 

Assigned. Chosen. Earned. Part 2 – 2 Stories and a Challenge

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

We shape our impact with our choices of how we respond to our circumstances and the influence we earn in our networks.  Our jobs and the hierarchy do not determine our ability to influence.

That concise message was prompted by The Australian Leadership Paradox, a book on improving leadership in Australia by tackling issues like roles and authority. Geoff Aigner, one of the co-authors, asked me for stories that brought a richer context to my last post. Here are two examples:

A Job. Limited Power.

At the launch of the Academy in NAB, I was asked to become the inaugural Dean of Customer Experience.  The job was tasked with building customer experience capability enterprise wide across a large financial services group.  As a direct report of the Australian CEO, the job was a high profile one in an important initiative.  

However, that description was where the hierarchical power stopped.  The role had no direct reports.  Everyone in learning reported to other leaders in a central learning function or across the many businesses.  There was no reporting on how much learning work was actually going on. The activity and budgets sat in these widely distributed teams. Everyone already had too much work. The Academy was being created because there was a need for better collaboration across businesses on learning. Nobody had seen a Dean before and there was no idea yet what they did.

I had to choose the role that I would play. I could have seen the situation as impossible and quickly failed. I could have chosen to influence the CEO and leverage his power to direct action. However, the giddy sensation of power would be temporary and the businesses would have quickly locked me out. The CEO would have rightly questioned the value I added. My authority would erode if it did not come from my relationships.

I chose instead to share my passion for learning, to advocate for the Academy and to help facilitate a community of the learning professionals across the organisation.  I chose to engage the business by demonstrating new ways for learning to lead change, to solve problems and to demonstrate the value of collaboration. Over time, my authority and my influence increased because of the impact the Academy team delivered.  People began to ask the Deans and the Academy to help solve tricky issues well beyond learning. That influence continued when I left the job.  After all, nobody had told me what role to play, so nobody could tell me to stop just because a job went away.

Why Are You Doing This Again?

The experience of being Dean led to my role in helping sponsor and grow NAB’s Yammer community.  When Yammer began at NAB, it was unofficial with no budget or sponsorship.  There was no place for it in the hierarchy. For the Yammer community to grow, it needed many leaders to choose play the roles of sponsors, advocates and community leaders, because these roles were not in anyone’s job description.  

Over and over again, as we did this, we were each asked a variant of the question:

Why are you doing this again?

Our answer was simple.  The roles were needed and the community added great value to NAB.  It was not our job but somebody had to do it.  We could play the roles and so we chose to do so.

For five years, I worked with other leaders in that Yammer community.  Everyone’s time was volunteered above delivery of the expectations their day jobs which ranged from Graduate to Executive General Manager. We did what was required to build a successful and vibrant community. The roles we played grew the benefits for NAB and the engagement of the community until we ultimately prepared a business case for sponsorship and formal adoption by the company.  

In this process, each of those leaders built their unique position of authority in the community. Many of the leaders got new roles as a result of demonstrating their ability to play different roles and their growing authority. In addition, the community was stronger because its leadership came from within.

Over to you: A challenge – your new role

  1. What problem or opportunity can you see that doesn’t fit in somebody’s job?
  2. What role could you play to draw attention to or solve for that problem or opportunity?
  3. Whose authority & support do you need to make the change happen?

Conflict – Don’t Panic. Engage.

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

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Many organisations are fine with collaboration and change as long as there is no conflict.  Once the conflict arises, everyone panics. Panic creates the worst reactions because it often leads to these strategies:

  • Freeze: pretending there is no conflict and hoping it fades away
  • Fight: Wading in to the conflict to impose the ‘right’ answer
  • Flight: Shutting down the conversation or even the whole change or collaboration

A panicked response is particularly likely if the conflict arises around one of the long threatening fault lines in the organisation e.g. between sales and marketing, between business and IT, between frontline employees and management, etc. Every organisation has its undiscussables and they are where leadership, change and collaboration begins to fail.

Don’t panic.  Celebrate and engage to shape the conflict into its most constructive form – deep engagement.

Conflict is the first sign of real engagement.  Until conflict occurs, everyone is assuming the collaboration or change is not worth the effort of a fight.

Conflict is also how you learn.  Well managed conflict helps share context between groups.  It will surface feedback and learnings. It helps you find the people to whom the activity really matters. Conflict is where you get to the real questions to be answered.  There is a good chance the real issue lies somewhere in that organisational fault line that everybody knows and nobody wants to discuss.

Any scriptwriter will tell you that every screenplay is driven by conflict.  Humans crave conflict.  Our stories are full of conflict.  We devote a huge amount of our attention to it. All the gossip in your office will relate to stories of conflict and their meaning for the behaviour of others or the culture of the organisation.  Successful change and collaboration needs this energy for human engagement.

So next time conflict breaks out around a change or a collaboration, recognise it as a good sign.  Engage to make it a constructive conversation:

  • Show genuine & deep interest in people’s views as to how to learn and improve
  • Tease out people’s purposes, concerns and context
  • Shift the discussion from opinions toward facts
  • Look for common ground and agreed actions. 
  • Accept that you can’t make every one happy.
  • Demonstrate change in your approach based on what you learn

5 Big Shifts – Chaos is Human

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

When you connect many people, you are reminded of a very human form of chaos. Things just cease to happen in the orderly way that you might expect. It is human nature:

  • to seek purpose,
  • to connect and share knowledge with others
  • to seek to make a difference.

Once we are connected, these natural human needs begin to take over reshaping efforts to structure relationships. 

Efforts to Control Chaos are Failing

So many of the ideologies and management approaches of human history have been efforts to control and shape these three natural human behaviours. They have been concerned to restrict their potential to drive change and create chaos. These ideologies rely on asymmetries of power and information to enforce their approaches.

Still solving problems of a pre-modern era, we still try to work against the grain of human behaviour:  

  • We seek to structure out the mess of human communication through silos, tools, meetings, formats which leads to a focus on the process over the conversation
  • We define teams, roles, hierarchies, discretion and decision rights with exacting detail down to the exact titles people can use to describe themselves and the social indicators in each role.
  • We specific processes in exacting detail in the hope that we can dictate exactly how that process will be best executed by each person in every case without discretion
  • We motivate people with top-down orders, objectives, rules, measurement, financial incentives and threats of exclusion  

Complexity, uncertainty and disruption are on the rise despite our best efforts. These techniques are increasingly seen to stifle innovation, to waste human potential and to frustrate motivation of vital talent.

Working with the Chaos

Human nature is not changing any time soon. Our technologies will continue to enhance our connection and opportunities for expression and collaboration. The potential for failure of traditional techniques will worsen with time.  

We need to work with human nature. Working with our human nature requires us to accept some fundamental shifts: 

  • Knowing to Learning:  We need to move from a view that experts have the stock of knowledge that they require. The model of knowing everything never worked. We need to embrace knowledge as a flow, constantly being enhanced, made relevant again and a part of a constant exercise of learning. 
  • Motivating to Inspiring: We need to engage around purpose and help people to see how they realise their goals and potential as part of collective activities and group goals.
  • Supervising to Enabling: Build people’s capability for more complex tasks rather than trying to simplify the tasks to make supervision, direction and measurement easier. Engage people in developing the ability to produce better outcomes that take them where they want to go.
  • Controlling to Engaging:  The role of leaders is not to direct but to shape the conversations to provide context for good decisions and ensure that all the stakeholders are appropriately engaged. Leaders also help the community agree the level of urgency for change and overcome change and collaboration barriers.
  • Inside-out to Outside-in: Understand the environment, community customer and other stakeholder views as you form your own. Create an organisation and people that engage with their communities. Be responsive.

Do one thing

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

Just one action is enough to make a difference. It helps you learn.

When we want to improve things or make a change, the opportunities can be overwhelming.  

All at once we want to change everything simultaneously. We can become a whirlwind trying to make everything happen now. Usually, that results in a lot of confusion and a mess of partially completed plans.

Alternatively, we can get stuck trying to make the best choice among the options.  We can go looking for that one perfect thing that will make the biggest difference.  Paralysis by analysis will result. There are too many choices and too much analysis to pick the right option with the fewest risks. 

Just do one thing. Today. 

How do you choose? Do what feels most right. Go with your best hunch. Back your judgement. You are immersed in the problem.

Do one thing well.

But, and this is a big but…

Measure your action.  Learn and do one new thing again based on what you learn.

Over time the actions will build. You will build momentum too. You might find others join you. The purpose and the answer is in the work. 

So do.