Tag: future of work

Why the Future of Work Won’t Come Without Work

Posted on by simongterry in Future of Work, Leadership

This was because the classic texts, whatever their intrinsic worth, supplied the higher strata of the ruling class with a system of references for the forms of their own idealized behaviour…

…They did not need to stimulate the imagination. If they had, they would have served their purpose less well. Their purpose was not to transport their spectator-owners into new experiences, but to embellish such experience as they already possessed.

John Berger, Ways of Seeing (speaking of the value of the study of classics)
Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

The Undiscussable Gap

I have many management books. My desire to learn means that I am always tempted by the latest contributions to the literature. Throughout the year management books often pile up unread. Once or twice a year, I reduce the height of the pile in a burst of reading.

Quite depressingly, all too often I find I can read faster and faster as I work my way through the pile. The insights shared are pedestrian. The examples used are often routinely quoted or misleading as an ex-post interpretation of a theory or practice. It is little surprise I often get greater insights in other areas of literature to inspire my work. Beyond management literature the reward is for challenging the paradigm, not making people comfortable with received wisdom.

Far too much of management literature exists not to challenge the experience of managers but to reinforce their comfort in their positions. We can all cite the comfortable phrases that are mantras of the grace and wisdom of management. Their practice is much less consistent and uniform:

  • Our people are our greatest asset
  • Start with the customer need
  • Align people with shared purpose
  • Encourage creativity, autonomy and continuous learning
  • Look beyond the bottom line and consider wider stakeholder interests
  • and many more

Whether or not these are falsifiable, these platitudes are the bread and butter of thought leaders, the jesters of modern management, entertaining the powerful but not challenging their world. How else would they consistently receive consistent invitations to the stages of global conferences and private boardrooms? These platitudes form the right answers to the right questions in interviews and across the work context, leaving only the gap between ideal and action. In that gap, lies the undiscussable in the workplace, the power that flows from status, wealth and privilege.

The Eternal Future of Work

The gap between what publicity actually offers and the future it promises corresponds with the gap between what the spectator-buyer feels himself to be and what he would like to be. The two gaps become one; and instead of the single gap being bridged by action or lived experience, it is filled with glamorous day-dreams.

The process is also reinforced by working conditions.

The interminable present of meaning working hours is ‘balanced’ by a dreamt future in which imaginary activity replaces the passivity of the moment.

John Berger, Ways of Seeing

I have contributed a great deal of literature to the ‘future of work’ discussions and even once between rated as an influencer in that domain. Of course, by ‘influencer’ that survey meant my work was shared, more than read and much more than acted upon. I wonder some times how much all the time sharing that work has just been another contribution to the ‘passivity of the moment’ by contributing to the distractions and appeal of a better future that is coming.

Real sustainable change comes not from trite phrases, pretty writing, or influencer lists. Change comes when the circumstances are so uncomfortable and that discomfort is sustained long enough to overcome our natural inertia.

The dynamics of workplaces have changed through the enforced hybrid working of Covid times. The pressures of a pandemic were serious and sustained enough to overcome decades of resistance to change. Those same pressures now flow on into reconsideration of the goals, benefits and manner of work for many employees. The so called Great Resignation is not a mark of the unreasonableness of employees granted a little leeway. Employees have realised that a better future is in their grasp if they make decisions to change now. The question for managers is whether they want to start to live in that gap between ideal and action and address employee frustrations.

A better future for all in our workplaces will remain a distant wish if all we do is daydream in comfortable home offices, letting the undiscussable become doubly difficult by becoming invisible as well. If we want to make a better future of work we will need to actively engage all our organisations in discussions of issues of power and make real difficult changes to the patterns of our work. All learning and growth demands some discomfort. Be wary of the advice that slides easily into your working world.

You Don’t Have A Strategy if You Don’t Have the Work

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

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The commonest error in plans to develop social collaboration in an organisation is the most obvious error. Too many plans aren’t focused on the work. You don’t have a strategy for realising the value of collaboration in your organisation if it doesn’t focus on the work of your organisation.

Early Friday morning last week was the #ESNChat tweet chat. Rita Zonius and Dion Hinchcliffe were discussing a question about the plans for developing ESNs. Dion reiterated an important point – adoption or other abstract goals don’t matter.  Your business is in business and needs your employees doing something meaningful.

One Success Measure

The only measure of success that really matters to your business is the value that you create in your social collaboration.  Value doesn’t have to be measured wholly in monetary terms but for a great majority of businesses value will have clear measures and commonly direct financial elements. Value creation, broadly defined, is what separates successful businesses from the pack.

Your organisation exists to fulfil some purpose. The strategy that is in place in your organisation sets out how you will maximise the value of the work to realise that purpose. If social collaboration in your organisation is not directly connected to this strategy and the value to be created for purpose, then everyone in your organisation has the right, and the obligation, to (a) question why it matters and (b) ignore it.

Measuring value in collaboration is hard. This challenge is greater when organisations are often sceptical of new ways or working or chains of benefits. Usually the benefit realisation happens away from the platform and is measurable only in other systems. Many proponents of social collaboration choose to ignore the hard to measure benefits and focus on easier to track goals, like adoption, satisfaction, sentiment, engagement or measures created specifically for the organisation’s collaboration plan. The danger of failing to align the measures of social collaboration to the measures of the meaningful work of the organisation is the danger of irrelevance.

Parallel Paths

The most damning criticism of many social collaboration networks showing high degrees of adoption and engagement is that they are a “parallel universe” to the real organisation and its interactions.  In this parallel universe, the hierarchy is levelled, leaders are proactively engaging people in conversation, employees are empowered to speak up and discuss their whole lives and great strides are being made in engaging employees and advocating for social issues. In the office, not so much.

In this scenario, the lack of accountability for real work outcomes has allowed the collaboration network to drift into play-acting an ideal organisation. Without real work there are no hard decisions and no ugly compromises. Without real work, it is easier for everyone to get along. You only need a little bit of fantasy to undermine the interactions of an entire network.

When a collaboration network is focused on supporting the real work interactions that network is bound to what goes on across the organisation.  There is a greater chance that the discussions in the network will reflect the issues, the challenges and the interactions that happen in the corridors of the conversation, for good and for bad. Getting tough work challenges into a collaboration network, as ugly as they may be, enables the network to help address and improve them.

Many organisations like the idea of a utopian network that shows them their better side. Role modelling is a valuable purpose. However, role modelling only works when the interactions are real.  The network can only contribute to making those interactions better, if the work is being done in some way across the network. Without the work, there can be no greater value.

A better network for social collaboration does the hard work to fulfil the organisation’s strategy. You don’t have a strategy for your social collaboration if you don’t have that work and aren’t measuring its value.

Do You Want Power or Entertainment?

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

I woke up this Sunday and I had a terrible nostalgia for the days where my morning question was not:

“What have the politicians done to entertain us today?”

All around the world politics has become far too similar to a reality television show.  The politicians, the media and our focus is on the daily conflicts, dramas and stupidities. The media environment and the demand of the media audience is far less concerned about leadership (other than the theatre of a leadership contest) than the entertainment of the political show. We have forgotten that the exercise of power for the betterment of society is more important that a following.

Politics is not alone in this confusion. Thought Leadership and other forms of punditry also shows a similar confusion. The accuracy or effectiveness of advice to better society now matters less than the ability to entertain and accumulate an audience. Platitudes and gross simplifications play better than difficult messages or a call to hard work.

Here We Are Now, Entertain Us

Conflict has always entertained humans. Conflict is the key to all our storytelling. Threat based narratives help us understand our tribes and bind together in times of adversity. We can see why politicians and pundits rely on them heavily. Inspirational narratives tend to appeal to our ego, our desire for ease and the uniqueness of our community and suggest the inevitability of our future success as long as we continue to follow the advice of the storyteller. We are suckers for entertainment as the makers of content for our mobile phones are well aware. Politicians, thought leaders, media commentators and even corporate executives are just meeting the market demand.

Increasingly, in the age of mobile devices, entertainment is a solo activity. We have lost much of the collective experience of entertainment that was the standard experience of previous generations. That lack of collective context weakens the foundations of community and hinders collaboration. We need shared context and trust to come together to make change happen. Trust is an outcome of the work and the experiences we share together. If we are each following our own personal entertainment guru, there is a fragmentation of that larger shared community.

As social technology and far better media tools creep into corporate life, we have also seen the rise of the executive as entertainer. Senior management can now engage and cultivate a following internally through collaboration tools and externally through social media and even traditional media roles. For some the dynamic changes from leading to entertaining. Rather than advocating for change and conflict within the organisation, it is easier to demonise an Other, such as a competitor, an external stakeholder or abstraction like errors or waste and demand the attention of a following without pushing people to change themselves. These executives are far less likely to demand challenging change of people themselves for fear that they lose part of their following or that they lose status to someone who promises a more compelling external enemy or an easier life.

We Need Power

We need to do more than meet a market demand for entertainment. We need power to push us beyond the limitations of our own efforts and our own imagination. We need the power to step outside of our individual potential and collaborate with others. The exercise of power in this way is called leadership.

A comment in a recent article on the often hidden role of power in design practice put the issue in a way that helped me see the connection:

The definition of power: the ability to influence an outcome

This quote starkly highlights the connection of power and leadership. We can often confuse power with its past abuses or the privilege that vests it undeservedly or unevenly in others. We can prefer our power to be responsive to the needs of the community. However, as Adam Kahane has pointed out in Power and Love, it is wishful thinking to wish power away or to demand that leaders are only responsive.

Leadership is about influence. Leadership is about achieving outcomes together with and through the work of a community. Without any resulting outcome, all you are doing is entertaining the community with a show. Bringing people together to help address complex social issues is going to take the exercise of power.

We need leadership because we need the action of small self-governing communities of change. That work is the power that matters now. We cannot rely on the politicians, the thought leaders, the senior executives or the experts to deliver us. We will have to do the work of change ourselves.

Work Changes Culture

Posted on by simongterry in Collaboration, Future of Work

Sharing Out Loud

Work changes culture, not words. The future of work needs action to create new ways of working together. Creating new value requires people to do more than communicate. They must work in new ways.

With management of enterprise collaboration often falling in the Employee Communications function in organisations it can be tempting to see the challenges as primarily challenges of communication. How do we get people to use a new communication tool? What information do we want people to share in our new communication tool? Which communication tool should we use when?

The bigger and more valuable opportunity is to change the very nature of work. Changing work behaviours runs directly into the challenges of changing the culture of the organisation.  After all, culture is the expectation of future behaviours in any organisation. What ways of working are expected, what work is valued and how others will support your work is all wrapped up in a rich tapestry of cultural expectations born of past behaviours, some going back as far as the origins of the organisation.

As we have seen from communication campaigns around values in organisations, message can temporarily influence expectations. However, what confirms a change in expectations is when people see new behaviours being practiced consistently, rewarded and ultimately expected by others.

Sharing information in enterprise social networks is a start but the real value of working out loud is created when people begin to change the very nature of their work process to respond to expectations that they be more agile, more transparent, more collaborative, more trusting and more open to the expertise of others.  When this occurs they get the benefits of the input of others in greater speed, productivity and effectiveness. The changing nature of work and the changing culture of the organisation will develop hand in hand in this case and be supported by increasing personal and organisation value to justify the ongoing change.

Organisations that want to realise the true value of enterprise collaboration need to create an expectation that work will change to be more open. The best way to start that change is not with talk but by fostering the action that role models it to all in the organisation.