Talking with Kevin Jones about the opportunities to Making Work More Human in the future of work.
(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)
Tag: future of work
Why Hierarchal Management Survives – Institutional Filter Failure
We like to believe hierarchical management survives because those in power won’t surrender it. More likely it survives because we have not yet developed better management practices for handling excess of information. Our hierarchies make us intentionally dumb to avoid the challenges of networked information flows. We rely on hierarchy to remain unresponsive.
The Power but No Glory
Ask most frustrated change agents about why management is not changing faster to new ways of working and conversation eventually turns to the lack of incentive for managers to surrender their power. After all when the rewards, power and prestige of senior management is so great, why would any organisational leader jeopardise these benefits by moving to new models of management. In this view a senior management cartel stands in the path of change.
Ask senior managers about the needed changes in organisations and they will list the same issues as the change agents – too many meetings, too many emails, not agile and responsive enough, bad decision making, not enough innovation, and poor execution. Senior managers recognise that power is not what it once was. Fiat power is declining, engagement is low and threats must give way to influence.
However, when you ask about moving to new network and self-organising ways of working, the first response is usually not about a loss of power. The first response is some form of “I barely manage my emails. How would I cope if everyone could contact me directly?” This complaint may take the form of social channels as a new method of two way communication, the need to respond to new issues from customer or community networks, new performance measures, managing autonomous experimentation or the being exposed to incomplete work in progress through working out loud.
Institutional Filter Failure
Consider for a minute the shared list of the sins of a hierarchical organisation: meetings, email, narrow internal views, partial data, bad decision making and limited ability to act. These aspects of the system are not symptoms of the hierarchy. They are its reason for being. They are the system.
In an age of an increasing overload of information, management more than ever needs filters. Clay Shirky famously said:
‘There’s no such thing as information overload – only filter failure’
Our management systems are full of these ways to reduce and control the spread of information to make management life more manageable. They aren’t flaws, filtering is the system. The system is working perfectly as we designed it. We have these process to make our organisations less responsive. We want to exclude lots of information to make managers’ lives easier.
Managers resist giving up these flaws of the hierarchy because we have not yet offered them alternative filters in which they can have confidence.
Responsive Organisations Use Information
Responsive Organisations don’t exclude information. They work it. Instead of trying to pass it around through series of filters, these organisations seek to enable people to make use of the information they have, to share it on a pull basis and to create new and valuable information to assist their work.
Think for a minute of the key elements of responsive organisations:
- External orientation: Opening up the organisation to its environment and orienting it this way pushes the traditional hierarchical approach of information management to breaking point. When the ‘facts are outside’ to quote Steve Blank, management must embrace different ways of managing information.
- Transparent Network structures: Network models of working are pull structures unlike hierarchies traditional push models of communication. In a network people have the ability to find the information that they need. We don’t need to push it around we just need to make it findable through approaches like working out loud. This transparency contributes to trust and shared context, critical elements to reduce the decision making overhead.
- Autonomy to employees: If employees have autonomy they don’t need to share their context and rationale with their boss to get a decision. They just make the one that they think best.
- Experimentation: Experimentation further shifts the burden of information and decision making. When the right answer is the one that survives a test, we don’t need meetings up the chain to get an OK.
- Purpose: As most managers know communicating strategic intent down a hierarchy is hard work. Either the strategy doesn’t survive translation or the application in a different frontline context is a challenge, particularly balanced with the rules and regulations that must come with it. Purpose is easier to get. Purpose comes from within an employee and can be a richer and stronger guide to their action. Purpose reinforces autonomy.
Responsive Organisations adopt new approaches to filter and use information. Instead of relying on the decision making of a few overwhelmed managers in the hub of the network. Responsive Organisations enable every node to filter and to act on the information. That approach accelerates both learning and action.
Don’t Know, Learn
Hierarchical management is obsessed with what is known. (This is both the appeal and the failure of ‘big data’) Managing what is known is the objective of the system. Instead of knowledge the system becomes an information filtering system and critical insights are lost. However, you don’t need to know as much if you can learn.
Knowledge is not worth much as a stock. It value comes from use in a flow. Insightful analysts like Dion Hinchcliffe and John Hagel are already describing a new information platform view of the next phase of our connected lives.
Responsive Organisations will be those that develop the approaches and practices to best use information in new ways to achieve the purposes of the organisation and realise the potential of its people. That’s called learning.
Start Yesterday
The only thing as a manager that you can’t fix is the discovery that you should have started yesterday. Working to create an effective culture is not a realm for the fast follower. Start!
All the Fast Followers
A fast follower mindset dominates much strategic thinking in business. It may not always be explicit, but successful practices are widely followed.
Nobody wants to bear the pain, the effort and the risk of the bleeding edge. Too many of the inventors failed to win the execution challenge. Once a successful approach has been identified it can be rapidly copied. Fast followers compete on execution. Fast following is seen as a safe play with only the danger that you give your competitor a small advantage for the period of time it takes to copy the approach.
You Can’t Fast Follow Culture
Your culture today is different to your competitor’s culture or your role model organisation’s culture. There is a reason you still haven’t caught up to the impact of those GE practices that you are trying to follow (A reminder: Jack Welch retired 14 years ago).
What will be effective in your organisation differs from what works in another company. Experimentation is required to find the ideal set of behaviours for the purpose, people and strategy of your organisation.
Even if a practice could be guaranteed to work, implementation of cultural change takes time. There is no purchase to make, no switch to flick or no announcement that will let you catch up on an advantageous culture as a fast follower.
Culture is an expectation of how interactions happen in the networks of your organisation. Networks are one area where fast follower strategies often fail. People can be reluctant to shift once they have adopted a set of beliefs and built skills in interactions in a network.
You need to do the work to change the expectations of behaviours in your company. That will not happen overnight.
Your Future Competitor has Started.
Somewhere a present or future competitor has started experimenting with new ways of working. Disruption is as much about new ways of working and new models of management as it is about new customer propositions.
The extensive discussion of the future of work means that different organisations are starting to explore better ways of working. People are experimenting with new modes of organisation, practices of management, the leadership of communities, and different ways to learn, collaborate, innovate or solve problems.
These organisations are exploring more effective cultures and modes of achieving higher performance in their team. They know that it will be a long while before you find out what works for them. When you do even knowing what works for them, you will still have to make sense of the change for yourself. There’s a lot of learning to do.
You can’t catch up without learning what works for you & your network, learning how to implement changes and making the new behaviours expected practice in your organisation.
If you are wondering if it is time to start experimenting with new ways of working, then take a closer look at the practices and experiments of the competitors around you. You can’t start yesterday, but you can run an experiment today.
Compassion
People can grow. Practice compassion. Help better their practice.
In my office I keep a statue of Guanyin, the bodhisattva of compassion. I found the statue in Hong Kong over 20 years ago and loved the serenity & beauty of Guanyin. I also loved the reminder of the value of focusing on compassion for others. Guanyin is connected with the Lotus Sutra which established in the Buddhist scriptures that everyone can improve with the right practice.
[The Lotus Sutra] teaches us that the inner determination of an individual can transform everything; it gives ultimate expression to the infinite potential and dignity inherent in each human life. – Daisaku Ikeda
The Compassionate Leader
Compassion is greater than empathy for the challenges of others. Compassion is when that emotion leads people to go out of their way to act to help others. Compassion is not a mindset. It is a practice.
Compassion requires a specific focus on each individual. Compassion is about helping each individual to relieve their situation. The ultimate belief of a compassionate approach is that everyone can improve, like the Lotus Sutra.
Traditional organisations with an industrial mindset encourage dispassionate leaders. With a fixed mindset of employee potential and mechanistic view of employee productivity, compassion is discouraged. Leaders need to play to the averages of teams, cut their losses on poor performers and move on. Leaders who show compassion will be seen as overly focused on soft skills or more bluntly as weak leaders.
When the future of work is becoming more human, we can no longer afford the waste in this dispassionate approach. We cannot predict the emergent practices which will define effectiveness in a new connected digital knowledge economy. Innovation, disruption and new value creation rely on leveraging diversity, new ways of working and learning. If so, how can we afford to write people off until we have tried to realise their potential contributions.
Compassion takes Practice
Much of the traditional concern in management around soft skills relates to concerns that these skills are just talk. However compassion demands more than the thoughts and talk of empathy. Compassion demands action.
Leaders can act in measurable ways to help their teams to learn, to improve and to practice new skills. The work of leaders in the future of work is to realise human potential. This will take the hard work of new practice.
Compassion begins with a focus on the individual and an acceptance of their real circumstances. Leaders need to understand an employee’s goals and build their plans around those goals and a frank dialogue about where the employee is today. Compassion does not require you to soften the blow of reality. It requires you to help change it.
Compassionate leaders must work to improve practice. Coaching will play a key role in encouraging employees to seek out, experiment with and learn from new practice. A coaching approach to performance aligned to the employee’s goals and the goals of the organisation can achieve dramatic improvement in individual performance.
Compassionate leaders do not protect their teams from change. They make them better able to benefit from change. These leaders teach new skills and perspectives, show the potential gains in new practices and find alternative ways to contribute for those who are adversely affected by change. Compassionate leaders see change as a way to better realise potential.
The future of work demands compassionate leaders. How is your leadership working to realise the potential of others?
Compassion is a necessity, not a luxury – His Holiness The 14th Dalai Lama
The Growth Mindset of Collaboration
Over the last week I have been speaking to a number of organisations across SE Asia around how they can start to realise the value that collaboration can create. I was outlining my Connect>Share>Solve>Innovate model and helping organisations to plan their collaborative communities using the approach.
One question kept coming up. The commonest question I was asked was a variant of the following:
How do we encourage our employees to share and try to solve problems when they are afraid to make a mistake?
At the heart of this anxiety is what Carol Dweck of Stanford refers to in her book Mindsets as a fixed mindset. If an employee believes that their ability, status or position is fixed, then they do not want to risk anything that might show themselves as performing below expectations. In a fixed mindset, you avoid testing your inherent capabilities for fear that you will be disappointed. Highly hierarchical organisations encourage a fixed mindset.
Collaboration demands what Carol Dweck calls a growth mindset. To collaborate, we have to believe that through work and effort we can learn and get better together. Mistakes, embarrassment and other challenges are learning opportunities that are overcome with effort.
Shifting to a Growth Mindset
My answer to the question above came down to a simple recommendation:
Make sure in the culture of your organisation there is a personal accountability on employees to improve their work every day.
This recommendation sounds so obvious. Surely we can expect this from any manager. However, many organisations treat their employees as if their capabilities are unchanging, that improvement is the work of specialists and managers and that daily productivity is all that matters. Mix in hierarchical relationships and you have strongly reinforced a fixed mindset in the culture of the organisation i.e. do your job with minimum effort to the best of your ability only and wait to be changed.
There are many ways a personal accountability for improvement can be created in organisations:
- customer experience, customer service improvement, etc
- continuous improvement, productivity, kaizen, six sigma, etc
- rising financial or performance expectations
- personal leadership expectations
- innovation, experimentation, agile, lean startup principles, etc
- organisational values of improvement, growing impact on purpose, etc
- talent development and on the job learning
Use one or all of the above. Whatever way it works in your organisations culture and strategy, the requirement is that your organisation expects and rewards people for the daily effort to improve. Over time that helps to create an expectation that every individual will work to make their work better.
The growth mindset in your organisation will drive the value of more mature forms of collaboration. Importantly, it will also drive an uplift in performance overall.
The Future of Management – Recipes and Mastery
For much of the industrial era, management has been a challenge of how slavishly can you copy the recipe. We are entering an era when mastery will demand new approaches and innovation and experimentation on management.
When you start cooking, you learn to copy a recipe closely. When you start in management, you learn to copy a recipe from GM, GE or another organisation. The spreading of a linear process mindset across industries has led to the view that the successful recipe for management is known. In this mindset, the challenge is compliance. Managers need to follow the recipe and variation must be eliminated.
Experienced cooks use recipes as guides for experimenting and adapting their practice. They work out loud sharing innovations in communities, accelerating the change in practice. Experienced cooks realise that recipes are no help when circumstances change or you need to adjust to variations in ingredients or tools. At the point where things become less predictable, mastery must take over.
Management increasingly needs to adopt a mastery mindset. Management thought leaders like Gary Hamel have been calling for innovation in management. There are many seeking to connect the change agents of new ways of working. This connection offers the potential to amplify the mastery and the effectiveness of the practitioners, experts and other change agents of future ways of working.
An Example: Toyota Production System
The Toyota Production System has been credited with driving a great deal of the success of Toyota in winning share and profitability in the automobile industry. Importantly, the development of the Toyota Production System was an open and ongoing collaborative activity. It developed from the insights of Ford, Deming and other founders of management. Toyota’s approach challenged its management and employees to seek new and better ways of working.
At the same time Toyota engaged with its Detroit competitors and its supply chain partners, sharing learnings, making open its factories and listening to its competitor’s approaches. Realising it needed to innovate on management as well as products, Toyota was prepared to be open and connected.
Interestingly, many of those other organisations could not make sense of what they were seeing at Toyota. Instead of trying to innovate their own systems they copied tools from the Toyota Production System and implemented them into their own environment as transactional interventions, often to little impact. Waves of management fads are attributable to manager’s attempts to extract a transactional change from the Toyota Production system.
Mastering innovation in management
The knowledge economy has led some firms to greater awareness of the need for management innovation. Startups, professional service firms and large organisations of the digital and knowledge economies are some of the first to realise that human potential is a differentiator. They explicitly acknowledge that innovation on the tools of management are as important to their success as innovation in their processes and systems.
Increasingly the network economy is forcing organisations to look at their world and explore the more visible and accessible systems. No organisation is an island any more. Systems thinking makes it even clearer that management’s simple recipes may not address the needs of all stakeholders or complex and dynamic processes.
When you let go of the management recipes, things do get more challenging. Measures are not as precise. Interventions are not as predictable. The shift for managers is from focusing on efficiency to focusing on effectiveness. In our traditional efficiency mindset we rarely consider the human potential lost because policy prevents action or requires wasteful steps.
In a mastery approach, instead of reducing loss and ensuring compliance, managers now have the potential to drive step changes in performance by discovering and implementing new and better ways of working.
How are you challenge your managers to step away from the recipe book and innovate on new ways of working? How are you helping them develop mastery in the practice, share that with their teams and continuously build the skills to connect and learn with others as a Network Navigator?
Change didn’t work? Work the system consistently
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.
Learning from the shared practice of bread making
Tonight I started making a new loaf of bread. The one I made this morning is gone. As I began I reflected that what once terrified me as a mysterious challenge has become a practice I can tackle with confidence. Mastery is still a long way off, but the practice has its rewards.
Making bread is a simple practice but one with remarkable options for complexity. The simplicity begins with ingredients. There are only four required – flour, water, yeast and salt. However each of these is a natural product and yeast is a living organism. Variations in flour, temperature and vitality of the yeast interact with the practice of kneading, rising, shaping and baking to introduce complexity. Additional ingredients, processes and time spin bread off in other complex ways.
The complexity means there is a lot to learn and learning from the practice of masters is invaluable. My first loaves were flat and inedible. My own starter was weak, I lacked a grasp for developing the structure of the gluten and I was unaware of what to do when my following of recipes went awry, usually through some minor error of mine.
Here’s a few examples of how I learned from studying the practice of masters:
- My master sourdough recipe came from the Fabulous Baker Brothers with accretions from all my reading.
- A sourdough course at the Brasserie Bakery gave me a better hands on appreciation of kneading and a better starter.
- I learned about letter folds to improve the dough from the recommendations of many recipe books.
- The Bourke Street Bakery’s Bread and Butter Project cookbook introduced me to a new effective kneading technique for the amateur
- No knead recipes helped me to understand time and wet dough was my friend and trained me in the ability to plan a loaf ahead.
- I worked out how best to slash and steam loaves in my home oven from the advice of others and my own experiments.
- Reading widely on styles of bread helped hone my confidence to build my own recipes and fix those that drift off track. Particularly useful were The Bread Bible, the Italian Baker, Nordic Bakery and Local Breads
- I have become a keen watcher of bakers at work from my lock pizza store to videos online.
If you reflect on the diversity of these influences, you will understand that my loaves aren’t copies of anyone of these sources. They draw from each in different ways, often at different times.
Complexity means each person needs to develop their own unique practice to leverage their opportunities and meet their own needs. There isn’t always a simple to follow recipe when techniques need to be learned. Experimentation is required to make sense of the practice and to make our own changes to make those practices suit.
However, we don’t do that learning and experimentation alone. We stand on ‘the shoulders of giants’ if we connect and learn from those masters around us. However, I can only learn from others if they are prepared to work out loud and share their approach. That working out loud is not all a free gift. I have paid for courses, a library of books and bought a lot of bread in my quest to learn.
The practices of the Responsive Organisation are far more complex than bread making. They involve the purposes, concerns and perspectives of many people in pursuit of common goals with agility and an external focus on customers and community. Sharing and building from our shared practice will help all of us to develop success. Working out loud fuels this learning and connection.
Value creation in networks
The old way industrial of creating value is well understood and commonly implemented. Develop a unique proposition with a discrete market. Create a simple linear process to deliver the proposition by turning inputs into outputs with value creation at each carefully delineated step. Maximise control at the choke points in the process to maximise returns. Manage efficiency and throughput of the process to minimise waste. Reduce risk. As easy as that sounds we have spent over 200 years perfecting the process and still have much to learn.
We know far less about creating value in the massively scaled digital networks that we face today. Mostly we know what doesn’t work. Failure is accelerating. A focus on efficiency will kill a company competing with disruptive competitors. Networks specialise in routing around control points. Parallel disaggregated processes disrupt the linear, particularly if relentlessly focused on key opportunities to create value. Transparency across the process and rapid exchange of information changes the organisation-customer-employers-supplier- community dynamic in radical ways.
Value creation in networks to date has defaulted to the nearest analogies of the industrial model. Build a platform with a unique global scale that you can control. Strip the value creating process back to customer acquisition and platform development. Control advertising revenues ( or less commonly enterprise sales) as the principal form of monetisation. Experiment and acquire relentlessly. Be transparent internally and leverage networked models of organisation internally, but behave like industrial peers to the external market, except for carefully structured communities of co-creation and innovation.
The latest clues in the Cluetrain Manifesto are a reminder that this model is not guaranteed. At the same time, the lessons of the last Dotcom bust documented in Seely-Brown and Duguid’s ‘The Social Life of Information’ are a reminder that we have not yet reached our disaggregated and disinter mediated ‘markets are conversations’ utopia.
What is clear is that we need new ways of working. We will build new practices using our new global networks and relationships to exchange what works and to discard what does not. The key to success will be effectiveness. Effective organisations will mobilise their potential, connections and capabilities to pursue the ever-changing network opportunities, to learn together with their customers and community to realise a meaningful purpose. Embracing the new network economy and networked ways of working is fundamental for any organisation seeking to make this shift. Any organisation that takes this leap is on the path to becoming a Responsive Organisation.
Value has never been created around a board table. That is where value and the resources to create value have historically been acquired or allocated, often poorly. Value has never been created by data alone. People transform the data into hypotheses, insight, decisions and actions. Value has always been created by that action in networks, even if those networks are the crippled relationships of hierarchy. Those are network of people, not data. The organisations that reap the potential will be led by Network Navigators who can help their organisations through the journey.
The network must do the work to create value led by Network Navigators. As Esko Kilpi put it ‘the time for reductionism as a sense making mechanism is over’. The way forward will emerge through practice, interaction and learning in the network. We will need Network Navigators to help us to work on the whole system.
Harold Jarche reminds us ‘the work is learning and learning is the work’. We have entirely new systems and practices of organisations to develop, to test and to share. Like our efforts to date we will begin with fixes and variants to the systems we have. Over time we will make more new sense of the future of work. We will need to learn to trust and enable people to leverage their networks and experiment. Then we have the journey of change advocacy to spread the successful practices. The widespread use of enterprise social networks is just one such step and even it has not addressed the potential of adoption, let alone value.
The fun of value creation in networks has only just begun. Our job is to make that fun a very human and purposeful experience.
Collaboration is Work. Not Meetings
One reason many organisations are hesitant to embrace future of work collaboration practices is that they perceive collaboration as slow, cumbersome and ineffectual. What these organisations are doing is associating collaboration with the meetings that they run.
We collaborate every day. We just don’t call it that. People get together through the work day and work together. They share ideas, answer questions, solve problems together and create new innovative approaches to business. People making things happen is collaboration. This kind of collaboration is across a wide diversity of channels and runs from a quick hallway conversation to a design thinking workshop.
Future of work practices are about accelerating these valuable forms of collaboration. We can all do more to connect, share, solve and innovate. Collaboration like this is rapid, engaging, efficient, asynchronous and incredibly valuable. This kind of collaboration can be anywhere and happens only when needed. It makes business work better.
The erroneous perception of collaboration sounds like a bad meeting. Action must wait until we have collaborated. Our conversation will be purposeless. Accountabilities are unclear. We need to get everyone involved together, preferably in the one space. We must discuss everything and listen to everyone’s views. We will make decisions by consensus or perhaps not at all. There will be politics, confusion and much wasted time. Nothing meaningful will be learned, created or done by the process of collaboration.
That sounds like a bad meeting because it is one. Don’t frame collaboration as a meeting process.
When you want to embrace future of work practices in your organisation, don’t try to replicate your worst meetings. Multiply your best examples of people working effectively together.