future of work – Page 7

Hack The Organisation: 6 Personal changes

Posted on 10/10/201306/02/2017 by simongterry in Change, Leadership

The best way to change the future of work is to change how we interact.

The Responsive Organisation Manifesto recognizes that there are fundamental changes afoot in the nature of work and calls for action to make our organisations more purposeful, responsive, more engaging, more empowering, more networked, more mobile and more community oriented. Groups like Change Agents Worldwide are working to help organisations with services and solutions to navigate these big changes.

Hacking Organisations is Hard

There’s lots of enthusiasm for big change. Big change is hard. There is a lot yet to be worked out. The decision making processes take time. Experiments are required. Not all of us feel we have the power to make big change.

There are things we each can do now. In our control. Today.

Hack Yourself First

Organisations are made up of individuals. The pattern of interactions of those people determine purpose, processes, decisions, use of resources & ultimately culture. Changing these interactions is more important than changing roles, hierarchy and many of the other formal organisation trappings. There are too many companies that changed their hierarchy and found things still work the same way as ever.

We can each have an impact on the future of work by changing our own behaviours first. If we change our own interactions that contributes to change. View each new interaction as an experiment. Is it worthwhile enough to inspire others to copy it?

Six Personal Behaviour Hacks for a More Responsive Organisation

Here are some simple triggers of our common organizational life where we can adopt new responsive habits

Discuss Purpose Upfront: Purpose is a critical aspect of intrinsic motivation and engagement. So why don’t we discuss it more? What’s the trigger for a purpose conversation: starting something new. Get connection to purpose clear at the start.
Work Out Loud: I recently outlined a simple way to start working out loud by trying three new habits: Describe, Interact and Recognise. Give these new habits a go and discover the power of networks.
Experiment.: Decision making is the engine of real power in organisations. Far too much is decided on the instincts of hierarchies. Next time you have a trigger of being asked for a decision, adopt a new habit of inviting those asking for a decision to conduct an experiment instead. If you need a decision from up the hierarchy, what experiment can you run to prove your case instead?
Allocate Accountabilities for Outcomes, not Tasks: Next time you face the trigger of needing a job to be done, allocate the entire accountability for the outcome to a team or to an individual. If you are being given a task, ask for accountability for the whole outcome. Let accountability surprise you as to how best the outcome be achieved.
Coach: Dan Pontefract recently highlighted coaching was a requirement of connected leaders. Start to ask, assist and build capability when you feel the trigger of a need to direct or answer. If you aren’t being coached to success, ask for it.
Measure Outcomes: Measuring performance is not about task completion. Measure outcomes achieved for the individual, organisation, customers and community. Measure impact and value created. Give people the greatest flexibility to deliver the right outcome for themselves, customers and the community. Next time you are coaching someone or being coached, frame the conversation in these terms.

These small changes can have a significant impact on the responsiveness of your work and your leadership. You might even inspire a movement of others to copy you.

These actions alone are not enough. What other hacks or changes can we make? Please post your thoughts in the comments

Be prepared for social change

Posted on 22/08/2013 by simongterry in Uncategorized

Our mental models of how things work are often a barrier to our adaptation to new capabilities. Digital disruption will stretch our thinking in many new ways.

When railroads were first invented they were designed to be a powered form of wagon for bulk goods. Only later did people develop the potential for railway travel, changes in communications and accelerate the distribution of fresh foods and other consumer goods. The introduction of railway travel created significant social change, demands for new resources and infrastructure, and ultimately innovation in business & society. After a start as a powered wagon, innovators changed the mental model of a railway developing its potential and its impact on society as a whole.

We are in the midst of digital mobile and social revolution that is so new and widereaching we can face the same challenges in adapting our mental models. Yesterday I attended the New Economy Conference in Melbourne. The audience and speakers who had chosen to attend the event were very aware of the digital & social transformations beginning to be realised.

A key theme of the day was the impact of digital, mobile and social processes in creating dramatic improvements in connection and speed of information sharing. This has major ramifications for markets and for corporations as they see their offerings atomised to services, boundaries becoming porous and competition expanding in speed and global reach. Even consumers are getting into the act of being producers through collaborative consumption. These ideas resonated strongly because they connect directly with the short-term transactional focus of our industrial age mental models of production, markets and competition. They involve the exploration of relatively simple changes to current models (who, where, what, volume or speed).

Harder for everyone to grasp are the changes to social systems which come with these new technologies and the need for new physical, legal and social infrastructure. To run their cross-continental networks, railroads needed and inspired new social infrastructure. An example was that railroads required society to adopt a precise concepts of time to manage their schedules. Railroads determined the implementation of the continental United States four time zones and largely became the arbiter of time in the communities that they connected.

There is already evidence that these broader social changes are being created. Work is shifting rapidly towards creative knowledge work in many parts of the world with new demands for leadership and organisation. The acceleration of social activism was discussed on the day and the consequences of eBay, the many task allocation and collaborative consumption organisations in changing natures of trust & work. We also discussed the social infrastructure required to measure value creation and waste in a broader more human way than just dollars (and the odd bit of avoided carbon). We need to innovate as hard in this social infrastructure as in that to support the transactions.

As much as we create new ways of transacting, we also need to create new forms of community to supply the social infrastructure to support the transactions. We need to support the short term interaction with a social fabric that can supply a longer human relationship. Just as the railroads need a precise sense of time, our new economy demands new precision in ideas like collaboration, work, trust, community and value.

When we think of the future of digital disruption, we need to allow both for how it will change the mental models we use every day but also how it may demand of us entirely new models, such as new concepts of organisations, jobs, reputation, social relationships and new measures of success. Success in the new digital era will take both adaptation to a new transactional environment but also adaptation of a new infrastructure of community, trust and long term relationships. New models of leadership and new social innovations will be required to achieve both.

Trust is a design choice

Posted on 26/04/201317/08/2016 by simongterry in Future of Work, Leadership

A man who trusts nobody is apt to be the kind of man nobody trusts – Harold Macmillan

At the beginning of any organisation, whether you realise it or not, you are faced with a design choice:

Do I trust my people?

The answer to that question and the culture that grows around that answer determines how so many processes, conversations and other interactions will occur across the organisation.

If you don’t trust your people

Should you be going ahead with your organisation? Seriously. Think about it. They are going to have to act on their own at some point. Nobody can or should remove every independent decision from another person.

Can you build their capability to earn your trust? It is worth investing some money in recruitment and development to avoid the costs ahead in an organisational design without trust.

If you still want to go ahead, prepare yourself for lots of controls, hierarchy, and monitoring processes and people. A lot of value will be invested in controlling people, managing the lack of trust out of your business so that you can function. You will also be more likely to have silos of power and information separating haves and have nots. These processes will all impede the agility, engagement, flexibility & potential of your people. Remember you don’t trust them so that’s what you chose.

Of course, trust may only extend so far. If they are not trusted in one process, do you trust them in others? Can you explain why the processes differ. You will need to or the lack of trust will be corrosive to an overall culture of trust. We all have heard examples of the refrain “I can discuss a $1m deal with a client, but I can’t post a comment on the intranet without approval.” If there is a reason then you need to be able to explain it.

Often you hear the excuse “but the consequences of failure are catastrophic, we cannot afford to trust”. If the consequences of failure are extreme, you need trust more but you might want to think about how you genuinely engage your people in mitigating the risks. Taking the risks out of their control may be no improvement at all if the result is apathy or lack of responsibility for the risks.

If you trust your people

If you trust your people, focus on the culture of personal accountability in your organisation. Work to build your people’s capability to that they are better able to exercise that trust. Give people real meaty challenges to enable them to show your potential. Ask yourself if you can have a flatter organisation, fewer approvals and put more upon your people. They might just revel in the challenge and surprise you.

A word about ‘Trust but Verify’

‘Trust but verify’ is a commonly discussed way to enable organisations to loosen the shackles and create a higher trust environment. In many cases, some verification will be mandated by regulatory or other requirements. People need follow-up and follow-through to see the reinforcement of their responsibility and to understand that there are consequences of breaches of trust.

However make sure you have the order right. If your process turns out to be ‘Verify, then Trust’, you have no trust at all. If someone can’t act on their own and wear the consequences, then you don’t have ‘Trust but Verify’.

The knowledge revolution needs an assembly line

Posted on 29/01/201317/08/2016 by simongterry in Collaboration, Future of Work

The industrial revolution was transformed by technologies like that of the assembly line which dramatically changed productivity and redefined the industrial model for a century. What will be the assembly line of the knowledge revolution?

From an era of mass manufacturing

Mass manufacturing arose when innovative manufacturing processes, such as the assembly line, arose to take advantage of the required capabilities like consistent & efficient power sources, better transportation, better communications and other technological advances. A number of large social changes came with the arrival of the era of mass production in the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries:

A shift from artisan manufacturing to factories & loss of power in the guilds (an end to skill as power)
The management of work inputs in the right context and at the right time with less waste by bringing work to the worker, reducing work-in-progress & reduction of the manual effort through assembly lines and other manufacturing changes
Specialisation and reduction in the task of the worker

These changes also had a wider impact as the productivity and value created further social change, particularly as it drove a culture of mass consumption and the rise of the knowledge and service economy. Importantly, the development of this industrial revolution was largely guided by a purpose of shareholder return. With a few rare exceptions, employee engagement and fulfilment, environment or social purpose and other purposes often played a deeply secondary role.

Further phases of the mass manufacturing model whether robotics, lean/kaizen, logistics or outsourcing have been evolution on the basic revolution that began when production shifted from task oriented workshops to process driven factories. To a lesser extent, these efforts have sought to address broader social purposes.

To an era of mass collaboration

We are likely facing into a transformation of knowledge work on the scale of the industrial manufacturing. We are beginning to see new models of knowledge work and collaboration coming to life in our increasing social and digital information capabilities.

We now have the information storage and processing power, the mobility solutions and the social context that can drive insights and low-cost sharing. The coming together of these technologies offers us the opportunity to deliver information to knowledge workers when they need it (leveraging mobile and the cloud) with insight & context (from data analysis and social).

From entrepreneurs to large corporations the focus of innovation in the future of knowledge work is on how to develop new ways to leverage this technology. However for all the innovation we may not yet have seen a defining innovation on the scale of the assembly line. It cannot be far away.

By analogy, knowledge work will change dramatically in an era of mass collaboration:

Shifting the work from a knowledgeable expert to an digital algorithm, social network or most likely both (an end to knowledge as power)
Reducing the search for information, the cost of sharing information and bringing knowledge to the worker as and when required for the task
Provision of information in a richer more relevant context and with greater insight enabling new methods of the discovery, use and dissemination of knowledge, which is likely to mean new knowledge itself.

Shaping purpose and outcomes

Managed with a focus only on shareholder value creation, this transformation could be massively disengaging and alienating for the knowledge workers of the global service economy. Managed with a focus on purpose (taking account of social value and economic value), this transformation could deliver massive productivity improvements, increased discretionary effort and an era of increased engagement and meaning in work.

Component parts of this transformation are being created now with innovation in enterprise social & cloud solutions, new mobile capabilities, big data and other innovations. The time to influence the direction and breadth of purpose of this innovation is now. The challenge that surrounds us is to develop the management innovations that will leverage these new capabilities to great social benefit.

The new era of knowledge work calls for its entrepreneurs and the simplicity & power of an assembly line for knowledge.

Do you agree? What would the assembly line for knowledge work look like? Can a broader and more balanced purpose guide this innovation in knowledge work? Which paths will we take as the knowledge revolution develops?

Concepts in this post borrowed from:

Richard Sennett, The Craftsman and Together
Clay Shirky, Cognitive Surplus
Gary Hamel, The future of management
Umair Haque’s HBR blog