Tag: futureofwork

The Problem is Everywhere

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

The peculiar character of the problem of a rational economic order is determined precisely by the fact that the knowledge of the circumstances of which we must make use never exists in concentrated or integrated form but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess. The economic problem of society is thus not merely a problem of how to allocate “given” resources—if “given” is taken to mean given to a single mind which deliberately solves the problem set by these “data.” It is rather a problem of how to secure the best use of resources known to any of the members of society, for ends whose relative importance only these individuals know. Or, to put it briefly, it is a problem of the utilization of knowledge which is not given to anyone in its totality. – Friedrich A Hayek “The Use of Knowledge in Society”

Yesterday I met with an organisation that wanted some of my help as they sought to solve a problem. The organisation was developing a new knowledge sharing system to enable is staff to be better informed about products and processes. There was one slight issue with this problem. The organisation already had multiple systems to enable its staff to be better informed about products and processes: intranets, social networks, training, help & support tools, automation, etc.

Problems Everywhere

As we asked why these other systems didn’t work it became clearer that the project team’s issue was that it was solving a problem for others, rather than with others. The explanations for needing a new system did’t stack up and suggested there was more that needed to be learned from the users:

  • ‘Most of the learning is peer to peer. We need to give them better options’: Why do they prefer to learn from peers who might be inaccurate or unavailable? Why will they change this if you offer a new system? 
  • ‘They won’t use a collaboration system because they say they don’t have the time’ : if time is a question of priority, why isn’t it a priority? To what extent is the culture, leadership and performance management of the team driving this lack of priority? If they won’t collaborate why will they have the time to use something else? What is there time actually spent on? What do they do instead?
  • ‘Those system don’t give them the answers they need so we are building a new one’: If the last system didn’t understand what was required, how do you? What does relevance look like to each user? What does relevance look like to their customers?
  • ‘They want help with process X, but we are building something innovative for all processes’: Why do they want help with that process? What’s innovative about ignoring the demand?

The Answer is Everywhere

The answers to these questions are dispersed in a wide range of people beyond the project team. They draw in questions of culture, of practice, or rational and irrational behaviour by real human beings doing real work under the daily pressures of customers and a large organisation. There’s a lot of learning to do.

We have the tools to solve this dispersion and gather insights into what needs to be done in the practices of Big Learning:

  • we can actively collaborate with the users and other participants in the system to get under the pat answers and explore the deeper reasons and problems
  • we can use the practices of design thinking to better understand and shape employee behaviour & the systems involved in action
  • we can analyse data to understand in greater detail what is going on
  • we can experiment and iterate to ensure that proposed changes work the way that we expect
  • we can enable and empower the users to create changes to their work
  • we can accelerate the interactions and the cycles of learning to move faster to better solutions

These aren’t parallel techniques to be applied independently. The practices of Big Learning work best as an integrated system that draws together the insights from all of these approaches to help organisations learn and work. Big Learning enables organisation to work with and through its employees to deliver change. Change does not have to be done to them.

The reason organisations need to develop systems to facilitate Big Learning is elegantly described by Hayek in the conclusion to his essay “The Use of Knowledge in Society”.  Hayek was critiquing the schools of economists who thought that centrally planned interventions designed by experts would be effective. The context may differ but organisations still use forms of central planning by experts to create change. These changes fall short for a fundamental reason – experts can’t know enough alone:

The practical problem, however, arises precisely because these facts are never so given to a single mind, and because, in consequence, it is necessary that in the solution of the problem knowledge should be used that is dispersed among many people

The practices of Big Learning help bring people together to share insights, learn and work as one.

Save yourself 20+ hours a week

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

Print out a view of this week in your diary.

Circle every meeting that is about solving one specific objective that needs the input of others to be achieved this week. Strike out the rest of the meetings.

Now look at the meetings that are circled. Can any of these collaborations be achieved another way, another week or in less time?

Strike any that are simply to share information, gather ideas or could be delegated to one person to manage. Strike out the meetings to make decisions and delegate or run an experiment with these decisions instead. Shrink any meeting that runs longer than the conversation needed.

Many of the meetings that got struck out will be imposed by others or are just part of a routine in your organisation. Have a hard conversation with the convenor of these meetings about how to manage them differently. The other people in these meetings will thank you for saving them wasted time.

What remains in your diary will be your high value collaboration. Meetings should be just for collaboration with others that create value. You can better use the time otherwise.

Focusing meetings on creating the maximum amount of value from your time releases a huge amount of wasted time. One of the biggest advantages of my independent life is the time released from ineffective meetings and the ability to focus my time on meetings that matter.

Releasing time is the most effective way to create potential to do more. Strike out a meeting or two today. Use your time wisely.

Now you have the time go have a coffee with someone and get to know them better.

Why Hierarchal Management Survives – Institutional Filter Failure

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

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

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

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

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

People can grow. Practice compassion. Help better their practice.

image

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

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

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.

Adaptive practice.

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

There is no perfect method.

Searching for a perfect method is not work and is a waste.  

The best way to judge a method is to use it. 

Method should be a path to better personal practice.

Use what helps you work better.  

All methods fail at some point.  

Stop using a method when it no longer works.  

The method no longer works when: 

  • you are spending time on the method that could be spent working
  • you continue to need a consultant, a manual or a system to help you to use the method
  • you do not understand, you feel less capable or you do not know what to do next. 
  • the method does not improve your work.
  • the method stops or delays your work.  

If the method doesn’t work, change it or choose another that works. 

Build your own method through adaptation. 

Stop the Machine. Engagement is Human

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

Employee engagement is a human psychological process. Stop treating it like an industrial machine.

Introduce a target into a modern management workplace and you will introduce a standard set of mechanical efficiency models to achieve that target. Employee engagement is a classic example.

Engagement is human

When we stop and reflect, it is obvious that employee engagement is a human process. Our engagement with our work is the psychological outcome of complex series of elements, including purpose, the work we do, its rewards both monetary and psychological, our relationships with others and much more. Everyone’s engagement outcomes are driven by their unique psychological and social needs. Our engagement is influenced by opportunities offered to us to experience states that people desire across all the domains of their lives like autonomy, purpose and mastery. Engagement is an integral outcome of our connection to others in the workplace and in the surrounding community.

Stop the Engagement Machine

Except that is not how the industrial engagement machine works. Search the internet for ‘engagement drivers’ and you will find lots of great advice on how to treat people as machines for generating engagement as an end in itself. The focus on drivers leads to a focus on top-down engagement plans. These plans measure and relentlessly focus on transactionally moving the drivers. The failure of these plans to shift engagement begins with the disconnect from the daily leadership interactions in the organisation.  

Further, the plans fail to take a systemic view of what influences engagement.  Clarifying the connection of my work to strategy (a substitute for purpose in many engagement models) will only worsen my engagement if the rest of the system frustrates my efforts to achieve these now more important strategic outcomes. When my leader then dismisses those strategic outcomes to foster their own agenda, all improvement in engagement is lost.

Because we have an industrial mindset we can become more focused on the measures than the actual process. Consider the averaging that is built into most engagement surveys. Does it allow for the fact that individual outcomes matter and that a few highly engaged employees can deliver an enormous impact for the organisation? Averages also foster initiatives tackling the averages, over individual conversations.  

Industrialising a psychological process weakens the focus on engagement. I have seen senior managers sit around discussing their engagement scores as if the black box of engagement is a mystery. These leaders expressed aloud the wish that it was a more transparent machine. However, their scores were transparent if they looked away from the report. Their scores were an outcome, not of their engagement improvement plans, but of their daily leadership actions and the culture that they fostered in their teams.

Changing engagement outcomes to improve the responsiveness of a business and to better leverage the talent of its people, requires a focus on those people. We need to leave the engagement machine behind and begin work on the human side of the challenge: an individual employees experience of the purposes, interactions, the connection and the experience of work in the organisation. That will lead us to the changes in the system that will sustain growing engagement.

Practice and Persistence

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

Developing mastery of new future of work practices is essential to individuals being able to leverage the networked economy and also organisations ability to adapt to become Responsive Organisations. However, new practices don’t develop overnight they take persistent repetition and gradual mastery.

Your way to Carnegie Hall

There is an old joke that an out-of-town violinist is walking through New York and stops a passerby to ask for directions to Carnegie Hall, the site of many famous concerts and recitals. The answer from a wiser old New Yorker is “Practice. Practice. Practice”

We have a current example of this insight in the hacker quest to demonstrate you can become an expert in a year through consistent practice.  For example, this man’s effort to reach the top table tennis players in the UK.

The key points here are that:

  • the practice is voluntary
  • the practice persists
  • the practice develops in mastery with a determined intent on improvement 
  • the challenge of the practice raises over time

Allow Time. Design for Flow.

In our rush to implement new practices in organisations, we can miss these characteristics of growing mastery. We choose target state behaviours. We impose them transactionally through short change management programs. We are often disappointed by the results.  Not surprisingly they rarely develop into consistent practice, let alone mastery. Alien behaviours can take time to make sense, to practice with confidence and to learn new capabilities required.

The ideal programs to the introduction of new behaviours leverage the concept of Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Individuals need to be presented with purposeful activities where the challenge raises over time as their practice grows in capability.  Keeping the developing practice in the zone of flow provides personal rewards to sustain the development of mastery.

The development of individual practice in this way may not fit within our traditional management timeframes.  This is not a 90 day challenge. Developing new mindsets and behaviours will occur on a human timescale.