Tag: human

Why Work Must Be Human

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

The future of work must be more human. As we move deeper into a networked knowledge economy we can already see the fractures of the traditional industrial management model.  

Taylorist scientific management that underpins much of traditional management can be so abstract in its consideration of the human role in work that it can border on a psychopathic level of detachment. There are many examples where the parallels between sociopathy and management have been drawn. Some even go far enough as to recommend it.

How to become a corporate sociopath:

  • Lose empathy: refer only to customers and employees as acronyms, abstractions and averages (see FTE, Engagement score, Customer Satisfaction, Average handle-time, NPS, etc)
  • Lose ethics: Compromise your values to maintain your power & your position first in small decisions and then in decisions with larger influence over time (see Management, Hierarchy, Goal-orientation) 
  • Culture: Surround yourself with a culture that glorifies anti-social behaviour and down plays human elements (see Results-focus, Hard management skills, Efficiency, League ladder, Bell-curve, etc)
  • Lose Reality: Learn to withhold information then to spin information to further your agenda. Slowly begin to believe your own spin and create an internal world that shapes your perception and decision making (see Personal Branding, Managing Up, Stakeholder relations, PR, Marketing, Excel model, Corporate Politics, etc)
  • Isolation: Isolate yourself from friends & community and develop an echo chamber for your own views (see Silos, Work/Life Balance, Corporate retreat, Business Networking, Travel, Staff, Yes Men, etc)
  • Paranoia: Develop a healthy sense of paranoia to survive (see Competitive marketplace, Corporate ladder, etc)
  • Be Bold: Start to judge leadership, power and status on absence of fear, willingness to tackle large scale and boldness of action. (see Go Big or Go Home, Burning Platform, BHAG, Too Big to Fail, Bet the business, etc)
  • Narrow Goals: Sacrifice discussion of the diversity of potential goals to chose a single abstract financial measure of success (see EPS, ROI, Make Plan, etc)
  • Power: Begin to see all living things as commodities subject to your power. (see Human Resources, Processes, Policies, Inputs and Outputs, Capital and Labour, GDP, etc)

All in a normal day in many offices…

Making Work More Human

Not all organisations suffer from sociopathy. They balance the inhuman thread in management with other considerations to retain a focus on realising the broadest of social and human outcomes.

Breaking the bubble of sociopathy in dysfunctional organisations takes effort. The steps are not that hard to practice:

  • Listen: Start to listen to the real human voices. Help others to speak and tell their stories. Help others to share their potential and contribute to a better organisation.
  • Engage: Find out other people’s goals. Help them to realise their goals and their potential. Invest time in working for others and understanding their needs more deeply.
  • Immerse: Spend time in the actual environment where work occurs talking to the people doing the work and the customers and community benefiting from the work. See the context and consequences of actions.
  • Reframe: Change the scale of decision making. Look at individual impacts as part of the process. Use names of actual people. Ask ‘what could we do to create more value?’ Ask ‘Is there another way to move forward without these impacts?’
  • Design: Recognise that policies, processes and products are built by and used by real people. Design to their needs and with their involvement.
  • Collaborate: Share your plans with others and allow them input. Let others help shape and improve your work.  Be transparent as to the strengths and weaknesses in this process.
  • Experiment: Test potential decisions. Make room to learn.
  • Lead: Encourage. Enable. Inspire. Don’t impose or impact.

Making work more human does not require us to abandon capitalism, to remove our results focus or be less ambitious. It may make work more challenging but it will also increase our sense of purpose and reward. 

Every employee in an organisation can ask for one or more of these steps to be added to a decision making process. One such request may be novel but it is rarely seen as a challenge to the authority of traditional management approaches. Introducing these techniques acts as a catalyst of change. The impact is to help make work more human. We are all the beneficiary of that action.

Be Human 2: Telstra Digital Summit 2013 Takeaways

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

The Telstra Digital Summit 2013 had a group of exceptional speakers with Robert Scoble, Shel Israel, Brian Solis and Tapan Bhat all sharing their perspectives on digital transformation facilitated by Monty Hamilton and Gerd Schenkel of Telstra Digital.  In addition there were panels on Telstra’s digital journey and the experience of a group of Pollenizer start-ups.

What did I take away?

Be Human 2

Just like the recent Products are Hard Conference, the key theme of the day was a need to deeply understand human behaviour. Whether it was the impact of sensors on our understanding of customer action, big data, focusing on design for customer journeys or building communities, better performance depends on better understanding of human behaviour.  

We are reaching a point where the opportunity of technology to enable us will offer wide choice, our understanding of human behaviour will enable us to design our responses. Ultimately our ability to build and leverage human relationships with technology will be key to our success.

Be Relevant

Robert Scoble reminded us all that 3% response or click rates are 97% irrelevance rates. That 97% irrelevance is a large drag in a real human experience and our businesses.  We need to leverage our understanding and relationships with our customers to do better by being more relevant – personal, timely, trusted, insightful and offering valuable choices

Be Responsive

How we want to offer our product no longer matters.  We are no longer in a broadcast or distribution world. We are in a personal, engaging and much more human one.

Customers will have the ability to pull and to choose.  We will be designing our paths of choices that will be triggered by customer actions.  Instead of pushing out to customers, the questions is what paths we offer to lure them in informed by our understanding of their customer behaviour. When they come in, we will need to deliver to them the best of our network of capabilities. That requires a fundamentally more responsive organisation. 

Trust matters

Human nature revolves around trust assessments.  It came up again and again during the day.  Businesses need to see building deep and trusting relationships internally and externally as a key part of competitive success. Remember trust demands internal and external alignment, real capabilities and consistent delivery.

Design and Learn for Scale

Fixed mindsets, static knowledge and narrow focus may offer comfort but run high risk in times of volatile change.  Leverage the scale opportunities of the new global network economy.  Most of all design your activities to learn and grow at scale. Australia is a small market and Australian businesses have the talent and potential to reach far.

We don’t know where we are going

From big companies to little startups, the comment was the same.  The outcome cannot be predicted: Jump off a cliff and build the plane on the way down.  That will demand a significant improvement in your organisations agility, engagement and trust in people to deliver before you hit the ground. Command and control, hierarchy and meetings won’t save you.  To borrow a Telstra phrase used in the day, you may need to invest early in ‘a few long poles’ to establish connections and options to accelerate your responses later.

Disclosure: I received a free ticket to the summit and a copy of The Age of Context by Robert Scoble and Shel Israel thanks to Telstra Digital.

Assembly Line of Knowledge Revisited: More Human & More Social

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

The future is here.

We are at a time of innovation in the future of work. We have choices as to the criteria by which we judge success. Let’s make the future of work more human and more social.

Some time ago, I suggested that we were approaching innovation in the way we work with knowledge (‘knowledge work’) that was of equivalent significance to the introduction of the innovation of the assembly line for industrial work. Roger Martin in HBR recently described changes at Proctor and Gamble that begin to treat knowledge work as a ‘decision factory’: focusing on project management of knowledge workers and leveraging algorithms to guide decisions.  To paraphrase William Gibson, the future of knowledge work is here, it is just not widely distributed yet.

Many knowledge workers recoil when you suggest the future of their work may resemble that of industrial work, even by analogy. Often they dispute that the work can be the subject of these kinds of innovation. However, we know dedicated entrepreneurs will find a way and that this disruptive innovation has begun already.  

At the heart of many of these objections is a concern that a focus on innovation will shift the focus of knowledge work from effectiveness into a focus on efficiency. In that change, people perceive real risks to the financial and social rewards of knowledge work, to the skills that will be demanded in future and the potential for change to wider society.  Many knowledge workers have benefited from traditional characteristics of human motivation, like autonomy, mastery and purpose. Losing those roles solely for efficiency may well be a great loss.

Assembly lines – more human and more social

Curiously enough, when Henry Ford introduced the assembly line innovations to his plants the changes were not solely about manufacturing process. Henry Ford realised that for the assembly line process to succeed he needed wider social change.  At the same time as Ford introduced the assembly line, he introduced a suite of social changes that were an attempt to build more complex social system around his organisation. There are arguments today as to what Ford’s purpose was in these changes, whether they were truly implemented or effective and the extent to which they may have just been clever marketing. Still, Ford introduced to its workers:

  • a $5 day a day wage that was a huge lift in income potential for workers and shared a small part of the profits of the new processes
  • a sociological department that explicitly sought to assess employee fitness across a range of social characteristics including family, thrift & home life and address social ills, like gambling and drinking.
  • a newspaper, education & language classes, medical treatment, parks and playgrounds and even a band
  • new workspaces that were models of light and open space at the time
  • a vision of buying the product that they made as Ford disrupted the luxury car market by making cheaper cars at scale

Today, we struggle to understand the Victorian values of these social changes. We would not want Ford’s near feudal power over his team. Also, we can lack context and understanding of the diverse nature of industrial workplaces before the birth of the modern factory system. However, Ford was seeking to make social changes an explicit part of the system of changes in his production system. Those changes were as radical then as many of the working models proposed by start-ups and other innovative companies are today. Ford’s wider social innovations, whether successful or not, suggested that he understood and saw the need to engage with the wider social role of work.  

Work plays a larger social role than a source of income and a source of profit.  Work sustains communities and families. Work provides personal satisfaction, gives rewards for our time and underpins our complex webs of relationships.  Lack of satisfying work correlates with all kinds of social ills. Each of these effects flows back to the workplace and influences outcomes.

The future of knowledge work – more human and more social

Knowledge work is going to get more efficient. Even today there is still too much drudgery that can be innovated, automated or analysed away. Some organisations will focus solely on the efficiency opportunity of innovation in knowledge work. They will reduce their knowledge worker populations and streamline processes to realise profit.  

These same organisations will likely find that they will struggle to recruit and retain talented people. Designing and maintaining their new systems will require even more expensive knowledge workers.  The lack of engagement and innovation in their businesses will require expensive external consultants. More importantly, the broader society outside of the organisation will continue to question the relentless focus on efficiency and profit, query the negative externalities on society and demand a social dividend. Solving this issue transactionally will mean even more expensive marketing and corporate social responsibility activity.

We get to choose the success criteria for our innovations in the future of knowledge work. Profit does not have to be the sole motive.  

We have the opportunity to ask of our innovators in work that they design for social changes and consider the broader social aspects of work. We can ask that work is more social.  We can ask that it take account of criteria like sustainability, natural value, social value and ability to deliver benefits for a wider community of stakeholders. We can ask that work is more human and that better delivers autonomy, mastery and purpose for all workers. My experience is that innovations improve when we take this broader systemic frame and when we are more demanding in our measures of success.  Great innovations involve constraints and stretch.  We will only deliver significant social benefits from this innovation if we leverage design thinking and adaptive innovation to deliver changes in work.

An assembly line or decision factory for knowledge work does not have to be a race to the bottom. Employees in workplaces across the globe will get to shape and debate the changes being made inside and outside their organisations. As community members, they are a part of a public debate on the standards that organisations should meet.  We all can leave organisations that do not respond well and entrepreneurs will start organisations to leverage the best innovations and new opportunities to realise value.  

Potentially, it could be the birth of a new golden age of human and social growth.  

We get to choose.  

PS: Obviously, innovation and consideration of a broader social frame is something that will benefit industrial work too.  However, because industrial organisations are much more competitive and more directly impacted by social pressures around environment, many leading industrial employers have already begun to look into new models that leverage wider social value and engage and empowering their employees to add new value.  Toyota’s work on waste and the Toyota Management System are examples.

Notes:  my limited understanding of Henry Ford comes largely from Steven Watt’s ‘The People’s Tycoon’, wikipedia and The Henry Ford Museum.

Assembly Line of Knowledge Revisited: More Human & More Social

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

The future is here.

We are at a time of innovation in the future of work. We have choices as to the criteria by which we judge success. Let’s make the future of work more human and more social.

Some time ago, I suggested that we were approaching innovation in the way we work with knowledge (‘knowledge work’) that was of equivalent significance to the introduction of the innovation of the assembly line for industrial work. Roger Martin in HBR recently described changes at Proctor and Gamble that begin to treat knowledge work as a ‘decision factory’: focusing on project management of knowledge workers and leveraging algorithms to guide decisions.  To paraphrase William Gibson, the future of knowledge work is here, it is just not widely distributed yet.

Many knowledge workers recoil when you suggest the future of their work may resemble that of industrial work, even by analogy. Often they dispute that the work can be the subject of these kinds of innovation. However, we know dedicated entrepreneurs will find a way and that this disruptive innovation has begun already.  

At the heart of many of these objections is a concern that a focus on innovation will shift the focus of knowledge work from effectiveness into a focus on efficiency. In that change, people perceive real risks to the financial and social rewards of knowledge work, to the skills that will be demanded in future and the potential for change to wider society.  Many knowledge workers have benefited from traditional characteristics of human motivation, like autonomy, mastery and purpose. Losing those roles solely for efficiency may well be a great loss.

Assembly lines – more human and more social

Curiously enough, when Henry Ford introduced the assembly line innovations to his plants the changes were not solely about manufacturing process. Henry Ford realised that for the assembly line process to succeed he needed wider social change.  At the same time as Ford introduced the assembly line, he introduced a suite of social changes that were an attempt to build more complex social system around his organisation. There are arguments today as to what Ford’s purpose was in these changes, whether they were truly implemented or effective and the extent to which they may have just been clever marketing. Still, Ford introduced to its workers:

  • a $5 day a day wage that was a huge lift in income potential for workers and shared a small part of the profits of the new processes
  • a sociological department that explicitly sought to assess employee fitness across a range of social characteristics including family, thrift & home life and address social ills, like gambling and drinking.
  • a newspaper, education & language classes, medical treatment, parks and playgrounds and even a band
  • new workspaces that were models of light and open space at the time
  • a vision of buying the product that they made as Ford disrupted the luxury car market by making cheaper cars at scale

Today, we struggle to understand the Victorian values of these social changes. We would not want Ford’s near feudal power over his team. Also, we can lack context and understanding of the diverse nature of industrial workplaces before the birth of the modern factory system. However, Ford was seeking to make social changes an explicit part of the system of changes in his production system. Those changes were as radical then as many of the working models proposed by start-ups and other innovative companies are today. Ford’s wider social innovations, whether successful or not, suggested that he understood and saw the need to engage with the wider social role of work.  

Work plays a larger social role than a source of income and a source of profit.  Work sustains communities and families. Work provides personal satisfaction, gives rewards for our time and underpins our complex webs of relationships.  Lack of satisfying work correlates with all kinds of social ills. Each of these effects flows back to the workplace and influences outcomes.

The future of knowledge work – more human and more social

Knowledge work is going to get more efficient. Even today there is still too much drudgery that can be innovated, automated or analysed away. Some organisations will focus solely on the efficiency opportunity of innovation in knowledge work. They will reduce their knowledge worker populations and streamline processes to realise profit.  

These same organisations will likely find that they will struggle to recruit and retain talented people. Designing and maintaining their new systems will require even more expensive knowledge workers.  The lack of engagement and innovation in their businesses will require expensive external consultants. More importantly, the broader society outside of the organisation will continue to question the relentless focus on efficiency and profit, query the negative externalities on society and demand a social dividend. Solving this issue transactionally will mean even more expensive marketing and corporate social responsibility activity.

We get to choose the success criteria for our innovations in the future of knowledge work. Profit does not have to be the sole motive.  

We have the opportunity to ask of our innovators in work that they design for social changes and consider the broader social aspects of work. We can ask that work is more social.  We can ask that it take account of criteria like sustainability, natural value, social value and ability to deliver benefits for a wider community of stakeholders. We can ask that work is more human and that better delivers autonomy, mastery and purpose for all workers. My experience is that innovations improve when we take this broader systemic frame and when we are more demanding in our measures of success.  Great innovations involve constraints and stretch.  We will only deliver significant social benefits from this innovation if we leverage design thinking and adaptive innovation to deliver changes in work.

An assembly line or decision factory for knowledge work does not have to be a race to the bottom. Employees in workplaces across the globe will get to shape and debate the changes being made inside and outside their organisations. As community members, they are a part of a public debate on the standards that organisations should meet.  We all can leave organisations that do not respond well and entrepreneurs will start organisations to leverage the best innovations and new opportunities to realise value.  

Potentially, it could be the birth of a new golden age of human and social growth.  

We get to choose.  

PS: Obviously, innovation and consideration of a broader social frame is something that will benefit industrial work too.  However, because industrial organisations are much more competitive and more directly impacted by social pressures around environment, many leading industrial employers have already begun to look into new models that leverage wider social value and engage and empowering their employees to add new value.  Toyota’s work on waste and the Toyota Management System are examples.

Notes:  my limited understanding of Henry Ford comes largely from Steven Watt’s ‘The People’s Tycoon’, wikipedia and The Henry Ford Museum.