Tag: knowledge

Do You Really Need That New Intranet?

Posted on by simongterry in Collaboration, Future of Work

Intranet projects are still popular these days. There is great new technology platforms & many new features available. Internet designs have moved on a lot so your old intranet is starting to look a little tired. Now your employees have new devices so your intranet needs to be mobile first and responsive. Think of the opportunities for new branding, a new name, better search and a refresh of all the content. Finally the intranet could be at the heart of the knowledge management and collaboration in the organisation. Delivering a new intranet is a signature career achievement.

Stop. Are you sure you need that new intranet?

New intranets don’t come cheap. Even after the technology solutions is acquired, the expenditure has only just begun. All that wonderful new design is going to cost money. You will need personas, card sorts and then branding advice. Getting the information architecture right can make all the difference so you will need a lot of time spent on the taxonomy of content, hierarchies of information, businesses and users. Glossaries and other reference materials will need to be reviewed and updated. Search will need to be tuned to make sure that it delivers the right options. All your existing content will need to be reviewed to fit into the new design. Throw in a policy and product information refresh and the costs and time skyrocket. Then there is the maintenance costs of all that content. Add in personalisation, collaboration and social features and the work never ends.

What is the Intranet really for?

To senior managers, an employee communications or HR team, an intranet is a showcase of the organisation, its business strategy and its knowledge. It is the one source of truth. It is the hub of collaboration and a critical place to share messages with all employees. This perception can create a whole lot of politics that disrupts the effectiveness of your new intranet. People become focused about the need to control the design and the content. User focus is swapped for the desire to meet the needs of the hierarchy. That control has real consequences when it disengages users. Worse still it can force one template on everyone and make everyone into ‘content providers’. The costs of this control are in content that gets out of date and grey market sites that spring up to break the shackles.  Soon the efforts to get around the intranet are drawing investment, effort and attention away from the platform. Confusion escalates and the intranet site is on its way back to being a stale reservoir of knowledge.

To an employee an intranet is where all the links in corporate distribution emails go. Usually the intranet is the last place they go to look when they and their colleagues don’t have the answer to hand and local searches have turned up no relevant ideas. Often the intranet is the place where knowledge is tied up in clunky processes & policy that don’t reflect their day job. Everything is anonymous. The context and authority that comes from human connection is lost. An employee does not care about single sources of truth or showcases of corporate messages. They care about findability and usefulness. Nobody browses an intranet willingly.

I know many organisations who have built elegant product sites on their intranet to explain all the features, process and policy relating to their products. Too often they discover that their teams use the customer facing website for product information. The structure of customer facing product information is usually better suited to employee’s roles in explaining that information to customers. It is indexed for Google search. Legal requirements ensure that product teams keep the external information that matters up to date. Also the employee can send the customer a link if they need to explain lots of detail. The pretty intranet is a showcase but the internet is the workhorse. How much of your intranet site could you do away with by directing employees to external sites?

Are the behaviours going to change?

In our work, we create value through our actions. If the behaviours aren’t going to change, then don’t change the intranet.  Changing only the technology alone, will foster only cost and confusion.

If you do want to get better at collaboration, communication and knowledge management, start with a clear understanding of the value to the organisation and the value to the user. Look for ways to achieve your goals that involved changed behaviours and community, not technology. When you are clear on the value of changed behaviours, you will be clearer on what your technology needs to look like to support that work. Now you won’t be forcing an intranet as a solution and you will be able to look at the breadth of options from social collaboration, to working out loud more, to using external internet sites and other tools of helping employees to find what matters most to help them do their job.

You will also have built a case for the whole organisation to align to working in new and better ways.

Guest Post: The Dizziness of Freedom by Diana Renner

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

Diana Renner and I were discussing working out loud this week when Diana mentioned that she had an unpublished blog post in development that I recognised as the feeling of the ‘trembling finger’ when I am about to work out loud. This guest post is a result of that conversation. It is too good not to be widely shared.

–

The Dizziness of Freedom

“…creating, actualising one’s
possibilities, always involves negative as well as positive aspects. It always
involves destroying the status quo, destroying all patterns with oneself,
progressively destroying what one has clung to from childhood on, and creating
new and original forms and ways of living”
Rollo May

 It has been almost two years since I stepped
into the unknown and became an independent consultant. Looking back, it feels
less like a step and more like a leap. In a single gesture of defiance, I
traded security for freedom, leaving behind a relatively comfortable,
predictable role in a large organisation. I had never expected to end up
working on my own. But the promise of freedom was alluring. It still is. At the
same time freedom opens up possibilities that are terrifying.

In his book The Concept of Anxiety,
Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard explores
the immense feelings of dread that accompany that moment when we find ourselves
at a crossroads in life. The moment when the choice to do something hangs in
perfect balance with the choice to do nothing. Kierkegaard uses the example of
a man standing on the edge of a tall building or cliff, from where he can see
all the possibilities of life. As he looks over the edge, he experiences both a
fear of falling and at the same time a terrifying impulse to throw himself
intentionally off the edge.

Every edge I have stood on has provoked
feelings of dread and excitement. Whether going into a first meeting with a new
client, writing a few pages in my book, or facing a bored and unmotivated
group, I have struggled with what Kierkegaard calls our dizziness of freedom.
Just like Kierkegaard’s protagonist,
staring into the space below, I have contemplated many times whether to throw
myself off or to stay put.

However, what seemed risky and largely unknown
two years ago rapidly has become part of a familiar landscape. It would be
natural to relax and enjoy the view… Yet I have
learned that it is at this very point that I need to become more vigilant than
ever and exercise my freedom to choose in three key ways:

  • To rally against the safe but numbing comfort of the status
    quo    . I need to keep reminding myself that the
    greatest learning is just outside of my comfort zone. I need to keep stretching
    myself to keep growing.
  • To resist the strong
    pull of the crowd    . I have found perspective on the
    margins, not looking to the outside for approval or acceptance, not following a
    trend just because everyone else is following it.
  • To interrogate the
    world    ’s criteria for what is good or successful. I am suspicious when I am being offered a formula to quick success
    or many riches. It is powerful to be able to question mainstream expectations,
    and carve my own path with courage and purpose.

The responsibility that comes with the freedom
to choose is terrifying. But the cost of not choosing is even more so.

We need to welcome this dizziness of
freedom as a sign that we are, in fact, just where we need to be. A sign
that we need to slow down and reflect on the risk, then step off the edge
anyway.

Diana Renner – Leadership consultant, facilitator, author of ‘Not Knowing – the art of turning uncertainty into opportunity’, Chartered Management Institute Book of the Year 2015, UK.

www.notknowingbook.com
www.notknowinglab.com
Twitter: @NotKnowingLab

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

It is by imagination that knowledge is “carried to the heart” (to borrow again from Allen Tate). The faculties of the mind—reason, memory, feeling, intuition, imagination, and the rest—are not distinct from one another. Though some may be favored over others and some ignored, none functions alone. But the human mind, even in its wholeness, even in instances of greatest genius, is irremediably limited. Its several faculties, when we try to use them separately or specialize them, are even more limited.

Wendell Berry’s Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities http://www.neh.gov/about/awards/jefferson-lecture/wendell-e-berry-lecture

Working Out Loud is the Lean Start-up of Knowledge

Posted on by simongterry in Working out loud

image

Working out loud enables early validation and engagement of others in ideas. By putting ideas to the test early when formed only to a minimum viable level wasted effort is avoided and the ideas move to fruition quicker. In this way working out loud reflects the value creation approaches of lean start-up.

Working out loud on Minimum Viable Ideas

One of the exercises in Harold Jarche’s PKM in 40 days program is around Narration of your work. I am a huge fan of working out loud and initially I wasn’t sure that I had much to learn. However, I took a risk and learned something new.

My experiment was to apply some lean start-up thinking to a concept that I am developing and put it out in a minimum viable form and seek feedback on how to develop that idea further in a relevant community. In this case, the idea was represented in minimum viable form as a single diagram and a story of where I was headed. Minimum viability in this case is just enough information to convey the information and test the key hypotheses that I wished to explore. 

We are used to fully thinking things through before sharing them. I am especially cautious around this. We are told that sharing something incomplete might be dangerous as people might form an incorrect impression or might copy the idea. I’d hate to miss an opportunity around something that seems important to my work. We are not use to putting minimum viable ideas forward for debate. 

However, perfecting ideas beyond that point in the quiet of our own workplace often means that when they are delivered they fall flat, miss the mark or need further work. How often have you worked long and hard on an idea that you believe in to have the “is that all?” response? I know it too well.

Working out loud brings Validation

My experience of narration was really powerful validation.  The diagram has drawn a great deal of support and feedback.  People have encouraged me to flesh out the tools behind the work.  They have suggested next steps, connections and applications that I can leverage further.  I have even had volunteers offer to work with me and someone offering to coach me in the lean start-up of this concept.

Working out loud clarifies Hypotheses

The other aspect of this experience was that working out loud enabled me to better understand the hypotheses that were a part of the work that I was doing. Had I gone on alone, I would have just buried these assumptions in the work.

Framing up my engagement of others as a test of the ideas pushed me to understand what were the key hypotheses that I needed others to confirm. Testing the assumptions reduces the risk of investing more time in the idea.

Working out loud reinforces Learning (Permanently Beta)

Because I and others know the idea is in development, improvement is part and parcel of sharing the work out loud. I don’t feel obliged to defend the work as I have less invested. I can be more dispassionate about the feedback of others as to how to improve the work. I learn more faster.

Work out loud to create value

Working out Loud with a Lean Start-up mindset can deliver powerful value in the creation and sharing of knowledge. As knowledge work becomes more important in the future of work, we need to be more effective and faster in our creation and sharing of knowledge. Practices like working out loud will drive real value the productivity, effectiveness and engagement of knowledge workers.

More Poetry at Work

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

image

The magic of social collaboration is when you become part of a conversation, then others bring their insights.  After the last two posts, this has become poetry week (or so it seems).  

Two Quick Reads

My last two posts discovered two further good reads on the power of poetry:

Deeper Reading

For anyone who wants to dive deeper into this topic, I can recommend:

Action

Lastly, go to your favourite bookstore and buy a book of poetry. There is no better way to realise the power than to dip into the inspiration of a collection of great poems.

One book can make a difference. My journey into the power of poetry began when a good friend, Geoff Higgins, gave me a copy of Seamus Heaney’s The Haw Lantern. Geoff did me an enormous favour because great poetry is a passion that can sustain a life of creative work.

You could do worse than to decide to follow this practice by the wise Lois Kelly:

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A Poem as Knowledge Work

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

A poet’s work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep. – Salman Rushdie

The moment of change is the only poem – Adrienne Rich

Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood – TS Eliot

Poetry is pure knowledge work. Poets take their art, sensibilities, training and deep domain expertise to create a work of pure knowledge, a piece of literature.

We accept that a poet might use elements of the following processes to create their work:

  • Engaging with the world
  • Taking time for reflection & seeking inspiration
  • Working drafts, experimenting, throwing away failures, restarting often and trialling different approaches and ideas
  • Building on patterns, influences, themes and ideas shared by others
  • Collaborating with others, seeking the guidance of colleagues, peers, editors and audiences to improve the work
  • Creating new forms, practices, breaking rules and pushing the discipline of the domain
  • Questing after perfection and never quite realising it. Paul Valery famously said “Poems are never finished, just abandoned”

Poetry in this way is an example of knowledge work’s pursuit of effectiveness, over efficiency. The best poems are the result of distilling human experience, creating a leap forward in capability and dazzling in their rich human value.

As much as we may joke about a roomful of monkeys with typewriters writing Shakespeare, we know it cannot happen. Yet many organisations seek to manage knowledge work as a monkey business, concerned solely with the efficiency of the process of knowledge production. This mindset rejects the potential of the elements above and seeks to apply industrial process management to knowledge work. An example is the concern that collaboration in organisations might be wasteful or time consuming.  That concern misses the engaging and creative potential of collaboration.

There is much knowledge work that can be improved. Even poets quest for better more impactful creation.  However, they focus of their improvement is increasing the value of the output and not reducing waste in the process.

We can minimise down time. We can reduce errors and waste in the process.  We can turn the process of knowledge creation into an algorithm. But like poetry created by monkeys, we must acknowledge that the great human potential for connection, emotion, creativity and innovation has been lost in that process.

Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history – Plato

Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth – Samuel Johnson

Always be a poet, even in prose – Charles Baudelaire

The Power of Collaboration

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

I was recently chatting to a doctor who described to me why she still works in emergency rooms well after others may have chosen to retire from a successful career. These days she sees fewer patients but she still plays a critical role in the functioning of a ward.

Her role is to contribute to management of the ward and most important of all she shares her wisdom and experience with her colleagues. She is a sounding board for opinions, guides the choice of tests and scans, helps read charts, and generally available to consult and guide others in the high pressure and high stress environment of an emergency room.

Where is the special value in access to advice and experience vs more hands-on work?

Well, the hospital asked the same question. Hospital budgets are tight and they need to be allocating their resources carefully to produce the best outcomes. Rather than assume an answer the hospital looked at the data and compared the time patients waited and the outcomes for the whole ward on the days the experienced doctor worked versus the other shifts. To everyone’s surprise, there was a dramatic improvement when she was working and advising her colleagues. Wait times for patients were significantly reduced on those shifts. In an emergency ward that time makes a big difference.

Adding a doctor to the shift who had a career of experience and had accumulated years of tacit knowledge made the entire system of the emergency ward perform better. Doctors took less time over their decisions and needed less often to wait to interrupt a busy colleague to get advice. That matters a great deal when many of the decisions are time critical and life threatening.

This is not a story about skills. All the doctors are smart, passionate and talented. They made their own decisions on what to do and when they needed advice. The ward is always well run, but it runs better with the opportunity for more collaboration. What mattered was that the opportunity for collaboration and access to greater experience, improved the outcomes by speeding the exchange of knowledge in the ward.

Tacit knowledge and experience matters to speed and to outcomes in knowledge work. Knowledge is a flow and comes from interactions between people with diverse experiences. Being able to draw on more of these interactions can save a great deal of rework and mitigation of doubts and concerns.

How do you enable sharing of knowledge and experience?

This story resonated deeply with me because I have both benefited from the advice of others and spent a significant part of my time sharing my experience with others. Knowledge work is a growing share of most developing economies (around 40% in Australia, US and EU) In my experience, the use of experience and advice in knowledge work is often undervalued by organisations and they rarely consider the impact of advice and counsel on team performance. This story was a great example of an organisation that measured that impact and saw a dramatic result.

There are a few lessons from this story that apply to all organisations:

  • Recognise that in knowledge work the discussion, debate, advice and counsel is part of the work: Many organisations take an industrial view of knowledge work. If there’s not an immediate tangible final output it is waste. That means any conversations in and around the process of work are seen as waste. It is a common misguided criticism of enterprise social media – ‘why is there so much talk? shouldn’t people be working?’ They are working if they are improving their understanding, gathering insights, learning and solving problems more quickly. That a is all knowledge work. Importantly, that learning is permanent and shared.
  • Design ways of work, teams and connections to leverage experience and other forms of tacit knowledge: People with experience, shortcuts and life lessons can be an invaluable part of the team. Their prior experience as a part of a conversation with the team can accelerate progress and reduce risk. The smartest, most talented and most energetic bunch of people in the world are better with a wise advisor. Drawing out tacit knowledge into conversation improves others learning. Make plans to leverage this. Foster mentoring, make it OK to ask others and build an advice culture. Social collaboration tools are a great start.  
  • Use data, not assumptions, to determine the contribution of individuals to their groups and teams: Individual performance is usually easily measured. It takes a little more effort to understand the contribution of people to group performance. As many organisations have learned to their detriment, the person underpinning team performance may be the person with less visibility but who is sharing the most.

PS Don’t forget the value of diversity too: Another key lesson is the power of leveraging older workers, especially female role models. There may be benefits you have not considered in a greater diversity of experience. This takes effort from organisations to create flexible roles that suit their interests and passions and a work environment to which they want to contribute. With the changing demographics of an ageing workforce, this is an important consideration for all employers.

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.