Infographic of my CMI Keynote presentation on 11 November 2015
Tag: responsiveorg
The Normative Billiards called Culture
Roll one billiard ball at another across a smooth carpet and they will collide. The outcome will be determined by Newtonian laws of motion. As a result, billiards is a game of control.
Ask a person to walk towards another across a carpet and no matter how narrow the passage they will make efforts to pass each other, wordlessly navigating the changes in course to prevent collision through glances and body language. Human interaction is a game of influence, not control.
The difference in those two scenarios is that billiard balls operate in the grip of immutable physical laws. Human being operate in line with dynamic social norms. One simple norm is that you don’t collide with another if you can avoid it.
Whenever someone offers you recommendations based on immutable human behaviour make the social norms explicit and consider how they might interplay. When you need to change behaviour remember that changing the carefully regimented process might be less important than changing the social norms. Any organisation will be composed of the interplay of many social norms, some explicit but many deeply implicit.
Awareness of norms will help your effectiveness in change. We are human. We are not billiard balls.
Change Itself is Changing – Keynote at CMIDisrupt in Sydney on 11 November 2015
The Network Always Subverts the Hierarchy
Human relationships are flexible and driven by shared information, influence, trust and other personal dynamics. These dynamic relationships will subvert any formal fixed hierarchical relationships.
We see the fixed relationships of the hierarchy. We obsess about their nominal power. What we don’t see is how the network wins slowly through human relationships. Networks of information, influence and trust shape how the hierarchy behaves:
- Want a positive decision from the CEO? You know who to lobby to influence his or her opinion.
- Want to know why some customers can get what they want? Look for their networks and connections into your organisation and into competitors.
- Why do all employee emails leak within minutes? Look for the gossips and informal relationships outside the organisation.
- Want to know why some are promoted over others? Look for the networks of previous experiences, trusted relationships and reputation helping careers along.
As soon as a new hierarchy is created or control processes are tightened, human nature starts subverting its effect in the name of relationships of information, trust and influence. The rational slowly yields to the relational. The network wins in the end because it leverages the human social process of decision making.
Fighting the influence of networks makes life less human. Embrace them as a part of any hierarchy.
Learn from the Practice of Work with #wol
Working out loud is key practice to move beyond the theory of work. Working out loud helps solve the obstacles of work, tests ideas and creates interactions to keep work grounded in reality.
The most theoretical conversation in the modern workplace is often when a stakeholder says ‘I agree’. What they are actually saying is ‘I agree in principle to your approach given our common theoretical understanding of what you are doing, the absence of obvious obstacles and my limited understanding of the context’. Agreement like that falls apart when practice diverges from theory, obstacles occur or when more context surfaces.
The theory of work diverging from practice impacts more than stakeholder conversations. It is at the heart of breakdowns of many customer experiences, work processes and policies, incentive schemes, restructures, change initiatives and many other domains. In each case as the theory leaves the design table it meets obstacles, exceptions and other challenges in practice.
Some organisations try to eliminate these issues with a stricter adherence to theory. Instead, the defining practice of an effective modern organisation is how it accepts theory’s limitations and focuses on learning the lessons of real practice. Big learning practices take advantage of the organisations ability to learn through each employee’s work and adapt to break the boxes of the theory. Knowing obstacles are the work, organisations plan to learn and adapt. These organisations never get stuck in theory because it is always subject to improvement in a live test.
Working out loud plays a key role in these responsive organisations bridging the gaps between theory and practice. Working out loud puts ideas out for early tests, surfaces obstacles and shares context widely. A stakeholder who says I agree in a process of working out loud has a surer foundation and a better expectation of what is ahead.
Judge the success of your work in practice. Allow for learning and adaptation. Use working out loud to strengthen the culture of learning in your organisation.
So long and thanks for all the bonuses
If you are reading this note it is because we have reached the end of management. This note was coded into all technology systems developed after 7 April 1964 (a date we fondly recall as ‘Peak Management’). We knew management would not last so we designed this message as a final push communication across all known means of communication, formerly known as channels. Publication of this message has been triggered by the departure of the last manager from the organisation.
Worldclass Management
We are calling to a close an extraordinary and extended period of world class management. Don’t worry if you are vague on that term. Just like a vision statement, you won’t have to live it and we never knew what it meant. We were great managers. Nobody gave us any real performance or productivity measures. We were too busy discussing how to manage you. The clever invention of peer ranking enabled us to skip the need to be more specific. The fact that we were allowed to do management for so long is our key proof point on how important we have been. When the histories of management are written, they will write about us and of course, GE. If only GE had continued to be a management role model, we might still be doing it. So much for management science, consultants and all those gurus.
We never really thought it would last this long. It seems like it has been downhill since the 1950s, but then we found ways to compensate ourselves for the loss of secretaries, long lunches and the executive lunchroom. We always find ways to compensate ourselves. We even triggered a final management compensation package with this message. Sorry if you got a little shortchanged. The robots or your peers may be more generous to you than we were.
We know you will miss the meetings, the reports, the obscure politics, the powerpoint, the email, the 360 reviews, the performance appraisals and the complete lack of transparency as to what was actually going on. We will. Most of all, we will miss the money and the status. Oh, and listening to the sound of our own voice. Such a pity that someone finally coined HiPPO. It exposed all the aspects of our little game.
Now it is up to You
Good luck working out how the organisational system works. We hope you have better luck than we did. We never quite got the hang of the interdependencies and the networks. Silos were a nice try to hide our lack of understanding. Restructures worked well for a while to keep everyone confused. The blizzard of management jargon and techniques kept everyone busy arguing over which of the latest fads was the best way to work (Wasn’t Holacracy a clever way to buy a few more years?). All those disconnected performance targets was another great strategy to avoid having to work out how the place actually runs.
Enjoy the autonomy. We may have had power, but autonomy is a different thing. Our power was mostly useful for clashing with other power. You might actually get to use your autonomy to do something purposeful, particularly if you are able to build trust and influence some colleagues and networks to collaborate with you. Run some experiments with changing the world. The customers and community would be pleased if you made a difference for them. They got a little tired waiting for us.
If we have one word of advice it is leverage the potential of people. We spoke a lot about “people being our best assets” and “world class talent” but mostly we just repeated what we read in books about management. That was much easier than doing something with people. You have a chance to use and grow the diverse capabilities of all the individuals in the organisation. There’s lots of potential we never tapped. You will have to make decisions that take the potential of people into account because they will be a part of the decision making process. Oddly, treating people like assets, machines and a commodity didn’t seem to realise the potential for organisations to learn, perform and grow.
So long and thanks for all the bonuses
So thanks for all your hard work, commitment to the organisation and putting up with our efforts at management. We are gone now but we will still be watching. The world is far more transparent. We were never able to adapt to all that transparency, openness and interaction. However, we will be able to keep a better eye on you now and learn what we should have done as you work out the path forward together.
Unfortunately for us, we will have no more opportunities to talk at you. We are all off to explore potential careers in politics.
[End of Message]
The Emperor’s New Clothes
“By breaking the rules of the game, he has disrupted the game as such. He has exposed it as a mere game. He has shattered the world of appearances, the fundamental pillar of the system. He has upset the power structure by tearing apart what holds it together. He has demonstrated that living a lie is living a lie. He has broken through the exalted facade of the system and exposed the real, base foundations of power. He has said that the emperor is naked. And because the emperor is in fact naked, something extremely dangerous has happened: by his action, the greengrocer has addressed the world. He has enabled everyone to peer behind the curtain. He has shown everyone that it is possible to live within the truth. Living within the lie can constitute the system only if it is universal. The principle must embrace and permeate everything. There are no terms whatsoever on which it can co- exist with living within the truth, and therefore everyone who steps out of line denies it in principle and threatens it in its entirety.” – Vaclav Havel, The Power of the Powerless
What exactly is the power in your company’s hierarchy?
A Culture of Consent
Debates over structure, governance and power dominate management. We want to get the right balance between command and autonomy as if this is a formula that can be designed externally and imposed. The realities of power in organisations are simpler than we perceive.
An organisation is not a state. Despite their orders, minions, wealth and luxurious surrounds, senior managers are not rulers. There is no army, no police force and no jail. Shareholders are not voters to provide legitimacy to coercion. Security guards have limits on their ability to apply force and is rarely constructive. Coercive power is in organisations is rather like the Emperor’s New Clothes. Senior managers know this well because daily they experience the limits of their ability to order.
Organisations have one form of power – exclusion through exile or ostracism. Senior management have security guards to escort you from the building. Management can encourage others to turn on you. They can deprive you of this source of income and relationships in a community of peers, but have no other power. Look closely, they probably can’t even deprive you of resources, as these are usually under the day-to-day management of your peers. You already work around that issue daily as you make your organisation’s budgeting work.
All the power of the hierarchical leaders of organisations is given to them by the culture within the organisation. It is social influence, not power backed by force. Like the greengrocer in Vaclav Havel’s example above, you either live within that culture (and sustain its power) or you don’t (and become a dissident or rebel).
If the Emperor of Management has no clothes..
- Change is closer than you think. Start to create new influence or question the sources and approaches of power and you are already leading change, potentially far more quickly than you realise.
- Management are not a blocker outside the system preventing change. They are a part of the same system and equally aware of its issues. Encourage them to adapt management practice through conversations about influence, culture and the practices of power.
- Network with like minded peers discuss and debate what needs to change. How should influence be structured in your organisation?
- Culture is not a project just for the HR team. The consequences of the real cultural norms are far wider and far more important than a poster of values. Culture will shape what the organisation perceives and how it is able to respond.
- Living in reality and being more human is harder than you think. First, you must separate reality from the views that you have chosen to believe. Second, you must continue to engage with the reality of the situation without the warm support of culture.
- The future models of power in your organisation are a discussion for the community. Adopting elaborate models of autonomy and decision making without this discussion is swapping one naked emperor for another. If you adopting a new model, what is it about this model that makes it closer to the reality of influence in your organisation?
- The ability to survive and restart reduces the threat of management power. That means a sense of personal purpose, savings of six to twelve months of living expenses, marketable capabilities and good external networks. Removing the danger from exile and strengthening purpose against ostracism frees the rebel to lead change.
“For the real question is whether the brighter future is really always so distant. What if it has been here for a long time already and only our own blindness and weakness and has prevented us from seeing it around and within us and prevented us from developing it?” – Vaclav Havel
The Problem is Everywhere
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.
Break the Management Spiral
Some days I wonder how much of what we call management theory is piling on new practices to treat the symptoms of the last practice we implemented. Let’s break the management spiral.
The Management Spiral
Let’s assume we are a traditional organisation run in line with prevailing management practices. Here’s one example of what we might experience:
- We hire to match fixed definitions of expertise and because we don’t help our people to learn & adapt so we don’t trust them to deliver alone.
- Because we don’t trust our employees to be able to work unguided, we have a strict processes & policies.
- The policies and processes don’t cover all situations or all decisions, so we have hierarchy to lead, sort issues & coordinate.
- Our hierarchy doesn’t do that work because human nature means hierarchical leaders become invested in their power and expertise which disengages people, so we run a complicated scheme of performance management and incentives.
- The performance system isn’t perfect and worsens performance by creating conflict, waste and misalignment so we need to resort to layoffs, restructures, outsourcing and automation in an effort to restore performance.
- Now that we are letting expert people go, it’s clear that we can’t trust anyone and there’s no point investing in people so we are back at the beginning again and need better compliance with policies and process, more effective hierarchy and a new performance management system.
This is a simple linear story. Even small organisations are far more complex than this example with interplay between each of these factors and a range of personal, political and human issues influencing performance. For example, there’s a reason engagement is low across many industries and countries as every one of the bullets above affects engagement.
We can’t go on adding bandaids to the symptoms of our previous management practices.
Breaking the Spiral
To break this spiral we need to change two key elements of the modern management paradigm:
- From knowing to learning: Expertise won’t cut it anymore. We need to embrace the pace of knowledge in a connected economy and focus on flows of knowledge, not stocks. Organisations need to ensure that they have Big Learning, where every role is building capability and contributing to the potential of the organisation. It also means means change & growth is inherent in every role and each role has a responsibility to fix, to improve and to share.
- From controlling to enabling: If the world is dynamic, we can’t specify in advance. We can’t dictate the process at the detail required. We can’t anticipate every customer need or every community demand. We need to focus instead on enabling the person best placed to make the call and realising value through enabling those outside the organisation. We need to manage to realise and enable our collective potential, the potential of employees, customers and community.
These two concepts seem to be at the heart of many of the new practices developed to help enhance the future of work. Let’s hope better practices will help us to better manage the system and break the spiral.
Use Digital Capabilities to Build Digital Capabilities
Our traditional management models die hard.
Many organisations are starting to consider how they build new digital capabilities like agile, hypothesis-based experimentation, design thinking, analytics and collaboration. Yet when they start to plan these changes to more digital ways of working, they use management models from pre-digital management:
- transactional approach to interventions
- solutions defined by expertise
- linear implementation approaches
- waterfall project plans
- push compliance and competency models focused on supply of new skills to employees
- narrow delivery models using only learning and classroom learning
- limited if any measurement of the changes
These approaches seek to make organisations ready for more digital management using the methods of traditional management.
Digital Dog Food
We can do better than this. We can start by asking projects to build digital capabilities to eat their own dog food. If nothing else, they will learn on behalf of the organisation the challenges and opportunities of new digital ways of working.
New Digital Capability Building
Projects to build digital and responsive capabilities in organisations can be role model projects for those capabilities. Taking a leaf from the digital tool suite challenges those building capability to consider capability building that offers:
- many paths on the learning journey as part of career paths and achievement of learner goals
- mobile options, social learning and performance support to sustain learning in the digital work place and wherever is convenient for employees
- offers people pull and push options across the range of 70:20:10 learning with options also for the depth of content and timing of learning experiences
- encouraging people to seek out and share learning options from the depth of learning available in their personal networks
- engaging programs built from deep insights into the change and capability challenges for employees in working in new ways
New Digital Delivery
The projects to build new digital capabilities themselves can adopt digital approaches by shifting to:
- agile delivery
- minimum viable solutions
- hypothesis-led test and learn iteration
- considering needs for adaptive change and related changes on the wider organisational system
- encouraging learners to act as a community to support successful delivery of the project goals.
- strong analytics supporting not just the delivery of learning but also the strategic contribution of the capability building
- leveraging collaboration and networks in and outside the organisation to build capabilities, particularly in making smart decisions on what to build and what to buy.
More Effective
Working on transformation projects in these new ways won’t always be efficient. It definitely won’t be easy. However, using the tools and approaches of digital management enables organisations to learn and evolve their goals through the process of transformation. This learning will be the path to step changes in effectiveness and a better match to employee and organisational needs. At a minimum, it helps ensure that the project creates a team of highly capable change agents to help drive the next phase of the journey.