Tag: responsiveorg

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.

Accenture Digital Double Down & Responsive Organisation

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

I recently shared a statistic on twitter on the need for digital transformation from a new piece of Accenture strategy and was queried by Ragnar Heil on the comparison of the Accenture recommendations to the Responsive Organisation.

In this post, I compare the two approaches.

Similar Rationale: Both the Accenture Digital Double Down paper and the Responsive Organisation are framed around a fundamental change in business circumstances with the rise of digital technology and particularly its ability to enable disruption, transparency of information and rapid growth. Accenture specifically challenge organisations to recognise that digital transformer’s

‘aspirations and investment plans set the pace, and the actions of these organisations should become the core assumptions of any future business strategy’

A Game Change: Accenture explicitly frame their paper around the difference between growth and efficiency orientation. This reflects broadly the characterisation of efficiency as the traditional model of management thinking in the Responsive Organisation focus. However, effectiveness and growth are not identical concepts.

Purpose vs Growth: Growth in the Accenture context is revenue growth with customers. Responsive Organisation generally discusses effectiveness in a more systemic and purposeful way. Effectiveness is an organisations ability to create new and better ways to fulfil purpose and new and better ways to manage its stakeholder relationships, including employee engagement, leveraging employee potential and engaging community.

Customer-led: Both approaches rightly highlight that digital transformation is customer-led.  Accenture focuses on the customer channel transformation occurring and only briefly references new markets and value migration.  Responsive Organisation is more specific on how experimentation and value creation will occur through better customer orientation across the organisation.

Recognition of Changing Organisation: The Accenture Strategy paper explicitly recognises that change will be required to the organisation though this message is carefully phrased and not a major theme of the document. In its strategic questions, the Accenture paper notes:

‘How should we organize, measure, recruit and reward in a digital world?’

Company vs Network: Accenture recognises that partnerships, external relationships and new customer engagement are important, but their model for the entity leading digital transformation is a traditional hierarchical organisation. Responsive Organisation asks organisations to look more closely at the networks within and around the organisation and how different models of value creation and working might better fulfil purpose. Accenture do not emphasize the need for innovation in management approaches as heavily as discussion of Responsive Organisation.

Planning vs Experimentation: Accenture are explicitly providing guidance to senior managers as to where investment should be allocated and what should go in strategic plans. There is no reference to experimentation, learning or other similar concepts in the recommendations of the strategy document. Increasing the autonomy of employees to collaborate, experiment and innovate is not an explicit recommendation.

Need for Change Management: Both approaches recognise that organisations face significant change to adapt to new digital transformation and new ways of working. The Accenture focus is on which senior executives should lead the transformation and how to manage senior executive support. Responsive Organisation focuses on the challenge of engaging all employees and distribution of the transformation through a more autonomous organisation.

Communicate vs Transparency: Accenture highlight that digital changes the transparency of information in and around organisations. However, their model is still one where the organisation must choose what it wishes to communicate to partners, suppliers and others.

Summary: The two approaches are very similar and reflect efforts to address the same root cause and opportunity. Accenture’s approach is perhaps better targeted to engage senior managers looking to start incremental change to digital transformation now. After all, this strategy document is a summary of their approach and content as part of a consulting sales program. As organisations move deeper into digital transformation, I expect that the two approaches may draw closer together, assuming the opportunity to move to new ways of working and greater autonomy in the organisation is not precluded by the organisational culture.

Back human potential

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

Management has challenges on its hands. The traditional pillars of management are breaking down as David Holzmer recently outlined. At the same time the demands on management increase. In seeking a new course we need to engage the creativity of human potential. After all, human potential got us here in the first place.

We must remember in the tens of thousands of years of history of human culture the industrial model of activity covers only the last roughly 150. Industrial management models have been enormously productive and transformed our society. However, it has been at the cost of valuing process over personality. As the industrial model frays we have an opportunity to experiment anew with new more human ways of working.

Reading Mark Pagel’s Wired for Culture has reminded me of the power of the diverse potential of humanity. However to engage this potential we must allow people the latitude to express diverse talents and solutions. Pagel makes the point that:

‘…social learning is to ideas what natural selection is to genes. Both are ways of picking good solutions from a sea of variety’.

We must engage people to experiment with the potential of autonomy, purpose and mastery. We will need people to do this in large numbers, in diverse ways, using diverse talents and with sharing of practice to enable connected social learning. From these approaches new adaptations will be found. There won’t be an easy linear recipe. However, human creativity given its freedom is a powerful problem solving engine.

Organisations go to great effort to hire the most talented employees and to align them to the goals of the organisation. Why not let them use those talents to adapt and change the system? Perhaps it is time to trust in the potential of those well chosen people to create new and better ways of working. Better still connect, enable and hold people accountable for this creativity. Supply the adaptive leadership to help them realise even more.

Back human potential. It is the future of work.

Value creation in networks

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

The old way industrial of creating value is well understood and commonly implemented. Develop a unique proposition with a discrete market. Create a simple linear process to deliver the proposition by turning inputs into outputs with value creation at each carefully delineated step. Maximise control at the choke points in the process to maximise returns. Manage efficiency and throughput of the process to minimise waste. Reduce risk. As easy as that sounds we have spent over 200 years perfecting the process and still have much to learn.

We know far less about creating value in the massively scaled digital networks that we face today. Mostly we know what doesn’t work. Failure is accelerating. A focus on efficiency will kill a company competing with disruptive competitors. Networks specialise in routing around control points. Parallel disaggregated processes disrupt the linear, particularly if relentlessly focused on key opportunities to create value. Transparency across the process and rapid exchange of information changes the organisation-customer-employers-supplier- community dynamic in radical ways.

Value creation in networks to date has defaulted to the nearest analogies of the industrial model. Build a platform with a unique global scale that you can control. Strip the value creating process back to customer acquisition and platform development. Control advertising revenues ( or less commonly enterprise sales) as the principal form of monetisation. Experiment and acquire relentlessly. Be transparent internally and leverage networked models of organisation internally, but behave like industrial peers to the external market, except for carefully structured communities of co-creation and innovation.

The latest clues in the Cluetrain Manifesto are a reminder that this model is not guaranteed. At the same time, the lessons of the last Dotcom bust documented in Seely-Brown and Duguid’s ‘The Social Life of Information’ are a reminder that we have not yet reached our disaggregated and disinter mediated ‘markets are conversations’ utopia.

What is clear is that we need new ways of working. We will build new practices using our new global networks and relationships to exchange what works and to discard what does not. The key to success will be effectiveness. Effective organisations will mobilise their potential, connections and capabilities to pursue the ever-changing network opportunities, to learn together with their customers and community to realise a meaningful purpose. Embracing the new network economy and networked ways of working is fundamental for any organisation seeking to make this shift. Any organisation that takes this leap is on the path to becoming a Responsive Organisation.

Value has never been created around a board table. That is where value and the resources to create value have historically been acquired or allocated, often poorly. Value has never been created by data alone. People transform the data into hypotheses, insight, decisions and actions. Value has always been created by that action in networks, even if those networks are the crippled relationships of hierarchy. Those are network of people, not data. The organisations that reap the potential will be led by Network Navigators who can help their organisations through the journey.

The network must do the work to create value led by Network Navigators. As Esko Kilpi put it ‘the time for reductionism as a sense making mechanism is over’. The way forward will emerge through practice, interaction and learning in the network. We will need Network Navigators to help us to work on the whole system.

Harold Jarche reminds us ‘the work is learning and learning is the work’. We have entirely new systems and practices of organisations to develop, to test and to share. Like our efforts to date we will begin with fixes and variants to the systems we have. Over time we will make more new sense of the future of work. We will need to learn to trust and enable people to leverage their networks and experiment. Then we have the journey of change advocacy to spread the successful practices. The widespread use of enterprise social networks is just one such step and even it has not addressed the potential of adoption, let alone value.

The fun of value creation in networks has only just begun. Our job is to make that fun a very human and purposeful experience.

Practice is Habit – Make This Your Year

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

“We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, and never to be undone. Every smallest stroke of virtue or of vice leaves its never so little scar.” – William James

Complex changes like realising the Responsive Organisation and developing the future of work need people to connect in communities and along networks of practice. Forming new habits will be essentially to developing the richness of practice required.

Habits are required in Practice

How are those New Year Resolutions tracking? A week into the new year and many people are already struggling with new practices that look like failed intentions. New practices struggle to embed unless we turn them into habits.

I was planning to write today about the need for habits to reinforce practice when tumblr served up the William James quote above thanks to the Explore blog and the work of Maria Popova. The article on William James says many wise words on the value of habit in reinforcing habit. 

However I can point out the serendipity.  Maria’s relentless and excellent curation is a habit. My practice of writing this blog is a habit.  Without these habits and many more the coincidence would not be possible.  Similar serendipity is found in the practice of working out loud.  These moments of encouragement extend the practice further. 

To create change we need to start developing suites of new future of work practices and turning them first into experiments and then embedding the successes as habits.  Through the long practice of habit will come innovations, solutions to problems and a richer connection with others pushing the practice forward. We need to create the habits and connections that enable the serendipity to power change for Responsive Organisations.

Habits bring time to Practice

Habits bring the gift of time to practice.  They ensure that our feeble new practices are not killed by lack of attention or effort. Habits sustain us through the hard days and the days we would rather not. We all love quick wins but focusing on new practices reminds us that not everything transforms immediately. There are obstacles, new skills and lessons to be learned in practice.

Successful practice takes time and learning. Habits are the key to winning that time.

This is Your Year

This year is definitely my year. I would like it to be yours too. That will take some new habits.

This poster first featured on this blog a year ago when its claims were decidedly uncertain. The poster celebrated that the obstacles are the work. It sits in my office in my eye line as a reminder that it is relentless practice and good habits that will deliver me the year that I seek. There are many ways I can ensure it will be my year:

  • If I practice what I preach consistently
  • If I experiment, to learn and to build new good habits
  • If I keep focus and avoid the distractions of the bright and shiny things
  • If I keep looking for ways to move forward, overcome the obstacles and achieve my purpose; but most of all
  • If I keep translating the believe that ‘This is My Year’ into action

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This year is your year too. Like it or not, it will pass with every action and omission you make. The choice is yours to make it a year to remember. Create the habits required to own your year. The resulting practice will deliver great rewards.

Habits don’t have to be big things. Small steps accumulate. Small steps that can be consistently repeated in a process of learning accelerate success.

What would make it really your year? What do you need to do consistently to make it happen? What is your new habit?

Responsive Organizations take Practice in Networks

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

A theme of my work and this blog is that large scale transformative change in organizations requires sense making. Employees must be able to make their own personal sense of change and connect it to personal purpose, knowledge and experience. This theme underpins the Value Maturity Model, the focus on leadership as a way to aid sense making and the emphasis on learning and experimentation. Sense making also highlights the importance of practice.

To make Sense, Practice

I am a huge fan of the simplicity of Harold Jarche’s Seek>Sense>Share model of learning in networks. Harold consistently emphasises the connection of practice as a key part of that learning. Mastery only comes from continued practice and refinement.

Henry Mintzberg published a recent post on practice in management education which stresses the power of practice. Inherent in this approach is time for reflection and sense making. Individual and group conversations accelerate the ability to make sense of changes.

The way we make sense is to experiment and reflect. Practice helps us to see the way forward. Like a startup we can run lean experiments with aspects of the large scale change to help us to make sense of new behaviours, new benefits and new challenges. We practice to learn.

Learning is critical when the changes are uncertain, when there is more to emerge as we change a system. Beware of recipes. Increasingly in large scale change like the creation of a responsive organization it is impossible to know the exactly answer when we start. The path forward involves as much adaptation as we expect to see in the end state.

Practice in Communities and Networks

We can accelerate our sense making, our learning and our practice in communities and through network connections. Communities are a place to learn from the experience of others, to gain the benefits of their help in your reflections and to collaborate.

Networks are a place to find likeminded practitioners and the reinforcement of new ideas and examples. Sharing and finding in networks supports ongoing learning at the speed required for adaptation. Networks also keep you open to the changing world.

These communities and networks of practice are accelerants of our personal change. My personal learning has been greatly accelerated by communities like Change Agents Worldwide and connections through many networks of practitioners.

Change follows Practice and Sense

In The Social Life of Information there is a story of how the graphical user interface went from Xerox PARC to Apple. The authors point out that innovation travels on the rails of practice. Apple’s engineers had shared practice and purpose with those at Xerox PARC. They made sense of the innovations and set about solving for the complementary innovations required to maximise the value of the new interface. Sadly, the rest of Xerox lack the shared practice to make sense of the changes.

The idea of a Responsive Organization requires a similar exercise in sense making and complementary innovations. For many managers there is simply no sense yet in change and there are challenges that need to be solved. The advocates of Responsive Organizations need to continue to practice, to share new sense and to learn better ways.

The appeal of Responsive Organizations already spreads along the paths created by communities and networks of practice. The value of those networks is one of the reasons I helped create #Responsivecoffee and its related events. Very few people set out to become a Responsive Organization as such. However as people practice with the various elements of a Responsive Organization they are drawn to make sense of new ways of management and organising work.

The advocates of the Responsive Organization need to leverage practice to help spread the change. Networks and communities of those in organisations who want to practice new ways of working and who can see a way forward will offer opportunities to further expand the practice and draw others in.

To make sense, practice. To turn sense into change, practice in networks. There is still much practice, sense making and connection ahead.

Weave the social fabric with leadership

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

‘Judgement & discretion are not features of software. They are the product of human socialization & experience’ – J Seely Brown & P Duguid

The biggest gap between strategy & execution is often found in the social relationships in an organisation. Decision making, learning, negotiating and alignment of people are rarely well done by machines. The human elements of strategy such as alignment, capabilities and the decision making of execution let us down.

John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid in their classic The Social Life of Information discuss the challenges that this ‘social fabric’ pose for our visions of legions of autonomous bots exchanging information. They note:

‘For humans, rules and goals bear a complicated relationship to the social fabric. Both may shift dynamically in practice depending on the social conditions that prevail’

That shifting is a sophisticated form of responsiveness. Much of the lament about the failure to execute top-down strategy can be explained by the diverse actors of an organisation needing to adapt the strategy to the social fabric of the organisation and its networks. Employees need to change the goals and the rules to retain relationships in their networks.

Top down strategy is rarely iterative enough to learn from these adaptations. Much top down strategy is short term, transactional and fails to account for the social relationships. They are assumed away or assumed capable of surrender to the higher order needs of strategy.

Simply asking why employees must changing the strategy to suit their relationships can reveal significant insight and opportunities to fine tune performance or realise greater human potential. Often it brings back in more stakeholders and more systemic and longer term issues the initial strategy assumed away. We ignore the adaptability of human social relationships at our peril.

Many evangelists of big data propose it as as a solution to the challenges of strategy. They see it will allow for better data and deeper analysis to overcome the inability to execute analytical dreams. Big data analysis already brings great power and insight. Yet it cannot overcome the social fabric of an organisation executing a strategy. Big data at some point must interact with this social fabric whether it is the assumptions and hypotheses programmed into the system or the decision maker who must use the output.

Big data will often make the challenge of integration into social fabric greater as its black boxes may not account for such simple things as human needs to trust, to learn, to explain, and to understand. Knowing where you are falling short is rarely the corporate challenge in strategy. The challenge is enabling human resources to respond.

We need to stop seeing the inherent humanity of the social fabric as a barrier to the perfect execution of strategy. This idea demonstrates echoes of the industrial era thinking that dominates management. A corporation of automatons would be beaten by human ingenuity simply because our social fabric is the engine of learning, creativity, collaboration, trust and adaptation.

The social fabric of an organisation is the source of competitive advantage. Social factors distinguish responsive organisations. Culture eats strategy for breakfast because of its ability to shape learning, creativity, collaboration, trust and decision making. Organisations need to work with and on the social fabric to optimise their performance. The more human organisation will sustainably outperform.

The technology we need to engage with the social fabric is leadership. Leadership can shape learning, creativity, collaboration, trust and adaptation in an organisation. Leadership is the engine of human potential.

In 2015, organisations need their leaders to play to the role of helping work with and on the social fabric of the organisation. Social factors in strategy can no longer be ignored or assumed to be overcome. These very factors are the heart of the human potential & adaptation that will differentiate successful strategies.

The Rules of The Organisation: part 1

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

All good is personal. All negatives are abstract. 
Information must go up. Opinions come down.
Internal facts override external facts.
Internal logic overrides external logic.
Internal outcomes override external outcomes. 
Arbitrary time trumps real time.
Arbitrarily chosen timelines have real consequences. 
Small errors have large consequences. 
Large errors have no consequences.  
Good news must be shared. Bad new must be good news to be shared. 
Decisions are made by the most senior person. 
Work is done by the most junior person. 
The most senior people work internally. The most junior people work externally. 
The most senior people know why. 
The most junior people know how. 
The more senior you are the more you talk about yourself. 
Junior people’s relationships are determined by senior people.
Junior people have too many people to engage.
Senior people determine their own relationships.
Senior people have too few relationships.
Only the most senior person can discuss the things that can’t be discussed. 
Small exceptions cannot be made. Large exceptions can be escalated. 
There is no value in emotion until there is. 
Junior people are fungible until they become senior. Senior people are unique. 
Measure something and it will be done. 
Nothing is done until it is measured. 
Measures matter more than people, but measures relating to people do not matter at all. 
Consistency is a virtue that is inconsistently applied.

Inspired by a post by Euan Semple on The System. ‘Tis the season to be merry. Happy festive season everyone.

Leadership in Transformation

Posted on by simongterry in Change, Future of Work, Leadership

A common topic of debate in the Responsive Organization movement is whether an organization can become responsive or it must be born that way.

Undoubtedly many of the leading case studies of future of work organizations are organizations created or rebirthed from near death by charismatic founders. Some use this as evidence that the elements of a responsive organization must be present from the beginning. In a previous post, I pointed out that we cannot rely on transparency alone to make change occur for us. The power structures in a traditional organisation will prevent most radical change.

I am unambiguously in the optimist camp. I am not alone and the company in the optimist camp inspires me. I have seen organizations change enough to not recognise their former selves. Change to more responsive ways of working is possible. The question is how.

What gets in the way

Chris Argyris’ classic article Teaching Smart People to Learn is a rich source of observations of what gets in the way of a Responsive Organization transformation.  In particular, Argyris notes that:

… There seems to be a universal human tendency to design one’s actions consistently according to four basic values:

1. To remain in unilateral control;

2. To maximize “winning” and minimize “losing”;

3. To suppress negative feelings; and

4. To be as “rational” as possible—by which people mean defining clear objectives and evaluating their behavior in terms of whether or not they have achieved them.

The purpose of all these values is to avoid embarrassment or threat, feeling vulnerable or incompetent. In this respect, the master program that most people use is profoundly defensive. Defensive reasoning encourages individuals to keep private the premises, inferences, and conclusions that shape their behavior and to avoid testing them in a truly independent, objective fashion.

These hidden values in most organisation get in the way of the transparency-led transformation that many hope to see. The Responsive Organization poses a threat to control, a threat of losing and negative feelings. Importantly the delegation of authority in a Responsive Organization may cause people anxiety as to objectives and rationale for action.

The role of leadership is to act as a counterbalance these natural human values and shift the behaviours to that of a Responsive Organization. We need to create rationales for action more powerful than embarrassment. We need to create community to generate trust, support and connection. We need to enable learning through conflict and experimentation. 

Purpose:

Leaders must create a strong rationale for the transformation. In cases of crisis, startup or near death of organizations, this rationale can often be imposed by a charismatic individual. The external circumstances enable a threat based narrative to bind people together in a defensive rationale for change.

However, most organizations are successful to their own terms. As Argyris notes, we want to feel successful even if our results don’t pass external muster.  

Leaders need to leverage two elements to create a strong rationale for change in this context:  

  • The Purpose of the organization: a purpose is the ultimate rationale for why people come together in an endeavour. It defines the common impact the group of people wish to have on the world.  As a higher agenda, it is the perfect rationale for change for even the most successful organisations.  Purpose is a mastery quest. Very few organizations have the capability to completely fulfil their purpose. They can however strive to better realise it.
  • External orientation: No closed system will find a rationale for change. External orientation is where organizations find the challenges and opportunities that define the purpose into specific improvement opportunities. Leaders need to relentlessly focus the organization on its customers and community to see transparently the challenges and opportunities that exist for change. Well defined external impacts in this community will be what can drive the autonomy of teams in the organization.  Using customer and community data in line with Purpose, also enables change agents to overcome embarrassment-based resistance in the organization.

Community:

Individuals will need support to take on the risks of a Responsive Organization. The role of leaders is to create the sense of community that will support an individual through that change. At the heart of that community will be engagement with others and a growing sense of mutual trust.  Leaders set the tone for any community. They must also work hard to reinforce these key community behaviours

  • Engagement: Engagement begins with transparency and connection. I cannot truly care about the others in my community until I know who they are and understand their purposes, concerns and circumstances. Leaders need to create the conditions to enable people to be more social, to connect, to solve and to share their work challenges together.
  • Trust: Engagement will build trust as it builds understanding. Transparency will reinforce trust. However, leaders need to take on the role of fostering responsibility and accountability as engines of growing trust in the organization.  When people see that individuals and teams are accountable for driving change then they will have greater trust in the change agenda.

Learning:

This post is deliberately not titled like a listicle e.g. ’The 3 or 6 things to transform an organisation’. Even a basic familiarity with change highlights that formulas will work only up to a point. Leadership needs to be adaptive to enable any system to change in a sustainable way.

To be true to their purpose and stakeholders, to leverage the potential of their community, each organization will take an unique path through change.  The role of leaders is facilitate the individual and organizational learning required:

  • Experimentation: creating a culture of rapid iteration to address challenges and opportunities will accelerate the cycle of learning in the organization. Leaders must help this experimentation culture to overcome the resistance identified by Argyris and also to spread and have a wider influence in the organization. Lessons learned must become new truths which will take a sense-making role for leaders in the wider organization and mean leaders must champion new ways of working when they arise, whatever the personal costs.
  • Conflict: The biggest reason that organizational transformations fail is an unwillingness of the leadership of the organisation to allow uncertainty and conflict. Conflict will happen. The uncertainty associated with conflict is inevitable. Efforts to suppress this will either undermine transparency, the rationale for change, engagement or learning. Failure to embrace conflict takes many names: politeness, bureaucracy, politics, corporate speak, history, culture, etc. Failure to embrace conflict is an unwillingness to learn and improve. There will always be resistance when change comes and it must be addressed. Leaders need to create and sustain the right kinds of constructive conflict – driven by purpose, based in facts from an external orientation & experimentation, mediated through an engaged community. 

Change is Coming. Lead.

I have seen the potential of purpose, external orientation, engagement, trust experimentation and conflict to drive change. Supported by leadership these are the elements of each organization’s transformation. These elements are critical to a Responsive Organization.

Throughout this post I have referred to leaders and leadership. This need not be hierarchical leadership. Clearly it helps if leadership and power are aligned in an organization in reinforcing the need for change. However, the changes described above are not capable of being implemented by top-down edicts. These changes must come as individuals and groups discover their power and are influenced as a result, This kind of leadership relies on influence and can begin bottom up or even from the middle management so often scorned in organizations.

Change is possible. Change is coming. Smart people can learn. Your people and your organisation can better realise their potential and their purpose. A Responsive Organization transformation will occur if you are prepared to lead the change.

Lead.

Transparency is a Disinfectant

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

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‘Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants’ Louis Brandeis

Transparency is a disinfectant. Openness highlights the need for change. Just as hygiene enables but does not deliver good health, transparency alone will not change the behaviours in an organisation. 

From Transparency to Transformation

Many people hoped the transparency of social business would transform organisations. We are now in an era when an organisation is more transparent internally and externally than ever. Networks & conversations reach across organisational boundaries. Opportunities exist to connect, to share information about opportunities and issues and solve problems together.

Many hoped that with this new transparency would mean organisations followed a path that looked something like this:

Transparency > Greater awareness of issues> Experiments towards a Solution > Autonomous leadership

In this model, increasing the transparency and connection across the organisation highlights the problems. The visibility of problems enables individuals to experiment with new models to address the issues. Those experiments foster the evidence and the leadership to complete the transformation. 

This model has the appeal that people need do little. Simply add technology to make the organisations more transparent and change begins. However we have learned that organisations are communities of humans and that greater transparency is a positive, but it not enough to catalyse transformation. There are real human forces like power holding us back from this change.

Transparency is a Prerequisite not a Solution 

Speak to any change agent and you will hear a common refrain: ‘My organisation can see the problem but it still won’t do anything’. 

Transparency is essential to highlight problems & opportunities. Transparency in networks is good at finding new issues that have been hidden by historical ways of seeing things. Customers and community can raise their issues directly, often for the first time. Employees can share frustrations.  People can use the new transparent organisation to find those with the ability to make a difference to the issue. What transparency doesn’t do is guarantee that person does anything.

Brandeis is right that transparency is a wonderful disinfectant. Transparency also changes behaviours. When people are aware that their actions are transparent they are more likely to consider others and feel the accountability of the community. The rarity of bad behaviour in enterprise social networks is a case in point.

However, more likely does not mean a guarantee. Transparency will not overcome the wilfully blind leader, the resort to arguments, justifications and excuses or the use of power to enforce an exception. Each of these may be seen by all but they also might be accepted in the culture of the organisation.  When organisations have strong cultural or power forces that resist the issues, people may see something but still refuse to acknowledge, to discuss or act on it. 

Transformation takes Transparency, Accountability and Leadership

Organisations need transparency. Effective organisations thrive on it and particularly on the most difficult forms of opening their organisation up to external parties like partners, customers and the community. These organisations make accountability to respond to what flows from transparency part of their leadership conversation.

The sunshine of transparency helps create safer and more human organisations. Accountability and leadership leverage that transparency to complete the transformation.

A future post will describe the characteristics of an organisation’s leadership conversation that leverage transparency to foster transformation of organisations.