Tag: responsiveorg

Why #responsivecoffee?

Posted on by simongterry in Collaboration, Future of Work

Yesterday was another great responsive coffee event in Sydney. The event began with my short talk about creating value with social business and working out loud. I shared some insights from the Enterprise Social Collaboration Value Maturity Model as a framework for developing a more responsive culture in an organisation. Then the group dived into a vibrant conversation sharing challenges and opportunities as people work to make their organisations more responsive.

One question I am often asked is ‘what is the value of a Responsivecoffee event?’ Here’s my response:

Connection matters:

People working in change can feel isolated. Simply meeting others doing similar work can make it feel more possible. Connection is the foundation of community. After the session yesterday there were all sorts of new connections established that will support people to do more work faster.

Connection is also important because of the diversity of Responsive Organisation challenges. People attending the event were considering the Responsive organisation approaches from the mindsets of consulting, communications, learning, knowledge management, technology, change, property management and many more functional areas. The connections cut across the boundaries of organisations, products, industries, roles, functions and ambitions of the organisations. All those diverse connects help expand the range of possibilities and enable clients to implement change faster.

Sharing Matters:

The conversation was a treasure trove of insights and shared experiences. That sharing encourages people and enables fast change. Many people are just starting out in the journey of being more responsive and more social. Hearing the stories others shared have them confidence to start and a sense of the possibilities and challenges ahead.

Problem Solving Matters:

Many people brought a practical problem to the table and over coffee leveraged the collective insights of the group to move forward and move faster.

Innovation Matters

Responsive coffee remains an agile experiment in value creation. The formats change to create value for those who are attending from session to session.

We are even seeing new intercompany collaborations and experiments being spun off these events. Participants are going away to work together to create new products and services to help accelerate change and address challenges shared. If you don’t bring people together to explore what might be possible you will never see the next horizon.

The Value of Responsive Coffee is Accelerated Maturity

The benefits of Responsive Coffee reflect that of the Value Maturity Model because a purposeful cup of coffee with other change agents is an act of social collaboration. We need more and richer connection to accelerate change in our organisations and the adoption of new ways of working for value. Value occurs in the rich conversations of social collaboration.

Long live #responsivecoffee.

Image credits: 

Coffee: http://pixabay.com/en/coffee-cup-time-meditation-talk-14662/

Photo of Responsive Coffee: Luke Grange

Why Work Must Be Human

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

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

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

How to become a corporate sociopath:

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

All in a normal day in many offices…

Making Work More Human

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

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

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

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

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

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

One minute video on How to Build a Responsive Organization

The Slides used in this video are available here: http://www.slideshare.net/simon_g_terry/building-the-responsive-organization

Credits:

Hacked from The Responsive Organization slideshare: http://www.slideshare.net/responsiveorg/the-responsive-organisation-a-framework-for-changing-how-your-organisation-works

Book: http://pixabay.com/en/open-book-page-pages-books-163975/

Music: B-roll by Kevin Macleod http://incompetech.com/music/royalty-free/

(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)
Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

A one-minute video on The Responsive Organisation. We need to lead the changes in the future of work to make our organisations more responsive to customers and community and to realise human potential.

The video is hacked from The Responsive Org slide deck. Why don’t you hack your own?  

Additional credits:

Dinosaur: http://pixabay.com/en/dinosaur-allosaurus-skeleton-bone-60588/

S&P 500 Chart: http://www.technologyreview.com/view/519226/technology-is-wiping-out-companies-faster-than-ever/

Supermarket aisle: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Supermercato_vuoto.jpg

No Frills Cumbia – Kevin Macleod: http://incompetech.com/music/royalty-free/

(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)

When Circumstances Change, Change Your Approach

Posted on by simongterry in Change, Uncategorized

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Changing circumstances demand changes in approach. Clinging to the old ways can be dangerous.

The Praying Mantis in the Schoolyard

When confronted with a threat, a praying mantis has a set program of responses to take advantage of the advantages of excellent camouflage: freeze & blend in, sway like a leaf, run to the nearest tree. All these strategies work well in the normal circumstances of a praying mantis, the leafy greenery of trees.

However when the wind is blowing strongly and a praying mantis finds itself blown to the unfamiliar circumstances of schoolyard asphalt, none of these strategies work. It can’t blend in. Freezing exposes it to risk of being stomped. What it runs towards is not a tree. It is the leg of a small curious boy. In the end, it need a generous young girl to carry it back to the bushes to escape the growing crowd.

Change Your Approach

A praying mantis can’t change its approach immediately. Evolution will take a while to catch up with asphalt. It will eventually adapt as a species, but that doesn’t help any individual insect.

Your organisation isn’t programmed by genetics. When circumstances change, your organisation and its people can adopt new approaches, experiment to find new ways and learn how to succeed in the new environment. If your organisation is still responding to the new network economy with the same approaches and practices that worked in the industrial era, it can be as dangerous as outdated practices were to the mantis. Nobody will be generous enough to return your organisation to its preferred environment.

There is No Formula – Just Learning

Many managers find this discussion deeply unsettling. Advocates of the future of work are calling for change, but they are often either highly conceptual or discussing concepts that seem very alien to the circumstances in an organisation.

The abstraction has a reason. The future of work is being driven by a network economy where the right strategies are often emergent and adaptive. Adopting a new fixed formula is as dangerous as the last one. While we would like a formula (and many offer to sell one), the future strategies need to be learned for each organisation in its own circumstances in the network.  Change can’t be imposed it needs to be led one conversation at a time.

Creating a responsive organisation that can leverage the human potential to learn and experiment a way forward will take new techniques and new ways of organising.  Many of these techniques that are rising to the fore in discussion of the future of work and responsive organisations are ways to foster the emergence of a new better approaches for organisation using networks, rather than fighting them.  That’s why much of the conversation comes back to enabling people to learn and act in new ways:

  • Leadership: fostering the leadership capabilities of each person to leverage their insights and their potential to lead change from their unique position
  • Experimentation: Moving from exercising the power and expertise of a few to experimenting to learn together
  • Learning: improving the ability to understand the environment by focusing on tools to better seek out, share and make sense of information.
  • Work out Loud: aligning the organisation and bringing out latent human capabilities using techniques like ‘working out loud’
  • Collaboration & Community: Networks route around barriers. Therefore you need to bring down the barriers within and around your organisation. Isolation is not a winning strategy in a period of rapid change.

Growing Crystals of Change

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

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When we confront large scale transformation, the scope and beauty of the outcomes we seek can be overwhelming. Crystals grow molecule by molecule.  Bring about your large scale change action by action.

Big Change is Daunting

Discussing large transformative change you will often hear people refer to how daunting it is to consider the entire idea of the change. Richard Martin has eloquently described the work of building our future responsive organisations as like the construction of a cathedral that will be completed beyond our lifetime. Mary Freer wants to change health and social care for the better through Change Day. Eddie Harran seeks to understand the role of nomadism in shaping the lives of digital nomads. These are but a few of the large scale ideas that challenge our understanding of how to move forward.

Just conceiving of a perfect endpoint for the change can be a barrier to getting started. The pressure for perfection of this final vision can come from many sources. We want our goals to as well as ordered as a crystal and with a fine gemlike finish as well. Too many people spend their time polishing the gem of an idea and never get started.

To lead large scale change, we need to unlearn the desire to know the exact shape of the endpoint. Instead of focusing our attention on the perfect gem of an end goal, we need to focus the process by which the crystal of change gets formed.

A Crystal Grows Molecule by Molecule

The crystals that we later polish to create gems are formed when a seed attracts molecules from a saturated solution or gas to form a solid structure. There are a number of parts of this crystallisation process that apply in change as well:

Seed – First Action: There needs to be a first point for a crystal to attach. Somebody needs to begin the process of change and create the first action. This action can be as simple as declaring a need to change or organising the first connections.

Saturated solution – Ready Network: Super saturation of the solution with molecules drives the formation of a crystal. Change needs networks that are connected and rich enough in change agents to sustain connection and action. If that saturation falls between minimum levels, change stops. Action is one key way to keep change agents engaged.

Nucleation – Small Experiments: Before crystals form, the molecules connect in solution. Consider this the experimental efforts to form a crystal. Only when conditions are right to achieve stability do they connect to form a crystal. Every successful change initiative finds that there have been previous unsuccessful attempts to achieve stable change and that others are working on change in parallel. Don’t see these are barriers or disappointments. Recognise that the key is helping these experiments connect together at scale.

Crystal growth – Open Structure: Crystals form in structures because there are clear points and structures for new molecules to attach. Large scale change needs an open structure that allows those who are ‘transformation curious’ to connect and engage with the change in their own way.

Impurities – Embrace a little chaos: The dynamic nature of the process and environmental conditions when forming crystals attracts minor impurities and irregularities. These are just part of the process. Large scale change is never perfect. Accept that things will have a few rough edges, but keep working to grow the change around them.

Time: Most crystals grow gradually molecule by molecule. This gradual process reflects the process of change where people make new sense of their world and add new actions slowly step by step.

The Lesson from Crystals

Start acting now with the first experiments in a connected network of change agents and allow others to connect and shape the work as it moves forward. 

Thanks to Eddie Harran for the conversation that gave the idea of crystallisation somewhere to connect

Policies are Tools. They are not the Result.

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

Organisations often treat compliance with policy as an outcome. This approach confuses the tool and the result. Policy is guidance, should allow for exceptions and should change to deliver the best results.

When I began my career as a banker, an experience colleague introduced me to Lending Policy 100. Numbered to sit at the beginning of a long list of lending and credit policies, the purpose of Lending Policy 100 was to remind bankers that policy is merely a guideline for action and people should always exercise judgement.  To put it in simple terms, Lending Policy 100 was a policy to explain that policies are only policies.  

This was bureaucratic absurdity but a useful tool. Lending Policy 100 came in handy when you needed to ask someone to exercise judgement.  Appealing to another policy gave people the wriggle room to escape the strictures of another policy that would otherwise be poorly applied. Lending Policy 100 enabled you to turn the conversation away from the tool and back to the result.

Policies are just tools. They are guidelines to help people do their job in an efficient and compliant way. Tools require application to specific circumstances and employees need to make judgement calls to interpret and apply the policy in each circumstance. No tool is always effective. What matters is how it is applied.

When organisations mandate policy compliance they have confused the tool and the result. Organisations fail to achieve their outcomes when they refuse to acknowledge that you can’t anticipate every circumstance, that things change and that employees need to be trusted to exercise discretion in cases to get the right outcome.

Focusing on perfection in policy compliance leads directly to your employees saying “But that is our policy” the next time they need to explain a bad decision to a customer, employee or other stakeholder. Zero tolerance for exceptions is zero tolerance for the reality of your customer’s world. There is no better way to show indifference to customers.

Responsive organisations accept that policy must work to achieve the desired outcomes. They focus on employees commitment and capability to achieve these outcomes, not compliance with policy. They allow for exceptions and they allow for people to ask for changes in policies when required. Policies can be a useful tool in organisations (even if only for legal reasons), but they must be applied as an agile and responsive tool.

How to Make New Sense

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

The Tools of New Sense

Every man is made a fool through his own wisdom – Erasmus

Humour plays with our ability to make meaning from our circumstances. The best humour involves a deliberate misdirection of meaning before dropping us into a new insight with the punchline.

The tools of humour are the same tools as leaders, change agents and entrepreneurs need to use to find and share new meaning.  At the heart of how we make and share meaning are three key tools of our sense-making:

  • Context: how we frame our understanding and what we choose to include in our thinking
  • Categories: how we group and relate ideas
  • Narratives: the inner and external stories we tell to guide our lives

Change the Context, Categories and Narrative

When I hear any man talk of an unalterable law, the only effect it produces upon me is to convince me that he is an unalterable fool – Sydney Smith

An adept fool, as a master of humour, can play with each of these tools.  Humour makes us fools through what we know. Great fools leveraging our settled patterns to send us in the wrong direction before showing their ability to make us laugh as we are switched away to another insight.

Change leaders need to both understand and change their own contexts, categories and narratives. This activity is at the heart of finding new insights to drive their changes and actions.

Critically, change leaders need to be able to share these new insights which requires the ability to help others to hear new narratives, shift categories and change their frames.  This is the work leaders need to do to drive change in meaning. 

Next time you need to drive change consider:

  • How can you change the context in which the new behaviours are seen and occur?
  • How can you help others make different choices to categorise the new behaviours?
  • What new story can you tell?

Leaders Create New Meaning

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

Fools & Leaders Question Meaning

Life is far too important a thing ever to talk seriously about. Oscar Wilde

When it comes to serious challenges in life, Oscar Wilde & Neil Gaiman have a point. A key advantages of humour is that it allows for the lightheartedness and irreverence that lets us reconsider our understanding of our circumstances. The fool in a medieval court was the one who could speak new truths because he could play with meaning and context.  

Great insights and opportunities for change come when people rethink the meaning of their circumstances and their actions. 

Philosophical issues like meaning and sense are not popular topics in the halls of business. Ask a manager to unlearn some common practice and you will get a blank stare. Often those who start conversations that question the sense of commonly accepted practices and beliefs are quickly categorised as fools.

Managers find it hard enough to embrace the time for reflection in the midst of the pressures for constant action. However, we need leaders to go further and find new meaning to realise the value for their businesses and the potential of the future of work. Creating change and new value depends on the ability to make new sense out of circumstances and opportunities and translate that new sense to new behaviours.

New Thinking Needed

Research is to see what everybody else has seen, and to think what nobody else has thought. – Albert Szent-Gyorgyi

Spend time with the creative, the innovators, the entrepreneurs and the change agents and you discover that they specialise in looking beyond typical thinking. Making new sense of their circumstances and translating that to new action is a speciality of those who create change. The inspirations from a new sense of possibility is where they find the opportunities to act in new ways and to break through the perceived limits and institutions that have constrained others.

In some cases, this new meaning is a denial of constraints. Roberto Unger described what he called ‘negative capability’ as ‘denial of whatever in our contexts delivers us over to a fixed scheme of division and hierarchy and to an enforced choice between routine and rebellion’. Many entrepreneurs and change agents refuse to accept the currently accepted options presented for a problem or practice.

Finding another creative way beyond the frustratingly constrained choice between insider (who is constrained, muzzled & influential) and outsider (allowed to be unconstrained, confrontational & excluded) is critical if we are to see greater change. What matters in many organisations is not the loudness of the talk, what matters is meaning and action.

In his book Opposable Mind, Roger L Martin described one positive capability to break the accepted meaning as integrative thinking, a capacity to take a wider view of the systems and outcomes and find new paths forward. We need to ensure that the creation of new sense is a valid management activity if we are to leverage its creative potential in the future of our work and our organisations.

Lead Sense-Making

A pile of rocks ceases to be a rock pile when somebody contemplates it with the idea of a cathedral in mind.- Antoine Saint-Exupery

As managers adapt to a rapidly changing world, they are going to need to accept new uncertainties. We will need to help build the capability to still manage.

The best way for managers to deal with the rapidly changing circumstances we find in the new networked economy is for them to lead the process of making new sense of why organisations exist, the value that they can create and how. The future of work is the future of leadership and human potential.

This change in leadership will require managers to break with the comfort of current approaches to the understanding of their organisation and roles. Incrementalism which is by definition grounded in current meaning will not deliver transformative changes. Managers will need to explore new meaning, experiment with its application and convey that meaning to others through stories and action.

Sense-making is a critical foundation for a responsive culture. We already see sense-making as a characteristic of success in the use of new forms of collaboration. Sense-making is also a critical component of personal knowledge management in an era with an abundance of information and stimulation. Instead of a once-and-done exercise in understanding leaders will need to embrace a continuous learning and sense-making to find new and better opportunities for change.  This ongoing process will need to be a part of people’s work widely across the processes and interactions in the Responsive Organisation.

People make new sense of themselves, their roles and their position in the world as they choose to adopt new behaviours and create new value. We need to explicitly design our processes and roles to allow for sense-making. Only through leadership of this work will we find the new ways to change the culture & practices of our organisations

Revolution doesn’t happen when society adopts new technologies – it happens when society adopts new behaviors – Clay Shirty

The Firehose, the Bucket & The Sieve: Information & Value in the Network Era

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

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The new network era quite evidently brings us a firehose of information, the ability to draw buckets of relevant insight and the need to sieve out relevant and quality knowledge. When we turn to value, we know it is rushing by but often we feel like we are holding an empty sieve. We need to rethink how we gain value in the network era.

Information: The Firehose, the Bucket and the Sieve

We are already aware of the impact of the network era on our access to information:

  • The Firehose: We are all experiencing information overload. The flow of data, information and knowledge is to great for anyone to follow in a meaningful way. The pace of change of that information in networks also stretches traditional techniques of gathering and using information. The hype around ‘Big Data" is a attempt to say ‘hey point the firehose here and we will find meaning in the volume’. Many big data initiatives will fail because the volume outweighs the value without clear goals and uses.
  • The Bucket: Most people cannot consume the flow from the Firehose so they resort to a Bucket. We search. We follow. We join communities. We turn the hose on and off to fill a bucket we can manage. All of these are personal knowledge management techniques to narrow our focus and draw a more useful amount of information.
  • The Sieve: Even with our Bucket, we need a Sieve to find the real insights, the actionable information that becomes knowledge and can develop into wisdom. Quantity is huge. Quality is variable. Significance can be scarce. The more efficient we are at recognising it the better. The value of working out loud is we can leverage others ability to find the significance with us.

Value: The Sieve

When individuals and organisations turn to look at value creation in the network era, it often feels like they are holding an empty sieve.  

Networks route around blockages and inefficiencies. Our traditional ways of capturing value from information often create exactly this. The information and media industries have led the way in this disruption of traditional value gates like copyright, access, etc. Getty images recent decision to let their photos be used for free in certain cases is a simple recognition that their content is already being used, reused and shared.

This disruption is already moving beyond the information industries as people use the opportunities of networks, information and analytics to route around other the methods of value creation in other industries.

Value: The Firehose

The huge valuations of a number of information sharing platforms in the network era shows the value that can be created and the speed with which revenue will shift from one industry to another. This is the firehose of value.  

However firehoses are hard to control and flick around. Some of these major players are already seen their world disrupted as the next wave of innovations arrive. The largest players need to be constantly evolving and acquiring to stay relevant in a rapidly changing environment. Like the railroads of the industrial era, some will fall behind and be over taken by better paths or entirely different approaches.

Value: The Bucket & The Sieve

Scale was the principle source of value creation in the industrial era.  Big data is an echo of the view that we should get big to reach big markets and make big value. The network may not agree.

Lean startups focus on a small bucket first. Draw a little water. Run some experiments and sieve out the insight and the value. Some of those experiments prove to scale. Many don’t.

Drawing a bucket takes clarity of purpose, an understanding of strengths and focused and aligned efforts at creativity and insight from everyone in the organisation. These are the first steps to create value in the network era.

If we stand with a sieve in the firehose and expect value we will be sore, disappointed and very wet. The test for each of us and our organisations is to understand what bucket of value we are seeking to draw and to experiment relentlessly to sieve out the new and better ways of working. We need to rethink our organisations so that they have the ability to act this way, to be responsive to the information and market opportunities around them. Scaled command and control won’t cope.

Responsive organisations that leverage human capabilities, networks and experiments are the starting place. The value creation of railroads in the industrial era was overtaken by value creation of those who used their networks to develop and distribute new products and services. The next phase of growth of the network era will see similar opportunities for value and job creation. 

People: The Firehose, The Bucket and the Sieve

Networks open up to us the exponential potential of people. We now have access to the talents of many more people than ever and the potential to create a firehose of value from collaboration.  Leadership is required to help those individuals to find purposeful domains, a bucket in which for people to collaborate to realise value.  Leaders also need to reinforce the direction, celebrate successes and help to discard the failures, creating a sieve for specific potential from all the possibility.

The transition will take leadership. Leaders will need to give up the apparent safety of scale and power to shift to a new more dynamic and empowering model. We will need new ways of working and organising people and the boundaries of organisations will be more fluid. Leaders will need to shift some focus from efficiency to effectiveness and start leveraging human potential to create value in networks.  

That is the work that will make work more human.

I am currently doing Harold Jarche’s PKM in 40 days program. This is the first post inspired by the activities in that program. I recommend it to anyone.