Tag: vmm

Collaboration Adoption: Act Your Way to a New Way of Thinking

Posted on by simongterry in Collaboration, Future of Work

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It’s easier to act your way into a new way of thinking than to think your way into a new way of acting. – Jerry Sternin, The Power of Positive Deviance

Thinking Gets in the Way of Change

A common barrier to social adoption in organisations is when we let our traditional management patterns of thought get in the way of employee adoption of the technology. Because social technology in the workplace demands new actions and new interactions that don’t fit with our mechanical metaphor of employee performance we find our traditional thinking is a barrier.

Adoption is commonly held up as senior executives and even the employees themselves debate issues like:

  • What if I don’t trust the employees in this organisation?
  • What if they waste time?
  • What if they don’t value my contributions?
  • What if nothing valuable comes of all the effort and investment?
  • What if they don’t collaborate?
  • What if I lose power or influence?

We struggle with these challenges because social adoption is ultimately a sense-making exercise. The platforms are neutral. The networks that gather on them have no defined purpose. We need to come together as a community to individually and jointly make sense of the potential, the value and how to realise it.

This sense-making exercise is why you can’t order collaboration. It is also another reason to be sceptical of those who will guarantee collaboration with technology or fancy adoption practices. The same scepticism should apply to any claims to deliver fast adoption. The best way for each community to realise the value of social adoption is for them to practice it and make sense of the change.

Acting Creates New Sense, New Potential and Accelerates Change

The Collaboration Value Maturity Model is based in a series of simple actions that individuals and communities can take. The power of these actions is that they are generic enough to be universally valuable in organisations. Every organisation and indvidual can benefit from connecting, sharing, solving and innovating. We can get started on these actions now in and for themselves:

  • Want to know people in the organisation better? Connect
  • Want to learn more about what’s going on? Share
  • Want to make work easier and better? Solve
  • Want to deliver more value? Innovate

These four steps enable the individuals and the organisation to benefit from a set of near universal use cases that deliver the basic value case for collaboration in any organisation. Starting a community with a clear sense of the value to be created by the action helps justify user’s time and efforts and also shapes the future growth of the community by providing a north star.

Acting As If Culture Has Changed

The secondary power of these four steps is that as people act on each of them, they effectively act as if a new paradigm of organisational culture is true:

  • Connect as if the organisation is full of humans
  • Share as if the organisation can be trusted
  • Solve as if the organisation is enabling, generous and collaborative
  • Innovate as if the organisation is empowering, agile and responsive

As people act through each of these four stages they surprise themselves with the potential that is realised, reinforcing their practice and fostering new beliefs as to the culture of the organisational community. There will be scepticism, doubts and recalcitrant sub-communities in the organisation. The goal is never 100% adoption. You only need enough people acting as if to create the value that justifies the organisational investment in collaboration and helps realise your strategy through collaboration.

Because culture is just a series of expectations of how we behave in an organisation. This pattern of ‘acting as if’ creates change in the culture of the organisation. Others see the practice and the benefits and are encouraged to copy the practice and reinforce it. Over time this consistent practice and the community it builds does more to change the organisation than posters, videos and CEO speeches.

Those who have been through the endless debates at the beginning of a social adoption journey know that issues like trust, safety and value are quickly resolved in properly managed adoption journeys. Often they are never discussed again after the program of adoption support is approved.

 

The Rhythm of Collaboration.

Posted on by simongterry in Collaboration, Future of Work

slide1Time and the pace of business cycles play an important role in collaboration. However, we are so accustomed to our own time cycles we don’t often reflect on them. Designing the rhythm of collaboration in your organisation for effectiveness is one of the key untapped opportunities for organisations.

Time Flowing Fast as Water

There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning, boys, how’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, “What the hell is water?” – David Foster Wallace Kenyon College commencement speech

Time is ever a concern in business. We worry about wasting it. We worry about how it can be better used. However, despite all our concerns time tends like water in the story above to flow past us unnoticed if not for the regular milestones that bring it back to our attention. Techniques like sprints, project planning and other productivity disciplines can also help focus our attention on time.

When I wrote about the role of transition in discussion Microsoft’s explanation of how their products support an inner and outer loop’s of collaboration, I threw into a table a row that discussed time. At the time I had a query about it and I intended to write more on the topic. That thought flowed away too quickly to turn into action. A recent conversation with Steve Nguyen of the Yammer Product Team reminded me to return to the topic.

Why did I include time?  The time cycles of a business are one of the biggest barriers to effective collaboration. We can often assume that everyone in the business perceives time the same way we do. Our perception of time is directly influenced by the normal operational business cycles within which we work. This cycle is usually determined by the length of the core process we manage each day.

This difference of perception can be a barrier to sustaining effective collaboration. If my definition of ‘fast’ is in the next hour and another business defines fast as by the end of the month, there is likely to be conflict. Let’s look at an example: an organisation with retail stores is experiencing an issue with a recently implemented IT project. 

  • Retail stores live and die by the day.  Everyone in the retail part of the business will be focused on having an issue addressed by no later than the end of the day. Tomorrow’s trading needs to be secured.
  • Depending on whether the IT project is waterfall or agile the natural time scale of that project could be weeks or months. They might be working ‘fast’ to fix an issue (i.e. fixing it within their shortest operational timescale), but still disappoint the retail store for days until the issue is resolved.
  • Head Office might work to its logical planning time scale, the quarter. When the dispute is escalated to head office there will be yet another definition of ‘fast’ to manage.

Managing the Rhythm of Collaboration

One reason the inner and outer loops approach works well in organisations is that it accommodates the differences between work that happens in immediate teams that is often on the shortest cycles of time and collaborative work that happens more slowly. A fast flowing operational feed will bury messages that invite reflection, discovery, serendipity, co-creation and the longer cycles of innovation.

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In Cultivating Communities of Practice by Wenger, McDermott and Snyder, their research into effective communities of practice highlighted that the rhythm of a community was an important part of effective communities. These communities had predictable and routine cycles that helped foster connection, sharing and working together to solve problems and innovate. Community members could adapt to the collaboration activities of the communities because they were predictable and because they aligned to the time cycles of the wider work going on across the organisations. If collaboration needs to be pushed against the grain of the organisation or the cycles of teams, then it will have an unsustainable overhead of community management and the collaborative community will not be sustainable.

When facilitating adoption of collaboration in an organisation, community managers need to consider the time cycles of the use cases that they want to see to deliver the organisations strategy.  In doing this community managers need to consider:

  • Change takes time. Have we allowed enough time & support for behaviours to change and for activity to mature into something self-generating?
  • Is this use case relating to the time cycles of inner loop or outer loop collaboration? Which approach will best support the use cases we are looking to see sustained?
  • What is the natural cycle of activity in the business? How can we align this collaboration activity to a natural and self-sustaining cycle in the business?
  • Are there any time cycle differences between fast moving and slow moving teams that we need to allow for or manage in this collaboration? How do we manage these transitions to enable effective collaboration?
  • What is the aggregate impact of all the various cycles of activity in the collaboration community? Can we engender more effective communication by adjusting the cycles or managing the calendar of activities to reduce conflicts and periods of high demand on users?

A Capitalised Noun is not a Future of Work Strategy

Posted on by simongterry in Collaboration, Future of Work

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A key issue for most digital workplace projects is a lack of connection between the goals of the project and the business needs of the organisation. Without specific goals and specific steps to realise them there is a temptation for professionals running these projects to rely on capitalised nouns like productivity, innovation, engagement, adoption and collaboration. Capitalised nouns do not make a strategy.

Why are we doing this again?

Whatever tool, platform or process you want employees to use in your digital workplace, they have the right and obligation to ask why. Employees lives are busy. They don’t need to do something for an abstract goal. They want to understand the specific benefits to the organisation and to them personally.

A capitalised noun won’t cut it to win discretionary employee effort or senior executive time. The best goals of any digital workplace are fulfilment of the business strategy of the organisation. Usually this can be measured on the simple dimensions of win customers, grow revenue, reduce cost, manage assets and reduce risk. Even those goals are so generic as to lack force. Every organisation should be able to describe what employers working better together will do. That’s what a strategy is.

From Business Needs to Specific Actions

The role of the team leading adoption of the digital workplace is to convert that goal to specific actions that employees should do using the workplace. These are the actions that become your use cases and are core to the communication and role modelling you need.

Beware of capitalised nouns creeping in to your use cases. Nobody ‘engages’ on a platform. You should be able to specify exactly what you want to see. That way you can measure the actions and the benefits.

The use case should be some combination of the key verbs in the model above. Ideally, more than one verb for bigger benefits. Ask yourself the following questions:

  • Who do I want to connect around some issue or process?
  • What information will they share in that connection?
  • What problems will they solve together?
  • How will that result in change, improvements, new services, processes or products?

When you can answer these questions to the satisfaction of a disinterested executive you have the beginnings of a plan. Your engagement activities will then be based in how you create the scaffolding for people to learn to use the platform to deliver the goals that fulfil business strategy.

The Art of Adoption: Influence, not Power

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

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Our traditional default in the workplace has been to rely on relationships of power.  The future of work and the adoption of new work practices demand a focus on influence and engagement

This week I was discussing technology adoption with a potential client and I was struck by a question that I was asked: ‘How do I make people share in your model?’

My answer disappointed them a little. ‘ You can’t make anyone share. All you can do is influence the way they choose to work.’

Default to Power

Traditional organisations like process, policy and predictability. Control and power reinforce the desire to standardise, to deliver efficiency and to manage performance in granular ways.

This focus on power means that models, guides to action and practices are often quickly turned into mandatory behaviours. ‘We could do this’ becomes ‘We should do this’.  Mandating change seems like a shortcut to success in adoption. Sadly it doesn’t work.

In the work I have done on future of work practices, I first saw this in Working Out Loud when organisations began to see the benefits. People immediately began to discuss how to mandate working out loud, how to require it in training programs and how to deal with those who still refused to work out loud.  The simple answer is do nothing. Working out loud is an individual choice. That choice can be supported by an environment and a culture of psychological safety, great leadership, effective communications and the actions of peers, but there always remains a personal choice of what and where to share.

The other way I have seen this default to power is when ‘What to use When’ guides become mandatory in organisations. Even the concept of the inner and out loop or my Value Maturity Model of collaboration can bee seen as recommendations of mandatory approaches to work. In both cases, the right answer for an individual may be different.  As noted in the discussion of Inner Loop and Outer Loop collaboration above you can use a tool designed for one to deliver the other kind of interaction, if that is what is best for you, your team and your work goals. Chats, Conversations and Collaborations are human behaviour not outcomes of a technology system.

Mandating future of work practices is wasted effort. The work of adoption is not the work of writing policy. The work of adoption is engaging users in understanding value creation and influencing their behaviour.

The Art of Influence

Changing the way people has to be about influence. Individuals are unique in their capabilities, their challenges, the context and their goals. If you have more than one person in your organisation you should have multiple ways of working. The goal of an adoption process is not a uniform standard. Uniform standards of work are for machines, not diverse, capable and creative humans. 100% adoption is not the right answer, no matter how good it looks on a chart.

The goal of advocating future of work practices is to maximise the individual and collective value of work. That is why the Value Maturity Model focuses on aligning the individual and collective goals from work, before it dives into who and how people will work together to achieve that value.

We have spent centuries reinforcing an efficiency culture in our employees. Asking them to work for no value will fail because employees will do the right thing and refuse. Asking them to work just for the value of others will fail, because business performance processes have taught people that self-interest matters, except for the altruists in any population.

Power leaves no room for an individual contribution to the work or the benefits of work. When everyone works the same way because one person decided it is best, the value of individual contributions to work practices are lost.  The greatest value of future of work tools is leveraging the context, insights and creativity of every employee. To do that effectively we must allow them to change their work and influence others to change their work too.

Adoption is the art of influencing better ways of working. Give your employees the tools to lead this change themselves.

Collaboration Everywhere

Posted on by simongterry in Collaboration, Future of Work, Working out loud

My early business career was in business development, buying and selling businesses and pulling together joint ventures. One thing I learned through that experience is that no matter how conflicting someone’s position was to yours, there was always a way to work together. You just needed to understand how and where their interests aligned with your goals.  Work hard enough to understand what they want and eventually a path forward together will open up.

Collaborating with Enemies

Reading the book ‘Collaborating with the Enemy’ by Adam Kahane recently, I realised how this early business experience meant I came to the work of organisational collaboration with an uncommon mindset. Kahane highlights that much discussion of collaboration focuses on the idea of one cohesive team with an agreed view of the problem and the solution. Kahane contrasts this with his term ‘stretch collaboration’ where there are multiple groups in conflict, where the group needs to experiment a way forward to solve the issues and where maintaining engagement is a key challenge. My friend Harold Jarche makes a similar point with his distinction between collaboration and cooperation.

This distinction is a critical one in organisational contexts. In many corporate and client situations in which I have worked the value of in team collaboration is obvious to people. In a team, everyone shares a leader and there is clear alignment of goals. The value of collaboration outside that team is usually less clear to employees who have come to see other teams as competing for resources, success and even existence. The great challenge of organisations seeking to transform to digital ways of working is not moving faster in the inner loop of the team. Moving faster and more effectively in a team context is a problem whose dynamics are largely known and there is leadership to deliver that outcome. The challenge of digital success is engaging the complexities and misalignment of the wider organisation.

Creating Psychological Safety for Collaboration

I can see now that my early career experience meant that I didn’t always fully understand the reticence of people to engaging in this wider outer loop stretch collaboration. Much research has highlighted the need for leaders and teams to create psychological safety to enable effective collaboration. Employees aren’t going to take risks and experiment if the environment feels unsafe.

My previous career experience had given me an unusually high sense of safety in risky forms of collaboration.  Worse still, it was obvious to me that you could collaborate to mutual advantage with competitors and people who shared no interest in your success. That is not a point that is obvious to employees who don’t feel safe in their organisation.

Organisations have not made that point obvious to their employees and many poor leaders enhance the within team dynamic by excerbating competition with and fear of others in the organisation. One of the benefits of working out loud is to enable people to discover the value of connection with people beyond their day to day networks and also to discover through contributions how their interests might align to achieve goals.

Focus on Alignment

One of the key themes of the work that I have done with organisations, leaders and employees using the Collaboration value maturity model is to stress the value of alignment, a step usually skipped in people’s rush to deploy new technology and race to the good bits of collaboration, like innovation.

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The Connection and Sharing phases of the Collaboration Value Maturity Model are opportunities for teams to understand and develop the rationales, behaviours and trust required for more effective collaboration. Activity in these two phases, led by leaders at all levels who are looking for alignment and are seeking connection to higher strategic goals, builds an environment of psychological safety and a strong imperative for employees to connect, share, solve and innovate together well beyond the boundaries of their immediate team. Working out loud reinforces the transition from sharing to solving as employees increasingly discover their interests are aligned with widely divergent teams across the organisation.

The value of the Collaboration Value Maturity Canvas is as a tool of alignment and one that reflects the fractal nature of collaboration in large organisations. The Canvas brings people together to see what they share and how their individual and team contributions to collaboration can achieve wider goals.  Like Kahane’s idea of stretch collaboration, the Canvas does not deliver a strict plan but shapes a series of experiments to tackle the challenges of collaboration in the wider outer loop.  The Canvas is not a process or a recipe. It becomes a map as people take the initial pathways and then build out their own.

We shouldn’t need everyone to go experience the challenges of business development in strange markets to build cultures of enterprise collaboration in the modern workplace. What we need is leaders and teams that are prepared to work out loud and focus on the opportunities of alignment in the broader domain of the organisation and its goals.

Simon Terry enables collaboration in organisations through Working Out Loud and using the Collaboration Value Maturity model approach. The Collaboration Value Maturity Canvas is a 2-hour workshop to enable organisations to discover the essential elements of alignment in their collaboration strategy. Get in touch to learn more.

 

Fast or Slow – Accelerating the Value of Collaboration

Posted on by simongterry in Collaboration, Future of Work

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This morning’s #esnchat led by my Change Agents Worldwide colleague and change management expert, Jennifer Frahm involved a vibrant discussion about how to launch an ESN quickly. A strong theme of the discussion was that collaboration takes time to build and you should take care not to rush that development. The Value Maturity Model above is founded in the growing sense-making and culture change in a community that surrounds that community’s embrace of new ways of working.

Launch Quickly. Succeed Slowly

In part the question is not the real issue. Launching a social collaboration solution of any kind is not the problem.  Launches can be put together in days or weeks depending on your passion for chaos. Send some communications, enable the network, have a fancy launch event and you are done. Launch is complete.

However, a successful launch, even with a high level of engagement, is not the point of collaboration in your organisation (this article was pre-reading for the #ESNChat discussion). Your organisation and your employees work to create business value. Until your collaboration platform is sustainably creating that level of business value your job is not done. The Value Maturity Model describes some of the key steps to that growing maturity over time.

What if you don’t have the time?

We don’t always have the stakeholder support to take time. Many organisations want or need to get going quickly. Launch dates become fixed in the calendar before organisations understand why they are seeking to launch a collaboration platform. The key issue in my experience is that the same organisations who want to go quickly are usually those who think that going fast will make their collaboration network cheaper to launch and run.

The value of a purposeful, strategic & vibrant collaboration community is that it becomes self-managing. The community begins to develop the value and the engagement that drives its own future success and growth. The community becomes the example to all new users as to ‘what we do here, how we do it and why’. Over time that self-managing, self-promoting and self-correcting characteristic of successful collaboration platforms is what reduces their cost to operate and accelerates their value creation.

Setting up a community to become purposeful, strategic and vibrant takes time and money. If you want to do that quickly, it will cost you more money up front in the planning, leadership and communication, not less.  You will also need to invest more money over the life of the community to manage the higher risks of failure and to sustain the community after launch until it becomes self-sustaining.

Community managers often bemoan the continued focus of business leaders on the costs of their work. Many organisations seek to continuously cut budgets and resources for community management over time. Let’s be clear that organisations decrease investment when they lose confidence in the returns from an activity. Community managers are the agents and architects of strategic value in collaboration. They need to embrace the challenge and justify their ongoing investment in their growing returns.

Given there are many platforms in the market that promise fast engagement (& with good evidence to support it), the issue is not how quickly you engage in use of the platform. The key challenge for any user and any organisation is how quickly their use of a platform becomes a self-sustaining contributor to the fulfilment of purpose and sustained value creation. When clients ask me why the investment in developing their community using the Value Maturity Model is required, my answer is that they can skip the work, but they risk skipping the value. The value of a clear strategy and an effective approach is that it accelerates the value of strategic collaboration.  If you want to go fast, you need to plan for more costs, now and later.

Collaboration is the Human Platform for​ Digital Transformation

Posted on by simongterry in Collaboration, Future of Work

Every digital transformation project needs to build a platform for the critical capability for success in digital – human learning and change. Ensuring your people have the tools to collaborate and the freedom to change is essential for the rapid and scaled digital learning and change to be able to deliver strategic value to your organisation.

Platforms for Digital Transformation

The evolution of digital transformation has put a high value on platforms because platforms offer more than just the opportunity to connect and transact efficiently and effectively. Digital platforms bring together diverse players within and across markets and enable them to connect easily with standard API interactions, interact in standard easy ways and offer a predictable stable environment of trust.

Platforms help interactions in digital to scale quickly because the platform gathers an active community of users building the network effects and the benefits of diversity of capability and information. Standard interaction patterns allow an innovation ecosystem to develop despite this diversity and users are spared the cost and complexity of dealing with each other’s complex processes costs and systems. The growing user commitment to the community, the learning that occurs in the platform and the growing trust helps further to reduce the cost of any transaction and increase the appeal of the platform as a place to solve problems.

So platforms work because they:

  • connect users in a market
  • provide easy standard processes to reduce the cost and complexity of action
  • provide transparency and other processes to improve trust
  • build an innovation and learning ecosystem that creates ongoing valuable change for users

In a platform environment, participants can benefit from greater transparency, greater learning and greater innovation, while retaining their freedom of choice and control over how they participate. We have seen over time the power & value of eBay & Amazon as an auction & commerce platform, Google & Facebook as advertising platforms, and many more. Increasingly organisations pursuing digital transformation are looking to the opportunity to create these two-sided market opportunities in their digital strategy or to participate in digital ecosystems effective which demands at least the ability to interact with these platforms, whether through APIs or other forms of integration.

The Human Platform for Digital Transformation is Collaboration

At Microsoft Ignite, I spoke with Cai Kjaer and Scott Ward on the role that collaboration plays as a platform for digital transformation enabling employees to transition easily between the inner and outer circles of their work.

In a recent post exploring the role of transition between the inner and outer circles, I highlighted that transition was the zone where users sought learning and feedback to help their work.slide12.png

Organisations that want to accelerate the digital transformation in their organisation need to develop ways to accelerate this learning and feedback process for their employees. A standard human platform for digital transformation on their collaboration platform will play a critical role in reducing the cost of learning and feedback and increasing the trust and effectiveness of the resulting change.

Traditionally, the biggest barriers to learning and feedback in organisations are:

  • not knowing where to go or who can help (no clarity of the human market for learning)
  • an uncertain, costly and slow process of engaging others (high complexity and transaction costs in this human community)
  • fearing that you will be judged adversely for asking for help or exposing work that is incomplete (lack of trust in the organisation)
  • concern that learning and change is likely not to be valued in a risk-averse compliance-oriented environment (lack of value in learning and change in the organisation)

The value of organisations building a collaboration platform in their organisation is to specifically address these three issues to help accelerate learning, feedback and change, whether in the domain of focused execution or in the wider enterprise challenges of alignment, engagement and discovery. Organisations that invest in change and adoption to build effective collaboration platforms for their employees see the growing maturity of the use of the platform by their employees through the Connect>Share>Solve>Innovate maturity model. This growing maturity itself enhances the ability of the organisation to deliver its strategic agenda and manage its day-to-day processes more effectively.

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Let’s examine for a minute those key items on the top right of the chart that describe the rising benefits of collaboration platform as it matures. How does the platform increase the value, trust, empowerment, collaboration and agility of the organisation?  An effective collaboration platform is a human digital transformation platform:

  • Market: employees know where they can find a vibrant marketplace of other employees willing to Connect>Share>Solve>Innovate: the collaboration platform becomes a straightforward home for any need for learning, feedback or change (connect a market).  Community managers and their agents in the community champions will play a key role in bringing people together in the community and fostering day-to-day use. Leaders can help by using their positional power and participation to bring people along and set the direction for the community.
  • Standards: employees have standard processes and interactions to get the learning and feedback of others – this is why effective collaboration launch and adoption programs focus on developing user behaviour around common uses cases, hashtags and groups. Building vibrant communities means that each of these areas that an employee will have a standard expectation in the community as to how it is to be managed, a culture of collaboration that facilitates interactions like a human-to-human API.
  • Trust: employees can see on the platform the culture of working out loud, others role modelling the behaviour that they want, the contributions of leaders and the lack of negative consequences and benefits of interacting. Experimenting with working out loud at scale reduces the trust cost of working out loud for any user. Importantly too when employees can see the authentic interactions of the wider community and come to know them better the cost of seeking learning, feedback or change is reduced. Community managers, leaders and champions play a critical role in creating a culture that fosters this.
  • Ecosystem: As these networks mature to the Innovation stage, employees will be exploring potential to take the strategic goals of the organisation further and have a demonstrated freedom to act building on the capabilities of the collaboration platform.  This role-modelling helps foster the degrees of freedom individual employees need in a digital organisation to learn and to adapt through needed change. A vibrant community of collaborators and access to leadership reduces the human cost of employee innovation and helps improve the alignment of these innovation activities to strategic goals.

Creating a Human Platform for Digital Transformation

You cannot rely on the technology tools you are using to create this platform. The most challenging aspects of this change are human and no matter how strong the engagement techniques are in the technology it cannot provide human elements like purpose, connection, trust, leadership, and alignment.  It is important to remember that employees first and foremost concern will be their safety and success in the everyday workplace off the technology platform. That is where change and adoption must help support employees.

Creating this human platform to accelerate the organisation’s digital transformation and to deliver real strategic value takes an investment by organisations in a number of key elements:

From the experience of organisations around the world, it is clear that it takes more than ‘launch and forget’ to realise this human dimension of collaboration.  Changing the collaboration in your organisation is a cultural change that impacts all your employees. The benefits to your organisation and its digital strategy are transformative if you are prepared to invest in the change.

Simon Terry enables organisations to realise the strategic value of collaboration as a platform for digital transformation. Simon is a Yammer Adoption Specialist, a Microsoft MVP and a Workplace by Facebook Adoption services partner.  Through Change Agents Worldwide, Simon and a global network of future of work professionals help organisations to lead change, collaboration and new ways of working.

Transitioning Between the Inner and Outer Loop

Posted on by simongterry in Collaboration, Future of Work, Working out loud

At Microsoft Ignite in September, Microsoft unveiled the logic underpinning its collaboration suite: the Inner & Outer Loop.  In this model, Microsoft Teams is for high-velocity communications with direct teams members and Yammer is a platform to connect with people across the organisation. The model explicitly called out there was a role for Sharepoint underpinning these two platforms and email as a channel of targeted communication.

The model resonated strongly with people at Microsoft Ignite because it reflects users different work patterns.  At the time, I quoted George Box that “all models are wrong but some are useful” and noted that for many at the conference the two loops model brought clarity in what had been an overlapping and complex suite of solutions often with little sense of how they worked together.  Since the conference, this new clarity of positioning has driven Microsoft’s product development & marketing activities for Yammer and Teams and even how the two products interrelate. The Inner and Outer loop has been shaping the future for the Microsoft Modern Workplace suite.  At the same time, people have focused on arguing about the model, reinterpreting the model, elaborating it or improving on it (Encouragement for the ‘what tool when’ crowd to redesign their many infographics).

Transition: Working Out Loud in Both Loops

One thing struck me when I considered the idea of Inner and Outer Loops: nobody works in only one loop. All our work involves a continuous process of transition between an Inner Loop of focused execution and an Outer Loop of learning, collaboration and discovery. The Loops are not places or tools. The Loops are patterns of our interaction around our work. Those patterns are ever-shifting based on our work needs. After a decade working on the adoption of social technology one thing is clear to me, we need to spend more time focused on the right ways to help users transition to more effective ways of working.

Working out loud can play an important part in aiding users to see the need to change their work.  Working Out Loud can occur in both loops. Working out loud also helps the process of transition to improve the effectiveness of work. We work out loud in the inner loop to enable our immediate team to self-organise, be better aware of status and be more agile.  We work out loud in the outer loop to benefit from serendipity, learning and discovery. One of the benefits of working out loud is that when we share our work openly other people can prompt us to open up further to the Outer Loop or coach us on the need to be more focused.

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If we are always in transition between the two loops then what I thought was missing was an examination of that phase where people make a change in their way of working from one mode to the other. People don’t need to know ‘what to do where’ so much as they need to know when their current mode of work is ineffective. If we consider all the work that is thoughtlessly done as closed targeted communications in email, we quickly see the problem is not a problem of email as a tool.  The problem is that people do not consider when they might need to change their way of working. When twigged to the need to change their approach to work or the tool that they use most people find ways to make that change work for them and their goals. The transition from one style of work to another is our opportunity to enrich and expand the understanding of value of collaborative work. This transition is the key moment in user adoption. It is also an opportunity to ensure we focus on the user behaviour in work, not the technology.

The transition phase between Inner and Outer Loops is also a reminder to all the enthusiastic and passionate advocates of particular collaboration platforms that transition is continuously happening and that tools like Yammer and Teams are ‘better together‘. There is value in exploring the complementary use of both tools. The better we are able to explain to users the value of a way of working and when we transition to another mode of working the better we will support their work. That goal is far more important to individuals and organisations than advocacy or adoption of a platform.

Focus on the User

For fear of taking a simple, easy-to-understand idea and making it so complex as to be useless, I thought it was worthwhile to tabulate characteristics of the user behaviour at work in the three modes: inner loop, outer loop and the moments where we transition.  Each mode of work meets different needs and is better suited to different challenges.  In the spirit of working out loud, here’s a first table which looks at the domains under a number of different user behaviour lenses. I have also included in the table common questions that might be asked in each of these phases as the work progresses:

 

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Triggering Transition

A focus on this moment of change in the pattern of work raises the following important questions:

  • what is it that prompts a user to look for a different way of working?
  • how might we coach ourselves to transition effectively?

If we look at both the Inner and Outer Loop we can see some signs of stress when these modes are used in the wrong ways for work.  The table below highlights some of these stresses and also some questions that leaders and team members can use to query whether it is time for a transition to a different mode of work:

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Transition Into the Future

When you consider the first table above, you see that the items listed in Transition can occur in both the Inner or the Outer loop.  These transition items are why you see enthusiastic supporters of one product or the other pushing across the divide. The Transition is also a realm where the two Product Marketing teams need to collaborate as competition will risk devaluing both products with further duplication and confusion over time.  We will leave aside for the moment that you can expand Teams to manage a whole small organisation an InnerOuter Loop or run a daily team transparently in Yammer, the OuterInner Loop.

Bringing the Transition into focus also aligns the Inner and Outer Loop model into alignment with a model that Harold Jarche has been advocating for some time that draws an explicit distinction between Collaboration in teams, Communities of Practice and Cooperation in Networked Communities. The value of this connection is that Harold Jarche has developed extensive materials on his blog and in his books on the 3 different domains and patterns of work.

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Source: jarche.com

For example, Harold has explored the use of this model in Innovation at Work and even the connection to the Value Maturity Model of Collaboration that I have discussed at length here.  A growing maturity of work across the four stages of the Value Maturity model comes as people are better able to handle the transition from connecting with an immediate team through to exploring innovation in the widest context. Mastery comes when people can hold all four stages at once around their personal work challenges and freely transition between the Inner and Outer Loop to Connect>Share>Solve>Innovate for greater value.

In future blog posts, we will explore other dimensions of the user behaviour of the Inner Loop, Outer Loop and Transition process.  Examples of these issues include the nature of the networks involved, the leadership styles and the time periods involved:

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Begin and End with User Behaviour

The focus on transition between the Inner and Outer Loop is also a reminder that for all the technology and all the powerful models what matters most is influencing new user behaviour. To do this effectively we must begin and end our work in change and adoption with a focus on what work users need to do now and what work we want them to be able to achieve in the future.  Tools alone merely enable new interactions.  The way people work requires them to make sense of new opportunities and to manage the change to new ways of working.

We must keep in the centre of consideration that these tools aren’t tools, media or technology we use for its own sake. These are tools of work interactions. Those human work interactions involve all the complexity of our human relationships with their questions of cultural expectations, trust, understanding and community. Our focus on the Inner and Outer Circle must keep the needs of these interactions at the centre of our new ways of working. The deeper we dive into how users can better leverage these tools to create new meaningful interactions, the richer the value we will create for both the users and the organisations of the future.

This is post is shared in the spirit of working out loud to gain feedback & start a discussion of the application of Inner and Outer Loops from a user behaviour, rather than a technology platform perspective. I would appreciate your thoughts and comments.  My thanks to Steve Nguyen & Angus Florance of the Yammer team for their suggestions on how to turn the initial idea into something of more value to users and community managers.