In three words I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life: it goes on.
Robert Frost (via gentlemen-always-know)
Writing
Leaders and their Tools
Leadership is the technology of realising human potential. In practice, leaders need to use different tools in different contexts. The use of a new tool does not change who they are.
Many leaders use the same approaches to leadership in every context. They either call it a best practice or their best style. They define themselves by their leadership tools. These leaders repeat phrases to themselves like ‘I am collaborative’, “I create accountability’, ‘I am powerful’, or ‘I am inspiring’. These phrases become constraints on their freedom of action. When the situation demands a different style of leadership, they find it hard to work against their self-created identity. These leaders have confused the tool with the result.
Leadership depends on context. The needs of others are different in every situation. Leaders need to adapt their styles to the needs of their situation and their people if they are to realise the potential of others. That means leaders need to choose different tools and have different conversations. If it is time to demonstrate power, then a leader must demonstrate power regardless of their natural style. Importantly, they still choose the values that they show in their use of power.
The best leaders have a dynamic toolkit of styles that they apply as the situation demands. They don’t define themselves by anyone one tool. What matters to the best leaders is the purpose they are seeking to achieve and the values that shape how they use a leadership tool.
Don’t define your leadership by a tool. Define your leadership by your purpose, your values and your impact.
Why I am excited by Do Lectures Australia
Photo: Do Lectures Australia – Write change across anything and it looks good to me.
Do Lectures Australia is almost here
When I first heard about Do Lectures Australia. I went and looked at the Do Lectures website and found stories that resonated deeply. I found:
- The idea which is put simply this way:
The idea is a simple one. That people who Do things, can inspire the rest of us to go and Do things too. So each year, we invite a set of people to come and tell us what they Do.
- The founder of Do Lectures David Hieatt has a great personal story of doing and that he was writing a book about Purpose, a topic dear to my heart.
- The talks are simply amazing – this talk by Tina Ross-Eisenberg (aka swissmiss) that Trust breeds Magic has become a personal favourite and great guidance to my personal work as an independent change agent.
I immediately wanted to be a part of the event. I am so excited that after some luck and a great deal of generosity from Yammer. I am going to be a part of the experience later this month.
Why Do I Want to Do?
There are 3 things that are at the heart of why I am excited about the first Do Lectures in Australia
- The Community: Do Lectures is not a huge conference. The scale is human. The goal is connection, interaction, learning and inspiration in a community atmosphere. The speakers which you can find on the blog are diverse and have achieved great things. However, the list of attendees is just as remarkable. This is a community that I want to join.
- The Purpose: In a world that can feel disconnected, apathetic and alien at times, we need people setting out to share their personal purpose, connect with others over purpose and bring great things to life to further purpose. From what I have seen and know, there is a rare depth of purpose among the attendees at this event. I have already heard some extraordinary stories of what people have done, want to do and why. I want to hear, learn and engage to help more of these purposes come to action.
- The Do: Conferences that are full of beautiful talking about talking are everywhere. Twitter was invented so that you don’t have to attend them, just read along or watch the videos later. I want to do, not talk. I want to be inspired to do extraordinary things. I want to meet people doing extraordinary things. I want to help others do. Purpose is in the work.
I look forward to sharing more on my return from this extraordinary event. I have had enough luck to date to tell this is going to be a great learning experience. I will share more of my adventures and insights after I return from Payne’s Hut. I am sure I will be raving even about the ‘Purpose is the Work’ and the ‘Community is the How’. I might even slip in the odd mumbling about leadership in communities, networks and the future of work.
Special Thanks: I would like to thank the Do Lectures team for keeping the pressure on for me to attend the event. There is nothing like an idea and the support of a community to produce results.
Most of all I would like to thank Yammer for the partnering with Do Lectures Australia to help bring this extraordinary event to life and for giving me the opportunity to attend as their guest, competition winner & Do-er. If any organisation has shown me the power of a community to reinforce purpose, to inspire and to do more, it is Yammer. Thanks for one more proof point.
Collaboration Fast & Slow
I admit I’m starting to struggle with the conflict been rapid change and extensive collaboration. Any help? #2014FOW
— Christoph Hewett (@ChristophHewett)
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Christoph Hewett asked this great question attending the #2014FOW conference. The question set off a huge discussion as people debated the need to move faster in a disruptive economy with an increasing emphasis on collaboration because of the networked nature of that economy.
Much of the discussion was about whether collaboration is really slower. The slowness of collaboration is the common perception. In traditional management terms of clear decision makers and control of resources, collaboration is often perceived as slower and more difficult.
I recognise the concerns raised. I have heard it often. My experience differs in that I have seen collaboration deliver accelerated results. I attribute that concern to the view that collaboration is a ‘softer way’ of management.
Separate Collaboration from Consensus
Collaboration and consensus are often used as synonyms. They are not. The involvement in other people in collaborative work does not mean that there need be large numbers, everyone has to have universal agreement or that the work is directionless.
Successful collaborative projects have strong leadership and direction at their core. This leadership helps them to find and leverage the common direction of the competing agendas of those involved. For example, Linus Torvalds remains the ultimate authority on what gets included in Linux despite its open source collaborative model.
Slow Collaboration – Collaboration as the What
We need to start to distinguish between slow collaboration and fast collaboration. When people see the slowness of collaboration, they often are looking at abstract exercises of stakeholder engagement or consensus. Talk oriented, this approach is the practice of engaging a rolling group of people seeking consensus for its own sake (or in the absence of any other plan). These forms of activity are rarely satisfying for anyone. The stakeholders engaged usually end up frustrated at the lack of action and the unwillingness to make a decision.
In this meaning of slow collaboration, collaboration is the point of the exercise (what). Consensus or other collaborative activities that have this approach are where traditional management develops the sense that collaboration is soft and ineffective.
Fast Collaboration – Collaboration as the How
“Collaboration – the action of working with someone to produce something” – Oxford English dictionary
We collaborate every day with other people to do our work. We just don’t call it collaboration. We call it getting help or using expertise or completing a project together. These small acts of collaboration are not seen as difficult because we understand the work, we understand the goals and who gets to make decisions.
Fast collaboration, at any scale, focuses on collaboration as a means (the how) to achieve a goal (the why) with clear roles for the participants which include decision rights (the who).
Collaboration is not the point of the exercise. The point of fast collaboration is getting work done better. If things drift, everyone can be reminded that there is a goal to be achieved and one or many leaders responsible for ensuring that the exercise gets to the goal.
The benefits of fast collaboration can be huge:
- Reduced search time for information and resources.
- Faster and more flexible access to the collective skills, capabilities and experience of other people.
- Increased passion and engagement leading to more discretionary effort, more creativity and better influence.
- Reduced time learning, selling change or educating stakeholders because they are part of the journey
With increasing leverage of networks and increasing complexity in our goals, how we do our work and how we structure our organisations, collaboration is increasingly unavoidable. The challenge for organisations is not how to avoid collaboration but how to effectively leverage it to gain the benefits of the network era. Those who don’t leverage collaboration will be at a significant disadvantage to those who can reap the benefits above.
Fast Collaboration is Hard
Reaping the benefits of collaboration is not easy. For traditional management focused on power, control and ownership, it can be a radical challenge.
Fast and effective collaboration is hard precise because the investment upfront and ongoing to align people. Alignment takes tough conversations traditional management often ignores in commands and one-way communication. In larger groups, these conversations challenge leaders to demonstrate adaptive leadership skills and focus not on their agenda but what realises the potential of the group.
Having hard alignment conversations upfront and ongoing around purpose and decision rights flushes out the real issues that are otherwise ignored and avoids learning, rework, duplication, conflict and waste later. To move fast, this kind of collaboration must manage the conflict in people’s agendas early and it must have ongoing mechanisms to drive accountability and resolve conflicts.
Stop Magical Thinking
Magical thinking is any attempt to bend reality to the will or hopes of an individual. Whether by sleight of hand or genuine higher powers, magical thinking leads people into flights of fancy.
Many will remember the Magical Realist school of literature that delivered some extraordinarily captivating novels. Novels would move along telling an engaging story. Then suddenly they would swerve free of reality while magic transformed the world.
Sadly many business plans follow this swerving course at exactly the moment value needs to be created. Instead of exploring the human changes required they swerve into magical thinking. Magical thinking makes for engaging stories, but it makes for terrible plans for the future of work.
Stop Magical Thinking at Work
Let’s leave the magical thinking to creative arts and stop it in the future of work. Value in the future of work is hard work and we will need to create it together.
A really good indicator that magical thinking is creeping in to plans in business is the use of the passive voice. The human contribution to change slips away and magic takes over. Nobody need do anything because great stuff is about to happen suddenly entirely on its own.
The following things are all examples of magical thinking:
- Adoption will be driven by the right launch, right features, etc.
- Value will be created by adoption of the terminology, features, systems or processes.
- Culture will be changed
- Leaders will be changed
- Ideas, changes and new practices will be understood and adopted easily
- Hierarchy, command and control, micromanagement, etc will be eliminated
- The desired outcome will be delivered by new policies, processes, measures or systems.
- More social/analytical/collaborative/cooperative/community-oriented/engaged/innovative work will occur and will be valued by management
- New forms of value will be created
- Great new jobs will be created
- New efficiencies will happen
- New performance metrics will be adopted
Change is not Magical. Change takes work
None of those things happen without the hard work of leading changes in the attitudes, behaviours and outcomes of the way people work. A real person needs to make that change happen. That special someone has to help others to:
- Change attitudes about work so as to
- Change behaviours at work so as to
- Change the outcomes from work
Only those changes in outcomes create value. Value creation is critical because value creation determines what businesses do and keep doing. Sadly, value does not magically appear.
Before we see any value, at least one leader has to experience those changes in attitudes, behaviours and outcomes themselves. Then that special leader get to work hard to create the value for others through effort, influence and experimentation.
There is no passive voice in leadership. Let your actions speak louder than words.
So when do you start?
Working Out Loud is the Lean Start-up of Knowledge
Working out loud enables early validation and engagement of others in ideas. By putting ideas to the test early when formed only to a minimum viable level wasted effort is avoided and the ideas move to fruition quicker. In this way working out loud reflects the value creation approaches of lean start-up.
Working out loud on Minimum Viable Ideas
One of the exercises in Harold Jarche’s PKM in 40 days program is around Narration of your work. I am a huge fan of working out loud and initially I wasn’t sure that I had much to learn. However, I took a risk and learned something new.
My experiment was to apply some lean start-up thinking to a concept that I am developing and put it out in a minimum viable form and seek feedback on how to develop that idea further in a relevant community. In this case, the idea was represented in minimum viable form as a single diagram and a story of where I was headed. Minimum viability in this case is just enough information to convey the information and test the key hypotheses that I wished to explore.
We are used to fully thinking things through before sharing them. I am especially cautious around this. We are told that sharing something incomplete might be dangerous as people might form an incorrect impression or might copy the idea. I’d hate to miss an opportunity around something that seems important to my work. We are not use to putting minimum viable ideas forward for debate.
However, perfecting ideas beyond that point in the quiet of our own workplace often means that when they are delivered they fall flat, miss the mark or need further work. How often have you worked long and hard on an idea that you believe in to have the “is that all?” response? I know it too well.
Working out loud brings Validation
My experience of narration was really powerful validation. The diagram has drawn a great deal of support and feedback. People have encouraged me to flesh out the tools behind the work. They have suggested next steps, connections and applications that I can leverage further. I have even had volunteers offer to work with me and someone offering to coach me in the lean start-up of this concept.
Working out loud clarifies Hypotheses
The other aspect of this experience was that working out loud enabled me to better understand the hypotheses that were a part of the work that I was doing. Had I gone on alone, I would have just buried these assumptions in the work.
Framing up my engagement of others as a test of the ideas pushed me to understand what were the key hypotheses that I needed others to confirm. Testing the assumptions reduces the risk of investing more time in the idea.
Working out loud reinforces Learning (Permanently Beta)
Because I and others know the idea is in development, improvement is part and parcel of sharing the work out loud. I don’t feel obliged to defend the work as I have less invested. I can be more dispassionate about the feedback of others as to how to improve the work. I learn more faster.
Work out loud to create value
Working out Loud with a Lean Start-up mindset can deliver powerful value in the creation and sharing of knowledge. As knowledge work becomes more important in the future of work, we need to be more effective and faster in our creation and sharing of knowledge. Practices like working out loud will drive real value the productivity, effectiveness and engagement of knowledge workers.
The Purpose Economy: How Your Desire for Impact, Personal Growth and Community Is Changing the World | Stanford Social Innovation Review
Purpose, leadership and exponential potential.
An extract from The Purpose Economy by Aaron Hurst.
Via Celine Schillinger and Kenneth Mikkelson
The Firehose, the Bucket & The Sieve: Information & Value in the Network Era
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.
The Hamster Wheel is a Choice
Working in a hamster wheel is a choice. The first step to a different work life is an awareness of the choices you make.
We work to throw away
Yesterday was hard rubbish collection in my suburb. I saw a truck taking away discarded televisions and computer screens. It is a striking thing to see two men loading screen after screen in to a truck be recycled or thrown away.
A screen was once an investment of hundreds if not thousands of dollars. Now like many of the products of our consumer society it is discarded regularly. Somebody works hard to make the money for all this rubbish. I hope they enjoyed the work:
How many hours of work in the hamster wheel are stacked on the back of this truck?
Less can be more
More than a dozen years ago I read a small book by Elaine St James called “Simplify Your Life”. The central thesis of the book is that much of the complexity of our life is because we need to buy and manage things we barely need. The cost of supporting these things means we need to work harder than we want and give up the things we would rather do.
The book didn’t cause immediate change. I still can’t say I have achieved a simple life. However, the idea from the book has stayed with me. Over time I started to make small different choices on what mattered most:
- I spent less time rushing to have the latest gadget only to then discard it for the next one
- I cut back my discretionary purchases to the areas that gave me greatest joy
- I started letting go of and not buying the stuff I never used or was keeping just in case.
- I started to make more choices to do the things I wanted rather than the things everyone else did.
- I kept a notebook to write down the things that I saw that I wanted to buy. I bought surprisingly few of them once I had achieved the endorphin rush of writing it down.
- In short, I became more aware of the difference between need, desire and enjoyment.
Work will always be hard
Work will always be hard, because it involves choices to sacrifice time spent on other things like family, friends and passion. We begrudge these choices at times, especially when the sacrifice is made only for money.
Small choices over time can help at the margins to reduce the pressure to make big sacrifices. They can help declutter your decisions and get you closer to what matters. Choice doesn’t get easier, but it can be clearer.
Most importantly of all, being more aware of your choices is at the heart of finding ways to work better, to spend time more valuably and to increase the time that you spend working on purpose.
Choices are hard. Make yours.
Leadership is changing. Leadership in networks is the future of work.
A 1 minute video to provoke some thought on how we best use leadership to realise human potential in the network era.
Transcript:
Leadership used to look like this: powerful grey haired men, standing atop a pyramid.
Now our pyramids look like this.
Leadership in networks is the future of work
And we are slowly realising that anyone can lead, anyone can help make their work better, do more for their customers or their communities
Leadership is how we turn community into opportunity, the opportunity to enable others to create exponential value in networks of human relationships
Leadership is the art of realising human potential.
It is time to leave pyramids to the pharaohs and make work more human.
(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)