Writing

Reversing work

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

What if your job was outside organisations and your work was inside? It is an increasing prospect in our networked world as organisations look to become more agile and responsive. At the same time, people are looking for more satisfying and purposeful work.

I was reading in Triumph of the City by Edward Glaeser about ‘reverse commuting’ where people live in cities for the amenities and commute out to go to work. Having done the same some years ago living in the Sydney CBD, it can be a great option. The lifestyle suited me and it cut down on traffic jams to always go against the traffic.

What if we reversed the logic of work?

We are used to job and work being synonymous. They need not be. Treating them as the same closes off options for other more amenable models of work

Many traditional organisations have problems with their amenities. Poor people management practices, command and control cultures, meaningless effort and bureaucratic process with a focus on preserving the status quo can create an uncomfortable environment for employees. In such an organisation, there are few amenities for people with talent, creativity and a focus on leading change. Ideally we would fix these issues, but organisations with the worst issues often lack the collective will. Many people work in large organisation for the scale of impact that they hope to have and the security of income. Both benefits are threatened by these challenges of traditional organisations.

Competitive pressures and rapidly changing markets mean organisations already need to look outwards for more and new talent. Fluctuating demands mean organisations need workforces to flex too. Attracting this talent will require organisations to offer new more flexible work options and more porous connections to the outside world.

In an increasingly networked world of talent, more people are looking to build portfolio careers inside and outside organisations but still dealing with the capabilities and challenges that matter to them and that they specialise in. These careers still offer the choice to go back and work inside organisations but this time helping with the worker’s choice of projects, challenges and change.

Like reverse commuters, amenity and convenience will drive new and different choices as people and organisations reverse work recognising that the job need not be where the work occurs. Inside or outside of organisations and formal jobs, talented people know their power in a networked world and can afford to increasingly realise their purpose and potential as they choose.

Increase the density of your organisation

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

When you increase the density, you increase the likelihood of collisions. Collisions of diverse people and ideas are a fertile source of creativity and innovation. Increasing the density of the ideas flowing in networks in your organisation will deliver a creative dividend.

Vibrant cities are rich sources of innovation because they bring together people and act as nodes in global transportation and knowledge networks. Into these cities pour people and ideas that collide to create new ideas, ventures and new activity.

The best teams that I have seen have this same dense, diverse and frenetic level of interaction. They are also equally creative. The constant collision of ideas and new interactions of people drives the growth of the organisation. These are organisations where people actually want more meetings and more talk because of the creative potential and the ability to leap forward in solving shared challenges. Creative interactions help people to do more, better or faster.

Through Change Agents Worldwide, I am currently experiencing the incredible creativity of a dense network of interactions, even though I am the most remote member of this global network of Change Agents focused on helping organisations transition to the future of work. Every day, there is a firehose worth of insight, interaction & creativity. In February we will publish an e-book of contributions of the members of the network that was only conceived in the last month. The same level of creative collaboration and inspiration powers work for clients and the creative output of the whole network. The first face to face meeting of this network has not even happened yet.

Increasing Density

Teams with dense idea networks and great creativity have a few things in common that can guide anyone seeking to increase the creative density of their organisation. Here are a few steps you can take:

  • Strengthen common purpose: purpose pulls people together and gives them reasons to connect and engage more. Purpose underpins the creation and sharing of ideas.
  • Increase connections: the more connected the organisation the more chance of a creative exchange. Knit your organisation together and ensure everyone is well connected.
  • Increase energy: the more energy, the more ideas move; the more ideas move, the more collisions will occur. The energy of meeting a challenge together will create dense connections. Don’t go for energy for its own sake. Create purposeful intent, energy in collaboration and willingness to collide in pursuit of a goal.
  • Be open: if you want interactions of people and ideas then the default should be open and transparent work. Put more ideas in flight and tear down barriers to the flow of knowledge. Openness also helps everyone to contribute and the group to pick up connections that might otherwise be missed.
  • Be diverse: more experiences and background means more inputs more ideas in flight, more conflict and less groupthink.
  • Orient outwards: there will be far more ideas in your conversations if you are drawing them in from outside. Let ideas out to return redoubled. New external provocations can help fire the creativity in a team.
  • Value learning if you know everything, you are an endpoint. You are choosing to sit outside others’ efforts to learn and grow. You are no longer connecting and building on others’ ideas.
  • Embrace chaos: a dense network of people connecting over ideas and action is never going to be neat and orderly. Bring order to the outputs if you need but don’t constrain the inputs or process in flight.

You can achieve these effects face to face in your organisation or you can use a tool like an enterprise social network to help your organisation increase creative density. Whatever you do, increase the flight of knowledge in the organisation and the creative collisions will follow.

Reputation: The Horse & the Tortoise

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

Reputation arrives on a tortoise and leaves on a horse. – traditional maxim

When it comes to social media, many organisations focus on the second half of this maxim. They stress about the damage that might be done by their people in social networks. That becomes an excuse for the organisation to play safe and stop both it and its employees from engaging.

Employees should be your best advocates. If not, then that’s an issue you need to fix ASAP.

Employees face a major constraint in influencing reputation. Too many organisations constrain employees by giving reputation little consideration. The bigger damage is when organisations don’t listen, don’t understand their current reputation and don’t think about social accountabilities. These organisation leave employees little positive to say in any medium.

The horse has bolted

You have a reputation. It is likely accurate to the experiences you deliver and well deserved. You will have a reputation whether you engage or not. The conversation goes on without you. The network is pretty good at sharing its information about your organisation.

Don’t worry so much about shutting the stable door. Make sure you have real substance to your reputation.

Don’t forget about the tortoise

Stop for a minute and think about the first half of the maxim:

A tortoise.

Slow. Very slow. Too slow for today’s networked world of business.

How important is reputation to the strategy of your organisation? Do you know your current reputation? When are you going to start building the reputation you need? How can you use everyone on the network around your organisation to help?

If you ignore reputation in the networks around your organisation until you need it, good luck moving the tortoise.

Bad Bosses are Survived or Escaped

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

Nobody leaves a company. They leave a bad boss when there’s no other reason to stay. Great bosses who understand the value of networks, offer support, development and challenge are a critical part of your talent network. Are you addressing the core of what attracts the network of talent to your organisation?

Bad bosses are diminishers of the talent of their people.  They destroy what value their people create.

I worked for a diminisher once. After a year in which my business exceeded its goals, with help from a great team, favourable circumstances and my colleagues in the business, I was told in my annual performance appraisal that “a drover’s dog could have achieved that result”. (Drover’s dog is one of the more flexible bits of Australian idiom, but the phrase’s most recent meaning which comes from politics is that a drover’s dog is a non-entity).  I would have been happy to discuss the many contributions to my team’s success, but that phrase left me with nothing more to say. I thought it unkind when my boss repeated the phrase to my leadership team colleagues a week or so later in a meeting, but if you can’t take unkind words, then corporate life is not for you. However, the moment that hurt most was when it was used again to describe my and my team’s performance at the end of year dinner in a speech to the leadership team and spouses. 

Who did it hurt? My boss, not me. By that point, I was used to the comment. Remember the actions of a diminisher says more about them than their team. The dinner guests were disturbed by the comment, especially the spouses who knew how hard their partners worked. While the comment was directed at me, it was a signal of what everyone could expect from such a boss.

Because the issues with bad bosses are usually their own concerns, it is rare that a bad boss will change without a major personal catharsis.  Few employees have coached a bad boss to better performance. Sadly that means that employees of bad bosses need focus on survival or escape. Survival will require employees to leverage their reputations, their networks & their mentors.  They need to work more transparently and deliver stellar performance. These actions can help replace missing leadership and build support to survive the assaults. Survival is hard work because a bad boss will focus their attentions on survivors as a point of resistance. Escape is by far the easier and better option. The organisation is the loser.

Do you know the diminishers in your organisation? They are easy enough to find as your networks will tell you all you need to know. If your organisation has bad bosses, change them, remove them or avoid them.

Remember it takes great talent to survive a bad boss, but most won’t. Great talent has better things to do than play defence. The networks of great talent offer too much opportunity. Even a drover’s dog knows when it is time to run away.

Purpose is exponential

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

Purpose is not who you are.
Purpose is why you are.
Better, it is why you do.
Your purpose is in your work.
Purpose begins within, but moves out through work,
Out through the impacts of your work, and
Out through the others who you touch.
Each interaction builds on those before,
Multiplying the power.
Networks carry your purpose out to the world and back,
Grown, refined and reinforced –
Strong enough to carry you away. 
Out in the world, through work,
Purpose is exponential. 

The Pineapple Effect: Learning to See the New World

Posted on by simongterry in Change, Learning

image

Discovering the New World was a difficult enterprise, as we have all been taught. But even more difficult, once the New World was discovered, was seeing it, understanding that it was new, entirely new, different from anything one had expected to find as new…

…the Old World catch the imagery of the New most forcefully when it still does not know precisely what it is dealing with, when information is scarce and incomplete, and it is difficult to separate reality from mistakes and fantasy.

from ‘How New the World Was’ by Italo Calvino found in Collection of Sand

We see the new through our old world. The new presents us challenges and mysteries of which we need to make sense. We make mistakes, learn and in the process we experience a Pineapple Effect.

The Pineapple Effect

The original meaning of the word pineapple was the cones of conifer trees. After the new fruit was found in the Americas, it was named pineapple for a perceived resemblance to what we now call pinecones. The discoverers of this new world fruit needed to made sense of it so they explained it with the tools they had at hand from their old world. Of course, the name was grossly misleading. There’s little beyond a surface resemblance between the two. Thankfully, pinecone came into usage and the terms went separate ways to avoid further confusion.

For those advocating for changes in the world of work this Pineapple Effect presents a quandary. How do we help people make sense of the new world of work?

Do you advocate for change using old models? or

Do you engage people in the creativity of the new with some mystery, mistakes and fantasy?

Build out from the Old

We see a lot of people choose the former path. The new world of social collaboration and new forms of work organisation are promoted often in very traditional terms that reflect management’s view of where benefits may lie:

  • reducing email
  • a new kind of intranet
  • increasing efficiency
  • making communications more effective
  • improving business processes or technology system adoption and use with a social layer

For many organisations, there is value in these approaches, if it begins the journey of adoption and further learning. New tools and new ways of working take new practice and new skills.  They must be learned the hard way, often by experimentation. Importantly, they often introduce new attitudes, thinking and elements of culture to the organisation. There is an important period of sense making that occurs as people engage.  As Buckminster Fuller said:

If you want to teach people a new way of thinking, don’t teach. Give them a tool, the use of which will lead to it

However, if this new thinking and new practice is not specifically enabled by the culture of the organisation, real limits will be met. Unless the potential of the new tools and practices can be realised in change, employees & their managers will see the new approaches as Old World v2.0. That alone will limit the sense people can make of the changes, the discovery and the ultimate extent of change.

Worst of all, it may mean that the organisation may come to see change as unnecessary or faddish. With heavily technical approaches to adoption of tools, there is a similarly technical expectation of quick returns. In many cases, that shortens the timeline for people to learn new ways and to demonstrate the value of the changing practices.

Explore a little mystery

The business world is usually reticent to live long with the dangers of uncertainty. Mystery, mistakes and fantasy are seen as sources of concern in most organisations.

Occasionally we see a burst of the froth and bubble of the new in the business media, such as the recent discussion of Zappos’ decision to pursue Holacracy as a decision making process internally. While few organisations are likely to adopt the same decision as Zappos, the conversations of managers around the world about other models of work are potentially creative, if they provoke new thoughts and experiments in new models.

Embrace a little chaos. Be prepared to make new sense. Accept that these new ways of working offer the potential for entirely new models of work,sharing knowledge and decision making. Accept that the new way of work can be an agent of significant cultural change. When organisations have stepped into that potential, they can discover:

  • people fundamentally redesign decision making processes to leverage social’s potential to engage more people regardless of their place in a function or their expertise
  • new forms of trust built as people have a richer sense of other’s agendas and purposes – trust is an extraordinary enabler of so much that organisations need like collaboration, performance and creativity.
  • innovation arise in many new and varied places as people are enabled to experiment with new and better ways of working.

Transformative change occurs when people have the liberty & support to experiment. That means allowing the opportunity to embrace discovery of new meaning and the accompanying chaos, mistakes, & fantasy. Importantly that also means the time for new meaning to grow in a community of people. Many initiatives are cut short before they mature into new meaning and innovations.

The new world of work presents us with the Pineapple Effect. We need both smart leverage of traditional approaches to encourage adoption and a willingness to experiment for new meaning.

The Pineapple Effect: Learning to See the New World

Posted on by simongterry in Change, Learning

image

Discovering the New World was a difficult enterprise, as we have all been taught. But even more difficult, once the New World was discovered, was seeing it, understanding that it was new, entirely new, different from anything one had expected to find as new…

…the Old World catch the imagery of the New most forcefully when it still does not know precisely what it is dealing with, when information is scarce and incomplete, and it is difficult to separate reality from mistakes and fantasy.

from ‘How New the World Was’ by Italo Calvino found in Collection of Sand

We see the new through our old world. The new presents us challenges and mysteries of which we need to make sense. We make mistakes, learn and in the process we experience a Pineapple Effect.

The Pineapple Effect

The original meaning of the word pineapple was the cones of conifer trees. After the new fruit was found in the Americas, it was named pineapple for a perceived resemblance to what we now call pinecones. The discoverers of this new world fruit needed to made sense of it so they explained it with the tools they had at hand from their old world. Of course, the name was grossly misleading. There’s little beyond a surface resemblance between the two. Thankfully, pinecone came into usage and the terms went separate ways to avoid further confusion.

For those advocating for changes in the world of work this Pineapple Effect presents a quandary. How do we help people make sense of the new world of work?

Do you advocate for change using old models? or

Do you engage people in the creativity of the new with some mystery, mistakes and fantasy?

Build out from the Old

We see a lot of people choose the former path. The new world of social collaboration and new forms of work organisation are promoted often in very traditional terms that reflect management’s view of where benefits may lie:

  • reducing email
  • a new kind of intranet
  • increasing efficiency
  • making communications more effective
  • improving business processes or technology system adoption and use with a social layer

For many organisations, there is value in these approaches, if it begins the journey of adoption and further learning. New tools and new ways of working take new practice and new skills.  They must be learned the hard way, often by experimentation. Importantly, they often introduce new attitudes, thinking and elements of culture to the organisation. There is an important period of sense making that occurs as people engage.  As Buckminster Fuller said:

If you want to teach people a new way of thinking, don’t teach. Give them a tool, the use of which will lead to it

However, if this new thinking and new practice is not specifically enabled by the culture of the organisation, real limits will be met. Unless the potential of the new tools and practices can be realised in change, employees & their managers will see the new approaches as Old World v2.0. That alone will limit the sense people can make of the changes, the discovery and the ultimate extent of change.

Worst of all, it may mean that the organisation may come to see change as unnecessary or faddish. With heavily technical approaches to adoption of tools, there is a similarly technical expectation of quick returns. In many cases, that shortens the timeline for people to learn new ways and to demonstrate the value of the changing practices.

Explore a little mystery

The business world is usually reticent to live long with the dangers of uncertainty. Mystery, mistakes and fantasy are seen as sources of concern in most organisations.

Occasionally we see a burst of the froth and bubble of the new in the business media, such as the recent discussion of Zappos’ decision to pursue Holacracy as a decision making process internally. While few organisations are likely to adopt the same decision as Zappos, the conversations of managers around the world about other models of work are potentially creative, if they provoke new thoughts and experiments in new models.

Embrace a little chaos. Be prepared to make new sense. Accept that these new ways of working offer the potential for entirely new models of work,sharing knowledge and decision making. Accept that the new way of work can be an agent of significant cultural change. When organisations have stepped into that potential, they can discover:

  • people fundamentally redesign decision making processes to leverage social’s potential to engage more people regardless of their place in a function or their expertise
  • new forms of trust built as people have a richer sense of other’s agendas and purposes – trust is an extraordinary enabler of so much that organisations need like collaboration, performance and creativity.
  • innovation arise in many new and varied places as people are enabled to experiment with new and better ways of working.

Transformative change occurs when people have the liberty & support to experiment. That means allowing the opportunity to embrace discovery of new meaning and the accompanying chaos, mistakes, & fantasy. Importantly that also means the time for new meaning to grow in a community of people. Many initiatives are cut short before they mature into new meaning and innovations.

The new world of work presents us with the Pineapple Effect. We need both smart leverage of traditional approaches to encourage adoption and a willingness to experiment for new meaning.

From Safety to Safer: Middle Management’s Dangerous Transition

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

image

Safety is a common conversation, explicitly or implicitly, in the halls of middle management. Change agents among the ranks of middle managers experience conversations about the need for safety and the dangers of change on a daily basis. Safety is the focus because there are many for whom safety means the preservation of status, roles and resources. We need to move from safety to making our organisations safer for a world of rapid networked change.

The Wrong Kind of Safety

Ask enough middle managers and you will find that there are definitions of safety which involve elements of the following:

  • Ownership: a clearly defined area of responsibility and resources that can be controlled tightly
  • Knowledge is Power: a set of skills, capabilities or knowledge that is closely guarded and relatively unique in the organisation
  • Hierarchical Power: relationships of dependence with management above dependent on the department’s functional expertise and the team below dependent on sponsorship of their careers in the domain
  • Comfortable Accountabilities: Accountabilities should be designed with reference to achievable measures, preferably internal measures related to the discipline.
  • Limited Stakeholders: A few internal stakeholders often from similar functions with similar ideas and ideally few customer or community stakeholders who may introduce different perspectives and diverse issues. 
  • Few Dependencies: Trusting others reduces control and introduces risks, so collaboration and cooperation are avoided by controlling as much of processes and projects as possible 
  • Limited Transparency:  With utmost politeness, share little and participate little in the concerns of the rest of the organisation to preserve the comfort of your domain.
  • Stability: Ensure there is minimum change in business environment, even if this includes refusing to acknowledge market changes.
  • Minimum Risk: Avoid any change that offers risk. Why jeopardise an environment under close control?

The core of these definitions of safety is the idea that the threats to middle managers are internal. The biggest threats comes from other managers or senior management. The external world is not a cause for concern. Safety comes from building an walled fortress within the organisation and focusing internally.

Unsafe at any Speed

In the rapid change of our current business environment, the greatest risk to middle management is not internal. The need for change, the pace of change and its impacts are being driven in the networks around the organisation. Middle management has much more to fear from changing consumer and social behaviour, disruptive technologies and networked ways of working. 

The classic middle management definition of safety makes nobody safer. By turning inward, by resisting accountabilities, stretch and change, these managers guarantee that their organisations are exposed to much more wrenching changes than need be the case. Each of these elements of safety stand in the way of an open, agile and responsive organisation. When middle managers choose to act as barriers to change, the forces of change risk sweeping whole layers and organisations of managers away.

By focusing on a misguided view of individual safety, these managers make the organisation more unsafe as a collective.

Leaders who do not challenge a culture of safety in their organisation are putting their whole organisation at risk. Leaders need to be working to make the organisation more responsive. The safer organisation adapts.

From Safety to Safer

Leaders, change agents and forward thinking middle managers need to disrupt this misguided culture of safety in organisations. The conversation must not be about safety but how to make the organisation safer through adaption. This disruption must involve conflict with traditional views. However, that disruption will help the organisation adapt to a safer culture that opens the organisation up to its internal and external networks.

Here are some simple steps that any leader in an organisation can take to drive a responsive culture:

  • Push for external accountabilities: Raise the bar on performance. Measure customer outcomes. Consider end-to-end process performance to cut across siloed walls. Look externally for measures of success (and not just in the same industry).
  • Bring in external stakeholders: If customers, community, employees and other partners are not stakeholders in the organisations decisions then gather their perspectives and bring them into discussions across the organisation.  There is enormous power in real external views of the organisation, its purposes and performance.
  • Network the organisation: Focus on increasing the flow of information and knowledge within the organisation. Demonstrate the value of collaboration and cooperation in greater efficiency, innovation and engagement in the way work is done. Foster diverse perspectives on the way forward. Most importantly of all delegate outcomes and enable people to make change to adapt without reference to the hierarchy.
  • Experiment: The new definition of safety needs to be a well-run experiment to improve performance. The absence of well-run experiments is a sign of major concern. If you are not testing the way forward in changing times, then you are taking big risks.

You don’t need to be CEO to drive these changes to make a more responsive organisation. (Undoubtedly, it helps). You will need to effectively manage your role & influence in the organisation. However, effective change agents and middle managers can begin to ask the questions and start new conversations leveraging external perspectives. Most importantly of all they can build a network of others frustrated by the culture of safety and work together for change.

From Safety to Safer: Middle Management’s Dangerous Transition

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

image

Safety is a common conversation, explicitly or implicitly, in the halls of middle management. Change agents among the ranks of middle managers experience conversations about the need for safety and the dangers of change on a daily basis. Safety is the focus because there are many for whom safety means the preservation of status, roles and resources. We need to move from safety to making our organisations safer for a world of rapid networked change.

The Wrong Kind of Safety

Ask enough middle managers and you will find that there are definitions of safety which involve elements of the following:

  • Ownership: a clearly defined area of responsibility and resources that can be controlled tightly
  • Knowledge is Power: a set of skills, capabilities or knowledge that is closely guarded and relatively unique in the organisation
  • Hierarchical Power: relationships of dependence with management above dependent on the department’s functional expertise and the team below dependent on sponsorship of their careers in the domain
  • Comfortable Accountabilities: Accountabilities should be designed with reference to achievable measures, preferably internal measures related to the discipline.
  • Limited Stakeholders: A few internal stakeholders often from similar functions with similar ideas and ideally few customer or community stakeholders who may introduce different perspectives and diverse issues. 
  • Few Dependencies: Trusting others reduces control and introduces risks, so collaboration and cooperation are avoided by controlling as much of processes and projects as possible 
  • Limited Transparency:  With utmost politeness, share little and participate little in the concerns of the rest of the organisation to preserve the comfort of your domain.
  • Stability: Ensure there is minimum change in business environment, even if this includes refusing to acknowledge market changes.
  • Minimum Risk: Avoid any change that offers risk. Why jeopardise an environment under close control?

The core of these definitions of safety is the idea that the threats to middle managers are internal. The biggest threats comes from other managers or senior management. The external world is not a cause for concern. Safety comes from building an walled fortress within the organisation and focusing internally.

Unsafe at any Speed

In the rapid change of our current business environment, the greatest risk to middle management is not internal. The need for change, the pace of change and its impacts are being driven in the networks around the organisation. Middle management has much more to fear from changing consumer and social behaviour, disruptive technologies and networked ways of working. 

The classic middle management definition of safety makes nobody safer. By turning inward, by resisting accountabilities, stretch and change, these managers guarantee that their organisations are exposed to much more wrenching changes than need be the case. Each of these elements of safety stand in the way of an open, agile and responsive organisation. When middle managers choose to act as barriers to change, the forces of change risk sweeping whole layers and organisations of managers away.

By focusing on a misguided view of individual safety, these managers make the organisation more unsafe as a collective.

Leaders who do not challenge a culture of safety in their organisation are putting their whole organisation at risk. Leaders need to be working to make the organisation more responsive. The safer organisation adapts.

From Safety to Safer

Leaders, change agents and forward thinking middle managers need to disrupt this misguided culture of safety in organisations. The conversation must not be about safety but how to make the organisation safer through adaption. This disruption must involve conflict with traditional views. However, that disruption will help the organisation adapt to a safer culture that opens the organisation up to its internal and external networks.

Here are some simple steps that any leader in an organisation can take to drive a responsive culture:

  • Push for external accountabilities: Raise the bar on performance. Measure customer outcomes. Consider end-to-end process performance to cut across siloed walls. Look externally for measures of success (and not just in the same industry).
  • Bring in external stakeholders: If customers, community, employees and other partners are not stakeholders in the organisations decisions then gather their perspectives and bring them into discussions across the organisation.  There is enormous power in real external views of the organisation, its purposes and performance.
  • Network the organisation: Focus on increasing the flow of information and knowledge within the organisation. Demonstrate the value of collaboration and cooperation in greater efficiency, innovation and engagement in the way work is done. Foster diverse perspectives on the way forward. Most importantly of all delegate outcomes and enable people to make change to adapt without reference to the hierarchy.
  • Experiment: The new definition of safety needs to be a well-run experiment to improve performance. The absence of well-run experiments is a sign of major concern. If you are not testing the way forward in changing times, then you are taking big risks.

You don’t need to be CEO to drive these changes to make a more responsive organisation. (Undoubtedly, it helps). You will need to effectively manage your role & influence in the organisation. However, effective change agents and middle managers can begin to ask the questions and start new conversations leveraging external perspectives. Most importantly of all they can build a network of others frustrated by the culture of safety and work together for change.

The Great Unbundling of Work

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

People want a purposeful challenge and an ability to earn a living. We have bundled these into choices that at times make it impossible for people to get either. We face an era when an unbundling will create new choices & challenges in work. Preparation for these choices is key.

The Great Unbundling

Early apprenticeships and clerkships offered little chance of progression or change. Employees were contractually bound for long terms of service. Career progression depended on a vacancy due to retirement or death. Rewards if there were any were the ability to earn one’s keep & practice a craft.

Careers in the long boom of last century were based on an evolution of this model. Instead of indenture, loyalty & security bound people to navigating one organisation and its hierarchy. Careers bundled up a succession of jobs to gain security of remuneration with occasional challenges.

We unbundled jobs from organisational careers. People now can expect to change jobs, organisation and discipline many times over their life. Increasingly career choice & the responsibility of managing a career are in the hands of the individual.

We are beginning to unbundle work from jobs. Side projects, portfolio careers, tasks, freelancing and other flexible working are new and more viable options for many. Networks and digital business models expand the reach, capability and connection of everything we do. New business models are springing up to take advantage of the demand and supply. Purposeful work can be the focus because of the extent of choice possible. However, a fragile and fragmented market means security is less. Many sources of remuneration are under competitive pressure or at least highly variable.

Our next challenge may well be a further unbundling of remuneration from our primary purposeful work where required. This is more likely to be the work of digital markets than a redistributive welfare state. We will see a renewed focus on creating sources of non-personal income or secondary income sources from side projects to help fund a life of purposeful work. Many artists must manage this model already, pursuing secondary work as their primary income. There are already signs of this change in the maker movement and the many discussions of lean entrepreneurship.

Unbundling

Industries that face competitive pressures to unbundle products often experience dramatic change and innovation in the process. Often the social outcomes are mixed with an increased efficiency of choice offset against the social protections of cross-subsidies, lower returns and new risks. The future of work is likely heading down a similar path.

Reflecting on unbundling work is not a purely theoretical exercise. The future of work will demand new networks and capabilities. We can each prepare ourselves for this future. Consider the following questions:

  • What work fulfils your purpose?
  • Does your job offer this work?
  • How are you leveraging the networking, project and digital capabilities in your job, work and career now?
  • What capabilities can you leverage for new choices of purposeful work or new income in future?
  • What capabilities & networks do you need to build for purposeful work or new income in future?
  • How would you use reputation, experience and other indicators to demonstrate the quality and value of your skills and capabilities if they were not tied to a job?

We cannot predict the future of an unbundled world of work for anyone one individual. All we can say is both choice and risk are likely to be higher. However in a world of greater choice than ever we each need to consider our own plans and be prepared. Answers to these questions can guide what we do today and the value that is placed on our work in our jobs, organisations and careers.