Writing

Apply Occam’s Razor

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A plurality should not be asserted without necessity – Occam’s Razor

We complicate things. We like big words, big aggregations & abstract ideas. We love a topdown & system view. These conversations make us feel like leaders. Then we find it hard to make the conversations at this level deliver even the smallest amount of traction to our goals.

Focus instead on the smallest unit of impact or action. Apply Occam’s Razor and only add to these units when needed. A lot of waste, confusion, interpretation and distraction is quickly cut away. Suddenly we are see impacts at a human level and can focus on changes and impacts that have real traction.

Here’s a list of a few small units that aggregate to deliver the impacts we discuss and debate.

The smallest unit of:
– a customer experience, sales or service is one customer interaction
– productivity is one task
– profitability is one sale
– branding is one customer decision
– communication is one message received
– leadership is one interaction
– purpose is one task
– learning is one skill applied
– employee engagement is one question
– trust or reputation is one interaction
– work is one task
– change is one new action
– innovation is one experiment

Each of these little actions or interaction aggregate to form their impacts. Most are controlled by others not you. Change at this level is more powerful. Piled on top of each other these small units create the measures we treasure. If we want better outcomes, we need to make sure our plans work at this tangible level.

What is the smallest unit in the challenges you face? What would be different if you focused on only changes at that level?

Manage an ecosystem or it will manage you

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Traditional management focuses on an atomised view of the relationships in a business. Relationships with employees, customers, suppliers, competitors, partners and the community are treated as mutually exclusive, individual & discrete transactions. We put all our relationships into a simple hierarchical structure.  

This convenient fiction is a classic example of organisational stupidity. Linear hierarchical choices are easier for us to use through than complex networks of relationships. Networks get messy quickly. We chose these simplistic view to make organisations easier to manage.  

In this simple model, relationships beyond the bounds of the organisation and its interactions are rarely considered, except under the categories of risks. In our disruptive networked world, every organisation exists in an ecosystem of complex networked relationships. We all need to adjust to making decisions in that ecosystem. If we keep managing to fictions, the ecosystem will take our influence and decision rights away.

So where’s the networked ecosystem?

No organisation is an island.  If you have one employee and one customer you have already begun to build a complex network in their relationships.  

We are increasingly experiencing the dynamic of a networked ecosystem as a result of following principles:

  • All the agents are connected: customers, suppliers, employees and the community are all much more able to connect, share information and collaborate. Importantly, they will connect share and collaborate whether your organisation exists or not.
  • Any agent can play multiple roles: An employee can easily be a customer, a supplier, an influential member of the community and even potentially a competitor simultaneously. The same could be said for any other agent in your ecosystem. Traditional linear thinking struggles to manage this. Just look how many organisations attempt to stifle their employees’ ability to connect with each other or play a role as customer or community advocates.
  • The pace of innovation brings down barriers: Traditional barriers like control of information, power or resources that kept agents isolated are coming down with the accelerating pace of innovation. It is far easier to shift between roles than ever before or to get access to information or connections that you need. If your organisation depends on barriers for its success, there is a great chance someone is working now to circumvent them.  
  • The tools of disruption help us see the system:  increases in networking technologies, data analytical tools and communication technologies increasingly help all participants see and manage the system

A social and natural ecosystem too

When we start to look beyond our traditional linear categories of relationships we can see a wider ecosystem around our organisations. This broader view of relationships helps us see the ecosystem in a fuller light:

  • We can see that our connections and our organisations contribute to social goals
  • We start to see the positive and negative environmental & social impacts of our organisation and its relationships
  • We see new ways to contribute
  • We can look to the relationships that occur beyond our traditional thinking and wonder what contribution our organisation can make or how we might leverage these relationships to add new value

Start Leveraging the ecosystem

With a new more complex view of the ecosystem around your business start asking new questions:

  • How does the wider view refine your organisation’s purpose?
  • What should you do more, better or differently?
  • How do you go faster if you leverage others?
  • What changes in the wider system benefit or harm you? What can you do with other players to have more of the good or less of the harm?
  • How do customers, suppliers, employees and others help you grow your business?
  • Where are the sources of value, the conversations, connections and opportunities in the system that you have been missing?

If you don’t ask these questions, somebody in the ecosystem else will.  There’s a good chance you won’t like their answers.

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

Great video from John Hagel of Deloitte’s Centre for the Edge on the Passion of the Explorer – a common characteristic of high performing people:

  • Long term commitment to a domain
  • Questing disposition
  • Connecting disposition

Call them Change Agents.  Call them leaders of the Responsive Organisation.  Call them Disruptors.  Call them bearers of the Challenger Spirit.  Call them innovators.  Call them rebels.  The pattern is consistent that change is driven by the passionate, the learning oriented and the networked.

What ever you call these people, make sure you treasure them.

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

Competency or Capability? Mindsets Matter

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Competency and capability are near synonyms. However I find there is a world of difference in the mindset that lies behind each measure of individual development. The difference in mindset has major ramifications for careers, talent development and diversity. The two mindsets raise different questions when assessing individuals.

I have personal experience of the difference. When I have failed to win a role that I sought, the feedback is almost always framed in terms of lack of a demonstrated competency. However when I win new roles it is rarely because I had a demonstrated competency in the area of expertise that defined the role. My career has been based on bringing my set of capabilities to address the challenges and needs of each role.

Competency Mindsets vs Capability Mindsets

Discussions framed around competency are often conducted with a mindset of assessing an individual against a defined standard. Often competencies are defined quite specifically and related to limited areas of expertise. Compentencies are often seen as tools to enable someone to do a job. Competency assessment is much more likely to be oriented to formal qualifications, demonstrated prior experience or demonstration of specifically determined skills in action.  People seek to define a fixed goal for a skill relying heavily on past performance. Reaching competency is often seen as the end of the road for that skill. That mindset can be quite limiting in assessment & development of individuals.

Capability as a mindset should be focused on the ability to deliver an outcome, not a test score. Capabilites tend to be seen as infrastructure to achieve an outcome. This mindset tends to be more general, more open to allow more room for the application of other or similar skills and explicitly allows for a talented individual to prove a potential to show their ability in future.

Considering capabilities allows an individual to choose how to tackle at problems, roles or situations. Importantly, there is much less likely to be a defined limit to a capability which allows for the development of greater mastery over time.

Talent Development

A mindset of building competency in the development of talent often leaves the talent wondering why their career is not in their control. Talented people feel limited when pursuing competencies as a series of boxes to be ticked to progress to the next opportunity. There is little chance to skip ahead and prove the potential that made them talent in the first place.

Disruptive change also means that many narrow competencies individuals acquire can become rapidly irrelevant. At the very beginning of my career, I was quite proficient in the use of Wang messaging systems.  Thankfully my more general capabilities in communication supported my future career as email and now social technologies succeeded that now redundant system.

Focusing instead on the ability to achieve outcomes and building capability towards those outcomes gives the individual greater latitude to shape their career.  It also allows greater opportunity to demonstrate that ability in new or different roles that may not have the typical opportunity to show competency at a task.

Our Changing Future Demands Capability not Competency

In a rapidly changing world, defining the standard or even the actions required in a role in advance is challenging.  Organisations increasingly need to shift to outcome based performance measurement with less specific direction on tasks.  

The defined hierarchies that enabled graduated assessment of competencies and detailed command and control process management are proving more and more challenging to manage.  Flatter organisations are more focused on capabilities required to execute strategy.  Networked organisations help us see that the required capabilities+ may well exist in any part of the organisation’s network.  

We need people to bring diverse skills to solve new challenges and we need people to engage with their roles to build a continuous improvement in capabilities.  Allowing people the rewards of movement to mastery in any capability is critical to engagement.  

Merit: Think Capability, not Competency

Merit is a contentious issue in diversity. Often merit is used as an excuse for poor diversity outcomes. Merit can clearly influenced by conscious and unconscious bias. However, when discussing merit we are often unclear whether we mean merit considered on a competency or capability basis.  

Merit measured as competency tends to favour those who have had the opportunity to build prior knowledge and experience. Competency favours the usual suspects. Focusing instead on capability opens opportunities to consider new candidates and allows greater consideration of potential.

Any individual who has had limited opportunity to be fostered earlier in their career is likely to perform better in a mindset focused on their talent potential and ability to deliver, rather than prior experience or accrued skills.

Look Forward to Capability

The distinction between competency and capability is not one that is hard and fast. What this distinction does is open a new question in our decision making. Next time you are considering a role or a candidate reflect on whether there is a difference in your decisions if you look back to a competency or forward to capability. 

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“The things to do are: the things that need doing: that you see need to be done, and that no one else seems to see need to be done. Then you will conceive your own way of doing that which needs to be done — that no one else has told you to do or how to do it. This will bring out the real you that often gets buried inside a character that has acquired a superficial array of behaviors induced or imposed by others on the individual.”

– R. Buckminster Fuller

http://www.swiss-miss.com/2013/09/the-things-to-do.html

Immersion is a Catalyst of Change

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When making major change finding symbols and mechanisms that help accelerate the change can be important. These elements of your change management plan act as catalysts, helping make the change occur. Jim Collins described the power of catalytic mechanisms as a vehicle to help organisations achieve goals in a classic Harvard Business Review article. 

Immersion in the problem is an incredibly powerful catalyst of change in organisations. Too often change conversations can have an abstract or a theoretical flavour.  Improving customer satisfaction, employee engagement or community reputation can seem like moving the needle on an intangible measure.  These conversations are often lifeless.  They are very different measures and conversations when you are at the edge of the organisation, face to face with those affected and discussing the issues.

Immersion changes the nature of people’s understanding of problems.  Put the change agents or those doubting the need for change in the heart of the problem, face to face with the issues and people involved.  The need for change change is more tangible.  People see things with new eyes. Immersion shows you parts of the system that you have never seen before.  There is nothing like being on the spot.  Immersion also delivers passion and insights that can’t be found around a conference table.

We have a lot of ways to immerse ourselves in any situation requiring change.  I have seen the power of formal immersion programs that prompt reflection, discussion and action.  More simply, we can eat our own dogfood. We can go to Gemba. We can know our enemies. We can manage by walking around.  We can do the work or live the life for an hour, a day or a week.  We can turn back on our customer and community understanding and use our own radar to contribute to the change.

Immersion can be the easiest powerful action you can take to catalyse change.  Everyone in the organisation can be involved.  It can take as little as half an hour and as much as a lifetime.  Put your leaders in the heart of the problem and watch the results.

Four things change agents need

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Driving change in any organisation is hard.  There are lots of approaches to driving change.  Two of my favourites are Kotter’s and the McKinsey influence model.  There are many more.

In my experience, getting traction and making change stick requires four key elements to be established.

This change is real:  You need leadership, a strong case for change and evidence of enduring intent.  The change must be needed.  It must not be temporary or a fad.  There must be evidence that the change is not going away or that management attention will drift elsewhere

This change can be done:  Are we clear on the symbols of success in this change?  Has anyone else done something similar?  Is there a role model that I can copy?  A clear statement of the world after the change is needed to help people make the abstract changes tangible for them.

We can make it happen:  The team needs the capabilities (skills, time, systems and resources) to make the change happen.  It needs to feel within reach and possible. Never easy.  Just possible.  Within our collective capabilities.

We are doing it together: Build a sense of community, discussion and engagement with the change.  We are not changing others.  We are all changing together.  

Ask new questions

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Asking the old questions will give us the old answers. New thinking comes from considering new questions. Disruptive times ask us to challenge ourselves with new questions. If we don’t, the changes ahead will ask even more of us.

At a recent Startup Australia organised by Powerhouse HQ, Kate Bennett Eriksson of PWC made the powerful point that organisations trying to create a more innovative culture need to learn to ask new questions in their decision making. Referencing Victor Frankl, Kate noted that between stimulus and response is time for thought. Changing decisions with new questions that alter our thought process generates a different outcome.

New questions are a powerful technique of change. When I want to learn a new way of thinking or consider new issues I develop a mental checklist of new questions to help me think differently in decisions. The provocation of a new set of questions changes the process and outcomes of thinking.

New questions to consider

I believe we need to lead change in the way we work and organise ourselves to survive digital disruption. This belief led me to the panel session on Startup and Corporate collaboration at which Kate spoke. It also has driven my engagement with organisations like The Responsive Organisation Manifesto, Disrupt.Sydney and Change Agents Worldwide in search of new ways of thinking and techniques for responding to the challenges of disruption. I have come away from those conversations with many new questions to ask.

Here are some of the new questions that I have learned to ask:

All confronting questions and only a beginning of the new thinking ahead.

Questions for you:

What new questions do you need to add from your decisions? What old questions are getting in the way? How can new questions drive new thinking and new results in your world?

What are you waiting for?