Writing

One of the challenges in traditional management processes is that goal setting is a one-way process. The cascade of goals down through the silos of an organisation without feedback and adaptation inevitably results in misalignment.

Consider the implementation of a collaboration solution. The overall business goals that justify the project are likely to be high level, ranging from supporting cultural change to specific improvements in customer experience, innovation and efficiency. However in designing a project for implementation these goals end up becoming soloed. Technology has a launch date and costs. Employee communications end up with a goal of user adoption. All the other goals are either cascaded to people too busy to care or are assumed to flow. Not long after users start to wonder why all technology wants is to give them the solution and all employee communications seems to want is for them to use it. By defining the goals in terms of the technology, the business loses its original outcomes and users lose reasons to use the system.

The approach of division of outcomes mean that the business has little opportunity to adapt to change or new opportunities. Budgets are set. Goals are fixed and tied to employee performance. This often results in the situation where the goals of one silo, say a launch date & costs, conflict with the goals of another, say adoption. Because these goals are baked into unchangeable and undiscussable plans, people push ahead knowing they are doing the wrong thing. The strategy becomes ‘we’ll fix it later’, but the next plan rarely allows that.

Roger L Martin, a leading strategist and a former business school dean, has highlighted in a series of books that the best strategies are adaptive. They allow for conversations up and down the chain from goals to actions and adaptation based on the lessons from conversations and action. If you want to prevent your business strategy turning into soloed nonsense then allow two-way conversations about goals and approaches. Better yet, use your collaboration platform as a hub of this learning and adaptation.

Scrolling through social threads today, I came across a criticism than an action was virtue-signalling. At first the phrase slipped by without reflection. Virtue-signalling is one of those phrases that gets thrown around in politics, particularly the subdivision of politics that is the culture wars. In those dialogues, it lives with a range of phrases from the left and right of politics, like political correctness, cultural appropriation and so on, that often had a specific meaning, but are now widely used as criticisms with loose, if any definition. I was about to go on reading but then I stopped and asked myself “What does that mean? What is wrong with signalling virtues?”.

Virtues are demonstrations of high moral standards.  Those standards are only standards and recognised as positives if they are shared in community.  An effective civil society needs some foundation of shared virtues. Virtues aren’t virtues in theory. You might source your virtues from a religious text, an ancient philosopher or lived experience. They become societal virtues when they are shared with others. A society comes to share virtues as a result of actions in line with those virtues. Actions that help those virtues become shared may be demonstrations of those virtues publicly or they may be creating signals that the virtues are required and will be rewarded. Of course, as with anything human, this is not a perfect process. Some of those signals may be false, flawed or hypocritical. The signals still contribute to creating the community standard that underpins the virtue. In fact, some of the strongest signals are when people suffer consequences for false, flawed or hypocritical demonstration of virtues. The problem with the problem of virtue signalling is you don’t have virtues without signalling.

Even if we accept that virtue-signalling is problematic, are we next going to suggest that evil-condemnation is also morally complex? If people can be unworthy to signal virtue, surely they can be unworthy to condemn evil. While I haven’t yet seen anyone explicitly throw that term as a pejorative, there are plenty of examples in our discourse as a society where people have cast doubt on (a) someone’s right to condemn evil (b) whether the way evil was condemned is adequate, (c) whether the evil is truly evil in some narrower or broader context and finally (d) whether evil is truly evil if it there is doubt as to intent, to means or to consequence. When we look the criticism of virtue-signalling, we see the intent is often not to address the issue of how best to promote virtue or suppress evil. The issue is a desire to silence others. Nobody is perfect. We know that. If we demand perfection as the standard for comment or action. Nobody gets to meet the mark. Only those with the power to speak anyway will get to discuss the issue.

One thing we learn from totalitarianism and other systems that leverage propaganda is that they master the art of taking phrases emptying them of their actual meaning and then twisting them to the purposes of control and power. We have to continue to question any phrases, subject them to discussion and query their role as criticisms and barriers to people to engage in civil society. Civil society needs more real debate, not less.

“Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.” – George Orwell, 1984

Our organisations learn how to manage human behaviour to productive ends from many aspects of society. The history of management shows many examples where it has borrowed from coercive human relationships, such as the organisational structures of military, the practices of slavery or the corrections system, because of the shared themes of control and coping with the complexities of human relationships at scale. If we are to create workplaces that have the necessary degrees of freedom to enable people to address the complex challenges of digital networks and realise their human potential, we need to be aware of these influences and to challenge control for its own sake.

This post examines an example of how the influence runs in both directions.  The tide in business press is running against the supposed productivity of open plan offices. At the same time we welcome an open plan prison.

Your Cubicle For Life

If anyone doubted the parallels between the modern office environment and a security state, the NSW Government just opened a new high security prison in Cessnock in the Hunter Valley. The facility has 400 beds in dormitory pods. The radical innovation of the new facility, which has been borrowed from Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, is that it has done away with cell walls and with privacy. Anyone will recognise the formats of those pods as cubicle arrays in an open plan office.

Photo Credit: ABC News

As with any open plan office, the facility has no privacy and a focus on monitoring of behaviour.

Correctional officers monitor inmates around the clock from first-floor corridors overlooking the pods and with infra-red cameras for night monitoring; and Immediate Action Team officers are stationed within the facility to provide a 24/7 response to critical incidents. – Cessnock Advertiser

A key focus of the new facility is to use the new openness and flexible spaces to foster interaction and relationships between inmates.  From sensory deprivation, the inmates will now need deal with an excess of human interaction

“For many that is culture change. The previous thinking has been minimal interaction with inmates.” – Newcastle Herald

The pitch is not that different from co-working giant, WeWork’s own residential facilities, WeLive. Of course, WeLive facilities have a colour scheme that includes colours other than grey.

From mailrooms and laundry rooms that double as bars and event spaces to communal kitchens, roof decks, and hot tubs, WeLive challenges traditional apartment living through physical spaces that foster meaningful relationships. Life is better when we are part of something greater than ourselves. Whether short term or long term, WeLive has flexible options designed to meet your needs.

Employee Engagement is the focus of the new office. Productive use of time will be carefully managed in this new open plan environment.  Employees will be guaranteed 5 hours of productive work, which is more than most open plan environments:

The inmates’ days have been carefully structured in a way that focuses on intense participation and access to education, employment, programs and activities. – Cessnock Advertiser

Recruitment processes for this new office will also be intensive to ensure an appropriate cultural fit and to sustain the desired levels of engagement in a vibrant collaborative culture. Like any good employee fit process, those who fail the test are subject to exile but we won’t discuss where.

Mr Severin said inmates will be carefully screened – and if they don’t fit the profile, will be placed elsewhere. – Cessnock Advertiser

The real rationale for the new office appears to be its low cost and rapid construction. Never let real human relationships interfere with a low cost property strategy.

It is only a matter of time before the innovations in Cessnock cross back into our living and working. Expect to see technology giants leading the way removing flexible working, requiring their employees to use their working for greater productivity and to restore human relationships.  Is it such a distant step to living facilities in a subtle elegant shade of metallic grey? or to WeWork’s laundry room bars? We will just need to remember that privacy terms and conditions apply and this lifestyle will be available to only approved applicants.

Simon Terry will be speaking at Disrupt Sydney 2018 to elaborate on these themes in his talk “If your company was a country, would you live there?”

Slow down to ensure your productivity. There is such a thing as being too fast to be effective. There is also a danger that speed will mean you miss more important relationship signals.

Unsafe at Speed

I started a conversation on twitter this week with a reflection on how productivity is being sapped by a culture of continuous activity and the relentless pace of business.

As Harold Jarche points out reflection and learning are the first things to go as we get busy. I also find many people don’t have the time to do their jobs, engage with others or move projects forward because they are so tied to a daily schedule of meetings and activities.

The power of working in more agile ways is that it forces us to understand what done means for a piece of work. There are lots of meetings, documents and other busy activities that don’t advance a piece of work towards done. Going faster and doing more of these things is just destroying productivity.

Unsafe at Any Speed

Working without time for learning and reflection, is dangerous because it threatens our relationships, our productivity and the effectiveness of others. We don’t work alone. Lack of learning and reflection impacts those around us.

After that twitter post, I received a call in the middle of a busy day. I dove into discussing the presumed topic of the call. I was enthusiastic, keen to get the call done and talking quickly. After about 5 minutes of chatter, I paused for breath and that pause helped me to realise that the other person wasn’t particularly engaged. My enthusiasm seemed to be draining them. Worse still, I realised their tone of voice suggested something else was on their mind. I had been prattling on when clearly they had called to discuss a more difficult topic.

Reflection is one thing. The next step is also making the time to do something different with that insight. If we are too busy, we can put off implementing the insight until later, if ever.

When I stopped prattling, I asked then and there if they were OK.  That simple question led to a much more meaningful and valuable conversation. We ended up discussing the challenges of modern work life, career struggles, motivation and the need to talk to others when you are struggling with symptoms of depression. If I hadn’t stopped my self-absorbed activity and reflected on the other participant in the conversation, then a valuable opportunity for us to help each other would have been missed.

Make the time in every interaction to check that others are OK

We need time for reflection and learning because we don’t work in networks of transactions with widgets. We work in networks of relationships with real complex and highly adaptive human beings. Being alert and allowing space for those relationships to develop enables our productivity and collective success.

Digital transformation in health, care and disability is delivering new customer and provider experiences. A focus on design of customer experiences is important, but equally important is leveraging the digital potential of provider platforms. Government and private schemes need to consider both portals and platforms in designing their claim and payment approach for providers.

Designing Experiences for all Stakeholders

Design thinking is now a standard part of any digital transformation project, especially in health and care. We now understand the value of taking the stakeholder’s perspective as we shape new digital interactions. These insights can deliver significant benefits from new, more flexible processes and interactions.

Choice and control requires three parties to collaborate. While schemes are focused on delivering choice and control to consumers by designing new customer experiences, enabling providers to support choice and control in health and care is equally important to achieve the policy outcomes. A design that does not cater to providers by delivering easy and certain claim and payment, will fail to deliver its goals.

Choice and control for consumers = Creating new customer experiences + Enabling providers

Many payers use portals for consumers and providers to manage transparency of their funding and payment of their claims. Portals force everyone through a dedicated app, website or digital channels. The payer has full control of the experience and can design it to suit its needs and preferred experiences, but they have lost the flexibility consumers and providers need.

At LanternPay we see an open multi-scheme platform is a better way to deliver choice and control in health and care. A multi-scheme platform like LanternPay offers simplicity that reduces costs for all participants and integration with the wider ecosystem of health and care solutions.

A platform approach also means providers and consumers can interact in the ways that best suit them. LanternPay does not dictate a single channel and seeks to integrate with a range of customer and provider solutions. This way the choice extends to where each party prefers to transact. For example, there is a rich and vibrant market of consumer search and booking applications, a scheme that is looking to bring transparency and choice to the market can launch its own to compete and gain a share of the market or it can leverage a platform to deliver an experience to its customers wherever they are.

Bringing Provider Focus to Consumer Experience

Design thinking challenges us to put ourselves in the shoes of each stakeholder and that means making choices to suit the breadth of consumer and provider needs. The best digital experience is not always the one that fits in a single channel. This is particularly the case for providers, whose needs are often given less attention.

When we put ourselves in the shoes of a consumer or a provider, we see the hidden costs of portals. Consider a physiotherapist starting their day by delivering care to a Transport Accident Commission of Victoria client at 9am. Their appointments that include a mix of private patients, worker’s compensation patients and several other government schemes. Given a typical health or care provider can deal with many schemes in a single day, adapting invoicing to each scheme’s unique payment approach can be costly, complex and filled with uncertainty. In addition, providers often must bear the challenge of explaining the payment processes to the consumer, which can mean they bear the brunt of customer frustrations.

The scheme controls its interactions to suit its needs. Consumers and providers need to go to the portal and manage the process for that scheme. This results in inconvenience and cost. Also, winning adoption for new processes can be challenging. Scheme portals need to invest in marketing and communication activities to win provider adoption. Given the many demands on provider system vendors for integration, scheme portals often fail to deliver integrated solutions that fit into providers’ standard business processes.

Providers are in the business of providing care, not adapting to multiple claiming portals. If the complexity or cost to the provider is too great, providers will either stop providing services to that scheme or increase charges to cover the extra costs. Many government schemes already see the costs of small pools of providers and high service costs. Consumer choice and control is meant to help address these issues. Imposing costs and complexity on providers in the claiming process will directly impact the benefits of consumer choice and control.

Platforms bring a diversity and volume of ready-to-transact providers to a scheme. Providers are familiar with the standard claiming processes and integrations in place make that an easier part of their business. At LanternPay, we have been able to work with schemes to deliver rapid provider claiming pilots with schemes. These pilots easily demonstrate the value of bringing providers to payers and enabling consumers to take control of their care in new ways.

The market for health and care is complex. No one solution is likely to meet the needs of all consumers, providers and payers. At LanternPay, we believe a focus on design thinking requires payers to consider the value of both portals and platforms. In the next post, I will look at the added value that platforms can bring in enabling access for payers to an ecosystem of innovation.

Simon Terry is the Head of Markets of LanternPay. LanternPay is an open cloud-based claim payment platform designed to standardise claim payments across the health, care, disability, insurance and ageing sectors. 

Startups operate effectively with less data and more uncertainty because they plan to learn and adapt.

When you work at the juncture of startups and large corporates, one difference is stark. Large corporates need much greater certainty to make decisions. Startups make decisions at much lower confidence levels.

A large part of the slow response of large organisations is the demand for certainty in decision making. Large corporates always need more information. For example, you don’t need to demonstrate the potential for a positive return, you need to calculate that return exactly and defend every assumption and element of the plan to win support.

Startups realise that businesses are made in the market, not in ever greater piles of data and better spreadsheets. Startups deliberately make decisions with less information because they know the best information comes from experimenting, doing and adapting. Wait too long and your beautiful data will be wasted as the opportunity closes or the data is out of date.

Corporates make decisions on the basis it is a one and only chance to decide. It has to be perfect. Most decisions aren’t actually irreversible or final.

Startups know the decision is imperfect. It always will be. The point of the decision is to start the process to learn and adapt based on the lessons from doing. Nobody learns anything new around a board table.

Making decisions with less than perfect information is a big challenge when you are used to the model of decision making in large corporates. However, just like the transition from perfect messages to working out loud, the change to less certainty and adaptation is a liberating one.

We can all benefit from being a little less certain and more open to learn.

Fintech startups are experiencing rapid growth and increasingly playing a role as enabling new capability and innovation for traditional financial services players. I recently spoke with Macquarie about the need for fintechs to understand their social purpose. This article expands on those comments.

The Social Licence of Finance

All forms of finance depend on a social licence. There are strict regulatory regimes in place for banking, wealth management, superannuation and pensions, insurance and other forms of finance. Importantly these regimes are just one part of supporting a social licence and the support of wider stakeholders. In many cases the regulation exists to enable wider community support or has been created to rectify loss of community trust in the finance industry. The finance industry complains about the burden of regulation but much of this regulation has been created in crisis or because of the danger of a rapid loss of trust in the industry. As the old quote goes

“trust arrives on a tortoise and leaves on a horse”

When community support and trust falls, all forms of finance quickly experience business risk, operational and existential issues. We only need look at our recent experience of the Global Financial Crisis or the stories of the Australian Banking Royal Commission to understand the degree to which community frustration and real business issues can arise when financial services players do not live up to social expectations.

The social licence exist because finance fulfils social purposes. Finance is an enabler of other business, personal and social activity. The benefit of finance in enabling or reducing the risk of that activity is key. When the finance industry’s attention shifts to money alone, it is losing its social purpose and that social licence is in jeopardy.

The Social Licence for Fintechs

Fintechs are the newer players in the finance industry. In some sectors of the wide range of fintech innovation, like crowd funding and blockchain, regulatory regimes are only now being created to catch up with the change they have created. In other parts of the fintech landscape, like attacker banks or new intermediaries, the goals of fintechs are to actively disrupt the approaches and practices of existing finance industry players. With a large, global addressable market, the daily challenges of innovation and a goal of disruption, social licences to operate may not always be a startup’s first consideration.

However, all fintechs must remember that the social licence that applies to finance applies equally to them. The nature of the finance industry is such that even the most disruptive of fintechs will depend on the community’s trust and confidence in the sector. More importantly, most fintechs depend on collaboration and partnerships across an ecosystem of innovation that includes other fintech startups but also includes partnerships with large financial services players. Some of the greatest and quickest value fintechs can bring is helping large financial services players to reach new markets or transform themselves with new ways of working or interacting with stakeholders.

The Role of Social Purpose for Fintechs

A social licence exists because a business fulfils a social purpose. Every fintech should challenge itself to understand how its business enables a social benefit to others beyond the organisation. Like the finance industry as a whole, fintech exist enable others. Their ongoing social licence depends on being able to clearly express a social purpose. Clever rent seeking, speculation or technology is not enough to enable a fintech to survive, let alone succeed.

At LanternPay, we have a clear social purpose and it is at the heart of our claim and payment platform – we enable consumer choice and control in healthcare, aged care and disability. We believe that giving consumer’s choice and control will improve their experiences of healthcare, agedcare and disability and create platforms for the sustainability of those important industries. Our platform can help hardworking providers of care to focus on care provision and remove the administrative paperwork of multiple different payment processes for different schemes. We can deliver efficiency This purpose guides how we develop our platform, how we price our service and how we operate. This purpose has been key to winning the support of consumers, providers, government payers and a range of other partners as we grow. Importantly, our social purpose engages all our employees, many of whom have direct personal or family experience of the benefits of choice and control in care. Growing a new two-sided platform in a rapidly changing health, aged care and disability industries is not easy work, our social purpose is an important ongoing part of our growth.

Fintech startups are a critical part of the future evolution of the finance industry and realising new capabilities for society as a whole. Fintechs need to understand their social licence to operate and support it with a clear social purpose.