Writing

I was honoured this week to have the opportunity to help launch my Change Agent Worldwide colleague Jennifer Frahm’s book, Conversations of Change.  The book was launched along with Lena Ross’s book, Hacking for Agile Change.

I contributed an introduction and an interview to Jen’s book and I think it is an important practical guide to change for any manager. I read Lena’s book too and I have already applied some of the hacks in my work.

Email is not the place to start. Stop hanging the case for the future of work all only on email. Meetings are a far better place for changing work behaviours.

Email is Bad But It Isn’t Going Soon

The way email is used in business now is terrible and mostly unnecessary. Many people have demonstrated that there are better ways to manage than email. Luis Suarez has has demonstrated his ‘no email’ approach to work that it is both possible to remove email and more effective. However, his example is unlikely to be widely followed soon.

Email practices continue and are tolerated by organisations and workers.  It is hard to see email disappearing because email meets some simple work that remain in the culture of most workplaces. These practices relate largely to the way organisations manage accountability and tasks. We might not endorse the following practices for many reasons but they aren’t going away until we first change the accountability and performance cultures in our organizations:

• Expectation of delivery (though not of reading or understanding or action)
• Allocation of responsibility to others (though usually badly or for the wrong reasons)
• A production line experience to create the satisfaction of a sense of work and the distraction of the new (not always a positive and a source of much of the overwhelming feeling of email)
• A form of authentication, confirmation or notice (also subject to abuse and the target of many hacking schemes)
• A low-touch asynchronous form of interaction that does not necessarily demand attention or a response (not always an ideal interaction pattern to choose)

We can keep up the fight to improve email practices, but it is holding change back to make the change in email practices the starting point for new ways of working.

Start Fixing Meetings Instead

We spend hours a day doing pointless email, but mostly we do email alone.  Even greater productive potential is wasted in bad meetings. Every diary has them. Many people live in back to back meetings with no time for preparation, reflection or more importantly action. Worse still, their presence in those meetings traps others into feeling like they need to attend too.

We can rebuild the meeting culture of an organisation quickly and with the active support of workers. Aaron Dignan has described the value of starting with a clean slate in building a new organizational tempo around meetings.  We can use the chats, conversations and collaborations concepts to rethink the purposes and work of our meetings and choose better tools to manage those interactions instead. Even a little exposure to better formats of meetings and better tools for interactions is likely to generate converts and a groundswell of support as people feel more productive, have better interactions and importantly gain back time.

Many of the bad habits that drive use of email above are driven by ineffective conversations in organizations.  They are created by bad meetings that don’t achieve anything or advance the work of the organizations.  Bad meetings leave the inevitable conflicts of performance to seethe and remain unresolved. You don’t need ‘CYA’ emails when the meetings and interactions of the organization are working effectively, you are working and managing tasks transparently and when the focus of performance is on accountability to achieve purpose.

The email culture of organisations will change in time. We can each work to improve our individual email practices.  If we want to show the collective benefits of new work practices, start by changing meetings.

On the weekend I came across multiple pieces of ‘thought leadership‘ describing the ideal time to wake up for a successful life. One even prompted an absurd thread where people were bidding their ever earlier waking times like the ‘Four Yorkshiremen’ of Monty Python. In a recent discussion of this phenomenon, Harold Jarche highlighted that the evidence on the work practices of successful people is so varied that you can say “Everyone is different”.  The discussion prompted this response in me:

The phenomenon of personal practice masquerading as thought leadership is widespread, particularly from the rich, famous and successful. So why do we see so many successful thought leaders come up with this kind of advice:

• Conventional Wisdom: If you want your advice to be popular and widely shared, it helps if it aligns to conventional wisdom. Nobody wants to be seen to be lazy and the ‘early bird gets the worm’. So, of course, success ‘must’ be driven by rising early.
• Generalising the Specific: Some people benefit from an early start. If you do and you succeeded, it can be easy to assume everyone just needs to copy your methods. You may even be quite judgmental about those who don’t follow your lead. Diversity means what works for you doesn’t work for everyone else.
• A Passion for Proxies: Discipline, mastery and practice are keys to success but they don’t sound easy or simple. For a thought leader, it’s far easier to advocate a simple hack as a proxy. Rising early to get to work is a good proxy for discipline and practice as it is one time of day to practice with little interruption. Focus on the discipline, mastery and practice, not the proxy of rising time.
• Small Commitments: Success takes focus and commitment. Psychological experimentation has shown that small commitments can have wide impacts on people’s perceptions of themselves. Small commitments can be a great place to start building focus and discipline. Waking at a particular time of day is a commitment but anything that signals a meaningful ongoing change could substitute.
• After-the-Fact Rationalisation: For many who succeed in life, success can be a mystery or even a source of ongoing self-doubt. When asked to explain a record of success, it is often easier, and more modest, to settle on some simple practice like a waking time.
• Ego over Relationships: ‘My networks helped me to succeed’ is rarely considered a heroic story of success. Many successful people actively or inadvertently downplay the role that their networks and supporters play in their success.  A mentor may fit in the heroes journey but there is rarely a cast of thousands helping the hero along. A heroic individual action like waking up in the cold dawn hours seems a more fitting contribution to the story than thousands of hours of conversation.
• Confusing Chance and Strategy: Much of success is luck or timing (or privilege). Successful people can find it hard to accept that they just happened to be in ‘the right place at the right time”. There is a temptation to have a set of rules of advice that explains their success and suggests others can replicate the outcomes.
• Talking over Doing: Only your family knows what time you really get up. Only they should care. Stop talking about it. Success depends on what you do with your waking hours.  Focus your efforts there.

Last night I was part of a rich conversation about the changing nature of work and the societal implications that was convened by the Catalyst Circle. There were many rich themes to explore in that conversation but one struck me with force:

How do we reconcile tensions of purpose in an API Economy?

The API Economy

As transactional costs decline on platforms and there is an increasing integration of the global economy, the Application Protocol Interface (‘API’) becomes the default form of interaction. APIs standardize the interactions with and between platforms to reduce the friction at interfaces. Not all APIs need be technology driven. Throughout history, temporary labour and gig economy platforms of all kinds standardize work, interactions, and labour to make transactions easier, supply greater, and workers comparable and fungible.

As the API Economy grows, smaller companies can operate as larger organizations by pulling on demand labour from these platforms.  Interactions and work that used to be managed within organizations boundaries are now managed by the API. Relationships can become more transactional and less bespoke. If you fail to fit the API, you won’t proceed further, an experience many are already encountering as job applicant management systems take over candidate screening.

Owning Our Purpose

We have always owned our own unique personal purpose.  However, large organizations and their culture of compliance have meant many people have left the management of collective purpose to others.  They have gone along with the needs of the organizational purpose and failed to consider their own.  Many employees have left considering the everyday tensions within purpose to other leaders to consider and resolve.

In an API economy, purpose is not part of the transaction dynamics. The hirer has theirs. You need to manage your own.  Conflicts or tensions of purpose don’t enter into the equation. You take work that fulfills your personal purpose as you see it and you let the rest go. Conflicts and tensions of purpose are friction and will likely fall out of the system. The API does not care for your opinion of a better way to work.

We can protect our own execution of our personal purpose in this environment. Everyone is clearly accountable to manage themselves in a transactional market that operates in this way. What is at risk is the creative leadership of collective purpose. An API Economy will produce optimal outcomes if the forces of individual purpose create an optimal collective outcome as people pursue their own agendas. The ‘invisible hand’ can do much, but it is also clear from history that we have had to supplement market outcomes with other structures to address uncertainty and manage market breakdowns.

Creative Tensions of Purpose

Every personal purpose has its own uncertainties and tensions. Scale these up at a collective level in an organization and one of the key roles of a leader is to keep a vibrant conversation and action going on the tensions between individual and collective purpose. Leaders help communities of people reconcile the tensions of purpose in creative ways.

An API excludes these tensions. Instead of the voice of employees discussing their opinions, an API supplies supply for a particular purpose. An absence of an adequate supply is a signal but it is a blunt one. Recent history of platform models suggests that these signals can be obscured by many factors: growth, hype, new labour market entrants, organizational culture or other dynamics.

As we move into these transactional models of work in an API Economy, the role of leaders will increasingly to be exploring these creative tensions of purpose beyond the boundaries of the organization.  The conversations you had with employees will now be had with your labour market community on the platform.  You can choose to treat these individuals as a transactional market, but you will surrender rich information and new levers of motivation. Engage these workers as a community and you will have new opportunities. Leaders will need to convene, navigate and engage these communities to learn and to adapt the business to new value opportunities that are revealed by the creative tensions of purpose within that external community.  These tensions will expose organizations to even wider communities of stakeholders. Treat all of these communities transactionally, relying only on your APIs, and you will miss business & social opportunities to create value.

 

Six months ago, I wrote a post that both focused and previewed of the work that I planned to do for 2017 with clients. This post reviews this work plan, gathers some lessons from the last 7 months of work and highlights some additional themes that have arisen as I have worked through these challenges. For those disinclined to read the prior post, this infographic summarizes the major themes:

Lessons from 7 Months of Practice:

• This story still holds: Working Out Loud is bigger than I expected with John Stepper’s continued success in Germany leading a global movement. Personal Knowledge Mastery is smaller than it should be but Harold Jarche’s work continues to grow. Agile is discussed everywhere and people are experiencing the role of learning by doing as a result. New models of leadership are key to sustaining change and I would rank this as an area that needs greater priority of investment & practice in organizations. If one thing is holding organizations back in the digital workplace, it is not employee engagement, it is the executive leadership of digital change.
• A tighter story of the digital transformation of work: The last post highlighted the history and future of digital to set some context for how work is changing. I’ve found that too much context for the busy executives who shape digital workplace strategy. This simpler single image captures the major themes and resonates quickly.
  
• Focusing on the Future of HR: In working with organizations on these themes, it has become clear that the Human Resources teams need help to shape their new role both in leading this work and in the ongoing function of HR as work is changing. The Ulrich model of HR remains dominant but it is designed for an area of stable industrial processes. Working with a number of clients, I have found that helping to set a strategy for HR and refocus the capabilities of HR for a new more agile operating model is an important part of any transformation.
• From Employee Experience to People Experience:  This work on the Future of HR has prompted some deeper dives into the work underway as Employee Experience becomes People Experience. People Experience is on the rise as the term and its strong focus on the digital transformation of HR spreads out from Silicon Valley start-ups. Much of the focus on the People Experience theme to date revolves around automation and design of people journeys. These are important areas of work (and lucrative consulting gigs) but I have seen a similar pattern before in the early days of Customer Experience in the 1990s. Without clear strategies, use cases and a focus on operational and financial sustainability of the new experiences, the new experiences will fade away having failed to achieve their outcomes. Today some People Experience is just outsourcing & other projects are pretty window dressing. People experience needs to balance business, operational and design goals for sustained success. Not just a story of digital automation, real innovation is required.
• The Return of the ESN: Enterprise Social Networks are back. Workplace by Facebook’s launch has reinvented the role of the category and organizations are more clearly seeing the distinction between chat, enterprise conversations, and collaboration. Yammer is growing strongly and both platforms continue to produce great case studies. Organizations are increasingly understanding the need to be able to leverage their wirearchies and ESNs are a key digital workplace tool for greater collaboration and strategic value.
• Analytics: Business runs on measurement. If you are not measuring your transformation you are missing out. Measurement and data analytics across the realm of digital transformation continue to be of importance in shaping the capture of value. Swoop Analytics launched a great e-book on measuring the Collaboration Value Maturity Model.

The New Work Ahead

The Roadmap set for 2017 was an ambitious one. For a solo consultant, even with the support of my colleagues in Change Agents Worldwide, this is more like a 5-year plan than a one-year work plan. However, I think of it as a product backlog and I remain keen to work and learn in each of the areas on that backlog.

Here’s what I am adding to that backlog now as new challenges:

• Degrees of Freedom: There is a range of practices and cultural expectations that are enablers for ongoing digital transformation. These ‘degrees of freedom’ are how traditional organizations can be included in and benefit from the new models of work that are often seen as being constrained to start-ups and new green fields ventures. More to come on this theme.
• Cross-Discipline Collaboration: HR disciplines are full of silos: Employee Communications, Collaboration, Culture, Leadership, Learning and so on. The digital disciplines are equally in danger of becoming siloed as digital customer service, digital marketing, design, agile project management, agile change and so on grow throughout organizations. Successful organizations work at the intersections of these disciplines and create their own vibrant culture of collaboration. There is no one discipline to unite them all and we need to avoid the religious wars of doctrinal disciples. We need neo-generalist practitioners to lead us forward to mastery.
• Storytelling: Social learning is critical to the future of digital workplaces. Can you discuss social learning with busy executives and get meaningful traction? Rarely. We need new models of advocacy for much of the future of work agenda and it begins not with thought leadership but with the hard yards of practice and new stories to tell.
• Resilience, Purpose, and Grit: Changing Work is Hard. We need our champions to stay in the fight when they may prefer to surrender to the antibodies of culture. Building resilience, purpose, and grit at an individual and a collective level in organizations matters.

 

 

Politely trash thought leadership and you get a big reaction of support. You will also discover a lot of similar frustration. However, these responses highlight how closely the message skirts the line of being merely entertaining thought leadership (a TEDX talk awaits me somewhere). If we are to stay true to the message of that post, we move beyond thought leadership when we share stories of the benefits of the real practice of change to inspire others. This is critically important in the domain of my work, helping organizations change the way they work.

Selling New Work Practices

Much of the advocacy for new work practices is awful. This advocacy for future of work practices comes in three main forms today:

• Theory: There’s a theoretically better way to work
• Criticism: The way you are working now is awful: Stop and change
• Threat: The end of the world is coming and you need to change your work

I recognize these three arguments because I have used variations of them at length in the blog.  Much of this advocacy has been ineffective in arguing for new approaches to collaboration, learning, innovation, and leadership.

David Wilkinson has written an elegant argument on the value of storytelling to help people understand the value of Evidence-Based Practice in Healthcare. The simple message of his post is that when we want to create change in practices we need to engage people with the challenges that matter to them, share stories of success and engage them to consider experiencing a change. Storytelling captures the human imagination and can make abstract change conversations credible, tangible and clear.

Let’s reconsider the three usual rationales in the light of David’s post:

• Theory:  The average busy worker responds to theory with a quick dismissal. The theory seems remote from their daily challenges. Their current work practices work well enough and who has time for the risk or the conscious incompetence of a new way.
• Criticism: Nobody responds well to criticism, express or implied. That’s, even more, the case when the criticism is based on an approach or view of the world that is not shared. If working entirely in email is all I know, all my peers do and my boss expects, how can it be wrong.
• Threat: Abstract threats don’t change behaviour. I don’t believe my way of working can save the company. I’m more concerned with the very real and immediate threat my boss will pose if I stand out and try to be different.

Tell A Real Story Instead

Instead of threatening, demeaning and bamboozling others, it is time for the advocates of change to take on more effective work of change. We need to build the practical stories of better ways of working and spread those widely to inspire new action in others.

Why does WOLWeek work? It is a time to share stories of working out loud. I’m not half as credible an advocate as the team at Bosch when they share their experience of working out loud.

How can we learn from David Wilkinson in advocating for new work practices:

Do the work of change: A great idea is not a story until it has been put into action. Be rightly sceptical of the stage and the usual suspects. Start with the work. Build case studies. Run experiments. Gather heroes and heroines of your future stories. Measure the real benefits.  This is the work that turns theory into story.

Recruit your cast: Stories have real people in them. Find communities that are doing the work. Get to know these people and work with them to spread the word.

Focus on outcomes, not the practice: The focus of your advocacy and the story needs to be the business and personal outcomes. Go on and on about a new practice and people will see you as a salesperson. Focus instead on what others need or want. Focus on the biggest end of the funnel. Business people are trained to care about outcomes.

Describe the experience: We don’t need 3 easy steps. To agree to change we need to hear a description of the detail of the experience from beginning to end. It has to make credible what work needs to be done, how hard it will be and most importantly what outcomes we can expect. Keep it real. Most importantly, don’t promise a rocket to the moon, if your story is really about a long hard slog through dark woods.

Set up the conflict: Include all the challenges and the opposition in your story. Listeners will recognise these difficulties. More importantly the conflict is what attracts human attention. Your story of a new experience will be better for the challenges.

Connect the story to today’s work:  A great story depends on a ‘willing suspension of disbelief”.  That relies on your story connecting in some way to something tangible about work today or more boldly the human condition. If the actors in your story, sound like they are superheroes or that they live in a sci-fi organization you aren’t changing anyone.

 

Thought Leadership has become a boom industry.  Claims to thought leadership are everywhere. Some days it seems every second profile on Linkedin, Twitter or some other social media or traditional media channel is someone claiming thought leadership.  The TEDX movement has expanded the audiences for tightly packaged and highly engaging content. Content marketing has created an impetus for many to pursue thought leadership as a driver of their business success. An explosion of self-publishing has meant your own book is almost a required calling card in industry.

We have also seen the beginnings of a pushback on this overabundance of thought leadership. Australia has seen the fall of the CEO of a large membership organization when questions were raised around the level of investment that organization made in his personal thought leadership profile. When consultancies start to sell the idea that anyone can be a thought leader on a $1m income in few easy steps it is tempting to think we have reached the ‘shoeshine boy’ moment in the boom of thought leadership.

So You Are A Thought Leader?

I hear thought leader a lot. I have even been called one. Occasionally I have tried to use it, but I have given up on that designation because whenever, I hear it I have this reaction:

Many people use thought leader to describe themselves because they share thoughts. Too often both their thought and their leadership is open to real question. Sharing ideas in networks is the start, but hardly the end of thought leadership.

We should demand our thought leaders have actual insights into change in the world and a capability to influence on how others will execute that change. David Session’ The Rise of the Thought Leader in the New Republic contrasts the thought leader with traditional public intellectuals based in academic research. In the article, Sessions quotes Daniel Drezner, that thought leaders

“develop their own singular lens to explain the world, and then proselytize that worldview to anyone within earshot.”

A cursory examination of thought leadership demonstrates the challenges of discovering actual insight. Much of thought leadership is a careful packaging of self-evident platitudes. Much of the research that underpins it does not stand up to scrutiny.  I have shelves of business books, both published and self-published, that use the same businesses as examples for propositions across widely divergent domains. Usually the thought leader has had no actual involvement in that organization, they are merely interpreting public reports and enhancing the reporting with their own interviews to confirm a hypothesis.

Leadership is more than a claim to a hierarchical superiority over others (which is itself suspect in the realm of thought). True leadership is inspiring others to act for their betterment and the world’s by engaging with their drives and purposes. Leaders are not just visionaries with catchy phrases and three step plans. Real leaders engage in the hard pragmatic and practical work of ongoing change. Unfortunately many thought leaders eschew complexity, doubt or challenge because it interferes with the marketing pitch.

Our use of leadership in this context also confuses social media followership and entertainment audience gathering with actual leadership of action. We define ourselves by those whose ideas we choose to embrace. We may consume large amounts of thought as entertainment in many media formats. We can follow others for years without the slightest chance of their thoughts influencing any tangible action on our part. A real movement is not an audience led by a prophet, it is a self-governing community of action.

Evidence that the thought leader has contributed an original insight, that the thought actually contributes to any outcomes claimed and that the idea is applicable more widely by others is less common than you might think. With a strong emphasis on entertainment and emotional appeal, much of thought leadership leaves you with the cloying sugary aftertaste of fast food.  So let’s talk briefly about TED.

Let’s Talk about TED

TED has created some of the major global thought leaders and magnified the influence of others through online videos. There are undoubtedly great TED talks that bring attention to critical issues in world affairs, share important scientific breakthroughs or help people to move forward with better approaches to their lives.  The power of law of viewership of these great examples has also sustained a long-tail of weaker thought leadership.

The success of TED and its expansion though TEDX have come to define what a thought leader looks like for many people. The format has been widely copied across conferences as it appeals to attention spans and delivers entertaining and highly engaging talks when properly produced. I’ve delivered a TEDX style talk and I am always asked for one by conference organizers. The TED talk format is the gold standard. The format has become so predictable that even TEDX has engaged in parody:

It has become trendy to blame TED for its optimism, its simplicity, its more dubious talks and predictions, its evangelism, and much more. The reality is that TED talks and the copies in other forums are entertainment. We consume this entertainment in our quest for easy digestible ‘thought leadership’ and many race to be a part of the format because of the demand for this entertainment. If you want to scale your media appearances, consulting revenues and followership on social media, a successful TEDX talk still offers a major step forward. TEDX can help you gather your own cluster of believers.

Let’s Move Beyond Thought Followership

In an era of ‘fake news’, thought followership is one of the biggest problems in society. Dividing our society up into rotating clusters of believers is doing little to help us to create workable civil societies into the future and to address major social issues. Our civil societies need real conversation and to find the working common ground of actual change. Echo chambers, simple messaging and entertaining bluster are in abundant supply. We need the practical leadership of change in our communities.

We need a new scepticism in the ideas we consume, who we follow and the entertainers we choose to promote.

Self-governing Communities of Action

Many of us have flirted with thought leadership because it seemed to offer opportunities of status, fame and influence. We want an opportunity to improve our hierarchical position and thought leadership seemed a way to make that happen. Sadly, the power law of thought leadership consumption means success is harder and a longer term proposition than its promoters will suggest.

A better way forward is purposeful action. We can each get the rewards of taking small steps to influence change directly ourselves. Our experiments will help us learn far more on what needs to be done. Connecting with others and collaborating on change provides opportunities for far greater social and emotional rewards and a much greater impact than thought leadership. We need to start to value community leadership as much if not more so than thought leadership. If anything is going to make our communities better, it is not thought leadership, it is small self-governing communities of action reaching out across society to make meaningful and purposeful change.

So what movement are you starting today? Just remember don’t start with the blogpost, the talk or the book, start with action.

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has. – Margaret Mead

The discussion of collaborative tools has resolved relatively quickly into two clear camps, the Slack/Microsoft Teams/Hipchat camp and the Yammer/Workplace by Facebook camp.  Debates are continuing as to which mode of interaction is the richer.  Stowe Boyd has described a difference between Work Chat (the former camp) and Work Media (the latter camp). Stowe’s preference is for Work Chat as he views it enables deeper work. Others have made equally strong arguments against chat as a mode of interaction.

My experience is that the success & value of any of these tools depends on three key elements: strategy, context and change support. No piece of technology is guaranteed to achieve any work outcome without considering the desired change in human behaviour in the current context of the organization.  The Collaboration Value Maturity model focus on how adoption maturity can be facilitated in any of these tools. My discussion of Chats, Conversations, and Collaborations is an effort to add another tool to the process of organizations considering their way forward.  This post will dive deeper into Chats, Conversations, and Collaborations as human interactions to highlight why they matter.

Interactions, Not Tools

This post will focus on human interactions, not the tools. Why? Changing the human interactions is what delivers the value.  We need to keep this clear as we target changes in behaviour and we consider workplaces that increasing have multiple platforms (& passionate advocates for each platform).  The role of a community manager in shaping the strategic value of collaboration in the organization is to be able to navigate all these platforms and to help the users of each to maximize the value of their work collaboration needs.  This is an exercise in coaching the human interaction of collaboration, not platform advocacy. If you don’t know what you want, you can’t shape the interactions that way.

No tool is focused on one form of interaction, but each is better suited to facilitate one mode. You can easily chat in Slack or Teams. They are chat platforms. You can carry out a conversation too, but you will have to deal with the interruptions of other colleagues chats and the fast moving stream of messages. You can chat in both Yammer and Workplace, but both tools endeavour to push instant messaging style interactions to other channels to reduce noise and handle chats greater demand for velocity.

We also use these interaction patterns in other forms of technology and other interactions around the workplace. Understanding the different roles and value of chats, conversations and collaboration can help us be more effective in the way we use text messaging, email, meetings and workshops in our organisations.

Chats vs Conversations – Confirmation, Context, and Coaching

I have described Chats as ‘Shared Information” and Conversations as “Shared Understanding”  Chris Slemp recently asked me to clarify this distinction noting that to many a difference between information and understanding might sound like ‘splitting hairs’. As a long term practitioner in collaboration, a deep thinker on how collaboration can create value and how the different platforms are better used I always value Chris’ insights. I agreed with Chris that the distinction is a fine one and that in our action-oriented organisational work cultures we are not used to reflecting on how we work and what makes our work more effective. Any thing that smacks of philosophy or models of thought is usually disparaged as being impractical and a waste of time.

Here’s how I explained the difference:

I can show you the data that climate is changing. That is ‘Shared information’. If you still believe it’s not an issue there’s no Shared Understanding. (If that topic stirs too many political issues or debate, substitute ‘the project is behind its burn down’. It works just the same)

Just because I transmit information doesn’t mean it is received and certainly doesn’t guarantee it is understood. We need shared context to interpret communication effectively and we also need to be able to navigate our own biases, distractions, worldviews and priorities to understand others. Choices of channels, relationships and available feedback loops. influence our perceptions and processing of any information. In our digital age, the idea of rapid fire exchange of information between humans is an appealing and ever present one. Too often we fall victim to the view that humans are like computers and will process each new piece of data immediately on receipt. George Bernard Shaw supposedly remarked

‘The single greatest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place”

As an aside, in information theory terms a Conversation is probably better described as seeking to achieve ‘shared knowledge’, where knowledge is when information becomes an actionable pattern, but that is an even more finicky technical distinction for most people. Understanding the distinction between data, information & knowledge distinction remains an under used concept and reflects the extent to which information theory and knowledge management have fallen from favour. In an era of ‘fake news’, we may be tempted to reconsider this.

Chris raised the following great example in our discussion of how we innately understand the need to navigate different patterns of interaction to achieve meaningful outcomes:

So, similar to people wanting to take email exchanges that go on too long into a face to face meeting, you’re positing that chat is for all the quick little exchanges we need in order to get our shared work done, and anything “meaty” needs be escalated to a forum. Conversely, the weightier matters were previously ironed out in a forum, and the picky details (information) are exchanged in chat.

Email is terrible for shared understanding because when we read we’re not forced to confront our biases and worldview. For example, it takes a whole cycle of email to attempt to correct me on a view and I will inherently resist ‘correction’. Email does not offer a relationship to keep me engaged in the discussion long enough to see my error. When I converse with another I’ve got a greater chance of having differences understood, exposed and explored. My experience is that forums do this better than email & chat tools. Partly this is an outcome of threaded discussions with a slower velocity and higher context. Seeing a conversation in the context of all of its information helps me find to find a shared understanding with others.  Text and chat appear in my context and are often shorn of supporting information or relationships. This can lead to confusion or misunderstanding when language is flat, concise and devoid of tone.

It’s too common for people to read email, text or chat and not get the information expected by the sender. Think of the classic CYA ‘everything’s going well but..’ email. So many times the recipient comes back later and says ‘how could this happen? you sent me an email telling me everything was ok’. The sender says ‘I was reassuring you before I highlighted an issue’. We chat to confirm our expectations. We discuss to explore our understanding.

However, one additional benefits of the conversation forum is transparency.  Transparency of lack of shared understanding invite others to coach the conversation. Some times third parties have a critical insight to bring people together in shared understanding or can better see the dysfunction. I have seen many debates in collaboration platforms where two opposing opinions could not find reconciliation until a third party joined in that group or thread to supply a missing part of context or to help clarify the language of one of the participants.

A Deeper Reflection on Collaboration

Talk is cheap. Doing is where the value gets created. If your collaboration platform is just about chats and conversations, then your senior executives will get bored and seek a better way.

Where most collaboration platforms fall short is that the organisation has not defined the value to be created and maintained an expectation that the discussion on the platform will advance the real work of the organisation.  Discussing abstract capitalized nouns, like innovation, digital transformation, quality, or employee engagement, can seem valuable. A richer conversation within your organisation and greater transparency will help your organisations performance. What is far more valuable is when the collaboration platform is the vehicle for the work of the organization and enables employees to lead change.

The Collaboration Maturity Model highlights the tipping point when this work begins.  The tipping point begins when employees move beyond just sharing information.  When employees begin to see the collaboration platform as a vehicle to solve work issues or to create new ways of working, the beginnings of change and innovation.

Some of our commonest issues in organizations are simple issues of misalignment and misundertanding.  Two processes don’t align. Two teams goals don’t enable coordination of their outcomes. The current targets no longer connect to the strategic outcomes sought. Solving these issues can be as simple as a conversation to highlight the issue and agree changes to fix it.  However, more commonly there is a project of multiple individuals and teams to make the change happen.

Collaboration also starts to offer organizations new models of work that fundamentally change the traditional linear process of production along value chains that cut across silos. We are not adding a layer of conversation on top of work. Collaboration offers new ways of working. Crowdsourcing, co-creation, agile methods of work, design thinking and more approaches enable teams to rethink each step in their process, turning interaction, feedback and priority setting from a one-off process to a continuous adaptation.  All the stakeholders can be a part of the process as it develops through iteration.

Even more radically collaboration enables organisations to let employees explore greater autonomy in the achievement of goals.  The autonomy is safely underpinned by transparency of the work underway, clear networks of relationships to support the employee and a sense of shared purpose to facilitate the new interactions. Leadership in this context shifts from planning, motivating and managing the change to inspiring, coaching and shaping the employee’s work and the outcomes.  In this context, collaboration offers organizations a new way to plan, not for specific tasks and outcomes, but for the emergence of new strategic value.