Writing

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.

We have reached a time when the release of a book on social approaches to business is almost unremarkable. Last month saw the publication of Social Technologies in Business: Connect | Share | Lead created by Isabel De Clercq. Having been a participant in the process of this book, come to know, respect, and admire all the contributors and contributed to three of the essays in this book, I am an enthusiastic fan of the book. With far too much bias to claim objectivity, rather than review the book, I will discuss three key themes that come out from my reading of the contributions overall.

The Value of Working Out Loud

This book is a testimony to the value of working out loud.  Naturally, given the focus on social technology, working out loud is woven throughout the essays in the book, but it is also a strong example of the value of practitioners working out loud. The pieces are by practitioners and focus on practically sharing the challenges and lessons won in a concise & engaging style. Whether it is how to convince management, how to lead in social or practical tips to win adoption and value the book is full of rich detail that other practitioners can use. Many of the pieces are collaborations of the perspectives of multiple contributors.  Not all the authors agree and these pieces sizzle with the interplay of ideas still developing.  That many of the contributors met through sharing on Twitter and other social communities are reflected in the strength of the shared themes throughout the book.

Digital Transformation is Human Transformation

Again and again, the authors return to the theme that an effective digital business is one that uses digital tools to enable more from its human employees.  Digital transformation requires focus on the change in human behaviour to see the benefits of new ways of working by employees. Engaging purpose, building capabilities and supporting this change is work we will be doing for years to come. Social and digital technologies are built into our systems, processes, and approach to work now. The challenge still is to help people and organisations to get the value of these tools through change.

Change Takes Leaders and Everyone Can Lead in Networks

The networks created by social technologies in business enable new models of leadership. We are no longer entirely dependent on the top of the hierarchy to guide and shape change. It certainly helps to have senior management support for any transformation, but networks have the ability to empower employees and to surface the change agents in their midst.  The organisations and the case studies in the book highlight the value of enabling change agents to experiment, adapt and learn with the support of peers.  There’s also more than enough room in these networks for a little fun and the creation of transformative business value by harnessing the potential of people throughout the organisation.

Thanks to the many contributors to the book for their generosity and time in sharing ideas and stories.  Thanks to Alison Williams for her work editing the book and distilling the takeaways from the pieces.  Thanks especially to Isabel De Clercq for passion, her vision and her many efforts in bringing together the contributors to the book. Her handiwork is evident from the list of contributors, to the quality of the design and the diversity of topics covered.

 

Posters in Facebook Singapore’s foyer

Change Agents Worldwide is a Workplace Services partner for Facebook. On a recent visit to Singapore I visited Facebook’s offices and saw examples of their famous propaganda posters on culture. One of those messages is a critical issue in culture of any large organisation. 

Somebody Else’s Problem. 

Without leadership, the interplay of bureaucracy and silos builds learned helplessness in employees. Martin Seligman first described learned helplessness as when animals or people stop trying to avoid adverse stimuli. This phenomenon occurs when we experience repeated inescable shocks. 

Learned helplessness develops when our natural instincts to act are frustrated repeatedly. A bureaucractic and siloed organisations discourage employees from trying to make change. Change requires approval from some higher power or change requires the cooperation of someone else in their team or another silo (who has their own issues of competing priorities or requiring approvals to act). After repeated frustrations, employees can adopt the attitude that change is someone else’s problem. 

The Critical Fix

Nothing is somebody else’s problem. This mindset confuses responsibility for doing the work of fix with accountability to see a fix completed. Even in the most siloed and bureaucratic organisations, you may not be able to exercise the responsibility to do the work but you should retain accountability to see a discovered issue fixed. Denial of permission, budget or collaboration is an obstacle, not an excuse. 

Leaders need to help organisations to create a culture where the expectation is that problems will be fixed. The management of responsibility and accountability in the organisation must enable and encourage employees to fix issues. The way to avoid learned helplessness is for leaders to role model the way forward and break the inescapable patterns. 

Much of my career I felt I was an amateur. Because I changed industry and field often, I worked in environments where others had deeper and more specialised expertise. I had fallen into the common trap of confusing generalism and amateurism. A society that venerates specialism treats anything less than a dedicated single specialism as unprofessional. The Martin and Mikkelsen’s book The Neo-Generalist helped me understand the role of a Neo-Generalist and the unique value that I brought to those roles.  Reading Steven Pressfield’s Turning Pro has helped me understand better the distinction between an amateur and a professional. This post explores these two important concepts for anyone who has diverse interests.

Amateur and Professional

Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art was a book I highly recommend to anyone looking to understand how to make a greater contribution in life. In this book he describes the battle against Resistance that artists face when they choose to tackle a creative endeavour. Resistance is all the fear and excuses we summon to get in the way of practice of our purpose and best work. The War of Art introduced the concept of Turning Pro, the moment when an artist determines to begin the consistence battle against Resistance and to create consistently.  His book Turning Pro, explores amateurism and professionalism in greater detail.

The distinction for Pressfield in Turning Pro is as follows:

“Each day, the professional understands, he will wake up facing the same demons, the same Resistance, the same self-sabotage, the same tendency to shadow activities and amateurism that he has always faced. The difference is he will not yield to them. He will have mastered them and continue to master them” (Note: Pressfield alternates gender in referring to the professional and amateur throughout his book)

I recognise this battle. My belief that I was an amateur in fields of professionals was one example of the Resistance. I was self-sabotaging my ability to contribute by demeaning my contributions before I had even made them.

The Quest for Mastery Distinguishes the Professional

The critical distinction is in the last line of the paragraph above: the professionals focus on mastery. The continued effort to learn and improve through practice is what distinguishes Pressfield’s professional from an amateur who yields to the distraction of Resistance.

My focus in my roles was always to learn more because I felt I was behind my more experienced and more specialised colleagues. When they may have felt content to settle into their expertise, I felt the need to push my practice and I felt the continuing tug of a Neo-generalist’s curiosity. The tug of mastery is that there is always a better way to practice.

The Advantage of the Neo-Generalist

In their book, Martin and Mikkelsen define a Neo-Generalist as follows

The neo-generalist is both specialist and generalist, often able to master multiple disciplines. We all carry within us the potential to specialise and generalise. Many of us are unwittingly eclectic, innately curious. There is a continuum between the extremes of specialism and generalism, a spectrum of possibilities. Where we stand on that continuum at a given point in time is governed by context.

Again the concept of mastery is key to the way that Martin and Mikkelsen see Neo-Generalism.  The Neo-Generalist no longer feels restrained by the arbitrary dichotomy of specialist or generalist.  The Neo-Generalist shifts as required between the domains, pursuing better mastery of practice in each context with the most relevant of their skills, whether a deep expertise or the breadth of their practice.  This fluidity of practice and the continuing curiosity and learning enables the Neo-Generalist to see potential where the domains of expertise overlap or a particular expertise ceases to run.

The intersection of Pressfield’s concept of Turning Pro and the discussion of mastery in the Neo-Generalist highlights an important point for any Neo-Generalist.  The personal commitment to mastery is what distinguishes a professional from the amateur. Neo-Generalists can overcome the resistance and self-doubt that comes from their diversity of interests when they recognise and embrace the role of mastery and continued learning in their work. Both books explore the shadows thrown by society and our own doubts. The need to continue to learn is not a disadvantage against a Specialist. A continued pursuit of mastery is an advantage for the Professional Neo-Generalist.

Be clear that amateurism and professionalism are not tied to the exercise of expertise. They are driven by a commitment to learning. Turning Pro is a defining moment for anyone Specialist, Generalist or Neo-Generalist.  Professionalism begins with an irrevocable commitment to pursue the practice of mastery.

 

Organizations that limit their ambition to employee communication miss the transformative nature of new collaboration patterns. An enterprise collaboration solution offers the opportunity for new two-way conversations with employees. Moving an organization from broadcast communication to two-way conversations with employees is an important change in the way employee communications occur. Don’t stop there.

Collaboration in your organization is about creating new ways of working together. In a complex and rapidly changing world, more work than ever is knowledge work and more work depends on the inputs and participation of others.  The priority is on learning together in many organizations. Collaboration is more than

Collaboration is more than a communication layer over the existing patterns of work. As shared work, collaboration is different to chats and to conversations. Collaboration involves people coming together to connect, to share, to solve and to innovate in new ways and to more effectively fulfill the organization’s purpose and employee’s personal purposes. Remember your organization creates no value talking internally. The value creation occurs when you come together to work to create value for your customers and other stakeholders outside.

Organizations need to investment in community management to help realize the strategic value of these new ways of working. Community management, whether by community managers, champions or leaders, is not just about facilitating a neat two-way conversation.  Community managers must play the roles of shaping the work, building community around key strategic priorities and creating the freedom to experiment, to change and to learn. Community management enables the transformational nature of collaboration platforms.

The demands on a modern organization mean that all organizations are looking for better effectiveness, improved customer experiences, more innovation and greater responsiveness. Two-way conversations with employees are important in this journey but more critical is enabling employees to lead change in the way they work every day. Collaboration enables the most effective, the fastest and the most innovative to lead change from every employee supported by the full capabilities of the organization.

Working Out Loud Week is from 5-11 June 2017.  Working Out Loud Week is a chance for a global community of practitioners to find new freedom to work together to practice sharing work in progress with relevant communities for learning and collaboration. The theme of this WOLWeek is ‘Contribute and Create Value’

Day 4: Share

In a digital workplace, much of the value that an employee can contribute and will receive depends on sharing: openness, transparency, better use of data, better use of knowledge, learning from peers, effective collaboration, greater autonomy, agile work practices and much more.  Working out loud is a key practice to get the work in process that we all have and make it visible and accessible for the rest of the organization.  That means you need to share your work.

You have a lot to share. Take your current email and make it available. Open up the contents of your C: drive. Share your calendar so that others can see what you have going on. Share your contact lists. Share your lesson from the day. Share your challenges, opportunities, and ideas.

Sharing doesn’t have to be big. You don’t have to share with the world. You don’t have to push the message to make sure other people notice. Find a place that has one or a few relevant people and lift your work and your challenges up where people can find them.

Your contributions will begin to create value for others immediately. Improving clarity and alignment, reducing rework, and helping people better understand what you have underway. You will find that the oppenness and generosity of sharing your work will draw others in to help and to learn from your work.

There is a vulnerability of sharing work that is not perfect or that is not finished. That vulnerability can feel threatening but it is also what makes your work more engaging to others. They can see your process of work and will respect your decisions to share, provided you are clear on your process of working out loud and respect them in your sharing.

Resources to assist you and your organisation with WOLWeek are available on WOLWeek.com. 

Source: #WOLWeek Day 4: Share

Working Out Loud Week is from 5-11 June 2017.  Working Out Loud Week is a chance for a global community of practitioners to find new freedom to work together to practice sharing work in progress with relevant communities for learning and collaboration. The theme of this WOLWeek is ‘Contribute and Create Value’

Day 3: Contribute

When we think of working out loud, our thoughts often go first to sharing. We begin with how our work can be shared with others. However, in the design of these five days of WOLWeek, we have put contribution before sharing.  The generosity of contribution is what turns a network into a community.  To share effectively and for mutual benefit, it helps to begin with generosity.

Our work is built on the foundation of our knowledge, our skills, our experiences and our place in the world. Everyone has this foundation to their work and each person’s set of capabilities and context is unique. We all have the ability to contribute our attention, capabilities, and context to the work of others.

Contributing generously to others builds our networks into communities. This develops relationships for future collaboration and learning.

We don’t need to be interesting to work out loud.  We have unique abilities to contribute to others.  We need to be interested in others and contribute to their work.

How can you show interest in the work of others? How can you recognise their efforts? How can you share your capabilities and context to advance their work?

Choose someone relevant to your work and make a contribution today.