Writing

Between People

There’s only one place collaboration happens in your organisation – between people.

Collaboration doesn’t just happen on your technology platform or in your activity based workplace. Collaboration happens wherever people come together to work. Collaboration is a human activity integral to work wherever it occurs.

Between Diverse People

Like the diverse people & work in your organisation, collaboration takes many forms. As an outcome of the interaction of many people, it reflects all their diverse contributions and preferences.

Build a monolithic and exclusive collaboration solution and you are likely to disappoint the diverse needs of people who are looking to tailor solutions from a digital workplace of “small pieces loosely joined.” Universal solutions designed for corporate control are complex. The greater the complexity of your collaboration solution and the more that it is top-down imposed on employees, the more likely it is to fall foul of Gall’s Law. Systems designed for single standard or even an average are likely to disappoint everyone.

Leave flexibility so that your employees can adapt and use the collaboration infrastructure in their work. If it is too hard or too ill-suited to their diverse needs, employees will just work around it, by bringing in their own small pieces.

Between People Everywhere

Beware efforts to promote collaboration that are tied only to one piece of infrastructure or one pattern of working. The needs of the employees of your organisation and their work will likely require more.

Don’t invest all your efforts in the infrastructure when what matters most is what is going on in the relationships between people. Infrastructure supports and enables collaboration but it doesn’t define it. Remember the real value of collaboration is following activity beyond the infrastructure to understand how it changes the work.

Kevin D Jones has turned his excellent video making skills to turn the What to Think When infographic into one of his great Business Processes That Refuse to Die videos. Enjoy!

We Plan for Execution Today

Organisations are addicted to planning. They run on their resource allocations. Planning decisions are the big decisions in every year and every day. Organisations judge success on plan delivery. Forecasting the future is the heart of what they do. The challenge is that this planning is all based on a historical model of planning for execution. We set our plan in advance and then we relentlessly deliver it until it is done.  The better control you have over the plan the better you shape the intended execution. Delivering the plan is far more important than success.

The agile and collaborative ways of working in the future of work start to threaten this mode of working. We want to learn and respond to facts and opportunities as they arise. We want to be responsive to what emerges in the networks in and around the organisation. All of this responsiveness creates a nightmare for traditional execution oriented planning.

One response is to throw our hands up in the air and say “there is no plan”.  If the organisation is small, this can be a feasible outcome as long as people remain connected but it is hardly a scaleable or sustainable strategy for larger organisations. What we need to do in these cases is shift our mindset from planning for execution to planning for emergence.

How Do We Plan for Emergence?

We could do away with the planning word completely, but most of our organisations are still going to need some guidance to embrace a world of emergent opportunities. Here are some suggestions on how to bridge the gap:

Create shared goals: Until you have shared goals, you have little chance of effective collaboration. Shared goals are a key point of connection. Start a conversation to connect people around their shared goals and objectives.

Have a shared guiding strategy: A strategy is a way to achieve the goals. It is not a complete set of instructions. A strategy can help independent employees work together to make the right decisions to take advantage of the opportunities in front of them.

Invest in open capabilities: Julian Stodd talks about ‘social scaffolding‘. I like the metaphor because it recognises that often we need open capabilities to support our work. We don’t want to be prescribed the actions. We need the support of the right tools, groups and capabilities to succeed. We get to choose how those are applied to our work.

A new mindset: Roger L Martin talks about the need to move beyond our traditional perfectionistic approach. We will need to let go of control. We can go further and look beyond our traditional incrementalist efficiency orientation for dramatic changes in effectiveness. Ultimately, we must embrace the personal and social dynamics of networks, uncertainty and change to allow for emergence.

Test and debate our logic & decisions: In a traditional plan the logic is often buried in the detail of cost allocations. Experimentation and an open logic enables everyone to help iterate the logic and the key decisions.

Measure success:  We need goals to measure our success. Measurement should be increased not abandoned in the ambiguity of how we specifically achieve goals. The dangers of traditional planning is that we often end up measuring the plan and not success. Make sure your metrics are focused on measuring what you actually want to achieve.

Involve the whole system: Top-down plans usually have few participants. They often fail at first contact with a customer. Working with emergence in networks enables a much wider part of an organisation’s system to contribute to the plans and the work underway. This build robustness of the action and contributes to chances of success.

Scale successes: Investing behind success is far better than investing upfront on a detailed plan.

Reach into your pocket or bag. Pull out your phone. Welcome to your digital workplace of the future.

Your Digital Workplace is Yours

On this amazing device you have a diverse range of communication tools. You have multiple apps. You work in different ways depending on the work, the other parties involved and the needs. Often you discover that you don’t even have the same apps on your phone as others do and the interfaces are all arranged differently.  How you use your phone does not reflect how the other people with whom you work use their phones. 

Sometimes you even send multiple messages across different apps to make sure you get the job done. Sometimes you use your phone for chat, a personal call, or reading Buzzfeed or watching a video. Nobody tells you what to do or say on your phone, but you are guided by etiquette and sensible rules of human interaction. Your focus on working on your phone is your effectiveness, not your or the organisation’s efficiency.

Small Pieces, Loosely Joined

Despite the best efforts of the phone vendors and application suppliers, there is no single phone solution for digital work. To change the solutions on your phone, you don’t wait for a central team to make a tool choice decision and then deploy it enterprise-wide over a number of months. You add the app you need and sometimes you forget about it or even delete it after one use. You are constantly experimenting, learning and upgrading your solutions as you go and your work changes.

Nobody supplies a ‘what to use when’ guide for your phone. Most of the apps aren’t integrated. In fact, they are often incompatible as vendors try to pull you into their universe. Your phone may manage single sign-on, provide status awareness, allow you to cut and paste or at least reduce the friction of moving between apps, but you are working in a digital way across ‘small pieces, loosely joined‘ in the words of David Weinberger. You can change phone if you want. You manage the complexity easily because you are in control of the journey of your work.

Employee Experience in the Digital Workplace

Any employee experience in a digital workplace that is not based on the level of ease, choice, and convenience of a phone is an enterprise solution pretending to be a digital workplace. Mandate one single integrated digital workplace solution and you are offering the smartphone options of North Korea, usually with the same degree of monitoring and security. When your people have to work in one way together, they cannot learn how to work better individually or together. That learning is the heart of the challenge of new digital work.

The owners of that solution will always wonder why users prefer to use unauthorised solutions on their phone. People need to explore more effective ways of working together. You may want to prescribe one way for your employees. However, when they work with customers and other network connections, they will need to have the flexibility of more ways of working. Instead of supplying a North Korean solution, focus on reducing friction, building capability and connecting critical enterprise applications in a secure way. 

Please note I am not suggesting that mobile is the only solution to a digital workplace. People work in diverse ways and many will need solutions for their desk and other places. The user interfaces and other enterprise applications are very likely change in future as we incorporate more personal assistants, analytics and so on. With all that change, we can learn from how we work on our phones. The issue remains that small pieces, loosely joined offers users the ability to tailor their digital workplace to meet their work needs and the needs of their networks.

People love easy answers. Promise a silver bullet. Sell a slogan. Give them a simple, short, step-by-step guide to success and they love it. However, as in politics, in the complex systems of modern business simple answers are easy to sell, but rarely effective. Selling the hard work of systemic change takes an entirely new conversation and different skills.

Isn’t Easier than This?

This is all sounding complex. Make it easier for me. What can I buy to make this change? What initiative should I run? Where do I start? What decision should I make?  What have you done for other clients that solves our problems. Show me someone else who has solved this. What benefits can I expect? How can I be sure we won’t fail?

Start talking about the challenges of the future of work and people quickly ask you to simplify the solution. There are lots of easy answers out there. People are in the business of releasing the tension with transactional solutions: panaceas, bandaids, painkillers, distractions and tools. This post will have much less traffic than one entitled ‘Five Simple Steps to the Future of Work’ or the “One Thing You Can Do Now to Succeed in the Future of Work’, even though it addresses ideas inherent in both of those titles.

We can’t simplify the problem because both the problem and the path forward and the outcomes are unclear in a complex system change. Systemic change is not about making one move. You can’t guarantee what weather pattern you get from the motion of single butterfly in the Amazon because no two butterflies are in the exact same circumstances and because other factors in the system are unpredictable. There is no one way forward because no two people are identical. Whatever our future model it needs to leverage, not supress, human diversity. Culture, collective human behaviour, competitive market dynamics, networked information flows, the evolution of disruptive technologies and many other issues in the future of our organisations are just as systemically complex as weather.

The Real Solution is Work

We can’t make it easy because the hard part is human work. Sadly for the sloganeers and their eager followers, the real solution is work. That work begins with challenging new conversations to define shared purposes, shared norms and to influence others to new behaviours. There is no one simple step that will guarantee human behavioural change. Even if you light a fire under people, some people still won’t jump.

The work continues to shape new ways of working that reflect real human diversity and leverage real human potential. The work involves balancing the changing circumstances, concerns and purposes of individuals, teams and organisations. The work involves the hard conversations to create accountability, to build capability and to lift the performance and value of new ways of working. The work includes the success, failure and learning of many experiments to find a new workable path forward together.

The Skills of Real Change

Real change comes from the hard work of creating connection around shared purpose, sense-making, influence conversations, practice and experimentation. If we need a place to start, let’s start to do the work to build the capabilities in individuals teams and organisations to focus on these key elements. We don’t need a hierarchical leader making the big one brave call to move our organisations forward into the future. We need swarms of individuals making a series of small moves, loosely joined and connected by shared purpose and vibrant conversations. The more we do, the more we learn individually and collectively.

Faith in one easy answer is just wasting the time when we could be working on real change.

PS Here’s the pretty picture of the individual and collective ‘easy answers’ that I prepared earlier:

Digital has accelerated a shift from leader as store of knowledge and expertise to leader as learner. It is time to relearn leadership in digital transformation. 

The model of leadership in traditional perfectionistic hierarchical organisations was clear. Develop expertise, hoard knowledge and make big decisions. Executives in these organisations built systems to give them control of decisions, to pull all knowledge to them and create massive stores of data & knowledge upon which to apply their expertise. 

Moore’s law and global network connection has smashed this model of work and management. The volume of data overwhelms human decision making. The pace of change makes knowledge stores quickly redundant. Technology like analytics can be used to extend the life of the model but it also accelerates the demise of the Perfectionistic Hierarchical Expert. Analytics are neither hierarchical, perfect, nor concerned about expertise. 

We are rebuilding work as a learning experience. Work now is about leveraging flows of knowledge. Leadership must be the facilitation of collective human learning. Leaders must be enabling the people and creating the systems that take advantage of the new opportunities to learn. The network navigator will lead teams to leverage the wirearchy and to learn through applying knowledge in action. Individual perfection is not the goal. The goal now is ever improving efffectiveness of work as we learn how to work better together. 

To learn more about digital leadership, get a ticket to this panel with Anne Bartlett-Bragg and Euan Semple in Melbourne. We will be discussing how leadership needs to change and what needs to be done to sustain change. 

In the competitive world of technology, there is a little meme that circulates widely – suggest a technology solution is dead, either because it is likely to be no longer supported, an acquisition is likely, it fails to work, or because it’s time has passed.  This meme is very common in the world of collaboration because there are many competitive products, new product launches and because the work of collaboration itself is hard. Instead of falling into the trap of focusing on who may or may not be dead, organisations would be better investing in the change to make their collaboration solutions effective.

So is it Dead?

I won’t link to all the post suggesting, insinuating or otherwise discussing the imminent death of Yammer. While the rumours continue, Microsoft is investing heavily in the Yammer product roadmap, deepening its integration to Office365, clients are getting value from the tool and Yammer is a key part of both the Office365 stack and Microsoft’s collaboration offering, including Teams. We can do the same analysis for the rumours of the demise of many other platforms. This parody was rather easy to write as a result. Most of the time the simple question “what is the agenda of the author here?” raises some insights into why something might be suggested to be dead.

To paraphrase Mark Twain, rumours of death have a way of being ‘greatly exaggerated’.  Let’s take a tour of recent examples.  I’ve heard a rumour that the IT departments may be dead. See this post on IT transformation, this one on the death of IT or this one and ask your IT team about how ready they are for a radically different way of working. You can also produce articles from leading publications that declare HR dead, Marketing dead, and so on. Declaring something dead is a good way to get a headline and ‘bad news’ is more viral.

As a general rule, it is usually a waste of time to ask people to confirm rumours. Hidden truth comes out in its own sweet time. It is also mightily hard to disprove something that doesn’t exist.

Making Quality Architectural Choices

What ‘everyone says’ is a poor guide to IT decisions. We need to ask our IT specialists to do what IT departments are meant to do on important architectural choice questions – do their research. There is a sophisticated literature on IT architecture and plenty of reputable analysts to help organisations make better choices.

Making these choices is more than just picking the best tool on the market. The best tool for your organisation’s strategy requires you to understand the specific organisational value that is to be created through collaboration, what use cases and behaviours are needed to be supported and then picking tools capable of sustaining that work and realising the value. The commonly agreed ‘best tool’ may not be the tool that works best for your users. In addition, you also need to understand what you need to invest to realise that value through changes in user behaviour.

Invest for Success.

IT specialists should also be advocates for the total project investment required to see a solution to success in achieving its business objectives.  Anyone who has researched collaboration knows deploying a collaboration tool is barely the beginning of the work. Any IT specialist who simply deploys the tool and walks away is wasting their organisation’s time and money.

As I stress repeatedly on this blog, any collaboration technology depends on the culture of the organisation, the support for change and ongoing community management. I have experienced or been told of a range of failed implementations of collaboration across all the major platforms, including the current wunderkinds Workplace and Slack. There are no magic bullets in changing how people work together.

On the broader question of whether collaboration solutions are dead, the evidence is that we are only just beginning to experience the maturity of the platforms moving beyond sharing and into work. Vendors are investing heavily in all these collaboration tools, because they have seen the value of collaborative work across organisations. Millions of employees around the world are connecting, sharing and solving business problems with these tools. The organisations who invest in helping their employees to leverage the platform are realising significant value and readying themselves to be more effective in digital transformation. If that is “dead”, then let’s enjoy the cemetery, it is a good place to be.

The Work We Need to Do 

The arguments about the death or not of the various products are deeply secondary to the work of engaging the employees of organisations in better ways of working. That’s what matters to CEOs and users. Every vendor is working to support that, but the hard work of making it happen comes down to the customers and the employees.

PS If we don’t embrace the learning opportunities of collaboration, perhaps we are all dead.

Organisations spend a fortune on leadership programs to prepare their mid-career and high potential leaders for senior roles. Mostly, those programs are about unlearning the lessons learned as junior employees.

Shouting More 

Early in my career, I worked in an organisation with a strongly hierarchical command and control culture. The environment depended so much on loyalty it was feudal in nature. It was also brutal where a meeting could turn vicious unexpectedly. 

I could do loyalty but brutality was new to me. However, the consistent feedback I received working in that environment was ‘You don’t shout enough. Push harder. Get a bit mongrel.’ The prevailing lesson was that leadership was a macho, hard driving and ruthless enterprise. Anything less than pushing your own position at full bullying force was weakness. I learned to swear, to manage bullies and to push hard to survive. I didn’t realise all organisations didn’t work this way until I left. 

What Junior Leaders Learn

We arrive in the workplace ready to make a difference. We have nascent capabilities, a new found sense of agency and ambition aplenty. 
At first the workplace is a new and ambiguous place. The official position is that the culture is based in integrity, collaboration & teamwork, excellence and other noble values. Nothing works that way. Either through observation or explicit guidance we learn different rules. For most junior employees the rules become clear very quickly:

• Do your job well without help, mistakes, or complaint
• Follow instructions meticulously and never exceed your authority
• Make your boss look good and cover your ass
• Keep your head down
• Develop your unique expertise to make yourself irreplaceable 
• Knowledge is power
• Get power
• Compete ruthlessly and view everyone else as a competitor for scarce resources
• Integrity is overrated; and
• Many more spoken and unspoken rules 

This isn’t leadership, but it is what we come to associate with the exercise of power. These are the rules of traditional management based in command and control. None of these rules work in the digital economy. 

Unlearning Leadership

Organisations teach the wrong lessons about leadership to employees for years. No wonder mid-career and high potential leadership programs cost so much and struggle so hard to make change. These programs are often a transactional investment in change in the midst of a systemic reinforcement of the traditional model. 

We are asking people to unlearn the leadership that got them to mid-career or high potential status while everything around them suggests change is unwise. When there is a form of safety and predictability in bullying performance from automatons, why would leaders consider influence, agency, change, creativity and new opportunities
We need more than a fancy workshop to make a change in leadership behaviour in this environment. We need to redefine our organisation’s understanding of leadership entirely.  Our digital future demands more systemic change. Those frontline employees that we are teaching to be passive are our lost competitive advantage. Digital leadership would be easier if the culture posters were real and if there wasn’t so much to unlearn. 

To learn more about digital leadership, get a ticket to this panel with Anne Bartlett-Bragg and Euan Semple in Melbourne or Sydney. We will be discussing how leadership needs to change and what needs to be done to sustain change. 

Everybody needs a narrative. 

Not all narratives are real. 

Not everybody is real.