Writing

2016 was a middling year in the all time rankings so it has taught me a lot. There were some amazing highlights like my Microsoft Most Valuable Professional award, two WOLweeks, meeting my Change Agent Colleagues in the US and speaking on Collaboration and Working Out Loud around the world. I was lucky enough to do some amazing challenging client work in learning, innovation and collaboration. With all of this, new relationships were built and existing relationships were strengthened. However the year had its shares of disappointments, frustrations and delays. 

Here are the lessons I learned (or was taught again) in 2016:

Hustle: Everything worth having takes effort. Hustle is the price and we never stop paying. 

Relationships Are Everything: the best work and learning we do together. You find great work through your networks. Work out loud to find and deepen relationships. When things get good, invest in others. When things get tough, call on your friends and connections. 

Shiny New Things: Shiny New Things are great when they are at the edges. Don’t get distracted by them. Don’t get over enthusiastic about them. Don’t make them the core of what you do until tested. Beware the person dangling a Shiny New Thing before you. It’s likely they don’t understand the dangers, no matter how well they sell it. 

There’s Always More Context: You can always learn more. Dig deeper. The better you understand the context. Surprises, disappointments and confusion are reminders to get more context. Some times you discover things are better than you think with more context.  Other times more context will save you. Make sure you share enough context to help others to succeed.  

Think Product: Products are easy to buy. Products are designed for ease of use. Products have a clear customer and a clear benefit. Products can be tailored. At as attractive as complete flexibility is, people want to know what they are getting and that it works. Products offer that promise. The other advantage of products is that they offer focus to the relationships and the hustle. 

Everything is a Test: We learn by doing. Do more. The best failure rate for learning is far higher than my comfort level. 

Give: Everything I have received this year is a legacy of some gift given directly or indirectly. Generosity works. Resist the temptation to make everything a commercial exchange. Don’t worry about the few greedy or unscrupulous people you meet on the path. When you dig deeper into their context, you wouldn’t want to be in their shoes.

Have Fun: I shouldn’t need this reminder. Whether working or not, there is more fun to be had. 

Focus on Purpose: You get one go. You need focus. Purpose is the reason for your work. Make it a relentless focus. 

Thanks 2016. I’m looking forward to applying all this in 2017. I’ve already made some changes but I’m sure there’s more to learn. There’s definitely a lot more to be done to make work more human. 

The blog post promised to transform my life in six minutes. A quick study indicated that I would have to execute six separate one-minute tasks every day. None of the tasks could be meaningfully executed in a minute and there was no time allowance for task-switching. I felt like commenting ‘Why does it take so long?’

Patience is lacking everywhere. Cars want to cut into the traffic from side streets. Politicians promise action on day one. Businesses want to scale fast. Get rich young. Instant Happiness. Respond now. Hustle.

‘Now!’ screams the world. ‘No, Now!’ we respond impatiently.

Understanding takes time. Learning takes time. Change takes time. Success takes time. Transforming your life takes forever.

Be patient with yourself. Be patient with the world.

You will find patience is the source of greater transformation than any scurrying six minutes of action.

We are approaching the end of the year. The Roman god Janus is the god of beginnings, transitions, and doorways. He faces both backward and forwards standing at a point of transition. As you come into the new year, what is your stance? Do you face outwards to customers, your community, and the world? Or are you faced inwards?

A simple question has a profound impact on how people, organisations and nations work, think and succeed. From solo entrepreneur to global politician where we look for answers, decisions, and guidance on our actions, shapes who we are and how we act.

In an outward-facing stance, the answer to the challenge is outside, through learning in the future. There is more to know, more value to create and more to do. The opportunity is to co-create new value together with others. You are open to discovering a better way.

The inward-facing stance looks for the answer inside, in proven capabilities and in the past. The focus is on preserving the current way and current value, often a personal outcome. Your back is turned to others.

Many individuals and large organisations expound the value of an outward-facing stance. However, the weight of their action suggests that they prefer an inward stance. Whether they realise it or not their intended stance is overcome by the inward pull of debate, politics, process, and numbers. Relying only on internal information and capabilities is a massive limiter in a globally networked world. This is rarely conducive to growth, effectiveness or success.

The challenges of our global networked economy demand new mindsets, new ways of working and new value creation. We need to look outward in 2017 to co-create these paths.

Both writing and baking involve long periods of waiting and short periods of activity. The rest of life happens in the gaps between the periods of activity. Consulting and knowledge work reflects the same patterns. The challenge is to use the time in between to best effect.

At work, we can easily fill our waiting time with wasteful effort. There is plenty of busy work to do. We drink coffee, tea or water. We can answer emails for hours. We can attend lots of long and ponderous meetings. We can search for information. We can make documents longer or slides prettier. We can update systems and manage the status and location of information. We multitask as if doing more than one task at a time was productive, fast or effective. Very little of this work adds anything to the experience of customers of the organisation.

Baking bread you need to manage the timetable of your rises and proving to fit around the rest of your work and deliver you a loaf when required.  That takes preparation, a few techniques to manage time and patience. When I bake bread, it is not multitasking. I do one task at a time but I am interweaving my tasks in the available time.  Because baking is not my day job, it is clear to me that I need to focus on completing other work in the time gaps that baking allows.

Because I want to blog consistently, I have a similar process for blogging. I write my posts at roughly the same time each day for a short intense burst. Into the 23 hours beforehand, I weave ideation, design, development, research and reflection for the post around the work I have to do. Blogging is not my day job, I focus on my consulting and coaching work and the life I need to live in that time.

In my consulting practice, the time between work on engagements is used for one of two purposes:

• developing new client or partner relationships; or
• developing new product offerings.

Managing the investment of time in these two activities is essential to the long-term health of my practice. When you are busy it is hard to continue to invest in this work so you need to be good at weaving. When you are quiet, you need to sustain the investment and ensure you don’t become wasteful of the time available.

The important part of all these processes is using time ‘in between’ work to best value. That time may not always be work. I have a life. I also want to relax, stare out the window and wonder about things. I just allow for those as activities, enjoy them for what they are and never confuse them with working.

One experience in my career is consistently the most rewarding. That experience is helping someone to discover their potential.

Many people realise that they have the potential to challenge themselves, to learn and to develop new skills through their schooling years. Some people never meet a teacher who inspires them and do not receive support from parents, friends or other community members to extend themselves. The first time some people encounter a purposeful supportive and challenging learning environment is in the workplace.

I have met so many people who can describe the effect of the first manager who believed in their potential. Someone took an interest in their work and their capabilities and encouraged them to do more. Often this moment of transition came around their first promotion when they were picked over others because of untapped potential. With the encouragement of a supportive environment and the push to do more, these individuals can go on to discover extraordinary talents. I know people who took up their university studies midcareer and went on to do PhDs or into the heights of new occupations as a result. I know people who never took formal study, but became the smartest and wisest CEOs in the business through practical experience, understanding of people and a keen intelligence sharpened by life experience. A few people get there on their own. Most require challenge, support and encouragement to start the journey of self-improvement.

We can all play a role in helping others to realise their potential. Sometimes all it takes is a simple act of recognition of potential to spark people. At other times, we can play a role to show people a possibility and begin coaching them into action. Even realising a small amount of potential can transform a person’s outlook, experience and life. This is work we can do as parents, managers, peers and community members.

What small step can you take today to help someone see their potential?

We know our positions. There’s no value in a stand-off. The value of conversation is the generative conversation. 

We have conversations every day. We aren’t very good at them. Too many of our conversations are determined by positions fixed before they begin. If 2017 highlights anything it is the need for richer and more generative conversations. 

I recently saw the phrase ‘the animated middle’. It was used by Poet Ann Lauterbach 

“The crucial job of artists is to find a way to release materials into the animated middle ground between subjects, and so to initiate the difficult but joyful process of human connection.”

When I saw that phrase it resonated deeply with me. The Art of Conversation is finding the animated middle ground and enhancing human connection. Great conversations aren’t always easy. Many are difficult and challenging for all involved. They generate new perspectives, new options and a new relationship between parties as they come to a better understanding and find shared ground in people’s purposes, concerns and circumstances. 

If our conversations aren’t doing this work, then we are just chatting. We are pushing information and positions at each other. Chatting can influence another to change their view but it is their action, not an outcome of co-creation by the two parties to a conversation. The other party to a chat is just as likely to dig in to their position or get the wrong impression. 

Seeing the work in the animated middle ground of Conversation as art also brings to the fore that we are engaged in collaborative co-creation. Something new is generated by the discussion. Nobody escapes from a real conversation with their perspective intact. Like art, some times what arises in that middle ground is difficult and provocative but essential. The more change we want from the conversation the greater the co-creation required. 

Our work and our civil society depends on better conversations. We need to explore the art of Conversation in Ann Lauterbach’s animated middle ground. 

Three things have become obvious to me in 2016 and on reflection they offer insights into how we can think about the ongoing culture change and challenges of enterprise collaboration:

People Love Chat: The rise of Slack, Hipchat and a raft other chat tools, the passion for chatbots and the advent of Microsoft Teams all signal the value of chat communication solutions. These tools (and their integrations) appeal to our need for instant gratification, the demands of an agile workplace, our wish for connection in a mobile world and the need for a little entertainment in the ongoing pressures of work. Whether this way of working appeals to you or not, it is a rich pattern of human behaviour and we recognise it from the way we use consumer tools like iMessage, WhatsApp, Facebook messenger, Line, etc. The growth challenges of Twitter can be traced to chat behaviours shifting to more controlled community oriented solutions like group messaging or to more engaging solutions like Snapchat and Instagram.

People Hate Meetings More: Of all the blogposts I wrote in 2016, the ones that discussed changing meetings exploded. People hate email but they are prepared to live with the pain because email feels like process work, they are accustomed to the burdens or email pushes responsibility to others. People hate meetings and they really want to change them. (Makes me wonder if Sartre had a point about ‘hell is other people’) Email can be a way out of interacting with others because we don’t interact with other people, just formal rituals around their words and artefacts. Meetings do require interaction with the messiness of real people. For many organisations, meetings are the dominant form of conversation and collaboration. For too many meetings, no choices are made to explicitly managed the pattern or optimise its benefits for attendees.

The Untapped Value of Collaboration is Huge: Surprisingly few organisations with collaboration solutions have a strategy to realise value from new ways of working. Fewer still have resources that strategy to ensure that they have managers working to realise the productivity benefit and the transformation of work outcomes. Often the collaboration solution is implemented for an abstract capitalised noun or seen as a platform for enterprise communications objectives. Organisations have a huge opportunity to work more effectively when they explicitly engage in shaping the nature of collaborative work underway.

Human Behaviour

Changing the nature of work is hard. We love to focus on the technology as if it will transform the human behaviour. However, from all the work I’ve done and read on adoption, one thing is clear to me. Technology enables new patterns of work. Human behaviour and decisions shape what patterns get used and how in organisations. At times, human behaviour gets lost under the features and functionality of the technology and we forget to focus on the enduring patterns. Many times the implementation of technology is not asking people to adopt a new human behaviour, it is just asking them to switch to another deeply human pattern.  Let’s look at the insights above in that context.

Chat (Share Information): We walk through the halls of our activity based office spaces to get a coffee and we chat with our colleagues. We ask our work colleagues for a quick chat to resolve an issue. We make a phone call (average call length is now well under two minutes).  These are short interactions. They are an exchange of information. A chat is fast, incidental and pointed.  A chat is far more likely to be lighthearted than a more considered form of interaction. The accumulation of chats contribute to a deepening of relationships even if the content of the conversations are not particularly significant or useful because they act as acknowledgement, share context and develop trust and social capital.

Conversation (Shared Understanding): Often in our work places we need a conversation to get deeper in our understanding of an issue. We need to reconcile divergent information and divergent views of the situation. We may need to make a decision either together or alone but in a way that engages others that are impacted. Conversations take time.  They can stretch from an intense 10 minutes to a gruelling 10 hours or weeks and weeks of cumulative interactions. Conversations need us to work through a process of aligning purposes, concerns, context and actions (as Conolly and Rianoshek explain in the Communications Catalyst).

Collaboration (Shared Work): Our work is increasingly dependant on the work of others. We don’t work as an island turning inputs into outputs. We need to manage complex scenarios, dynamic processes, the interplay of our work with the goals and processes of others and we need to interact with others to discover, design, deliver or deploy our solutions. We do this work in an environment of a rapid flow of information, high levels of uncertainty and continuous change. Many organisations see collaboration as a long meeting with lots of people, debate and sticky notes. The need for the pattern of collaboration in our organisations is far more extensive. We may need to collaborate with our team, a project team, a group of stakeholders, the whole organisation or even people well beyond the organisation to achieve our objectives.

Sidebar: On the Thing We Call Communication (Shared Narrative)

Communication is a term we use a lot in business. It is embedded in business vernacular because most organisations have teams responsible for communication. However, it is less common that communication is a two-way exchange of information in this usage. Communication is the broadcast of information to audiences in the organisation through email, intranet or social channels.  The pattern of human interaction that best matches to communication is story telling. A narrator holds the attention of others usually for a while to recount some important information to the group in the form of a narrative. Stories can be told in as little as 30 seconds (think a TV ad) but usually we take 30 minutes to an hour (TV show) or 2-3 hours for a saga with lots of conflict and many phases of action (think a movie) When communication teams start to engage in two-way exchange in an organisation, the pattern of interaction tends to be a chat, a conversation or a collaboration.

Lessons For Meetings:

What is the point of your meetings? Is your meeting a chat, a conversation, a collaboration or communication?

One of the key meeting pain points is that we call one hour meetings for a chat. That’s about 59 minutes of time wasted. We also call meetings to narrate stories (usually with slides). Narration by slide deck is another time waster, particularly if we forget to make sure that the story has enough value, conflict or action to engage people’s attention. The audience sits passively and lacks the emotional engagement in the narrative to feel their time is being rewarded.

Meetings work as a place for conversation and collaboration when run to achieve those explicit purposes. Aligning the attendees, purpose and facilitation of a meeting to this goal is critical. In a busy working life, people expecting one pattern of interaction will not sit happily through another.  There are also other options that might work better, particularly if you are unsure of your purpose, looking to work out loud and you aren’t exactly sure who would value and add value being in the room. In these cases, there is probably more value working out loud in an enterprise social network, even if only to shape the work to be done in a later meeting.

Lessons On Choice & Adoption of Technology Tool:

IT and business executives focused on efficiency of effort and investment long for the one tool to rule them all. These demands often push tools to stretch across multiple patterns of human interaction. The complexity of features that result as tools endeavour to cover chat, collaboration, conversation and communication patterns can add to the adoption challenges for users. The nature of real social human interactions in relationships means that even if we choose one tool for each pattern, people will still mix their behaviour into other tools. If you get frustrated that people chat in your social network or hold long conversations in your chat channels, get over it and then help the users how to work in more effective ways.

Human behaviour also reminds us that we know how to switch between chats, conversations and collaboration. In every day parlance we even signal these changes to each other with “this needs further discussion” or “we should meet to work on this”. We happily switch tools when we move from phonecall to meeting to application. Instead of worrying about too many tools, let’s focus on realising the value in each pattern of work with the new tools available and encouraging a better match of pattern and tool.

To add to this we now see vendors increasing the diversity of their tools to match to these different patterns. If you’ve ever seen the infographics of all the brands of cloud marketing automation solutions, I think that’s where vendors are headed for productivity and collaboration solutions. This is not an era for one perfect solution. The competitive landscape is a raft of different solutions, that meet a single point use case to every use case under the sun.  Leading vendors like Microsoft will try to crowd out most of that space with offers that appeal to the enterprise IT buyer and offer some form of stack integration. It’s the marketing strategy of Nestle, Unilever and P&G of the 60s/70s. Take the shelf space. Smaller vendors will make their solution appeal to a niche.

The patterns of human behaviour aren’t going away. The technology doesn’t change them. What is important to organisations and users is to understand what patterns of human interaction are needed now, what patterns are desired for future strategy and how to nudge behaviour from one to the other to make work more effective. If a team depends on a high volume of chat to manage agile digital product development, turning that off won’t increase engagement or productivity. If a team needs to interact widely across the organisation with stakeholders and work out loud with uncertain stakeholders, then forcing a chat tool is not likely to deliver the required benefits for adoption.  If your digital team is working in a chat tool effectively but regarding as alien by the rest of the organisation, how can you help both parts of the organisation to communicate and collaborate more effectively. Work in your organisation, now and in the future, has its tempos and patterns and the tools need to align to those patterns.Not the other way around.

Lessons for Team Structure:

Harold Jarche recently published a blog post exploring three contexts for work of self-governing teams, inspired by his Personal Knowledge Mastery work and the insights of Valdis Krebs and Patti Anklam.  The discussion in Harold’s post of a Productivity Network, an Alignment Network and a Connectivity Network has a very close relationship to the human behavioural patterns Collaboration, Conversations and Chats.

We need to recognise that network connectivity, the transparency possible in networks and the have permanently changed the options for how teams manage collaboration, conversations and chats and offer new contexts for leadership and self-leadership. As discussed in my 2017 work roadmap, key organisational challenges are developing the models of team structure, management and organisation to be able to leverage this work.