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Writing
Present
Our lives are full of distractions. Many organisations sole purpose is to distract, to hold or to shape our attention. In our hands we hold devices that are a window to a global world with distracting images, notifications and the insistent call of unread messages. Our attention wanders.
We find it harder than ever to be present. Here. In this moment. Now.
Earlier this week at the end of a long day, I was going through the motions of life wrapped up in my thoughts. Luckily my intuition twigged me that something was not right. When I stopped and paid attention to what was going on, I found a little change that helped another person. All I had to do was be present, make a connection and ask some questions.
If we aren’t here now, we can’t make the change that is ours to make.
Presence underpins our awareness of our context. Presence gives us the time to be aware of our intuition, our purposes and our capabilities. Presence enables us to truly see and engage with others.
When we take the time to be present, we give ourselves the chance to make a difference.
What’s your difference?
Presence
See the opportunities that life presents.
Forgetting
What we forget, we must relearn through experience. Corporate memory loss is a barrier to effectiveness, change and adaptation.
The pressure of now in organisations can be incessant. It can feel like there is no time for history. When I work with an organisation, I like to ask questions about the history of the organisation. The stories and insights are always worth the conversations. In all organisations, history shapes many drivers of current performance – community, context, purpose, values, customer value propositions, strategy, structure & culture. Sometimes this shaping is an explicit choice to be one way or a choice to not be another way. Often the influence has been forgotten but the legacies remain in the structure of performance in the organisation.
When organisations forget their history, they lose the context to be able to review current performance and these drivers against the past. Past success on its own is a terrible guide to future performance. Past strategies without context or understanding are even more dangerous. Usually strategies are born of successes and failures in specific contexts. When we forget the failures and the context, the strategies become harder to interpret, implement and adapt. Effective organisations understand their failures, successes and the context for each. They understand what they have learned ongoing.
Failures forgotten, or worse hidden, will be repeated by future generations. Many organisations enter a cycle of repeating the same series of decisions in a circular effort to improve performance. Centralisation fails and decentralisation follows. Decentralisation fails and centralisation follows. The cycle continues without progress until someone with the history and the understanding can challenge the binary choice and learn a new way to manage.
The same process of forgetting dooms many change programs. Launched for a specific reason at a specific time, that context is soon lost. The project develops its own logic and soon the organisation moves on to another change leaving the change orphaned. If the project succeeds many will question why. Later the organisation will return to this change to try again.
Help your organisation to understand the full context of its history and experience, both the successes and the failures. The lessons of this experience will be the foundation of future adaptation.
Context
The dysfunction in organisations is often a lack of shared context.
Part of any community is a shared context. That context is a common set of facts and understanding of the world. At its best that context includes shared goals and purposes. This context enables people to see the world in enough of a shared way that trust and collaboration is possible.
Civil society breaks down when people stop sharing enough context to collaborate and reach consensus. Much of the dysfunction of politics globally is influenced by the breakdown of shared context. We can find our own media that reinforces our own worldview. Politicians actively reinforce this to strengthen their following and influence. The vitriol and political dysfunction is an outcome of a lack of shared context.
We’ve all experienced the moment where the same action takes on a different meaning in a different context. The car that wants to cut into your lane on a day you are late and stressed creates a different reaction to the same action on a peaceful day of vacation. Context can literally change how we see and react to the world.
In organisations there are many ways that shared context breaks down. At its most dangerous, an organisation can lack a shared context with the customers and other stakeholders that provide its reason for being. Look at any customer service breakdown and there will be a lack of shared context. Organisations lose track of their customer’s context when they stop listening to feedback and stop changing with their customers. Success builds ego and hubris that builds barriers to understanding.
Within organisations, shared context is absent when there are misalignments of purpose or information. The silos that brought us efficiency now promote division and lack of mutual understanding. No two teams can collaborate comfortably when they have their own sets of metrics and differing goals.
A key role for all in organisations but particularly for leaders is to create a shared context. Help people understand the whole system through transparency, understanding and engagement. When there is conflict and dysfunction, start building new understanding.
Community
Communities depend on more than connection. They are fostered by relationships and shared purpose. Change the relationships or purpose and you create a new community. Communities take ages to build but disappear quickly when you break these rules.
The visibility and connection that comes with global networks has driven new attention to the idea of community. Community is a business buzzword and organizations are increasingly seeking to leverage the value of the communities in and around their business.
We can inadvertently carry over our thinking from traditional marketing across to consider these new corporate relationships. We start to treat every segment of our customers, employees or stakeholders as a community. We believe we own these communities because they connect to us. We try to determine our and others’ interactions with these communities. That’s the way our traditional one-way marketing relationships have been managed. We can’t say it has been effective even in marketing. It doesn’t work in community.
Customers aren’t a community. Employees aren’t a community. In most cases these groups of people have no shared relationships and have not considered any shared purposes. They may be interested in interactions with your organisation but it is not yet clear that it qualifies as a relationship with you, let alone similar others.
People can’t be put into communities. They join them. Nobody owns a community, not even the platform owner. Groups of people aren’t a community until they move from connections to building two-way relationships and find a shared purpose. Community involves both what we get from the interaction and what the community as a whole benefits from the interaction. The intentions of a common corporate master matter little unless executed in alignment with these outcomes. This applies even where you have the ability to control and reward employees for participation in your community. One of the reason truly valuable enterprise social communities have been challenging for organizations is that they have failed to understand this dynamic. The organizational masters expect, rather than engage.
The sense of control that comes from traditional marketing’s one-way communication is out of place in this new two-way context. Communities are engaged in, not informed of change. When you decide that you want different membership, different interactions or a new purpose for a community, you are deciding you need a brand new community. Assume you are starting from scratch. There is no migration. You are recruiting for a new community. Don’t be surprised to discover that your wishes are resisted or the community simply moves elsewhere and leaves you out. After all your relationship is only one connection in that community.
Real communities change from within driven by the needs of the members. You can’t expect your current community to follow your wishes. You are asking them to start again and you have unilaterally imposed a change on their relationships and sense of personal purpose. If you want change in a community, you need to engage in dialogue around the purposes and relationships in the community.
Too many communities are simply networks of interactions that create no value for anyone. Treasure the relationships and shared purpose created in community. Respect the magic of these relationships and you will find the value of community.
The Roles of External Experts
Experts are terrible at knowing what’s going to happen. One of the key role of external experts is introducing divergent opinions into a hierarchy.
I’ve been reading Tim Hartford’s Adapt on the role of failure in success. The book begins with a review of the literature on how poor experts are at prediction. We live in a complex connected fast changing world. Experts, whether consultants, thought leaders, academics or futurists struggle to make predictions of what comes next. So if experts aren’t great at knowing what’s going to happen, why are they so popular?
External Experts are a Source of Variation
Even with the limits of their predictive power, external experts do two things well. They can supply confidence for organisations to tackle divergent ideas and they can help find divergent ideas internally in organisations and carry them around or through the hierarchy. The former occurs when senior executives hire external experts to bolster their risky decision. The latter is the source of the classic consultant joke that ‘a consultant borrows your watch to tell you the time’.
In both cases, an external expert helps an organisation to break the patterns of its dominant thinking and explore variation with greater confidence. In an environment of rapid change the ability to experiment with variation is a key to adaptation. The expert may not be right but the learning and adaptation that results can be incredibly valuable.
External Experts Build Capability
That learning is what differentiates great experts from the average ones. Great experts worry less about predicting what’s around the next corner. What they help organisations do is build the capabilities that have value in many scenarios in the future.
Teaching organisations how to learn for themselves through experimentation, how to become more effective in change at scale, enabling teams to work more effectively and enabling individuals to thrive is a winning strategy in almost every scenario. Add the transfer of the way to build particular practices and expertise and you have a valuable proposition.
Once you stop looking for experts to know everything, you can explore their potential to help your organisation to change and adapt through variation, experimentation and new capability. These roles are important new challenges for your internal experts too.
If you’d like to chat more about how to build these capabilities and better leverage your internal experts, get in touch with Simon Terry.
The New Role of Managers: Increase Variation
So much of what we call management consists in making it difficult for people to work – Peter Drucker
For 100 years, the role of managers has been to increase consistency of performance. Executing a proven business model in times of stable growth demands a focus on consistency, simplicity and efficiency. Managers have prospered through a focus on command, process and centralized decision making. In an era of global networks, we have entered a new domain. The role of managers in the future of work must be to increase effectiveness through leveraging the potential of their people and the learning opportunities in complex networks & systems.
Beyond Efficient Simplicity to Effectiveness
Management has a bias to the simplicity because simple actions can be executed efficiently and consistently. From before Adam Smith described the pin factory, managers have been breaking down tasks and processes in pursuit of an ever simpler and more efficienct mode of execution. Great strides in performance and productivity have been made in the use of this model. We have extended it further through global outsourcing, global supply chains and increasing automation.
However, as we have extended this model we have encounter an increasing realization that efficiency in a process is not always correlated with effectiveness of the outcome. Customer experiences are delivered by entire business systems. Societies are complex interrelationships of many systems not just simple business processes scaled up. At a global level we can increasingly see the disconnect between the simple and the needs of the system. Personal purpose and the purpose of our organizations calls us to look to the effectiveness of the system, not the efficiency of a process.
As many innovators have demonstrated embracing the complex systemic view can achieve a step change in effectiveness for both consumers and the business. Embracing systems thinking, complexity and variation, creates new ways to disrupt business and meet consumer needs. Variation is not a cost. It is a signal of a new potential for effectiveness.
Beyond Predictability to Experimentation
The central planning model of most organizations driven by strict budget processes placed a heavy emphasis on predictability of outcomes. Managers were valued for their ability to consistently deliver outcomes, even if that merely represented a consistent ability to game the system. A focus on predictability drove a concentration of decision making in the hands of those with the most expertise and information to make decision.
Innovation is not predictable. Innovation recognizes that there is now too much information for any one person’s knowledge or expertise. Organizations need to embrace learning through experimentation. This process of learning by experimentation in complex systems can be hypothesis driven but it is not predictable. The test is no longer how one manager decides but how the entire system of an organization experiments and learns. The pace of adaptation driven by experimentation will be what drives an organizations effectiveness and competitive position.
Beyond Automatons to Autonomy
An expert manager focused on consistency seeks to replicate best practice in simple processes to be executed with minimum variation by automatons. If they can’t be robots, then they should be people with the greatest consistency of skill and the minimum discretion. Individual talents and ideas are sacrificed to scaling consistency of performance. Command and control is a path only to scaled consistency of performance, ask any traditional military structure.
In complex networks & systems, agents need autonomy to react to the variation circumstances that confront them. For all the focus on command and control, even the military recognizes that in battle the ‘plans rarely survive first contact with the enemy’. To achieve effectiveness, our organizations need to enable employees to respond to the circumstances that face them, to experiment, to learn and to adapt. Great managers need to become coaches of this agility. they need to foster the variation of autonomy to find new paths to effectiveness in the system. The key role of a manager is no longer direction. The role of a manager is alignment of the autonomous agents to realize the purposes of the organization and the team.
Beyond Competency to Capability
Consistent processes demand a focus on known competency levels. In an ideal case for a manager focused on consistency, this competency was so low that people could either be recruited with the skills or they were quickly acquired. Development of people in this environment by managers involves lifting an individual to the required proficiency and reskilling where processes change.
Managers in the future of work are now leaders of a continuous process of capability development of which human capability is only one part
Beyond Assessment to Empathy
Traditional managers role was to assess performance against a predetermined standard of consistency. The tails of a bell curve of performance were either rewarded or cut. The focus of management was a continuous process of objective assessment. This experience of assessment through performance assessment processes became the most alienating experience of management. Performance was a transactional experience focused on consistency without consideration of systems, relationships, diversity or effectiveness.
Great managers in the future of work understand that effectiveness is the scaling of personal effectiveness. They begin with empathy, not objective rationality. Discovering an individual’s personal purpose and objectives, developing their individual talents where ever they may lead and staying connected to an individual’s human experience and potential are key points of effective performance. At the heart of this approach is embracing the diversity and variation inherent in any group of people. The transformation of performance through this approach is a step change compared to the plus or minus 10% model of traditional consistency performance management.
Variation is the Key to Value Creation
Risk and return are correlated. As much as management science has pretended to break this axiom, it has largely shifted risks elsewhere in the pursuit of higher return. Value creation opportunities come from exploring the variation in human society and its networks. We need managers who can embrace and foster variation in the future of work. Too many managers can be replaced with robots because of the predictable nature of the algorithm at the heart of their work. Worse, those who suppress variation in their teams will be left behind in the disruptive economies ahead.
If you would like help to improve the effectiveness of your managers and teams, please get in contact for a conversation about how this applies in your business.
Thanks very much to Luis Suarez, Jonathan Champ and Janet Fouts for their contributions to the Twitter conversation about yesterday’s blog post on email and meetings. This post is inspired by that chat. We learn through debate and discussion in the future of work.
Email is A Problem, But Meetings Are the Collaboration Issue.
“Has everyone got a drink, lots of paper, a pen and a device? Good, Dave is still not here, but let’s start the meeting anyway.”
Future of work experts like to focus on email as a source of ills. There are many cases where emails can be avoided by more social forms of communication. Undoubtedly, there is much information in email that would be better shared other ways. Email takes up a lot of time, but there is far greater danger to productivity and effectiveness in our organisations: meetings.
The Cost of Meeting Culture
The real challenge in organisations is the meeting culture. Efforts to become more collaborative, inclusive, decisive and to mitigate risks have results in a marathon series of pointless meetings. There is no research suggesting that our current level of meetings are a great idea. Research from Verizon and Atlasssian suggests between 25-50% of meetings are wasted. 45% of people admit to being stressed by how many meetings that they have. We spend hours preparing documents for meetings that don’t scratch the surface of the discussion required. In a world in which all other forms of management are subjected to performance scrutiny meetings escape attention because they are where managers try to create performance scrutiny.
Reflect on your last 24 hours of meetings. How many of those meetings were:
- required to be held at that time, started on time and finished when the work was done?
- had exactly the right people in the room and the right pre-work had been done?
- effectively chaired to stay on topic, engage all participants and achieve an outcome in the minimum time required?
- had a clear purpose, sufficient information for the conversation and a defined outcome with clear next steps?
- kept a record for later review of the information considered, the relevant discussion and any decisions or actions required?
- were back-to-back with another meeting that allowed no time for personal reflection or preparation?
Running great meetings is an art, but these basic needs are just the tools of a great meeting. Too many meetings are called without regard for these basic needs. Nothing in that list above is meeting rocket science. These are the fundamentals of thinking through purpose, timing, audience, pre-work, agendas and outcomes. In most organisations you need approval to spend $500 but you can waste thousands of dollars of salary costs by calling a meeting without any of the above basic preparation even considered.
Replace Meetings
We use meetings for five main purposes:
- Gathering Information
- Sharing Information
- Discussing Issues
- Making Decisions as A Group
- Building personal rapport
The first two purposes are almost always better done using other ways outside of meetings. How many hours would you save by removing these meeting from your diary? Move the gathering and sharing of information to tools designed for this purpose. At least this step will at least halve the length of your meetings.
There are alternative, and often better, ways of managing the next two of these purposes than a meeting. Requiring everyone to have been seen in the same room or teleconference for a decision to be made or for work to count suggests work needs to be done on an organisations culture of personal accountability and trust.
Even for building rapport, extensive experience with social tools shows rapport can be built without a meeting when people have seen each others style of interaction and understand their positions, talents and contributions.
Bad meetings are the reason most executives doubt the effectiveness of collaboration. Managers who have experienced bad meetings struggle to see how collaborative work is not time-wasting, indecisive or lacking in accountability. The way to fix the collaboration problem in organisations is not more meetings. It is to replace meetings with ways of working that are far more effective at achieving value.
An awful lot of the wasteful emails are setting up, sharing documents or following up on bad meetings. Let’s fix the collaboration problem at its source. Make meetings the last resort as a way of working.
If you’d like to improve the effectiveness of the meetings, collaboration and work in your organisation, get in touch with Simon Terry.