Writing

Feels Like Work

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

Avoid work substitutes and improve your personal productivity.

Working for yourself you soon discover a change in your work practices. You become acutely aware of what is work, when time is your income and personal productivity your only mode of delivery. In our busy work lives, it is too easy to be fooled by things that feel like work. 

Travel: Today is a travel day for me with transit to the airport, checkin, waiting and flights to another city. All big grown up activities but none of it actual work. The only work in this time is this blogpost written from my seat. The daily commute can also feel like work but it rarely adds any value. 

Meetings: meetings are the commonest work substitute. Discuss status. Make personal connections. Drink coffee. Push ideas round in circles. Mute the call. Decide others need to do something. Play a little politics. All these activities are great work substitutes. 

Research: whenever I am particularly anxious about work, I feel the need to research. It is a great form of work avoidance. Rather than tackling the actual topic, you accumulate useless information, muddy the waters and waste time on distractions. Research gives the illusion of progress without requiring output. 

PowerPoint: What other application offers every business person the opportunity to fiddle with a message, bury it in distracting graphics and tweaks pages of bullet points and data tables. PowerPoint provides useless work for the recipients who must sort through the pages, print the deck and carry it to the meeting where they will be handed another carefully collated copy. Then they sit and listen to someone read the slides to them. 

Conferences, offsites and training: done well these events create connections, foster learning and coalesce actions for individuals and teams. Done badly they are work substitutes of the highest order. Distracting PowerPoint fests with no consequence far from the pressures of work. Worse still, like travel, this is a highly expensive work substitute. 

Email: every down moment we check if another message has arrived and furiously respond. Surely that’s progress?  All that email creates less value than an open share of the same information or a quick phone call. Email has the illusion of work because it is a digital production line for memos. However what we gained in speed and response has caused a loss in thought and value. 

Self-assessment: we spend a lot of time judging our own performance. Self-awareness has value. However too much of the self-assessment we do is not work. Either we assess ourselves against our intentions, not performance or we assess ourselves without action. The best assessment is in work and leads to new actions. All the rest is just an elaborate form of self-doubt or egotism. 

Work is hard. Adding things that feel like work to the calendar make it only more difficult. 

The Hidden Craft

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

“We struggle with insecurity because we compare our behind-the-scenes with everyone else’s highlight reel.” – Steven Furtick

We see only outcomes. Worse still, we see mostly successful outcomes because the other outcomes are hidden from view or disappear quickly. No matter what we tell ourselves, it can be hard not to take the highlights reels around us as a measure of our own shortcomings.

We don’t see the hours of craft. For every magical moment there are hours of creation, rehearsal, tweaking and learning again. Every overnight success is a long time coming. There are hours and hours of outright failure. Great craft comes from great practice. As we struggle in our practice, we compare ourselves to the great and we wonder if the gap will ever close.

Forget the comparisons. Devote yourself to your craft. Put in the time and the effort. Share your craft openly, connect with others working the craft and learn from their efforts too. Focus on the 99% of perspiration and the rest will follow.

“Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working” Picasso

Your Own Facts

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

‘Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.’  Attributed to Daniel Patrick Moynihan

Once debate was a contest of opinions. There may have been disputes around the edges about the facts but the common ground was clearly agreed.

Increasingly we see the facts themselves as the subject of a debate. Each side girds itself with its own view of the world and the facts. Read the paper, listen to the radio, watch the television or study social media and you will see people put forward the facts that justify their position and deny all others. Without common context, any hope of agreement or resolution is slim.

‘Lies, damn lies and statistics’ 19 Century British Political Phrase

The growing availability of data in our world and the increasing ability to connect a niche audience for your data is only likely to make this an increasing challenge. Even if we put aside the patently false, selective use of data can tell almost any story. Fact checking can only go so far before it meets differing references periods, unclear definitions, crossed purposes and misinterpretation.

Our focus on science, political science, economics and scientific management has been part of creating an intense focus on the idea that the answer is in the data. However, data confirms hypotheses and arguments. We cling to data as the trump card in debate. A wide choice of data enables many competing approaches to be confirmed. As we deal with ever more complex and more global systems, we are reaching a point where a single data story can no longer be the simple answer.

“I would not give a fig for the simplicity this side of complexity, But I would give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity.” Attributed to Oliver Wendell Holmes Snr

We need to accept that no argument will be won with a data point or a trend, however appealing that simple approach may be. As reassuring as they are our own facts are useless in society. Allowing ourselves to be divided into tribes with their own facts is far too unproductive and dangerous to our future. Civil debate begins by finding the common ground and creating a growing shared context. That takes leaders who can explore what is shared rather than focus on differences of facts.

We also need to embrace a greater share of the complexity of life in our global interconnected world. We can no longer rely on the simple answers. That trend may lead only to a local maximum or miss some wider ramifications of the decision. We need to go hunting together in the complexity, experimenting and genuinely debating the paths forward together. Continuing open dialogue that builds a shared common ground is the path to a new contest of ideas on the other side of complexity.

Do You Really Need That New Intranet?

Posted on by simongterry in Collaboration, Future of Work

Intranet projects are still popular these days. There is great new technology platforms & many new features available. Internet designs have moved on a lot so your old intranet is starting to look a little tired. Now your employees have new devices so your intranet needs to be mobile first and responsive. Think of the opportunities for new branding, a new name, better search and a refresh of all the content. Finally the intranet could be at the heart of the knowledge management and collaboration in the organisation. Delivering a new intranet is a signature career achievement.

Stop. Are you sure you need that new intranet?

New intranets don’t come cheap. Even after the technology solutions is acquired, the expenditure has only just begun. All that wonderful new design is going to cost money. You will need personas, card sorts and then branding advice. Getting the information architecture right can make all the difference so you will need a lot of time spent on the taxonomy of content, hierarchies of information, businesses and users. Glossaries and other reference materials will need to be reviewed and updated. Search will need to be tuned to make sure that it delivers the right options. All your existing content will need to be reviewed to fit into the new design. Throw in a policy and product information refresh and the costs and time skyrocket. Then there is the maintenance costs of all that content. Add in personalisation, collaboration and social features and the work never ends.

What is the Intranet really for?

To senior managers, an employee communications or HR team, an intranet is a showcase of the organisation, its business strategy and its knowledge. It is the one source of truth. It is the hub of collaboration and a critical place to share messages with all employees. This perception can create a whole lot of politics that disrupts the effectiveness of your new intranet. People become focused about the need to control the design and the content. User focus is swapped for the desire to meet the needs of the hierarchy. That control has real consequences when it disengages users. Worse still it can force one template on everyone and make everyone into ‘content providers’. The costs of this control are in content that gets out of date and grey market sites that spring up to break the shackles.  Soon the efforts to get around the intranet are drawing investment, effort and attention away from the platform. Confusion escalates and the intranet site is on its way back to being a stale reservoir of knowledge.

To an employee an intranet is where all the links in corporate distribution emails go. Usually the intranet is the last place they go to look when they and their colleagues don’t have the answer to hand and local searches have turned up no relevant ideas. Often the intranet is the place where knowledge is tied up in clunky processes & policy that don’t reflect their day job. Everything is anonymous. The context and authority that comes from human connection is lost. An employee does not care about single sources of truth or showcases of corporate messages. They care about findability and usefulness. Nobody browses an intranet willingly.

I know many organisations who have built elegant product sites on their intranet to explain all the features, process and policy relating to their products. Too often they discover that their teams use the customer facing website for product information. The structure of customer facing product information is usually better suited to employee’s roles in explaining that information to customers. It is indexed for Google search. Legal requirements ensure that product teams keep the external information that matters up to date. Also the employee can send the customer a link if they need to explain lots of detail. The pretty intranet is a showcase but the internet is the workhorse. How much of your intranet site could you do away with by directing employees to external sites?

Are the behaviours going to change?

In our work, we create value through our actions. If the behaviours aren’t going to change, then don’t change the intranet.  Changing only the technology alone, will foster only cost and confusion.

If you do want to get better at collaboration, communication and knowledge management, start with a clear understanding of the value to the organisation and the value to the user. Look for ways to achieve your goals that involved changed behaviours and community, not technology. When you are clear on the value of changed behaviours, you will be clearer on what your technology needs to look like to support that work. Now you won’t be forcing an intranet as a solution and you will be able to look at the breadth of options from social collaboration, to working out loud more, to using external internet sites and other tools of helping employees to find what matters most to help them do their job.

You will also have built a case for the whole organisation to align to working in new and better ways.

What is the Opportunity Cost of Your Time?

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

Opportunity cost is the value you give up by making a choice. Every moment of your life has an opportunity cost. What you decide to do with that moment is a choice. Every moment offers other choices that can create new value and opportunities for you.

If you don’t make choices, there is a good chance opportunity costs are accumulating against you. The paths you haven’t considered and the choices you have deferred might be more rewarding. These choices are rarely as difficult as you think.

If you don’t insist on reciprocity for your relationships and your efforts, then you will likely find that you will rue the opportunity cost of your choice. Work, relationships and other opportunities tend to be like buses. They all come at once. Take the first one on unfavourable terms and you might rue the missed opportunities later.

Consider the opportunity cost of your time. You will make better choices.

Slow Motion Disasters

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

In a competitive global economy, organisations want to improve their execution. With manufacturing paradigms, organisations often choose to focus on improving the teams doing the work of delivery. Management literature is full of processes and approaches to improve project and other forms of delivery.  However, organisations often fail to diagnose that the causes of poor execution can also lie around the teams and processes of the work.

Story: A Slow Motion Disaster

Yesterday I decided casually to make some sourdough bread because I thought I needed to use my starter again. My starter wasn’t quite ready but I thought it was close enough and I would push on. I was distracted when starting because I had a bit going on in the kitchen and I accidentally added a little too much water. I tried to fix that upfront with more flour and I thought I had it under control. The excess water made the dough loose and sticky and hard to knead.  I convinced myself it would work. When I finally had some shape to the dough, I left it to prove. As the dough proved, I found that it became too sloppy again and I took some steps to fix it but mostly failed.  

Now deep in the process, I tried to push on shaping a loaf into a basket and leaving it to prove overnight. When I turned that loaf out of the basket I no longer had a loaf. I loaded a collapsing mound of sticky dough into the oven hoping against hope it might rise a little in the oven. What came out of the oven was a flat mess. The entire process was a slow motion disaster from the beginning.

The output – half flat and half rounded. Tastes fine.

There are many points in that process where my execution of the sourdough bread failed. However, the bigger challenges were not my techniques of delivery but in the environment and mindsets surrounding the work:

  • I didn’t have a clear reason to start
  • I didn’t get ready to execute properly
  • I didn’t focus exclusively on getting the job done well
  • I was distracted by other goals
  • I kept convincing myself it would work out OK if I kept going
  • I tried to make late changes to fix earlier errors
  • I didn’t have any help, other viewpoints or external checkpoints to make me review my decisions
  • I fell into the sunk cost fallacy trying to finish when I should have seen the failure and started again
  • I felt the need to get the job done, rather than the pressure to do the job well.

Avoiding Slow Motion Disasters

Having been involved in many corporate projects, I have seen organisations experience many of the issues of delivery that I experienced above. These issues shape the ability of the team doing the delivery to manage the project and to succeed.

Talents are variable. Circumstances change. Mistakes will happen. Obstacles will get in the way. The challenge of effective delivery is how to design work so that the job gets done despite the skills, mistakes and the obstacles. That takes organisations to think through the goals, the support and the environment of the project to help those doing the delivery to best adapt to what happens. Process and talent won’t get you there alone.

Effectively delivery demands an environment where:

  • Clear outcomes are set and the outcomes matter most to the team and the stakeholders of the work
  • Work is put into preparation and clearing the path for the team doing the delivery to focus on their work
  • Hard conversations are had and clear choices are made to start, stop or continue based on progress towards the outcomes
  • Accountabilities are clear and teams are supported with autonomy, trust and support to achieve their outcomes around and through challenges
  • Issues are addressed properly as they arise
  • The environment, support and collaboration enables the project to work through issues, to make the needed changes and to pursue the agreed outcomes that define success. 

Poor execution is not a mystery and it is not always the fault of the team’s at work on delivery. Often organisations need to take a hard look at the contributions of leadership, debate, decision making and collaboration in achieving effective execution. Execution is as much an artefact of the culture of an organisation as any other activity.

Breathe

Posted on by simongterry in Life & Career, Working out loud

Last year there were over 200 posts to this blog. I have been blogging almost daily for more than eight years now, first internally for five years at NAB and then for the last three years on this blog. I write on many of the days I don’t publish, leaving some ideas for future research and development. The near daily process of working out loud on ideas has been amazingly productive and a wonderful source of new relationships and opportunities.

Last week I needed to put together two different talks on working out loud, one for the AITD Conference and another for Intranets2016. As I sat down to work through those talks I discovered I was able to draw on a reservoir of ideas that I had thought through, blogged and turned into images. Having a ready source of my thoughts helped me to see new connections and new opportunities:

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Blogging has also become a deeply ingrained habit over time. When I began trying to blog daily I used BJ Fogg’s tiny habit approach to get me started. My blog post each day was the work I did while I drank my first coffee. I would never have forecast when I began that thinking out loud would become the way I work through so many challenges. When I have an idea or a challenge to consider my first thought is to start working through how I would blog it. Now I am much more alert each day to the insights and the opportunities. I am always looking for connections and querying how what I read relates to past and future blogposts. I have learned to be much more concise in my thinking and expression. Most importantly I have learned to let more of myself out in the process. The latter has played a key role in creating and deepening relationships.

Last week I was explaining my blogging process to a friend and I found myself saying ‘It’s just like breathing’. I surprised myself with how casually I referred to the process, but it was true. Persistent practice moved me forward to a different relationship to my working out loud. Because the habits are deeply engrained the stress and anxiety of writing slips away a little more. What is left is the joy of thinking, sharing and making new connections.

Breathe.

Choices

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

We have them. Every moment presents a new choice. Every moment gives us the chance to choose our work, to pick our way or to better fulfil a purpose.

We have more than we want but never the ones we need. Choices are always with us but the big ones are too quick and the small ones seem too slow dragging us back and distracting us from the next big step.

We are more likely to fail from a small choice than a big one. We do every day. That’s what small choices are for, ways we test explore and shape our world incrementally.

Choices come in hard and soft and a myriad of variations in between like the cheeses. The difficulty of the choice is simply a flavour. It plays no part in the significance. All the effort we put into our decisions is process not outcome.

The most satisfying choices are created like sculptures carved out of solid blocks with a hammer, chisel, polishing tools and lots of perspiration. When made these choices look so perfect that they were always there ready made.

Our choices are our life, our work and our purpose. Abandoning choice leaves these outcomes to others.

So what do you choose now?

Breaking Down the Value Creation Opportunities in A Yammer Post

Posted on by simongterry in Collaboration
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Value is created in enterprise social networks as people connect, share, solve and innovate together. That value creation is an outcome of the work people choose to do together. Measuring the activity in the technology isn’t a measure of the value created, it is simply a measure of adoption. The value of the adoption comes from the organisations strategy and the work of its teams.

However, the features in a typical Yammer post, or any enterprise social network, can give us a guide as to how people come together in networks to work in new ways.  Let’s break down a Yammer post using the Value Maturity Model so see how new organisational value gets created.

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Connection brings people in the organisation together often for the first time.  That connection can be a simple as the feeling of belonging or recognition when a post gets a like. It might be bringing people together around a topic of current need or ongoing mutual interest like a community of interest or a community of practice.  Most directly, connection can be a way in large, distributed or siloed organisations to find the people responsible and get in touch to move work forward. 

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Sharing lifts information out of its hiding places, makes it findable and directs it to people who need to know. That can happen in the enterprise network through replies that answer common questions for everyone’s benefit, provide links to information or provide documents meeting a present need and saving future time and searches.  Shares make sure information reaches the right people whether a group, an individual through a private message or even by taking a message out to email to those who don’t regularly use the network. All sharing is silo-busting. Adding topics, either in a message or later, provides people new ways to navigate information and helps make information searchable. Sharing creates a rich domain for social learning and helps the new employee seeking to learn more. A culture of sharing fosters working out loud to help people achieve personal purposes, bring work to the surface and further increase these benefits. Most importantly of all, this activity helps build a shared and discoverable context for the work of the organisation reducing errors, duplication and improving problem solving and efficiency.

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Value creation accelerates when an enterprise social network becomes a way for people to come together to work on solving problems. People can ideate, offer solutions and work together in the thread or in groups to discuss ways to solve work problems with existing or new solutions. Having a way to discuss and work through problems in products, policy or process, either through fixes or hacks, helps the organisation continue to flow for those doing the work. The problems raised in this way are able to be solved not just for one user but for everyone in the organisation. The value of these solutions will increase as the problems that teams tackle increase in value. Leaders, experts and creative individuals can help enable the organisation to move past its daily obstacles and create better experiences for customers, employees and other stakeholders. The benefits here are in work in the network and out in the organisation that continuously and responsively improves organisational effectiveness.

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Innovation adds value to the organisation when employees feel enabled and encouraged to put forward possibilities, to seek ways to make them happen and to recruit capabilities and coalitions to experiment and execute on opportunities.  Vibrant communities will work well beyond a single post out into the broader organisation to make their ideas a reality and help the organisation to respond to its opportunities. Innovation allows employees to explore ways to better fulfil the purpose of the firm, to radically reshape the processes of their work and to deliver new forms of value.

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Building the Goodwill of Networks

Posted on by simongterry in Collaboration, Working out loud

Networks give people access to more people than ever before. However, they can also create new inconveniences by allowing people to free ride. Networks are fostered when people are encouraged others to making contributions to others first and to consider in their approaches the value created for others in their requests. These actions, like purposeful and generous working out loud, rebuild the goodwill that free riders consume.

The Network Externality of Free Riders

In economics, an externality is a cost imposed on other people who did not choose to incur it. Free riding is where a person consumes more than their share of a common resource. Every network depends on common resource of goodwill in continuing connection. A common barrier to the development of collaboration in networks is the network externality of thoughtlessness and free riding.

Great networks build up goodwill among the members which facilitates collaboration through trust, shared connection and a sense of reciprocal benefits. Free riders are members of those networks who don’t contribute to the general goodwill. 

The Externality of Thoughtlessnesss

Thoughtless activities in networks consume goodwill because they impose costs on others in the network without any return:

  • Noise: It takes time and effort to filter out noise. Creating noise in networks is costly to everyone. Noise can include repetitive posts, broadcast messages, long rambling messages, diversions from purpose, spam and other forms of low value messages.
  • Laziness: Failing to check that the question you ask has not been answered already or that the answer is not readily available. Let me Google That For You is a great example of a solution to this common occurrence.
  • Confusion: Making a unclear request of the network. In many cases questions are far easier to ask than to answer well. Many people do not think through what others need to be able to answer their query. It takes time and effort to clarify what the issue is and what answers or assistance will be helpful.
  • Selfishness: Making request of others for effort without giving anything back. We have all been asked to help others in our networks. The better requests are respectful of the individual and the network. Most of the requests that come through Linkedin have a clear benefit to the other person but much less consideration on how I might be interested in helping. Responding to these requests takes time and effort which lowers the value of the network and the priority of responding at all.
  • Lack of Follow-through: Making requests that are ambit claims, have unnecessary urgency or where you are not prepared to invest in follow through on the responses others will make. A common issue is when people ask for urgent help and then disappear again without responding to even acknowledge the answers given to their query. 
  • Unclear Benefit: Making unclear offers of benefits. If you suggest something offers ‘exposure’, ‘mutual benefit’, ‘rewards’, ‘an opportunity’ or similar it helps to quantify this in your request. Leaving it for others to discover the meaning of your obscurity imposes costs on others and on you.

There are many more examples. While it may be easy to decline all poorly framed requests, some times opportunity lurks under the thoughtlessness.  The challenge is that the time and effort to respond, to clarify, to negotiate mutual benefit and to help can unduly burden network participants. Suddenly people withdraw from helping others in the network because the collective experience is burdensome. 

Sidenote: Recognise Your Own Value In Networks

Under an avalanche of requests for free time, free help, free speaking engagements, free advice, offers of ‘exposure’ and general lack of consideration, it can be tempting to decide that you have to acquiesce because the whole system works this way. This is even more the case when you are told ‘everyone else’ seems to be doing things on this basis. We are still learning how to manage relationships at scales, timeliness and distances that have never been possible before in human history. Remember always you have choices. The best way to make choices is to respect the value you bring, set your own strategy and set your own rules for the value exchange. That way you take and miss the opportunities you choose, not others. Ask people you trust to help you assess the value you create, if you can’t do it yourself. Grace, humble respect for the value you create and a focus on reciprocity can make magic happen.

Replenishing Goodwill with Purpose, Contributions and Serendipity

One of the reasons that I am a advocate of John Stepper’s work in promoting the value of working out loud is that John has made explicit the value of making contributions to others. Making purposeful contributions to people in your network builds goodwill. It is a great way to start a relationship. People are more likely to assist you if they have seen you making contributions to others. Most importantly of all to make a contribution to another person you need to take the time to think of that other person and their needs.

Goodwill erodes if it is not actively restored by reciprocal benefits in a network. Creating goodwill through consistent contributions to others and serendipitous benefits helps the networks deliver net benefits to participants overcoming the costs imposed by the thoughtless and the deliberate free riders. The more people make purposeful contributions to others the more likely the balance will be a net positive one. For this reason many early online forums excluded lurkers in an effort to foster purposeful participation and reciprocity. The champions, change agents and connectors at the heart of your network will be some of the most purposeful, considerate and generous individuals that you know.

Fostering a culture of working out loud that is purposeful and generous will help any network overcome the challenges of occasional free-riding.