Writing

Five Daily Reflections of the Change Agent

Posted on by simongterry in Change

Reading Seeds for a Boundless Life, a book on Zen Buddhism by Zenkei Blanch Hartman, I came across a reference to the Upajjhatthana Sutra’s Five Daily Reflections. The Sutra recommends daily reflections to help Buddhists to focus less on their attachments to ego & desires and more upon their actions.

Reflecting on these, I saw a parallel to common challenges for each change agent’s practice of bringing about a better world. Change agents are taking on difficult work, not for the benefits of ego or any personal desire. Change agents act out of a purpose to make an impact that helps others.  At the same time what surprises many who take on change is that the road is harder and more difficult than they ever expected.

Every change agent lives with these five daily reflections:

  • I can’t go back. There is no way to go back.
  • I can’t avoid obstacles. Obstacles are the work.
  • I don’t have forever. Time is limited.
  • Everything changes. Loss is part of that change.
  • My actions and my interactions are how I make the change work.

Once a change agent sees the need to make a change in the world, it becomes impossible to ignore. They can’t wish it away or pretend things are as they were. They can’t undo their commitment to purpose. 

Embracing that commitment means accepting that there will be obstacles to be overcome. The obstacles aren’t inconveniences or distractions. They are the work to be done to bring about the change. 

Time is always a constraint. Time demands we make the most of every opportunities to create change. Time means we must start now. Time means we must involve others.

Just as we must embrace the obstacles we encounter in our work, we must accept that there will be loss in bringing about change. Some things we lose will be important to us and to others. Part of a change agent’s role is to help others understand and manage that loss. 

We have only our actions and our interactions. That is how we bring about change. That is how our change will be judged. Ends don’t justify means. The means are a key part of the change.

Change agents can and do wish it were different. Keeping reflections like these ever in mind helps us to avoid the disillusionment that comes along with unmet expectations and unfulfilled wishes. Change agents are pragmatic and realise that little changes without the hard work to make change happen.

Who is that exactly?

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

One of the most important questions to ask in any leadership conversation is “Who is that exactly?” Getting beneath the opaque references to people is important to bring real human impacts to the foreground in decision making. Human behaviour is richer and more complex than segmentation and averages can show. Importantly, a specific conversation about people can also surface other impacts, alternative approaches and bias hidden in decisions. 

The Opaque Other

Politicians love opaque phrases to refer to their opponents: ‘the 1%’, ‘big business’, ‘immigrants’, ‘refugees’, ‘special interests’, ‘leaners’, ‘those people’, and so on.  The value of an opaque phrase is that avoids the risk of conflict with the current audience and builds a sense of conflict with an Other that they use to unite that audience. Demagogues have been threatening audiences with an Other since politics began. In an age when sexism, racism and overt discrimination have become less acceptable, the Other needs to take on a more opaque form. Usually when confronted with specific examples or challenged to name who exactly they mean, politicians duck and weave to avoid being more specific. Who they actually mean can be quite surprising to the audience. 

The Opaque Other at Work

The same opaque conversations have drifted into business and social conversations too. It is not unusual to hear that a particular decision will have an adverse impact on ‘retention’, ‘a small segment of customers’, ‘stakeholders’, ‘some performance indicators’, ‘poor performers’ or even just ‘employees’. Behind each of those opaque phrases are real human impacts often on a scale that is far larger and far more important than the phrase indicates.

Asking “who is that exactly?” lifts the curtain on that obscurity and enables a better quality decision. Understanding specific individuals impacted can reveal unintended consequences beneath the averages. Percentages and other statistics are driven by real human decisions by specific customers. I have seen examples where organisations have approved decisions like changes to customer loyalty programs that have a forecast of a minor uptick in customer churn, only to discover later that it adverse impacted the most loyal and most profitable customers. The business impact was far worse than expected. 

Equally changes to organisational structures, processes, performance management, leave, flexible working and other HR policies rarely impact employees equally. While they may looks so in the data used for business decisions, real human employees are rarely fungible. To consider one example, a decision to ‘spill and fill’ a management role in a restructure had a devastating consequence on the business because of the experience that was lost as employees took their talents to market and the market lacked of talent to fill a sudden large demand for lost experience. Had people considered individuals in both the roles and the market first a better decision could have been made.

If you want greater collaboration and innovation at work then you need to get beneath consideration of the opaque bucket called ‘our employees’. Innovation and collaboration are different for specific employee.  They have different meanings, benefits and costs to different people. A successful strategy focuses on real individual employee needs to achieve the organisational outcome.

Turning your conversation to consider the specific people impacted and ensuring that you understand them well before making a decision is important in any conversation. Importantly this is also a key step to make sure the decision is inclusive and not divisive. The consideration may not change the decision but it will make everyone more aware of the risks and impacts. The consideration will also improve the quality of any engagement you have with impacted people as discussions move into implementation.

Asking the simple question “who is that exactly?” will help you to consider the complexity of real people.

Returning to Autonomy

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

Ubiquitous communication is taking us back to approaches to organisation of work that predated modern communications. The challenge now is not lack of communication. The challenge is the complexity of ubiquitous communication.

image

If you were setting up a business in 1816 and you were going to operate over any distance, you needed to rely on your people to operate autonomously. Through much of the 19th Century as the telegraph, railroads and eventually automobiles arrived, communication and transportation remained slow and costly.  If you relied on instructing a distant workforce through more than an occasional letter or shipment, you were in danger of losing your business. Bureaucracy had been created to enable management on merit and talents and to provide consistent decision making to the management of local autonomy. People hired for trust, autonomy and the creative talents to manage a business because there was no other way to manage local affairs in a volatile changing world.

image

By 1916, the cost of communications and transport had fallen significantly. The technology of management responded by leveraging the communications technology to measure, simplify, standardise and organise. Risk, discretion and variation were eliminated to achieve economies of scale and consistency of quality. Communication technologies enabled the end of autonomy, replacing it with policy, process, hierarchy and management. Bureaucracy enabled by communication took over the art of management in a fast global world. People hired for experience, organisational fit and ability to execute.

image

In 2016, digital communications are ubiquitous, logistic networks cover the world and through technology like 3D printing and digital services we are even beginning to explore options to avoid transportation costs entirely. We have passed beyond exchanging, measuring and recording enough information to manage the business. Now there is too much information for everyone.  Employees, managers, customers and stakeholders are overwhelmed and unable to properly understand and respond to the system of interconnected processes that exist across organisations. 

In this complex adaptive system, we can no longer expect an all powerful centre to see and manage the processes, policies and business. We have returned to autonomy. People are hired for trust, autonomy and the creative talents to manage a business because there is no other way to manage complex affairs in a volatile connected and rapidly changing world.

The organisations that succeed in an interconnected world will be those who enable their people to respond autonomously to their environment, to lead experimentation and adaptation and to apply creative human intelligence to improving the system. New models of management are being developed now to create these responsive organisations

Design the Work

Posted on by simongterry in Collaboration

Don’t design workflow for the product features. Design work for the people. Let them improve the process from there.

Features Change

Microsoft MVP Melanie Hohertz, Online Communications Lead of Cargill recently remarked in conversation ‘People need to stop designing workflow in Yammer around product features’. This comment is needs to be more widely understood as it is a key source of frustration for many community managers and their organisations. I am not surprised Melanie would so simply distill the issues vexing community managers with Yammer. Melanie is always insightful about Yammer, based in both her excellent command of the product capabilities but also her expertise in community management.

Cloud software solutions have brought powerful new capability into our organisations. However they have also created havoc with traditional ways of working due to their agile product development methodology.

Processes Don’t Change

The process-centric history of management means we try to turn much of our work into a tightly defined process. Many organisation take agile cloud solutions like Yammer and build their features into tightly structured workflow. This process centric approach doesn’t work.

Yammer’s product development is highly agile. Product features change to a loose roadmap but also as a result of a continuous program of A/B testing. We might wish for greater certainty and transparency, but the agile approach isn’t going to change.

The testing enables Yammer’s product managers to learn from the use of the solution by all their users. Your unique use case of a tightly defined custom workflow won’t fit in this approach. That one workflow is a blip among the way millions of users engage with the tool. Melanie’s insight means that we need to step outside our traditional process-centric view and embrace a people-centric approach.

Collaboration takes Community

The opportunity with collaboration in the future of work is for people to be able to reshape their work. Collaboration is not just a layer over the process. Don’t design a process for the features of the tool. Design around the people, those who do the work. Give them the capability to shape their work. Help them to become more agile and adaptable. Let the people take their work forward from there. People will learn in time to navigate the changing features, adapting them to their needs. The product roadmap matters far less than the creativity and agility of community.

Supported in the right ways, people will improve their work through creating new network connections, sharing information, solving challenges and continuously creating new ways of working. The results will be more agile, more collaborative and more effective.

Algorithms Work Out Loud

Posted on by simongterry in Working out loud

Whether we like it or not, working out loud is coming as a work trend. The benefits for productivity, learning and effectiveness from working out loud make greater transparency and connection in our work inevitable. If we do not work out loud, it will be our tools that work out loud for us.

Algorithms Ascendant

If you have any interest in digital trends you will have noted the news that software beat the world’s best Go player 4-1. I’ve played a little Go and even at a much smaller scale than a competition board it is a mind-bendingly tricky game that relies on intuition as well as logic. Software being able to beat a Go master so comprehensively is a significant development because analysts had forecast it could be up to a decade before Go fell. Go is too complex for a simple brute force strategy of computation of possible paths. 

The breakthrough occurred because the Google team developing AlphaGo didn’t just rely on one source of technical expertise or one strategy to beat a Go Master. AlphaGo improved itself by testing multiple strategies in machine learning, specifically learning better models of play each time it watched or played a game of Go.  AlphaGo’s success reflected a key benefit of working out loud – learning through observation and experience of not just one’s own practice but also the practice of other Go algorithms and Go masters.

Algorithmic Insight

Whether we practice working out loud or not, the software around us is already beginning to leverage our work to learn and enhance its effectiveness. Social media sites are all moving to algorithmic display because they can leverage our behaviour and relationships to better meet our needs (& their own business models).  I remember my resistance when Yammer first implemented an algorithmic feed and moved away from following. I thought there was no way that I would value the algorithms choice of messages over my own curation of content through following strategies. These concerns passed quickly in use and it has been a long time since I reflected on the need for a better following model.  Incidentally, Yammer moved to this change as a result of analytics and A/B testing, leveraging the work of thousands of customers to find better ways to build its product.

These algorithms are coming deeper into our work. I recently had a demonstration of Microsoft Office’s Delve and Delve Analytics. My takeaway was here was that I was looking at the potential for algorithms and analytics to turbocharge the value by leveraging a form of passive automation of working out loud. Clearly tools like Delve can help by reducing search, however they can also deliver further benefits for learning, collaboration and business value by helping make working out loud a default practice in the future of work.

Delve offers a key way to address the concerns many critics of working out loud raise. Today working out loud requires an individual to push their work out visibly so that others can pull the work for the purpose of learning or collaboration. That first push upsets some critics as it is seen as contributing to noise, raising the possibility of unconstructive distraction or requiring incremental effort from the worker. My experience is that the benefits far outweigh this minor inconvenience.  However, algorithms and analytics like Delve, change this game by leveraging our working behaviours to pull information and insights from the work of others and make them available to enable us to better learn or to find better practice. 

Solutions like Delve enable all of our working out loud practice to rest on a pull model. If Delve can surface a document that I need to see or I can use from the work of my peers then it doesn’t rely on any more effort from my peer that to enable this sharing and configure privacy and security settings. If Delve Analytics can help me to learn how better to use Microsoft’s productivity tools by supplying insights on my use and that of my peers, then again it does not require my colleagues to measure, document and share their approaches. A similar example is that Swoop Analytics have now released Swoop personas to enable each user of an enterprise social network like Yammer to understand their personal style and effectiveness in the use of the platform. 

The trajectory of innovation is that these algorithms will be increasingly effective and increasingly deeply integrated into our products.

Is that it?

If algorithms are the answer, it that it? Do we no longer need the human practice of working out loud? Why don’t we just wait?

There is an adoption challenge of sorts with the coming algorithms. Algorithms can help with insight, but they cannot address the human side of openness to learn, willingness to experiment and ability to handle the social elements of working out loud.  We all need to learn to be able to manage new practices and to have mindsets to be able to benefit from the change.  These mindsets stretch from an attitude of generosity, desire for connection, a move from reliance on personal expertise and through to the ability to handle odd moment of embarrassment. If we do not get the mindsets right, then we will miss the benefits of new ways of working.

The value of the practice of working out loud now is that it enables each of us to learn important social skills in the network era: building connections, reciprocity, generosity and how to create and sustain the creation of value in networks.  The networks and the algorithms are not going away. The challenge for all those seeking to be ready for the future of work is to learn how best to leverage these new models.

Just like AlphaGo, those who are already working out loud are discovering new practices and approaches to work through their own work and through watching the practices of others. You can wait for an algorithm to arrive to make the change for you or you can get ahead of the curve and enhance your practice of working out loud.

Factlets

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

Factlets aren’t facts. Factlets are far more useful. Factlets are the fragments we keep to reassure ourselves we are right. They are the parts of facts that suit your argument.

Truth is irrelevant to a Factlets. All that matters is your argument.

Factlets are quotes from sources we have never checked. Factlets are theories we picked up in conversation. Factlets are opinions that ‘sound right.’ Factlets are that phrase everyone thinks they know without reading the book. Factlets are reassuring statistics devoid of source, method or context. Factlets are history that now has new meaning because new stories suit us better. Factlets are trends from a single data point. Factlets are the simple answer in a complex world. Factlets are easy, comfortable and quick.

Reality is hard, uncomfortable and slow.

Every time you see an argument that depends on one piece of information you will find a factlet. Factlets are bias, distortion and deceit. They dominate our thinking but thrive on a lack of attention. Factlets avoid the effort and inconvenience of real facts and actual knowledge.

Factlets couldn’t be more dangerous to our health, wealth and wellbeing.

Small Changes Accumulate

Posted on by simongterry in Change, Uncategorized

1 – Make a small change today.

2 – Do it again tomorrow. You have doubled your influence.

4 (2 to the power 2)- The next day invite 3 people to join with you in the next change. You have doubled your influence again.

8 (2 to the power of 3)- The following day ask everyone to bring 1 people to make the next day’s change. 

16 (to the power of 4) – From day five ask everyone to keep adding one person each time you make a change. Spread the message far and wide in your network.

…

1,073, 741, 824 (2 to the power of 30) – If you can double your influence for 31 days, only one month, you will have over a billion people carrying out that change. 

Most changes you want to make don’t need that many people or that cumulative power for change.  You might not get to double every day for a month, but the further you get down the path of small changes powered by a network, the greater your influence.

Of course, you have no influence until you start making change. Today.

Obstacles are the Work

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

Obstacles are not constraints. Obstacles are not limits to possibility. Obstacles aren’t disappointments.
Obstacles are the work.
Obstacles are a creative challenge. Obstacles are an opportunity to learn. Obstacles are a reminder to improve.
Obstacles are the work.
Obstacles are the reason they need you. Obstacles are the best test of your potential. Obstacles are the challenge.
Obstacles are the work.
Obstacles are why you need others. Obstacles are where process breaks down. Obstacles demand purposeful change.
Obstacles are the work.
Ranting doesn’t remove obstacles. Hope doesn’t remove obstacles. Work removes obstacles.
Obstacles are the work.