Writing

The Leverage of the Change Agent

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

Give me a lever and a place to stand and I shall move the earth – Archimedes

There’s a tiny thing on the edge of a rudder called a trim tab. Just moving that little trim tab creates a low pressure that pulls the rudder around. It takes almost no effort at all – Buckminster Fuller

Change Agents move the world to change because they understand the importance of leverage. Small actions can be leveraged into larger outcomes through their work.

The Leverage of Purpose

Change agents take grievances, disappointments and frustrations and turn them into purposeful action. Crowds can easily share a grievance. However someone needs to help the group to turn abstract frustration into a shared purpose. Discovering that shared purpose in a group is a lever of influence and motivation that scales rapidly.

The Leverage of Networks

Change agents understand that networks are extraordinary ways to scale their influence. They can connect with likeminded individuals, share information, solve challenges and develop new ways of working. The network expands the influence of the change agent across their organisation and across the world.

The Leverage of Role Modelling

Change agents do. Change agents understand that the most effective way to lead change is to show others change is possible through action. For every role model there are thousands of eyes in networks who can be influenced to magnify the scale of the change.

The Leverage of Experimentation

Change agents take advantage of the leverage that comes with experimentation. If you do more often, you have had a greater impact. Rather than wait for the perfect information, change agents experiment to learn and create an example for others.  Experimentation enables networks to scale beyond individual expertise and accelerate learning and change.

The Leverage of Tension

Change agents create tension. For many organisations, the existence of people pushing for change creates tension that focuses new attention on the need to change. Creating and shaping tensions in the organisation is a role that change agents play to create the ‘low pressure’ pull through the resulting focus, discomfort and action.

The Leverage of Generosity

Change agents give because a culture of giving expands influence. Working out loud with a generous intent, giving of their time and effort to help others or focusing on the needs of others are highly effective ways to move change forward and set an example that encourages others to do the same.

Unsubscribe Marketing

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

We are in the era of unsubscribe marketing. Lazy marketing behaviours favour activity over outcomes. 

Seth Godin wrote permission marketing 17 years ago. He and others have regularly returned to the reminder that the best relationships are built on consent to a conversation. 

Mostly, marketers and marketing platforms haven’t listened. LinkedIn connections add you to their mailing lists. DM messages blast marketing at you. Every day messages and calls come in sellIng regardless of your preferences and settings. 

When you complain, you are politely directed to unsubscribe. Of course, even unsubscribing is not straight forward. One conference organiser uses a unique list for every email so you unsubscribe only to the email you just received. Spammers use unsubscribe as confirmation of a valid email. Social media sites and others change preferences and hide unsubscribe options to retain and re-enroll users. We have shifted from permission marketing to unsubscribe marketing without considering the impacts.

All this unsubscribe marketing It is all pointless and counterproductive. These campaigns in many cases generate additional sales. In a digital era when costs of an email or social message are low, people may be lured into thinking that they are ahead.  They are not when the cost is fully considered.

Let’s consider the costs. On many of these campaigns unsubscribe rates exceed conversion rates. Being told by your prospects to never contact them again can’t be the outcome of a great brand experience. Worse still, these campaigns are so ineffective that at best they fail in the heights of the 90th percentile. Many marketers see the only cost of this mammoth failure as the unsubscribe rate. In fact, they risk creating a negative impression on the far larger group who note the campaign and form a negative impression. An economic analysis of spam estimated the externality caused by these messages was 100 times the value created.  Every time a marketer sends an unsubscribe marketing campaign they are destroying time and money for their potential prospects. Last time I checked the best way to do business is create value for customers, not destroy it.

Unsubscribe marketing isn’t be a sustainable way to do business. Marketers who put their faith in unsubscribe need to look at the bigger picture and understand the damage they do to their brand, their business and their target market.

The Value of Collaboration is Changed Work, Not Answers

Posted on by simongterry in Collaboration, Future of Work

Read the literature on enterprise social networking, chat applications and collaboration and you could easily fall into believing that all that matters for a vibrant and valuable community is generating good answers to employee questions. The value of collaboration is not in answers. The value of collaboration is in changing the way work gets done.

Answers to questions are an early signal of the maturity of a network. Suddenly, it feels like the organisation has a Genius Bar of its own. Once people start to share their expertise, their knowledge and their ideas you have the platform for further development of the way your organisation works. However, many people focus on these answers as the point of collaboration.  They become diverted by the need for more participation in answering questions and generating faster or more accurate answers. Some of the paths to achieve a better answer can have negative consequences to the further maturity of the network.  

Placing the pressure of social support on a few champions alone can threaten the participation of a group critical to the success of the entire community. Badgering leaders to answer questions without any personal rationale leaves them seeing enterprise social as just another inbox. Gamification, badges and other recognition will increase participation but can also make participation, less purposeful, less flexible and more a numbers game. 

The appeal of many of the new chat applications is that for a small engaged teams, such as a development team, project team or consulting team, they can provide a ready access to answers and a forum for sharing. However, a dynamic of answering can lead to the community descending into a ‘groundhog day’ experience of the same questions asked repeatedly. When people expect quick answers why search the community to see if your question has been asked before.

Solving work problems and innovating in an work community is about more than answers. Faster answers is an example of reducing the cost of knowledge work in your organisation.  The greater value creation opportunity comes from step changes in products, processes and ways of working generated by employee interactions in your enterprise social network.  This value creation impacts your entire organisation, not just its knowledge workers.

The bigger opportunity is to bring people together, to share their insights, to address problems and to create new ways of working. Answers play a dominant role in only the first two stages of that problem. The latter two stages require people to give and take, to debate, to test and to make business decisions to see new opportunities, change products, processes and reallocate resources. The best outcomes from the Solve and Innovate phase are outcomes of the group dynamic, not an individual contributor’s answer. This generative process is far harder to gamify because small infrequent contributions can play a critical role in moving a group forward, for example making available access to a critical resource.  It is in this process that we move beyond Sharing Out Loud to genuinely purposeful Working Out Loud.

Moving the maturity of collaboration in your organisation beyond just answers is more than a technology or incentive challenge.  Creating real collaboration in work depends on having a strong value case for the organisation and the individual. It also requires the engagement of wider organisations systems to support the changes in work. Lastly, community management can play a critical role in fostering the development of work communities and the wider organisation transformation.

If you would like to discuss how Simon Terry and the Value Maturity Model can help your organisation to get greater value from collaboration on any platform, please get in touch through Twitter, Linkedin or https://cotap.me/simonterry.

Hustle, WOL & Flow

Posted on by simongterry in Working out loud

The toughest thing about working for yourself is the lack of perspective. Three practices will keep you at the edge, learning and pushing forward.

A Singular Perspective

The biggest danger in working for yourself, particularly as a consultant, is talking to yourself. Without perspectives from others that self-talk can swing quickly from entrepreneurial delusion (Everything’s fantastic) to pessimistic catastrophe (Never Gonna Work). When you are absorbed in a single project or worse with nothing to do between projects, it is easy to lose connection to others and the perspective (& learning opportunities) that interaction provides.

In my experience, three practices can help you with much needed perspective. Put together, these practices not only help you to remain in touch with the commercial opportunities and needs of your clients, they also stretch you to find new opportunities for your business.

Hustle

Always be Hustling. Write it down. Say it to yourself. Do it. 

Some people don’t like the word hustle because it can connote the con and the swindle. What I like about the hustle is it demands street smarts and effort. The hustle isn’t passive. You have to be out building networks, connecting with new and existing people, finding their current problems and working to solve them.

The hustle reminds you that the solution you will deliver is the one that the client wants to buy, not the one you walked in to sell. The hustle keeps you open to new ideas, new opportunities and new solutions. The hustle takes creativity, innovation and nous.

The hustle is one more call, one more meeting and the right amount of never say die. The hustle treats ‘no’ as a signal to learn more and work harder. The hustle is the best antidote to both delusion and catastrophe. Whichever you are in, there is still need for the hustle.

Work Out Loud

Working out loud in your networks is a great way to build your business. Closed intellectual property atrophies. You can’t test the product fit or market fit of a secret. 

Working out loud is not just sharing. Much of what I do, I share here. That has value to enable people to see my work and to judge my ability to contribute to solutions. I rarely get calls about what I blog. I get calls because I blog and people see my capabilities and think that they might help. 

More valuable than sharing out loud are the situations when I actually work to solve my problems or client problems out loud with peers. Working out loud has developed my practice areas, reshaped my products, introduced me to collaborators and extended my networks to new clients. Working out loud on my solutions with trusted peers and referral partners has sharpened my efforts and ensured I am delivering what clients need. I have saved so much time and effort by avoiding reinventing the wheel and developing to a market need as a result.

Flow

The concept of flow developed by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi describes a state of optimal experience. In flow, you work as if time stands still and you have deep focus on the work at hand. It occurs when the rising challenge of our work matches to our rising ability. Flow comes when we push ourselves to work at the edge of our capabilities.

Some one once told me ‘If you don’t reach for the edge, you will never know where it is’. When your work depends on selling your expertise, there is a temptation to sit in the comfort zone. We are tempted to sell only what we are 110% capable of delivering. We sell what we sold yesterday. 

Flow pushes you to use your client’s problem and your client’s constraints as an opportunity to do more, to do better and to learn. Pushing yourself to this edge gives you valuable feedback from the real world beyond your bubble.

We can all benefit in our work from stepping outside the bubble of our usual experience. The three practices of hustle, working out loud and flow help us build the capabilities and the information we need for success in our work.

The Future Belongs to the Curious #PSKEvents

Posted on by simongterry in Future of Work, Learning, Strategy

Curiosity is a critical capability for the future of work. We have reached the end of stocks of expertise.

This morning I was lucky enough to be involved in a fishbowl conversation with Cheryle Walker, Andrew Gerkens, Renee Robson, Charles Jennings and an insightful audience. The final question of the engaging conversation about learning and performance was ‘What capabilities matter for learning and development professionals in the future?’ The question prompted a great discussion of the value of strategic, business, relationship and systems acumen as learning becomes more focused on performance improvement & more integral to work.

My contribution was that curiosity is an important capability. As the attention shifts to how organisations can manage big learning systems, those facilitating this change need to be curious well beyond traditional domains of expertise. When work is learning and learning is the work to quote Harold Jarche, there is a need for facilitators of this process to be looking at their system and looking beyond the organisation with an intense curiosity. The question is not ‘what do I or our team need to know?’ The question needs to be ‘what can we learn that helps us work better and be more effective?’

Traditional approaches to learning often have an implicit or explicit assumption that there is a fixed reservoir of knowledge to be known by employees. Global connectivity has shown us that the required knowledge is constantly expanding, being shared and being created as people experiment with the edge and step into new domains or engage with new systems.

Big learning processes are key to the future of responsive organisations. Performance will depend on how fast and how effectively we learn. To shape this we must remember, the future of work belongs to the curious.

Trust vs Trustless

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

Recently there has been a lot of discussion on how blockchain technology will revolutionise our approach to trust. Most of these pieces glide over the design of blockchain, the distributed ledger at the heart of bitcoin. Blockchain is designed to be trustless. Human behaviour in high trust scenarios is very different to behaviour in trustless ones.

Enthusiasm for blockchain as a technology solution is growing. Bitcoin has a thriving payments ecosystem and many clones.  Global financial services and professional services firms are exploring the potential of blockchain as a transparent distributed ledger system.  There are potential applications for blockchain to further reduce the friction in payments systems, to support smart contracting systems and to provide registers of asset ownership. At the same time there are issues that need to be addressed, particularly how the computing power demands of a distributed blockchain ledger will be managed without a currency like bitcoin to be mined in payment for processing.

Transparent distributed ledgers may revolutionise our approaches to recording and exchanging assets. Because the intermediaries who help us exchange assets today often rely on trust to sustain their intermediary role it is common for people to see blockchain as revolutionising trust. Banks, brokers, registrars, accounting firms, and trustees all depend on the market’s trust to provide a viable service. Changing to a trustless distributed ledger will have a significant impact on these industries.

Putting aside technological considerations, trustless exchange is not necessarily an improvement in human relationships. Bitcoin is trustless because it was designed to be anonymous. That has encouraged its use in capital flight from controlled markets like China and also a currency of choice in black market transactions as well. Because the system does not rely on the identity of the owner of bitcoin, once it is stolen or defrauded the currency is irrecoverable.

Perhaps the new applications of blockchain will factor in new less anonymous usages. However, trustless behaviour in human society is generally poor. The institutions blockchain distrusts were social innovations to address the flaws of the trustless exchange before that point. Stock markets were easily manipulated when shareholdings were a mystery. Property ownership disputes dominate the history of legal affairs because of the mystery in ancient ownership systems.

Many organisations creating new global frictionless markets have found they need to implement new systems to reduce anonymity and create trust proxies to balance exploitative human behaviour in an anonymous trustless world. Auction and ecommerce sites’ seller ratings are an example to cut down on fraudulent behaviour. The trolling problem on social media sites is another consequence of trustlessness. Look at any failing state and you will see the banditry, violence and corruption that comes with breakdowns in social trust. Solving the technology challenges of blockchain is only one part of the challenge. We will need to address the social innovations to support a trust based economic exchange as well.

We need to remember that trust is a human decision. The trust algorithm stays in the human brain and works on human relationships. Technology can support but will not replace that decision. The future of trust is likely to remain independent of blockchain, but it will provide useful insights into how far we need new social behaviours to manage in a trustless commercial world.

Leverage Tensions

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

Traditional management is designed to suppress tensions. The future of work demands we embrace tensions to create new ways of work and to create new value.

Many of the elements of traditional management suppress tension. Hierarchy, silos, decision making rights, carefully managed flows of information, narrow roles, tight process are all efforts to reduce uncertainty, variation and tensions in the coordination of people. You only look to the loom-smashing, violence, strikes and street riots of the late 19th century and early twentieth century to see why we may have preferred to manage in a predictable safe low tension environment. However, practices designed for low information and high barrier to communication start to break down in an era of greater connection and greater visibility of the surrounding systems.

The art of management in the future of work is leveraging the generative potential of tensions. The tension that comes with uncertainty and doubt is a signal to learn more through experiments and engagement. Customer tensions are insights to improvements in experiences, products and value. Employee tensions are sources of insights into new ways of organising and working. Community tensions are ways to shape a new role for the organisation and to engage with its purpose. Supplier tensions are the platform for new partnerships and new approaches to the entire supply chain. Conflicts between these stakeholders is the ground on which truly new value is created. At an individual level, flow occurs when the rising challenges of our work meet our rising capabilities.  Generative tension creates new human capabilities.

Leveraging tension requires new practices in management and new ways of leadership. We need to surface, engage and explore these tensions in conversations and in our work. If we aren’t working against some tension, then we are going through the motions. That is now or soon will be the work of robots and not worthy of the creative talents of humanity. In customer experiences, employee experiences and community engagement, an absence of challenge and debate is a sign of entropy. We are most comfortable passing over the peak to decline.

When we step into the discomfort of tensions, value, learning and growth await us.

PS. Thanks to David Holzmer for prompting this piece on his comments on yesterday’s post.  Thanks also to James Altucher for the reminder “Don’t Be Easy”

Put the Conversation First

Posted on by simongterry in Leadership, Working out loud

Fishbowl session in Sydney. Photo credit: Michelle Ockers

Put conversation first.  There is nothing more powerful than real conversation. Generative discussion is far more likely to engage, inspire and create value than a presentation or a recitation of an individual’s expertise. 

I first saw deep generative conversation in adaptive leadership work. Creating a container for a conversation, being able to surface tensions and explore a whole system generates a new perspective for leaders.  Conversations like these, can be the foundations for new more effective action.

My passion for working out loud is shaped by the value that I have experienced in putting ego in the background and working with others aloud on ideas and actions.  The growth of working out loud globally is testament to the fact that my views are not isolated.

The Anti-panel is another example of work where the value of fostering a real and diverse conversation can be seen.  Through multiple formats, engaging a conference audience to create their own panel session has been insightful & rewarding.

Next week I am putting another generative conversation format to the test.  Along with Charles Jennings, Rene Robson, Cheryle Walker and Andrew Gerkens we will be discussing learning and performance in a fishbowl format. I have been a part of a number of fishbowl conversations before. Each have been intense, engaging and insightful experiences because they bring the audience into the panel conversation, focus on a conversation and create an atmosphere of collaboration in the discussion and the surrounding audience.

From Life-crushing to Life-affirming Work

Posted on by simongterry in Future of Work
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My parody post on the Life-crushing Magic of Hierarchy, rightly prompted the reaction: “Yes, but what do you recommend we do about it?”. This entire blog is an extended essay on what to do to help make work more human. I believe the critical challenge for organisations as we move into the future of work is how to use learning, leadership and collaboration to create more life-affirming workplaces and work. For those who are looking for quick clarity, I thought I would distill a few basic responses to the challenge.

Call The Life-crushing Management & Discuss it

Frighteningly several people have taken the post at face value as a recommendation of management practices. This highlights our need to discuss the excesses and abuses of management practices more widely. Transparency & debate is a first step, because many of the practices will be stopped or adapted when challenged or discussed openly. Importantly, transparency alone is not enough.  We need people to act on change too.

Calling hierarchical leaders to explain their actions is not a step taken lightly. Like it or not, the call will challenge some leaders and not all challenges are welcome. Simple steps can be taken to make it easier to call bad practice and start a discussion:

  • Don’t do it alone: Build a coalition or at least check your perspectives with others before you call a bad practice. Ensure that there is a crowd of supporters for your view point.
  • Seek to understand: Begin by seeking to understand the management perspective. Don’t presume malevolence or incompetence. Most bad decisions come from a lack of shared context.
  • Based your questions in higher purpose, values or strategy: Appealing to and clarifying the higher order can give you more basis for a challenge.
  • Add external perspectives: Closed systems atrophy. Some times lack of diversity can be the problem. Add external ideas, data and perspectives to add weight to your call.
  • Offer help: If you call something, be prepared to work to create a better way. There’s a lot of critics. There are fewer collaborators.

Discuss People, Outcomes & Purpose

The practices “recommended” share a common goal of valuing management power over the effects of work. Creating a vibrant discussion of purpose, the importance of meeting people’s needs and the impacts of work beyond the organisation is critical to moving to more meaningful work. Starting with a strong sense of why work is to be done and the goals it is to achieve for the organisation, the individual and other stakeholders is a key part of a better more engaging work environment.

Importantly, this begins to foster and “outside-in” perspective that pushes hierarchical managers to look to new data and perspectives in their decision making.  Being clearer on goals and purpose is also a fundamental underpinning to allowing new forms of autonomy for employees to react and make change.

Grow Accountability, Autonomy and Change

As we add human accountability to the networks in our organisations, we enable people to begin to grow trust and influence. Think of the definition of wirearchy and focus on increasing ‘the dynamic two-way flow of power and authority, based on knowledge, trust, credibility and a focus on results”. Many simple issues in our organisations can be addressed by allowing people to share more information and begin to exercise autonomy to make decisions that need to be made beyond roles, mere compliance and process constraints. The exercise of that autonomy rises as accountability & trust rises. At the same time, we start to accelerate the pace of change in our organisations enabled by the distributed talents of our people. Increased accountability is one of the goals of traditional management, but common practices tend to disempower. We need instead to increase accountability and empowerment at the same time.

Build Capability

The appeal of traditional management practice is that managers need not be very effective at coordinating people and the employee’s roles are kept rote and simple. Working in more human ways will require organisations to build new capability to lead and to influence and also to make more complex decisions in every role in the organisation. We can’t manage and work in different ways if we have not helped people to develop the required capabilities. Enabling people throughout the organisation to gather information, to learn, to make change and to influence others becomes very important.

Continue the Collaboration & Change

There are no quick fixes, no gurus and no systems to buy to make a more life-affirming workplace. The steps above need to be led by management and by the entire team in the organisation over an extended period of change.  We don’t necessarily need to start by throwing out hierarchy or managers.  In most cases, they come back in another form anyway. What we need to do is to learn to work in new and much more effective ways that value human potential inside and outside the organisation.

Capabilities aren’t learned overnight and new ways of working take time to embed and be secure from the next round of management changes and new hires. The best way to carry this journey forward is to embed it in a collaborative change program that the entire team embraces.  Making life-affirming work part of the cultural fabric of the organisation must be the ultimate goal.  After all, there is no destination, just an endless journey of improvement and change.

The Hustle

Posted on by simongterry in Life & Career

Want to do something meaningful? Meaningful is hard. It is going to take hustle.

Meaningful is Hard

There is no truer statement than “if it was easy, someone would have done it by now”. Making change that matters and doing purposeful work takes effort. The obstacles are real. They are the real work.  Do the work.  

The effort begins with understanding what impact you want to have. Then you have to understand how you can fulfil your purpose. Lastly you need to find people to work with and opportunities to tackle. Finally you get to find out whether you can make a living through working on your purpose. Some times purpose is a living but others times purpose turns out to be a hobby or a calling.

To make matters worse, you need to do all that work in the wrong order and in overlapping steps. In many cases the answers are unclear or contradictory. You do the work and you learn a little more about where you are going.  You keep doing the work and you learn even more. The work sustains you and provides momentum & networks that matter. 

The Hustle Required

There is far more hustle required than you expect. Here’s one example of the hustle required to persuade others: 2% of sales are closed in the first meeting. Yes, 98% of the pitches fail when every failed pitch feels like time to call it quits. 80% of sales are closed after more than 5 follow-up calls, when every empty call feels like time to move on. No wonder 44% of sales people give up after only one follow-up. The winners are those who hustle more and hustle longer. Remember these numbers come from enterprise sales, if your change is more unique or more unusual it could require even more hustle to find your market.  The winners in change stay in the game and they hustle.

The hustle is just working intensively on your purpose: making connections, building relationships, identifying problems and offering ways to solve them. You don’t need to use sharp practices. There are no shortcuts. They will only cut you in the end. You need to do more than “build it” and “turn up”. You need to get out into the market and challenge people to listen to your pitch. 

Hustle. Work your purpose hard. Remember to take the odd break to reflect and reset yourself for the next burst of hustle. If you work it continuously, the hustle will become the Grind.