Writing

Micromanagement & Autonomy

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

One consequence of better communication is little discussed. Better communication has enabled the school of management that micromanages employees. We would do better to use our communication technologies to enable our employees to realise their potential.

Management in the Dark

We are starting to forget what the world was like before pervasive communication. Read about the beginnings of our modern organisations in the 19th century and you are always surprised to consider the barriers communication presented. 

The flipside of the barriers to communication also meant that managers had autonomy. Before the railroad and the telegraph, you didn’t need to be very far away at all to be required to manage your branch, factory or location with complete autonomy. All the decisions required to run a business like hiring, sourcing, pricing, distribution, financing and distributing profits, were managed by local managers. There were no alternatives. There was simply no way to seek guidance in time for most of the decisions required to succeed in the market. The need to trust a manager in these circumstances meant that many corporations relied on family members, trusted associates or had real limits to their scale.

Global Micromanagement

Enhanced communication technology has enabled organisations to manage their business on a global scale. The two-way flow of information has enabled trust to develop in the use of cadres of independent managers. It has also allowed those with less trust in their managers to micromanage on a scale that has never before been possible.

Look at the marketing materials for big data and HR analytics offerings. Many of these solutions are promoted as ways to know more about your business and the actions of your employees than ever before. The ‘golden goose’ school of management then dictates that you tightly manage your employees leveraging the rivers of data, the ability to adjust process controls and to communicate in real time. These communications are increasingly mechanistic and some even claiming value in automating them. Increased efficiency of your employees is the goal. However, that efficiency represents a massive trade-off in effectiveness of employees and the organisation.

Better Understanding, Alignment and Trust

Once again organisations are facing the need to drive autonomy of employees. Because of the pace of our economies driven by modern communication technology, we have arrived again at a point where autonomy is required. In the past, communication was too slow to meet a competitive local market. Now communication in the competitive global market is too fast. Employees can’t anymore wait for advice from head-office or be constrained by a policy that no longer refects circumstances.

We need to recognise that the alternate opportunity of better communication is better understanding, better trust and better alignment. With better connection, we can enable people to achieve exponentially better performance because we have the foundations of trust. If we chose a human approach over a mechanistic one, we can leverage the many human talents of our people. That diversity has far greater value than relying on only the decisions of an all-powerful all-seeing management team.

Global communication technologies have made learning the competitive advantage in the modern organisations. Now that they also allow a massive scale increase in understanding and trust, why wouldn’t we want to involve all our people in leveraging their insights, talents and knowledge?

The future of work is not better micromanagement. The future of work is how we better realising human potential. That will take trust and human connection.

The algorithm for trust is human #futureofwork

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

We don’t need more algorithms to help us manage trust. The human brain is a finely tuned trust algorithm. Let’s focus on building trust, not proxies for trust.

The proxy for trust

Global connection and scale are routinely proposed as a rationale for new services to help us manage trust. Inspired by the success of rating systems in EBay, Uber and similar services, entrepreneurs continually propose new universal solutions to help manage trust.

Humans are actually very good in managing trust. Our built-in systems for assessing trustworthiness are pretty good. We can assess the trust worthiness of a person in their available social data pretty quickly. We can adapt that assessment in real time based on the actions of others. We use this trust assessment to determine our decisions.

The human trust algorithm isn’t perfect. Psychology, economics, manipulators, and criminals all can describe the flaws, but they are far more subtle and accurate than any five point scale. We don’t need a rating to discount an email from a Nigerian prince we’ve never met.

Rating systems are only a proxy.

The value of the ratings in EBay, Uber and other systems is that they act as a proxy for trust in otherwise low information frictionless systems. They don’t prevent issues, but they reduce recurrence because there are penalties within that system.

Rating systems that aren’t tied to a process or system are popularity contests and distorted by the best and worst of human social behaviour like social proof, bandwagon effects, abuse, etc. They don’t relate to human experiences of trustworthiness through interactions. The failure of Linkedin’s endorsements feature is an example of how ratings without consequences produce junk.

Even if an entrepreneur develops an elaborate effective trust system, few humans will cede their decision making to that rating. The trust rating will just be one proxy in a human decision using the human algorithm. Anyone who ceded their decisions to an algorithm would be exposed to exploitation by a simple hack of that algorithm.

Stop rating. Start Building Trust.

Trust is critical to the pace and effectiveness of modern commerce and organisations. However few organisations focus explicitly on how to build deeper trust within and outside their organisations. Let’s focus our investment there and not on 5 point systems. That investment will take human actions, interactions and decisions. This is one critical way we can help make the future of work more human.

Flip the question

Posted on by simongterry in Learning

John F Kennedy in a famous piece of rhetoric said ‘ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country’. We can all benefit from the perspective of a flipped question.

As you congratulate yourself on your 3% conversion rate, do you wonder what went wrong with 97% of your efforts? As you hear about the engagement of employees are engaged, do you ask what engagement you have in their work and life? When you talk of driving employee motivation what if your not in the driver’s seat? When you measure your market share do you also consider your share of wallet? What happens if you flipped all the positive performance indicators in your business? And now the negative ones?

Taken too far like Kennedy’s quote flipping can become trite rhetoric. However there are moments when it can open a new insight, particularly in settled and traditional modes of business and thinking.

Organisations that are successful and dominant in their industries are inclined to accept the usual logic. Success is its own momentum and brings its own blinkers. Many times the attackers will come with new metrics or a flip of the traditional logic.

Ask not how this data confirms your thinking – ask how your thinking is challenged by the data. That’s where the Big Learning lies.

Lower the bar. Share more #wol

Posted on by simongterry in Working out loud

The minimum viable blog is the least amount of content to communicate an insight and start a discussion.

Many people don’t share their work and ideas because their standards for publishing content are high. Their few posts could run in a newspaper or even a peer reviewed journal. Many people hesitate to work out loud for fear their work is not good enough.

A minimum viable blog is not the end point of an idea. It is a test. By elaborating an idea just enough, the minimum viable blog starts a conversation and draws out more inputs through working out loud.

Lower the bar. Break up your big ideas. Share them regularly in minimum viable form. Start new conversations and learn. Best of all, a regular minimum viable blog is a habit and a constraint. The best creativity is the outcome of consistent practice under constraints.

Anti panel 3.0: the personal urgency to act #disruptsyd

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

We have choices in the future we want. To ensure a better future, we need to create it. We can begin now together.

Our annual experiment in disrupting the conference panel format occurred again at the Disrupt Sydney conference last Friday. The anti panel followed an extraordinary morning of inspiring speakers and provocative discussion of the impacts of disruption for good and for evil.

The anti-panel was reinvented again for its third appearance at Disrupt Sydney. This year the panellists set the teams in the room three activities on the theme of disrupting Sydney as a place, community and City:

– create a collage of your inspirations from the morning for the future of Sydney
– develop a newspaper headline on a vision of Sydney in 2050
– build a model in Lego of an intervention to move Sydney to a positive future.

The power of an anti-panel is to leverage the ideas, insights and interactions of the whole room. Using exercises individually and in groups enables people to work in parallel. Challenging people to communicate in other ways and to be hands on changes the nature of ideas. We had an incredibly broad ranging discussion driven by the creative potential in the room.

We experienced a different panel to previous years. The interaction between participants was far greater. The depth of discussion was less due to the physical challenges to be met but the breadth of ideas increased. The panellists learned from the energy in the room that we had one design flaw. The newspaper exercise was too narrow a constraint for the middle of a Friday afternoon. Luckily, we adapted timings to shorten that exercise and moved on to a coffee break and Lego to restore momentum.

The themes of the debrief were clear:
– people enjoyed the opportunity to interact through shared creative tasks
– we need time to reflect and to create new ideas and approaches
– ideas flowed from doing
– one person’s utopia is another’s dystopia
– the power of storytelling and metaphors
– whether we were pessimists or optimists, it was clear we could not sit passively with the range of change, opportunities and threats. The future needs to be created.

That final insight was a wonderfully generative outcome from an afternoon of purposeful play. Let’s create our future. A great place to start is leveraging the creative potential of many people.

The anti-panellists were Kai Riemer, Matt Moore and Simon Terry. Thanks again to the DDRG for the opportunity to deliver the anti-panel.

Disrupt the Metrics #disruptsyd

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

Can your people redefine success? Disruptive innovation changes the metrics of success.

Yesterday working on design thinking, I came across a great article on an Intuit’s lessons from measuring design thinking. A key insight that struck Intuit was that the value of design thinking is the ability to use research and empathy to redesign what success means and change the metrics of projects. The measures of success in Intuit were no longer fixed.

I am sitting today in conversations about digital disruption at the Disrupt Sydney conference by the University Sydney Business School Digital Disruption Research Group. What interests me is how often we accept assumptions as to the measures of success. We talk about disruption with traditional business measures: revenue, scale, market share, employment, productivity, efficiency, profitability, etc.

Disruptive innovations redefine effectiveness. They challenge traditional measures of success using deeper insights on what matters for real success. They don’t accept the prevailing and predetermined logic of success.

New measures already appear in conversations around us: bump factors, percentage of e-commerce participants, community participation, density of interactions, social good, global reach, food miles, transparency of business models. How do we use these in our work?

Do your employees have the opportunity to redefine success? If they can’t discuss what success means, there will be opportunities and threats that they can’t respond too. How do you create an ongoing conversation about new measures?

Learn from the Practice of Work with #wol

Posted on by simongterry in Future of Work, Learning, Working out loud

Working out loud is key practice to move beyond the theory of work. Working out loud helps solve the obstacles of work, tests ideas and creates interactions to keep work grounded in reality.

The most theoretical conversation in the modern workplace is often when a stakeholder says ‘I agree’. What they are actually saying is ‘I agree in principle to your approach given our common theoretical understanding of what you are doing, the absence of obvious obstacles and my limited understanding of the context’. Agreement like that falls apart when practice diverges from theory, obstacles occur or when more context surfaces.

The theory of work diverging from practice impacts more than stakeholder conversations. It is at the heart of breakdowns of many customer experiences, work processes and policies, incentive schemes, restructures, change initiatives and many other domains. In each case as the theory leaves the design table it meets obstacles, exceptions and other challenges in practice.

Some organisations try to eliminate these issues with a stricter adherence to theory. Instead, the defining practice of an effective modern organisation is how it accepts theory’s limitations and focuses on learning the lessons of real practice. Big learning practices take advantage of the organisations ability to learn through each employee’s work and adapt to break the boxes of the theory. Knowing obstacles are the work, organisations plan to learn and adapt. These organisations never get stuck in theory because it is always subject to improvement in a live test.

Working out loud plays a key role in these responsive organisations bridging the gaps between theory and practice. Working out loud puts ideas out for early tests, surfaces obstacles and shares context widely. A stakeholder who says I agree in a process of working out loud has a surer foundation and a better expectation of what is ahead.

Judge the success of your work in practice. Allow for learning and adaptation. Use working out loud to strengthen the culture of learning in your organisation.

Building Bridges

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

The bridge, then, is a symbol both of choice and connection. We determine in which direction we wish to travel. We also work to connect people to people and people to knowledge…Our role is to make the right choices so that we build bridges towards holding spaces where positive connections can be made in the future that will benefit society. – Richard Martin

Bridges go from one side to the other. They connect. Bridges don’t make value judgements about the shore.

In our passion for change it can be easy to dismiss the value of other ways of working. In so doing, we make it harder to bring change about. Before we can encourage people to new ways of working, we need to connect with where they are today.

Change Agents aren’t masters of elegant theory. They connect people to new practice. They help people take up the how. Change Agents are as much marketers, salespeople and evangelists as they are theorists. Effective change connects the new and old domains.

Build a bridge to a different opinion. Walk awhile on both shores. Your influence will be greater for it

Be good enough

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

Talk to otherwise successful people about their unrealised ambitions and one phrase often comes up: ‘I am not sure I am good enough’.

When you dig into this uncertainty, they are the only ones imposing this doubt. All sorts of information suggests they are in fact ready to start. Whether because of a fixed mindset or some other fear, these talented people resist testing their capabilities or accepting the voice of their chorus of supporters. I recognise this fear because I’ve battled it myself. However, I’ve found only one antidote. Start.

Start. You are good enough. Good enough to try and to learn. Good enough to start does not require mastery. You can’t get mastery unless you start.

Be good enough. Start doing today.