Writing

The Hypotheses of #wol – #biglearning

Posted on by simongterry in Collaboration, Learning, Working out loud

Working out loud helps us to learn faster by making our hypotheses explicit.

Hypothesis is one of those words that makes something simple sound elegant & scientific. Many digital practices like experimentation and design thinking push people to work and test from explicit hypotheses. It sounds better than draft or work in progress. Using hypotheses and testing them quickly is a core practice of organisations that leverage big learning approaches.

Working out loud can help you to discover the speed, engagement and agility of explicitly testing ideas as hypotheses with your work colleagues. If you are reluctant to share a draft idea, ask for help to validate a hypothesis that shapes how your idea will advance.

Confirming the underpinnings of your work as you go both brings stakeholders on the journey and also enables you to get to the destination faster. Treat every share as an opportunity to confirm that you are on the right track. You will benefit by making small adaptations now rather than rework later. You will also be helping your organisation to practise big learning.

The Exception Ends in Transparency

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

The power of culture is it changes our behaviours without us always noticing. Take care your culture is not creating exceptions from social norms. If so, transparency will hurt you one day.

Yesterday, I posted on the exception we have in business for the use of arbitrary power that would be unacceptable anywhere else in society. We allow this exception because we see the use of arbitrary power as part of the expected behaviours at work, part of the culture of work. One reader commented that the use of arbitrary power in business seemed ridiculous when you think about it. That’s the problem with culture. Most of the time we don’t examine our expectations. We just align our behaviours.

Over and over again organisations don’t see the issue in their culture until the light of transparency is shined on their behaviours. Suddenly their actions are judged not by their own internal norms and expectations but by the public social norms of the community. Too many organisations are shocked to see their own behaviour in that light.

Before you get caught by surprise by your own culture, open it up to discussion and reflection. Work out loud to engage customers and community outside the organisation. Keep the boundaries of your organisation porous. Listen carefully to the rebels and change agents bringing you news of issues. Most of all do purposeful human work in the real world. That’s the best way to keep yourself honest.

Arbitrary Power

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

‘A tyrannick and arbitrary power …is contrary to the Will and Happiness of any rational being’. – Benjamin Franklin

Arbitrary power has a huge effect on the human psyche. We have devoted much of our efforts at civilisation to restrain its negative effects. So why does your organisation still have arbitrary power?

The Civilisation of the Arbitrary

The cost of arbitrary power on human performance is real. We have spent centuries trying to restrain it.

We began sacrificing to fickle gods in efforts to control the weather, prosperity or safety in a harsh and uncertain world. We build institutions to protect us from the arbitrary powers of other tribes and eventually our own. We invented insurance to mitigate the uncontrollable. Our culture is rife with constraints on untrammelled power: etiquette, rule of law, political systems, etc.

The Last Domain

We’ve come a long way to constrain the arbitrary power in our businesses. All sorts of legal and social changes have made the modern organisation in many ways different to that of the early capitalists. However our organisation remain the social sphere with the strongest residual legacy of arbitrary power.

The costs of fickle managers are real. Engagement is poor. Trust is low. The psychological costs of a highly uncertain workplace are rising. We even impose our corporate power on customers and the community in arbitrary ways. All this results in wasted human potential at work and wider social impacts

If we have spent so much effort to constrain power and to make it fit within human relationships, why don’t we extend that throughout our workplace? Next time you have a choice ask yourself is there a way to make this process more engaging, transparent and predictable? You may not change the results of the process but you will be making work more human and improving the long term outcomes.

Manage Portfolios of Capability – #BigLearning

Posted on by simongterry in Learning

In strategy, we often think of organisations as portfolios of capability. Capability creates options. The set of capabilities in an organisation enable you to do some things and not others. Managing that portfolio to allow for performance, adaptation and growth is critical to success in changing environments.

The same principles apply to learning for individuals in organisations. We can help our people see learning as a way to manage their portfolios of capability. This approach creates options and adaptability for the individual and the organisation. Individuals who manage their own portfolios of capability will have richer and more purposeful careers.

Traditional Learning

Traditional learning approaches borrow from the industrial management mindset. What matters is the role, which is an input in a production process. The role has to have certain fixed capabilities. Therefore we recruit and train our people to have those capabilities.

When something changes, we have a problem. We focused on a fixed role, not the people. We treated people as cogs in a process and hoped we could find or stuff them with the capabilities required for a role. This learning largely happens independent of the individuals purposes, hopes or dreams. Their desire to have a role requires them to learn fixed capabilities.

Managing a Portfolio is Adaptive

Nobody is in perfect identity with the capabilities listed on their role description. We all have diverse portfolios of capability. We have different education, experience and networks. We are hired because we bring more to the role than others.

How often have you seen someone with skills required elsewhere but who doesn’t get to apply them? An IT manager once challenged me to demonstrate that new employee profiles couldn’t help him with his need for a programmers in a particular language. “I know all the programmers here”, he said. The first name that came from a search of employee’s profiles highlighted a financial analyst in the same organisation who had a masters in computer science and had declared their experience in programming in that language. The analyst was unknown to the IT manager. What secret talents are hidden in your employee population?

Let’s manage people, not roles so that we can leverage our individual and collective portfolios of capability. People adapt by drawing on additional skills and capabilities. People can look ahead and learn for the next role or the next challenge. Importantly that allows our employees to manage their own portfolios of capability beyond this role and into their whole life.  

A Capability Portfolio Approach for Organisations and Employees

  • Start with your employee’s needs: Use Design thinking to understand your employee journey before, during and after their time with you. What does a new perspective do to help you change the way you enable them to learn?
  • Manage a portfolio strategy: You have business needs for certain skills. These become the priority areas for your portfolio of capabilities in the organisation. However, they will not be the only areas you have skills in the team. Re-weight the priorities of the portfolio constantly as the business needs change.
  • Encourage employees share their full set of capabilities with you. Enable them to disclose the skills and experiences that they have that can help you with your business challenges. Look for options that can be created with these additional capabilities for employees and the organisation. Make capabilities searchable, encourage collaboration and create clearing houses to enable projects to call on those skills as needed.
  • Let employees develop to their purposes and their needs: If you are clear on your business needs, employees know what skills need to be developed. If they don’t want those skills, it is better they don’t want to stay. Finding the alignment between employee purposes and your portfolio needs will strengthen the organisation
  • Hire and Encourage Diversity: Diverse people bring diverse capabilities into the organisation. Everyone of these is a future option. That’s an option that comes for free when you hire someone whose capable of doing the job.
  • Employees are accountable for their portfolios of capabilities: This has always been the case but we lost focus on development in some of the paternalistic HR models. Organisations should support and enable development, but they can’t do it to an employee. Leveraging PKM, working out loud and 70:20:10 models enables employees to take greater control of their learning.
  • Use employee’s capabilities and watch them grow: The best way for a capability to stay current and grow is to be used. How do you let employees step outside their role and use skills on a project, a secondment, helping out a peer in a collaboration, on a hobby project or volunteering externally.

Dumb by Choice – Foreword to ‘Collaborating in a Social Era’ by Oscar Berg

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

The following is my foreword to Oscar Berg’s ’ Collaborating in A Social Era’. The piece was inspired by the themes of the book, particularly on how organisations need to better use information. It was an honour to be able to contribute a few words to Oscar’s great work.

Dumb by Choice

Traditional hierarchical organizations are designed to make us dumb. These organizations work to deliver the predictable execution of a stable, proven business model. We have designed these organizations to exclude information from decision-making and isolate employees to focus on efficiency, predictability, and control. Without better ways of distributing and filtering information, we chose to create the many layers of management, channels of communication, and decision making processes. Each of these familiar elements of organizations limit the information we use and the way we work. The consequence was an improvement in efficiency, but limited adaptability to exceptions, challenges, and change. Our employees and our customers feel the costs of these limits. We have created organizations that treat people, whether customers or employees, as a cog in the machine of value-creation.

In the last century, with the opportunities presented by expanding global consumer markets, our dumbness, loss of human potential, and inflexibility were small prices to pay. There were real financial barriers to better use of information. The lost opportunities were overwhelmed by the ever-growing market opportunity. Most organizations used the same operating model and faced the same economics of information, so the threat of disruptive competition was muted.

As Oscar Berg highlights in this book, the competitive marketplace for organizations has now fundamentally changed. Information networks and digital capabilities have reduced the cost of creating and sharing information and expanded the access to information of businesses, consumers, and communities. Increasingly, organizations are dealing with knowledge work and complex situations. The cost of a dumb process and the missed human potential is rising. Organizations can see competitors better leveraging the potential of their people to learn, to adapt, and to collaborate.

The challenge for managers and for employees in this new world, is how to change our ways of working and how we create, share and make use of information. We need our organizations to make us smarter. We need our organizations to help us to learn and to realize our collective potential. This book sets out to equip us all with some key tools to begin this redesign of the way we work.

Getting Smarter

Work has always involved people coming together to achieve more than one individual can do on their own. The most effective organizations enhance the knowledge, capabilities, and potential of their employees. Changing our ways of working to better use information and foster new forms of collaboration is a critical design element to the future of work. Rather than being passive participants in a process, employees can become a crucial element in the way our organization gathers, shares, and creates value from information.

In this book, you will find a number of key concepts and tools that will help your organization to realize the opportunities and the value offered by new models of social collaboration. Change is not easy. New capabilities will need to be learned and practiced. New mindsets will be required to foster effective communication. Ultimately, teams will need to mature their practice to work in increasingly valuable and visible ways. This book highlights these concepts, provides examples of the new approaches, and supports each of us to put them into practical use.

If we want to work in smarter ways and to see our organizations prosper, leadership is required. These changes to established ways of working won’t happen on their own. We can’t rely on technology to change established practice in our work communities. We will need change agents and leaders to take on the role of building new capabilities, advocating for new mindsets, and role modeling new practice. Adaptive leaders, collaborating in and beyond their organizations, will change established practice and help organizations experiment with the potential of new ways of working.

Take up the challenge of this book and experiment with new ways of collaborating in your organization. You have the opportunity to be well equipped to begin leading the change and making your organization smarter and more effective. Most of all, you will be contributing to making the future of work that much smarter and more human.


To order the book in a variety of formats see Oscar’s launch announcement today

The Lost Art of Prioritisation

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

I once worked for a manager who loved to tell everyone their work was his #1 priority. Perhaps he thought it would encourage them. When clashes occurred and priorities needed to be sorted suddenly everyone put up their hand claiming to be first and fought for their status. Time and effort was wasted. ‘Everyone is #1’ was counterproductive.

I see many people working hard to do more. The demands of our work lives are high and there is always a stretch. Sometimes that stretch is to pick up the little things that others drop. Hustle becomes hassle.

Doing more is fine. Doing more of what matters more is better. Sometimes ‘less is more’ as Ludwig Mies van der Rohe said. Focus matters.

Bring back the lost art of prioritisation. Spend your time first on what matters most.

Here’s how:
– before you start understand the goals and outcomes of work. Without clear goals you can’t prioritise.
– work out loud to enable managers and others to understand your work load and priorities.
– Ask people to help you place new requests in priority based on outcomes
– Negotiate deliverables, delegate, delay, and critically stop work based on priorities. Doing a little to keep things moving is more dangerous than you expect. You don’t multitask. You just spread attention.
– when conflicts arise make the conversation about the value of the projects to customers and the organisation.
– remember the Pareto principle. Usually 20% delivers 80% of the outcome. Let that shape your work. Bring that focus to bear on projects and look to trim the edges.

Spending time on what matters more works. Bring back the lost art of prioritisation.

Backchannels

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

The public in social media and enterprise social media gets all the attention. However often the greatest connection goes on out of view.

With social media channels inside and outside organisations comes the direct message and the private message. These are key parts of the value created by a network.

Private messages are the communication channels that are most comfortable for many users. These messages don’t offer the value of full working out loud but they can play key roles:

– creating access
– building and deepening relationships begun in public
– exchanging confidential information or additional context
– coaching users
– helping connect community management and community leaders.

In the passion of adopting new public ways of working, we cannot overlook the value of integrated private messages. After all some times the first step to working out loud is sharing something with just one other person.

7 Tips to Working Out Loud in Your Organisation #wol

Posted on by simongterry in Working out loud

Here are a seven simple tips to help those who want to encourage the use of working out loud in an organisation

1 Start with why

Working out loud is a change in work practices for your team. People will find it embarrassing, scary and strange. If you want change, you will need to help people to see the rationale. Explain the benefits you hope to see. Connect working out loud to your strategy. Measure and share the successes.

2 Start where your community is

If your organisation talks about work in the tearoom, don’t try to make them work out loud in a brand new technology. You will spend all your energies on the change of technology, before you get to the practices that create value. Put up a poster in the tearoom. Go where your communities currently engage and work there. If you have an enterprise social network all the better, engage its champions and heavy users.

3 Find volunteers

You promised engagement in the social network by December. If you make everyone work out loud, you will get there. Don’t. Forcing people to share defeats the generosity, the learning and the community from working out loud. It increases the chance they will try once and abandon the practice as alien. If I know you are working out loud only to meet an order, I don’t trust you more.  John Stepper starts with career talks to find volunteers for working out loud circles. Start with your volunteers and find champions. Remember you are the first volunteer and should role model the way.

4 Simple Practices

Three simple habits. Working Out Loud Circles. Huddles. Posters with questions. Post-it notes on office doors. Town Halls. Sharing photos of work. Don’t overthink it or over-specify it. Authorised use cases can get in the way of serendipity. There are lots of simple options to help people start and see the benefit.

5 Connect networks

Working out loud circles work because people enjoy the peer support as they learn new practices. How can networks in your organisation reinforce the efforts of your few initial practitioners? Make them role models in your networks to find more volunteers. Go outside the organisation and bring in people to help. The working out loud community are a generous bunch.

6 Have Fun

What’s your version of Working out loud under the stairs.  Take the stress out of the new and different by making it fun.

7 Take time

You won’t get 100% of your people doing anything any time soon. You may never. Take the time it needs for people to learn by doing and to convince each other with their success. Networks will spread success over time.