Writing

Value creation in networks

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

The old way industrial of creating value is well understood and commonly implemented. Develop a unique proposition with a discrete market. Create a simple linear process to deliver the proposition by turning inputs into outputs with value creation at each carefully delineated step. Maximise control at the choke points in the process to maximise returns. Manage efficiency and throughput of the process to minimise waste. Reduce risk. As easy as that sounds we have spent over 200 years perfecting the process and still have much to learn.

We know far less about creating value in the massively scaled digital networks that we face today. Mostly we know what doesn’t work. Failure is accelerating. A focus on efficiency will kill a company competing with disruptive competitors. Networks specialise in routing around control points. Parallel disaggregated processes disrupt the linear, particularly if relentlessly focused on key opportunities to create value. Transparency across the process and rapid exchange of information changes the organisation-customer-employers-supplier- community dynamic in radical ways.

Value creation in networks to date has defaulted to the nearest analogies of the industrial model. Build a platform with a unique global scale that you can control. Strip the value creating process back to customer acquisition and platform development. Control advertising revenues ( or less commonly enterprise sales) as the principal form of monetisation. Experiment and acquire relentlessly. Be transparent internally and leverage networked models of organisation internally, but behave like industrial peers to the external market, except for carefully structured communities of co-creation and innovation.

The latest clues in the Cluetrain Manifesto are a reminder that this model is not guaranteed. At the same time, the lessons of the last Dotcom bust documented in Seely-Brown and Duguid’s ‘The Social Life of Information’ are a reminder that we have not yet reached our disaggregated and disinter mediated ‘markets are conversations’ utopia.

What is clear is that we need new ways of working. We will build new practices using our new global networks and relationships to exchange what works and to discard what does not. The key to success will be effectiveness. Effective organisations will mobilise their potential, connections and capabilities to pursue the ever-changing network opportunities, to learn together with their customers and community to realise a meaningful purpose. Embracing the new network economy and networked ways of working is fundamental for any organisation seeking to make this shift. Any organisation that takes this leap is on the path to becoming a Responsive Organisation.

Value has never been created around a board table. That is where value and the resources to create value have historically been acquired or allocated, often poorly. Value has never been created by data alone. People transform the data into hypotheses, insight, decisions and actions. Value has always been created by that action in networks, even if those networks are the crippled relationships of hierarchy. Those are network of people, not data. The organisations that reap the potential will be led by Network Navigators who can help their organisations through the journey.

The network must do the work to create value led by Network Navigators. As Esko Kilpi put it ‘the time for reductionism as a sense making mechanism is over’. The way forward will emerge through practice, interaction and learning in the network. We will need Network Navigators to help us to work on the whole system.

Harold Jarche reminds us ‘the work is learning and learning is the work’. We have entirely new systems and practices of organisations to develop, to test and to share. Like our efforts to date we will begin with fixes and variants to the systems we have. Over time we will make more new sense of the future of work. We will need to learn to trust and enable people to leverage their networks and experiment. Then we have the journey of change advocacy to spread the successful practices. The widespread use of enterprise social networks is just one such step and even it has not addressed the potential of adoption, let alone value.

The fun of value creation in networks has only just begun. Our job is to make that fun a very human and purposeful experience.

Practice is Habit – Make This Your Year

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

“We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, and never to be undone. Every smallest stroke of virtue or of vice leaves its never so little scar.” – William James

Complex changes like realising the Responsive Organisation and developing the future of work need people to connect in communities and along networks of practice. Forming new habits will be essentially to developing the richness of practice required.

Habits are required in Practice

How are those New Year Resolutions tracking? A week into the new year and many people are already struggling with new practices that look like failed intentions. New practices struggle to embed unless we turn them into habits.

I was planning to write today about the need for habits to reinforce practice when tumblr served up the William James quote above thanks to the Explore blog and the work of Maria Popova. The article on William James says many wise words on the value of habit in reinforcing habit. 

However I can point out the serendipity.  Maria’s relentless and excellent curation is a habit. My practice of writing this blog is a habit.  Without these habits and many more the coincidence would not be possible.  Similar serendipity is found in the practice of working out loud.  These moments of encouragement extend the practice further. 

To create change we need to start developing suites of new future of work practices and turning them first into experiments and then embedding the successes as habits.  Through the long practice of habit will come innovations, solutions to problems and a richer connection with others pushing the practice forward. We need to create the habits and connections that enable the serendipity to power change for Responsive Organisations.

Habits bring time to Practice

Habits bring the gift of time to practice.  They ensure that our feeble new practices are not killed by lack of attention or effort. Habits sustain us through the hard days and the days we would rather not. We all love quick wins but focusing on new practices reminds us that not everything transforms immediately. There are obstacles, new skills and lessons to be learned in practice.

Successful practice takes time and learning. Habits are the key to winning that time.

This is Your Year

This year is definitely my year. I would like it to be yours too. That will take some new habits.

This poster first featured on this blog a year ago when its claims were decidedly uncertain. The poster celebrated that the obstacles are the work. It sits in my office in my eye line as a reminder that it is relentless practice and good habits that will deliver me the year that I seek. There are many ways I can ensure it will be my year:

  • If I practice what I preach consistently
  • If I experiment, to learn and to build new good habits
  • If I keep focus and avoid the distractions of the bright and shiny things
  • If I keep looking for ways to move forward, overcome the obstacles and achieve my purpose; but most of all
  • If I keep translating the believe that ‘This is My Year’ into action

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This year is your year too. Like it or not, it will pass with every action and omission you make. The choice is yours to make it a year to remember. Create the habits required to own your year. The resulting practice will deliver great rewards.

Habits don’t have to be big things. Small steps accumulate. Small steps that can be consistently repeated in a process of learning accelerate success.

What would make it really your year? What do you need to do consistently to make it happen? What is your new habit?

On influence

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

There are only two powers in the world, saber and mind; at the end, saber is always defeated by mind – Napoleon Bonaparte

Power is the ability to make someone do what you want. Power is fleeting.

Influence is the ability to shape someone’s beliefs and actions. Influence endures.

Power is yours. Influence is the others.

Power begins with talking. Influence begins with listening.

Power is open to the few prepared to use or threaten force. Influence is open to everyone who is prepared to discuss.

Power provokes countervailing power. Influence fosters the influence of all.

Power comes with uniforms. Influence is as diverse as the voices of humanity.

The use of power frustrates the ability to influence. Those forced against their will are rarely open to persuasion. The use of influence retains the option of force.

Influence prevails eventually. That moment begins when diverse, purposeful and connected people discuss what they want openly.

Choose influence.

Who translates for your organisation?

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

The word ‘translation’ comes, etymologically, from the Latin for ‘bearing across’. Having been borne across the world, we are translated men. It is normally supposed that something always gets lost in translation; I cling, obstinately to the notion that something can also be gained.- Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991

More than five years of my career in banking can be explained by the phrase ‘he is a banker but he speaks wealth management’. I focused on translation because I was lateral hire into banking and hence an outsider to both cultures. The differences in language and mindset were visible to me. There were all kinds of little shibboleths to distinguish the two businesses. The most common of these distinguishing pieces of language was that the bank had customers and wealth management had advisors and clients.

Keen to learn about the new businesses I became a keen student of jargon and business models. Knowing the language helped build trust and connection. The ability to collaborate across a language boundary made for all sorts of opportunities.

Translators Required

Understanding someone’s mindset and language is an important part of any collaboration. Network Navigators need the capability to speak the local language. Collaboration must be founded on a shared context and effective communication. To collaborate we need to make sense of each other’s purposes, concerns and actions. When there are strong cultures or silos, a translator may be required to help create that common context.

A great deal is lost in organisations when there are not translators able to surface knowledge or opportunities trapped in silos. There are many areas where different languages and mindsets can breakdown collaboration: sales vs marketing, product vs engineering, subsidiary vs corporate, management vs workers, etc. Translators must have practice working across these boundaries, surfacing, sharing and working together on opportunities.

To leverage the knowledge and capabilities of your organisation you will need translators. Do you know who is working these boundaries? What are you doing to give them a larger voice and influence?

A small investment in fostering the work of translators may reap great rewards in collaboration and new opportunities for your organisation. Critically, the work of translators is also a great way to spread connection, collaboration and shared context

You choose your philosophy of translation just as you choose how to live: the free adaptation that sacrifices detail to meaning, the strict crib that sacrifices meaning to exactitude. The poet moves from life to language, the translator moves from language to life; both like the immigrant, try to identify the invisible, what’s between the lines, the mysterious implications. – Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces

Responsive Organizations take Practice in Networks

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

A theme of my work and this blog is that large scale transformative change in organizations requires sense making. Employees must be able to make their own personal sense of change and connect it to personal purpose, knowledge and experience. This theme underpins the Value Maturity Model, the focus on leadership as a way to aid sense making and the emphasis on learning and experimentation. Sense making also highlights the importance of practice.

To make Sense, Practice

I am a huge fan of the simplicity of Harold Jarche’s Seek>Sense>Share model of learning in networks. Harold consistently emphasises the connection of practice as a key part of that learning. Mastery only comes from continued practice and refinement.

Henry Mintzberg published a recent post on practice in management education which stresses the power of practice. Inherent in this approach is time for reflection and sense making. Individual and group conversations accelerate the ability to make sense of changes.

The way we make sense is to experiment and reflect. Practice helps us to see the way forward. Like a startup we can run lean experiments with aspects of the large scale change to help us to make sense of new behaviours, new benefits and new challenges. We practice to learn.

Learning is critical when the changes are uncertain, when there is more to emerge as we change a system. Beware of recipes. Increasingly in large scale change like the creation of a responsive organization it is impossible to know the exactly answer when we start. The path forward involves as much adaptation as we expect to see in the end state.

Practice in Communities and Networks

We can accelerate our sense making, our learning and our practice in communities and through network connections. Communities are a place to learn from the experience of others, to gain the benefits of their help in your reflections and to collaborate.

Networks are a place to find likeminded practitioners and the reinforcement of new ideas and examples. Sharing and finding in networks supports ongoing learning at the speed required for adaptation. Networks also keep you open to the changing world.

These communities and networks of practice are accelerants of our personal change. My personal learning has been greatly accelerated by communities like Change Agents Worldwide and connections through many networks of practitioners.

Change follows Practice and Sense

In The Social Life of Information there is a story of how the graphical user interface went from Xerox PARC to Apple. The authors point out that innovation travels on the rails of practice. Apple’s engineers had shared practice and purpose with those at Xerox PARC. They made sense of the innovations and set about solving for the complementary innovations required to maximise the value of the new interface. Sadly, the rest of Xerox lack the shared practice to make sense of the changes.

The idea of a Responsive Organization requires a similar exercise in sense making and complementary innovations. For many managers there is simply no sense yet in change and there are challenges that need to be solved. The advocates of Responsive Organizations need to continue to practice, to share new sense and to learn better ways.

The appeal of Responsive Organizations already spreads along the paths created by communities and networks of practice. The value of those networks is one of the reasons I helped create #Responsivecoffee and its related events. Very few people set out to become a Responsive Organization as such. However as people practice with the various elements of a Responsive Organization they are drawn to make sense of new ways of management and organising work.

The advocates of the Responsive Organization need to leverage practice to help spread the change. Networks and communities of those in organisations who want to practice new ways of working and who can see a way forward will offer opportunities to further expand the practice and draw others in.

To make sense, practice. To turn sense into change, practice in networks. There is still much practice, sense making and connection ahead.

Hidden collaboration

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

We barely notice as collaboration improves our organisations.

A young and curious mind asked me today why we fall into step when we walk. My unscientific answer was that is what humans do because it makes it easier to walk together. Falling into step is one of those hidden moments of effective collaboration that we rarely notice.

Our organisations are full of hidden moments of human collaboration when we following good intentions, habit or unconscious behaviours to make things easier or better The Social Life of Information points out one example. Meetings & conversations work because of the silent collaborative language of waiting turns, signalling a desire to speak and calling for contributions. People offer help, take turns and otherwise collaborate because of the value of relationships and because it makes working together easier.

We are not the hyper rational goal driven actors of economics (& most performance management schemes) because human relationships require us to consider the value of a wider range of factors. Maintaining and strengthen the social fabric is important. The expected behaviours in any group become its culture and determine the value of that social fabric to any individual.

The pull of social relationships is far more powerful than edicts and posters calling for collaboration. Too many of these top-down collaboration strategies fail to account for human needs and the hidden collaboration already in place. Employees are right to ask: ‘why are you asking us to change the way we work when those behaviours are not required, not effective or not supported by other systems?’

Across your organisation now people are collaborating in these hidden human ways. There is far more collaboration than you can see or your organisation would not work. Enhancing the productivity and connection in the organisation is about celebrating the effective moments, encouraging more and removing the assumptions and systemic barriers that prevent the effective moments from spreading.

Soft power

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

In a world that is often obsessed with force, much more is accomplished every day through influence.

Every year Monocle magazine publishes a soft power index chronicling the rising influence of various nations. Much of that soft power is attributable to the influence generated through tourism, aid, music, arts and other creative endeavours. These activities build connection, reciprocity and trust and importantly improve influence by making a nation a leading example or aspiration that others wish to follow.

In organisations, soft power plays a critical but often unexamined role. Role models have great influence. Invisible networks of advice, support, trust and generosity weave through organisations. With increasing options off exit, voice or passive resistance, people choose to follow much more than they are forced. I have never seen a leader survive a mutiny so force has its limits.

A famous HBR article once asked:

‘Why should anyone be led by you?’

The article’s recommendations highlight the human side of leadership. They focus on examples of soft power like empathy, understanding, vulnerability, interpreting soft data and leveraging personal strengths and inspiration.

Everyone in an organisation has the ability to build and leverage their soft power. It comes from building strong personal networks. In an era where networks are increasingly important understanding and using levers of soft power is increasingly important.

Soft power is ultimately the way leaders address the soft issues of management. The soft issues of management are the hard ones to solve. Edicts are easy. Engagement is hard.

Take a purposeful stand that reflects who you are. Engage with others with generosity, creativity, empathy and trust. LIke Monocle’s creative nations, you will find collaboration becomes easier, others follow your lead and your influence on the rise.

Your soft power is you.

A year of gratitude

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

2015 will be a year of giving personal thanks.

I’ve been wondering what I should choose for a new year’s resolution when circumstances this morning reminded me of the power of a handwritten note.

One thing I miss from corporate life is the ability to celebrate the achievements of others. Networks today offer connection and the opportunity for joint celebration, but I have not taken up the opportunities to make thanks quite as personal. The personal is required in a world where there are IFTTT recipes to auto congratulate people on new roles posted on Linkedin.

I know the power of giving and receiving thanks and recognition. I was enormously flattered recently when John Stepper mentioned me in his #thankyouthursday efforts. A gesture of recognition can be all it takes to change a mood, sustain people in their work and to help achieve higher performance.

Giving thanks takes nothing but gives a lot. Importantly, gratitude is a mindset that needs to be contagious in a time of generosity and abundance. Consistency of giving thanks is important to broaden the experience of recognition and to sustain a mindset of thankfulness

This year I am going to write a note of thanks or recognition each week. That ensures at least 52 moments of gratitude. Most importantly it will create a new habit for me to look out more keenly for those people that I can celebrate.

PS. Thanks to John Stepper, Tom Amos and Aaron Dignan for inspiring this resolution.

Weave the social fabric with leadership

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

‘Judgement & discretion are not features of software. They are the product of human socialization & experience’ – J Seely Brown & P Duguid

The biggest gap between strategy & execution is often found in the social relationships in an organisation. Decision making, learning, negotiating and alignment of people are rarely well done by machines. The human elements of strategy such as alignment, capabilities and the decision making of execution let us down.

John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid in their classic The Social Life of Information discuss the challenges that this ‘social fabric’ pose for our visions of legions of autonomous bots exchanging information. They note:

‘For humans, rules and goals bear a complicated relationship to the social fabric. Both may shift dynamically in practice depending on the social conditions that prevail’

That shifting is a sophisticated form of responsiveness. Much of the lament about the failure to execute top-down strategy can be explained by the diverse actors of an organisation needing to adapt the strategy to the social fabric of the organisation and its networks. Employees need to change the goals and the rules to retain relationships in their networks.

Top down strategy is rarely iterative enough to learn from these adaptations. Much top down strategy is short term, transactional and fails to account for the social relationships. They are assumed away or assumed capable of surrender to the higher order needs of strategy.

Simply asking why employees must changing the strategy to suit their relationships can reveal significant insight and opportunities to fine tune performance or realise greater human potential. Often it brings back in more stakeholders and more systemic and longer term issues the initial strategy assumed away. We ignore the adaptability of human social relationships at our peril.

Many evangelists of big data propose it as as a solution to the challenges of strategy. They see it will allow for better data and deeper analysis to overcome the inability to execute analytical dreams. Big data analysis already brings great power and insight. Yet it cannot overcome the social fabric of an organisation executing a strategy. Big data at some point must interact with this social fabric whether it is the assumptions and hypotheses programmed into the system or the decision maker who must use the output.

Big data will often make the challenge of integration into social fabric greater as its black boxes may not account for such simple things as human needs to trust, to learn, to explain, and to understand. Knowing where you are falling short is rarely the corporate challenge in strategy. The challenge is enabling human resources to respond.

We need to stop seeing the inherent humanity of the social fabric as a barrier to the perfect execution of strategy. This idea demonstrates echoes of the industrial era thinking that dominates management. A corporation of automatons would be beaten by human ingenuity simply because our social fabric is the engine of learning, creativity, collaboration, trust and adaptation.

The social fabric of an organisation is the source of competitive advantage. Social factors distinguish responsive organisations. Culture eats strategy for breakfast because of its ability to shape learning, creativity, collaboration, trust and decision making. Organisations need to work with and on the social fabric to optimise their performance. The more human organisation will sustainably outperform.

The technology we need to engage with the social fabric is leadership. Leadership can shape learning, creativity, collaboration, trust and adaptation in an organisation. Leadership is the engine of human potential.

In 2015, organisations need their leaders to play to the role of helping work with and on the social fabric of the organisation. Social factors in strategy can no longer be ignored or assumed to be overcome. These very factors are the heart of the human potential & adaptation that will differentiate successful strategies.