Writing

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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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‘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.

Happiness is our creation

Posted on by simongterry in Life & Career

“Happiness is not a reward – it is a consequence,” Robert Green Ingersoll

Happiness is personal. Happiness is created. Decisions must be made to achieve happiness. Be aware of the decisions you make.

Happiness does not come. Happiness cannot be bought. Happiness is not found in others. Happiness is our creation.

Time is the ultimate allocation of priority. Make happiness a priority. Spend your time where you can be happy. This may require difficult changes to work, lifestyle and income, but you may be surprised at the ease with which happiness comes.

Attitude is for many people a choice. The same circumstances approached with different attitudes produce different levels of happiness. Choose the attitudes that foster happiness. Generosity, forgiveness, openness and a little equanimity go a long way. Seeing yourself as an empowered and responsible actor with choices helps too.

Action brings happiness. Action has an intrinsic value but also leads to better outcomes. If you are not happy, what can you change to be happier? Make small changes. Experiment. Find a way to make things better step by step.

The greatest barrier to happiness is the feeling that things can’t change. We experience enormous change every day. We can find new ways to change those things blocking our happiness. Abandon hopelessness and start making change.

Finding a way forward takes awareness of what gives and takes from your happiness. Without focus on the choices we make they slip by feeling like the force of circumstances. Put a small step of reflection and find new paths to happiness.

Happy New Year

“I have come to the frightening conclusion that I am the decisive element. It is my personal approach that creates the climate. It is my daily mood that makes the weather. I possess tremendous power to make life miserable or joyous. I can be a tool of torture or an instrument of inspiration; I can humiliate or humor, hurt or heal. In all situations, it is my response that decides whether a crisis is escalated or de-escalated, and a person humanized or de-humanized. If we treat people as they are, we make them worse. If we treat people as they ought to be, we help them become what they are capable of becoming.” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

This light hearted essay from my school days resurfaced today. This essay reads many of like my current posts in format & style. An essay was conceived by Montaigne as a test or experiment of ideas. Today I write blogposts to experiment with ideas & to learn the art of writing. There weren’t blogs when I finished school, but essays like these were the experimental foundations for the writing in today’s posts.

A Gift from Blog Secret Santa – The Head and the Heart

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This post was anonymously written as part of Blog Secret Santa. There’s a list of all Secret Santa posts, including one written by Simon Terry, on Santa’s list of 2014 gift posts.

I grew up in a 2-parent household, and for many years my dad was the sole breadwinner. He was a truck driver. He worked long, hard hours. And as I started to get into computers and technology, I distinctly recall my dad telling me, “Don’t do what I do. Use your brain.” My parents wanted what was best for me and I took my dad’s words very seriously.

In addition to that advice, I learned over time that using one’s heart is also instrumental in being successful. The path to this point was challenging. During my career I was the person who could do it all, the manager who made mistakes, the glue holding a team together. In each and every case I found that understanding the emotions, needs, and desires of others – and, critically, myself – was instrumental in being successful.

So let’s talk about that all for a moment.

Your co-workers

Having empathy for co-workers is a well-worn path for me. Before I dedicated time to working on myself, I found selflessness to be rather simple; I viewed my role, no matter what it was, as to be a vessel for others. This meant I would quickly and efficiently do what I was asked or told to do. But soon I started asking, “Why?” a lot – not to be a stick in the mud, but to gain greater understanding. I was in positions where I’d ask about business development or technology although I was solidly in a creative, UX, or programming role. This made some people uncomfortable but I found more and more that people really enjoyed talking about their work and having someone listen, understand, and work alongside them.

In one of my prior positions, I was tasked with the redesign of a video streaming product. It was going to involve people from teams across the company. Initially this was scary to me. I wanted to go it alone and figure it out, and be viewed as the super genius. But other parts of me knew this wasn’t the way to get the best product, and get the best support. So I scheduled 30-minute meetings, brief and to-the-point, with the stakeholders to get a sense of what they needed.

But instead of straight-up stakeholder interviews, I approached these meetings as listening sessions. We started with small talk about the project and work, but that quickly gave way to a platform for these individuals to have someone hear them. I listened critically, took notes, and genuinely participated in the conversation. That was what they needed. I learned a lot from them for this project, and was proud to have them count as true collaborators from the start.

Working on yourself

In addition to having empathy for co-workers, it is absolutely critical to have empathy and compassion for yourself. This has been a much harder path for me. For years, I had taken up habits and rituals that put myself last and others first; I saw anything else as selfish or indulgent.

Let me indulge for a moment. You’ve been flying, yes? And you know the safety instructions at the start of every flight? When they get to the point about oxygen masks, a big point is made: take care of yours first before helping others. It’s an excellent analogy. I’ve found that if you have not worked on designing yourself, on observing and understanding your words and actions, it becomes much more difficult to help and serve other people.

I’m not admitting that I’m fully realized, or fully developed. I’m learning new things about myself and the world every moment of every day. But I have a much stronger picture of who I am, what I value, and what I believe. My intentions and goals have led me to find those same beliefs in my family, friends, co-workers, and my employers.

Companies have changed, too

Something I’ve distinctly noticed over my career is a shift in company attitudes towards people. Some organizations, to this day, treat people solely as resources. They even use the word “resources” in non-business speak contexts, which is very telling. More and more, I’ve been attracted to organizations that encourage individuals to be, well, realized. They welcome people with big ideas, a personal brand, and a point of view. And they aren’t looking to quash it; they’re looking to grow on it.

I once joined an organization while I was teaching web design part-time. I loved teaching, and I was good at it. This organization, however, expected me to stop teaching and work 90-100 hours per week. All of this while I was in the planning stages of my wedding! But my work didn’t support or know this, and did not work to understand who I was. My values weren’t aligned with those of the company. I did not listen to what the company was saying, even though it was all implicit. As a result, it was a bad fit.

More recently I’ve worked with organizations that have spoken about all of this right up front: We know you love public speaking. We know you love teaching. And we know you love UX work. We want you to bring that same passion and that same drive to our work for clients and each other. We won’t stop you from doing it. Do it. It makes us stronger. That’s a very, very different perspective, and a very empathetic one.

So when I think about the future of work, I see empathy as the path forward. It’s a prelude to compassion. All of this is very powerful. It begins with ourselves, extends out to our co-workers, and can all be supported by an encouraging workplace.

—

I took part in Blog Secret Santa this year and this was my awesome gift.  It was great to wake up on Christmas morning and find a blog post under the tree. Thanks anonymous Blog Secret Santa. I love my post and it fits perfectly. Just what I always wanted.

Give Yourself a Gift

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‘Tis the season for giving.

One of the best gifts I ever received I gave myself. What will be your gift to yourself this season?

Six years ago at a year end function after a day of making plans for the new year, the team gathered for dinner. Towards the end of that meal my then leader, Matt Lawler said:

‘I’ve been asking you all for commitments all day for next year. Tonight I want you to commit to one thing for yourself next year. What commitment are you going to make to yourself next year?’

That’s a powerful ask. The answers given by the team revealed the value of taking a moment for yourself and committing to something.

My commitment that night became a new habit and the basis of a much better way of working. I committed to make breakfast for my family at least 3 workdays a week. Now it seems a very small commitment, but at the time I was travelling 3 or more days a week. I haven’t been perfrct but I’ve exceeded that commitment in most weeks since.

Why did such a simple gift make a difference?

  • A gift of time: time is the ultimate way to allocate priority. It never comes back. Time with family is precious.
  • A gift of change: By making this commitment I had to change the way I worked. My new habit pushed out old lazy ways of working and gave me voice to argue for better ways for the team to work
  • A gift of perspective: the commitment helped me realise why I was working and where I got pleasure in life. That ultimately drove to the changes that led to the wonderful work & life I have today.

I’ve told Matt since how much that personal commitment gave to me. Here’s a chance to experience a version of same in this season of giving:

‘What are you going to commit to do in 2015 as a gift to yourself?’