Writing

The Art of the Unreasonable

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

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Every day I deal with unreasonable people. I wish there were more of them.

Unreasonable clients

The unreasonable people I meet are those executives, entrepreneurs and other change makers who are trying to change their organisations, to create new products or who are trying to make the world more human. These individuals don’t want to hear that it is hard, or that success is unlikely or that they are unlikely to see rewards.

These individuals are purposeful and all they want is help to bring their unreasonable visions into being. Willingness to persist is what ensures that they will succeed. They want to know they are not alone and that there are people to help them deliver their visions of the future.

Unreasonable partners

In addition to conversations with my clients and prospects, I am exposed to the unreasonableness of Change Agents Worldwide.  It is entirely unreasonable to believe that you could form an effective consulting and thought leadership network full of smart, highly capable and rightfully busy people without any traditional forms of central coordination.  However, Change Agents Worldwide delivers, constantly challenges itself to do better and the community is prepared to engage because the purpose of a better future of work is unreasonable, but necessary.

My respect for that group and others like it is huge because the network views spreading unreasonableness as part of the mission.  You only have to look at the extraordinary Executive Change Agents who are trying to make change in some of the largest corporations in the world, often solely on their personal authority.

If your organisation does not have people like these, why not? What are you doing to champion them, enable them or hire more?

Unreasonable inspiration

Unreasonableness inspires me. Do Lectures Australia was full of people willing to believe that they could deliver the extraordinary if they just started small and they started now. Social enterprises are another haven of the unreasonable as people seek to use the levers of business to address the challenges of the world. Social movements, like Change Day, inspire me, because they ask people to seek to make a difference and are led by unreasonable people, like Helen Bevan and Mary Freer. Artist are another inspiring source of an unreasonable view of the world.

What is inspiring you to be more unreasonable? What in your organisation shows others that more is possible, new thoughts are allowed and that more can be done?

Unreasonable change

We can’t change settled management practices without unreasonableness.  We can’t create more customer centred organisations within the bounds of what we define internally as acceptable or our accountabilities. We can’t make our organisations better for customers and society on the sensible practices of the past. If we want to be more responsive, we need to be a little unreasonableness.

If we want to lead, we need to be a little unreasonable in our expectations and actions.

There are more than enough forces in our world to encourage the normal, the static, the secure and the stable. Most people find it hard enough to win the support of their boss. Let’s foster the unreasonable.

Go find someone who wants to be unreasonable. Help them. Spread the contagion. That unreasonable purpose is the best engine of change.

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Note: GBS = George Bernard Shaw. 

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Networks have Feelings Too!

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

In enthusiasm for our ability to connect people in networks and to see the potential of new ways of working, we can lose sight of an important element. Networks are composed of human beings.  The rules of human relationships still apply and there is no magical technology that allows us to escape these fundamental rules.

Networks need to Form, Storm & Norm to Perform too

The process of forming a group dynamic in a networked community follows that of a team. Because a network is a mix of strong and weak ties the process of reaching community norms may well be a difficult and extended one.  

In a network, each individual forms a sense of the community, its purpose and the practices that prevail. At times for some individuals or groups in the community this sense of meaning can be quite out of alignment with the broader consensus.  However, in some cases the interactions in the community do not surface the differences or do not make that misalignment obvious to those in the community.

If each participant proceeds on and does not meet a conflict with their sense of meaning, then they will not discover the need to revisit their view. Often this failure to develop common meaning and norms will create major challenges for the network later when conflicts arise. People who feel that their sense of the norms ‘are obvious’ and have been acting on expectations of the same from others may experience a deep breach in trust at this moment. 

A key role of social leaders is to foster the meaning in a network and alignment of norms and value creation.  Leading these conversations early in a network’s life will help accelerate the community development and avoid later issues.

Remember weak ties means limits

One danger of the weak ties found in large networks is weak accountability. Without a strong connection to you, I can easily engage in the avoidance of conflict and the hard work of leadership. Rather than deal with a difficult situation it is human nature to see if we can’t ignore it or pretend that it is someone else’s responsibility to respond. See a conversation in a network that disturbs you and you can let it go or worse filter it out, if there is no accountability to engage.

Equally weak ties can mean that there is little cost to me for the snide remark, the cutting comment or even troll activity. Personal accountability for our actions through strong ties to others cuts down on this behaviour. I may not have accountability to the individual but I have a reputation to maintain with others and so I moderate my behaviour.

Leaders need to foster an environment of accountability in networks. Encouraging all participants to engage, to challenge and to clarify understanding helps accelerate the value in the network.

Build a network up from a single conversation

In this wonderful video on innovation by Sylvain Carle from Creative Mornings Montreal, there is a description of Unix and the need to build up complex systems from smaller systems that work beforehand. Networks are complex systems composed of smaller connected systems. 

The smallest systems of a network is two people in conversation. The conversations in your networks should work as great stand alone conversations.  If those conversations don’t work the way they work in the rest of your life, then something is wrong.

This week I was asked ‘why can’t we just let the network do its job to create a community virally?’ Networks don’t create a community. They only connect people. Conversations create communities. Conversations help people understand the purpose of the network and the personal and collective value that will be created. Those conversations are the work of leaders. Engaging movements of people in sharing and spreading ideas is the work of leaders through stories and conversations, not the networks themselves.

Start your leadership work by focusing on creating effective, valuable and engaging conversations.  Build your network back from there.

Management Practice Lags Culture

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

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Management practice is influenced heavily by hierarchy, tradition and risk aversion. As a result our practice as managers lags the changes in culture in the society around us. Leaders need to work to close the gap between management practice and social expectations.

Management Practice is a Lagging Indicator

The way we manage our organisations is defined by practices that often trace back to the industrial era. The consequences of this are evident in many ways:

  • the diversity of our organisations does not reflect the diversity of our communities. Gender is just one diversity dimension in which management practices lag that the practices and views of society as a whole.
  • organising activity using networks and leveraging the potential of people to contribute is another way in which organisations are only beginning to address opportunities that communities, our personal relationships and the innovative organisations have already embraced
  • resistance to give up hierarchy, planning and demands for predictability and certainty when even the political structures based in these models have surrendered to approaches that operate far more adaptively and responsively.

Art is a Leading Indicator of Changing Society

Our cultural products adapt far more quickly to changes in society than our management practices.  Film, television, music and other forms of entertainment rapidly embrace changes in the way society operate and reflect that in the protagonists of the stories, songs and other art forms.

An example can be seen in the role of the detective in arts like novels, film and television.  In the birth of the industrial era, the detective was a logician, like Sherlock Holmes unravelling facts and relying on expertise in predictable processes, By the early 20th century the detective was a master of the human elements of relationships, like Simenon’s Maigret.  The uncertain times of the mid century introduced the detective in a much more ambiguous role. Richard Martin has documented how the changing nature of the detective film reflects our changing society.

Cultural products appeal to our need to be entertained, connect and engage with each other. Therefore they must be relevant to our society as it is today. Art is an experimental market where failure is common and success is usually defined only by audience acceptance. Someone is always seeking a better way to express the zeitgeist.

Why does management practice lag changes in the culture of society?

Management practice lacks these same pressures. Too much of our management practice is assumed to be canonical and confirmed only by inward looking assessment:

  • Focus on best practice: Best practice is historical and often particularly contextual. However, managers are often reluctant to move beyond accepted best practice.  As Harold Jarche has argued we should look instead to practice to be best and look to be more social leaders.
  • Risk Aversion: Avoidance of failure is a core tenet of management practice. Managers stick with practices that have worked safely for them, often in face of evidence that newer practice is better. Safety is valued.  There are real costs to this risk aversion.
  • Hierarchical & Internal: Managers who are more hierarchically senior set the bounds of acceptable management practice and control the HR processes that reinforce acceptable practice. Without an external & learning mindset, these leaders can inadvertently reflect management views and mindsets of a previous generation that were handed down to them during their early career.

Change

Responsive Organisations will have a culture and a set of management practices that reflect the needs of our society now. These organisations will experiment, test and measure the effectiveness of their practices in the marketplace and in their organisation. They will not rely on canon, hierarchy or accepted opinion.

The benefits of organisations using management practices that better reflect the changing culture of our communities are clear. These organisations will be more human and better able to realise the potential of all people.

Bringing this change about is the work of leaders and change agents. 

Shapes, Guides, Decides: on Structure

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

In leadership we are starting to see the need to pull apart our obsession with jobs. We are realising that what matters more than a job is the roles that leaders play and their authority to play them.

A similar need exists in the structures we form from those jobs. In organisational design, we have a tendency to focus overly on structure as if it is the determinant of how the organisation functions.
The structure of an organisation is important. However, we know that all structures perform in different ways because of the networks of relationships that weave through them and the resulting culture that is created.
A focus on structure can be of little value to a manager looking to respond practically to the challenges of a networked economy. That manager often well knows that while changing structure can require as little as a new powerpoint slide, but the way things get done changes far less frequently and with a great deal more difficulty
Why?
  • Structure: A collection of status relationships between individuals. Shapes
  • Decision Process: The commonly accepted series of stages by which decisions are made in the organisation, including what information is expected, who is aware, who participates and who is consulted. Guides
  • Decision Rights: Who & how the final call gets made on any decision. Decides 

Structure influences decision processes and decision rights. However structure does not determine them and at times can work at cross purposes to the intended goals of the organisation. You can have a hierarchy where decision rights are delegated and there is a high level of autonomy. You can have a network that is paralysed by an insistence on consensus before anyone acts on a decision. 

The process used for decisions and what exercise of decision rights are accepted in an organisation is a function of the network of relationships more than the structure. Control by structure is often an illusion.

We need to spend less time focused on our structures and spend more time on how our relationships work and how we make choices.

The Choice: Two Roads or Promises?

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

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Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
– Robert Frost

At times, we can reduce the challenges in leading organisations to a greeting card: There are two paths in management, a traditional one and now a better one. Pick the wrong one and your organisation will fail. The reality of modern leadership is more complex.

However, the glorification of the ‘road less travelled by’ is not the meaning of Frost’s poem. ‘The road less travelled by’ is hardly an appealing option for managers who must make decisions every moment of every day about how to lead their organisations and respond to the challenges before them. “The road less travelled by” is usually a road out of the organisation.

Frost’s subtle poem reminds us that many choices are obscure and evenly balanced when made. That obscurity is rarely resolved. We are left to define ourselves by the choices we have made and see the outcomes as results when the connection between choice and outcome is often remarkably complex.

Two Roads

Faced with the challenges of a rapidly changing networked economy many managers choose the path of efficiency. In a time of crisis, they redouble their efforts to deliver certainty, control and secrecy. Seeing threats in a digital economy these manager seek to take greater control and shore up the traditional defences that seem to offer certainty. Rather than deal with complexity, it is easy to declare a new simplicity.

Others are increasingly experimenting with experimentation, autonomy and transparency. They are seeking to create new forms of organisation from responsiveness and adaptation. However, as the use of new models increases there are real challenges to be resolved and new cultures and practices to be built.  It is a brave middle manager who chooses to introduce this approach into an existing organisation of any size. At times, the Responsive Organisation can feel more discussed than delivered.

Some times the two approaches are mixed and we don’t even realise. Our traditional ways can be so deeply ingrained that we can’t see the irony of ordering autonomy and experimentation. For a manager considering how to respond to a situation in the moment, considering new ways of working can seem like a luxury. After all, wasn’t the point of all our experience and training to give us tacit knowledge on which to rely when things get challenging?

Not Simple, Complex

Managers don’t struggle with organisation and choice in the simple or even the complicated domains of choices.  In these cases, traditional approaches work with some predictable degree of success. Recommending a responsive strategy in these examples is as wasteful as managers embedded in traditional management mindsets would see it.

However, the challenge of the modern organisation is rarely bringing complexity to simple choice. Bureaucracy may make simple management choices feel complex to implement, but the choice remains straightforward. The challenge for organisations is pretending there are simple choices when the domain becomes increasingly complex.

Complex choices are where we need learning, experimentation and new ways of working. This is the where we need to sense and respond. This is the domain in which managers see the networks around us change the nature of our traditional considerations.

Promises to keep

The nature of the complex environment in which we operate as managers is that we rarely know in advance what path will be the best choice. This can be a tough pitch to sell to your executive committee.  Worse as Roger L Martin has argued even a ultimately superseded business model may be successful long enough to make you look stupid.

We are trained as managers to define our journeys by their outcomes, just like the narrator of Frost’s Two Roads poem. This consequentialist logic is often used to justify the triumph of abstract organisational goals over personal, human or community outcomes in the process.

Perhaps instead we should define our journeys by the path.  Focusing on the process of walking the path changes our questions:

  • What management path values our personal purpose and delivers the greatest personal rewards?
  • What management path values the potential of others and seeks to maximise that potential?
  • What management path delivers on the promise to customers and the community inherent in our organisation and its people?
  • What management path maximises the net positive impact and contribution from all in the organisation?

Asking new questions is an act of leadership. The answers to these questions will help define better ways of working and new models of social leadership that can carry us through the management journeys ahead.

When we cannot know the journey’s destination, perhaps the better challenge is to walk the road well. We can run our organisations to deliver better answers to these questions.  A first step is freeing our people to contribute to their potential to these answers. We may yet find that all our roads lead to the same place, but we will arrive in better shape as managers, organisations, communities and as a planet, if we do so.

This reflection brings to mind another equally beautiful Robert Frost poem, “Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening”.  As we go forward into the dark and cold challenges ahead, this reflection challenges us as managers to consider the miles to go and the promises we must keep:

He gives his harness bells a shake 
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep, 
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
– Robert Frost

Picture credit: http://pixabay.com/en/tree-stump-forest-environment-283218/

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

At the #responsivecoffee in Sydney on 20 June 2014, we discussed how management practice often sits in conflict with the goals of an organization to respond to network disruption by becoming a more responsive organization.

In this brief one-minute one-take video, I demonstrate with the Responsive Organization discussion scales (or RODS), the irony of this management approach.  We need responsive management for a responsive organization. 

Thanks to Luke Grange, Angus Florance, Kai Riemer and cinematographer Mark Woodrow.

(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)

Why #responsivecoffee?

Posted on by simongterry in Collaboration, Future of Work

Yesterday was another great responsive coffee event in Sydney. The event began with my short talk about creating value with social business and working out loud. I shared some insights from the Enterprise Social Collaboration Value Maturity Model as a framework for developing a more responsive culture in an organisation. Then the group dived into a vibrant conversation sharing challenges and opportunities as people work to make their organisations more responsive.

One question I am often asked is ‘what is the value of a Responsivecoffee event?’ Here’s my response:

Connection matters:

People working in change can feel isolated. Simply meeting others doing similar work can make it feel more possible. Connection is the foundation of community. After the session yesterday there were all sorts of new connections established that will support people to do more work faster.

Connection is also important because of the diversity of Responsive Organisation challenges. People attending the event were considering the Responsive organisation approaches from the mindsets of consulting, communications, learning, knowledge management, technology, change, property management and many more functional areas. The connections cut across the boundaries of organisations, products, industries, roles, functions and ambitions of the organisations. All those diverse connects help expand the range of possibilities and enable clients to implement change faster.

Sharing Matters:

The conversation was a treasure trove of insights and shared experiences. That sharing encourages people and enables fast change. Many people are just starting out in the journey of being more responsive and more social. Hearing the stories others shared have them confidence to start and a sense of the possibilities and challenges ahead.

Problem Solving Matters:

Many people brought a practical problem to the table and over coffee leveraged the collective insights of the group to move forward and move faster.

Innovation Matters

Responsive coffee remains an agile experiment in value creation. The formats change to create value for those who are attending from session to session.

We are even seeing new intercompany collaborations and experiments being spun off these events. Participants are going away to work together to create new products and services to help accelerate change and address challenges shared. If you don’t bring people together to explore what might be possible you will never see the next horizon.

The Value of Responsive Coffee is Accelerated Maturity

The benefits of Responsive Coffee reflect that of the Value Maturity Model because a purposeful cup of coffee with other change agents is an act of social collaboration. We need more and richer connection to accelerate change in our organisations and the adoption of new ways of working for value. Value occurs in the rich conversations of social collaboration.

Long live #responsivecoffee.

Image credits: 

Coffee: http://pixabay.com/en/coffee-cup-time-meditation-talk-14662/

Photo of Responsive Coffee: Luke Grange

You know the moment

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

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You know the moment.

You know the moment when someone showed you what you were capable of achieving. That moment when another person helped you to see as possible achievements that you doubted yourself.

Someone helped you find your purpose, inspired you to tackle a challenging goal, refocused you on your strengths or helped you to find the missing piece of capability to reach new levels of performance. In that moment, someone helped you realise your potential.

That moment is a moment of leadership.

The person who led you in that moment may not have had a position of authority. It could be a colleague, a team member, a customer, a teacher, a storyteller or a stranger. Whoever demonstrated leadership did so from an interest in developing your potential, not from a position of power.

The conversation in that moment most likely did not feel like a ‘leadership’ conversation. It could have been a question, praise, a concern, feedback, mentoring, coaching, advice, suggestions, ideas, a chat or a story. Whatever the conversation in that moment, you knew they were genuinely interested in helping you to achieve what you were capable of achieving and because it would help fulfil your purpose. Whether or not, that conversation fulfilled a purpose of the other was secondary.

Leadership is the art and technology of realising human potential.

Every moment is a moment to help others find their purpose or their potential. Every moment could be one of those conversations. Everyone can make a difference.

So, how are you using this moment?