These certifications apply across our products and services, and we plan to maintain these certifications on an ongoing basis, and to extend to additional security certifications overtime. You should also notice that all our sites are running SSL, with a signed digital certificate, ensuring that any traffic between our servers to your web browser is encrypted.

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Improving your sales

Stop. Look. Listen.

Ask – Don’t Tell.

Stay on the map.

Be Discoverable. Be Credible. Be Fun.

Qualify Out Early and Often

Margin Beats Revenue

A Good Journey

The post Sales – Why Selling Matters appeared first on SocialOptic.

• Passion
• Interaction
• Learning

I captured notes from the groups I was part of. In the first discussion group I was part of, there was quite a reaction to the word ‘passion’ – particularly in the context of the fairly reserved nature of British business culture, but passion is clearly linked to interested ,and interest to inquisitiveness, an eagerness to discover, to learn, to acquire (and share) knowledge. That desire to discover and share knowledge is key to building successful communities of practice.

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Working With Technology

Any discussion around A.I. in the workplace has to start with Robert Williams. That might be a name that is familiar to you, but I suspect it is not. Let me add a date to that name: 25th January, 1970. You will find him in the Guinness book of records, and if that seems odd, that’s because it is: Robert Williams was the first person to be killed by a robot.

Much has been done to improve the safety of working with robots; most robots today operate within safety cages that humans are excluded from. It is only more recently that robots and humans have started to work in shared spaces, most notably at companies like VW. When I mention that last point it often results in a sharp intake of breath. Our concerns about robots these days are quite different that those early days: Mis-application and job destruction are the most commonly expressed worries.

Technology, historically, has been introduced into industries in a remarkably gradual fashion. All change “appears quickly, happens slowly and rarely completes“. Where technology has been, or has the potential to be, detrimental to  humans, it has always operated within some sort of “safety cage” – it has been constrained and partial. With artificial intelligence, that is a simple task to achieve, at least with embodied AI, like robots. But what happens when the intelligence is built into our communications? What fences can, or should, be put in place to reduce the impact of AI decision-making in society? In the case of market trading, there have been very few controls on when and how AI can behave, and yet it accounts for most of the trading volume on many markets today. This isn’t to say that AI technology is somehow inherently bad or risky, but rather to make the point that the impact and dangers of technology are often underestimated or overlooked, and move faster today than they have done historically.

AI Coming for Your Jobs

There have been numerous articles in recent months about AI making millions of people redundant, including from many people who should (or do) actually know better. Pause for a minute to think where we are: Yes, computing power continues to grow exponentially, and we have come a long way from the days of IBM wardrobe-sized RAMAC 5 Meg Hard drive of 1956. A few Terabytes of storage today costs little more that a takeaway meal, and computers are now being given away free on magazine covers. Let’s put that into the context within the different technologies and approaches within AI. Emulating the human brain (and more specifically the neurons that make up the brain) has been a scientific pursuit for many decades.

Two years ago researchers from the RIKEN HPCI Program for Computational Life Sciences carried out the largest neuronal network simulation to date. They used the K computer, a Japanese supercomputer that would quite happily fill a football pitch, to simulate 1.73 billion nerve cells connected by 10.4 trillion synapses, using 82,944 processors. That sounds rather impressive, until you realise that it took 40 minutes to complete the simulation of 1 second of activity, and that 1.73 billion nerve cells is 1-2% of the number of nerve cells in a human brain.

We are a long way from having enough computing power to emulate a human brain. Even allowing for Moore’s law, it will be a good few decades before we have that sort of computing power available, and that does account for the curious thing about simulating the brain: as we get closer to it, it usually turns out more complex than previously thought. The RIKEN simulation used about 24 bytes of memory per neuron (about 1 petabyte of computer memory in total); emerging theories in neuropsychology suggest that there may be quantum processes within the brain’s structure,  which would push the computing requirements off of the current scale.

Technical issues aside, there is an economic issue: computers are still relatively expensive. You might spend $300-$500 on a laptop that will last a couple of years, then another $100-$200 on electricity to power it (at today’s energy prices). Already, before factoring in the costs of support, repairs and software, we have run up an annual bill that is greater than the average salary of a third of the planet. Basic human thinking is remarkably affordable; computers will have to work hard to deliver the same sort of economic value.

Thinking Outside of the Box

Of course AI is coming for your “Jobs” in other ways :- your Steve Jobs iPhone is imbued with Siri, while Windows phones have Cortana and Android devices have Google Now. Emulation – directly aping the working of the human brain – isn’t the only approach. We can simulate the functions we are interested in, for example speech recognition, reading or decision-making. This works well where we can clearly define the desired inputs and outputs, and the processes are consistent and repeatable. Emulation falls short when the parameters change or are unclear (try speech recognition when you have a cough or a cold). The challenge with the world of work, at least the knowledge-driven work that is common in the industrialised work, is that its workings are remarkably poorly understood. May I present exhibit 1: Management Science. As anyone who has worked with business process automation software will tell you, figuring out and documenting what goes off inside of a business is incredibly hard. Yes, there are the formal process and mechanisms, but there are also “informal processes” that tend to dominate the working of the business. Organisations are inherently relational, and our brains use some amazing tricks to manage relationships. Whenever we talk to someone, our brains are running a simulation of their own – simulating the other person’s mind. Theory of mind, as it is known in psychology, looks at how our brains work to understand the brains of others. We don’t just think about what the other person is thinking about, we can think about what we think the other person thinks about what we are thinking about. This mental gymnastics is a fundamental requirement for human communication; no wonder your phone struggles.

Re-record Not Fade Away

Replacing humans isn’t the most likely way that AI will impact the work place. It is more likely that AI will augment or subvert what we do. AI is already being used to help medical practitioners with decision making, using expert systems, to reduce the risk of traffic accidents, in collision avoidance systems, and a host of other applications. There will undoubtedly be places where AI subverts jobs – making some old processes irrelevant – just as CDs brought an end to jobs in record pressing plants (although not so much) – and areas where artisanal sensibilities will win over automation (think about the universal ‘unlove’ for the robots that say: “there is an unexpected item in the bagging area”). There will be new skills to learn, and workforce transitions, which leads me on to the greatest mystery about technology in the work place.

I Wasn’t Expecting That

Technology has been pushing into the work place for at least half a century, yet none of us seem to be basking in hours of additional leisure time, and while unemployment in many countries is uncomfortably high, it hasn’t risen dramatically. This is an economic mystery. Investing in technology should improve worker efficiency, which should increase worker output, reducing the need for workers. But that isn’t what has happened. This is best stated in Erik Brynjolf’s “Productivity Paradox”. At the start of the 90’s Brynjolf noticed that IT driven increases in productivity were not quite what they should have been. Robert Solow, Nobel Laureate economist, put it this way: “we see computers everywhere except in the productivity statistics.” – so what happened as a result of all that investment in technology during the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s? That turns out to be a very good question, especially if you are an academic researcher. The mystery deepens, the more you look at it. From communications, to robots, investments in technology have not resulted in mass reductions in the requirement for workers. My personal observation is that this looks like a classic case of reverse causality: As workers have become more skilled (with improved access to education) they have driven investments in technology that have led to improvements in output quality, and efficiency in the use of raw materials.

Not investing in technology is not an option. Technology is required to keep pace with increasing complexity and demands for quality (either from regulatory requirements, e.g. increased safety and quality legislation or product demands – I still haven’t used all of the features of most of the products I own). AI will increasingly be required to do our jobs at the level that is expected. Take the case of technology in surgery. It hasn’t put scores of surgeons out of work, it has meant to improved survival rates (for the patients!), and increased numbers of procedures being performed. Technology can help to reduce human error – rather than “working in the cage” with the technology, increasingly AI will provide a safety cage for the day-to-day work that we do, and tools to manage the volume of information we have to deal with. AI is incredibly effective at pre-processing and categorising information (which helps us in our work here at SocialOptic).

Go To the Future

Yes, the robots are coming, and yes, AI is coming, but the most likely outcome is not the destruction of jobs, it is the creation of new kinds of jobs. There are still many, many problems to solve in the world, and increasingly there are not enough humans to solve them. There is even AI in the Elevators in our work places, but it isn’t coming to take our jobs, it is coming to enable us to deal with the increasing challenges that we face in performing them.

The post AI and The Future of Work appeared first on SocialOptic.

Photo by Mark Mason, Design Thinking, GROWGreenPark

Last year I had the privilege of speaking at the inaugural Reading StartupGrind. StartUpGrind provides a great way to meet startup folk, and to learn from the successes (and sometimes failures) of others. It isn’t often that you get to have a frank Q & A session with a business founder, so if you are working in a startup, find an event near you, and if you are in the UK and can get to Reading, come along to Grow.

When you meet Sarah, you are going to hear about the RiutBag, that’s a given! There is still time to back it on crowd funding site KickStarter, where the latest campaign has already blown through its target by almost 300%.

The process of going from a business concept, to shipping a product to a global customer base is a daunting prospect. Sarah credit’s Guy Kawasaki’s “Art of the Start” (now in its second edition) as the inspiration for getting going: breaking things down into small steps and setting milestones on the way to generating a profit. That future-backwards approach reflects itself in Riut’s products, and even in the company name (Riut = Revolution In User Thinking) – once you’ve seen the video you’ll get it.

The other thing that was music to my ears was hearing how Sarah used surveys in her user research. I’m a great believer in the value of surveys as a way of moving people away from assumptions and individual subjective opinion (that’s why SocialOptic built SurveyOptic). Surveys, done well, are a fantastic way to test assumptions and understand your market and your customers. Sarah’s well designed questions enabled her to eliminate her own biases in the design process, and to hone in on exactly what would make her product stand out.

You can read more of Sarah’s story in the (very nicely designed) infographic on the Kickstarter page. Like many entrepreneurs, she has very a eclectic background, crossing multiple disciplines and career paths. For many entrepreneurs, those bumpy rides often end up as a strong foundational base, creating the ability to see and understand the diverse perspectives you have to address in running a business.

Do check out Riut, I think it is a business that will go far!

The post Going to Start a Riut appeared first on SocialOptic.

On board were and many of the local ConnectTVT folks, as well as representatives from UKTI, Sage, NatWest bank and the Start Up Loans Company, all ready to help local entrepreneurs to get their business set up. According to StartUp Britain, 50,000 new businesses have been started in the UK this month alone, and we have certainly seen a surge in StartUps using Milestone Planner to plan and track their new businesses progress.

Louize Clarke, from ConnectTVT was busy talking to the local press and start ups. There are a number of events planned at the Green Park office to help start ups in the coming months – there is a full list on the ConnectTVT site – so if you are local, come along, and look out for me there.

It is certainly an exciting time to be an entrepreneur in the UK; economic times might still be challenging, but there is more support available for start ups than their ever has been. Like many thinks, the start up journey is best with fellow travellers, so events like the StartUP Britain bus tour, and local communities like ConnectTVT are things that I’d highly recommend getting involved in. Sharing your experiences, and learning from the successes (and mistakes!) of others, is one of the best ways to accelerate your business.

The post StartUp Britain Bus Tour appeared first on SocialOptic.

Non-response Bias – The Bigger Picture

Firstly, although it isn’t the main topic of this post, a few words about something called “non-response bias“. Non-response bias is where a survey does not accurately reflect your target group due to biases in the subgroup of people that respond (or don’t respond!). Imagine that your survey is for 100 workers, and 50 if then respond. This initially sounds like a great sample, but if the 50 that don’t respond are all happy with their work, while the 50 that do are not happy, then the survey results are not going to accurately reflect the workers (we have 100% of one group and exactly 0% of the another). A sample of the group is fine, but only if there isn’t a bias in that sample.

There are a number of different ways to handle this. One is to target a 100% response rate, although in doing this care has to be taken in how it is achieved to avoid biasing the responses by changing them! By way of a silly example, if I offered everyone who responds to the survey a lifetime’s supply of ice-cream to boost the response rate, and the survey includes questions about future purchases of ice-cream, that may well impact on the answers. Similarly, cajoling employees into completing an engagement survey may have a negative effect on their answers.

Non-response does not always have a negative effect on survey result (there is a large body of research in this area: Curtin, Presser, and Singer 2000 ; Keeter et al. 2000; , and Earl, “The Practice of Social Research”). Anything over 50% is usually sufficient, and over 70% is viewed as a very good response rate. There are a number of reasons for survey non-response:

• Awareness (people were not aware of the survey due to communication failure).
• Capability (people do not have the knowledge/competence/tools to complete the survey).
• Motivation (people are aware and able, but unmotivated/unwilling/refusing).

Each of these can be addressed specifically. When thinking about non-response bias, a basic analysis will help you to see if there are specific groups that are under or over-represented in your survey responses (this is easily achieved in SurveyOptic using result splits and filters). Completion rates for surveys in SurveyOptic are often over 95%, so traditional non-response bias is generally not an issue, however that is not the whole picture when it comes to non-response.

“NA” – Question-Level Non-Response

At question level, there are many types of non-response:

• Non-presented – the question has not been presented (seen), due to the person not getting to that point in the survey (yet).
• Non-presented (skipped) – the question was not presented (shown) as it was skipped over (by the survey flow/skip logic).
• Non-responded – the question was shown, but no answer was received from the participant.
• Invalid response – the question was answered, but the response was not a valid one (e.g. invalid date, number versus text etc).
• Null response – the question was shown and an empty or null response was returned (this is usually a web browser issue).
• NA – the question was explicitly NA’d – the participant clicked/tapped a “No Answer”/”Not Applicable” option.

We do a number of things to control and reduce invalid responses, for example interpolation, where we convert text answers into numbers, e.g. “two” becomes 2, and so on, and by using custom input controls, for example a date picker for picking dates, so that only valid dates can be chosen, sliders for selecting number ranges, and number input fields on mobile devices to bring up just the number pad.

“NA” responses are frequently not supported in survey tools. When you dig into it, you can start to see why. “NA” has a nasty habit of being using interchangeably to mean “No Answer”, “Not Answered”, “Not Applicable” and “No Opinion” – however not all of those “NA”s are equal. Sometimes you do not want to code “NA” as an additional response choice, as it changes the percentages in your reports, and can distract from more explicit answers. Then there are times you actually want to report on it, for example in the case of a “No Opinion” response you may want to factor that into the response calculations. A rating of Not Applicable, just like Not Answered, usually removes the response from reporting, for example from the average score, and doesn’t affect minimum or maximums. SurveyOptic reporting is flexible enough to cover all of these options, so it is purely a matter of design choice.

The ‘No Opinion’ sense of NA is worthy of thought in survey design. If we force people to choose an answer, but they don’t have a definite opinion, all that we are doing is adding noise into our survey results, and clearly we don’t want that. Similarly, a refusal to answer can often be a signal about attitudes, or just point to a poorly worded question.

Computer Says NA

Just to keep our life interesting, in the world of computer programming, 0, “”, and [] (null) are sometimes treated the same, and sometimes treated differently. To make things even more interesting, this treatment varies by computer language. And, to add even more to the confusion, different web browsers also handle empty responses slightly differently. Thankfully that is generally a problem for the programmers, and is hidden away behind the scenes, but it is worth being aware that NA also has its own set of meanings in the computing/data analysis world too.

NA Problem

With all of that said, for a well designed survey, with a good response rate, non-responses are more of an opportunity than an issue. They help you understand more about your respondents (which is why you were doing the survey in the first place) and can also flag problems with question wording that can occur especially when respondents aren’t using their first language.

Hopefully that has provided some answers! If you need help with survey design, please do ask.

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Let us know how you get on either via a comment here, or via Milestone Planner feedback. And, of course, if you love it don’t forget to give it a nice rating or grab your moment of fame by leaving it a review.

We will be adding more planning functionality to the app over the next couple of months, and taking advantage of more native Windows 8.1 and Windows Phone 8.1 features to provide productivity enhancements and tighter integration.

A massive thank you to UI Centric to the Windows Apps London team, and to all those that helped it happen!

The post Submit It – Milestone Planner Comes to Windows appeared first on SocialOptic.

How do we predict customer needs? Is there a future for focus groups, or will research by social media replace them? Many organisations make poor use of focus groups. They aren’t there to design your next product or offering for you, they are to help gain customer insight. Predictive analytics, driven by big data and on-line versions of traditional data gathering, like surveys and behavioural studies, provide a very cost effective alternative. While they don’t deliver exactly the same insights as a focus group, when they are combined with interaction via social media, they come very close. Close enough, I believe, that they will definitely threaten the future of expensive focus group research.

Do we trust the data or do we trust our gut? A very controversial question, but one that isn’t really the dichotomy that it seems. How do we balance between data driven and intuition lead decision making? By involving both. Both have benefits and limitations. We need to understand that our interpretation of data is subjective; even though it might not feel like it, all decisions are to some extent gut driven. That means we need to ‘program’ our sense of intuition well. We ‘prime the machines’ in the same way that we train predictive analytics, by using the right inputs. Feed your intuition by spending time with end customers, and gathering data about what is and is not working.

Innovate or Increment? The balance of kaizen-like continuous improvement versus radical innovation is one of the hardest things in business. When do you focus on small incremental changes, where analytics are critical for tracking optimisation, and when do you do things radically differently, where analytics are used to target change? I’d argue that you need to plan “innovation experiments” into your programs – try something radically different every so often, and see what learning and opportunity it throws up. Then feed that into how you optimise your business.

Lastly, Lucian made a key point about the dangers of over optimising business processes: be careful. As I ‘ve said may times, a system that is 100% optimal and efficient ends up as 0% resilient, unless resiliency is built into the criteria for efficiency. If we focus exclusively on the analytics, we can fail to spot dangerous change that is outside of our focus. Predictive Analytics are an additional tool for business decision making, not a replacement for good leadership and management.

The post Business Impact of Predictive Analytics appeared first on SocialOptic.

Beyond Hierarchy Again

Hierarchy remains the predominant paradigm in business, with tree-like organograms dominating the landscape. The underlying reality is that organisations have and are shifting away from that model, and that shift from hierarchy to process to commitment and network management is an ongoing journey. Hierarchies simply can’t adapt fast enough for the rate of change that technology has unleashed on the world, and if your business isn’t fast enough, it isn’t going to be interesting. Strict hierarchies inhibit cross-functional communication, filter out critical pieces of information in the cascade process, and slow communication down. They can, however, provide stability, clarity and consistency. There are contexts where hierarchy is an appropriate structure, don’t write it off completely!

Networks Not Works And Real Work

So what is the alternative? Networks, you cry, of course. But networks are a curious things. An organogram represents a form of network, but it is a hierarchical network. If we are going to talk about “networked organisations” then we need to be a little more nuanced. When I started working in computer networking, IBM ruled the roost, with its mainframes and hierarchical networks (yes, I am that old) “Strong, stable, dependable.” Then the Internet, and with it Cisco, came along, with a distributed form of networking that turned out to be even more robust and dependable, and significantly more adaptive. The resilience of the Internet comes from its highly distributed form of control. No central point of control means no central point of failure (and my, how CEOs have become a central point of failure in recent decades).

The protocol that you have probably never heard of that allows the Internet to work is something called BGP. It uses the concept of Autonomous Systems to construct the network. I mention it, at the risk of giving myself flashbacks to the days when I daily risked bringing the whole thing down with a single key stroke, because it evolved into an incredibly stable and robust system that has survived an incredible amount of change. The Internet survived the arrival of The Web, online video, mobile phones and social networks, none of which were even conceived of before it was initially designed. The Internet exists as a collection of distributed autonomous systems, and the term was established to mean “a network of networks.” So do distributed autonomous systems hold the answer to the company structure of the future? Is their independant-interdependence the model for the leaderless organisation?

Distributed Networks

In short, no. In conversations with Philip Sheldrake it became apparent that while systems like The Internet, bitcoin, wikipedia and git hub are interesting studies, they don’t provide answers to the key challenge of distributed organisations: How do you deal with change, and steer the organisation through it? Open source software development is often held up as the ultimate in distributed, leaderless, networked execution, but experience of it says that it is anything but. Yes, it is a great model, but it doesn’t work in the way the most people perceive it to work. The successful open source projects all exhibit an exponential contribution profile (few contribute much, and many contribute little) and depend on a benevolent dictator to keep things on track. They are anything but egalitarian and efficient.

Flat networks require stronger leadership than hierarchies, and without that leadership, the network rapidly fragments in to separate competing networks (or forks in software terms). The network needs a control plane to manage its structure during times of change. Many start ups are fantastically functional flat networks, but fail spectacularly when confronted with either rapid growth (restructuring) or fundamental change (directional uncertainty).

Distributing Control

One of the fundamental concepts we had in mind when we built Milestone Planner was the idea of distributing control out to the furthest parts of the network. Let project team members make autonomous decisions, then communicate them “at the point of impact.” – by default every team member can update every part of the project. Teams still have leaders, and there is clear accountability. We borrowed heavily from the concepts of social network platforms, but it turns out that there were more lessons there than we had realised. I strongly believe that, at their heart, all business problems are communication problems, or rather, they are communication failures.

Restructuring Communication

Social platforms introduced us to the idea of ‘Fans’ and ‘Followers’ that enabled conversations to scale. Users could select who to follow (or unfollow) and build their own networks – distributed networks, with distributed control.  But, and this is a big ‘but’, in the limit (as the network grows increasingly large) friend/fan/follower models turn into another form of broadcast. We follow more and more people, and rapidly become overwhelmed by communication. Facebook came up with the now defunct “EdgeRank” algorithm filtering the level of communication to be manageable. EdgeRank was optimised towards interest and attention (Facebook needs eyeballs for ads), leaving the intellectually hungry, well… Hungry. Twitter filled the void by allowing users to build networks based on serendipity and value creation, rather than historical relationships, and thus it thrived, for a time.

The challenge with distributed control is that the distributed points need enough information to make the right decisions, but not so much information that they become overwhelmed by the process of communication.  Email has become the control plane in the modern organisation, and people are overwhelmed by it, being constantly pushed irrelevant information and missing out on the detail. The friend/follower model can help here, but it needs a little help itself. The friend/follower network needs effective discovery mechanisms to enable it to scale. In short, it needs structure (or meta-structure).

Restructuring Organisations

To build an organisation that is responsive, and agile, neither the traditional hierarchy, nor the friend/follower model works. We talk a lot about networked organisations, but having been on the leadership teams of networked organisations for over a decade, they too have their weakness. Legal and regulatory structures means that someone needs to take ultimate responsibility (or to ‘be in charge’). There needs to be directional steering and shepherding to ensure that the network remains cohesive. There is a structure that addresses these challenges. It turns out that the answer was in our heads all the time. Literally, in our heads.

The brain is a network that adapts to change with incredible agility, even if it does have some quirks. The brain solves the design problem using heterarchy – adaptive networks that structure and restructure according to need. Heterarchy isn’t a new concept in organisational design, and many of us have worked in them for many years. Virtual Teams, in their original form, were organisational structures that rapidly established purpose-specific teams, leadership and authority. The teams were fluid and adaptive – the very model of a heterarchy, where roles were context specific rather than permanent for an individual.

Don’t Rest When You Design for Flow

When virtual teams become static, they are no long a heterarchy. They become the aching grid lock that is the modern matrixed organisation. The recent turbulent economic times have sent organisations mixed signals. When change stops, hierarchy sets in, or rather rivalling hierarchy sets in. It explains much of the organisation angst that is happening in larger businesses today. As economic growth, hopefully, re-establishes itself, change will flow through the organisation. The challenge will be which businesses can create the control plane to support heterarchy. We have the technologies to communicate and adapt to change like never before. What we need now is operating models that enable us to use them to build organisations that are both responsive and robust enough to deal with the challenges ahead.

The post New Models of Organisation appeared first on SocialOptic.

We have found no evidence of malicious behaviour, but we have replaced our SSL certificates, including those not using the affected OpenSSL software. This also ensures that we are correctly validated as “not vulnerable” by the main checking services.

Because the affected software (OpenSSL) provides encryption for so many services on the Internet, the prevailing advice is to reset your passwords across all services you use that may have been vulnerable, especially if you use common passwords. Please note that you should first check that the service you are changing the password for is no longer affected. This can be verified using services like LastPass’s Heartbleed checker: https://lastpass.com/heartbleed/ – if you wish to change your Milestone Planner password, go directly to milestoneplanner.com and change your password with the reset password link, or via “my account” settings.

This also seemed like a good time to tighten up our login options. Mozilla’s “Persona” authentication is relatively unused, so we will be retiring this in the next week. If you were previously using the Persona authentication service, you can set a password for your account, and continue to use Milestone Planner with a normal login. We will also be updating the Google sign in process to use Google’s most recent APIs. If you login using G+ or Google sign in, you  may be prompted to re-authorise Milestone Planner as we make this change. If you have any problems signing in, simply reply to this email or use the feedback form and we will investigate. We do not believe that there are any immediate security issues with these services, but we want to ensure we are using well maintained services.

When people ask if cloud services are secure, it is worth bearing in mind that the most common sources of data leakage and data loss remain email and failed hard drives. Emailing locally stored spreadsheets and documents remains higher risk than using a managed cloud-based service for your data, so there is no reason not to login and keep your plans up to date.

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The new year is a good opportunity for a reset, be it at work, or in your personal life, but by this point in January the initial enthusiasm of those New Year’s resolutions has worn off, and reality has set in. Now is the time to make those changes stick and get down to some serious planning. The key is to set some sensible goals, track them (did I mention Milestone Planner yet?) and then adapt to the changes which inevitably happen along the way. Sometimes things  don’t go according to plan (we love this Dog House Diaries cartoon), but that is ok.

Friend and author, Jean Russell, recently shared this post from Entrepreneur magazine: Forget Setting Goals. Focus on This Instead. It is one of those slightly intriguing, clickable headlines. If you haven’t read it, let me summarise for you: Systems are more powerful than goals. Goals won’t serve you or make you happy, because you can’t control everything, and because things change. While the article has some interesting points, I don’t agree with it. The key to effective goals is to understand how they serve you, and their role in shaping what happens.

“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”
“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat.
“I don’t much care where–” said Alice.
“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cat.
“–so long as I get SOMEWHERE,” Alice added as an explanation.
“Oh, you’re sure to do that,” said the Cat, “if you only walk long enough.”
(Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland)

Goals help you to build the right systems

Picking goals enables you to define and build the right systems. Goals don’t just happen, they require a process of identifying and completing specific actions (we very deliberately use the word ‘actions‘, rather than tasks here). Completing the actions moves you towards your goal. Similarly, actions do not (reliably) happen on their own, they need a system, or structure, to support them – actions and goals are not enough. In the Entrepreneur article, James Clear talks about the need to “build feedback loops” – this is where milestones come in. Setting milestones helps to break the progress towards goals into digestible chunks. As well as being easier to identify specific actions towards, Milestones enable you to see your progress more clearly. Just as importantly, they help you to see a lack of progress too. Here is where my perspective on goals starts to differ from many…

Goals are a hypothesis.

At the point that a goal is set, it is not always clear that it is the optimal goal, or that it is achievable. In times of rapid change, it is hard to set goals, as the uncertainty makes it difficult to commit to a direction as “the right one”. That doesn’t mean that we should not set goals! Let me remove the double negative from that last sentence: That means we should set goals. Remember, without goals, how are you going to pick systems or choose purposeful actions?

Selecting one goal means unselecting many others. That one truth is at the heart of so many business and personal problems. By saying “yes” to one thing, we are forced to say “no” to others, by avoiding the decision we are pretending that everything is a possibility, while pursuing nothing in particular. Choices are hard, and even harder when constant change makes everything appear risky. So often, business leaders want to pursue every single strategic opportunity, and individuals unhappily flip-flop between conflicting directions. Making a choice and committing to a direction,means accepting the risk  you might be wrong. That turns out to be a good thing. You cannot do everything, because you do not have that level of resource available to you! Bill Gates is, at least from time to time, is the richest man on the planet, yet even with access to that level of resource, he and Melinda Gates focus their efforts to make a difference.

Often, the only way to know if a goal is the right one, is to pick it and pursue it. We test the hypothesis, or rather the goal tests the hypothesis and the desire behind it. Does the company want to be the largest in the market? Or does it actually want to provide the best service? Company goals, just like personal ones, are driven by a desire and a hypothesis. We don’t have to wait until we achieve, or fail to achieve, the goal to discover if the hypothesis was correct. If milestones are not being met, that isn’t failure, it is feedback. Was that the right goal? Is it in conflict or contention with another goal? Which leads me on to…

There are two types of goals –  ones you know and ones  you don’t

OK, there are three – There are the ones that you don’t know that you don’t know. Goals are always present, but they are either explicit (they are clear and people can see them) or they are implicit (they have not been surfaced). Just to add a little confusion, sometimes implicit goals can be explicit ones masquerading in non-communication, where you know what your goals is, but you have not shared it with me. If members may have explicit goals set by the team leader, but they don’t share them with each other, the goals are still drawn implicitly in how the team members interact with each other and the rest of the organisation. Similarly, if I have an implicit goal in my behaviour that I am unaware of, it still shapes what I do and how I behave towards others. I am a big proponent of sharing goals, for two reasons:

Shared goals are identified and validated

You can’t write it down if you don’t know what it is! A commitment to sharing goals implies a commitment to defining them. Most behaviour has some form of goal behind it, it is just that we have not identified it yet. Even the simple act of walking to the kitchen, picking up a biscuit and eating it. Similarly, if a business doesn’t like what its sale team is doing, the starting point for change is not the behaviour, it is the (possibly) hidden goal that is driving the behaviour. If I understand somebody’s goals, I am more likely to understand their behaviour, and more able to cooperate. “I don’t understand why he did that” is a point of friction, just as “I don’t understand why I did that” is… Goals are an attempt to make sense of the world, and an attempt to make the work make sense. Yes, there are some things that can not be changed or controlled, but there are others that can. Sharing the goal with others allows for reflection, and often leads to support in reaching the goal.

Defining goals identifies conflicts before the fight

Kevan Hall, CEO of Global Integration, had me thinking about this last year. Goals usually don’t conflict, they contend or compete with each other. In psychological research people will talk about evidence that conflicts, coexists or compliments. It is a useful model for understanding goals as well. “Close down the London office” and “double the size of the London office” are in conflict. Conflicting goals are rare, but where they appear, process will be limited until the conflict is resolved. Hidden goal conflicts are toxic, both at the business and at the personal personal level, the sooner they are identified and addressed, the better. More often, goals coexist or compliment.

Complementary goals are often surprisingly problematic, they are complementary because they overlap slightly, and that usually means that they compete for resources and attention – they contend with each other. Good planning is key to identifying that contention, and mitigating against it. As soon as we have more than one goal, there is always going to be some degree of contention, we only have so many hours in a day, so we have to accept and manage that – or focus on a singular goal (but that is a whole other post).

Goals that coexist are also not without their problems. They can create independence, rather than interdependence, and lead to fragmentation and inefficiency. Complementary goals, in their overlap, carry synergies. It is a much misused word, but synergy is key to achieving goals, reducing friction and creating efficient actions. It gets more done.

synergy

the interaction or cooperation of two or more organizations, substances, or other agents to produce a combined effect greater than the sum of their separate effects.

 

Goals are a poor master, but a good servant

It should be fairly obvious that if we slavishly hold ourselves to undesirable, out-dated goals, that they are not going to serve us well. Goals need to be periodically reviewed and reset. The start of the year seems like a particularly good time to do that, if you haven’t already. Setting goals is a useful tool for identifying where resource limitations are going to be a challenge, and where there may be either  conflict, or opportunities for collaboration. Creating markers (milestones) towards the goals helps to create a sense of achievement and progress, or to flag where the hypothesis of the goal is flawed or has been invalidated by a change in circumstances.  Do not give up on goals, renegotiate them. Sometimes a small change in direction is all that is required to make a big change.

The post You Survived That Goal You Changed appeared first on SocialOptic.

Euan Semple is the author of “Organizations Don’t Tweet, People Do: A Manager’s Guide to the Social Web”  and former Director of Knowledge Management at the BBC. He has worked with organisations including Nokia, the World Bank, and NATO, and is well-known for his insights on putting the web to work for business.
 

Dana Lesson is the global Digital Workplace Architect at BSI (British Standards Institution), one-quarter of the Intranetizen team, co-founder of theICcrowd, and co-organiser of The Big Yak. Dana is a passionate  social media enthusiast, with over a decade of communications experience, that includes a three-year post as President of a charity.

And then there is me… During my time as the global advocate for Internet Technologies at Cisco Systems, during in the 90’s, I championed the deployment of literally hundreds of Intranets. Two decades later, web technology is back to revolutionise The Enterprise again, and this time, it’s personal. Can social platforms really solve the problems facing today’s businesses, and are they really different from the intranets that came before them? Come and join us to find out.

The post Enterprise Social Platforms – Putting Lipstick on the Pig? appeared first on SocialOptic.

Some great conversations, and talks from fellow speakers @davidjmclare @andybargery @tomball2 @BernieJMitchell and @alex_butler – there is so much great technology available to help us work better, from Quantified Self to great work spaces (and of course, Milestone Planner and GoToMeeting :) ). We really shouldn’t still be working like it is 1999!

More pictures on Flickr.

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The full set of presentations is on the unlocked blog.  Behind all the acronyms (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, …) the cloud represents a new way of delivering applications that is ultimately better suited to today’s business environment and the next generation of web-based applications. Hybrid solutions let us get the benefits of scale available in the cloud, while preserving the security that we need for ourselves and our customers.

The 5 Pillars of Cloudiness

There was a particular set of concepts in the fundamentals of cloud, that caused me to think. Rackspace’s Wayne Walls describes them as these:

• Parallel
  • Multiple workstreams
  • Get things done faster
  • Avoid deadlock (two things competing for one resource)
• Modular
  • Decouple applications
  • Small units of work are more manageable
  • Partition tolerance
• Horizonal
  • Scale out, not up
  • Eliminate single point of failures
  • “pets versus livestock” – it’s a server, not your friend!
• Agile
  • Innovation velocity
  • Development practices
  • Quality control
• Secure
  • Establish trust
  • Security domains
  • Partnership

In the technical domain, the advantages of each of these is fairly clear. Building applications that will run on a cloud infrastructure inherently forces you to build applications that are inherently scalable and robust. That’s all good, but let’s put the technology aside for a moment: Can these same ideas be applied to the design of the business itself, to build a company that is scalable and robust?

Cloud Concepts for Better Business

Working on Milestone Planner means that we get asked to help with all sorts of interesting business planning challenges. The most common reasons that we see people struggling fall into one of these buckets:

• Lack of a strategic clarity – unclear goals/purpose.
• Lack of resource – resource contention.
• Unresolvable dependencies – dead-lock.
• Inability to adapt to adapt with rapidity.
• Poor communication – understanding, trust and expectations.

So let’s apply cloud pillars to those project problems:

Parallel and Modular

The working default, when building a project plan, is to build a long serial chain of events. Sometimes there are good reasons for that, but more often, many of those events can happen independently, in parallel. Designing activities to be in parallel, while also less closely interlinked, avoids dead-locks and deadline bow-waves down the line. Break things down into smaller sets of deliverables as soon as there is enough clarity to do so (but not before!). Define and describe the dependencies (in programming terms, the interfaces). It is not simple to do, but it is a highly effective way to get a project on track, and to make it robust enough to stay on track.

Horizontal Scale

Horizontal versus vertical scaling is very poorly understood. In technical terms, vertical scaling is going out and buying a bigger server, with more CPU and memory, when the current server is overloaded, and ditching the old one. It is expensive (server price-to-power ratios are fairly exponential – you pay much more to get a little more). Vertical scaling means there is still a single point of failure – the one server. Horizontal scaling means going out and buying more small servers, and keeping the old one. It requires a different design to the software, since it will need the ability to run in parallel (across many servers).

Let me describe it another way. If you needed a to lift a big weight that kept growing, you might hire a weight lifter (although I’m not sure how well the job sites would serve you!). As the weight got bigger, you might have to hire a better weight lifter, may be a regional champion. Then after that, maybe the national champion, and after that the olympic champion. You can see how that is going to get both difficult and expensive, but I have seen many businesses head down that path! The alternative solution would be to put a longer bar on the weight, and have a growing team of people lift the weight. It requires a different design (that long bar between the weights), but it means that many people can contribute. Can you redesign your business structure and processes to allow horizontal rather than vertical scaling? If you can, the advantages are obvious.

Agile

This is a whole post on its own, so for now I’m just going to assert that the ideas around agile in the technical world have very real applications in the business world, not least because they came from the world of manufacturing in the first place! Businesses need to be able to make decisions quickly, then test them and learn from the results.

Security

I don’t just mean information security here, I mean the level of trust enjoyed by the project and the project team. Contrary to popular misconceptions, security is not about “secrecy” or “restricting access” – it is something quite different. Good security is about creating domains of trust, and defining what information flows between them, and under what conditions. Security is about ensuring predictable behaviours, which lead to trust. Clear expectations and predictable behaviours are the foundation of security in the technical world, and in business.

The Cloud is not Vague – it is Specific

In the conversations I have about cloud, people always give me a sense that they think it is something very vague. While there are still some debates about the definite of cloud, the fact is that it is a very specific set of principles. The fact that those principles are portable to other domains, gives me a high degree of confidence that they are sound and valuable. New ways of doing business need new ways of running the business. If you want to adapt to the way that the world is changing, you need to adapt the way that you do things.

The post What Business Can Learn from The Cloud appeared first on SocialOptic.

Surveys and Polls

There is a continuum of feedback gathering, from informal comments (either verbal, or on-line), through simple polls, up to multi-page, stringently designed survey instruments. Many businesses make use of formal employee engagement surveys, while others use simple one question polls into their intranet homepage. There is little substitute for a well designed survey. It can often take a number of iterations to refine question wording, especially in environments where English is not the first language, and get a quality working survey. However, sometimes a quick poll can be useful for gauging reactions to a new policy or piece of communication. Understand what sort of feedback you need, and pick the appropriate tool.

Real-time or regular?

There is certainly an advantage in capturing feedback while it is fresh in the moment, however regular, consistent surveys provide a way to track progress and adjust for biases in the responses. Many users of SurveyOptic conduct before and after surveys, or regular quarterly or annual surveys. Repeating the same survey enables them to measure the effectiveness of training and other initiatives. The timing of employee surveys is important, as the results can be biased by recent or upcoming events – for example a recent restructuring or an upcoming review. Regular surveys require subtlety different design than one-off surveys, as the same questions need to be re-usable potentially multiple years down the line.

You Would Say That, Wouldn’t You?

Beware of biases in your survey responses. Firstly, there is the issue of response bias. Different cultures (both country and company) will answer questions with their own particular biases. Repeated surveys will give you the data to factor this out. Be careful of sample bias too. How did people get the survey? Who selected them? What percentage of people completed the survey (non-response bias)? It is often tempting to reward people for completing the survey, but with smaller surveys, this too can create a sample bias. Incentives can be good, but they select one psychographic or another.

Transparency – feeding back the feedback

Do you share the results of the survey? It may not be appropriate for every survey in every environment, but when it comes to feedback, showing all results, even the negative ones, is critical to building trust and buy-in. The act of sharing the feedback demonstrates listening, and is the first step in responding to and actioning the feedback. It also provides an opportunity to validate the feedback that has been received. There is aspect of transparency that is import for  surveys that gather feedback: responses are always biased by people’s trust in the anonymity of the results. Great care needs to be taken with the collection of results, and especially with the use of verbatims. Working with an external partner will increase people’s trust in the process, both that confidentiality will be preserved, and that all of the feedback will be shared with the management team. These are both things that will drive up response rates.

Listen, Respond, Act

Worse than not listening, is collecting feedback, sharing it, and then not acting on it. Have a clear plan to listen to the feedback, share and respond to the points raised, and then to act on it. That should include negative or ‘challenging’ responses too. People will decide if their feedback is taken seriously by the changes they see as a result of it. If staff can see real changes, they will value the act of completing survey.

Get to the story

As with all data, it’s important to get to the narrative behind it. What is the underlying story? Even with a 97% response rate, that still means 3% didn’t have their say, and they may be the ones sitting on issues. Bystanders are important, so don’t just survey the obvious suspects. Back up quantitative surveys with qualitative input – feedback groups, focus groups and interviews. When we design surveys, we will usually start with some focus groups or interviews, to test and shape survey questions. Similarly, building in a selection of open-ended questions helps to round out the picture painted by the numbers.

With thanks to:  Katie Marlow,  Keith (@icnow), Jessica Roberts, Ramat Tejani, Lisa John,  Zoe Mounsey, Corrinne Douglas, Krishan Lathigra, Andrew Hesselden and Corrinne Douglas whose tweets provided many of the points for this post. If you have any questions about surveys, SurveyOptic, or gathering feedback, then do get in touch, or add a comment.

The post Surveys Feedback and The Big Yak appeared first on SocialOptic.

This video gives a brief overview of the new timeline. We have preserved the look and feel, but added many new features to make planning faster and more effective.

Firstly, you can now edit actions directly in the timeline – simply click on the action progress bar, or the expand arrow. You should notice that large plans now load faster, and for long plans, you can now zoom out to view years or even decades at a time. A number of key features from the Milestones and Kanban page have been added:

• Click on a person or resource in the people bar to see just that person’s milestones.
• Click on the legend (which is editable!) and show or hide completed milestones.
• Drag work streams to change their order in the plan.

We have also taken the opportunity to sharpen the look of Milestone Planner, and make it easier to use. Take a look at your plans, or sign up for a free account and try it out!

The post Touching on the Timeline appeared first on SocialOptic.

You might have heard about “Big Data” but what I want to focus on today is HUMAN Big Data – the information that is gathered about human attitudes and behaviours – particularly in the on-line world. We can collect data about (almost) everything, but can we make sense of it? How do our attitudes about our attitudes about our attitudes affect how we understand Human Big Data, and how we use it effectively.

I was an engineer from an early age – you know, the usual stuff – taking things apart, loosing bits, and eating too many sweets. However, I’ve always been fascinated by people, and by learning. That lead to a Post-Graduate Certificate in Education, and more recently, a Diploma in Psychology. I spend my time straddling the worlds of people and technology, helping them get the best from each other!

From scarce data to abundant data

We are in the middle of a world-changing shift. When I started working in the business world, all of the data for running the business would fit into a single file in today’s spreadsheet applications. Data was scarce, highly sought after, pored over in intimate detail and highly valued. Today we generate huge amounts of data every single day, and one of the biggest challenges in business is dealing with information-overload. The focus is less on gathering data, and more on curating and making sense of it. Technology to the rescue…
IBM’s “portable” hard drive solution from the late 50’s. You’ve probably seen this photo, or variations of it. That drive is actually less than 5Meg – that’s probably less memory than is in your washing machine (at least if you’ve every washed a USB memory stick by accident it is!). Today though, storage is cheap. By the end of this decade, you will likely be able to affordably store the whole of today’s internet in the palm of your hand. That’s changing how we build computer systems, but also changes how we deal with data.

Unstructured data? Not a problem.

The other big, historical, challenge with data was that we needed to have a good idea of what we were going to collect, before we started collecting it. And if we wanted to change our minds half way through, well, that was going to mean tears before bedtime and a lot of hard work. Today, technologies like NoSQL databases mean that we don’t have to worry about the structure of the data until we want to make sense of it. We can also collect different sorts of data in the same system, capturing more or less as our sources change. Platforms like Twitter and Facebook lead to the development of technologies that can process and analyze huge amounts of data in near-real time – restructuring and refactoring it as we go. It’s a revolution in our relationship with data.

Any Questions?

So what does that all mean? Let’s step back a moment, and think about how we collect data. The traditional tool of choice for research has been the questionnaire. Brand surveys, customer satisfaction surveys, these are familiar weapons of the market researcher. Similarly, focus groups and interviews. But all of these methodologies share a challenge: They ASK people what they think. They are attitudinal self-reports: expensive to gather, and tricky to design.

Liar!

“It’s a basic truth of the human condition, that everybody lies. The only variable is about what……I’ve found that when you want to know the truth about somebody, that someone is probably the last person you should ask.”  Dr Gregory House

You have to love the idea of a fictional doctor telling us that we are all liars. Of course we aren’t. But we do bend the truth occasionally. Especially if we think we are being watched (or listened too…).

People will tell you what you what to hear, what they heard and what they would like to hear… …but rarely what they think.

Socially desirable responding is a major challenge with surveys and many other traditional data gathering methods. Certainly, experts can help to minimize their impact, and control for other issues like response set bias. It gets interesting when we turn those biases from issues into data. Technology allows us to record not just the answers, but to record the response times too. This is an altogether different sort of data.

From attitudes to behaviours

We can move from ‘expressed’ measures (attitudes) to observed measures (behaviours). Of course, not all ‘behavioural’ measures are actually measures. Foursquare check ins, for example, are expressions – people don’t (usually) check in at every physical location that they visit. The choice of checking locations is an expression of attitudes about themselves and the location brands. Social media, contrary to opinion, is not about transparency. It is about continual, partial transparency. We need to get smarter about understanding the data that we collect, and learn new techniques to control for the biases in it.

Business social graph (Autodesk)

Of course some data is more ‘objective’ – this is a lovely visualisation of the Autodesk organisation over time. In our early days of working with human data, we spent quite a lot of time building these sorts of visualisation. They have become cheaper and easier to produce, and they are certainly good discussion points. The bigger lesson is that not all data matters, or at least much of the data that we see as important may not actually matter. I can predict more about the interactions of people in an organisation based on the physical distance between their desks, than I can from a hierarchical org chart. Objective information is good, but it is overly valued in business. Aggregate subjective information often tells us more. Not all opinions are meaningless!

Language Tells

One of the most interesting things about social media is that it gives us more access than ever before to the raw language that people use. As software algorhythms have become more advanced, and our understanding of language has improved, we can create software that can analyze, on aggregate, the emotional content of communications. The hedonometer is a great example – how happy is the Twitter-verse today? But language tells us much more…  Shared vocabulary can predict social groupings and influence, in quite unexpected ways.

Looking for patterns can seriously damage your health wealth

Edcrowle – http://www.flickr.com/photos/edcrowle/383301200/sizes/z/in/photostream/

Blindly looking for patterns is a dangerous sport. It hits many of the weak spots in our cognitive systems, and can lead us up all sorts of dark alleys.

Correlation is not causality

Get it printed on a t-shirt. Say it randomly in meetings: “Correlation is not causality.” – ok, it won’t win you many friends, but you’ll be right most of the time. The assumption that unrelated events have causal links almost makes the business world go around. Literally. It is a much harder habit to break that you might think, for reasons I’ll come on to later. When we operate in the world of human data, it is an ever present danger – misunderstanding how variables do (or don’t) relate. Camera tripods have cameras on them. Cameras take good pictures. Cameras don’t like getting wet. Andy here is on a camera tripod. He takes very good pictures. He hates getting wet. Andy is, of course, a photographer, not a camera. But ascertaining that from a few variables (rather than a few megabytes of data and a lifetime of learning) is a very non-trivial problem.

You are biased – Really biased

Perceptual / Attentional biases, observer expectancy effect, anchoring and focusing, conformation bias, availability, cascade effect, bandwagon effect… We have a sea of cognitive biases that play in to one another. We tend to fixate on the first thing that we see, becoming blind to other interpretations, we are biased towards spotting evidence that supports our hypothesis, and ignoring data that doesn’t. We value and believe things based on repetition, more than reliability, and when you put that in a social context, we support what we believe that other people believe. It is a chain of events that leads to big mistakes, and big data is high octane petrol, especially in the business context, where we value ‘objective’ data so highly. Numbers are not always objective, they are vulnerable to subjectivity.

Attention

You will have seen this video on line. Think through the consequences carefully. When told to diligently observe something, we completely miss the gorilla in the room, beating its chest. Apply that to big data. Our perceptual systems keep us safe from predators, and help use locate friends and relatives. They were not specified or tested for analysing terabytes of data on a computer screen…

But you are better than that…

Actually, there’s a name for that bias too: self-enhancement bias. We always over estimate our capabilities. When asked, on average, everyone is above average!

Presentation is bias

“[Big Data] is sometimes seen as a cure-all, as computers were in the 1970s. Chris Anderson…wrote in 2008 that the sheer volume of data would obviate the need for theory, and even the scientific method….

“[T]hese views are badly mistaken. The numbers have no way of speaking for themselves. We speak for them. We imbue them with meaning….

[W]e may construe them in self-serving ways that are detached from their objective reality.”Data-driven predictions can succeed — and they can fail. It is when we deny our role in the process that the odds of failure rise. Before we demand more of our data, we need to demand more of ourselves….Unless we work actively to become aware of the biases we introduce, the returns to additional information may be minimal — or diminishing.” Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise

There is no such thing as a neutral presentation of data. We always bring something of ourselves to the presentation, even if it is unconscious. Phenomenological approaches to psychological research understand, embrace and control for the biases of the researcher. Ignoring them, or even worse, denying their existence, simply increases their impact. Understand why (at an emotional level) you are measuring what you are measuring, and the story you tell while you present it.

Humans communicate at the level of stories, not at the level of data, so tell stories, and understand stories. Each story is a potentially narrative. Most data has multiple potential narratives. Without a narrative, an embracing context, data is meaningless, or at least meaning less.

Reification

The biggest challenge with Human Big Data is that it breaks the scientific model. Most people working in the data processing world come from a background that draws on the epistemology of natural science. We build a hypothesis, we construct experiments, we measure things. We gradually ‘discover’ the nature of the world around us. Of course human big data doesn’t work that way. Marketing people are paid to CHANGE WHAT PEOPLE BELIEVE. So, if we are measuring what people believe (attitudes) or how they behave (which is related to what they believe – says the marketing world!), we are changing the thing that we are measuring. At a higher level, we are using the learning from big human data to architect the social construct that people operate within. Marketing has never been static. What worked yesterday, won’t always work today. Humans adapt and normalise. If you use behaviour economics in your pricing, eventually you change the behaviours. Why don’t you by the cheapest or the most expensive wine today? By operationalising measurements, we literally ‘call them into being’ – giving them substance and reality – even if they had none in the first place.

Designing out bias

When we gather and present human big data, we have to do our best to design out the biases. But we can turn this all on its head and use our biases, combined with big data, to change attitudes and outcomes. Nudge is common parlance today. Decision architectures generally play on age old cognitive biases. When we add social data we turn on the turbo button; we add social proof. The Facebook like button that you see on websites has faces on it for a reason – instrumenting behaviours and playing back the data is powerful.

 The Iron Cage

But we have to be careful. It can be too powerful. Overly rationalizing the world, and using social forces to drive compliance, can lead to an icy and brittle world – to borrow from Max Weber. We need to use these new tools with caution. This is not a single move chess game, and eventually there is a tipping point at which contrarian approaches become the dominant strategy. If we measure emotional responses, and engineer the ultimate film script, and then every film studio follows it, suddenly it becomes bland. We have to apply our learning lightly, and with a bit of fun…

Game mechanics

Probably the fastest way to start a fist fight at a game developers conference is to describe “gamification” as psychology for dummies. Ok. Some parts of that statement might not be true. But what is true is that we can usefully borrow from the tool box of gamification. In gaming, the players enter “the circle” of the game – temporarily adopting a perspective on how the world works. We can escape the game. When we can’t, it stops being a game. There is something else that gamification gives us: The construction of measures. Not everything that we want to measure in human big data has a metric that we can express. In the world of games, we create measures and play them back. Number of lives, energy level… Constructed measures can be used to turn the disadvantages of reification into a positive advantage. We create and combine the things that we can measure, into new measures. Number of twitter followers, number of Facebook likes. These are actually all just constructed measures, which are used to drive behaviours. The players play the game to earn the points they need to level up!

The road ahead

An exciting journey, with some risky pitfalls, is ahead. Our relationship with data has changed irrevocably, as has our relationship with ourselves and society. New thinking is need to understand how we best make use of the data that we collect about ourselves, be it Google Glass, the instrumented-self or a Facebook marketing campaign. We are measuring more and more, and understanding less and less. The technology exists to turn that around; the next generation of billion dollar businesses will be the ones that create and operationalise a deep understanding of human big data…

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Smart People – Dumb Decisions?

If someone smart makes (what looks like) a dumb decision, then they probably know something you don’t. There is, of course, a chance that you know something they don’t, but the further away from the situation you are, the less likely that is. I spend a large proportion of my time hopping between the ‘top’ and ‘bottom’ of organisations. It means I get to watch decisions get made, communicated and received. Almost every time I hear someone say “that was a dumb decision.” the comment is from someone who doesn’t have access to the same information as the CEO, either because the CEO failed to communicate the context, or because the CEO was prevented from communicating the context. Sometimes we do have additional information or experience, but Marissa Mayer saw the situation at Yahoo! and made a judgement call. I’m pretty sure she knows more about what is happening inside of Yahoo! than any of us do – and that includes disgruntled ex-employees. A few weeks on, and it seems to be working.

So, Working From Home is Dead, Right?

Not so much. There are two very different things here, and I’m going to very deliberately step away from the context of Yahoo! to talk about them. There are two root causes for home working to fail, and they are:

1. Poor management now.
2. Poor management in the past.

‘Managing’ remote employees requires a mature and confident approach. If an employee is in the office, it is easy to ‘feel’ like they are being effectively managed, because they can be observed. That’s an illusion accepted by junior, ineffective managers. The business isn’t paying for someone to sit at a desk, its paying someone to be productive. If I am measuring output (what was created) rather than activity (movement/location), then at the end of the day, I can measure that just as well if the employee is at home. So that’s the first management failure: valuing presence over productivity. Output beats contact, unless you are running a social club – Hold that thought, we’ll come back to it.

Fire Up the Factory

If effective home working is simply a matter of effective measurement, then why do so many businesses struggle with it? Quite simply: Most of us aren’t running a factory, we’re running a studio. In a factory it is easy to measure output: it’s a matter of quantity that meets a quality threshold :- 4,000 working hammers and we’re done. In a factory, work is easily identified and quantified. It is also individualistic and compartmentalised, making it relatively simple to measure the impact of each individual worker or machine. Yes, there are production line dependencies, but it’s pretty easy to spot the robot that has crashed or taken an extended lunch break.

The Studio

Most knowledge-lead businesses are much more like a studio. Output is relatively hard to quantify, except when it is close to the sales process. You only truly know what a painting is worth at the moment it is sold, not a moment before or a moment after. It is also much harder to identify each person’s contribution to the work. What of the person who cleaned the brushes? The person who created the set? The person who fetched the paint? The completion of products is infrequent and sporadic, and it is hard to identify each individuals contribution. And so it is with knowledge work.

A product manager or designer might launch four products a year. That doesn’t give many measurement points. It is very hard to measure progress on a weekly, let alone a daily basis. And who’s work was it anyway? The engineers’? The sales person who provided input? The output is a collaborative effort, in fact the effort may be the collaboration itself. Even if you don’t view your office as a studio, if you are reading this, it is probably more like a studio than a factory.

It’s Not Where You Started From

There are two much larger problems than management and measurement, and the solutions to them actually take management and measurement off of the table as issues. These are, I suspect, the dominant issues at Yahoo! right now:

• What are we trying to achieve?
• Can we achieve it?

The biggest challenge in a distributed environment, like a home working one, is alignment. Alignment is the critical difference between efficiency and effectiveness. Which of these is better:

• One person achieving one thing that moves the business towards a strategic objective.
• One hundred people, each doing ten things towards five irrelevant goals.

Anti-work is corrosive to a businesses, and yet in survey after survey, we find that most workers in a business either don’t know what the goals of the business are, or are working towards a set of goals that were long-since abandoned, updated or replaced by the leadership team.

It’s Where You Are Going

Clearly set and communicated goals, wrapped in a set of principles that codify ‘how we get things done here’ are the framework that allows people to work both independently, interdependently and flexibly. Goals need to be broken down into meaningful steps (we call these Milestones), so that there is an objective way to establish if things are going off track, failing to progress, or need revising. Business changes rapidly, and changing goals mid-course is a legitimate course of action, although if it happens too frequently, the goal-setting process probably needs carefully looking at. If people know where they are going, they will get there – provided they are motivated! Here is the most fundamental failure of management: The failure to believe, and create belief. It is all very well outlining your ship’s journey, but if your crew aren’t bought into the voyage, then there’s a mutiny ahead. And that’s the best outcome. Worse is an unhappy, meandering journey that doesn’t reach any particular destination.

Better Together or Better Apart?

There is a common myth that having employees in the office will fix the motivation issue. It might do so in a factory, although that is debatable, but it definitely doesn’t do so in the studio. Presenteeism is far more dangerous in the office. One dissatisfied employee can demotivate and entire team, if not an entire organisation. Yes, if people have lost sight of where the business is going, or have lost their belief that, as a team, they can achieve great things, then it’s time to get people back together. Remote working is founded on trust. Actually, all collaborative working is founded on trust, and trust comes out of relationship. People do need to meet face to face, from time to time.

Exception Becoming Normality

The creative energy of the (physical) water cooler conversation is a powerful binding force. Seeing family photos and personal clutter at a fellow employee’s desk all help to create rounded characters that we either want to work with, or know how to work with. When you are running a business, you are running a social club. When fellow workers are de-humanised into bland corporatized stereotypes, disenchantment, if not malfeasance, is not far behind.

People, from the management team, to the latest hire, need to be real and connected. Physical co-location can help with that, but it isn’t always the answer, and it certainly isn’t the only answer. It depends on the type of work, and the type of working. People often convolute two different things. Let’s call them “homeworking” and “teleworking” – the names aren’t actually important, it’s the idea that there are two different types of remote working: One where the home is the permanent place of work, the other where the business office is the main location, but work can happen at other locations. Most customer-facing roles involve at least some degree of teleworking – I’m not quite sure I like the image that the words “road warrior” conjures up, but sales people seem to have (quite literally) run with the term. Again, let’s not fuss over the definition, other than making the point that almost every business operates along a continuum of home to office-based work, and employees operate along that continuum too. Different points on the scale have different benefits and challenges, and require different kinds of infrastructure to work effectively.

My Time is Not Your Time

I think it is probably Paul Graham who most popularised the idea of the different types of different time slicing in business for managers and makers. I alternate between managing, consulting and coding. When I’m managing, I’m operating in very small slices of time. Interruptions are frequent, and part of the flow. Decisions are made in minutes, if not seconds, and then I’m on to the next thing. When I’m consulting, I am at the mercy of other people’s diaries. I’m working in hourly chunks, that’s the rhythm of meetings (or billing). When I’m coding, I’m lost in thought. A two minute interruption can set me back hours. Coding, at least the way I code, is like building a Lego house in your head. Mentally examining each piece, working out where it fits and arranging it. When the phone goes off, it’s like a parent coming into the bedroom with a hoover and an anger management problem. Boom. Start again.

What Works Well at Home?

It’s probably no surprise then, that different types of work suit different types of environment. Note that I say “work” there, not “role” There is a time and a place for homeworking in almost every role. As a manager, it makes sense to be in the office, unless, of course, your staff aren’t. Actually, it’s not about location, it’s about availability. Having Skype and Milestone Planner fired up makes it easy for me to see what needs actioning, answer quick queries, and touch base with the rest of the team. When I’m consulting the diary is king, Skype is off, and the phone is on silent. I am as happy in an office meeting room as I am in a quite coffee shop. When I’m coding, I usually want to be at home, with the phone off, real-time comms shutdown and my two 30 inch monitors keeping the room warm. I often end up coding at night; There’s something about the quiet of the early hours that makes me especially productive.

Yes, there is much about my role that is unique, but the reality remains that the choice of location isn’t a binary one. I know people who are glad to get into the office; either they don’t like the solitude of being home alone, or don’t have a space where they aren’t being climbed over by an overly enthusiastic toddler or disturbed by a noisy neighbour. I also know people whose productivity and creativity in the office is destroyed by constant interruptions and the levels of noise pollution inherent in the kinds of open-plan offices that are so de-regur which many HR folks.

Our business is built upon work force flexibility. I strongly believe that, in the long term, it will enable us to attract and retain talent that is inaccessible to some of our would-be competitors. Sometimes people need to be at home to take a delivery, deal with a child-care logistics issue, or just to concentrate. And if they have a sniffy cold, I am very happy for them to keep that at home, away from the rest of the team. It’s not about when or where people work, it’s about what they get done. Different types of work are best suited to different environments, and in today’s kind of jobs, we are rarely doing the same kinds of work all of the time. I am very sure the same is probably true for your work and your business. Then there’s the environmental benefits and all of that time recouped from commuting.

But Will They Work?

The most common push back I hear about home working is this: Surely people don’t work when they are at home. And, believe this or not, I’ve come across more than one business where “working from home for the day” does actually seem to mean “taking the day off.” That’s not typical, trust me! Factories need managers. Studios need leaders. Motivating team members, and being sure that they will do the right thing is not a location problem. Is a leadership problem. Yes, there is a fine art to accountability – you will need to agree and track outcomes. Yes, you will need some tools to support you (and we’d love you to talk to us about that :) ). Yes, you might need some leadership training for your team leaders (we can point you to some great folks). But by being flexible about where people work, you are going to create a more flexible, better designed business. It gives the ability to attract unique talent, and keep people engaged in the business. Oh, and by the way, you’ll probably fix your disaster recovery challenges at the same time.

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“The Surprising truth about moving others.”

The title of this evening’s talk caught my attention because I know that a huge amount of project time is spent ‘selling’ – it’s something Milestone Planner users mention time and time again. So, Dan’s opening gambit? Like it or not, we are all in sales now.

When asked “what percentage of your work involved convincing, or persuading people to give up something they value, for something you can offer?” People responded that it accounted for 41% of their time on the job. That’s 24 mins of every hour spent doing, as Daniel put it, things that are “kinda, sorta like sales” or “non-sales selling.” That’s a pretty striking statistic.

We’re all in sales now

“Non-sales selling” is selling, but where no money changes hands. Think of it as sales denominated in attention, resource and all sorts of other non-cash things. Dan’s logic, is that if 1 in 10 people are in sales-sales, and 9 in 10 are doing non-sales selling… Then that puts ten out of ten people in sales, regardless of the cats preferring it.

And here is a thing: Almost universally, we don’t like sales. Dan’s research asked “When you think of sales or selling what is the first word that comes to mind?” The answers were not pretty. So why does it have such a negative connotation in our culture? He argued that the reputation of sales comes from the context of selling, not the process. The history of sales is a history of ‘information asymmetry.’ Traditionally the salesperson had the information, and the power, which puts us as buyers ‘on guard….’ Remember ‘buyer beware’ and all that comes with it? Information asymmetry. Now it’s a world of seller beware… The premium in sales has shifted from problem solving, to problem finding. Solutions are often obvious, problems rarely are (at least not until it is too late), so it’s a much more valuable skill.

From Surviving to Thriving in Sales

Dan’s research cites three keys to thriving in a world of selling: Attunement, buoyancy and clarity. The problem with sales is that, in the words of one sales person, every day you face an ocean of rejection. The key to surviving that rests in “Buoyancy” – your explaining style. How do you explain failure? Research by Marty Seligman (who has also spoken at the RSA), has shown that the way we explain failures to ourselves and others is key in how we recover from them. There is a growing body of research that is finding ways to build resiliency into our character. Enabling people to recover from set backs.

Avoiding rejection in the first place is obviously a good strategy too, and that’s where attunement and clarity come in. Successful sales people cut through the noise and get to the signal. This is clarity. Clearly stating things, and removing confusion, is a powerful tool of persuasion. Dan listed a number of rules for attunement, the first of which was to “Increase your power by reducing it.” Leadership qualities came up a number of times during the talk, and Jim Collins was heavily referenced. Collins and other researchers point out that humility is a key leadership skill.

One of the keys to attunement is aligning with the receiver of your message. Match the conventions of the recipient. A common cause of failure, particularly in technical sales, is that people use their own language, not the language of their customers. Don’t use your own technical terms, use your customers’ terms. Communicate your project or product in the language of the people you are trying to persuade, and connect with them.

Here was an interesting myth that was blown apart during the evening: Are sales people extroverts? Or do you have to be extroverted to be a good sales person? Research shows that extroverts are more likely to go into sales, more likely to get promoted, and generally get on, but actually, the correlation between introversion/extroversion and success in sales is non-existent. Actually, the best sales people are ‘ambiverts‘ – those who are neither strongly introverted, nor extroverted actually, and can adapt their style. Strong introverts and strong extroverts both do badly in sales.

Attunement, buoyancy and clarity

There was much more discussed during the evening and the audience Q&A afterwards – I suspect many of the topics covered are in Dan’s latest book, which you might want to grab from Amazon: To Sell is Human: The Surprising Truth About Persuading, Convincing, and Influencing Others

Attunement, buoyancy and clarity was definitely the key message. Welcome to sales, or at least the non-salesy selling of your next project…

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Kevan Hall

More and more of the conversations we are having with Milestone Planner users are about the challenges of matrix working. The formal definition of a matrix is anywhere there are dual reporting lines i.e. people have more than one formal boss. Almost anyone using Milestone Planner will be working on teams where they take instructions from, or are reliant upon, others, either within their own organisation or externally. That means a greater need for matrix management skills, so I was very pleased to have the chance to catch up with Kevan Hall, the author of  the new book “Making the Matrix Work.”

What are ‘matrix management’ skills?

Many Milestone Planner users will know – better than most – that work refuses to fit neatly within old-fashioned silos. (As an interesting aside, the matrix structure evolved from the need to manage very complex projects in the aerospace industry in the 1970s.) We need to get things done irrespective of the reporting structure of the people involved. We often need the skills to get things done without having direct control over people and resources needed to deliver results, and have little traditional authority and control fall back on.

This isn’t always a bad thing. Kevan is the CEO of training consultancy Global Integration, which specialises in matrix management, virtual teams and global working. A recent internal study inside one of the company’s clients showed that employees actually slightly preferred their ‘dotted line’ bosses to their ‘solid line’ bosses, because the dotted line bosses have to try harder to persuade and motivate them to deliver what they want/need.

We cannot simply focus on activity any more: we need to build long-term relationships and to sustain teams and groups, and that means time and attention needs to be spent on people management as part of any plan.

To add to this, competition for attention is increasing. Global Integration’s benchmarking survey (conducted using SurveyOptic) of over 4,000 people who work in large organisations shows that people are now, on average, a member of five teams. Multiple streams of activity are the norm – another project might simply tip the balance into overload.

However, there is academic evidence that multiple team membership actually leads to an increase in productivity, as people have to become more effective at managing their time. Of course, that is not an unlimited effect – at some point it becomes too much!

These are the kinds of issues addressed in Kevan’s latest book, Making the Matrix Work – how matrix managers engage people and cut through complexity,  available from February 7, 2013 – today!). Note: If you work on a team where you think multiple copies may be useful, drop us a line , I’m sure that Global Integration can arrange some discounted copies for your teams.

New ways of working require new ways of thinking, planning and managing. Today’s businesses are very different from those of a few decades ago. It’s time to learn some new skills!

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The problem with many team meetings is that they can feel like a monologue with witnesses. That’s not how great teams work. However, Tu says that he finds great teams do start with great individuals. Great individuals are often awkward, or at least difficult to manage. That’s not a bad thing, as George Bernard-Shaw put it “all progress is due to unreasonable people.”

Start with good people

While great individuals are important, in most areas it is teams, not individuals, that achieve things. Steve Jobs learnt that lesson when he was removed from Apple because he wasn’t working with the team. On starting Pixar, he hand picked a great team, and built an amazing success story together with them. Another great team success is The Rolling Stones, especially as they represent a business that has turned over 1.3 billion in revenue. Like any good team, said Tu, they have different characters, creating both conflict and cohesion. While Jagger is a firebrand, the other team members balance out with different attributes. The harmoniser, the stoic, each has their place in a super team. In great teams there is creative friction between the different individuals, but there are also things that keep them together – teams need a compelling and common purpose to keep them on track and performing.

“A powerful idea pulls people together”

Teams need this balance of conflict and cohesion to work. Too much cohesion, and creativity drains away, and group think sets in. Too much conflict, and the team breaks apart. You absolutely need both, to get the best ideas and the best execution.

Team excellence is a learned habit

Tu talked about “the protocol for performance” – super teams have a codified way of doing things (something that can often become a culture) and an agreed way of assessing performance. There is a democracy of ideas, but a dictatorship of decisions. Ideas are freely explored, but commitments are made and adhered to – this is the balance of creativity and execution.

“Practice really does make perfect.”

Formula 1 teams get good by practicing pit stops over and over again. Practice is key in any team – whilst there is creativity in exploring ideas, there is consistency in execution.

The Q & A after Tu’s talk raised some interesting questions. The first was about size. Teams fill that gap between an individual and the organisarion, but there does seem to be an ideal size, generally from 4to 12.. The Red Cross says you need at least 4 people to get the benefits of diversity, but beyond 12, is becomes difficult to “herd the cats.”

The same objectives and no disproportionate rewards

There was also a question about leaderless teams, which Khoi answered with the example of the SAS, which recruits highly independent, free thinking individuals, who are also completely submitted to the discipline of the team. Ideally you want teams to be as flat as possible, but there is a place for heiracrchy, although more important than any form of status is a sense of fairness.

“The leitmotiv of a disaster is chaos. That doesn’t mean that you take a chaotic approach to tackling it. You need a solid dependable base to respond from.”

Change the person before changing the people

There will always be conflicts in a good team, but the key, as a team member or leader, is to pick the right fights (and sometimes, just to pick fights!). Too much harmony leads to group think (for example, the financial crisis), so sometimes people need to play out the opposing views. Sometimes at Pixar, they had people take an opposing view, to create the friction, but committing, and agreeing to, the the final decision is key.

Teams are often viewed as highly inclusive, but when do you exclude people from the team? There is often a view that you need to change the people to change the team, but there is a lot that can be done before that. Changing a person out is not the first answer, there are many other steps before that, advised Khoi. Reliability of team members is key (that leads to trust), and a sense of mutual protection (will this person protect me – have they got my back).

One of Khoi’s key tests of a team is to ask each member what the three key purposes of the team are. Divergent answers point to issues in the team. In general, the main issues in underperforming teams are: they don’t know where they are, they don’t know where they are going, and if they do, they don’t know how to get between the two.

There isn’t a problem in being in multiple teams, unless there’s a problem. People can be in multiple teams, as long as the objectives don’t conflict. A common goal is clear need in any team, and that goal might be avoiding a bad outcome – teams are at their best when the alternatives are worse.

The key ingredients

Via Twitter, Khoi was asked what the key ingredients would be if he was baking a super team pie. He said:

• Great individuals.
• Diversity of the team (in all senses).
• Clear protocols about performance.
• Building trust and cohesion.

Reflection and practice are also key ingredients. Take time out to sharpen the axe before cutting down the tree – business teams simply don’t spend enough time practicing.

Failure is also important. Every team needs to fail quickly, then recover from it, Khoi said. The shared experience of surviving tough things is key to the cohesion of a team.

Habits in groups can become culture

As a side note, it was interesting that someone who has spent much time studying teams, sees personality type as being much more of a situational thing. Teams shape behaviour and, ultimately, the culture of the organisations they are part of. There is an interplay between the business culture, team culture and the behaviour of individuals. A super team brings out the best in great people.

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Repeat That

Ever got to the end of a project and thought “that was good, let’s do that again?”  Well now you can. Simply click the “Repeat” button on a project, or a workstream, milestone, or even an action. This creates a new copy of that item (and everything in it). You can shift the repeat forward by a day, a week, 2, 4 or 12 weeks – more options in future releases. Once you have created the repeat you can adjust the new actions, sub-actions and milestones as you need – they are completely independent copies.

From Discovery to Optimisation

The repeat feature completes the planning cycle: Start with a blank page. Add in milestones and actions, and continue to build them out as the project continues. At the end of the project, you can ‘repeat’ it – review the new plan to ensure that you have captured all of your learning, and use the pattern as a template for future projects. At a smaller level, you can create repeatable patterns within a project – for example if the plan requires multiple press releases, or software releases, create a check list of actions underneath a milestone, then repeat it as frequently as you need to.

Agile Meets Waterfall

As we build out Milestone Planner’s functionality, we are increasingly working to bring together the best of the Waterfall and Agile worlds. Different methods are appropriate for different moments, and an effective project management tool needs to be able to pivot between them.

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Although I didn’t physically manage to get to #mindtheproduct2012, I did get to enjoy the tweetstream, mainly thanks to the tweets of @welovelean and @mindtheproduct (the latter under the prolific fingertips of James Mayes). If you are, or aspire to be, a product manager, then Mind The Product is a great site, and the presentations will be up there later. I’ve captured the sound bites, and done my best to attribute them to the appropriate speakers (I’m sure the Twitterverse will let me know if I’ve made any slips – it was tricky, as there were quite a few Tom’s on stage – Tom Chi, Tom Loosemore, Tom Coates!). I’ve worked in (and around) product management for two decades, and am still learning. There’s a great mixture of sound advice and inspiration here:

Marty Cagan of svpg

Marty talked about products that can change the world, driving disruption, and putting design and experimentation (and prototyping) front and centre. Product management is about reaching beyond what the customer already knows, to bring them something much better.

“I cannot point to a single successful Founder who was purely mercenary” – driving vision is key.

“Figure out what your customers can’t know” – Customers don’t know what’s possible!

“Two thirds of your ideas won’t work”. Keep that as a rule of thumb!

“If you’re not killing at least half your ideas, you’re wasting build time.”

“Be very stubborn on vision and very flexible on details.”

“Cross-functional, co-located teams.” – a low tech approach with massive benefits.

“Design is not a coat of paint at the end, it’s how it ALL works.”

“the biggest source of innovation is typically the Engineer, they best understand what’s possible.”

“If you’re just using your developers to code, you’re only getting about half their value.”

“It’s not about process, it’s about culture…”

“…Data beats opinions.”

“Quick physical mock-ups can offer huge leaps in interaction understanding.”

“Rate based goals. If one thing has 5% change of success, by the time you try 20 things, 64% of success.”

“To maximise the rate of learning, minimise the time to try things.”

“It’s just as important to define what your product should not be”.

The Nordstrom Labs innovation videos were recommended as a great illustration of these concepts, you can watch them here: Nordstrom Labs.

Tom Hulme – Design Director @ IDEO

Tom had some great points around lean methodology (and its weaknesses):

“Pivoting is promiscuity. It does not necessarily mean progress.”

You have to go through “Ignorant optimism, Informed pessimism” before you can approach value.

“Great businesses evolve their purpose over time.”

“One hour window, each month. Stop, reflect, what’s our purpose? Are we all clear on this?”

“You are what you measure…. so measure the right things!”

“It’s not good enough to drive for revenues, they have to be the right revenues.”

“What metrics tell you if you’re tracking your purpose?”

“Halfway through 4 week training, Zappos offer people $1k to LEAVE”. If they’re motivated, they stay.

Rule of three. If someone’s already doing it well, you need 3x the resource to break in there (paraphrased, via @jearner)

“Don’t copy without understanding. It’s about how it works, not just how it looks”

From Charles Adler (@cadler – co-founder of Kickstarter.com)

“Each feature, each function we put out, regardless of intent, is an experiment”

“Hire curious people, then get out the way”

Tom Loosemore – @tomskitomski of UK Gov’t Digital Services

“Vision should represent the emotional response you want from your customer”

“Hire for attitude. Curious, passionate polymaths”

“Design rules include optimise for common case, build for inclusion, understand context, start with needs”

“We own the process, it doesn’t own us. Kind of Agile Jazz, really!”

“Publish the deadline and vision widely, then we managed scope to fit”

Critical to ensure you don’t live in a bubble and build what you want… actual user, front and centre.

“Start small. Run fast. Gather momentum”

“Feel fear. Then do the right thing anyway”

My top 5 favourite quotes, actually 6 – think of it as a 20% extra offer!

“Be stubborn on vision, be flexible on details.” Marty Cagan

“Process is mostly religion. It’s about the culture you create.” Marty Cagan

“Most our meetings are a big guess-athon. Don’t guess. Learn.” Tom Chi

“Don’t pivot just because the problem is tough to solve.” Tom Hulme

“Methodology beats process. Choose the right tools for the job.” Charles Adler, Kickstarter

“We own the process. The process doesn’t own us. We call it Agile Jazz..” Tom Loosemore

Product management has evolved massively as a discipline over the past decade, but I think we are only just at the beginning of it’s evolution, as skills in design, human behaviour, project management (yes, that) and management sciences converge on the role. If you are a project manager, enjoy it and excel! If you aren’t, but you work with one, be kind – it’s a tough mission!

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The KTN event looked at business models and how social media is changing them. At one side of the spectrum, people talk about “Social Business” as the area of businesses becoming focused on serving communities, rather than profit. At the other end, people talk about a “Social Business” as a business that had set up a Facebook page. Perhaps not, but the reality rests between those two extremes. Mellissa Norman, Business Models and Growth Champion for the Creative Industries KTN, asked for my thoughts on how business models are changing. My answer was captured on video:

Benjamin Ellis – How social media is impacting business models from Creative Industries KTN on Vimeo.

My take, in short: Social Media is impacting on every single part of the business model. It’s impacting on the way you acquire and interact with customers. It is changing the way you reach existing customers, disrupting existing channels, and turning customers into referrers and channels themselves. It’s impacting on how the inside of the business works, by making communication even more rapid, and disrupting business processes. It’s changing partnership models too, enabling even small businesses to maintain quite large ecosystems. It’s also disrupting how business gather the inputs for their business decisions, and carry out market research.

For any business, now is a good time to stop and look at your business model. Not just where the revenues are coming from, and where your costs are, but what happens in between the two of those things. Who are your partners? How do you get to your customers? How do your internal processes work? Ask yourself how social technology is, or can, change those.

Get ahead of the curve by disrupting your business, before someone else does. Ask yourself difficult questions about your business, and about how you can do things differently. Look at what other people are doing in your space, and adjacent industries, and see what the best practice is.

Social Media is opening up huge opportunities to innovate. It’s time to ask your business what you are going to do about that, and to tool up to take advantage of the new opportunities, while defending the old. For us here at SocialOptic, actively providing some of these technologies means that we are seeing many of these changes first hand. It also means we have to think even harder about how we manage and run our own business. Avoiding the hard questions, is the easiest way to miss the big opportunities.

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This video walks through the updated interface, and you might spot some power-user tricks too…

There’s more to come, keep the feedback coming, and remember to check back in to Milestone Planner to update those plans up to date – it’ll be the most productive thing you do today!

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“Cloud” has become the buzz word to bolt on to every tech vendors products. Cloud computing, cloud software, I’ve even seen “cloud” broadband routers. Since The Internet was born, it has been the inevitable destination of services. Back in the 70’s and 80’s, computing was centralised, with remote terminals providing access to software running in huge data centres on the other side of the planet.

Roll forward a few decades, neatly hopping over the Personal Computing revolution, and we are back in the same model, but this time the flickering green-screen terminals are shining multi-media cell phones, and ultra-portable executive laptops. In the last week, I’ve listened to a few people talking down the cloud (sorry, couldn’t resist the pun). The Cloud model definitely has both strengths and weaknesses. The key weaknesses being:

• Depends on network connectivity – no network, no service!
• Data security and continuity dependent on third party. Their data loss is your data loss.
• Access to data may be limited. Can’t always get out what you put it.

On the other hand, there are big benefits:

• Cross device availability of data – from  desktop to mobile, no syncing problems.
• Independent of location/network – remote access is baked in.
• Data survives device failures – broken laptop or phone? Change it. No problem!

For our service here, we have done, and are doing, a few things to neutralise the weakness of the cloud:

• Using web browser storage – providing offline availability of plans (for Professional users).
• Full export capability – it’s your data, you can always get it back, and you have it locally.
• Enhanced security and continuity procedures.
• New API for  developers and professional users (contact us for details)
• Broadest possible browser support (from the oldest versions of IE to the latest touch devices).

Of course there’s always more to do, but the cloud model of computing is actually a tried and tested one – used by the financial services industry, and many others, during the mainframe computing years. Cloud makes even more sense with today’s almost disposable devices – how long have you had your phone? When will you next replace it? How long until laptops – or tablets – get to that level?

The post Computing is Getting a Little Cloudy appeared first on SocialOptic.

Stephen Covey authored numerous best-selling books on productivity and leadership, and was named as one of America’s top 25 most influential people by Time magazine. If you have not yet read one of his books, I’d urge you, in the strongest terms, to at least read “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” if not all of his books. They are full of insights into being an effective leader, manager and team member. It speaks volumes that Stephen Covey passed his skills and passion on to a whole new generation.

In “4 Disciplines of Execution: Getting Strategy Done” Sean Covey, Stephen’s son, together with Chris McChesney and Jim Huling, speak to the need for prioritised goals in a business, and their important in achieving results. The book outlines how to get things done amid a ‘whirlwind of distractions.’ It advocates a team-based approach to the development of goals and methods of measuring them. “The best ideas come not from the leaders, but from the interaction of the leaders and the front line.” These are 4 disciplines are:

1 – Focus on the wildly important. (set clear goals)
2 – Create a compelling scorecard. (measure them)
3 – Translate lofty goals into specific actions. (break them down)
4 – Hold each other accountable – all of the time. (get them done)

Discipline 1

Focus on the wildly important (goals). Develop clear, measurable goals that are tied to a specific deadline, and are well understood. The goals, obviously, should link in to your overall strategy.

Discipline 2

Create a compelling scoreboard. “People play differently when they’re keeping score.” The scoreboard should reflect:

1. Where are we now
2. Where we want to be
3. When need to be there.

It should be visible and identify if things go off-track, so that corrective action can be taken.

Discipline 3

Translate lofty goals into specific actions. What do we do to achieve them? “To achieve goals you’ve never achieved before, you need to start doing things you’ve never done before.” It is Goal Breakdown Structure i.e. breaking the goals down to specific actions (we’d say Milestones and actions). We need to employ creative new and better thinking process to break goals into specific actions of weekly bite-size chunks, so that progress is made and measured.

Discipline 4

Hold each other (constantly) accountable. The level of mutual accountability, and knowing other are counting on you, raises your level of commitment. It requires that the team stays engaged and aware of results being achieved.

If you are already a Milestone Planner user, you can probably see how this plays out, and how it fits with the collaborative style of it. Set goals together, break them down into milestones and actions, then measure yourselves against them. Success isn’t just about good ideas, it is about executing on the best ideas.

The post Covey’s Legacy and The Discipline of Execution appeared first on SocialOptic.

• Support for sub actions, and sub sub actions, and even sub sub sub actions (or as far as you want to go).
• Local caching of plans in your browser, enabling you to view your plans offline…
• …and to use Milestone Planner on slow or intermittent connections, like mobile, or dreaded conference WiFi!
• Touch support for tablet devices, such as the iPad and Android devices (more on that soon).
• Optimised, adaptive layout. Milestone Planner now adapts to screensize, so that you can see more on the screen…
• …with out getting all crowded.

There is much more to come, but do give the new version a try and let us know what you like and what could be better. Our survey and dashboard products are going from strength to strength too, so if you’d like to know more about them, or have an app you think we could help you develop, then do get in touch – We love making things happen!

The post Sub-Sub Actions – Milestone Planner – the next generation appeared first on SocialOptic.

@TomChatfield

“Time is not something that can be measured with a pendule. Time is something that we build together within a tribe, a family, a region.”

“Someone who accepts every technology is not being technophilic, because this doesn’t require any reflection or choice.” Cory Doctorow

The post On Time and Technology – Thinking Digital 2012 appeared first on SocialOptic.

In short:

We don’t know what we don’t know! Many businesses are obsessed with information technology. However, information isn’t great for a business. Information needs context that can turn it into (actionable) knowledge, and more that that, it needs a generalised narrative that turns that knowledge into “wisdom” – knowledge that transcends specific contexts and gives staff the insight to make the right decisions in the new situations that constantly appear in today’s high speed business world.

We are drowning in information. We need to curate it, to create stories around it, to give it social context. Numbers don’t do anywhere near as much for managing the business as we’d like to think. It isn’t the spreadsheet that runs (or ruins) the business, it is the people, and the stories that they tell each other.

The social technologies that we use in our personal lives can be immensely useful in the business context. Social technology has made tagging things, mapping relationships, geo-tagging and adding metadata incredibly easy. These are all essential tools and techniques for curating business information.

Fish are the last to discover water.

Lastly, breaking the confines of our context is incredibly important. Only by getting outside of our day to day thinking do we ‘see’ what we are in the middle of. That’s why you should talk to people you have no ‘business’ talking to, it is why company boards and advisory boards are so important. It is also why you should read things that don’t interest you. It’s why you should get other people to look at your business.

Sometimes you need to get out of the safety of the tank to really understand what your business is about. Social software helps with that too. Expect some new products, unexpected conversations, and the occasional surprise from SocialOptic in the next few months…

The post Drowning in Data appeared first on SocialOptic.

For those not familiar with it, PRINCE2  is a UK government endorsed, project management methodology. It stands for PRojects IN Controlled Environments (see what they did there!) and is built around the idea that there is a central point of control (i.e. a project manager! ) for each project . It’s been around since 1996 and has become the de-facto way of managing projects.

However there is a fundamental problem with the type of project management that PRINCE2 encourages….

Centralised control does not work anymore.

If you look back at the history of projects in your organisation I bet you’d see something like…

Ancient History: “Fly the company from A to B”

It used to be that most projects were of the “Fly the company from A to B” type. You knew where you were starting from, you knew where you wanted to get to, you knew how you were going to get there and you could calculate how much fuel (cash) you needed to get there.

In Living Memory: “Fly the company from A to B while upgrading the engine of the plane”

The world outside your organisation was changing faster than before. That meant that there were often changes to the thing you were changing. Cue memories of BIG government IT projects where the computers initially specified were obsolete before the implementation was finished.

Recently: “Fly the company from A to B and upgrade the engine and change the navigation system”

More change, on more fronts. As the number of interacting changes increased the complexity, the chances of making anything happen at all diminished.

Now: “Take off from A, realise B isn’t where you need to be, so work out where C is… while upgrading the engine and changing the navigation system”

Admit it – this pretty much describes what work is like for you right now.

Does this feel like a controlled environment? Look at the trajectory. I’d argue that as the speed of change increases it gets disproportionately harder to maintain centralised control. To maintain central control you need to route all communication about the project through a central point – as the pace of change increases this becomes a bottleneck. If you’re not careful, the need for centralised control actually impedes progress. Thats why traditional methodologies like PRINCE2 are creaking at the seams.

We founded SocialOptic on our belief that the businesses that will thrive in our increasingly changing world are the ones that work differently. The companies that will survive are the ones who organise themselves along the lines of a network, not a command and control hierarchy. We build software that helps those companies.

More and more we see examples of distributed control replacing centralised control. With smart software taking on some of the traditional project managers role of tracking progress and communicating changes and a move away from centralised control where does that leave methodologies like PRINCE2?

In our view, PRINCE2 and similar methodologies will become increasingly irrelevant. That’s not to say all project management skills are redundant – far from it – but smart organisations are distributing Project Management skills across their organisations and smart Project Managers are getting to grips with how to work within a network of people rather than sit in their command and control bunkers.

Hey, who knows, maybe in the future we’ll see job adverts that are asking for certification in PRINUE – PRojects IN Uncontrolled Environments.

The post Do Project Managers have a future? appeared first on SocialOptic.

There is a tight linking here between business methodology and social technology. People who use social software inside of the firewall, and those responsible for managing the external social media activities of a business, will both hopefully find some useful insights, as those situations often expose the problems inherent in hierarchical business structures.

In this CBS News piece, Don Sull outlines the 3 different ways that things get done in complex organisations:

• By hierarchy
• By process
• By commitment

The first shifted out of favour in the 1980’s, although it lingers on! In the 80’s, Six Sigma, TQM and other techniques gave management by process the crown, as it demonstrably out performed management by hierarchy in that era. But just as management by hierarchy creates silos and slows communication across the organisation, management by process creates its own problems.

Management by process originally gained traction in the 1950s in Japan, going on to become a global phenomenon in the 1980s. This view of management sees the organisation as a bundle of processes, and has spawned a sea of different methodologies. They are variations on the same theme, focused on streamlining, removing excess resources and variance, and continuously improving and optimising how the business works.

One of the key problems with management by process is its strength: standardisation (and optimisation), which can get in the way of innovation. Mary Benner, from Wharton, and Michael Tuschman, from Harvard, found that the higher an organisation’s commitment to standardized processes, the lower the level of innovation in that organisation. In a rapidly changing world, what is most critical to your organisation – optimisation, or innovation? Hopefully that one is obvious. Everyone is having to think outside the box, because their box has been moved.

Which brings us to that third approach: managing by commitment. It’s a perspective that looks at an organisation as a network of overlapping, continually evolving promises that people make to each other to get things done. It’s a mindset familiar to anyone who works with social networking platforms. It’s not about groups or divisions, it’s about continually evolving relationships between individuals. It’s an approach that it lends itself well to situations which cannot be standardised: innovation, emergent strategies, and crisis management. It also works well when you need to coordinate among people who don’t report to you: suppliers, distributors, customers, virtual teams and so on. It’s no co-incidence that those applications are where Milestone Planner has its largest number of users.

Sull points to a study conducted a few years ago that says 40 percent of all employees in the United States added most of their value to their organisations through non-routine activities. And about 70 percent of the growth of employees in the U.S. was among people who did this non-routine, non-hierarchical work. He goes on to say:

A lot of the organisations we’ve traditionally thought of as well-managed companies have put emphasis on making and fulfilling these kinds of commitments. It’s a big deal in General Electric and similarly Goldman Sachs… .[Talking about InBev, the largest brewer in the world:] …They’ve built a culture where people are very clear on what they are being asked to commit to, and their progress on their commitments is very transparent and obvious to people throughout the organisation… …they have posted their key five performance commitments for the year and their progress toward them. The charts are right there on the wall with red, yellow and green tracking stickers for everyone to see. They are very careful about bringing in people who are achievement oriented, not driven by power.

Now, we prefer the progress tracking to be in the cloud of course – not everyone is in the office. Don Sull and Charles Spinosa have researched how individuals make commitments within their teams. According to them the most effective commitments have five characteristics:

• They are public. They’re made publicly and their progress is tracked publicly.
• They’re active. Parties understand what they are agreeing to and what each party is requesting; people don’t just nod, they really have to take responsibility for the commitment.
• They are voluntary. The other party has the option to say something other than “yes”; they can refuse or make counteroffers.
• They are explicit: it has to be clear who is committing. These aren’t committees making promises, they are individuals. And it works best when it is perfectly clear to whom the commitment is made.
• They’re motivating: the rationale is made clear–why it matters to the individuals and the organisation is made clear.

That’s why, in Milestone Planner, we encourage sharing the plan with a broad group of people: The more public the commitment, the more effective it is. We make Actions and Milestones provisional when they are assigned to someone, until the person accepts them, and the comment/reply feature let’s people actively negotiate and renegotiate the commitment. The aim is to help you keep commitments active and voluntary. It’s that process that enables  managing by commitment to work. It is a radically different way of working, and can take a while for people to get their heads around it, but once adopted, it fosters the kind of innovation that hierarchies and process too easily smother. Of course success is not just about the strategy, as Sull says:

Some people think the key to success is nailing the right strategy. But companies in your industry often will have a base strategy very similar to your own. Execution is where the real separation comes between winners and losers. Executing via hierarchies can be too slow in the kind of unstable markets most companies face today. Standardised processes by their very nature don’t lead to the kinds of variation and flexibility you need to execute new types of projects.

Like Sull, we’d say that it’s not a simple case of one model being good, and the rest bad. Hierarchy has a role, as do standardised processes. Most sucessful organisations need a combination of power, processes and commitments. What matters is the kind of work you have to get done, building and tracking the commitments that enable that to happen, while building the supporting processes and structures to enable you to get better at it.

If you’re Toyota, and the bulk of the value you’re adding is in manufacturing a huge number of cars with a low number of defects, then an almost exclusive focus on standardised processes is completely appropriate. The times when you need to be more oriented toward managing by commitments is when you have this kind of emergent work that has to fit within networks rather than within a hierarchy.

It’s the latter kind of work we are seeing in abundance, coupled with a shortage in the ability to manage by commitments. Our aim is to make management by commitments easier, through Milestone Planner. There’s much more we’ll be doing with the commitment graph. This is just the beginning of a conversation.

The post Managing by Commitments appeared first on SocialOptic.

We’re used to hearing people describing social as revolutionary, but I agree with Andrew that if you are focusing on solving a real business problem you need to have some structure to it.

The implementation approach that Andrew advocated is a good one. He approached it as a grass roots implementation, focused on getting middle management buy-in first. Soon there were success stories demonstrating how socially enabled collaboration was shaving (very) valuable time from  Oil & Gas exploration & drilling projects. At that point, “Exec level” buy in became a no-brainer.

We see the same pattern with companies adopting SocialOptic’s collaboration technologies. Milestone Planner is a tool which helps collaborative organisations manage the complex, ever changing network of commitments between individuals. Our most successful customers typically follow a similar pattern to Andrew’s. A small group start using Milestone Planner, which then spreads through the business. It’s a cost effective way to try it out and build some hard evidence around how clearer management of commitments and deadlines drives better business execution. More about that very soon.

The post Social for collaboration: A Structured Revolution appeared first on SocialOptic.

 David Stillwell, Science Director, Cambridge Personality Research
 Azeem Azhar, Founder & CEO, Peer Index
 Martin Talks, President, Digital, Draft FCB.
 Nathalie Nahai, Digital Strategy | Web Psychology, The Web Psychologist

It was a highly interactive session, becoming a trending topic on Twitter and ending up as one of the most talked about events of the week, with Nathalie Nahai winning speaker of the week award. Gabrielle Laine-Peters has curated an excellent storify of the event which gives an overview of what was covered, and the video of the session is now on YouTube:

David talked about the impact of personality type on our on-line behaviours,  Nathalie introduced neuroesthetics, Azeem shared insights from PeerIndex and Martin was our caveman-in-residence. With cognitive, experimental, applied and evolutionary psychology covered, I threw in some social psychology: Should we consider groups as a unit of influence, rather that individuals? We often think about influence as an end point, but we’re constantly influencing and being influenced. It is a networked effect, at least in what we see in the work we do here – a business is built of influences working together and against each other, shaping opinions, making things happen, blocking things. Messages flow across the network, spreading, branching and interrupting.

It was very interesting that the lean methodology came up during the session. Want to test a new product? Create a Minimum Viable Product, test it and adapt it. Even the experts find it very hard to predict behaviours. Sometimes a good old-fashioned experiment is the fastest way to find out what will work. Decision making is a complex process, involving emotional factors that lead to “evidence” gathering to  justify the decision rationally. The over riding evidence is that we aren’t as rational as we think we are (although not totally unpredictable)!

Nathalie has posted her slides and has a book coming out soon, and Martin has posted a podcast of interviews. And, if you missed it or want more, keep your eyes peeled – Chinwag has a longer half-day event in May – more details soon.

The post The Psychology of On-line Influence appeared first on SocialOptic.