It has never been more possible to decide to influence how you experience work, and to take responsibility for developing future-focused skills and capabilities for yourself. Do something, learn from it. Do it together with others.

Once upon a time

Once upon a time, a long time ago, I was researching process innovation approaches to organising work. These came in different varieties, like quality, lean, just-in-time, and agile manufacturing, and they evolved over time.

Whatever form they took, I loved what was at the core of them all:

• Customer focus
• Responsibility for innovation and problem-solving everyone’s business
• Learning sewn into everything the business does

What I particulary loved was the fact that people on the shopfloor were now taken seriously. Their deep knowledge of customers, their work, machines, and each other, was essential to this new philosophy of work.

Every day

I talked about process innovation philosophies to anyone who might be interested. I talked to people about them at conferences. I wrote blog posts. I even wrote a book saying that continuous improvement had now become connected, collective intelligence. How amazing is that? Not the book, the possibilities created by connected knowledge.

Nobody listened. Well, not many anyway. I became discouraged and stopped talking about process innovation philosophies. I thought perhaps I was stuck in the past.

Not that I gave up on what I know about them. I incorporated their principles into a suite of tools for developing future-focused capabilities – for both people and organisations.

One day

Then one day, very recently, I read a post on LinkedIn. John Lovell, an Operation Excellence Director, asked: “Where is the leading edge thinking on Lean Management?”

What a good question. What does than mean? Is current lean management thinking outdated? If so, why?

Is ‘leading edge’ thinking about adopting a future-focus? How might process innovation approaches be interpreted and applied to digitally-connected organisations in the coming  ‘fourth industrial revolution’, where the “scale, scope, and complexity, of the transformation will be unlike anything humankind has experienced before”?

I checked out several books that Mr Lovell mentioned, and had a look John Shook’s useful Lean Transformation Framework, which he also mentioned. It uses a house as a metaphor “to think about enterprise change”.

Because of that

I realised that a metaphor could be useful in helping me to describe the suite of tools and learning programmes that I have been developing. It could help people to think holistically about future-focused change, and why the tools might be useful.

And because of that

I thought about what that metaphor might be. Could I use Shook’s framework? No point in going to unnecessary effort of creating my own if I could. The house metaphor no longer feels appropriate, though. It isn’t that I disagree with the components of the framework. Far from it.

A house is too solid, too rigid for what’s happening now. That’s all about connections, networks, and relationships. Organisational walls are falling, boundaries are being breached.

What other metaphor might do the trick? Inspiration escaped me.

Until finally

Then I remembered a friend saying she believes it is possible to explain anything with circles and triangles. There’s a challenge. So I had another think, and then it hit me. A guiding star, that’s it!

Starting with an an inverted triangle, ‘customers’ go at the bottom with ‘workflows’ and ‘capabilities’ as the top two points (that’s the equivalent of the two pillars in Shook’s house). Another triangle on top of that, with ‘workforce’ at the pinnacle (I might change it to ‘people’), and ‘performance enablers’ and ‘purpose’ on the bottom two points.

Et, voila. the Smart Work Star is born! Now I can ask the sort of questions that Shook asks in his Lean Transformation Framework, and use them to explain the tools that I’ve been developing – including Tiny Triumph Learning Experiences.

I’ll leave it there. The star gives me plenty of scope for other explanatory blog posts and resources (videos and voice).

P.S.

I once watched my friend, Eleonoor, brilliantly develop a star framework and as the last piece fell into place, she declared ‘a star is born’. The conference audience of teachers loved it. I’ve pinched her idea. She let me do it.

The format of the post is also pinched from the Pixar Pitch – see point 4.

The post A star is born, and it could be you! appeared first on The Smart Work Company.

A recurring observation is the tension between being overwhelmed by the time-consuming demands of work, and stepping back from the busyness of it all to pay attention to personal development. There are so many demands on our time. It is small wonder that it can be hard to step off the treadmill to do something just for us.

Possibilities

I have to admit to being an idealist. My view of the democratising potential of social technologies is unwavering. Anyone who wants to now has the opportunity to use these tools to develop future-focused skills and capabilities. Who needs a business school?

Only if accreditation, the rubber stamp, is important to you. If not, and taking advantage of amazing possibilities of being connected to people and information, the world is your oyster. You can can do it!

Making the time

You can do it but only if you feel like you have the time and energy. This is one of the things that has been niggling at me in designing the 10-week, action-focused learning experiences for anyone wanting to future-proof the skills they will need as workplace and ways of working continue to evolve.

Yes, it’s practical. And yes, it’s customised to you and what you need. But are the people I want to try to reach – mainly people with operational responsibilities – too exhausted?

And then I think about senior people I have interacted and worked with over the years. They are no less exhausted and under pressure but they made a conscious decision to carve out time for themselves.

I used to co-facilitate a network to explore the future of work, where people met about three times a year for a morning or afternoon. Executives from large corporates encouraged us to get dates in the diary early. They saw these meetings as precious time away from the pressures of day-to-day, to enjoy the ideas and energy generated.

Another group that made time for their personal development was senior executives on an innovative post-graduate strategy programme. The thing that was extraordinary about that was the community that developed among these people. It became a focal point for emotional support and learning from each others’ experience.

Connected and networked

In my previous post, I summarised the advantages of the Tiny Triumphs approach to developing skills:

• Small steps = succeed or fail fast, learn, adapt and repeat
• People choose to do something they care about
• Short bursts = opportunity for more frequent recognition and opportunities to celebrate
• Mastery takes time and practice, so go at a pace that suits you
• Community builds as people share and get too know each other
• Facilitators coordinate with a light touch, offering support and resources as needed.

Community is mentioned but the advantages focus on practical actions, in small chunks, through a customisable approach.

Those things remain valuable. Thinking about it though, the real value is in the community. My view has always been that expertise lies with people doing a job – nobody knows the work and organisational context better than those experiencing it.

Communities can be energising. They connect everyone in them to the knowledge and experience that each person has, which sparks off yet more ideas and things to try to make work more satisfying, meaningful and, perhaps, less stressful.

Tiny Triumph in September

Kirsten Holder, from KickstartDevelop, and I are joining forces to co-design and co-facilitate a Tiny Triumph learning experience that kicks off mid-September 2017.

Kirsten’s sketched summary, which I really like

Committing three hours a week for 10 weeks to yet another thing that makes demands on your time might seem daunting. It might also be the best investment you ever make, if it restores some of your depleted energy.

Please contact me if you would like more details.

The post Making Time For You appeared first on The Smart Work Company.

It (this post) is about the power of informal communities, and issues involved in ‘harnessing’ the energy and insights generated in these self-determining self-managing social spaces to achieve business objectives i.e. to create value for customers and shareholders.

Social dynamics

Organisations are complex entities. You could go down rabbit holes and spend lots of time trying to understand complexity science. Interesting though that is, my understanding of complexity was initially influenced by social psychologists.

People create, and can destroy, value for an organisation and its customers. They do this through their connections, relationships and interactions – by what they do together. Organisations are complex because of this connectedness and interdependence.

Wherever you have people, you have some degree of complexity. That is true even in simple operating contexts. People do not do what they are told. They can act in the interest of the organisation, and they can act in their own interests.

Someone in this short video about complexity, from the Santa Fe Institute, talks about “minds interacting with other minds“. These minds come with emotions, attitudes, desires, ambitions, and psychological needs.

How do social dynamics play out in practice? What happens when two or more people come together to “hammer out their differences concerning what’s up in the organization, and what to do about it”?

This is where I think things get really interesting.

Communities 

In Two worlds and in between, Neil Usher tells how Luis Suarez (@elsua) “made a pennydropper of a point for thinking about change – communities share, while teams solve problems”.

This really is a fundamental insight.

Dr Marie Puybaraud and I brought a group together in 2009 to explore knowledge management and enterprise social networking. What came through loud and clear from the conversation was that people relied primarily on personal, informal relationships and connections for knowledge and social support.

Marie drew this diagram for the white paper we produced following the event (copyright Johnson Controls, 2009).

The Enterprise side of the diagram is where teams collaborate to solve problems, within the constraints listed. Increasingly though, the space in between is where activity in pursuit of the organisations’s agenda takes place – as informal digital communities grow and people in them willingly apply insights generated in these communities to organisational objectives.

The Community side of the diagram, representing the free-wheeling, self-determining, informal, unsanctioned communities where people act according to their own purposes, turns out to be critically important. What happens in these informal communities matters a lot for what happens formally.

Power of informal

Data emerged a few years later that was consistent with what we heard at that gathering. Professor Sandy Pentland and his team at MIT showed, by asking people to wear electronic badges that tracked patterns of communication, that “the best predictors of productivity were a team’s energy and engagement outside formal meetings.”

Informal communities, digital or in-person, are a big deal. They are where creativity and shared passions are explored. This McKinsey article from ten years ago , Harnessing the power of informal employee networks, acknowledges that:

“in any professional setting, networks flourish spontaneously: human nature, including mutual self-interest, leads people to share ideas and work together even when no one requires them to do so.”

The authors go on to say:

“As we studied these social and informal networks, we made a surprising discovery: how much information and knowledge flows through them and how little through official hierarchical and matrix structures … we concluded that the formal structures of companies, as manifested in their organizational charts, don’t explain how most of their real day-to-day work gets done.”

This article is ten years old now. It bothered me then, and it still does. My reading of it is that the authors thought that informal communities “flying under management’s radar” and “eluding control” is problematic.

It is obviously of great benefit to the organisation if people in these communities could share their insights more widely. There are things that organisations can do to encourage this. But while informal communities can be nurtured and encouraged by formal performance systems, attempts to control spontaneous, self-directed communities would be – I think – unwise.

Increasing social complexity

There are many reasons why work is becoming more socially complex but a look at just one trend – open workforces and some of the forces driving it – is enough to illustrate.

Organisations are connected through networks of contractual arrangements. For example through businesses providing and receiving services from each other in supply networks, outsourcing, or collaborative partnerships sharing expertise, sharing risks, or sourcing capital. These trends have been on rise for some years now. Think about the agile networks of supply networks needed to support fast fashion. Add to the picture industries integrating to generate new products, or make familiar products more complicated (think the extent to which cars have become computerised)

Another source of openness is the gig economy, which is on the rise: employment arrangements that include a mix of permanent, fixed term, and freelance contracts.

This fluid, kaleidoscopic workforce has implications for how work is managed, and how workplace relationship form and are sustained. The trend increases social complexity, as fluid relationships and interactions reach across organisational boundaries.

I sense increasing social complexity is particularly impacting people in operations. It is no longer just senior executives that need to develop skills for thinking and acting in complex contexts.

There are three consequences, that I can see:

People will need to update their skills to reflect increasing complexity, and learn to adapt as work evolves.

As before in the previous shift from traditional manufacturing to customer-focused, process-innovation approaches, businesses will need to innovate how they mobilise and coordinate the connected knowledge, capabilities and experience of their increasingly open workforce.

They will also have to pay attention to how performance is supported.

Facilitating the space in between

I’ve been interested for a long time in formal performance systems that generate conditions where people can effectively work together to create value for a business and its customers.

The Purpose and Performance elements in the diagram below are widely-recognised elements of high-performance work systems, and process-innovation approaches like quality and lean. These centre around customer-focus, innovation as everyone’s business, plus problem-solving and learning sewn into everything the business does.

These things coincide with what people apparently need from work. If the social psychologists, Edward Deci and Richard Ryan are right, in general that is autonomy and developing competence in things that we care about.

For those responsible for shaping performance environments, this means trying to understand how others see a situation, supporting their explorations, encouraging them to have a go at doing something, making sure people have choice in what they want to do, and how they do it, plus making sure that they have the resources, time and space.

Facilitating the space in between means understanding what people need to get on with creating value for customers and shareholders. There’s plenty of existing research and insight on what that is. It might be being largely ignored but that’s another matter.

Recognising and accommodating the power of informal community is critical in that effort. There’s a much longer way to go on understanding how to do that, I think.

Supporting community

The third thing that Deci and Ryan say people need is relatedness, which is being connected, feeling a sense of belonging and being cared for. We are back to the power of communities, Luis’s observation that “communities share, teams solve problems”, and the fact that people share and cooperate in communities for a variety of self-determined reasons.

How could formal systems support these informal communities?

They could nurture and encourage them (digital or in person) by giving people tools, time, opportunity, space and place to play with ideas. In Pentland’s MIT research, mentioned earlier, this meant something as simple as recommending that management of  a call centre in a bank ensured that team members all took their breaks at the same time.

Developing future-focused skills

The executive summary of the WEF Future of Jobs report notes that education systems will have to be re-thought in the longer term, as the so-called fourth industrial revolution unfolds. Meanwhile those of us outside the constraints of higher education institutions can offer innovative ways of developing skills.

The approach I’ve been developing is about doing something and learning from it. Based on practical experiments and finding things to do that people care about, experiments are supported by a range of simple tools, topics (create your own ‘curriculum’), resources, a learning facilitator, and a community of peers:

Diagnose – what’s happening?

What trends are affecting the business (or are likely to)? How might this affect how things are currently done?

What could be adapted, improved, dropped, tried for the first time?

The aim of this exploratory phase is to get a ‘big picture’ view that will spark ideas for possible things to do.

Do something – what’s feasible?

Learn how to choose an experiment, plan it, do it, and review it as you go.

Reflect on the experience, using the Skills Grid to monitor and map.

Develop – what’s next?

What are your options for the next experiment?

Advantages 

This approach to skills development has several advantages:

Experiments are facilitated in short bursts. Small steps mean that people can succeed or fail fast, learn, adapt and repeat.

People choose to do something they care about – the futurist, Ray Kurzweil, call these ‘passion projects’.

Short bursts give people the opportunity for more frequent recognition and opportunities to celebrate (and even to show off a bit).

The experiments are an opportunity for people to shape the performance systems that they use to support them in what they do – if that’s what people care about.

Mastery takes time and practice. This approach enables skills development at a pace that suits individual people.

Activities on the 10-week programme are completed individually, with colleagues in the workplace, and with peers online. Community builds as people share and get too know each other.

The approach is one way in which learning communities can be nurtured through a facilitator who acts, with a light touch as a coordinator (on the Goldilocks principle of ‘just enough’), ensuring that everyone has the support and resources that they need.

One of the roles of the facilitator could be to ensure that insights from the community (subject to confidentiality, and with permission) are fed back into into the wider organisation, celebrating and recognising achievements, and sharing learning on why something succeeded or not.

I didn’t set out to facilitate the space in between Enterprise and Community. Neil’s post has made me realise that is exactly what I’m try to do. The power of a blog post in shifting focus

The post Facilitating the space in between appeared first on The Smart Work Company.

Learning and performance in work are becoming so integrated it’s hard to know what a ‘learning technology is’ any more. I’ve been thinking about how I settled on the one that I’m using to take The Smart Work Company into the next phase, but not before I made several mistakes.

I’m not sure we ever really learn from the mistakes that other people make but maybe mine will encourage you to take on board that its not primarily about the technology – of course.

It helps if you know exactly what it is that you want to achieve. I’ve always known what I wanted to do in a high-level, vague sort of way. That’s not good enough.

Focus, focus, focus

You will, I know, already be well aware that the pace of change in the business environment is happening at warp-speed. Personal skills and organisational support systems will need to adapt to these turbulent conditions.

As well as challenges, I think this presents huge opportunity to individual people who are willing to commit to “sharpening their own shovels”, and to organisations to create performance conditions that let the phenomenal connected knowledge and capabilities of these people flourish.

That’s why I want to promote and facilitate practical learning experiments that develop both:

• personal capabilities

• and organisational capabilities.

How do I intend to do that? Through a combination of:

• active learning through small work-based experiments (Tiny Triumphs)

• augmented by group and personal reflection on progress – what might be happening? Why? What could be done differently? Adjust as necessary.

Learning through work

I found it useful at this stage of writing the post to remind myself of all the possible ways that people can learn at and through work.

As far as I see it, we learn by:

• listening
• watching others
• thinking
• talking
• asking (who knows what, who knows who?)
• socialising and playing
• connecting across boundaries
• doing (purposefully, copying, experimenting).

We can do these things:

• together and on our own

• online and in physical workplaces (at a variety of locations – ‘at the bench’, social spaces, meeting rooms, co-working centres, etc.)

• in-the-flow of activities and taking time out (online, classroom, workshops, awaydays)

• synchronously (at the same time) and asynchronously (in our own time).

Innovating Through Tiny Triumphs

The pilot programme I’ve developed, Innovating Through Tiny Triumphs, brings people together to explore, experiment and share experiences. What will people be guided to do? For what purpose?

The pilot is divided into three phases:

Diagnose (what’s happening?)

The focus of this phase is discovery. The aim is to find possible things to do. Activities look out into the business environment, and also look inwards to how workforce performance is supported.

What’s happening? What does it mean for skills and performance support? What needs to change? What options are there for doing something?

Do Something (and learn from it)

The focus of this phase is developing the personal skills and capabilities that people will use to complete a practical experiment. The expected outcome is an innovation to a work process, or to some feature of performance support systems.

Develop (what’s next?)

The Develop phase looks to the future. What are the next step? What’s beyond that?

5 Themes, 3 Activities, 1 Hot Topic

Diagnose, Do Something, and Develop are the top-level headings. A number of sub-headings sit under them, and they all follow the same format – Five Themes, Three Activities, and One Hot Topic.

For the three activities, people will use a suite of simple tools (checklists, scorecards, questions and frameworks) and will be asked to:

• do something together, as peers in a programme cohort
• do something with work colleagues.
• do something on their own

Which Technologies?

What I’m proposing is a mix of in-the-flow sense-making as an experiment unfolds, complemented by a structured ‘time out’ approach for individual people and groups to think and talk about what they are experiencing.

Slack

As a fan of Slack, I was interested to read this interesting article that Lee Bryant published last year on the history of chat and activity streams. It was the first time I had come across the term ‘Chat Ops’ to describe Slack and other chat tools.

Reviewing tools that Lee and his colleagues used prior to Slack, he notes that they were about more than chat. They generated:

“an activity stream into which various updates and events could be shared in a social, sense-making context”.

Social sense-making could also be seen as in-the-flow learning. It’s how I see it. This was one of the reasons why Slack was initially a strong favourite for what I wanted to do. The other reason was that I thought that the channels and private channels in Slack would allow me to create the scaffolding structure that is so important in what I want to do.

Noddlepod

Noddlepod is designed to build communities of practice and knowledge-sharing. With a focus on practice and doing, that gets a big tick. I eventually decided on Noddlepod because of the following:

1. It allows me to create a structure, a loose scaffold of phases and learning activities to guide practical, self-managed and peer-supported learning experiences. This will make it easy to customise and co-design scaffolded programmes with clients, to reflect their unique business contexts and constraints.

2. It is a doddle to use.

3. It facilitates social learning – discussing, sharing, co-creating together, and learning from each other.

4. At the same time, Noddlepod lets people keep their thoughts to themselves. I think it is important for people to have a private space to think, if they prefer. They can make their thoughts public later.

5. As well as enabling social and solitary activities, I think Noddlepod will be able to support the in-the-flow and time out learning activities that I’ve included in the pilot programme.

An example of in-the-flow support could be asking for suggestions, advice or ideas from peers in the learning programme about something that has come up in connection with an issue at work.

For time out activities, I could use Noddlepod to generate discussion in preparation for a workshop, or use it to carry on conversations afterwards.

Final Thoughts

I wasn’t sure about Noddlepod to begin with. It felt basic and simple. That turns out to be a strength, though. Being lightweight makes it easy to use. The combination of being able quickly and easily to create an enabling structure, plus the ability for people to keep their thoughts private convinced me.

The personal and warm support from Ollie is a bonus.

Noddlepod lets me do what I want to do. I’m still a fan of Slack, though. Writing this post has made me think that one of the activities in the pilot could be to suggest that people consider Slack as an option with their work colleagues, to make sense of what they think is happening with their work-based experiment.

I didn’t find it straightforward finding a technology that fits the bill, and made a few costly mistakes along the way. Mainly this was because I was not crystal clear on why and how I was going to ask people to use it. I think I’ve learned from my own mistakes. At last.

The post Choosing a Learning Technology appeared first on The Smart Work Company.

Am I about working with people and organisations to help them to explore changing customer expectations, and how to adapt to that – who does what, with whom, and why?

Or is it work-based learning, building on what I know about process innovation approaches to how work is organised, for example lean and quality?

Process innovation approaches to designing work and performance (there are many variations) are based on a philosophy of innovation as everyone’s business and real-time problem solving sewn into everything a business does.

Or is it performance environments? What do different organisations do to influence the conditions for agile, customer-focused performance? This is about performance systems (physical and organisational – structure, governance, cultures, job design, information etc), and cross-functional cooperation.

It’s too much.

Plus clients are giving me big clues as to where my focus needs to be. It needs to be on people and organisations becoming fit for the future.

Becoming future-capable

Scanning Dan Pink’s To Sell is Human, I was pleased to find a chapter that I find really useful. It is about practicing six types of ‘sales pitch’. One of these is the one-word pitch.

It struck a chord because I recently, and eventually, decided on ‘future-capable’ as my focus.

Becoming future-capable applies to people, whose skills and capabilities need to acquire currency (ability to perform) as the business environment changes. For organisations, it’s their ability to adapt business models and to provide people with what they need.

So much depends on context. That’s why I’ve developed The Smart Work Value Toolkit (simple questions, checklists, scorecards, and tools to facilitate practical experiments) to let people explore what they think might be happening in their own work:

Diagnose – What’s happening? What can you do?

Do Something – Build personal and organisational capabilities.

Develop – What’s next?

The tools can be used to help people think about their own skills and capabilities. They can also be used to explore what needs to adapt (be dropped or experimented with) as the business environment changes. I’ll write more about how I’m trying to pilot them in future posts.

‘Pitching’

I dislike the idea of a ‘sales pitch’. It seems so pushy. I do, however, like the sound of the ‘Pixar Pitch’, based on Emma Coates’ (ex Pixar) 22 story rules. It doesn’t sound like a pitch at all, more a way of framing focus, and why it matters, as a story. The pitch is:

• Once upon a time ….
• Every day …
• One day …
• Because of that …
• Because of that …
• Until finally …..

I’m still thinking about how to frame ‘future-capable’ as a Pixar Pitch. Becoming Future-capable. Finding Nemo. See the resemblance? Will let you know when I’ve filled in the dots

The post Finding Focus appeared first on The Smart Work Company.

I’m in complete agreement with his core proposition that:

” … organisations need to move beyond the traditional silos of business services – IT, HR, Finance, Legal, Facilities, Procurement. A cohesive platform for work would be best serviced by producing a support organisation that combines all of those disciplines into coherent teams.”

Matt also says that “the Minimum Viable Workplace is basically a coffee shop”. I think it depends on context, and would ask:

What’s the minimum that people need, individually and collectively, from platforms for work to let them do what they need to do?

Performance and Workplace Transformation

The recent JLL Future of Work report summarises issues involved in workplace transformation. It proposes a five-dimension framework for exploring “how and where work gets done”, in particular “real estate’s potential to help an organization achieve its ambitions”.

Having made high-level suggestions throughout the report, the JLL authors make some final recommendations:

• Align to the business
• Put people first
• Build a coalition
• Become technologically savvy
• Place a premium on adaptability

The JLL report is a useful resource to help explain our thinking behind the Minimum Viable Workplaces initiative. In my mind, it raises three points:

• Who creates performance environments, and how?

• Implications of size of organisations

• Issues involved in building coalitions

Who’s Responsible?

The JLL report is aimed at real estate specialists. Quotes throughout are predominantly from Vice Presidents and Senior Directors of Real Estate of global corporates. Real estate is one function, albeit a crucial one, that can lead an initiative to transform how work gets done.

Transforming how customer-focused work gets done can also be initiated by CEOs, Operations Directors, Finance Directors, Marketing Directors and HR Directors, who manage to gain support from others for what they want to do.

I think transforming how work gets done can come about in four other ways, beside being initiated by senior executives in large companies – whatever organisational function they represent:

• Informally

• Distributed leadership

• Disruptive innovation

• Contextual adaptation

Informal Transformation

People do not just accept what they are given. They shape their work environments, which in turn influences how formal performance support is provided. The ‘bring your own device’ phenomenon from a few years back is a good example.

People taking their own superior digital devices to work changed the way personal devices were provided and supported in one large company. For people who did not want to use their own, the company initiated a policy of ‘choose your own device’. The push for this came from the self-directed way people were behaving.

Especially if they have skills and capabilities that in are demand, people are choosing where they want to work – from home, cafés, co-working centres, client facilities, on-the-go, etc..

Rather than going off-site to external destinations, what if people were given a minimum viable workplace that they could informally and autonomously adapt to suit themselves? For example, they could be encouraged to appropriate spaces for their own purposes using temporary, low-cost solutions like Magic Whiteboards.

As well as customising their experience of the devices they use and choosing to work from a range of places, social tools that connect us to people and resources are powering an explosion of do-it-yourself learning and self-directed performance at the point-of-need.

What’s the minimum viable support that people might need to shape their own platforms for work, in the way that they choose which apps they use?

Distributed Leadership

Leadership is no longer, if it ever was, restricted to senior people. Organisations are fractal networks of relationships, influence, and cultural diversity. If the conditions are right, it is possible for local performance transformation within a wider organisational context.

How can these local leaders acquire and use minimum viable workplace insights to influence performance environments that let people get on with what they need to do?

And how could cross-disciplinary platforms for work teams best support them?

Disruptive Innovation

The coworking movement is an example of a freelancer-led movement that bubbled up from small, innovative providers of informal workspaces. Coworking is now mainstream. It is influencing how large companies provide workspace, with companies like WeWork expanding and going global.

The same thing applies to how technologies are contributing to disrupting workplace learning from expert-led courses to a focus on learning from connected, reflexive, and self-directed performance.

Contextual Adaptation

Examples and quotes throughout the JLL report are from large, global companies with annual operating revenues that can run into billions of dollars.

According to official statistics*, Small and Medium Enterprises, those employing 250 or fewer, represent 99.9 of all business in the UK. They are said to be responsible for employing 60% of the workforce, and generate 47% of total turnover.

How do research insights gleaned from large, global companies apply to SMEs? How can they be adapted for small company contexts? Do they need to be? What advantages or disadvantages might smaller companies have?

We think the minimum viable workplace concept might be particularly attractive to SMEs. What low-cost, creative approaches can they deploy?

And what of giant employers like the NHS? What do the diverse parts of this shift-working, some location-based and others peripatetic, under-pressure, workforce need?

Building Coalitions

How might cross-disciplinary teams support and facilitate minimum viable workplaces for all of the different contexts that were briefly described in the previous sections – and more?

We hope to be able to kick-start cross pollinating conversations online and, depending how it goes, getting together at events. The objective is to be inspired and learn from people in different work contexts, then taking ideas back into the workplaces and trying some of them out.

Find out more here: https://sites.google.com/stamplondon.co.uk/mimiumviableworkplace/home

*House of Commons Library Briefing Paper, Number 06512, 23rd November 2016

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I created this diagram for my own benefit, to help me clarify the focus for what I want to do with The Smart Work Company.

It has been useful enough but it would be even better if it was somehow animated. The diagram looks deceivingly simple, when in reality what it aims to show is the collision of multiple complex systems, of differing degrees of complexity (connectivity, uncertainty of outcomes, and rates of change).

Social complexity

I’m interested in getting to grips with the complex adaptive systems stuff that comes out of the Santa Fe Institute, but the language in some of the papers on complexity that I’ve had to plough through just annoys me. Call me an ignoramous if you like.

Although complexity experts might disagree, this wee video explains one interpretation of what complexity is in an easy-to-understand way.

Complexity is the outcome of elements (people in a social system) that are:

• Diverse
• Connected (the more connected, the more complex)
• Interconnected
• Adaptive

Rates of change

Each element in the diagram at the start of this post is complex because of the people involved in designing and making the systems exist in the first place – through what they do together.

This includes all the elements in the Environment section, and all the elements in an organisation’s performance support system.

There’s something else that I think has to add to complexity and that’s diversity in perceiving rates of change. If the elements in the environment are changing rapidly, some people will sense what’s happening before others who have more closed or fixed minds.

For people who do see what’s happening, convincing others of the need to adapt to a new reality might well be a bit of a struggle because of ‘path dependency’: “Path dependency occurs because it is often easier or more cost effective to simply continue along an already set path than to create an entirely new one.”

The conclusion I come to on this is that there will typically be a lag between events in the external environment and the rate at which existing performance systems change.

Reflexive Learning

That’s why reflexive learning sewn into everything a business does, not as a Learning and Development add-on, is critical if organisations are to be able to adapt as rapidly as they need to.

David James of Looop is on the money when he talks about in-the-flow, “learning at the point-of-need”.

Tools like Looop give people the resources to be able to learn reflexively, as things unfold. But there’s a step before that. Businesses need to organise in ways that encourage informal social networks and collaboration across organisational boundaries.

I wrote about that in more detail on my website, if you are interested.

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The Tiny Triumph package of tasters, tools and tribes (people co-creating and sharing in communities) are all aimed at helping people and organisations – to practice skills and develop the capabilities they will need going into an evolving future of work.

I’m not going to explain the tasters, toolbox, and tribes for the moment. What I will say is that the generic tools are co-developed in use with clients to reflect their unique contexts.

They are underpinned by insights from the Big Picture framework, which is based on the ideas and experiences of numerous practitioners and researchers.

Resources

People create (and destroy) value for customers through what they do together. Formal systems that support performance create the conditions for co-created, connected knowledge to emerge.

Formal performance systems are beginning to include technologies that help people to create their own resources, drawing on what they know and can do through experience – personally and collectively. See Looop, for example.

The already phenomenal capability of people within organisations can be now be augmented by ability to connect to ideas and knowledge of others beyond organisational walls, including insights from decades of research and practices that remain valid.

Whether those insights are relevant to specific work contexts is another matter, and assessing that is a skill to be developed.

Next Phase

I’m piloting the Tiny Triumph package and process at the moment. The next phase is to promote it more widely. That’s scary but also exciting.

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Re-Generation

Whatever productivity is, and it’s not easy agree on what it is, other nations appear to be getting more bang for their buck. To use a horrible phrase.

I wrote in my last blog post about the seven Acas Productivity Levers, saying what I thought was missing (organisational cultures and performance systems that nurture strong informal social networks, where people can bond and develop supportive, congenial, playful relationships).

As I said, this flies in the face of decades of attempts to control social behaviour and messing around seen as wasting time – despite evidence that social bonds away from work are linked to high productivity.

This got me to thinking. How can things change? How can evidence of good practice, which piles up and remains valid, be discovered and used? Here’s what I know from experience:

• There’s always a somebody, an energy behind a vision behind a proposal for change.
• Starting small can get the ball rolling towards generating something big.
• I know who those somebodies were back then. Who are they now?

Do Something

One of the things I saw two decades ago in companies shifting from traditional manufacturing to customer-focused ways of working and organising (lean, just-in-time, quality) was how often organisation-wide culture change was kicked off – and sustained – by a visionary person. This was typically a Managing Director, or a Production Director who could see there were better ways of doing things.

Focusing on some aspect of work that could be improved, or dropped altogether and replaced by new ways, these people showed their colleagues what was possible.

They involved them, persuaded them, listened to them, and made sure systems were in place so they could contribute their energies and knowledge to the innovation.

Starting small, doing something else, others then finding things they care about that they want to change – taking responsibility for it, and bringing colleagues along with them as needed. This accumulation of small things accelerated as people gained confidence and experience. It was how the transition to customer-focused working practices became the norm over time.

Learn From It

Roll forward some years to when I was working with senior people, who were using small, focused projects to introduce new technologies or working practices into their organisations. This was through an innovative post-graduate Master’s course at a UK university, and then later with the same university in partnership with a Russian university.

It was the same passionate, visionary people – Finance Directors, Marketing Directors, Operations Directors, HR Directors, and so on. For some of these people, they had a business problem that needed addressing. For others, they were curious to learn about ideas that could be applied to change or improve some feature of their work.

There were so many great things about working with the Russian executives. One was the realisation that these practical people did not dismiss theory and philosophy. They were curious to discover management ideas that were ‘the best of the West’ – not to copy but to evaluate for usefulness in their own contexts, and adapted to fit.

For all of them, the experience was an opportunity to engage with colleagues back in the workplace, demonstrating different ways of doing things. In one particular case, the project became the pilot that was the forerunner of a longer-term effort to improve the quality of services to citizens in a Siberian city.

Who are these people now?

It’s anybody. Let me qualify that. It’s anybody who cares enough, and who has the energy to change something about their work – for their own satisfaction primarily, but that will also benefit colleagues and the company they work for.

I’m hoping it’s going to be young people who are not yet infected with cynicism and who are at a stage in their lives where they are particularly open to learning. I’m part of the Baby Boomer generation and I never stop learning. But when I was first in the workplace all those decades ago, I learned things that stayed with me a lifetime.

The sort of people I worked with in the past had the influence and clout to instigate change that had the potential to go organisation-wide. What if others don’t have that positional authority?

The extent to which anyone can make an impact depends on how fertile the conditions are in an organisation for change to seed and grow.

And if those conditions are not there?

They might be absent organisation-wide but exist in pockets. If that is the case, then re-generation can happen locally – and for a time until conditions change, which unfortunately they can do.

Re-Generation

So go on, young people. Hook up to others like me, who can point you to hidden, long-known principles of good practice. Be like my Russian friends – learn to interpret and use this information, and use it to change something about your work.

The information is there. The tools are there. It’s all possible.

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to create a customer.”*

No matter what the future of work looks like, securing customers and creating value for them is fundamentally what business will continue to be about.

I haven’t decided on a name for this framework, so for the moment I’m calling it the Big Value Picture. It’s simplicity conceals a multitude of ideas and insights from numerous practitioners, researchers, and theorists.

People Create Value

People generate value for customers (and they can destroy it) by what they do together, through their social relationships, connections, and the way they communicate with each other.

Social Relationships

It turns out that informal social relationships play a critical and positive role in team performance, and there’s evidence for that from almost a century ago. If you look all the way back to the Hawthorne Studies in the 1920s and 1930s, you see that:

“Beneath the formalities of the organization chart was not chaos but a robust, informal organization, constituted by the activities, sentiments, interactions, norms, and personal and professional connections of individuals and groups that had developed over extended periods of time.”

The researchers concluded that:

“Mental attitudes, proper supervision, and informal social relationships experienced in a group were key to productivity and job satisfaction”

Although the Hawthorne Studies were flawed, the researchers were on to something. Informal social relationships were found to be linked to high productivity at the beginning of the 20th Century, and the evidence for the same thing has been suggested at the beginning of the 21st Century.

A team of researchers at MIT found in 2012, by measuring a range of behaviours captured through people wearing electronic badges, that talking to your pals away from work is associated with high team performance.

They say “the best predictors of of productivity were a team’s energy and engagement outside formal meetings”, and concluded that socialising is “deeply critical” to team performance. The researchers go as far as proclaiming this discovery as “the new science of building great teams”. 

Formal Systems

The right-hand side of the Big Picture summarises formal systems that create performance environments underpinning customer-focused ways of organising (who does what, how, and who with).

At the core of customer-focused ways of organising:

• Is the belief that people create value for customers
• Through sharing their knowledge and capabilities
• Working together to solve problems
• Constantly learning and looking for better ways of doing things.

We should know all this. Formal performance systems create the conditions for people to work together, so that they can do what they need to do. They also create the conditions for supportive, social relationships to develop.

Acas Productivity Levers

It feels to me like a chasm persists between what researchers churn out, and what happens in real life in organisations.

I was recently made aware of the Acas Seven Levers of Workplace Productivity. A specific focus on nurturing informal social relationships in the workplace? Nope, not as far as I can see. Implied, perhaps, in that ‘relationships based on trust’ is one of their productivity levers.

I have to admit that my heart sank a bit when I read the summary on the website. I don’t disagree with any of it. It’s just that I’ve been around new ways of working and learning for too long. I’ve seen so many similar reports. And not a lot seems to change.

Proper Supervision

Mooching around the Acas website, my eye fell on this short paper, Rediscovering Human Potential,  from Ewan Keep. What some people understand as ‘productivity’ would be funny if it wasn’t so appalling:

” Fifty-one per cent of 18-25 year-olds believe that attending internal meetings signifies “productivity” “

I’m not having a pop at young people. The same survey finds that:

“Seventy-one per cent of workers thought “a productive day in the office” meant clearing their emails.”

And everybody’s reporting working long, unproductive hours – ” 2 billion hours a year of unpaid overtime”, apparently.

He’s commenting on an another paper by Keith Sissons. That’s what drew my attention to the article in the first place. Would that be the same Keith Sissons who was one of my lecturers so long ago at Warwick University? Looks like it. I diverge ….

Professor Keep says:

“We need to go where policy makers and politicians have not gone for a long time – back to the workplace where, as Sisson states, “skills, capabilities and technology come together, where people acquire technical and social skills and where social capital is formed”.

I agree with Acas that first line supervisor skills, and nurturing these people, is important. I don’t think that’s where the main problem lies, though.

I think that our need to socialise flies in the face of decades of attempts to control social behavior. Messing around, not working. Get back to work.

It would seem that playful, congenial working relationships are linked to productivity. Who’s got the time? Seems like everyone is going round in circles. We need to try to stop.

It’s good to talk. And it’s productive.

* Peter Drucker, The Practice of Management New York,: Harper, 1st ed. 1954 ; Routledge, 2012. P37 (haven’t read the book, am taking the reference on trust)

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