Jan 19, 2021 | Collaboration, Governance, Leadership
As we come to grips with remote working, we will also have to come to grips with the central challenge, of how do you create the sense of community and teamwork that requires face to face but is not as present in remote work.
More particularly, remote working groups that have a changing membership, often a rapidly changing membership.
Great sporting teams win because they have the right blend of talent to get the job done, then they practise and practice, and practice. What happens when the membership is not stable, when practice is not possible, simply because you cannot predict what it is that you need to be practising, and with whom.
Google has spent years and millions of dollars examining the characteristics that make groups successful. The starting point is that no Google employee is short of intelligence, otherwise, you simply do not work there, but some groups are extremely effective, and others are failures, when on paper, the group members appear remarkably similar.
They called it ‘Project Aristotle‘.
Google, if it has what we might call a core competence, it would be finding patterns in data. They have large data sets of the teams in their business, their makeup, demographically, ethnographically, education, experience, and so on, but they could find no correlation between all these variables, and the quality of the team output. It seemed almost random.
The problem was to identify how individual intelligence translated into group intelligence.
We seem to accept that teams that were working well are more productive, creative, and harmonious than those that do not, but we do not really recognise the drivers of those outcomes.
Eventually, an unexpected pattern emerged, that discriminated between high performing teams, and the others. The pattern had two characteristics of the interactions that occurred in the teams, that explained the performance differences.
Those behavioural patterns are:
Equality of conversational turn-taking.
When everyone in the team has the opportunity to speak, and is encouraged to take it, and the result is that team members hold the floor for roughly the same amount of time, the team works. It does not mean that everyone takes turns, it does mean that the culture and often unspoken norms of the group are that everyone is respected, and has value to be added to the conversation, and is therefore listened to equally.
Ostentatious listening.
Just speaking in roughly the same amount is not enough. Others in the group must be overtly and ostentatiously listening, taking in what is being said, and giving it the attention and thought it deserves. This particularly applies to the team leader.
Together, these two behavioural norms together create what risks becoming a cliché: ‘Psychological Safety’.
This is the willingness of team members to speak their mind, express opinions, and ideas, knowing that they will not be judged, that the group welcomes the views, even when they are against the ‘run of play’ or the expected. Psychological safety is the single greatest correlate with a group’s success. When team members have that safety, it unlocks their best ideas, their ability to collaborate meaningfully, and innovate creatively.
Contributing to the success of a team, on top of the two core drivers that deliver psychological safety, and contributing to them in meaningful ways, are 4 supporting behaviours.
- Team members get things done on time, and meet their obligations, in a manner that enables the team to perform its tasks to at least the standard they expect.
- Structure and clarity. Individual’s in the team have clear roles, plans and goals, and the decision-making processes the team uses are clear. When an individual’s goals and plans are aligned with those of the team, the impact is magnified.
- The work being done by the team is important to team members.
- Team members believe their work matters, and that it will create positive change.
Taking up the hard-won lessons from Google seems to make great sense to me.
How well do your processes to manage and leverage the intellectual capital, represented by your employees, work in the evolving working environments inspired by ‘The Bug?
Header credit: My thanks again to Scott Adams and his mate Dilbert.
Jan 15, 2021 | Collaboration, Innovation
Today, January 15, 2021 is the 20th anniversary of the launching of Wikipedia.
It would be easy to pass it over, but few innovations amongst the millions over the past 20 years, would have had such an impact on so many people as Wikipedia.
The evolution of Wikipedia has democratised knowledge in a manner only approached by one other innovation in history I can think of: the printing press.
I can remember being envious of those kids at school who had Britannica on their bookshelves. It was way too expensive for my parents to buy, and besides, it was out of date the day the latest version was published.
The creation of Wikipedia came out of the fertile, original mind of Jimmy Wales.
Working in finance, Wales played around with early web portals and video games, recognising the power of the net to connect people. In the mid-nineties, he was fascinated by the idea of a web-based encyclopedia, replacing the hugely expensive monolithic offerings then available. In 2000 with a couple of friends, and funding from his modest success with the web portals, he founded Nupedia, which aimed at consolidating articles written by experts voluntarily, and peer reviewed, with advertising as the revenue generator needed to make a profit.
It bombed.
The academic status quo standards for peer review almost ensured that submitting an article for the review was akin to waiting for feedback on an academic paper submitted for review, a lengthy and undefined time, with no chance of a no revision acceptance.
In early January 2001, as an experiment, Wales and co-founders Ben Kovitz and Larry Sanger created a ‘wiki’, at that time a new technology, that aimed at removing the academic barrier by opening articles to anyone to review and edit in real time.
The academics involved with Nupedia would have nothing to do with it, but such was the response, that a week later, on the 15th, the Wiki, by then named Wikipedia, was launched on a separate domain.
The idea of an open source, editable encyclopedia had its challenges, some of which remain today. However, the original vision of Wales and Sanger to ‘Imagine a world where every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge‘ has been largely realised.
Wikipedia continues to evolve, managed by the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit organisation founded for that purpose by Wales in 2003. Wales remains a critical voice in its management.
Can you imagine the last year, disconnected, without Wikipedia as a source?
Happy 20th Wikipedia.
Jan 14, 2021 | Change, Management
It is new year, all those resolutions going to waste!
It seemed a timely spot to suggest how we can change outcomes, as it is those we want to change, we just call them habits reflecting the action.
Let’s pick one of the most common: ‘I will stop smoking’.
The usual outcome is that we fail to stop smoking, despite wanting to, resolving, and trying often. It is expensive, and not good for us, but it is a ‘habit’ that is extremely hard to break.
I know, I successfully stopped smoking, for a day or two, at least monthly for several years. Then I stopped, successfully, no drugs, not hypnotherapy, no doctors’ orders, now almost 40 years ago, when a packet of Dunhill 20 was still well under a dollar a pack.
What I realised so long ago, was that there were triggers that set up the urge to light up. The phone ringing at work, after a meeting with my then boss, having a beer (that could happen any time) and several others. My strategy was to substitute the habit of lighting up with something else, a substitute habit that satisfied and then replaced the craving for a fag.
Once I had figured out the substitute, and ensured the new routine was in place, it was actually pretty easy after the first few days.
The challenge is to find that new routine that can replace the nasty habit, and build it to the point where it effectively substitutes for the habit you want to stop. Obviously, if you want to lose weight, stopping eating chocolate cake by substituting it for ice cream is not going to do you much good.
The reward of the new routine has to be real, and related to the cue.
Part of the reward I gave myself was semantic. Sounds silly, but it helped.
I never said I had given up smoking, which implies a cost of some sort. Instead, I told myself, and others, that I had taken up non-smoking, which implies a reward, and attracted the support of those around me for the short time it was necessary. Quickly, I became one of those boring former smokers who pontificated about how easy it had been to become a non-smoker.
It is a simple psychological process.
Identify the cue, substitute the nasty habit with a ‘reward’, create a new routine that works to the same cue.
The simple cue substitution process works, whatever ingrained behaviour you are trying to change, personally, or in a group in a commercial context.
Don’t be afraid of it, embrace it.
Good luck with that resolution!!
Thanks again to Scott Adams and Dilbert for the header cartoon
Jan 11, 2021 | Governance, Management, Strategy
It is January, and looming in many organisations is the annual, calendar driven budgeting exercise.
In more normal times, the strategic planning update would have been done in September or October last year, but that went out the window, along with the comparisons of performance to budget that are usually the basis for an extrapolative budgeting process.
Never has there been a better time to revisit the whole process, as it is clearly no longer fit for purpose.
There are better ways.
Top-down mandated budgets designed to give senior management the appearance of control and foresight have been on the slippery slide for some time. The ‘Bug’ should have been the terminal injection of reality.
Constant and unforecastable crisis does not lend itself to a process that purports to predict the future 18 months to 5 years out.
Given that background, how should management be thinking about the planning process?
My advice is that the process should be one of rolling planning, that accommodates information as it emerges, and rolls it into the action programs, while retaining the necessary strategic consistency and functional alignment.
What constitutes strategic success?
Strategic success is not about the money, profits, or shareholder dividends, although sometimes you might wonder. Strategic success is a function of the choices made, the distribution channels opened, customer lifetime value and share of wallet, the innovation pipeline, and capability development that will enable commercial sustainability. These are all things, amongst many others, that are enabled by the tactical choices being made. While the costs and returns are important considerations in these choices, they are just the simplest but often misleadingly one-dimensional means by which they are measured.
How does this impact the planning process?
Planning is vital, as the absence of a clear destination means any road can be taken. However, the process must be way more agile than has been the norm, while not losing sight of the objective. This requires a clearly articulated and understood strategic framework within which the ongoing tactical decisions can be made. At every point of choice, the question should be asked:
‘Does this choice add to the achievement of the strategy?
Strategic priorities can be broken down into operational and tactical choices across and within functional responsibilities. These choices can then be reviewed and updated regularly as information is received and absorbed.
The ideal outcome is that there is regular communication, and by regular, I mean daily, weekly, monthly, and so on, where information is absorbed into the decision processes and used to adjust on the run. Rolling planning at every level can be ‘rolled up’ (pardon the pun) into the longer-term processes ensuring strategic consistency and alignment.
In effect you are matching the tempo and type of decision making to the level most appropriate for that decision to be taken, with those in whatever ‘front line’ is engaged, taking the responsibility and accountability for the decision.
I refer to it as ‘Nested Planning’.
Each stage builds on the former, becoming increasingly less tactical but more strategic in its nature. The most visible metaphor is the Russian wooden dolls that progressively fit inside each other.
Abandon the immoveable budget that becomes set in stone, and replace it with rolling forecasts that track the progress of the resource allocation choices at every level, towards the strategic outcome agreed.
Header credit: ‘mountaineer’ via Flikr.
Jan 4, 2021 | Analytics, Social Media, Strategy
Which StrategyAudit posts gathered attention during 2020?
The StrategyAudit blog, and supporting research is both a personal archive of ideas, that vary from complete to really half-baked, a recitation of the things I see and learn from those I work and interact with, and the lessons that come from those interactions.
Over the course of the year, there were 120 posts published on the StrategyAudit site. It seems like a small return for the effort. Luckily, I did not keep a count of the hours spent thinking, researching, writing, and editing these 120, or I would probably have to counsel myself to do something more useful to my retirement fund with the time.
The 3 most popular posts published this year.
A bit of an unfair advantage accrues to those published earlier in the year. However, the pattern across the decade of this blog has consistently demonstrated that most views of most posts happen over the week or so after publishing. It is the minority that then pick up later and continue to deliver multiple views weekly over a long period.
Reflecting on the new management challenges created by Covid, the April attempt at predicting the impact of Covid came in first. Perhaps understandable, and with the benefit of now 8 months hindsight, I am very pleased with the accuracy of the predictions. That will be the subject, as promised at the time, of a separate post. Second place goes to a June post that looked at what I saw as the 6 critical challenges of remote work, a topic we were all thinking about, and at that time just coming to grips with. Third was a bit of a personal rant, which obviously struck a chord at the time, after that idiot MP Craig Kelly jumped on British morning television in January, telling all and sundry that the fires, then ravaging the east coast of NSW, bore no relationship to the hoax that is climate change.
I am going to stretch the friendship a bit and give a dead cat bounce award to a post that I think had some considerable value as I review it, but that got no traction at all. I set out to describe the benefits that may flow from the Covid crisis, reflecting on the adage that there is a silver lining in every cloud. As with the winner in the category, I feel vindicated that the predictions made have been pretty accurate. Perhaps it was just a lousy headline?
The 3 most popular posts of the year.
This is a hands down to a post published over 6 years ago that describes the business model of supermarkets. It has continued to be the most viewed post every year since it was first published. Coming in second is the perennial runner up published in 2016, describing the 4 dimensions of project planning. Third was a welcome surprise, from early 2018, a marketers explanation of the accounting term Net Present Value. Many of those who run small businesses have a disturbing lack of understanding of even the most basic financial management tools, of which NPV is a common and very useful one. There are several other similar posts on accounting related ‘accounting type’ topics that also contributed significantly to the numbers.
Ideas that got no traction, but that seem valuable.
Some of the ideas I post may be a bit whacky, at least to some. However, it is not my job to reflect the consensus, it is my job to stimulate thought, and create some disturbance to the status quo by throwing in stuff from left field.
This one from 2019 combines two ideas. The first that the demarcation between marketing and sales is artificial nonsense created for the convenience of corporate management, and the second, that the accepted sales funnel is as redundant as a knife in a gunfight. Checklists on just about everything abound on the net. This post from late 2017 summarises a checklist I use when assessing the health of a business, was prompted by a similar idea published in the AICD magazine written by Phil Ruthven, for whom I have a very high regard. In 2013 I stumbled across an article in Fast Company magazine that started to explain the OODA loop, an idea that evolved from the fertile and obsessive mind of US air Force colonel John Boyd. I have since read a biography of Boyd, and spent considerable time reflecting on the competitive implications of the OODA loop, which I think is a seminal idea, highlighted this year by the speed and destructive spread of the Corona virus. Those who have successfully re-oriented themselves to get inside the ‘turning circle’ of their competitors, and the spread of the ‘Bug’, and been able to pivot their businesses in the face of the unexpected, have followed, mostly without knowing, the wisdom of the loop to their collective benefit. This follow up published in October 2020 was, sadly, a very strong contender for the dead cat award for 2020.
Finally, one of my personal favourite posts, viewed only once this year, published in 2016 after the death of Leonard Cohen. It has nothing to do with running a business, but is a deeply personal post, reflecting on a couple of the pivotal events in my life.
I look forward to interacting with you throughout 2021, which is getting harder, and harder. The combined impact of the continuing increasingly intense battle for your attention, and the squeezing of organic access to those who may be interested by the ‘social’ platforms makes life a challenge. (with the number of links in this post, LinkedIn is likely to stick me in solitary and throw away the key) If you find value in my thoughts, subscribe to them directly from the website, and spread the word amongst your networks. I promise not to follow you around when you do.
Have a better 2021 than 2020, perhaps an easy goal for most, and the basis of continuous improvement, finding a way to do a better job every day.
Header cartoon: once again, my thanks to Hugh McLeod at gapingvoid.com for the header
