Work

business & working

normal is the bias

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Almost a decade ago Harvard Business Review featured Scott Berkun’s article on how Automattic, the parent company of WordPress, was able to function as a 100% distributed company.

“Culture is critical. Automattic has many policies designed to empower employees and remote work is just one of them. They believe individual workers know best how to be productive and that management’s job is to provide choices and get out of the way. If employees are self-motivated and empowered, remote work can accelerate productivity. However in autocratic or bureaucratic organizations the freedom of remote work runs against the culture. Of course remote workers will be less productive if they’re in environments that depend on centralized, rule-oriented, or committee heavy processes. But even then it can work if managers care more about results than pretense.” —HBR 2013-03-15

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stupidity — the new normal

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Two years ago I wrote about the new normal of work, citing a Citi Global Perspectives & Solutions report that had just been published. The major trends identified in the report included observations such as evidence that in cities more likely to vote for Donald Trump, there were fewer jobs that can be done remotely. Much of the focus was on the impact of working from anywhere and the decline in air travel. Citi’s Chief Learning Officer discussed the company’s investments in learning technologies, collaboration technologies, and improved meeting practices — the latter which I had discussed in bloody meetings.

I concluded that most people would like the option to work from home, most of the time. Many workers have tasted it, and in spite of the challenges of being forced into distributed work — they like it. Now that everyone is familiar with video conferencing we can also see that in many workplaces — zoom is not the problem, meetings are.

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Dee Hock 1929-2022

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Dee Hock, founder and CEO of VISA, died last week at the age of 93. VISA’s success was based on its chaordic structure.

chaordic [kay-ordʹ-ic], adj., fr. E. chaos and order. 1. The behavior of any self-organizing, self-governing, organ, organization, or system that harmoniously exhibits characteristics of both order and chaos. 2. Patterned by chaos and order in a way not dominated by either. 3. Blending of diversity, chaos, complexity and order characteristic of the fundamental organizing principles of evolution and nature. —Dee Hock

In the early 1990s, Hock looked into how to create more democratic companies, a mission he never achieved.

Not so long ago, says [Peter] Senge, Hock was addressing an audience full of CEOs. And he really had them pumping: “Great! This is how to create a learning organization that can grow at 20% per year! He’s found the keys to the kingdom!” That is, until the end, when he told them about the one little problem: “You’ll never be able to justify paying a CEO $1 million a year to run this kind of corporation.” —FastCompany 1996-10-31

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stupid management practices continue

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Ten years ago, I wrote that the performance appraisal treadmill is keeping organizations from testing out and adopting better management models for the networked economy. Performance appraisals are like academic grades and keep the focus on the individual. In a collaborative, social enterprise this is counter-productive. In today’s enterprise, work is learning and learning is the work, and it has to be done cooperatively.

“Evaluation of performance, merit rating, or annual review … The idea of a merit rating is alluring. The sound of the words captivates the imagination: pay for what you get; get what you pay for; motivate people to do their best, for their own good. The effect is exactly the opposite of what the words promise.” —W. Edwards Deming (1982)

Even technology companies are governed by outdated management models.

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analyzing automation

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Several years ago I recommended one small change that could have a major impact would be to look at everyone’s work from the perspective of standardized versus customized (non-standardized) work. Every person in the company, with the help of some data and peer feedback, should be able to determine what percentage of their time is spent on standardized work.

If the percentage is over a certain threshold —perhaps 50% — then it becomes a management task to change that person’s job and add more customized work. The company can be constantly looking at ways to automate any standardized work in order to stay ahead of technology, the market, and the competition. While automation is pretty well inevitable, it does not have to decimate a workforce.

Looking at the overall company balance between standardized and customized work should be an indicator of its potential to succeed. By visualizing the Labour/Talent split, people in the company can take action and make plans before the inevitable shift. This also means that jobs and roles have to become more flexible and open to change.

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learning is the work, redux

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Ten years ago I wrote — work is learning, and learning is the work. I have been asked to speak about this topic at the LernOS Convention on 5 July, which I will present online. Let’s see what has transpired in a decade.

The first paragraph is even more pertinent today, especially given the global experiences of distributed work — We have come to a point where organizations can no longer leave learning to their HR or training departments. Being able to understand emerging situations, see patterns, and co-solve problems are essential business skills. — where social learning becomes critical in knowledge sharing and learning in the complex domain.

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one personbyte is not enough

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Nick Milton refers to an interesting knowledge management concept — “‘personbyte’ – the amount of knowledge one person can reasonably learn in a lifetime. In the craftsman economy of 100 years ago, a personbyte was enough knowledge to create an impressive artefact — a steamboat, a canal, or a suspension bridge. Nowadays one personbyte is nowhere near enough to create modern products, or deliver modern services.”

So why do we have individual performance appraisals?

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there is no public in the global market

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Two years ago, just after the pandemic was declared, I suggested that we need to go beyond civil society, governments, and markets — toward a commons or noosphere — to deal with the entangled complexities facing us. My assumptions at that time have not changed much to date.

  1. The three organizing forms for society, chronologically — Tribes, Institutions (Governments), Markets — are widely applicable across history.
  2. Each form builds on the other and changes it.
  3. The last form is the dominant form — today that would be the Market form (market volatility today is increasing inequality and turmoil)
  4. A new form is emerging — Networks (Commons)‚ and hence the T+I+M+N model.
  5. This form has also been called the noosphere.
  6. I have found evidence that what initiated each new form was a change in human communication media — T+I (written word), T+I+M (print), T+I+M+N (electric/digital).
  7. I believe we are currently in between a triform (T+I+M) and a quadriform (T+I+M+N) society, which accounts for much of the current political turmoil in our post-modern world.
  8. This model can help inform us how to build better organizational forms for a coming age of entanglement.

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the coherent organization

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Several years ago, the team at Innovisor asked — Why Do Organizations Led by Women Perform Better?

The new study puzzled Innovisor. Why do organizations led by women perform better?

Since we already established that the women on an individual level were not collaborating more than men, we decided to look somewhere else in our data.
Also because Innovisor had previously established that there was a correlation between organizational coherence and performance.

We decided to look into if organizations led by women were more coherent.

And they were! —Innovisor 2018-07-18

I have noticed similar other indicators, such as the observation that we collectively understand that what are considered ‘feminine’ traits are what leaders need today, as shown in this 2013 Inc. magazine study.

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management must move first

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This morning I gave a presentation at the IOM Summit on digital work. My topic was — Digital Work is all about human connections. The key messages are ones that have been presented here.

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