Reflections

I  thought that I would try to write down in blog form what I often write down in my book. I find that writing in a book helps me to get my thoughts straight, then when I've reflected I could then write it down on the blog. They may be long but maybe short it just depends on how the muse strikes me.

When Busy is Bad

Have you noticed that when you ask someone how they are, they often respond with one word: “Busy.” Apparently, busy is their state of being: not healthy or sick, happy or sad,  excited or anxious. Yet the word busy is fundamentally neutral and doesn’t tell the whole story about one’s current state. After all, one can busy and happy about it (especially when compared to the alternative of under-employment) or one can be frustrated by it. And yet we persist in describing ourselves as busy.

Clearly, the word “busy” is meant to convey a wealth of meaning. But what meaning? In some circles, it means that one is fully engaged. For a lawyer, it can mean full utilization. Perhaps it even suggests a high level of productivity. But that would be misleading. As we have been learning in the legal industry, a high level of input (our effort is no more than an input), does not necessarily ensure a high level of output or, more importantly, a good outcome. And it certainly does not ensure a high level of value from the perspective of the client.

But there is an even more troubling side to our propensity to describe ourselves as busy.  As Ryder Carroll, the creator of the Bullet Journalling method, noted in his TEDx talk at Yale:

 

“Being busy doesn’t mean that you are being productive.

A lot of the time, being busy just means that you are in a state of being functionally overwhelmed.”

Carroll says that this extraordinary level of busyness stems from the extraordinary amount of choice we have. After all, every choice requires us to make a decision. And every decision requires focus. But here’s the rub: Focus requires our energy and our time — our two most valuable resources. According to Carroll, every unnecessary choice is a distraction. As we eliminate those unnecessary choices, we reduce distractions, thereby increasing our available time and focus. So unless we are disciplined about reducing the number of unnecessary choices in our life, we end up depleting our most valuable resources without a corresponding benefit.

Ryder Carroll’s TEDx talk hit me with extra force as I wrap up an amazing year in which I started a new job with fabulous possibilities. As I have learned, all those possibilities have led to a To-Do list that just won’t stop. I’ve tried working until I get closer to the end of the list, but that is a recipe for exhaustion rather than a sustainable approach. (After all, it’s a never-ending list.) So my resolution for 2019 is to be even more deliberate in assessing What goes onto my To-Do list, understanding that every task on that list represents a choice that requires a decision, my focus, and my nonrenewable time.

How will you deal with your own never-ending To-Do list in 2019? How will you avoid the state of being functionally overwhelmed?

My wish for all of us is that we have a truly productive and satisfying 2019.

Happy New Year!

 

 

 

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perpetual beta 2018

Fast learning in action - the Tailboard AAR

Sometimes learning after an event should be instantaneous, as in the "Tailboard AARs" used by fire crews.

The Tailboard AAR

 is a term used by the Fire Service to describe a short Knowledge-sharing session (an 

After Action Review

) that should happen immediately after activity, around the Tailboard of a fire truck, if necessary.

The great thing about this reflective event is that it should happen immediately, while the team are still "present in the moment", before they get back to base, before memories start to shift, and while the shared experience they have just been through is still at it's most vivid.

Here's what the Fire Service says

"For (Goodyear Arizona Fire Department Chief) Russ Braden, AARs provide the first level of  learning for the organization and the best opportunity for constructing a safety-aware working culture. “Quite simply put, this is nothing more than a crew taking a few minutes to review the incident or a recent event. This is the time within the safety of their crew to review what went well, what can be improved, or what didn’t work at all. This type of learning environment will begin to spread lessons to each of the work groups, shifts, and to the rest of the department as it perpetuates.”  

District employees for the Northwest Fire District in Tucson, AZ, recently began carrying AAR pocket cards to facilitate the district wide use of “tailboards.” 

At a recent meeting of district Battalion Chiefs, personnel said the AARs were making impacts on the organization in several different ways. Captain Tim Graves said one of the best features of the four-question AAR that he’s found is its adaptability to the scale of the incident. ..... 

Battalion Chief Mike Duncan said “I think the AARs are a very critical trust piece: people learn that it’s OK to bring out actions that didn’t go as planned. ...   

Division Chief Kelly McCoy said he thought the AAR format was helping to promote the mindset of planning. ...  Other personnel said what they liked about the AAR process was that it was easy to use with a group.”

After Action Reviews have been around for a long time as a Knowledge Sharing tool, and the experience of the Fire Crews reminds us of some of the AAR ground rules.

1. Hold your AAR immediately after activity. For the fire crews, it's round the truck tailboard. For a sales team, it might be the a Back of the Taxi AAR. For a legal team, it might be a Courtroom Steps AAR. For a forestry team, it's still a Tailboard AAR, but the tailboard is a logging truck.
2. Hold your AAR routinely. By tagging it to the tailboard, the taxi or the courtroom steps, you introduce a trigger for review and reflection.
3. Give people support. Give them the Pocket Cards. Allow them to adapt them to the needed scale.
4. Carry the AARs through into planning. 

You may not use trucks with tailboards, but how can your organisation embed the habit of immediate after-the-event pausing, and learning?

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5 first steps to KM success

Here are the first 5 steps in a successful KM journey

Buffalo, NY by JasonParis, on Flickr

At Knoco, we have seen enough Knowledge Management implementation programs by now  to know that there a few key steps every organisation needs to take in the beginning. These steps are as follows;

1. Assess the current state
2. Build a business-led strategy
3. Develop a draft KM framework
4. Create an implementation plan
5. Deliver some early pilots

Here is some more detail around each of these five steps (and if you need even more detail, read my book "Designing a Successful KM Strategy").

Assess the current state. Before you can plan any future KM development, you need to know where you are right now. Knowledge Management is common sense, even it if is not common practice, and most organisations are already doing some elements of KM under different names. Those elements may not yet be effective, and they may not yet be joined up, but you need to know what's working, what's present but not working, and what's missing. We see three types of assessment;

• An assessment of the current KM system (and by system we mean processes, roles, governance, technology) to see what's missing. A gap analysis, if you will, and the KM implementation program will largely seek to fill the gaps, and connect the unconnected elements. 
• A scan of your current knowledge topics, to see which ones need the most urgent attention.
• An assessment of the supporting culture. Do you have the correct culture to become a learning organisation, or is some culture change also needed?

When you are conducting an assessment, make sure you talk to stakeholders at all levels. As my friend Lisandro Gaertner pointed out to me "listen to a lot of people's stories about how they share knowledge and what are the outcomes they get. Sometimes people use cold (but apparently logical) assessment tools, interview mostly the wrong people (middle management and up) and get a fake glimpse about the KM culture. I don't have to say to you that it is the recipe to failure".

Build a business-led strategy. Time and again, experience has shown that the most successful knowledge management initiatives are those which are business-led, and which solve business problems. Your KM strategy needs to be closely aligned to the business strategy, to focus on the critical knowledge needed by the business, and to deliver practical ways of managing that knowledge better. Elements of the strategy include

• Vision 
• Scope 
• Business drivers 
• Value proposition 
• Critical knowledge areas 
• Change and stakeholder management 
• Potential business-led Pilot areas

Sometimes the strategy can be driven by one overriding business need, such as the risk of Knowledge loss, and in this case a Knowledge Retention Strategy may be needed.

This blog contains plenty of guidance on getting your KM strategy correct.

Develop a draft Knowledge Management Framework. As Knowledge Management has evolved over the last two decades, the need for an integrated Knowledge Management framework has become apparent. With a Management Framework, KM can take on the aspects of other management systems, and be made part of normal business, rather than relying on a disparate set of tools.

A Knowledge Management Framework ensures that all necessary KM elements (Accountabilities, Processes, Technologies and Governance) are in place, and interconnected. This ensures that there are no gaps in the system, and that knowledge flows freely through the organisation.

Your Assessment (Step 1) should have been planned with a Framework in mind, and will have identified the gaps which need to be filled.  we are calling this a "draft framework" at the moment, as the framework will not be finalised until after piloting.

This blog contains plenty of guidance on building an effective Knowledge Management Framework.

Build an implementation plan. Implementing Knowledge Management is not easy. You really only have one attempt, and if this fails, you may find that the concept has become irrecoverably tarnished. An excellent Implementation Plan is needed, based on lessons from successful (and less successful) implementations in other companies, and tailored to your own context.

The plan will be based on

• the results of assessment and benchmarking 
• the Knowledge Management strategy 
• the draft Knowledge Management framework
• the potential pilot areas, and
• a staged, change management approach.

This blog contains plenty of guidance on Knowledge management implementation.

Start some business-led proof of concept pilots. A key component of your knowledge management strategy involves running some pilot projects. A pilot project is a project where knowledge management can be applied within the business, to solve a specific and important business problem, to deliver measurable results (and therefore prove the value), and also to act as a proving ground for Knowledge Management within the business.

Choosing the right pilots can be a massive springboard for your eventual KM implementation. A spectacular success early in the journey can give you some real momentum.

This blog contains plenty of guidance on Knowledge management pilots.

There are plenty of ways to get Knowledge Management wrong, and a few principles you need to follow to get Knowledge Management right.

Follow the five steps listed here and, with advice and guidance from a good experienced consultancy, your road to Knowledge Management success is clear.

Contact Knoco if you need more help.

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The three Cs

I recently wrote a post about the potential for systems to be self organising and the way that we compromise this ability by attempting to exercise control over the world around us. In order for systems to become self organising the networks that make them up have to be comprised of healthy cells.

It occurred to me yesterday that in order to become healthy the cells need to be encouraged to work on the following three characteristics.

Curiosity

Wondering why things are the way they are. A willingness to relax their grip on fixed ideas and to consider alternatives. An inclination to tinker. This is what allows kids to adopt new technology so quickly. We have driven curiosity and playfulness out of the workplace in our attempts to be "businesslike" and in the process have compromised our collective ability to adapt and be effective.

Critical thinking

Constantly thinking about where information is coming from, who are its sources, and who has vested interests in its propagation. Working out the likely truth of the things we consume measured against our other experiences and with a healthily sceptical attitude. Considering the consequences of onward sharing of the information we take in.

Conversation

Adopting a more conversational tone in how we share ideas and discuss the world around us. Avoiding dogma and dogmatic attitudes. Engaging in a to and fro with equals. Recognising that we are conversing with another human being who shares our challenges and is also struggling to make sense of the world. This last principal needs to be applied just as much online as off.

These three Cs are just as important as the traditional three Rs and we should consider teaching them in school.

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May I Ask a Question?

Image from pixabay by Dean Moriarty, CC0

My friend Ben Collver recently loaned me a book called A More Beautiful Question, by Warren Berger, that arose from some ideas in Warren’s blog. The book is specifically focused on questions that spark business innovations, and his key questions boil down to “Why, What If, and How Might questions that can’t be answered with facts”.

Earlier this year I wrote a post about questions to ask to really get to know people better. And I’m familiar with the value of Appreciative Inquiry type questions.

So I’ve started thinking whether there is some larger question set and question criteria that might, in a broad range of circumstances:

• Identify the qualities that make for a good question
• Identify the benefits of asking questions (and when asking a question is most effective and interesting)
• Identify the types of questions that can best achieve these benefits

Over the past few weeks I’ve read everything I could get my hands on on this subject, and I think I’ve been able to synthesize the results down into something useful.

Building on and generalizing my earlier post, I think the 6 most important Qualities of a good question are:

They elicit honest, thoughtful answers rather than clever, safe, automatic or socially acceptable ones. They are not so personal, so complicated, or so distressing to think about that they make people hesitant to answer, but they are personal enough, challenging enough, and provocative enough that they elicit sufficient consideration, focus and passion to produce interesting, revelatory and possibly ‘useful’ responses. They don’t (for most people) require an enormous (ie discouraging) amount of time and energy to ponder to come up with a considered response. They encourage follow-up questions and deeper explorations into the answers and reasons for them. The responses to them achieve one or more of the six Benefits listed below. Both the question and the responses help us learn, and provide knowledge, ideas, perspectives, insights, and/or a deeper relationship with someone, that otherwise wouldn’t have been achieved.

And the 6 most important Benefits of asking, thinking about and responding to high-quality questions are that they help us:

Understand why things are the way they are Appreciate what we don’t know, need to know, and/or can’t hope to know Imagine novel alternatives Iteratively move an idea or process forward or deeper Learn important and/or interesting things about ourselves and others Encourage people to articulate and share what they know and care about

Building on Warren’s three types of questions to spark business innovation, I looked through several hundred examples of ‘beautiful’ questions that seemed to have the 6 Qualities, and discovered that they generally had similar syntaxes, depending on the purpose (and hence on the Benefit they potentially delivered). While a few offered more than one of the 6 Benefits, most were clearly designed to offer just one of the 6, so I’m listing them below, sorted by Benefit. Key Question Types:

To understand why things are the way they are Why is it this way? What’s really going on here? Why isn’t it that way? Why has no one (else) done… ? What’s working, and what’s not working, and why? Tell me a story about when things went really well. To appreciate what we don’t know, need to know, and/or can’t hope to know What’s the ‘problem’ we’re trying to solve (and is it real and do we really care about it)? Tell me a story about when things went badly. What do we need to find out? What are the risks of not knowing… ? Who else should we be talking with or involving in this? What are we missing? To imagine novel alternatives and workarounds What if we… ? What if things were different in that… ? Can we imagine a better state and then figure out how to get there? How might we… ? How might we begin to… ? What would be the first step forward? To iteratively move an idea or process forward or deeper What if we… ? Is this really true? Is this really important and useful? Is it actionable? What’s happening here? What are we missing? To learn important and/or interesting things about ourselves and others What would you do if… ?  Imagine that you… ? What if you could… ? What do you wish… ? What do you think/believe… ? To encourage people to articulate and share what they know and care about What do you think about this? How do you feel about this? What are your instincts telling you about this? What are we missing?

We should recognize that we’re not all good at coming up with good questions, and we don’t all have the imaginative and creative skills needed to come up with interesting or breakthrough answers. That means assessing who’s good at asking, and who’s good at answering certain types of questions, and drawing on those strengths — and building our own competencies.

Some of the above questions (eg What if we…?) may require great imagination to move beyond the incremental. And answering some of the other questions (eg How might we…?) may require a rare level of imaginative thinking to answer affirmatively at all. Poor questions and unimaginative or ignorant answers are of no value at all.

So here are a few scenarios where asking (and answering) questions might be of particular value, and some sample questions (of the appropriate Type) that might help. I’ve provided one scenario to address each of the potential Benefits (though obviously in any real situation more than one Benefit might be achieved by asking questions, so questions of many Types might be appropriate).

What’s particularly interesting is that sometimes just asking the (right) question confers some, or even most of, the value.

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Scenario: You, and someone you love and also work with, have recently been at constant loggerheads, disagreeing about what’s true, what’s good and bad, and what to do. You’re constantly triggering each other, resulting in anger, fear, tears and withdrawal.

Some Benefit 1 Question Types: Why has this been happening? What’s behind it? What’s really going on here? Why aren’t things smooth and easy and any upsets effectively and dispassionately resolved? What are we handling well, and why? What are we not handling well, and why? Tell me a story of when we were at our best. [then you’d move on to Benefit 2-3 question Types]

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Scenario: You and your family are entrepreneurs worried about climate change and the state of the economy. You are thinking of moving to a more sustainable place, but there seem practical obstacles to any of the ones you’ve identified, especially with your fledgling business.

Some Benefit 2 Question Types: What’s the real problem we’re trying to solve here? What do we need to find out to make an informed decision? What are the risks of moving, and of staying put, that we might not have contemplated? Who can we talk with to get a better understanding of the situation and options? What are we missing here?

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Scenario: You just learned that a new competitor for your small business is using cheap overseas labour and exploiting poor environmental standards overseas to offer products and services possibly comparable to yours for half the price. You have to innovate or your business may not survive. [In such a scenario, different types of questions might help achieve all six Benefits, but I’ve just listed some Benefit 3 & 4 Question Types.]

Some Benefit 3 & 4 Question Types: What if we did nothing? How might we create products and services that no offshore competitor could match? Is it true that this new company threatens us; is there anything we can really do anyway? What if the new competitor didn’t exist; what would we do differently? What are we missing here?

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Scenario: You and three other people with complementary skills have recently been approached about a potentially exciting new social enterprise opportunity. None of you know each other, and you’ve convened to see whether you think you might get along well together in such an operation, and personally.

Some Benefit 5 Question Types: (this is one of Ben’s brilliant questions, after seeing the work of a portrait photographer who often placed objects of note in her subject’s hands:) If you were getting a portrait taken, and the photographer asked you to hold something in your hand that told viewers something important about you, what would it be? (the famous Peter Thiel question:) What do you believe that no one else does? (and another famous question) What would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail? (and from my earlier post:) What do you wish you’d learned earlier in life? Of the people you’ve known in your life but fallen out of touch with, who would you most like to reconnect with, and why? If you had to write 200 words that summarize your worldview or philosophy of life, what would they be?  (and finally, a few adapted from Arthur Aron’s famous 36 questions:) Given the choice of anyone living in the world, who would you want as a dinner guest? What would you like to be renowned for? What are you most grateful for? What would you most like to know about your true self, or about your future? What’s on your bucket list, and what’s holding you back? If you knew you were going to die soon, what would you do with your remaining time?

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Scenario: Your small enterprise is dealing with a new challenge, but at your meeting a small number are dominating the conversation, and others are clearly feeling unwilling or incapable of proffering their thoughts.

Some Benefit 6 Question Types: (for the wallflowers) What are your thoughts and feelings on this (“Let’s go around the circle.”)? What are your instincts telling you? What’s your sense of what’s going on here? Are we missing something?

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There is, unfortunately, no straight-forward checklist of questions, and no easy way to know exactly what to ask. Everything depends on context. And the art of divining and asking the right question, and asking it the right way, can require almost as much imagination as answering the most wicked and challenging question. But perhaps a ‘roadmap’ like the one above might be useful in getting you started and pointed in the right direction. What’s your objective in asking a question in a particular context (ie what Benefits are you striving for)? What Types of questions might achieve that objective and achieve those Benefits? And, once you’ve arrived at what you think are the right questions, before you ask them, ask yourself if they meet the 6 Qualities of a great question.

 

(Thanks to Ben and to Tree Bressen for their contributions to this synthesis.)

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How to stimulate creativity in online teams: A 100% online process to design a blended learning trajectory

Joehoe! I am very proud of the result of three creative online sessions, resulting in a blended design. Sibrenne and I have just completed a design process for a blended trajectory with WWF. The special thing about this project is that the whole design process took place online. The members of our design team live in Namibia, Switzerland, Suriname, Nairobi and the Netherlands. It has produced a design that has been very well received, we have received many compliments about the process. It was for me the first time for me to do kind of creative process completely online - it was a challenge, but I thought it would be possible with clever design and tough facilitation. My own goal with this project was therefore to try and release online creativity. I used the book Creativity in Virtual Teams Key components for Success van Nemiro,  though the book is writing for semi-permanent teams and we were just a temporary team my experiences were quite similar.

What did we do?

The design team knew each other pretty well. We have planned three online sessions, each of two hours. In two hours you can easily dive into a topic. Three hours would be really demanding for concentration and the work schedules. In between there were a number of assignments, eg searching for cases or information. The sessions took place in a period of one month, if we had longer we could have planned more time in between the sessions, but we had a deadline.

Our tools set consisted of Adobe Connect in combination with Google docs and a Facebook Workplace group. The design team was used to Zoom instead of Adobe, but we chose Adobe Connect because of the whiteboard, and the ability to work in groups. Google docs worked well to prepare an assignment or to work on documents together. In addition, we used a Facebook Workplace for communication between the sessions, the choice for Workplace was made because it was already in use within the organization.

In terms of content we have worked with personas, images about the future, formulate learning objectives, inspiring examples of blended trajectories and building blocks. Although the idea was to shape the goals and building blocks together online, this has proven difficult. It needs thinking time. The co-creation process hence consisted of brainstorming together online in the design sessions after which we, as facilitators, worked out the elements for the next session. The result was discussed within the group.  This worked quite well as a process. Although we had a framework for the three sessions, we dealt with it flexibly. We discovered that the design team needed more time to discuss things than we had thought. In the second and third sessions, we therefore made a planning with the least important issue at the end. This gave the flexibility to drop it.

 What worked to stimulate creativity?

 There are a number of things that are crucial in my experience:

• Plan synchronous sessions where you can work together. We chose three work sessions in Adobe Connect as central co-creation places, but you could even 4-6 if you don't have a tight deadline as we had. By spreading the design sessions over time, there is time to work together intensively, but also to reflect in between or divide work. For me the fact that the synchronous sessions are key is very logical but in the book they warn that with email stimulates little creativity. Seems too obvious to me. 
• Make extensive use of "creativity techniques". We did several brainstorms on the whiteboard. This worked well because everyone could share their ideas at the same time. We also provided variety in working methods. Working in subgroups was very well appreciated. This was the modality in which we worked on the personas. One person even asked "can I be with her in a group" showing how enjoyable it can be to work in smaller groups. 
• Invest continuously in teambuilding. It was a bit of a trade off: investing in getting to know each other and a tight schedule. Hence we decided to start introductions in the Workplace group. We also choose not to invest in the team know each other's private lives, but learning to appreciate each other's professional view. For instance by asking for positive online experiences. The personal approach makes it attractive to participate. If you know each other, it is easier to build on each other's ideas. In the book about creativity they call this "creating the right climate". In the evaluation someone formulated it like this: "it was nice to meet each other"
• Online you need to structure and guide more tightly than face-to-face. "I appreciated the guided approach" we got as feedback. A tight role for one, preferably two facilitators is important. I wouldn't have liked to do this alone. This was a group that could easily exchange for an hour about content issues. We made sure that we move on and changed the talking modus. It may seems unfortunate to stop a conversation which is important and interesting, but it does benefit the energy. The chapter "leadership" from the book is dealing with this part.
• Show progress. Each session started with sharing the products from the previous session. This gave the team the positive feeling that the sessions were productive and that together we were in the process of designing of something solid and beautiful. "Keep team members and their efforts visible" is stated in Nemiro's book. In our evaluation participants said: "concrete outputs, great products"

So I'm quite proud with what we achieved in such a short period of time. If I'd had another online design process I would like to have a longer period, with more time in between the sessions. I would also like to try out working with image association, and other creativity techniques from Nemiro. And a very practical tip: make sure you can go offline for a short while after the sessions. Online sessions remain intense and demand a lot of energy. I used to jump on the bike to get a breath of fresh air and exercise.

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A Lesson for the Modern Workplace and School: Connection Before Content

A few years ago I had the privilege of attending a discussion led by Clayton Christensen on the future of education. As you may know, Christensen is a professor at the Harvard Business School who became famous for his work on disruptive innovation. So it was likely that this discussion would leave us feeling uncomfortable.

Christensen did not disappoint. He asked lots of challenging questions about the true value of higher education as currently constructed. What were residential colleges delivering that so exceeded the educational value of a free MOOC that those colleges could justify charging over $60 thousand or even over $70 thousand per year? And what about graduate schools? In this era of back-breaking student debt, what were they offering that the school of hard knocks could not?

I have been thinking a great deal about these questions since I started teaching in the M.S. in Information & Knowledge Strategy (IKNS) program at Columbia University. And those questions became even more pressing when I became Academic Director on July 1. How do we justify the time, effort, and expense required by our program?

It would take me a while to enumerate all the ways in which the IKNS program provides value so let me focus on one thing that became very clear this past weekend: we provide a laboratory in which our students can learn proven concepts and practices that equip them for effective leadership.

On Wednesday, August 22, our new cohort of students arrived at Columbia University’s Morningside campus for four days of Intensive study (the Intensive). Our original impulse was to stuff them as full of learning as was humanly possible in such a short time. As a practical matter, this would have required lectures from 9:00am – 6:00pm daily. We could do that. But was it the right approach?

Early in our planning, we realized that we needed to rethink our approach. Given that our program is demanding and very hard to complete without collaboration, the key was to spend the Intensive building the capacity of the cohort to collaborate. So we rethought everything. Rather than making them sit through hours and hours of lectures, we first had them develop their own self-awareness and then their knowledge of their teammates. Through a series of carefully designed individual and group exercises, they built an extraordinary level of trust and empathy. Then we could focus on learning collaboratively.

Our bet paid off. Within hours, these new students moved from being strangers to being friends. And, in that capacity, were more than willing to share their own knowledge and experience to help a classmate integrate new concepts and practices. In the process, they all learned an astonishing amount remarkably quickly. Arguably, more than they could have learned sitting passively through a series of well-intended lectures.

Don’t get me wrong. We had formal teaching sessions. But only after they were ready to learn together.

This experience is a timely reminder of an insight Nancy Dixon has shared with several prior IKNS cohorts: “Connection before Content.” Building on the work of Peter Block, Dixon observed that in the workplace, we all work better when we know each other and trust each other. But that knowledge and trust should not be left to happenstance. A thoughtful manager can help speed the development of professional relationship and trust through some intentional practices such as ensuring that team members connect (and later reconnect) with each other before diving into the agenda. This creates a foundation of goodwill and understanding that can act as a shock absorber for the necessary creative friction of teamwork.

If “Connection before Content” is true in the physical workplace, it is doubly true in the virtual workplace and in a virtual learning environment such as ours. The capacity to connect enables the capacity to collaborate and the capacity to share knowledge.

Thankfully, our newest cohort demonstrated this past weekend that they are well on their way to developing their capacity to collaborate with their classmates. NOW they are ready to learn in our program and share that learning with their colleagues at work.

All of us will be the better for it.

 

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Navigating From the Industrial Age to the Contextual Age

In the Industrial Age, scalable efficiency drove value creation. The bargain of the Industrial Age was that, if consumers wanted affordable products and services, we would have to settle for standardized products and services – one size fits all. You can have any color as long as it’s black. It’s a bargain that drove the growth of mass consumer societies in developed and developing economies.

And it shaped the scalable efficiency model that drives virtually all our institutions today – the key to success is to become more and more efficient at scale. Efficiency requires tight specification and standardization of tasks throughout the institution and tightly integrating those tasks into end to end business processes. It is very much supply driven, since the demand was willing to settle for standardized products. The winners would be those who could produce the most cost-efficient products at scale. In a world of standardized products and tasks, context was largely irrelevant, a distraction. Focus on the standardized product and process.

The world is changing

Now, that’s all changing. The forces shaping the Big Shift are progressively undermining standardization and efficiency (as conventionally defined) as drivers of value creation. As consumers, we’re gaining more and more power and we’re less and less willing to settle for standardized products and services – we want offerings that are tailored to our unique and evolving needs. On the supply side, digital technology is making it easier and far more affordable to produce highly personalized products and services. That’s leading to more and more fragmentation in product and services businesses, something that I’ve explored here.

As these forces play out, context is becoming more and more central to value creation. If we don’t pay attention to the circumstances surrounding a person or an event, we’re unlikely to understand how to create the greatest personalized value. Those who are most insightful and adept at understanding context, will be those who create the most value, both for customers and for themselves.

Exploring the many dimensions of context

So, what is context? In my experience, we’re much too simplistic in our framing of context. Context tends to be viewed as a snapshot of the circumstances immediately surrounding an individual or event. If you want to serve the needs of a consumer who is cooking a meal, it helps to understand what meal is being cooked in the moment and what that consumer values in terms of the meal that will be produced. Certainly that helps, but is that all there is?

Context across space. Context is fractal – there’s a never-ending series of broader contexts within which any specific context is embedded. Take the context of the consumer cooking a meal. Who else might be sharing in that meal? What is their broader network of friends and family and how might that shape the way they view this meal? What is the broader community that these friends and family reside in and how is that shaping the meal experience? What region and country does that community reside in?

Context across time. But that’s not all. Context doesn’t just expand across space at any point in time. It also expands across time – both into the past and into the future. We have a much deeper understanding of a person or event if we can situate them in a broader arc of experiences that are playing out over time. It’s especially valuable if we can anticipate how the context might evolve so that we can address needs that haven’t yet surfaced, but will soon become very important. In a more rapidly changing world, we need to understand that context is dynamic – it will evolve rapidly and could fundamentally change in a short time span.

Context as a complex adaptive system. We don’t just need to understand the components of context, we need to understand how those components interact with each other and connect into ever more complex systems and understand how those systems are evolving. In short, we need to understand context as a complex adaptive system.

Context within. A key element of these complex adaptive systems is people. We are complex in isolation but become even more complex in the context of our interactions with others. Our understanding of context will not be complete unless we delve deeply into the psychology of the people who inhabit the context – we need to gain insight into the emotions and perceptions of their context that shape their own behavior. They often don’t see the context in the same way that we might. But we often get consumed by the “objective” elements of context, those things which can be measured and lose sight of the much more qualitative human elements of context.

Context of others. And it’s not just about customer context. As our work becomes more and more tailored to specific problems and opportunities and as we expand our ecosystems to leverage the expertise and capabilities of others in a much more flexible manner, we need to better understand the evolving contexts of everyone in our ecosystems, including the people who work within our institutions.

Context to be shaped. Finally, let me also caution against understanding context only as a passive observer. We in fact have significant opportunity to shape contexts. First we need to understand the context as it exists on its own but, if we truly understand the dynamics that are shaping the context over time, we’re likely to see opportunities to shape that context. In fact, that’s one of the reasons why I‘ve become increasingly interested in the role of opportunity based narratives – as an inspiring call to action, they can motivate people outside our institutions to take action in ways that could significantly alter their contexts.

Welcome to the Contextual Age

In this context, let me return to why I resist describing our current era as the Information Age. Coming from Silicon Valley, I can certainly understand the fascination with the proliferation of data that’s generated by our digital infrastructures. But the data is only valuable if we use it to gain more insight into evolving contexts. My concern is that we can get easily distracted by the data and focus on generating more and more of it, without understanding how to use that data to create value. True to our scalable efficiency institutional models, we’re largely using that data to drive more efficiency in our operations.

What institutions will have the greatest impact in the future? It will be those who shift their focus and learn how to harness that data to generate greater insight into expanding levels of context and to see new opportunities to add value in those contexts. In fact, the ability to generate and access much of the data that’s relevant to context will increasingly depend upon the trust of the participants. One of the best ways to build trust is to show a deep understanding of context and, even better, to deliver more value tailored to that context. We’ll never build deep trust-based relationships with others without a much richer understanding of their context. Those who do not build this trust will find it more and more challenging to access the data in the first place.

That’s why I suggest describing our current era as the Contextual Age. Yes, data and information is a key enabler of value, but it’s the deep understanding of context that will generate the value. It’s the reason we described the previous era as the Industrial Age, rather than the Machine Age. Machines were a key enabler of value but it was the industrial organizational model that generated the economic value from those machines.

Seeing more

So, if we’re in the Contextual Age, what actions should we be taking to generate value? That’s probably the focus of another round of blog posts, but let me just quickly summarize some actions that will help to gain greater insight into context.

Look ahead. Don’t get consumed by snapshots of the relevant contexts. Make an effort to look ahead and understand the forces that are shaping these contexts and what these contexts might look like many years from now. There’s no better way to create value than to anticipate unmet needs.

Look around. Don’t just look at narrowly defined contexts. Expand your horizons to look at the contexts of those contexts and how they might shape the more narrowly defined contexts. Also, explore seemingly unrelated contexts to see what insights they might offer about the contexts you’re addressing.

Look again. We often take context for granted because we’ve seen it before. We need to adopt a beginner’s mindset and explore context as it it’s completely new. We may surprise ourselves and find elements of the context that we never noticed before.

Look within. Seek to gain insight into the emotions and aspirations of the participants in the contexts you’re addressing. Objective contexts matter, but what really shapes value is understanding what motivates participants in these contexts.

Look for impact that matters. As we gain more insight into what motivates participants in the contexts around us, we can begin to understand much more deeply what value really matters to them and how to achieve an impact that will be more meaningful to them.

Look together. Find a diverse group of people to explore contexts with you. Understanding contexts is not a solitary effort, it needs to be a collaborative effort. No matter how observant any one of us is, we’re likely to find that others, especially if they come from different backgrounds and perspectives, are likely to see things that we completely missed. And encourage the group to challenge each other in terms of what they’re seeing – I call it “productive friction.” We’re likely to see a lot more if we look together.

Act and reflect. Don’t just observe. Have a bias towards action so that you can learn more about the contexts by observing how they evolve in response to your actions. And take the time to reflect on what impact your actions had so that you can gain even more insight into the context.

Bottom line

If we take context seriously, that can be a significant driver of learning. In a world that’s more rapidly changing, going exponential, as some might say, learning is an imperative. We expand our horizons and better understand the forces that are shaping the environments within which we operate. To be clear, this isn’t about learning in the form of sharing existing new knowledge; it’s about learning in the form of creating new knowledge. Every context is unique and every context is evolving at an accelerating pace. To truly understand our contexts, we need to pull ourselves out of the classroom and immerse ourselves in the context, take action based on growing understanding of the context, and then learn even more as we reflect on the impact that we’ve achieved.

If we take this seriously and mobilize others to join us in this effort, we might begin to harness scalable learning. The paradox is that scalable learning is much more efficient than scalable efficiency in a rapidly changing world. But it’s far more – it’s a way to unleash increasing returns that come from focusing on delivering more and more meaningful value in the contexts that we’re addressing. Another key dimension of the Big Shift is the shift from scalable efficiency to scalable learning as the rationale for our institutions.

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The Open Office Revolution Has Gone Too Far

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As of this July, what do Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, and Associate Professor Ethan Bernstein have in common? They’ve all published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B.

Bernstein’s new paper, The Impact of the ‘Open’ Workspace on Human Collaboration, is featured in the newest issue of the renowned British research journal, the oldest scholarly journal in the world dating back to the 1600s. This latest issue was organized around the theme of how architecture impacts collective behavior.

As its title suggests, Bernstein’s paper empirically examines the effect of open office architecture on employees’ interpersonal and electronic interactions. Working with co-author Stephen Turban, who was introduced to Bernstein by the late HBS professor David Garvin, their study yielded surprising findings about the potentially negative impacts of removing spatial boundaries in the workplace. Professor Bernstein took time below to talk about the genesis of this intriguing research and its implications for the office architecture of the future.

Christian Camerota: How did your interest in this research first come about?

Ethan Bernstein: There’s a lot of interest in open offices because so many of us work in them, and we have very strong opinions about them. They were all the rage in the late 20th century, and academic attention in them followed suit. But most of those studies were based on survey data (self-reported, by definition) and intangible outcome variables (like employee satisfaction). Those are fine for understanding individual perceptions, but aren’t so good at quantifying real behavioral responses and organizational performance outcomes from open offices. The gap between perceptions and real outcomes has now become the battleground for employees and employers on this issue.

Much of my research is about the impact of workplace transparency (the observability of employee activities, routines, behaviors, output, and/or performance) on employee productivity and collaboration. So these questions interested me, as did new ways of answering them. Technology—in this case specifically, wearable technology—has enabled us to track individual or dyadic interactions at a really refined level. It’s not just “did you do this?” but “you did X, Y, and Z at this particular time with these other people.” If I was going to dive into researching open offices, I wanted to do it more empirically, tracking variables that were previously unfathomable to measure beyond proxies and guessing. The advent of wearables meant I could do exactly that.

“There’s a lot of interest in open offices because so many of us work in them, and we have very strong opinions about them”

What my co-author Stephen Turban and I were ultimately able to produce is the first work I know of that looks empirically at how interactions between individuals in headquarters change when employees move from cubicles to really open spaces.

Camerota: How did you decide to structure the methodology?

Bernstein:This study would not have been possible without my collaborator and close friend from the days of my doctoral studies, Ben Waber. After finishing his doctorate at the MIT Media Lab, Ben co-founded (and is CEO of) Humanyze, a company that uses sociometric badges to help companies use people analytics to improve how people work. These badges, and the multiple sensors inside of them, allow careful tracking of interactions in the workplace. Ben was kind enough to partner with us to help us measure, carefully and without affecting behavior, the interactions of individuals in two different company headquarters before and after a shift to truly open offices.

As with any research at HBS, we were careful: the same people were tracked before and after the move; we asked them to wear the devices for a long enough period of time that we were confident we were measuring meaningful, not idiosyncratic, differences while not going so long that we ended up capturing noise from other changes in the working environment; we were careful to compare apples-to-apples by ensuring, for example, that interactions were measured at the same time in the (quarterly) business cycle; and so on. If there was one thing our reviewers focused on, it was making sure that our results were robust!

Camerota:Did you have an idea of how the study would turn out?

Bernstein: Somebody once told me that business academics are the janitors of our field. Because out in the real world, practitioners do crazy and interesting things as managers and designers of their organizations. And then we, the academics, come around and try to figure out, rigorously, what had a positive and negative impact on performance and other behavioral variables. We collect and organize everything, plow through the data, and then develop theories that will help predict behavior in the future.

I don’t know that I had a clear hypothesis about this research question at the start. You hear so much said about how much people don’t like open offices, but there’s also so much said about the vibrancy of an environment when you open space and data up, about the collisions and interactions that will happen there. For me, the promise of open offices was at least as compelling as the traps. Would everyone bustle with productive collisions, or simply put their big headphones on and become numb to the space? In reality, I was torn. One of the best parts about being a professor is that you can study the questions that are most interesting to you and the business world. And the mystery behind this question was a key reason this was so interesting to me.

Camerota: If you were a Fortune 500 manager and you read this paper, what would be your reaction?

Bernstein:It depends on what you’re trying to achieve with open offices. My understanding, from speaking with real estate managers and architects, is companies’ conversations about the built environment tend to start with cost per square foot. If the question is how to lower costs, the answer is more people per square foot, and open offices will always have the upper hand on that dimension.

Nonetheless, many managers and executives seem to believe that open offices will both lower costs and improve interactions. My hope is that this research throws a bucket of ice water on the idea that there’s no tradeoff—that you will naturally both save in real estate costs and get more collaboration from this kind of design. If the cost motive were sufficiently strong, there might be other things a manager could do to mitigate the potential negative impact on interactions: hybrid or flexible spaces; train people differently; allow work-from-home time; set a tone and work culture that tries to deprogram us from our natural instincts to respond the way these organizations did. There are those who love open offices, in part because organizations mitigated the downside with other deliberate managerial actions.

“My hope is that this research throws a bucket of ice water on the idea that there's no tradeoff...”

That said, in general, I do think the open office space “revolution” has gone too far. If you’re sitting in a sea of people, for instance, you might not only work hard to avoid distraction (by, for example, putting on big headphones) but—because you have an audience at all times—also feel pressure to look really busy. Indeed, all of the cues in open offices that we give off to get focused work done also make us less, not more, likely to interact with others. That’s counterproductive, at least given the rhetoric of open offices. Architects aren’t clueless to this, of course. It’s just that the cocktail of other considerations, like cost per square foot and the promise of innovative collisions, got too powerful for them to try to pull back from those extremes.

Camerota: Any closing thoughts?

Bernstein: Ultimately, human beings get agency to decide how to use any space, so design is only part of the equation. I was recently in a meeting with several senior managers from a company known for its open office environments. One of them told me that the research did not reflect his experience—that they found open office spaces encouraged dynamic interactions and collective behaviors. His colleague then piped up and pointed out that all of the “noise” (as an indication of interactions) actually comes from behind the closed doors of the separate, team-based spaces. That should make us wonder: if all the noise is coming from behind closed doors, isn’t that where people are interacting and working well together? Wouldn’t you maybe want more of that?

Here is perhaps one way to summarize the shift in perspective that is suggested by this work. In the past, when it comes to workplaces, office design (and many other artifacts of organizational life) have catered to the observer and not the observed. Unfortunately, it’s the observed who make our organizations successful. So maybe everything, from office design to people analytics, ought to shift slightly in mindset to optimize for their work more often.

Related Reading:

Hiding From Managers Can Increase Your Productivity
Airplane Design Brings Out the Class Warfare in Us All
Why You Are Unhappy at Work

What do you think?

What's your opinion of the open office concept? Share your insights below.

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The Enthusiasms of Tom Peters

Unleashing the power of small, independent teams

Re-Building Trust in Our Institutions

I wrote about the trust paradox about 8 years ago. The paradox is that we all say that trust is increasingly important, yet trust is rapidly eroding in all institutions worldwide. How could that be? If trust is so important, why are we not building institutions and adopting practices that can amplify trust, rather than erode it?

In my previous blog post, I tried to explain why we’ve been unable to resolve this paradox. At a high level, my explanation suggested that the very practices that helped us to build trust in the past are now contributing to the erosion of trust. The harder we work at building trust, the more rapidly it erodes. I went into a lot more detail in that blog post on why this is the case.

In the intervening years, trust has continued to erode in all our institutions globally. What surprises me is that, while this erosion is widely reported, few people seem to be focused on understanding why this is happening, much less addressing the issue. Of course, there’s a tendency to focus on slices. Liberals and socialists tend to put all the blame on corporations and greedy capitalists. Free market advocates tend to blame the government. What everyone seems to ignore is that this is a much broader issue, extending across all institutions around the world. Effectively resolving this paradox will require re-examining the foundation of all our institutions, not just a segment.

In the years since I wrote my original post, I’ve continued to reflect on what is fueling this paradox and what will be required to resolve the paradox. I stand by the perspective that I offered in the original post but, as always, there are more dimensions to be explored.

Fear and trust

In my earlier post, I didn’t highlight the psychological dimension that is contributing to the erosion of trust. As I’ve discussed elsewhere, we are in the earliest stages of a Big Shift in our global economy that produces mounting performance pressure on all of us, as individuals and institutions. As humans, we have a natural psychological tendency when confronted with fear to magnify our perception of risk and discount our perception of reward, we therefore tend to shrink our time horizons, just focusing on the present and, as a result, we tend to fall into a zero sum view of the world (it’s a win/lose proposition) and trust erodes because at the end of the day we know only one of us is going to win and the rest will lose. At an emotional level, fear begins to prevail.
So, part of the erosion of trust is that we, as individuals, are becoming less trusting. But that’s not all.

The trap of scalable efficiency

As I’ve written elsewhere, all our institutions today have been built on a model of scalable efficiency. The key is to tightly specify all tasks, highly standardize them and tightly integrate them. It’s very much a command and control model – the best way to be efficient is to tightly control everything. It prompts institutional leaders to look inward because that’s where the efficiency gains are greatest. Since the key to efficiency is tight control, everything outside the firm is viewed with suspicion and fear – it’s far better to bring everything inside so that it can be tightly controlled.

In the scalable efficiency institutional model, asking questions is a sign of weakness. You don’t know the answer? Go back and read the manual.

All these tendencies are reinforced in an environment of mounting performance pressure. We need to squeeze harder and become more self-sufficient if we’re going to survive. We also need to get bigger as institutions so that we can squeeze everyone outside our institution harder as we gain more scale and bargaining power. We can’t trust anyone that we can’t control, so is it any surprise that those outside our institutions lose trust in us?

The big shift from scalable efficiency to scalable learning

If we’re going to extricate ourselves from this spiral of eroding trust, we need to undertake what I call “institutional innovation”, reassessing at a fundamental level the core rationale for our institutions. We need to challenge the prevailing rationale – scalable efficiency – and replace it with an alternative rationale – scalable learning. In a world of accelerating change and increasing volatility, if we’re not learning faster, we’ll be increasingly marginalized.

To be clear, when I talk about learning here, I’m not talking about training programs or reading books. That’s about transmitting existing knowledge. In a more rapidly changing world, the most powerful form of learning is creation of new knowledge. If we’re serious about creating new knowledge, it increases the importance of learning through action since we need the feedback loops to help us gain even more insight and ideas. It also increases the importance of learning with others since, no matter how smart any one of us is, we’ll learn a lot more if we come together with others from different backgrounds and perspectives in a shared quest to achieve growing impact. Most importantly, scalable learning requires us to reach out beyond our institution and to find ways to build deep-trust based relationships with others who have relevant expertise and knowledge so that we can learn with them.

A commitment to scalable learning helps to build trust because it inherently requires us to acknowledge that we don’t know everything and that we want to address questions, problems and opportunities for which we don’t yet have answers. In other words, we have to express vulnerability and, as I suggested in my earlier post, that's a key to building trust.

The role of narratives in building trust

That leads me to the topic of narratives, something that I have written extensively about, starting here. For those who haven’t followed me on this journey, I make a distinction between stories and narratives, even though most people treat these two words as synonyms. For me a story is self-contained – it has a beginning, middle and an end. Also, stories are about me the story teller or some other people – they are not about you in the audience.

In contrast, for me, narratives are open-ended, there is no resolution – yet. There’s some kind of significant opportunity or threat out in the future and it’s not clear whether it will be effectively addressed. The resolution of the narrative hinges on you, the listener. It is a call to action since your choices and your actions will help to resolve this narrative.

So, what’s the role of narratives in building trust? As I’ve suggested elsewhere, narratives express vulnerability. They’re a call to action because the individual/institution framing the narrative is at least implicitly acknowledging that they can’t address the threat or opportunity on their own. They need help and they’re asking for help.

And, by the way, opportunity based narratives are far more effective at building trust because they suggest that everyone can benefit from the opportunity. Threat based narratives play to the fears that many of us already have and tend to make trust more challenging – if my life or well-being is at stake, can I really afford to trust those who might be part of the threat? Opportunity based narratives, on the other hand, can be very effective in overcoming the fear that more and more of us feel as we experience mounting performance pressure. Yes, there are challenges ahead, but there's an opportunity that can significantly improve our condition.

At the institutional level, narratives also shift the focus from inside to outside. By (my) definition, an institutional narrative is a call to action to those outside the institution. It defines an opportunity that's inspiring and motivating for those outside the institution and calls them to come together to help achieve the opportunity. If framed in the right way, it also builds trust in the sense that the institution is not just focused on its own needs, but on the needs of others and is committed to investing time and effort to help others to achieve some meaningful opportunity.

Opportunity based narratives are also a powerful way to unleash scalable learning. These narratives define an opportunity at a high level, but tangible enough to be credible and inspiring. They leave a lot of room for learning what that opportunity truly requires and, most importantly, for learning about the actions required to ultimately achieve that opportunity. By focusing on a meaningful opportunity and inviting others to join together, narratives provide motivation to learn faster, together. As people find that they are learning faster, together, they develop a deeper trust in each other, as well as in the institution that framed the narrative that brought them together.

The bottom line

Institutional narratives can be a promising way to build and sustain trust with people outside the organization. They can also be a powerful catalyst in helping to shift institutions to a scalable learning mindset and model. But they cannot do this on their own. Avoid the temptation to pick up the phone and call your PR agency to craft a narrative for your institution. To be credible, narratives must be lived every day by the people in the institution. Words don’t persuade people to trust; actions do.

Opportunity based narratives will require institutions to embark on a transformation journey in order to be credible. Unfortunately there’s a very powerful immune system and antibodies ready to mobilize to crush any attempts to transform an organization. Never, ever under-estimate the power of that immune system. It is a key reason why all institutions have remained wedded to the scalable efficiency model for so long, even as evidence mounts that that model is less and less effective. To succeed in the transformation journey, institutions will need to find ways to scale the edge, rather than trying to transform the core. The good news is that a powerful narrative can be very helpful in scaling the edge much more rapidly and with far less resources than might have been required even a few decades ago.

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