Are you familiar with The Reduced Shakespeare Company? Their Hamlet in two minutes is very funny. And then they do it backwards.

The Reduced Version

I am not suggesting that for one second that my prose might be compared with Shakespeare’s masterpiece. Half-way readable would be good. Once the book is finished though, I will do a two minute version of each chapter. But for the moment, I am afraid you are lumbered with the full version.

I would really appreciate any comments, suggestions or questions.

The following is an exerpt from a draft chapter from the book I am writing just now. It is not blog-friendly prose but it will do to show why I think Bandura is not full of shit. What he says is linked to Karl Weick, who is other of my favourite theorists.

Social and Complex

“Organisations are essentially dynamic networks of relationships. Weick (1979) provides strong thought leadership in understanding how complex social interactions among people play out. He speaks about organising as flows of behaviour and describes the basic building blocks of organising in terms of “individual behaviours interlocked among two or more people, who change each other’s behaviour”. When two people engage, he calls the act of one person responding to another an interact. If the person who instigated the exchange then further responds, this is a double interact. Weick tells us that the double interact is the stable component in organisational growth and decay, and that inter‐locked behaviours are the elements that make up dynamic processes.

We are all individually complicated to begin with and we constantly change; our moods fluctuate, we feel more or less at ease in different places and with different people, we have sensitivities, agendas, positions to defend, cultural biases and personal values that influence how we communicate, how we react and so on. Add to this fluctuating and fluid personal change the influence we are able, or unable, to exert on each other and it is not difficult to see what happens when complex individuals try to communicate with and manipulate other equally complicated individuals.

Weick was far from alone in focusing on the highly‐dynamic and social nature of human systems. Argyris and Schon (1978) for example recognised organising as active and cognitive, and Schoderbeck et al (1978) described groups interacting within ‘organised complexities’, which they describe as:

“phenomena composed of a very large number of parts that interact in a non‐simple way”.

In Bandura’s social cognitive view of human activity, events are the outcome of continuously interacting behavioural, cognitive and environmental influences, which are inter‐locked and mutually shaped (Bandura, 1978). This ‘reciprocal determinism’ is a core feature of Bandura’s work. His stance is very much in opposition to behaviourist theorists, who believe that behavior is causally determined by what is happening in the environment, so that the environment “becomes an autonomous force that automatically orchestrates and controls behaviour”. Bandura disputes this. Although the environment does influence behaviour, people choose, through cognition, what they want to see and how they perceive their environment. They learn in four ways:

• Enactively ‐ by doing and experimenting

• Vicariously ‐ by watching other people’s experiences

• Socially – through conversation and by listening to the judgements of others

• Logically – by developing rules of inference and deriving new knowledge from reasoning.

As Bandura says:

“By their actions, people play a role in creating the social milieu and other circumstances that arise in their daily transactions”.

Self‐regulating, self‐organising and self-reflecting are core concepts in Bandura’s accounts of the constantly shifting, mutually adapting and dynamic engagements of people with each other and their environments. Bandura points out that complex interactions among behaviour, cognition and environment lead to probabilistic outcomes rather than predictability.”

Talking Shit?

Talking sense more like!

Why despite so much accumulated advice and good practice is there so much bad management practice around?

In the face of such tumultuous environmental change and organisational dysfunction, there are many voices calling for management re-invention and new paradigms. This obsession with novelty is delusional*. Bob Sutton says that anyone claiming invention of radical new models “suffers from arrogance, ignorance, or both.” The tendency in management literature to talk of 21st century management and new paradigms risks overlooking fundamental insights of trail-blazing theoretical thinkers from decades ago, from years of academic research and lessons learned from process innovation methods that took root in manufacturing from the 1980s onwards.

To be fair, there are workplace changes that really are new, like getting to grips with social networking and collaboration technologies. What are they? How are they used? Which technologies are used for what purpose? What are the social protocols associated with them? What are their implication for ways of working, and what does their use imply for skills development? Castells et al (2007) tell us that all technologies diffuse only when they resonate with pre-existing social structures and cultural values. Social networking and digital collaboration technologies might be new but knowledge around social and organisational issues are not.

We already know a lot about the social structures, organisational design and cultural conditions that have to exist to support these technologies in practice. We also know what issues are involved in making the transition to new ways of doing things. Technologies change but people essentially do not, or if they do they change much more slowly.

Many of the people promoting Enterprise 2.0 come from a technology background. While these professionals appreciate the need to understand how people engage with their work, how they work together, and what helps or hinders this, they may not be fully aware of the abundance of well-documented research that exists around work organisation design principles that would support these new technologies in use.

In his quest to lead the charge on re-inventing management, Hamel (2007) identifies what he sees as three of the most pressing challenges facing businesses today . These are:

“adapting to the pace of change, the need to make innovation everyone’s job, and the need to create a highly engaging work environment that inspires employees to give the best of themselves”.

The need to make innovation everyone’s job through continuous improvement is a core component of process innovation and control methods like lean and approaches to quality. There is a resurgence of interest in lean being linked to a “new era in management”. Fine et al. (2009) suggest that “substantial, scalable and sustainable” gains are achievable by focusing on the ‘soft’ side of lean. It is hard to see why this is news and it is also hard to appreciate how it is possible to do lean effectively, without integrating a culture of innovation and collaboration within everyone’s jobs. Lean requires all involved to think and act differently, actively participating in and taking responsibility for process integration and innovation. The clue is in the fact that many companies bring in external experts to instigate and oversee lean initiatives, which makes no sense if the people with the process knowledge, those doing the work, are not made responsible for sharing and applying that knowledge. Lean methods are receiving renewed attention in national and regional public sectors as the need to cut costs and demonstrate efficiencies following massive public spending, for example a focus on lean in the UK National Health Service.

Hamel is an influential management thinker. It is therefore disappointing that he makes no reference to the plethora of European research that exists on high-performance management systems (Cowling et al, 2008; Guest, 2006) and work organisation (Totterdill et al, 2009). These are rich resources for businesses looking for guidance on designing adaptive and emergent ways of working and managing, and finding help on making the transition to working practices appropriate for the environment the business is operating in. The lessons, principles and management challenges arising from the case studies Hamel references are necessary but insufficient. Among his “21st century management principles” are a number that can be traced back a long way.

That really is the point of the book I am trying to write (which is frankly driving me nuts). I am suggesting that there are first principles of organising. These have to be constantly assessed, interpreted and applied according to what is happening in the external environment and how most effectively to organise to meet customer expectations.

One of the principles Hamel mentions is variety and observes that “the broader the gene pool the better”. The gene pool from which this book draws is very broad indeed. It precisely because there is so much actionable knowledge being overlooked and not being heeded in practice that the book is being written.

The objectives of the book are to:

(a) review current workplace trends (in people, technology, place and space)

(b) review what we already know about effective management and high performance work methods

(c) show how first principles from what we already know can be discovered, interpreted and used in action to help businesses learn and adapt in today’s turbulent, fast-changing and connected business environment.

Whether it will make a blind bit of difference to anyone is debatable.

P.S. Contact me at @drmcewan if you would like the references

* Andrew Pettigrew and Evelyn Fenton (2000). The Innovation Organisation. Sage

According to the article, critical thinking skills include how to frame questions, how to question assumptions, how to look at problems from multiple perspectives, thinking through clashing priorities and ability to choose among potential options.

Business Education At Master’s Level

The Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education in the UK provides benchmark statements for undergraduate and postgraduate learning across a range of subjects, including Business and Management. Skills expected of all master’s programmes are listed on page 6 of the business and management document, and include the requirement to think critically, identify assumptions, evaluate options and deal with complexity.

I became aware of the QAA master’s-level learning characteristics a decade ago when leading a university-wide effort to  widen master’s level work-based executive education in a UK university (more about that in a while). I obviously cannot share internal university documents. What I can say is that the academic standards unit within the university produced a document that made the QAA criteria very explicit and comprehensive, including:

• the nature of the operational context (complex, unpredictable, innovative and with the likelihood of ethical dilemmas arising);

• cognitive skills (ability to deal with complexity and contradictions, to evaluate alternative approaches, and confidently synthesise ideas)

• key transferable skills (ability to engage critically with communities of peers, reflecting on own and others’ work, including skills in negotiating conflict).

So UK business programmes are already teaching people to think and learn critically? Well, probably not effectively – and that has to do with content-led taught programmes. It seems to me that the QAA’s intention for interconnectedness between subject knowledge and skills development is unrealistic without some element of practical work-based knowledge-in-action. Teaching business practice in the classroom is like teaching people to ski. For that you need to try, fall over, get up again, improve your technique, fall over some more and then  – voila, one day you remain upright.

How many people setting out on a taught master’s programme realise that the degree is being awarded for skills development as well as demonstrating competence in subject knowledge? I would bet not many.

Critical Thinking In Practice

“Once people begin to act, they generate tangible outcomes in some context and this helps them to discover what is occuring, what needs to be explained, and what should be done next. Managers keep forgetting that it is what they do, not what they plan that explains their success … meaning lies in the path of action … if you get people moving, thinking clearly and watching closely, events often become more meaningful.”

Karl Weick, Making Sense Of The Organisation, p346

The work-based approach my colleagues and I were promoting starts with the question ‘What do you need to do?’ Using a learning agreement and applying the criteria for critical thinking and key transferable skills to crafting learning outcomes and assesment criteria, a custom-designed programme is designed around achieving that objective for an individual executive or cohort.

The learning agreement is like an empty framework of learning goals, activities, learning outcomes, assessment criteria and modes of assessment – all to be specified to fit the needs and requirements of individual students. Customised subject knowledge is dropped into the framework in a just-in-time way, at the point where it is needed in action.

My experience is that value really comes from community. Of course facilitators, mentors, subject knowledge, tools, methods and analytical frameworks matter. But it is what happens when people support and teach each other that really makes the difference. Acting and learning within our social networks teaches us how to trust, take risks, judge, discern patterns,collaborate, resolve paradoxes, choose, negotiate, listen, understand cultural differences and engage in constructive conflict.

Now how can you begin to teach these things in a classroom?

Have Wiki, Will Collaborate?

Some people at the CIA are already well aware of the changed cultural imperatives. Efforts to use Web 2.0 technologies to foster a ’21st century intelligence community from the bottom up’ are well known. Old habits, power structures and vested interests take time to change even, it would appear, within an intelligence community needing to mobilise urgently in the face of networks of determined adversaries.

What To Do?

The speaker on the radio said an additional layer of structure was being put in place to co-ordinate information across organisational boundaries. Now there is nothing inherently wrong with hierarchy. It does depend on whether this layer is being added as an unwarranted panic reaction, or if exiting systems have been diagnosed to understand what the weaknesses are and a decision made that this is one valid response from among a range of alternatives.

If you follow the link above, you will hear Sean Dennehy and Don Burke of the CIA talking about their efforts to encourage grass roots adoption of information sharing on the wiki. They also talk about tentatively experimenting with piloting a top down, mandated approach where contractors in the intelligence community would be contractually required to submit information via the wiki.

This set me off speculating about what this additional layer might usefully do if it is not just to become an empire building, turf-defending layer of bureacracy. A hypothetical possibility for further cementing bottom-up and top-down approach might be collaboration through job design, which could be co-ordinated at the new supra-level.

Job Design

Job design emerged in the 1970s from Hertzberg ’s theorising on motivation. He claimed that the environmental factors like pay and working conditions which he called hygene factors, while important, are not motivators. Motivators, he said, are job characteristics that are consistent with people’s psychological need for recognition, achievement, responsibility and growth. Hertzberg differentiates between job enlargement and enrichment. He thinks enlargement, for example through job rotation or multi-tasking, is problematic because such efforts do nothing more than expand “the meaninglessness of already meaningless work”.

Although management interest in Hertzberg’s ideas was enthusiastic, few examples of job enrichment programmes were found in practice and the literature was criticised for its “missionary zeal” in reporting only positive results.* Coming back the present in the UK, the CIPD report Smart Working: The impact of work organisation and job design found that:

“Despite a large body of academic and management literature, a survey of members indicated a lack of practitioner interest in deliberately designing job roles.”

Collaboration By Design

So why am I suggesting that designing job roles has value? Because it now has huge potential in integrating work across functional, professional and organisational boundaries. The CEO of a generic pharmaceutical company I met at a conference is typical. He told me that one of his biggest problems was that the scientists were unable to collaborate effectively with people outside of their specialisms.

It must be a decade ago now that I was project managing a 26 partner, EU funded project on new ways of working for the UK Work Organisation Network. This particular example from a Scandinavian company impressed me:

A manufacturer of mobile handsets designing a new model for the Japanese market had to produce a handset that was to be crammed full of new functionality. Over‐runs would not be tolerated. Elements of the design process were normally allocated to separate teams in different countries. Problems then arose at the joins, late in development, when fitting the bits together.

Applying inside‐out‐thinking, the company created new design teams around usual problem areas from the start of product development. Giving cross-functional and cross-country team members joint responsibility for overcoming problems and integrating functionality as the project developed was highly effective. The company delivered all that was required and on time.

A by‐product of this joint, cross‐boundary job design within very tight time‐scales was there was little opportunity for politics. Instead, the teams worked together to maximise learning opportunities.

The integration challenge is significant for knowledge workers. According to Dr Kjetil Kristensen collaboration is a dominant characteristic of work today. Specialists and subject matter experts now often spend up to 80 percent of their time on different types of interactions.

“The inherent multidisciplinarity of today’s complex products, services, projects and processes implies that collaboration is a cornerstone of knowledge work. Hence, collaboration should become an essential part of company strategies and policies.”

This includes designing workplaces with appropriate collaboration spaces, enabling technologies and supporting operating principles – including where necessary top-down job design and bottom-up responsibilities for negotiating the complex multi-disciplinary interactions to meet joint task completion.

A Final Observation

In a retrospective commentary in 1987 on an earlier article, Herzberg wrote**:

“The key to job enrichment is nurturing client relationships, rather than functional or hierarchical relationships.”

He explains what he means by giving the example of various trades supplying services to one another in aircraft maintenance. This new focus on process, relationships and service (absent in his earlier article) is crucial. This is exactly the philosophy of process integration in approaches like quality and lean, where participants interacting  across internal and external processes regard each other as customers expecting and receiving service. Herzberg talks about ‘who do I serve’ rather than ‘who do I report to?’.

If businesses have until now shown little interest in job design for motivation, they would be wise to develop competence in  applying job design principles for collaboration and integration in the knowledge economy. It turns out that what is good for people  is also good for business. Linking back to the US intelligence community, the new structural layer could see itself in a servant capacity to the community. Pigs flying anyone?

* Blackler, F.H.M. and Brown, C.A (1978). Job redsign and management control. Publisher Teakfield Ltd, Farnborough.

** Herzberg, F. (1987) One More Time: How do you motivate employees? Harvard Business Review, Sept – Oct 1987.

For me 2010 will be the year of intensive doing, helping businesses develop management and learning environments that enable them to do what they do better or differently.

This sounds insultingly simple. Of course it is not, otherwise we would not be reading about so many failures of governance in 2009, plus events like GM going into bankruptcy.

Here are some of the things other people have said that have stayed with me:

“China and India are phenomenal innovators. We won’t just go down, we’ll go down big time if we don’t watch out. We have to think of the clever new ideas and be ahead of the game while we have the affluence and economic growth to invest in way‐out concepts.

That includes the way we work.”

Professor Cary Cooper, Director, Jan 2005

That was in 2005 and this selection is from 2009:

“Governance practices are, by their nature, organic, dynamic and behavioural rather than akin to black letter regulation. But it is critically important to know how the boards of entities that best survived the storm were different or “better” than the boards of entities that were effectively taken over by the state or lost their identity through forced merger.”

Sir David Walker, Para 1.16 Review Of Corporate Governance In UK Banks. Nov 2009

“I strongly believe that the real underlying cause of all the problems was simply this – a total failure of all key aspects of governance. In my view and from my personal experience at HBOS, all the other specific failures stem from this one primary cause.”

Paul Moore, ex-head of Group Regulatory Risk at HBOS plc

“… in GM this is a specific case. There is a theory-driven set of practices that are about monitoring people below, incentivizing people above, and always trying to make sure that you set up the relationships so that you extract everything.”

Yochai Benkler, www.edge.org

“The history of modern business is the history of GM, and vice versa … if the success of GM defined the management agenda for 20th century, then its failure defines the management agenda for the 21st.”

Professor John Kay in the Financial Times

Reasons To Be Cheerful

Innovation and co-ordination processes embodied in lean systems provide base knowledge about how to facilitate knowledge development and sharing through continuous innovation and problem-solving. In addition, decades of case studies and research on lean and quality have left us with a legacy of learning on effective collaboration across process boundaries – including across organisational boundaries.

Cross-boundary collaboration and knowledge sharing are crucial competitive requirements in today’s globally fragmented and networked knowledge economies. The picture emerging from research on employee engagement is that people seek jobs that give them opportunity to learn and contribute.

We now have unprecedented opportunity to build on what we already know about creating operating and management environments that nurture continous innovation, improvement and collaboration. What was previously localised continuous innovation is now powerfully enhanced through electronically connected knowledge networks, globally distributed through inter-linked social structures. Every person a business employs now comes with an associated and electronically-connected network of distributed knowledge, influence and contacts.

What a phenomenal opportunity for astute businesses to think about how they can take advantage of all this creativity and brainpower. In doing so, they will be putting in place ways of working and managing that people find engaging. And ways of governing that not only protect the viability of the oganisation but that also ecourage a tranparent and open culture, where people can challenge without fear of bullying or recrimination.

Now that is something for businesses and workforces to be optimistic about. Here’s to a connected  and energised 2010 for us all.

We were recently very fortunate to have Alistair Moffat from Nokia speak to the group about his experience and involvement with a set of interventions intended to create the conditions for a new culture to emerge within NSN, a new entity with a 60,000 strong globally distributed workforce and formed from the merger between Nokia’s Networks Business Group and the carrier‐related businesses of Siemens Communications.

Mergers are fraught with emotional turmoil and uncertainty, and are usually accompanied by redundancies; this merger was no different. Research consistently indicates that a majority of mergers fail and that inadequate efforts to recognise and deal with cultural mismatch significantly contributes to post‐merger power struggles and conflict. Given this particularly challenging context, how did he and the team go about creating the conditions for a new culture to emerge?

Culture At NSN

The view taken of culture at NSN is that it is socially constructed and emerges in time from the struggle for shared meaning via participation and dialogue throughout the entire workforce. Alistair described the steps and activities involved in supporting a company‐wide conversation throughout the 60,000‐strong workforce of NSN against the backdrop of the merger.

The intention from the outset at NSN was to create the conditions for the emergence of a new culture, rather than merely merging existing legacy cultures from Nokia and Siemens. Underpinning the process of cultural emergence is a long‐term commitment, realistically five to seven years, to giving all employees the opportunity to participate in culture formation as confident, self-determined adults capable of constructive conflict and disagreement while remaining mutually respectful. A further challenge for NSN was how to facilitate participation among so many people spread throughout different geographical regions.

The process started with exploratory conversations with groups of ex-Nokia and ex-Siemens people, using visual images, story, metaphor and dialogue, around how they perceived the corporate cultures they had come from. Further details are available in an article published on the Ashridge Business School website. Visual outputs from initial exploratory meetings were the presented to the Top 300 senior executives. Conversations among senior teams led to engagement and commitment to the cultural process, plus the emergence of an embryonic set of cultural indicators.

The next crucial step was to engage the rest of the global workforce, the majority, in dialogue about the tentative cultural indicators. Social networking technologies provided the opportunity to create an online place, The Culture Square, where company‐wide conversations could take place and where people were encouraged to talk freely and anonymously about what the Top 300 had said and issues arising that concerned them. There was initial suspicion and worries about being monitored. When the Chief Executive said that no‐one would get fired for what they believed in, people began to realise that he was as good as his word and participation began to build. These conversations were often difficult and angry as people voiced their feelings about the merger.

Shadow Conversations

I have long been a fan of Ralph Stacey and his promotion of the concept of shadow and legitimate systems in organisations. Shadow systems are the informal, unofficial and self‐organised networks that co‐exist and are interlinked with legitimate systems. This is what Stacey says about shadow systems:

“I am arguing, then, that it is primarily the state of the shadow system that determines whether or not an organisation operates in the space for creativity … (the shadow system) lies at the edge of disintegration or anarchy.”

And of course shadow systems can also be destructive, characterised by skulduggery, sabotage and resistance.

Honouring Shadow Conversations

It was not easy for senior management to listen to a deluge of criticism, even if it was considered legitimate. Despite the difficulties, it was felt that these conversations would be taking place privately anyway. The Culture Square provided a safe outlet for people to let off steam. Alistair spoke about “honouring the shadow side of the process”.

Now I don’t know about you but that thought stopped me in my tracks. Honouring shadow conversations. Isn’t that great? And the resilience that must have taken. Senior management are after all people with emotions and sensitivities just like the rest of us.

There were calls from some senior executives to pull the plug on Culture Square conversations, retreating to parent-child relationships when the going got tough. This was resisted and the CEO’s commitment to parent-to-parent relationships paid off. Communities within the workforce effectively and collectively imposed their own code of conduct to online behaviour, allowing negative comments but drawing the line when comments against senior people became personal.

Providing a public forum for surfacing fears became a symbol of management commitment to listening and caring. The Culture Square came to represent trust and inclusion, and became a powerful tool since equality of participation was guaranteed regardless of position in the company. It revealed issues that were bothering people and allowed management to engage in dialogue, participate and try to understand.

In time, exchanges and contributions moved more in the direction of possibilities for the future. A key indicator of moving forward came when some people chose to reveal their identities rather than remain anonymous. Next came requests from The Culture Square participants to meet face-to‐ face, followed by responsibility for facilitation passing from the culture creation team to one of the active site participants.

There is a paper about creating the conditions for emergent cultural processes at NSN in publication at the moment. I will let you know as soon as I have details of the journal and issue number.

Taylorist Buildings

He made the fascinating observation that Taylorist offices influenced by Scientific Management, with its unremitting focus on efficiency, have resulted in unsustainable workspaces that are under‐occupied and unsuitable for emerging business conditions. Dr Duffy calls office buildings ‘misleading and obsolescent units of analysis’ and wonders why self‐reliant people should be constrained by them. Knowledge nomads use their clout to choose how, where, when and with whom they work. They are certainly not constrained by walls and place.

Taylorist Management

It is not only building design that is having to escape the strangling dominance of Taylorist influence. Despite unstoppable and converging forces in the external business environment, management practices and attitudes, also significantly influenced by a century of Taylorist approaches to management, remain stubbornly resistant to change. The parallels between under‐utilised workspace and under‐utilised human intelligence and creativity, arising from the separation of thinking and doing, is striking.

Taylorist IT Deployment

Taylorist attitudes are also influencing IT deployment in the UK. Although take-up of information technologies in the UK is high, one of the publications from the Future of Work, a six-year research project involving twenty two universities, drew attention to the fact that business have the choice of using ICT as an enabling technology deployed in combination with high‐performance HRM measures or as monitoring tools to control workforces. At the time the research was being reported on five years ago, the authors of Managing to Change? commented that the trend toward control without workforce participation was “deeply disquieting”. In their view, there is a substantial risk that low cost, automatically generated monitoring and control information, not shared with those being monitored, would be likely to become damaging and divisive.

Something’s Got To Change

IT, HR and FM need to mobilise urgently. The functions need to be having conversations internally and across professional boundaries. Stepping back to think about how things might be done better is not easy. The drag of the status quo is a major obstacle and of course businesses tend to become more controlling in recessionary conditions such as we are currently experiencing. Nevertheless, concerted effort at dialogue and understanding is now urgent. We have communication and collaboration tools at our disposal like we have never had before, and highly effective techniques for visualisation and decision support. There are no excuses – only the will to recognise the pervasiveness of the Taylorist stranglehold and to overcome it.

As Darwin was reputed to have said, “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.”

Changing World, Changing Workplace? for my own business, and three others for the Global Mobility Network, which I co‐facilitate with Dr Marie Puybaraud, Surviving The Global Cultural Mash‐up, Using Place To Breach Cultural Boundaries and Workplace To Zero?

But my big news is that after dithering about it for a year, I decided eventually to submit a book proposal and am chuffed to say that Gower have accepted the proposal without amendments. The book will be about smart working being integrally linked to knowledge and learning.

FIRST WAVE SMART WORKING

The quality movement and lean methods of 25 and more years ago, which constituted the first wave of smart working. As I said exasperatedly in a previous post, where I was commenting on McKinsey stating the bleeping obvious, if there was no ‘soft side’ there would be no lean. Process‐based methods rely on the willing compliance of shopfloor operators to reveal their tacit knowledge, and participate in problem‐solving and cross-functional collaboration throughout the value chain, including across organisational boundaries within supply eco‐systems.

SECOND WAVE SMART WORKING

It is increasingly apparent that a perfect storm of global technological, demographic, economic, structural and environmental trends are driving the necessity and possibility of a second wave of smart working. This was all before the global financial crisis. Regulatory drivers will add to the need to look at how work is organised.

Whereas CI 1.0 in the first wave was continuous improvement, CI 2.0 in the second wave is about collective intelligence.

WHAT ROLE HRM?

What really interests me is – what is the role for Strategic HRM in the second wave of smart working? HR was entirely absent, in my experience, first time around. Lean, JIT, Quality was then driven then by hands‐on and very visible on the shop‐floor production directors, who created the operating, learning and management environments. First line supervisors and team leaders were given prime responsibility for day‐to‐day implementation, including overseeing social interactions within their teams as well as responsibility for technical and health and safety issues.

For the me the key is in the network. Of course understanding and satisfying individual intrinsic motivation and rewards continues to be crucially important. The fact is, though, that individuals work as part of a personal social network that extends beyond organisational and even national boundaries. The tacit knowledge of the first wave is now on steroids, amplified and augmented through culturally diverse personal networks. What’s not to like?

A quick example. I hired the services of a young animator last year. The first thing he did in the morning was to log onto Skype and say his hellos to all his friends. He continued to chat with them throughout the day. How did that benefit me? It kept him engaged. And when he needed to show me work in progress, it had already gone out to his network for comment. So I was getting the benefit of the talent distributed among his personal network.

This post is being written in haste. If anyone is interested in further thoughts on knowledge management and enterprise social networking, here’s a link to a paper I wrote on the subject for Johnson Controls Global Mobility Network. I think a major role for strategic HRM will be in understanding and creating learning environments, and knowing where value is being created and who is creating it.

Benkler wrote of GM:

“They monitor people below and incentivise people above”

To my mind, this needs to be exactly the other way around but, like turkeys voting for Christmas, why would senior teams willingly subject themselves to scrutiny? I think many would, at least many of the ones I know would.

What Set Me Off?

An item on the BBC Radio Four news this morning about the ineffectiveness of Boards of Enquiry following the failure of ageing aircraft, with associated loss of service personnel lives. The point being made was that these boards repeatedly missed systemic failure. What was also said was that the boards are subject to interference from top military personnel.

I have been thinking for a while about senior management influence on organisational culture. The testimony of Paul Moore, ex-head of Group Regulatory Risk at HBOS plc to a government select committe makes a great case study. Mr Moore says:

“I strongly believe that the real underlying cause of all the problems was simply this – a total failure of all key aspects of governance. In my view and from my personal experience at HBOS, all the other specific failures stem from this one primary cause.”

The testimony is really very detailed. Mr Moore claims in his statement that he and his team “experienced threatening behaviours by executives .. in overseeing their compliance with FSA regulations.” He reports being prevented from having some things properly minuted by the CFO. He also said:

“But sadly, no-one wanted or felt able to speak up for fear of stepping out of line with the rest of the lemmings who were busy organising themselves to run over the edge of the cliff behind the pied piper CEOs and executive teams that were being paid so much to play that tune and take them in that direction.”

It is not often we get to hear what apparently goes on in some companies. I have however seen and been on the receiving end of vile management behaviour implicitly sanctioned at the top.

I have also been thinking about agency theory and stewardship theory in influencing executive behaviour but I will leave that for another post.

Looking Back At History

The E2.0 movement is just another manifestation of a shift to new forms of work organisation. We were here twenty years ago, as traditional manufacturers wrestled with the process, organisational, structural and cultural upheavals in making the transition to adopt lean manufacturing, TQM, TPM, Continuous Improvement, and JIT. Then the limiting factors were in complying with safety-critical rather than financial and legal responsibilities. Different contexts, remarkably similar issues.

This is what the E2.0 advocates are missing:

• There is a continuing and overwhelming plethora of national research available into policy debates over work and working life issues, for example the Swedish Worklife 2000 Programme co‐incided with the Swedish presidency of the European Union, plus a series of Norwegian and Finnish programmes. In the UK, and off the top of my head, the large‐scale 1998 and 2004 Work Employment and Relations Surveys provide detailed data on UK workplace trends, barrers and enablers, as did the six year long and involving twenty two universities, ESRC‐funded Future of Work research programme.

• An abundance of EU-funded, collaborative research among European countries. This is just one that I was part of, MOSAIC, which explored social, physical and technological aspects of mobile working. I project managed a twenty six partner research project into new forms of work for the UK Work Organisation Network. There are loads of case studies from that research and many others on the UK WON website.

• Finally there are the case studies buried deep within academic journals, written in unreadable style and riddled with jargon. Underneath all that, there is just so much insight that might help us as we grapple with making the transition to contextually appropriate E2.0 structures and working practices.

Dennis asks for case studies. This one from EMC is a cracker. It is an honest account of struggle, involving the same old, same old management and cultural resistance. You have no idea how familiar it all sounded.

What’s this post about? I am musing on how the blogs and sources I read are rich in parallels, loops and connections. Several articles from this week changed my view on the future of large corporations.

Future Of Higher Education

I was responding earlier this week to an article in Fast Company entitled How Web-Savvy Edupunks Are Transforming American Higher Education. Asking what business schools are for now that quality content is free and widely available, I said that business schools create the opportunity for shared experience in a place and time. Strong networks and personal bonds develop. There is also the prestige associated with many institutions. For these reasons, there will always be a demand for expensive business school education.

Then later in the week @josiefraser sent a link via Twitter to a blog from George Siemens reflecting on the the future of universities. George asks a similar question, “What does higher education look like when all content is freely available?” He goes on to say:

The importance of university reform should call us to do our best thinking. But, what is the response by our community and quasi-researchers like Don Tapscott (see The Impending Demise of the University)? Primarily rhetoric with a blend of nonsensical proclamations.

Universities aren’t going anywhere. They are not going to disappear. Recent UNESCO (here and here) and World Bank publications (here) speak to the centrality of universities in international competitiveness.”

Christensen’s concept of disruptive innovation does not apply. Business schools and universities are in no way threatened by edupunks and open education, but what the edupunks do offer is wider choices from among increasingly innovative alternatives. Higher education will be both traditionally taught and open.

Future Of Large Corporations

I had been thinking recently that large corporations might be under threat. This is what I said:

“Why do valuable knowledge workers need to be employed at all?  Social media and digital communication technologies are enablers. But it is other trends and shifts that are tipping the balance of power in favour of knowledge workers becoming self-determined. “

Then another interesting link came to my attention via Twitter from @markgould13. In Why We Need Big Organisations, John Hagel, John Seely Brown and Lang Davison ask:

“So, corporations increasingly need talented individuals to survive. But why would talented individuals join or remain in large corporations? Why wouldn’t they simply strike out on their own and leverage the digital infrastructure to connect with other individuals?”

They predict that “large-scale corporations will remain a prominent feature of our professional landscape: because they will be best positioned to develop and support scalable, long-term, trust-based relationships”.

Now that is a seriously interesting statement. And it immediately links in my mind to a key reason I think people will continue to pay for expensive business education. It is partly about access to networks and the creation of long-term trusted relationships, which are additionally associated with institutional prestige and belonging.

This post is getting far too long. The comments on the Hagel et al article are thoughful and thought-provoking. One is from Daniel Pink, who says:

“My sense is that organizations, like so many things*, are going bimodal. We may be seeing an ecosystem of the very large and the very small — nation-straddling megacorps and folks in their home office — and not much in between. The ends grow, the middle hollows.

*See http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.05/start.html?pg=2″

Final Thoughts

Business schools and large corporations are changing but they are not going away.

Just as ‘edupunk’ companies expand options for business education, so there is increasing choice for knowledge workers. My own experience as an independent knowledge worker is that I have the possibility of developing long-term relationships with people in a number of large institutions, giving me the benefit of ‘belonging’ while retaining independence.

(1) Literature, art and history tell us that humans have always been connected.

(2) Social media give us new and evolving ways to connect, discover and inspire.

Evidence From The Middle Ages

I am currently reading Roads To Santiago: detours & riddles in the lands and history of Spain by Cees Noteboom. He describes a book he sees in the museum attached to the cathedral in El Burgo de Osma. He specifically describes a map of what they thought the world looked like in 1086. Noteboom says:

“This Codex Beato is Carolingian in its colouristic treatment and ornamentation, Arabic in the application of yellow and ivory and geometric patterns, Lombardian in the interlaced arabesques and animal motifs, Irish in the spiralled braiding, Islamic in the predominance of red and black, while eastern influences manifest themselves in the Mozarabic stylisation…

But we know how profound the pollinating influence in those days was, that the world was already a world, that people communicated and saw each other’s art, that artists and craftsmen travelled and inspired one another.”

Evolution Of Social Media

I was alerted to Om Malik’s post about the evolution of blogs through a Twitter micro-message, a Tweet, by Jon Husband. Om says:

“Today most of us walk around with newfangled smartphones that are nothing short of multitasking computers, essentially content creation points.

And they’re networked, which means creating and sharing content is becoming absurdly simple to do. With the increased number of content creation points –- phones, camera, Flip video cameras, Twitter -– we are publishing more and more content.”

Applications like AudioBoo and VideoBoo allow us to “capture information at the point of inspiration”, as Ajit Jaokar and Tony Fish proposed three years ago in their book Mobile Web 2.0. The iPhone and applications being developed for it now given us a glimpse of what is possible to do, create and share using smart phones.

Discovery And Inspiration

I wrote a post a while back called Thinking About Discovery. I have been thinking about that a lot lately. Until recently, my dominant feelings have been frustration and incomprehension that we know about effective, smart working and managing and yet so much of this knowledge is overlooked in businesses. Talent, skills, knowledge and willingness to contribute are going to waste.

The view I am choosing to take now is, “Great that means a journey of discovery for businesses and enterprises stuck in old attitudes, ways of managing and working”.

Like the medieval artists who travelled, discovered and were inspired by each other, we now have amazing tools and technologies that let us discover and inspire each other. What an opportunity businesses now have to create learning architectures and social collaborative environments where people can experiment with insights gleaned from beyond their organistional boundaries, learning and being inspired from different practices and cultural influences.

Trying to explain and describe new ways of working doesn’t work. Like trying to explain the business value of social media, you just have to explore, discover, experiment – and experience.

If you are in any doubt about the business value of Twitter, this is an example of how it can be used to share business intelligence and keep on top of trends. I digress.

From the Fast Company article:

” “The Internet disrupts any industry whose core product can be reduced to ones and zeros,” says Jose Ferreira, founder and CEO of education startup Knewton. Education, he says, “is the biggest virgin forest out there.”

Ferreira is among a loose-knit band of education 2.0 architects sharpening their saws for that forest. Their first foray was at MIT in 2001, when the school agreed to put coursework online for free. Today, you can find the full syllabi, lecture notes, class exercises, tests, and some video and audio for every course MIT offers, from physics to art history. This trove has been accessed by 56 million current and prospective students, alumni, professors, and armchair enthusiasts around the world.”

The article goes on to point out that despite making quality content available for free, MIT are still are able to charge “upwards of $189,000″ and outstanding student-loan debt in the US is $714 billion.

What Are Business Schools For?

Well, it is not for quality content. Apart from institutions like MIT making their content available online and for free, state-of-the-art reseach is no longer restricted to higher education institutions. The internet is awash with free corporate and government-sponsored research. And yes of course there may a danger of corporate bias. Even taking that into account, there is so much quality stuff available that patterns quickly become visible from freely available meta-evaluations of studies.

If not content, then what?

A huge advantage of business schools is that they create the opportunity for shared experience in a place and time, an intensive experience at that, from which strong networks and personal bonds develop. There is obviously also the perceived prestige associated with many institutions. And it is for these reasons that there will always be a demand for expensive business school education.

Business Schools And Edupunks

Business schools also teach people how to think. This capability, experience and knowledge is no longer confined to higher education institutions. The UK-wide criteria for postgraduate learning, which particularly interests me, is published and available. Using these criteria, the subject knowledge, wide experience and academic training of people in my partner network, plus the sort of social technologies referred to in the article, it is now possible for The Smart Work Company to offer another way to participate in a Master’s-level learning programme, the mb*MBA.

I had intended to talk about Christensen’s concept of disruptive innovation. On reflection, The Smart Work Company and the businesses mentioned in the article are not disruptive in the sense that business schools are in any way threatened. They will will not be displaced. They continue to be attractive and will in time adapt the way they do things. What the edupunks do offer is wider choices from among increasingly innovative alternatives.

The Smart Work Learning Place

One of the things I want to do with The Smart Work Company is to build on this experience and create a learning network for senior executives online. And so The Learning Place is just about ready. Well, the software has been ready for a while. It has taken me some time to sort out practicalities, like Terms and Conditions and membership criteria.

Who Is It For?

The profiles of the people I have in mind are modelled on the sort of senior people I have been working with since 2000. They are all executives, in public and private sectors nationally and internationally, who have a specific strategic thing they need to do. This is probably something they have not done before, and there are significant consequences for their enterprise and for them personally. Examples in the past three years are from sectors as diverse as construction, engineering design, energy, retail banking, public sector, executive search and telecommunications. The executives who become members of The Learning Place will have their own unique and widely diverging strategic challenges they are dealing with in their workplaces.

What Is It For?

The Learning Place is an online resource for busy executives to challenge their strategic thinking and action during a time of change. This is what the recent press release said:

“In fast changing times – senior managers and directors need time to think. Sadly, a relentless schedule of travel, meetings, emails, phone calls and deadlines leaves little time for reflection and independent feedback. A lull may happen within an airport lounge, between meetings or at some random time of the day.

The Learning Place is waiting for the member to log in and think in a way which suits them. The Learning Place gives the member time to breath, learn, think and reflect in their own time and in their own way – on their own and with peers. They are helped along the path with tools, techniques and resources which are right for them. There is no set course or ‘one-size-fits-all’ format. This is learning and development as it should be – social, natural, flexible and human.

What Topics Will Be Addressed?

That will depend on the executives who are members of The Learning Place. I have structured The Learning Place into four ‘lounges’, as a way of loosely sign-posting conversation and resources on:

Smart Working

Smart Strategising

Smart Collaborating

Smart Managing

I have also condensed my knowledge of research and theoretical insights on organisational dynamics, enterprise responses to them and current workplace trends into 5 ‘first principle’ modules: Smart Basics. This content and structure is suggestive to get things going. Members will add content and direct conversations.

Won’t People Be Too Busy?

That of course is a danger. The conversations and content on The Learning Place will need to provide real value to attract and keep the attention of busy, high-profile people. This is just some of the value I hope will be created:

• Emotional support. Listening to my friends, many of them are worn-out. We have all experienced temporary insanely busy periods. It appears that this has become widespread and unrelenting. Recession, threat of redundancy, overwork – how can people be expected to innovate and be effective under these conditions?

• Getting different perspectives and ideas is energising; I know this from my experience of co-facilitating the Global Mobility Network.

• Access to research. Of course the professional institutes are a source of current research. What The Learning Place offers is an inter-disciplinary research perspective. IT, HR and Facilities Management need to be working together much more than they currently do.

• Most valuable of all, perhaps, will be the opportunity to explore the practical implications of workplace trends, smart processes, and tools and methods.

I am obviously interested in hearing from you if you think you might fit the profile I have described, and you think you could gain value from The Learning Place. Membership is by application and will be free until the end of December, 2009. After that, an annual subscription fee applies.

I am also interested to hear from you if you think you have experience of implementing strategic change in finance or pharmaceuticals. Please contact info@thesmartworkcompany.com if you are interested in knowing more.

“If the future is inherently unpredictable, it follows that a single, organisation-wide ’shared vision’ of a future state must be impossible to formulate, unless we believe in mystic insight. Any such vision that managers put forward is then bound to be either a dangerous illusion or an interpretation of what has happened with the benefit of hindsight”

Business As Whitewater Rafting

I have written elsewhere, in How Organisations Work And Don’t Work, about hearing Jim Balsillie using the metaphor of whitewater rafting to describe business, which he describes as a series of optimisations. He compares it to white‐water rafting. You know roughly the direction of the course but energies are constantly in the moment to keep the boat afloat and heading in the right direction as quickly and safely as possible, while avoiding the rock that has just come into view.

Balsillie says the same thing as Stacey about claiming intention after an event; if things turn out well (and randomly) the tendency is to believe that the outcome was intentional.

Man On Wire

I found myself thinking about this the other evening, watching Man on Wire. It has been a long time since I was so enthralled watching a documentary. It is the story of how a young Frenchman, a tightrope walker, pulled off an audacious stunt and walked between the Twin Towers in New York. So much about the tale was absorbing. As well as watching it for its own sake, I couldn’t help drawing business comparisons.

Again, I have said elsewhere that I have an issue with leadership. I do not follow leaders and I do not expect people to follow me. Work with me, yes, but follow implies subservience. In my mind, of course.

The wirewalking stunt was only possible because of the burning passion and obsession that drove the walker. And it was fascinating to see how he enlisted the help of friends and strangers. The friends out of loyalty and the strangers because they thought the deed was outrageous and was also a two-finger gesture to the authorities.

The logistics and practicalities of getting the ropes anchored, illegally and dodging past security, were mind-blowing.

But the thing that really interested me was how the enterprise came to happen at all. He began dreaming about it six years before, even before the towers were built. Such excitement when the towers were actually built. Then he spent months planning and simulating the conditions he would face, including getting his friends to jump up and down and shake the rope to try to dislodge him. This was to try simulating the effects of wind.

But the thing that really, really interested me was what he did as time got closer to the event. He built physical models of the towers. He visualised where the anchor points for the rope would go. Making it ‘real’, physical and observable was important to him.

But the thing that really, really, really interested me what was what he did in the hours before. He drew on walls; he drew what he was soon to face. He drew to make it real, to work it out, and he drew to make his thoughts and emotions visible. And if I remember correctly, abandoned his first attempt. He knew he was not ready.

Corporate Vision A Dangerous Illusion?

I have a vision for The Smart Work Company. It has been so long in the gestating that I wonder if I am fooling myself that it will happen. Having a vision for what I want the business to be is of course not going to make it so.

Having a vision, though, helps me plot and plan. And after all that, I might not succeed. Who knows what will happen? But I am now steadily getting everything in place, and pace is gathering. Like the ropewalker, I know what I want to do and am busy assembling all the bits. The next thing is to see who wants to join me.

I imagine the feeling of watching the business take shape might be something like stepping out on the wire. The fear will disappear and the exhilaration kick in. Corporate vision for me is not only possible, it is crucial.

Anyone who knows me professionally may be sick of hearing me refer to the daddy of all inspirational books on organising, the always and increasingly relevant Social Psychology of Organising by Karl Weick. My edition was published in 1979, McGraw Hill. I have referred to it, unsurprisingly, in previous posts. For example in Reflecting on Chaotic Action and Management Reformation.

The Social Psychology Of Organising

Why? At first I thought I might review and summarise what the book is about. I can’t. It is so dense with insight that my copy is defaced with highligher marks and asterisks on every page. Where would I start?

It is the opposite of so many prescriptive, easy to digest business books that profess no silver bullet solutions and then proceed to do just that. Weick says:

“This entire book … has been written to evoke lines of theorizing from the reader, to serve as grist for the reader’s free association mill and to release lines of arguement that previously may not have been given much attention.

The book is about ways of talking about organisations, and it is intentionally focused in this way in the belief that as ways of talking and believing proliferate, new features of organisations are noticed.

That’s why the book is more concerned with metaphors and images than it is with findings.”

He talks of organising as being about flows of human experience and says that relationships, rather than people, are the critical control points in an organisation. Again he says:

“Most ‘things’ in organisations are actually relationships, variables tied together in systematic fashion. Events, therefore, depend on the strength of these ties, the direction of influence, the time it takes for information in the form of differences to move around circuits.

The word organisation is a noun, and it is also a myth.

Events linked together, that transpire within concrete walls … are the forms we erroneously make into substances when we talk about an organisation. Just as the skin is a misleading boundary for marking off where a person ends and the environment starts, so are the walls of an organisation. Events inside organisations and organisms are locked into causal circuits that extend beyond these artificial boundaries.”

Isn’t that great?

Social Networking, Social Media And Workplace Trends

So here we are in 2009. The world is changing at warp-speed. Physical walls are no longer relevant; social networks extend across demographic, cultural, geographical, organisational and professional boundaries. Weick refers to the time it takes for information to move around circuits. That is now instantaneously.

The world changes, technologies change, contexts change. Human dynamics do not. A final quote from Weick:

“Conformity, independence, and social pressure are mainstays in any sets of concepts about human interaction, and all of the dynamics associated with these processes unfold in the cycles where two or more individuals hammer out their differences concerning what’s up in the organisation and what should be done about it.”

So much food for thought. What do you think?

I was asked to produce a thought provocateur piece late last year for a one-day seminar as input to the report The Smart Workplace in 2030, which was just recently published.

Atomised, Customised and Kaleidescopic

In my short talk, I spoke both as an observer of workplace trends and from my own experience. I said that work is becoming atomised and kaleidescopic for knowledge workers. I can customise my day according to what mood I am in, what I need to do and who I need to be with. Taking the four categories of knowledge work (socialise, focus, collaborate, and learn) from the Gensler UK Workplace Survey 2008, I gave examples of different places I work and why.

Focus: I can ignore emails, not immediately answer calls, set my Skype presence indicator to Away and not check into Twitter if I need to focus working from home. What I like about working from home is that it is comfortable and the decor is oviously to my taste. Working from home too much drives me stir-crazy and I have to get out, especially if I need inspiration or contemplation. In which case, I take myself off somewhere like the members area at the Royal Festival Hall, where I can sit and think while looking out across the river. There are loads of quiet, inspiring places like this. A friend was telling me that there is a cafe in the Royal Opera House. Must check that one out.

For me, I focus best in isolation but also focus when collaborating with colleagues.

Collaborate: So where do I collaborate? At client offices, sometime we isolate ourselves in a room and plan, review, create, brainstorm, write  – and mess around a bit looking at shoe websites. That’s working, by the way. Our brains are processing stuff. My excuse anyway. We also collaborate in open plan offices, in which case we need to keep the noise down.

I also go to One Alfred Place to meet and to collaborate. The physical surroundings are important to me. I used to be a member at the Institute of Directors but I found it male and stuffy. As an aside, an Economist special report last year, Nomads at Last, on the consequences of mobile telecoms noted that so-called third spaces can be isolating places. Although people might be gathered in the same place, they are all busy communicating via digital devices to others elsewhere. These spaces can be lonely and noisy.

Socialise: Not as often as I would like these days, I go to Tuttle on a Friday morning. This is the most interesting, eclectic, intelligent and influential business network in London. I go because of the calibre of people I meet. When it began, the group used to meet at The Coach and Horses in Soho. It has now moved to the ICA – how cool is that?

Learn: Continuous learning is just so much a part of what I do, on my own or socially, and I do not go anywhere special to learn.

As work becomes more knowledge-based and less location-dependent, place assumes great significance as an enabler of what we do and what we wish to communicate about our identity.

The Employment Contract

The Washington Post article reports on ‘teleworkers’ and implies that they are a mix of free agents (entrepreneurs) and employees. This topic deserves a separate post. I want to quickly note here that not many people have yet picked up on the employment contract as an issue. In all the scanning of workplace trends I have done over the past three years, I have read a lot about talent, the war for talent, the need to engage talent etc. I have also noted the rise in employers conceding to employee demands flexible working, including choice in where, when and how people work. Some of this rise is a response to legslation in the UK but is also as a response to employee demands.

Perhaps now in the recession is not a time when people feel that they can jump ship, but my question is – why do valuable knowledge workers need to be employed at all?  Social media and digital communication technologies are enablers. But it is other trends and shifts that are tipping the balance of power in favour of knowledge workers, who now have access to technologies that enable them to connect, share, and collaborate in their efforts to become self-determined. I think this is a trend to watch and one that will challenge how employers engage with staff they wish to retain.

If they wish to retain them as employees. Perhaps permanent employment contracts are on their way out? Just thinking out loud …

Nothing New Under The Sun

Much of what I read from the big business schools and consultancies is repetitive. My own blogs have become repetitive. A lot has been said before and is frequently nothing more than the same old stuff re-branded. See for example Freedom-based management (my doctoral thesis explored how to optimise local autonomy, self-determination and self management with simultaneous, centralised co-ordination).  Time to apply what is already known to real, practical business challenges.

Executive Work-Based Learning

I led the effort to grow the Master’s by Learning Contract at a UK university, establishing it as a university-wide provision across all faculties, and was also a personal learning consultant to executives on the programme. This gave me wide experience of the andragogic, emotional and practical challenges of Master’s level work-based learning in the UK and Russia.

Whereas in a traditional Master’s degree people get shoe-horned into experiencing a common curriculum, with some flexibility in choice of electives, the work-based Master’s degree turns the engagment with students on its head. This starts with the question ‘What do you need to do?’ and a custom-designed programme, or set of programmes, is created around achieving that objective for an individual executive or cohort from within a specific company. The learning programme is pulled together within a learning contract.

Learning Contracts

A learning contract is a highly flexible framework for structuring learning. It can be completely customised or can be generically written so that one framework can be interpreted by multiple individuals for their unique situations. It can be based entirely on work activities or it can include traditional taught modules. The learning contracts I have used contain learning objectives, outcomes, activities, resources, assessment criteria, and modes of asessment – artefacts showing that learning has taken place. This is usually a thing produced at work – report, diagram, a signed-off technical specification, spreadsheet etc, accompanied by a critical reflection.

In this method content is accessed in a just-in-time way, as it is needed. I said in my last post that I help senior executives discover what works for them as they make the transition to new ways of working and new strategic positions. I see myself like the Mary Poppins of the business world; I have a big metaphorical carpet bag of content, sources, tools, frameworks, approaches and research, and I dig into this and make suggestions to executives as to which of them I think might be useful. If not useful, no problem. We try something else.

There are regular points of stopping and checking along the way. Where are we? How do we know? What’s working or isn’t working? Again, how do we know?

Thinking And Doing

That is basically it:

(1) Diagnose (2) Framework (3) Do it (4) Facilitate individually and collectively – suggest content, modules, sources, tools as required (5) Peer support – sharing, talking, challenging, laughing, collaborating, explaining etc (6) Reflect, iterate and complete the programme.

At Workplace 2017, Dr Frances Westley spoke about needing to develop new methodologies able to synthesise individuals’ specialist disciplinary knowledge while integrating it with those of other disciplines. These new methodologies also need to promote thinking about collaborative learning within work systems full of paradoxes and dilemmas. Using the conflicting dimensions of safety in speed in sports cars as an illustration, she emphasised that managers regularly have to reconcile the horns of multiple dilemmas.

In The Opposable Mind, Roger Martin calls this integrative thinking, which he defines as:

“The ability to face constructively the tensions of opposing ideas and instead of choosing one at the expense of the other, generate a creative resolution of the tension in the form of a new idea that contains elements of the opposing ideas but is superior to each.”

Engaging in knowledge production demands higher-level cognitive skills and the ability to act effectively within our social networks, including risk-taking and assessment, making choices and judgements, pattern discernment, inter-personal skills, negotiation, active listening, cross boundary and cross cultural collaboration, and conflict management.

My experience tells me that the learning contract framework and work-based learning processes are highly effective and flexible structures for developing the sort of thinking and doing skills required for knowledge production in complex operating environments.

In my last post, I said that I would explore in this one why I think looking back at the first wave of smart working helps us to see how we can respond to current workplace trends.

I also quoted Gary Hamel’s pressing challenges for the future of management, two of which are:

• the need to make innovation everyone’s job

• creating highly engaging work environments.

It just so happens that these are core attributes of lean manufacturing. Effective lean manufacturing systems make innovation everyone’s job through continuous improvement (CI) and problem-solving. They also incorporate physical layouts of machines, uncluttered working environments, and management systems that support CI and collaboration across sub-process and organisational boundaries.

There is an abundance of research telling us what works and doesn’t work in building engaging physical and organisational work environments that enable learning cultures where making innovation is everyone’s business.

DISCOVERY

At this point, I had intended to take two specific examples of the implications of current workplace trends – distributed work implying workforce autonomy, self-determination and self-organisation plus enterprise fragmentation implying cross boundary collaboration and integration – and show how principles from lean process management show us how to do this.

Then I realised something. I was boring myself writing this post. I felt like I was going on and on. Yak, yak, yak. So what? And if I was bored writing it, the chances would be very high of your being bored reading it.

I have a friend who said to me recently, when I was regurgitating some piece of research, that he didn’t care what anyone else has said and done. He values discovery and finding things out for himself. My response was ‘But that means re-inventing wheels and not learning from experience’. The more I thought about it, the more I realised that he is right. Which of us learns from other people’s experience, without trying things out for ourselves? I mean really learn and understand?

ABUNDANCE AND SCARCITY

I enjoyed reading Confused of Calcutta’s reflections on abundance and scarcity. In this context, it seems to me that the scarcity is experience of taking other people’s insights, trying them out and either rejecting them or adapting them to make them work personally and uniquely. Other people’s insights are abundant.

This blog post really has been emergent. I did not mean for it to lead so neatly to the next post but it does. Although I have spent a long time, at least the past three years, monitoring workplace trends and creating a sort of curriculum (a series of short modules I am calling Smart Basics), I am not in the content development industry. I am in the service industry, helping top teams and senior executives to discover what works for them in making the transition to new ways of working and strategising.

So more about that next time.