Surviving workplace disruption #1
Collaborative workspaces are all the rage at the moment. Client organisations are looking for them and commercial developers and interior designers are providing them at speed. But moving offices can be stressful and disruptive to work lives.
We hear about a ‘roam and work’ ethic which involves removing cellular offices and making dedicated desks a thing of the past. We read about desks, booths and lounges arranged into ’village’ formations, tree beds designed into floors, corridors mimicking city footpaths and hanging plants providing a sense of outdoors.
I wonder how the occupants of these new offices, specifically designed for collaboration, will adapt to these new environments. I have heard from colleagues and clients that, for those used to having their own space, their own desk and a place they ‘belong’, the idea of ‘roaming and working’, sitting at a different desk every day and not being able to personalise their space with photos and nic-nacs may be quite confronting. As I heard from a client facing workplace disruption yesterday, “even though we brought people along every step of the way in designing new processes, now they have to work differently our people tend to revert to their familiar, comfortable way of relating to others, telling rather than listening, taking orders rather than taking accountability. Can you help us?”.
One client is watching a new building going up across the street that will house four different government functions. The aim is for the staff of these four departments to use the new layout to work better together. The planners and designers are creating new spaces to support collaboration because this is in their brief. Simultaneously with the space planning, workers in these new collaborative spaces need the opportunity to rethink the way they will do their work in this new environment. Giving staff an opportunity to get their ‘fingerprints’ on both the new environment and a new way of working before the move is important to them understanding and achieving the desired outcomes.
Twyfords has developed some Golden Rules for Thriving in Workplace Disruption. One of those is to avoid the success fantasy. In the office scenario I’m writing about, this success fantasy might play out as “Once the challenge of the move is over, everyone will settle down into a new and more collaborative way of working together.”
We suggest that:
- sharing expectations for new ways of working across functional boundaries in the new spaces .... because this creates ownership ...
- paying attention to feelings and relationships ... because this affects behaviour ...
- having time to try and test new ways of working before and after the move ... because this builds confidence ...
can make a difference.
If you’d like any advice or ideas about how to set functional teams up for success in any new collaborative way of working ... give Twyfords a call.
Are you planning to act or acting to learn?
Most of us would be familiar with the management aphorism: “If you fail to plan you are planning to fail”, and there is a lot of truth to it. But there is a darker side to this saying as well, one which many of my clients struggle with. Clients like Bob.
Bob is a project manager, smart, competent and successful. He works in a large water company, but there are many like him in all sorts of companies around the world. Bob has a track record of managing a range of difficult projects from planning through to delivery. Most recently he took on the exciting task of working with a diversity of stakeholders to improve water quality and amenity across a large urban water catchment. Bob knows his organisation can’t deliver outcomes on its own, and he is committed to collaborating with others to create lasting solutions together.
But a few months in, progress wasn’t as fast or as easy as he had expected. In fact, he was very worried that the collaboration would fall apart. People seemed unsure, unhappy, frustrated at the complexity and messiness of the task. Bob felt it too. But, being an experienced project manager, Bob gritted his teeth and applied himself to the problem of how to ensure this collaborative group delivered outcomes.
Going back to first principles, Bob decided he needed a plan of action, setting out the steps he and his collaborators would to take in order to get outcomes in a timely fashion. So he sat down with some smart colleagues to create the document.
But there was a problem. He actually didn’t know what the next steps should be. He wasn’t sure what the problem was – is it lack of commitment or lack of clarity or lack of resources…? He wasn’t sure who should be a part of the problem-solving process or who wanted to be a part of it.
What did Bob do? Being a good project manager, he decided to gather more data so that he could answer some of these questions in order to write the plan. But hang on, what data did he need? Where should he get it? What will that data mean..? He needs a plan for this…
Poor Bob was stuck in the space of not knowing; paralysed by the need to get the answers in order to proceed. His powerful urge to line up the ducks on this project was clashing with its unknowability.
The lesson is that planning can only take you so far when collaborating in complex situations. Rather than plan in order to act, Bob found more success when he began to act in order to learn. In practice, that meant Bob and his collaborators confronting and acknowledging the inevitable uncertainty of the situations they faced, but not getting paralysed by it. Instead, they tried things, developing small experiments to run. And together they learned from those activities. Some things didn’t work so well. Other things were more effective. All have been useful to help shed further light on how to tackle this catchment management problem. Only by taking action has the group learned what it takes to make a difference to their waterway.
Taking action when we don’t have all the answers can be scary, but Bob has now been working this way for many months as part of our program, and together he and his collaborators have created actions that no plan could have covered. They have learned not to plan in order to act, but to act in order to learn.
If only we had a new meeting structure.....
In my past life at a major manufacturing company, I was frustrated in a job I had supporting the leadership team in one part of the business.
The team met regularly and always struggled to have effective meetings. They were getting bogged down in detail, meetings ran over and out of time, and generally were ineffective.
The boss's response was always about the structural elements we needed......and the wait for that certain something that would "fix" things":
- if only we can get a new meeting structure.....
- if only we could follow the agenda......
- if only people would come better prepared....
- if only we were all really clear on our roles in the team....
The pattern seemed to be a desire to get the structure sorted, then everything would be OK and we would be functional!
Unfortunately nothing we tried made any real difference!
In looking back, I've realised that I was seeing a common pitfall when tackling complexity- seeking a simple solution when faced with uncertainty, which instead delivers delay, frustration and avoidance.
I call it lining the ducks up.
Unfortunately, in complex situations there is not likely to be a simple answer or answers, and it’s a fallacy that you can get all the ducks lined up- or that you even know what all the ducks are!
In this case it seemed that there were a few other ducks that we were avoiding- the less pleasant ones around poor relationships, lack of trust and competition.
In such circumstances, a more useful approach is to accept we may not understand the problem, resist the temptation to 'nail' the answer, and live with a little uncertainty while trying something.
An emergent approach is more appropriate as it recognises that one cannot order or design the pathway forward in such situations.
With hindsight we may have been better to step back from the boss's single-minded focus on the "right" approach (in this case the meeting structure and logistics), and given space to learn a bit more about what else might be happening (poor relationships, etc).
We might then have tried some different actions like listening a bit more, checking assumptions etc, and perhaps been more functional as a team!
Perhaps if we had set the ducks free....
A Parent's Guide to Complexity
So there we were last night, finally in bed with reading in hand when my wife put her book down, paused thoughtfully for a moment before saying “the boys seem happy at the moment”.
And it’s true. They do. They seem happy, increasingly resilient, even a little more confident in themselves. Beat the drums and sound the trumpets! Which parent of teenage boys doesn’t want to be able to utter those words from time to time. Of course we want these things for our boys, but there seems to be a problem. We don’t really know how to deliver them.
We feed them: check
Clothe them: check
House them: check
Slip them some spending money from time to time against our better judgement: check
Drive them to parties and pick them up in the wee small hours: check
Provide access 24/7 to endless Netflix and computer games: check
Educate them and give them a range of experiences to draw on: check
Yet despite this, there have been times when each of them has been deeply unhappy, even intractably so. How can that be when we are so obviously ticking the teenage boy happiness checklist?
Raising boys is complex. (Raising girls they say is even more so God forbid). So this of course means that we poor parents are sentenced to long years of uncertainty, worry, intermittent feelings of failure and an abiding sense that ‘we must be doing this wrong’.
Those feelings are understandable and probably unavoidable. After all, they come with the territory of complexity. Yet I take comfort from this idea of creating confident, happy boys, comfortable in their own skin and ‘well-rounded’. We may not know what it’s going to take to get them there but we know that this is what we are working towards. Sometimes, as last night, it seems to be quite close. Other times it seems unattainably distant.
The point is of course that we are aiming for something. Our loosely-defined destination guides us every day as we learn this parenting thing. While we can never be sure how to get there, the idea is like a light on a distant hill inspiring us to act and learn together, even when we are most unsure.
So if you are facing something complex, whether raising a family or delivering something at work, identifying your light on the hill and keeping it in sight can help you navigate the uncertainty.
Now can I go back to reading my book?
Experimenting with a new thought....... by Bridget Marsh
As a coach my role is to help people think differently so they can behave differently....... so I started to think about what makes it difficult for people to think differently.
One of the possible causes is how we are taught in school. In school there is usually a correct answer and we are rewarded for knowing it. We are seldom rewarded for questioning ... anything, particularly authority. Is it any wonder that in work we find this hard.
I'm not sure why I always found it difficult not to question, however I did. So maybe I've always been challenged by the idea that there is a right way to do things.
In my working life I also challenged the 'right' way to do things.
When I was Head of School at Unitec School of Performing Arts we wanted to create a degree that was different, that would give us a significant point of difference. I suggested a number of quite radical ideas including offering a degree where all the streams of acting, dance, choreography, directing, writing were taught together. This was certainly a novel idea and took some time for my team to accept.
I also suggested that we could challenge the usual way of assessing students.
At first this was rejected but eventually my team chose to do it on their actual performing skills... not what they could write about acting and dancing.
What that experience highlighted for me was that even people who are normally creative in their work seemed unwilling to question or experiment with different ways of doing things.
I feel it is natural to question why things are done in one way and not another. So it also seems natural to me to question others on their thinking. But it doesn't make it easy for them to necessarily think differently.
To think differently starts with a desire for a different end result. What we are currently doing isn't getting us the results we are looking for. And a willingness to accept that we could be wrong....maybe not wrong, rather just not succeeding in the way we want to succeed.
So I get clients to experiment.....try a new thought. Like trying on new ideas they need to see how it feels and imagine how they might behave with that new thought. It doesn't change behaviour immediately because, depending on how long we have been thinking in the old way, we quickly revert to old behaviours. However slowly over time we can change our behaviour. And by behaving differently we get new results. The next step is to ask if these new results take us closer to the end result we are looking for or further away. If it takes us closer then we can do more of the change. And so it goes.....one thought at a time.
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by Bridget Marsh- Twyfords NZ Associate
Just try stuff…. (or let’s call it experimentation)
One of the best explanations I’ve heard of how to work in a complex environment was from a client last year when I asked her how she now approached her project.
She said that rather than trying to plan out the answer (which was her previous approach), she said she just tries something, checks to see if it is getting her closer to a useful result, and then either does more of that if it seems to be helping, or tries something else if it isn’t.
I was struck by the simplicity of her explanation, and find it a very useful way to describe an appropriate response to the demand for action that is ever present when tackling a difficult to solve dilemma.
I reflected on how we have learnt the value of “experimentation” with a recent issue facing us internally. We were reviewing our marketing approach and were frustrated by a lack of traction with our messaging with potential clients about what we do.
So while our past tendency and experience was to be sure an alternative strategy was robust and would guarantee success, we recognised that we are facing a complex dilemma where cause and effect are not obvious, and probably unknowable, and so perhaps we could just try something different without risking the our whole approach, and see what effect it might have.
We had some reluctance and anxiety in trying that, given the uncertainty and risks inherent in not knowing what might happen (heaven forbid- we might turn off potential clients or push them away!)
So we decided to try something different- a significant change to our messaging.
But we also added some discipline-
- checking that we had an overall outcome in mind (a “light on the hill” reflecting our sales goals)
- making the change manageable – keeping it “safe to fail” where we feel we can manage the risk
- Making the changes quickly and over a short time period (so we can evaluate quickly)
- And identifying what evidence and outcomes we needed to see over that period to either keep promoting the change, or for us to try something different
This experiment is still a work in progress, but it just feels like the right way to go when we are facing a complex issue. We know from bitter experience that being certain about the way forward has led to disappointment and frustration, and we are increasingly confident that just trying stuff makes more sense.
Is Best Practice Water Management a Myth?
Managing urban water challenges lies at the heart of a sustainable future and drives my work in the sector. As a coach, I talk to many managers and leaders grappling with difficult water projects, learning from both their successes and their failures. In my blog of November 2018, I shared some of the things I’ve learned about mindsets to enable great collaboration. In this blog I will explore one specific element of mindset for water managers.
The mindset I strike often is the idea that we must apply ‘best practice’ to our projects. But this can be a trap for us all. I have learned that when facing complex, multi-party water challenges, the myth of ‘best practice’ can limit, rather than support, progress.
What do I mean? There are many urban water and sanitation initiatives around the world, and from these are emerging many models and frameworks for how to achieve water outcomes. A good example is Sanitation 21, published by the IWA and partners in 2014. This document lays out a comprehensive, detailed ‘map’ for improving sanitation in the developing world. It includes process flow charts and step-by-step instructions and is explicitly an attempt to reflect best practice.
Its great strength is its careful detail about how to go about sanitation projects. Yet, I believe that without a collaborative mindset, this detail can also be a great weakness.
If you are building a water treatment facility, you will find a best-practice, step-by-step guide very useful. You know what the problem is. You know what the endpoint will look like. And if the construction plans have already been proven, they should work just as well here. But changing the long-term sanitation practices of a community is a qualitatively different type of problem. In this situation, there are multiple variables, only some of which we can be aware of and lots of players with different drivers and concerns. There are unique geologies, geographies, governance practices, climatic conditions, budgets and habits. There are social interactions and practices that we can’t possible understand completely. In short, every project is unique and what worked last time may not be appropriate here. In this context, if we attempt to rigidly apply our ‘best practice’ approach we are very likely to fall short.
A key weakness of the best practice myth is that by focussing on delivering a program we greatly increase the likelihood that we are doing this program ‘to’ the people we most need to work ‘with’. This is where mindset comes in. If I feel I have a clear, smart process to follow then my task is to apply it to the best of my ability. But if my belief is that my process map is a hypothesis I bring to the table, rather than the best practice answer, I will think and act differently. I will see stakeholders as co-designers of process. I will listen as loudly as I speak. I will be prepared to put my process back in my pocket and experiment together with this community.
Doing so will encourage innovation from the very people who are impacted by the problem in the first place, whereas doing my change process to them will likely drive them away.
But giving up my process is hard. Sharing control and taking risks makes me feel vulnerable. Isn’t it easier to stick to a proven pathway?
Easier, yes. But that is the trap of the best practice mindset.
Want to read more about how to successfully deliver complex projects and avoid the trap of best practice?
Simple Habits for Complex Times: Powerful Practices for Leaders 1st Edition
Jennifer Garvey Berger, Keith Johnston
Stanford University Press 2015
A leader’s Framework for Decision Making
David J Snowden and Mary E Boone
Harvard Business Review Nov. 2007
The Power of Co: The smart leaders’ guide to collaborative governance
Vivien Twyford et al
Twyfords 2012
https://extranewsfeed.com/making-sense-of-complexity-ee78755d56b9
Note this article was first published by the International Water Association
The risk of your 'like' bubble
I am noticing more and more as I surf the web how my apps keep managing my feeds - identifying what I click, like, find, etc, and tailoring the results so I get more stuff that will probably appeal to me.
At a deep level I suspect it is quite satisfying and gratifying - making me feel good as I read more stories that I like.
But part of me feels that this isn’t really OK, that I might be at risk of being somewhat manipulated – even just that I’m at risk of missing the bigger picture and perhaps missing out.
So quite a dilemma - because if I opt out I might feel worse off!
It strikes me that I see the very same curating happening with our clients, as they work to collaborate on complex issues across boundaries.
This most often manifests in a discussion about stakeholders - it seems that they often unconsciously select those they like (are easy to get on with, probably agree with, or at least they think might be constructive), rather than those who might disagree, and hold diverse views that might take the activity in new and potentially challenging (but perhaps more useful) directions
So how might we force ourselves out of our “like” bubble? Here are some simple suggestions:
- Invite those who the organisation is most likely to be nervous about
- Sit with the person you like the least in the room
- Pair up with the person you know is most likely to disagree with you
- Find the wisdom in the view you are most opposed too
- Share information with those who you think are most likely to misuse it/or use it against you
While such actions may go against the grain, they might just reduce the risk that we compromise the power of our collaboration by relying too much on our curated feed, and not opening our minds to the diversity that we know is a requisite for improved outcomes.
What is your experience? Is your collaboration in a 'Like' bubble?
What can El Capitan Teach Us About Managing Complexity?
In June 2017, climber Alex Honnold became the first person to climb Yosemite’s El Capitan without ropes. If that feat alone isn’t amazing enough, he made the climb in 4 hours, when the climbing guides describe it as a four DAY climb.
Coverage of the climb made me think of what it takes to manage in the face of complexity. When you find yourself in a situation that is volatile, unpredictable, with many elements that interact in unknown ways, you may find yourself thinking “I don’t know what to do”. In that situation the trick is to be clear on the direction, while recognising you can’t know the precise steps that will take you there.
It’s a bit like I imagine rock climbing to be. The climber knows the direction – up! And the destination – to the top! But a climber facing a new climb doesn’t know exactly how to get there. Yet, they don’t stay at the bottom of the climb until they have solved the problem. Rather, they start. They go up. They head in the direction.
And on the way, they will often be wrong. A new climb will lead them up false paths. Sometimes they may end up going down rather than up. Sometimes they will need to back track and make another choice. But they are constantly learning and always clear about the direction they want to go.
The climber on an unfamiliar face is an experimenter. She hypothesises: “If I follow that crack it should get me around that face”. She conducts the experiment by following the crack and testing her hunch. If it seems to be working she will keep moving forward and up. If it runs out, she will either return or strike out in another direction.
That’s the essence of managing in the face of complexity. Identify the direction: we want to ensure the waterway is healthier and more suitable for all users. Then test the ‘leads’. Follow those cracks that might take you to the top. They won’t all be successful, but by experimenting your way forward you stand a good chance of getting where you need to go.
Alex Honnold had to use this approach even on such a well-mapped and well-known climb as El Capitan. There were a couple of places where he had to leave the route and find his own way up. Despite not knowing, he managed to make progress and smash every preconception about what it takes to achieve the goal.
So, you don’t have to leave the ground to experience the thrill of climbing. Go forth and experiment your way to success.
The ABC of Complexity
As I write, the head of Australia’s public broadcaster, the ABC, has just announced a very significant restructure of the organisation and its 5,000 employees. CEO Michelle Guthrie was quoted as saying:
“This exercise today is about making sure we work collectively and in better and smarter ways to serve our audience.” “The initiatives … will improve collaboration and decision making,” “[These changes] provide for more flexibility in allocating resources.”
It sounds very impressive and sensible, but how confident can the CEO be that the restructure will deliver as expected? Complexity science would say not confident at all. Just consider some of the basic concepts of managing any complex system, such as a large corporation.
With a complex system we can only manage the current state, we can’t manage the future state.
In other words we have no way of knowing that if we do X we will get Y. An organisation is like an organism, with many separate parts all interacting in multiple ways, some of which we know about and some we don’t. Because every part of a complex system influences and is influenced by every other part, it is impossible to know with certainty the outcome of any action large or small. Complex systems are the realm of unintended consequences and emergent responses, meaning we can never be sure that the structure we bring in today will deliver the outcome desired tomorrow. The only thing we can be confident of is that we won’t get what we expect.
Beware Premature Convergence
Landing on a solution is what leadership is about, right? Except when we are dealing with something genuinely complex, it is much easier and more comfortable to name a ‘solution’ than to acknowledge and grapple with the inherent unknowability of the situation. The temptation to come to a position is powerful but the minute we start narrowing down – converging on a solution – we reduce our capacity to scan for the unknown, to explore other possibilities, to have our ideas doubted and tested and to test others. In complexity, the answer is never the answer anyway so staying open to what is emerging is a much more powerful strategy.
Experimentation is key
Nobody knows what is the ‘best’ structure for a large public broadcaster in Australia in the early 21st Century. Nobody can know. The changes announced today for the ABC, while couched in terms of certainty, in fact amount to an expensive, possibly disruptive and risky experiment in corporate design, as all such restructures do. They can’t be anything else. But leaders aren’t allowed to acknowledge that they are experimenting on their organisation. They particularly can’t acknowledge it to themselves. Yet, experimentation is in many ways the best strategy.
In complex situations we can’t know in advance the outcome of actions, so how do we manage? We create hypotheses and test them in ‘safe to fail’ ways. We experiment around specific ideas about how the system works and what might improve it. If we find those experiments successful we ramp them up. If we find them failing we dial them down, while learning as much as possible about why they aren’t working as expected. And then we do it again. And again. And….
Management therefore becomes a continuous exercise in ‘learning the way forward’ through incremental changes, using pilots, tests, trials, experiments. At no time can anyone say with certainty that the existing structure is ‘the best’, but they will be able to say that new ideas are constantly being tested and improvements introduced. Importantly, the brainpower of the entire workforce can usefully be employed in generating hypotheses, designing and running experiments, deciding what did and didn’t work and determining and making changes as a result. Rather than paying a big four consultant to ‘fix the problem’ a manager can rely on the employees to co-create something unique, fit-for-purpose and always, always shifting to meet emerging needs.
In some ways, managing complexity is very challenging, but to accept uncertainty and adopt an experimental approach is as easy as ABC.