Paul McKey - Synergistic Design

Redbean - If you have ever been involved in a Change Management program - as a buyer, practitioner or participant - and wondered what that term means, you are not alone.

In the past few years this term seems to have blossomed into a catchall phrase to describe everything from a new ICT system rollout to a complete organisational transformation.

The Organisational Development and Learning types (they’re the ones in pure wool cardigans and slip-on business shoes and using iPhones) suggest only people change not companies so we need to nurture that personal transition, not force it, while the ICT and Project Management junkies (they’re the ones in wrinkle-free white shirts and polyester ties and using a Blackberry) argue that in any change program process, time, resources and money are king.

The question is which one of these ‘types’ do you hire to implement change in your organisation? Or do you hire both of them?

Organisational change comes in several forms. What’s motivating the change? Is it anticipatory or reactive? How do you want to proceed? Incrementally or in a discontinuous mode? Nadler and others* suggest these questions can lead to anything between tuning the organisation to completely re-creating it. And all this falls under one term - change management. Or does it?

When the HR types owned the process it was slower and called Organisational Change. In the past few years more radical change required by mergers and reconfiguration of businesses (from private capital influence in particular) has seen the business get involved and demand faster and more predictable results.

To say the former is people-centric while the latter method is process-centric is simplistic but no less correct. And it is obvious we need both. But are we getting that? I would say not.

Unfortunately while the people people were away facilitating change workshops and consuming reams of newsprint, blu-tac and wall space the process mechanics were engineering software that virtually ran the whole change management process for you. You just had to fill in the blanks of the latest prescriptive process such as Prince2, ADKAR or PMBoK and voila! - you had a change program.

Well sort of. What you had was half a change program. The process half. I would suggest that none of these processes properly address the other half of the change, the people.

No matter how tight the timeline and fiscally brilliant the Gant chart your internal people and external forces are not going to give two hoots about it, unless they want to. Real organisational change requires managing, or at least understanding, all the forces acting upon your organisation and its people - staff, shareholders and customers.

Driving change by just managing the low hanging fruit you ‘appear’ to have control over - time, resources and costs - may deliver a successful project but will it deliver the change desired/required? At least developments like Benefits Management coming out of the UK are focussing change managers on the outcomes.

So who do you hire? The soft change people or the hard change people? One of the best descriptions of the competencies a successful change manager should have has been developed by the Australian Change Management Institute. It sets out in clear language both the hard and soft skills, and the personal attributes required. Change Management Practitioner Competency Model - PDF

So who do you hire? As the iconic Indie band The Go-Betweens once said “Sometimes I need two heads“.

* Discontinuous Change. Leading Organizational Transformation by David Nadler, Robert Shaw and Elise Walton. Jossey-Bass Inc.

Melbourne - Last week I met with Professor Hugh Taylor and members of the National Indigenous Eye Health Survey Team.

They are considering using digital information systems to get their health and well-being messages out to a geographically remote and resource restricted audience. A difficult prospect for sure yet tending to be far more effective than the old glossy brochure alone!

Professor Taylor is quoted as saying “Indigenous children are born with better eyesight than their non-Indigenous peers. However, by the time they reach adulthood they are six times more likely to be blind and three times more likely to have low vision.”

The key findings of the landmark survey are available here.

http://www.cera.org.au/news/Key%20Findings%20-%20NIEHS.pdf

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Redbean - My sometimes partner in all things design, Joel Flom, has been doing a bit of navel gazing of late and has come up with an insightful and honest view of the whole design field.

He has noticed that the user-centred/interaction/experience/service/information design field can be a bit self-interested at times which leads to what I call Digital Noise. This noise gets the hip young things doing groovy design sites and products extremely excited and leaves their clients stone cold. Why? Mainly because they are speaking different languages. The former is focussed on the means and the latter is focussed on the end.

If you know the current version numbers to more than three or four applications and you can rattle off arcane designer speak (like iterative redundancy like) you are living in a sea of digital noise. To survive you may need to stick your head out and see what the humans are up to (that is the people who pay for your services). Then if you want to be successful build some bridges between the technical and the client needs without swamping them in noise. Simplify, simplify, simplify!

Google did a bit of street research recently where only 8% of people they asked knew what a browser was. They think Google is the browser because that is where they start. What that means is 92% of your prospective clients don’t know or care about how you do, only what you do, or really, only what it means to them.

http://elavision.typepad.com/elavision_insights/2009/06/design-is-a-verb.html

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Redbean - What do possums know about Television? Not much. But they know that every night when they are sneaking past to eat the papaya outside the kitchen that we are too busy to notice because we are watching TV. But Penelope Possum is a kind and thoughtful marsupial and recently she gave me back my cognitive surplus. And I am truly thankful to her.

Clay Shirky recently gave a speech where he showed how the sitcom has become the gin of the 20th century which leads us into a nightly stupor of time wasting decay. He has estimated that over 200 billion hours are spent watching television in the USA every year and around 100 million hours of surplus time is spent just watching advertisements every weekend.

In contrast around 100 million hours has also been put to use in another form - the design and development of Wikipedia. And unlike television it is a community project and useful.

User-generated content is the current and next big thing. Whether it is YouTube, Face Book or World of Warcraft, online usage of cognitive surplus has got to be better for the planet than the mind-numbing, passive consumption of television. Who knows what we might build after Wikipedia? I don’t know but it seems people interacting across the globe in various forms has to be a vast improvement on the current xenophobic broadcast news and media services that “keep the ignorant ignorant”.

Yet Shirky’s real point is that the world is heavily utilising online technology, not to passively consume, but to develop and participate - for both good and for ill. This he says in his new book “Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations” means a new revolution in social organization has commenced.

So when Penelope recently returned from a hard night of making love, stealing fruit and thinking about the meaning of life she accidentally (or was it on purpose?) disconnected the aerial cable of our television. Bingo! I now have a cognitive surplus to utilise. Penelope still gets her papaya though. I am usually too busy watching YouTube to hear her sneak past.

Clay Shirky’s Speech:

http://www.herecomeseverybody.org/2008/04/looking-for-the-mouse.html

His Book:

http://isbn.nu/9781594201530
http://isbn.nu/9781594201530

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Redbean - It was no surprise recently when yet another global car manufacturer announced closure of an engine plant dedicated to manufacturing large six cylinder petrol engines with the loss of 930 jobs. What was surprising were the press releases and comments by the CEO that they were surprised by the market move to smaller cars. He stated that “there was now a deepening trend away from larger cars”.
( Mitsubishi Press Release )

What annoys me is that for a small fee, say a million bucks, I could have spared an hour or so to tell them this several years ago. They would then have saved possibly the tens if not hundreds of millions they have spent trying to revive a dead horse.

Yet it would be difficult to convince an industry dominated by men obsessed by speed and power and disparaging of environmentalists, that small is beautiful when it comes to one of the earth’s great polluters and users of energy, the automobile. Their vested interests and cultural prejudice have kept them blind to the changing world as they mainly admire and mix with people of their own kind and the ingress of fresh ideas and alternate opinions are subtly discouraged.

I can just imagine the board meeting where the funky inner-city type from marketing presents her research on the future of the automobile industry as being small and green. The CEO would listen intently and then in one breath dismiss her hypothesis with “only faggots drive small cars”. The whole boardroom would shake with laughter and it would be back to business as usual.

Cultural prejudices exist in most industries. In a democratic and diverse society that is to be expected and differing viewpoints encouraged. Yet when this becomes a culture of prejudice it is detrimental to the organisation as a whole and the people involved.

The problems associated with cultural prejudice in many government authorities has been well known for years. From the security services and police to immigration departments not only do they build strong cultures but they also have the power to inflict great hurt on to people they consider ‘outside’ their idea of the required norm. Religious, racial and tribal prejudices are often the stem and, despite the work done around corporate diversity in the past generation, these are still present in the boardrooms of the world.

Yet prejudice is never far away even in seemingly benign environments. I am always amazed at how undergraduate students are despised in higher education. For many administrators and academics the ideal university would contain no students. The culture of prejudice among technologists in the IT industry is well known and parodied. The way doctors still talk at their patients rather than with them changes only slowly. Not only is this behaviour disrespectful but it is also bad for business.

New ideas can range from uncomfortable to outright threatening and so it is easy to build a culture of collusion where they are avoided. Many organisations get advice, do surveys and research but never really believe or act on the results. Shifting deeply held beliefs is the hardest work of organisational change.

My job entails helping organisations see new ways of doing things, envisage threats and opportunities not yet apparent and build cultures that are welcoming and responsive to new ideas. It is tough but rewarding work. Sometimes though I wonder why I don’t just get a job as an academic or a civil servant or work for a corporate in HR, or IT. But that may require joining a culture of prejudice.

Every organisation needs a regular check up of its diversity, biases and cultural prejudices to maintain its relevance but particularly to avoid being blind to social and cultural change affecting its performance. A diverse organisation that encourages different viewpoints is a healthy organisation. And they are usually great to work for and with.

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Redbean Learning Solutions - Learning and performance in an organisational context can be incredibly subjective. Not knowing how well any learning program is going to achieve its business objectives makes employers anxious. Their response to this anxiety is typically to prescribe authoritive training regimes that have the structure of; tell ‘em what you’re going to tell ‘em, tell ‘em and then tell ‘em what you told ‘em. Then do lots of assessment to ‘prove’ learning took place.

There is a smarter way. Benchmarking your learning and performance provides not only a valuable resource for current and future comparison but also a revealing and enlightening insight into both your learning programs and employee performance. Knowing the causes and conditions that effect success or poor performance in your organisation is invaluable business intelligence that few companies possess.

Benchmarking, whether by survey, testing, interview or observation, is usually a win-win way of asking employees how they are doing and what would help them do better.Yet done poorly it can dumb down results fooling managers into thinking that it is just a ‘training’ problem. Providing yet another training course to improve their attitude will usually just piss them off. There’s no other way to say it! Research has shown that up to 60% of staff are only partially engaged and a whopping 15% are actively dis-engaged from their work. Now that is a lot of money you are paying to have people push a mouse around their desk all day.

Gallup research on Worker Engagement

Hence the first part of benchmarking is to ask about attitudes before trying to measure the learning and performance behaviours - activity, aptitude and application. Attitudes may be good or poor for all sorts of reasons which training either had no effect on, or has no hope of fixing. And guess what? If people’s attitude is either good or bad then their learning and performance will follow suit. But you don’t need me to tell you that. Just ask HR.

Unfortunately, even in small HR departments the people who measure attitude, as an element of performance, rarely talk to the people who design, develop and deliver learning programs. And both groups are often guessing as to which causes good or bad outcomes. Benchmarking learning and performance, thoroughly, often and together, is the only way to gain insight into what works and why, and perhaps provide that edge your competitors don’t have.

Organisations in the ‘information age’ are having difficulty retaining young workers. They arrive full of youthful enthusiasm, willing and able yet within months if not weeks are considering moving on for any number of reasons (and don’t give me that gen XY garbage. Many who are twice the age of the XY age groups exhibit most of their attributes - albeit with flab. I argue gen XY is attitude first, age second and mainly driven by postmodernism, not birth date.)
However, here’s one reason they might not be hanging around.

The average person in first world countries, not just twenty year olds, now has access to a wealth of information systems and services with which they can participate in humankind’s favourite pastime - communication. We were born to communicate. Speech and literature are the main characteristics that separate us from the primates and we love to use them. This is not new. But the ubiquitous, inexpensive and relatively easy-to-use technology we have at our disposal is.

These netgen kids take this stuff for granted. Old codgers with attitude also get pretty excited. It is like living in a rich rain forest, full of life, noise and activity. Communicate with multiple people, known or unknown, anytime anywhere. Share new ideas and discover a whole world of collaboration.

And then they arrive in corporate world circa 2007. What a contrast. Hopefully they will get a computer, one without Internet access restrictions. They may get email or even groupware. They may not. They will probably get at least some form of office applications.

What they won’t get is their rich array of communication and Web 2.0 tools they have on their home PC. That means they won’t have access to their peer and support groups, nor their knowledge network built up through an arrangement of trust and sharing with friends and strangers (new friends) from all over the planet. They won’t be able to move about, listen to music nor multitask for fear of being called a troublemaker in the cubicle-farm office. Their information sources and interaction channels will dry up.

In effect they will have come from their equivalent of a rainforest to an information and interaction desert. The average organisation.

Once corporations had all the latest technology, the only global networks and all the bandwidth. Now they are playing catchup to the average living room in terms of functionality and bandwidth. They are so hamstrung by security and misuse fears that they have to put their whole network into lock down, missing all the benefits of a collaborative world.

But this is just the tip of the iceberg These kids can smell a conservative, dead end culture a mile off. If they can’t get some freedom in return for their servitude, if they are not acknowledged for the expertise and value they bring (because their bosses can’t understand it let alone exploit it), or they can’t use their tools of choice, then they will be off like a shot.

Consideration of, and allowance for, people’s preferred working style is a smart business move. Regardless of their age, happy, respected people make great staff. So if you own or manage an organisation which employs humans under the age of sixty I advise considering how you can turn the workplace from a cultural desert into a rich and dynamic forest full of art, creativity and growth.

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If you want to learn more on topics such as social networking, interaction technology or independent music and film, consider a trip to Texas for this little conference in March 2007.

“Attracting digital creatives as well as visionary technology entrepreneurs, the SXSW Interactive Festival enables you to connect, discover and inspire your link to the cutting edge.”

SXSW Interactive, Film and Music

The People component of Synergistic Design is affected by all perspectives and equally affects all perspectives. Yet who looks out for the people? The shift in thinking of people as a resource to people as an asset has taken place over the last 50 years. When manual skills were dominant and labour costs low people were treated as a fixed price commodity. The information age reverses that view and attitude and we now consider human capital instead of resources.
The human related disciplines have spread from the narrow personnel payroll view to spawn over thirty disciplines concerned with some aspect of the recruitment, retention and improvement of people. Shareholder management, customer service and the myriad of HR services (such as remuneration, downsizing, learning and development) all recognise the new importance of people in all parts of the organisation.
For example in the insurance sector, for years dominated by price, has prompted Roger Bell, CEO of Vero New Zealand, to say “we get our growth from the strength of our brand and better people” (Insurance and Risk Professional, December 2005).
Organisational change, business improvement or transformation, and performance management are all growth industries as organisations seek that elusive competitive advantage. They all have people at their core.
The People category will accumulate the ideas and practices affecting people in organisations.