Five Physical World beliefs that fail in the Digital World

Transitioning effectiveness from physical to digital world often requires revisiting cherished beliefs and accepting the limitations of these beliefs as action gets transported to digital world.  Unless consciously called to note, these beliefs stay hidden and affect the overall results.  Top five such beliefs are:

1. Keep only the most useful- throw the waste:  Anything that has not been used for last three months has very limited probability of being used ever again.  Dispose that and free up some space- so goes the logic in the physical world.  This is clearly not true in digital world.  Check files in your desktops that have not been used for over six months, and note that you are actually keeping multiple versions of these documents with no intent to delete.  In physical world, carrying things costs and hence exclude/expunge those that you don’t need while in digital world loosing things that you may require (in case) is more painful than carrying additional inventory.  As David Weinberger says- In digital world, it costs more to exclude then include, and inclusion is lot easier. 
2. Social loafing is not acceptable and is to be exposed:  We all resist social loafing in group work and expect social loafer to buy permission by compensating elsewhere (either in financial or social form) or risk being socially exposed.  In social media, social loafers- those set of passive consumers who only read and download your stuff and occasionally vote in form of likes, are actually welcome.  Going by statistics, free riders are lot more than content creators and contributors.  They tend to provide psychological returns for the investments creators make in developing the content.
3. Always go with the Professional advice:  Peers comments are more reliable than that of critics in deciding the best restaurant to dine at. Experience sharing at sites like patientslikeme.com, provide good reference to compare your doctor advice with.  People like me will have unstated evaluation criteria similar to mine, and will have seldom hidden motive to misguide.  Off-course, if the stakes are high, and involve specialized and contextual knowledge, professional advice prevails.  According to Clay Shirky, go for professional advice if you are taking about brain surgery, but its ok to go with peers advice while choosing restaurant.  
4. Revisions represent errors that can not be ignored:  Think deep and wide, develop opinion, publish and persist- for the reputational and financial cost of undoing or reworking is very high in the physical world.  Not so, in the digital world, where you start small, build on, refine, refute, synthesize and redefine almost continually as more information and views pour in.  Iterations represent dynamism, responsiveness and agility in the digital world! 
5. Real work requires serious money to get it done: It costs to commit dedicated resources spending physical efforts and time to execute work and needs to be paid for.  Digital world leverages collective knowledge of commons (aggregated through google) and free time of the volunteers (emotionally hooked to the cause) to create works of great social and civic importance.  Wikipedia represents one hundred million hours of volunteer cumulative work – as per Martin Wattenberg, an IBM researcher. 

It is the wider appreciation of the different set of beliefs ruling the two worlds that needs to be stressed upon, as we design strategies to use digital world in non-linear radical manner.

      Reflect!

RIP your Way into Collaboration

Another client, same story! “We have provided the employees with the best collaborative tools, accessible even from mobile, but not much uptake. Those people, who were collaborating previously, have migrated to new platform, but not many new collaborators have emerged. Do you think we should advertise more or conduct another training session on the tools and its functionality?” NO. RIP your way into collaboration.


Provide REASONS for employees to collaborate: Broadly, reasons have to include Work-related reasons and Self-related reasons. Which aspect of employees work gains most from collaboration? Is it in managing customer care, designing new products, or solving delivery problems? What adds value; Expertise advice in solving problems, access to reusable assets to expedite work or tacit knowledge sharing by stakeholders for developing more practical cross-functional solutions? Unless there is sustained reason for employee to engage in collaboration for performing his/her work more effectively, collaboration is unlikely to become habit.

Self related reasons provide answer to the essential “Whats in it for me?”. Is being collaborative, essentially being open and helpful, rewarding to me in some-way? What do I gain from providing expertise advice, or sharing my work-products so that someone else is able to do work better and faster? Designing right motivation strategy is the key. Do you leverage financial incentives or social recognition or both? Complexity of solution, level of effort, business benefits from collaborative behavior, are some of the parameters to be looked into.

Provide INSTRUMENTS to Collaborate: While your collaboration goals may be small in the short run, it pays to have collaboration infrastructure architecture designed to handle advanced features of collaboration. It’s the rolling out strategy that needs to be calibrated to the overall collaboration road-map. If the collaborative instruments are intuitive enough, early adopters shall be your best sales-force to get others learn how to use them.

Provide PERMISSIONS for employees to collaborate: Formal permission is easy and mainly comes from having well defined social medial policy and usage guidelines. It’s the informal permission which comes from leadership behavior and overall culture that often needs attention. Are leaders ok to respect the outcome of the community deliberations and happy to experiment or acknowledge? To what extent, project leader is ok for team member to seek help from open community in solving problem, instead of reaching out to him for advice or permission to ask? To what extent employees feel it safe to ask questions or share comments without their bosses sitting on judgment about their competence or attitude?

Providing Instrument for collaboration is often resource intensive decision and hence often takes lot of discussion time, whereas returns on the investments depend upon other two factors that need careful consideration.

Reflect!!!

Key Decisions that determine whether Social Network Enterprise Investments will deliver Value!

Too much has been written and talked around about the potential benefits of turning organization into socially networked enterprise- wherein employees and customers exchange ideas, views and information about common areas of interest- almost dynamically, collectively and in an open format supported by appropriate set of technologies. At the same-time, not all organizations have actually gained through these transformation initiatives despite investments in technology and leadership support. Here are few decisions that have to be made right, to evolve organization into socially networked enterprise- that delivers Value:


1- What are the top two most compelling features of social network enterprise that will provide immense value to business and employees- be it expertise location, customer problem solving, new product idea generation, operational best practices identification and assimilation. Agreed all of these usages will have some value to business, but prioritizing those areas where enhanced collaboration will deliver maximum business benefit makes designing, targeting, incubating and tracking adoption more effective. Besides organizational pay-off, there must be equally compelling response to “what’s in it for me?” for employees to participate.

2- Is primary purpose of social networking initiative to facilitate or to substitute the normal delivery route to goal accomplishment? It could be both or either depending upon nature of goal and delivery requirements. Expertise location or Idea generation aspects provide facilitative support, while crowd sourcing, task contracting- such as documentation, reviewing, analysis can actually enable work to be delivered through communities instead of dedicated teams. Linking communities’ outcome to mainstream work processes and formal decision making avoid potential conflicts and encourage participation.

3- Who is the right leader for the initiative?: Asking enterprise or business unit head to lead this initiative may not the right choice, as his/her presence may stifle openness or promote projectionist behaviors, besides potential time and attention challenges on his/her behalf. Choose someone that is foremost passionate about enterprise objectives and is recognized as credible boundary spanner among colleagues and not necessarily social media tools and technology expert. Those who are very active at individual level on blogging, surfing, or community activities for self pay-offs, may not be necessarily be effective in driving social business for the enterprise. Besides leader, make sure there are other suitable stakeholders engaged as part of governance and nurturing committee.

4- What is the right unit level to start with? Most value unlocking/creation comes from cross silo dialogue and marrying of conflicting perspectives tied to common objective. Hence, the initial coverage should span multiple boundaries to ensure significant diversity and inclusion of employee sets those do not otherwise mingle so often. Also it pays to limit number of communities, otherwise too many gated communities may sprout up reflecting existing organizational silos, defeating the very purpose of enhanced enterprise-vide collaboration. Further multi-community memberships may spread employees’ contribution too thin to create meaningful impact.

5- What technological choices to provide for? To begin with, simplicity should rule over extensive choice of technologically available features. Calibrated introduction of other features periodically generates excitement and also help in easy adoption. Search facility made available in the beginning especially when there is not much content looks odd! Integration with the existing software applications helps in migration, but may be achieved in phased manner.

6- How elaborate should be the usage guidelines? Not as big as operational manual but a bit more than statement of good intentions. It pays to link to existing behavioral guidelines in the enterprise. More than acceptable norms, its important to provide examples of some behaviors that are clearly not acceptable- say writing about client business or behavior.

7- How do we measure success? Tracking activity levels are easy and do give some indication of adoption levels, especially when details such as average response to discussion threads, ratio between writers, contributors and visitors etc are considered. Individual level gains from community participation come as good stories supporting the benefits case. User’satisfaction score does give pointers towards effectiveness of design and ease of usage. However, numbers of proposals/ideas generated by the community that get accepted (and eventually adopted) by Management for enterprise adoption provide real measure of business value add.

8- How to reward contributions? Shall we reward winners in the form of social recognition or money? No straight answer. Depends on the contribution and the person involved! Customer contribution that leads to direct business benefit needs to be surely paid in tangible form, while employee’s contributions of ideas or information in response to of discussion threads surely does not warrant payments, but recognition among the peer group and enhanced visibility to Management. Including community contributions into performance evaluation decisions may make sense to promote collaboration in general, then specific adoption of social media. For if collaboration is a general norm, social media platform will be lapped up anyway.

If strategy is all about making right choices, there are some key choices that need to be made right on path to becoming social business enterprise that delivers Value.

Although business context, organization culture and employees profiles will dictate most of the choices, there seems to be growing evidence of some choices being more effective than others. It pays to take cognizance of “what seems to be working more often”.

But note that Social business strategy helps design the instruments to enable collaboration, but can not by itself address intent level challenges that may be characteristics of prevailing culture.

Reflect, as always!

Force strategic dialogue around people as business plans for 2012

As management starts planning for 2012, instead of waiting for the business plan to be handed over to the HR department to append the manpower section, its time to proactively get engaged in the conversation as the plan evolves. There are few potential entry points into the dialogue that can be exploited to be there!

Question the assumptions behind productivity gains and cost take-out programs: Enterprises will continue to focus on becoming more cost efficient in 2012, by targeting aggregate level savings from various cost heads such as procurement, process refinements and staff costs. Given the uncertainty and volatility of demand in market place, expectations may be to have a more linear relation between staff costs and scale of business, even when the business contracts. However, it is easier to gain scale efficiencies as business volumes go up than to take out costs as business contracts or stagnates. Also, with the last few years of belt tightening, easier options for cost take-outs may be hard to find. It is the responsibility of CHRO to ensure that unrealistic assumptions around staff cost maneuverability are not made at this stage.

Articulate people level dependencies as prerequisites for effective business program roll-outs: Various business unit programs are often conceived assuming the people enablement will be taken care of by the HR department, which is a legitimate view, provided HR is informed and cost of providing the program related additional interventions are accounted for. CHROs need to seek details about the programs envisaged by other departments early-on, conduct impact analysis and seek wherewithal to deliver their part of the deal. This is crucial, since examining aggregate impact of multiple programs on employees help HR point out any conflicting expectations from the employees across programs, besides warning against any change overload. HR can help in prioritizing and sequencing employee level interventions across the programs for effective roll-out and execution efficiency.

Gain specific commitments to proposed employee mix changes: Given the uncertainty in demand, management is likely to support any proposal that brings in labor cost flexibility. Changes in employee mix (by hiring more part-time workers, contract employees, retirees, low skilled workers, etc.) will require the business unit head’s support in managing resistance from managers within their units who are used to working with permanent employees with certain skill levels. This is the time to break aggregate level commitments to specific business unit levels so that execution does not encounter reluctance in the form of “this is too critical and can we have an exception, this time!”.

Capitalize on uncertain business environment to push for most compelling HR function transformational initiatives: Businesses are looking for greater operational flexibility, more variable cost structure, directed investments and speedier benefits realization from transformational initiatives to sustain in the prevailing complex and uncertain environment. Organization redesign for tighter strategy-structure alignment supported by effective performance management system, HR service delivery transformation (moving towards shared service set-ups), HR process standardization and application portfolio rationalization, Workforce strategy and optimization are some of the transformational programs that are likely to get management support. Success lies in choosing the right program, developing robust use case (including potential cost of not doing anything) and garnering requisite stakeholder support.

Offcourse, HR effectiveness in engaging in business plan exercise depends on how informed it is about business, how evidence based and data driven the arguments are and how much credibility HR has built with fellow stakeholders over the years.

The environment demands HR contribution in business planning more than ever before.
Are we ready? What are we doing differently this year as part of business plan exercise?
Do share.

Linking Employees Motivation to Business Benefits

It is almost a matter of faith that motivated employees lead to better business outcomes. Is it always the case? Are all enterprises equally effective in capitalizing on the employee motivation for business benefits? What are the intermediate variables that translate employee motivation levels to increased business benefits, and what if any, are the influencing variables that explain the variances?

Here is my take. All employees need to work enough to deliver on minimum commitment required to avoid any managerial pointing out. Any effort over and above this required effort is discretionary effort. Motivated employees are often associated with discretionary effort, as going the extra mile, beyond strict call of duty. For sake of simplicity, it is safe to assume that the more motivated an employee is, more discretionary effort (s)he is ready to spend. Another characteristic of the discretionary effort is the primacy of enterprise well being as the key driver instead of self gain (say in the form of more bonus and accelerated career growth).

The sum total of discretionary effort of all employees forms the discretionary effort account (DEA) available with the enterprise. Business outcomes depend upon the level of DEA available and enterprise ability to make its effective usage.

Here are the key hypotheses:
1. DEA is probably the best assurance for the sustained above normal performance and risk managing ability of an enterprise

2. DEA reveals itself in day-2-day employees behaviors such as active volunteering on enterprise initiatives, continuous flow of suggestions, employees standing for each other when required without seeking managerial interventions, employee learning new skills in their extended time (after office hrs/week ends), and amazing sense of resourcefulness shown by employees while solving problems or managing challenging situations.

3. Absence of DEA shows in terms of need to monetize every additional commitment, frequent reference to rules and entitlements in all manager-employee conversations and continuous demand for better clarity around roles and responsibilities among staff.

4. DEA gets generated by right employee policies and empowering culture.

5. Leveraging DEA effectively depends upon managing the right influencing variables. 

6. IF the dominant management style of governance is “telling” type, ie detailing out in prescriptive manner what employees are expected to “DO”, key influencing variables are right supervisor behavior and perceived sense of fair play. In such a situation DEA helps manage variations in work load, and contingencies, as employees are willing to spend discretionary effort to help enterprise overcome the hump. It also comes handy when changing the procedures or adopting technology (ERP implementation), which often requires employees to spend time learning and practicing new ways of performing tasks.

7. IF the enterprise is more “outcome focused” with some level of autonomy given to employees on "how", DEA helps capture new opportunities and develop creative, breakthrough solutions. Sales force surely spends required effort to meet their targets, but DEA will include sales staff actively cross-selling and looking beyond their own sales target to uncover client additional needs and develop innovative ways by which enterprise can help meet them.

8. Influencing variables for DEA in “outcome-focused” enterprises include leaders sharing the bigger picture and goals, reinforcing guiding values (and what is not acceptable as means to an end!) and providing safe environment to experiment. Over enthusiastic employees in absence of shared value system and lack of purpose can create severe damage to enterprise reputation and make it vulnerable to unavoidable risks.

9. In essence, employee motivation as source of sustained advantage, needs well designed and coordinated interventions that help develop DEA and ensure its effective usage. Leaders, functional supervisors, HR staff have a definitive role to play. In the absence of integrated design and coordinated efforts by all stakeholders, either DEA may not get generated or may get frittered away without much business benefits.

10. There is need to trace path from employee motivation to business benefits, going beyond hope or faith. The above hypotheses is an attempt to provoke comments, suggestions and feedback to collectively define this path better.

Looking forward to your inputs, as always………..

Hiring RIGHT STARS - the Right Way!

Once in the market for talent, there is natural appeal to hire the best (Stars), given their easily availability (surfing for best deals) and enhanced affordability made possible by liberal compensation guidelines (better than for those paid within the system). However, the irony is, the repeated experience and extensive research reveal that “Stars suffer a performance decline when they move to new firms” and “mostly destroy value for the hiring firm” especially given the premium paid for their acquisition. Quite like M&A, this implies the need to acquire and integrate RIGHT Stars - the right way, to realize the potential Value.

It starts with recognizing that Star performance is outcome of three key determinants: Business Environment, Firm Specific Characteristics, and Individual Talent. Everyone in sunrise industry looks talented, when seen from mature industries perspective, and everyone working for well run companies may be performing better than staff from average company, not necessarily due to better individualized talent.

And often the relative contribution from each of these three factors towards overall outcome is difficult to ascertain, but is the key in choosing the right Talent and not lucky Stars. Recruiters explicitly recognize concerns about the potential portability and replicability of performance by Stars across firms, but often fail to test it well enough during the selection process. Why so?

One reason could be overreliance on what Stars tell them during interaction. Stars often tend to overstate their contribution, as part of self serving performance enhancing bias, and ignore the firm specific performance enablers. This may not necessarily be a projection but actual belief.

Second reason is an inherent assumption that when sourcing from competition, the firm specific enablers are likely to be of same order, and hence performance of the Star is likely to sustain in new firm setting as well. This is truer for companies, especially those with similar size and overall characteristics, and serving same customers/markets. While, the tangible hard characteristics like Resources, Brand, Market Access, Financial leverage, Process maturity, Work practices, may be of similar order, it is the intangible firm specifics like leadership, decision making, information sharing, collaboration, culture, which may vary a lot, and to that extent their influence as performance boosters gets ignored. Accordingly, it pays to investigate to what extent the firm specific intangible performance boosters will the new firm able to provide, to ensure replicability of star performance.

Recruiters may like to ask Interviewees the following (and reflect on similarities between the responses given and what’s true for your firm) as a quick check:

- What role did Manager play in your success? (Nature of relationship, dependence, supervision, etc.)

- To what extent did you leverage your colleagues support and informal inputs in meeting your objectives/improve quality of outcome? (Colleague role in success)

- What is the preferred approach to access information required to deliver? (Information is available freely on shared platforms/strictly on need to know basis/heavy reliance on knowledge bank)

- Share an instance wherein you have taken decision (risk) beyond your regular mandate.. (Is your firm ok with that kind of risk/deviant behavior?)

- Discuss any cross functional initiative and approach taken towards solving conflict between competing priorities (gives insight into decision making, escalation management, credit sharing etc)

Often discussions around the above help understand the role firm specific performance boosters have played in Stars performance and provide good indication of the extent to which the performance is replicable in the absence of these boosters. This may be revealing to candidates as well!

Of course, choosing the right Star is only half battle won, the other half lies in developing right integration strategy that help Stars overcome natural resistance from incumbents, and quickly assimilate specific advantages/ performance boosters associated with new firm. There are quite a few challenges in doing this right as well.

Happy to know your experience with Hiring Stars and tricks that work?

Three tricky questions to evaluate Proposals

  

Leaders are regularly inundated with proposals seeking sponsorship, be it for business growth (say entering new markets/new product line) or organizational strengthening (say restructuring, ERP implementation etc.).  Almost all of these proposals promise significant pay-offs- supported by some sort of financial numbers and assumptions that are acceptable (but not likely to be showstoppers). It is quite clear that proposal owner has developed a case and is interested in winning sponsorship by bringing all convincing abilities to board.  How does one ensure that right decisions are made without getting sucked in well rehearsed story telling?  Here are three questions that help:

WHERE is the payoff?  Is it directed to solving comprehensively the top most problem/ capture most promising opportunity?  Or is solving partially motley of problems/ capturing list of mediocre opportunities?  The second scenario happens, when the main payoff falls short of the hurdle rate, and peripheral payoffs are attached to make the overall proposal acceptable.  Management often agrees to the second option, with a view to handle multiple situations in one go and please multiple stakeholders, but it rarely works out that way. 

Why will WE succeed? Is it because we have the execution capabilities – technology, geographical spread, expertise, access to capital/market  or because we generally believe we are smart enough to make it work and optimistic in our planning? Amusing, but true, how often proposals reveal embedded beliefs that we can deliver better than competition and that what made us successful ensure continued success.  Lessons learnt and best practice knowledge only enhances the probability of success but provide no guarantee.   

WHY pilot?  Is it to test the efficacy of an idea or refine the execution plan before overall roll-out?  Pilot is often a compromised formula proposed by the proposal owner, so that it is not all or nothing as an outcome on something on which he/she has invested time and energy.  Similar logic tends to influence leaders as well, who seem to be more comfortable going the pilot route.  Pilots centered on testing an idea, often become battleground for competing egos, getting disproportionate attention, with both sides amplifying early signs of success or shortcomings.  Also remember, if the idea is truly revolutionary, by pilot testing, competition is also given the heads-up to match up, when you roll-out completely.  Piloting is different from developing solution iteratively (beta testing/agile way) in a well defined staged-manner with risk and return evaluations at various milestones, which seems to be sensible preposition given the high cost of failure and associated reputation risk.

No matter how rigorous the evaluation criteria are, the decisions of go/on-go can still go wrong.  The above three questions can help understand the logic better.  It may still be ok to take a counter view, even if the responses to above are not convincing enough- it could be context, power equation, culture, or leaders’ inherent preferences that can tilt the decision, but it pays to know.

Happy to know your views on above, or other questions that may help?

  

Consulting Business witnessing shifts in Clients expectations

Surely, Consultants are getting more calls from and appointments with clients these days.  Business is looking up, but with a difference.  Clients in the new world of business have distinct demands/expectations from Consultants, and it has direct implications on how Consultants need to deliver.

Clients are looking at “Speed to Value” underlined by greater sense of urgency.  The eagerness to compensate for lost time due to recent slow-down, and enhanced gains associated with “being first in the market place” mean clients are expecting Consultants to deliver advise/results in much shorter time.  This means the traditional liberty of Consultants learning about biz on clients paid time and taking detailed approach to problem diagnosis are no more acceptable.  Consultants with sufficient understanding of clients business armed with rapid but effective diagnostic tools and agile way of delivering value iteratively will be in demand.

Consultants’ uniqueness to contribute will be tested in terms of Value Delivered, which span both “thinking” and “helping do”.  Given the frequent talent movement between clients and consulting firms, standard industry frameworks, logical thinking (excel sheet based analysis) and industry best practices repository are no more sufficient for ammunition with Consultants to serve clients.  The compelling Value Add has to come from intellectual assets (encapsulating collective wisdom of earlier experiences) and implementation enablers (tools, accelerators etc) that promise unique insights, rapid diagnosis, and speedy, risk managed execution benefits.

Clients are ready to partner with consultants to experiment in creating Value.  It means that the business share from “Possibility centric services” is going to increase at the cost of “Problem Solving services”.  Creativity has gained immense importance with clients and all proposals are tested on their creativity quotient.  Accordingly, clients are ready to bet on new experiments with associated risks as long as potential gains are high and the proposition, if found successful, is scalable at global scale in short time.  Consultants need to continuously develop radical proposals with sufficient promise and seek Clients that are ready to partner.  This also means that Consultants need to be more comfortable in betting their share on Value Delivered.

In short, the traditional Consulting Business of advising clients on solving problems, using generic approaches while learning during engagements and charging for time spent is getting replaced by upfront ideas driven, possibilities centric, assets assisted, value-sharing linked pricing approach to Consulting Business.

Have you also witnessed the above shifts in Clients expectations?  What other changes have you noticed?  Happy to hear, as always!!!

Decision Making Mechanism: The Core Competency that Matters Most!

Behind successful stories, be they acquisitions or product launches, there are a series of decisions that have been taken which proved to be right. These decisions could have turned out right by chance or by design, through the support of a robust decision making mechanism embedded within the organization. Given that we all are aware of the cost of making wrong decisions or the gains derived from making right decisions, we still don’t focus enough on improving Decision Making capabilities within the organization.

Different Decision Making Mechanisms can emerge based on the combinations of options around four key decision making elements: What? When? How? Who?

Decision Making Mechanisms and four Elements

Each of the four ‘Decision Making’ elements present two further options, thus providing theoretically sixteen Decision Making Mechanisms to choose from (Diagram above depicts combinations related to strategic choices).

Decision taken about an operational matter (say replacing a tyre) by an individual (driver) provoked by the dip in the reported performance (car mileage) is a decision making mechanism that is most prevalent in all enterprises and most easy to execute. It also provides limited differentiation potential.

Strategic Choices (say adding features to new product launch) made proactively by a group based on facts derived from analyzing nontraditional information sources (pattern recognition from text, speech, blogs news, taken from social media) is a decision making mechanism with immense differentiation potential, but not widely leveraged among organizations. Employing this relatively sophisticated decision making mechanism demands certain execution capabilities (say collaborative tools, web 2.0 technology, business intelligence tools, text analytics), transparent, creative and bold leadership and enabling culture (valueing experimentation, openeness and performance driven approach ). Not easy set of pre-conditions, but justifiable given the significant pay-offs!

Here is my hypothesis: Organization that has the ability to leverage more Decision Making Mechanisms, coupled with framework and discipline to choose right option to suit the context and derive desired outcomes, enjoys sustainable advantage in this uncertain, volatile, hyper-connected and demanding business environment.

Implication: Organisations should conciously work towards increasing its capability to leverage more decision making combinations.

So where does your organisation stand today? Let us do a quick check:

- Is there a preferred, predominant Decision Making mechanism promoted by your organization’s leadership, emboldened by culture that comes as a default choice?

- When was the last time your organization consciously changed or experimented with alternative Decision Making mechanism?

- Out of the potential Decision Making mechanisms, which combinations are not feasible within your organization that have potential to add value? (If only, we could..........)

- Have you consciously benchmarked differentiating Decision Making mechanisms employed by your competitor or leader in other industry?

- How many investment proposals are examined for their ability to enhance organization Decision Making Mechanisms? And tracked to its realization?

As leaders, it is time to take some tough decisions with regard to increasing the Decision Making Mechanism Choices we leverage.

Happy to hear about initiatives or programs your organisations have taken up to strengthen its Decision Making Mechanism, the core competence that matters most!

Beyond Rationality and Authority: Influencing tricks that Work

The quest for techniques that enable one to influence others to do what one wants (especially when there is no formal authority or unquestionable rationale backing the expectations) is near universal.
Several researchers from behavioral sciences, experienced management professionals and successful executives have discovered or realized few tricks that seem to work. These tricks have proven effective in different contexts: increasing sales, garnering support for social cause, or driving transformation agenda within an enterprise. 

Let us consider the most common five tricks:

1. Anything Limited has unlimited appeal : Limited editions/designs, trial period, discount window etc. accelerate decision making and often to desired outcome. The potential loss of perceived missed opportunity seems to enhance appeal. Fear of Loss provokes action more often then scope of potential gain. Deadline tactics restricts procrastination game– another natural tendency with most of us. Make it scarce, it will be perceived valuable.
2. Associate inferior comparative to get chosen : The easiest way to look slim, without dieting, is to select a fatter friend. It is all about being relatively better. On a school 25 th year reunion, if you choose the silent character near the bar than the one in the centre of the room tasting wine to all, that will make you feel good about your accomplishments and go home feeling good about life spent so far. So to sell something that has no off-take, it may be worthwhile to consider introducing an inferior option than a better one - experiments seems to suggest so!
3. Unleash the irresistible allurement of FREE : Zero cost upsets all calculations and comparisons and fail all economic rationale decision making. We seem comfortable to pick-up trash if it is for free (recall pencils and pads you brought along from last conference you attended) but will do sufficient due diligence if it costs even one cent or may choose a costlier option, even if we have to pay extra. We can accept any quality of tea as long as it is free, but will walk to nearest Coffee Shop if canteen charges even Rs 2 for it. There is no downside associated with something that is for free and so there are not much performance expectations either. But loosening purse strings comes with lot more due diligence, no matter how meager is the amount.
4. Leverage power of passion, commitment and guilt if you can not pay enough: We live in two worlds simultaneously- one run by market rules and another driven by social norms. Position the request in right world to get compliance. When attending party thrown by too affluent, gifting bouquet is safe, for flowers are priceless and best wishes are too valuable! Provoke emotions of being responsible citizens that care for the city, to get lakes cleaned up through voluntary kar seva, if you can not afford to pay everyone sufficient for their labor. Ask doctors for free service to the poor but not discount on their consultation charges - off-course they will like to pay back to society that has given them so much.
5. It is all about “give to get” : Treat reciprocation as given, for the receiving parties can not sit idle till it has returned the favour you have done to them- even in cases where the favour was thrusted on them in unsolicited manner. We have all seen sudden endorsement on social website for us from someone we barely know, and beware this comes with hidden expectation for reciprocation. Worst is the exchange of concessions; if you seek concession for being late to the meeting, rest assure other party would expect you to gloss over their minor mistakes related to quality aberrations.

Now that these tricks have been pointed out, I am sure on reflection, you may be able to appreciate their wide spread application in our daily personnel and professional lives. You may also be using some of them, may be intuitively then in a designed fashion!

Share interesting instances, where you have seen these tricks being applied, and what are the effective counter-strategies. I will also be happy to hear from you any other tricks that you realize work well in enhancing compliance power,

Lets Reflect!

( Readers serious about enhancing their influencing power are suggested to read: Influence- The Psychology of Persuasion by Dr Robert B Cialdini )

Five Resolves for 2011

Continuing with tradition of writing (typing/texting) New Year Resolutions, here are my five Resolves:

1. Let customer speak once more: The conceit to assume that one knows “what customer wants?” is a dangerous habit that grows proportionately with years of experience as consultant. Hence the resolve to ask one more question (after the hurried run through of the check-list) before preaching to customer “what he needs to do” and be patient and shut-up till he reflects and respond. Better Insights, Better Results.
2. Dump the soulless Language : Enough of strategy, competency, commitment, knowledge management, collaboration; words which although bring sophistication to the dialogue, make conversations slave of standard patterns and arguments devoid of personnel attachment. Hearts and Soul react better to words like choice, will, clever, create, partnering or winning. Resolve to substitute as many listless words with curiously new/even absurd sounding words that provoke emotions.
3. Learn from new sources: Reading from similar sources is often more reassuring bias then illuminating new perspectives. Our ability to traverse knowledge across boundaries, often call for right level of abstraction, which with practice is within human realm of learning. Hence, resolve to consciously try to pick Dominique Lapierre over John Kotter, with hope that his recount of historic events has much to teach us on managing large scale transformations and radical societal shifts, that are going to be characteristics of global business entities.
4. Leverage Collective Intelligence: Captive knowledge and learning has a good companion in the form of wisdom of crowds and experts (real and imagined). Social media enable us to gather dispersed knowledge from our networks –no matter how weak are the links- as long as we have directional understanding of what we are seeking to achieve. Promise for potential digital eminence is sufficient for Gurus and specialists to willingly share and contribute. Resolve to go beyond captive intelligence to leverage dispersed but accessible knowledge in quest for better answers; but not to let collective intelligence be substitute to personal wisdom.
5. Leap beyond quick wins : Resist the temptation of bunching all quick wins (low hanging fruits etc) at the beginning of the execution plan to any transformation program, with hope that this will create momentum and stakeholder buy-in for expected tougher steps ahead. It seldom achieve these objectives, except making the program sponsors look good to have achieved something tangible in the short run- while doing nothing to mitigate stakeholders’ resistance for tougher measures ahead.!!! Resolve to see, that transformation initiatives insist on crucial steps early on (supported by better stakeholder management, plain speak and sufficient resource commitment) and to ensure that results come before project sponsors move on (say in first year). Further easy wins are dispersed along the complete program timeline then bunched in the beginning.

Not sure, if all of the above will yield better results, as these resolves are more based on self hypothesis then outcome of rigorous management research, underlining the need to continually experiment and break habits.

Happy to hear one thing that you plan to do differently in 2011.

“Hunters for credit” meet “Bosses that love fan clubs” – A convenient nexus that hurts!

Let me recount an interesting story my friend shared last Sunday. He leads a team of analysts and managers, who team on short term client engagements and multiple initiatives across the whole group. My friend shared an observation which seems to be worrying him. Some of his managers seem to be having tough time engaging analysts to work with them on volunteer initiatives, while some others always have more volunteers engaged in the task, then actual requirement (adding more to confusion than effectiveness). In his assessment, those managers that failed to engage were not particularly that bad in human relations, teaming or emotional intelligence, nor the other category of managers spectacularly better in those aspects. But the outcome was clearly underperformance on volunteer initiatives that were essential for group’s sustained prominence.


So what explains this phenomenon? Title provides the hint. Yes?

Here are few questions I asked my friend?

1 Do you ensure that in all team initiatives, whole team is invited as a norm, and that the decision to choose who attends and who doesn’t is not left to Managers? (Assured Airtime with the leaders)

2 Do you ensure that in collective work, the individual level contributions are clearly called for and accounted for? (Social loafing)

3 Do you seek Manager’s reasons for team composition and size that seems to be disproportionate (and skill-wise inappropriate) to task at hand, as per your estimate? (Building fan clubs)

4 Do you ensure that you praise progress, BUT reward only outcomes and impact?

5 Do you ensure that all your managers know the difference between GOOD (fit for purpose), EXCELLENT (better, faster) or EXCEPTIONAL (radical and beyond)? , and use same barometer (consistent language) to evaluate performance? (Demonstrate by example)

He has agreed to consciously try to apply above measures and demonstrate appropriate behaviours to see if situation improves. My hunch is it should work.

What do you say?

Competition at Workplace may not deliver results associated with Free-market competition

Often market place innovations and ever improving customer service standards are attributed to free market environment and players’ need for one-upmanship.
Competition is assumed to be motivating force that pushes all players to do their best. Organizations often seek to rely on internal competition (practicing relative performance ranking) to provoke employees’ efforts and spur creativity. The process surely leads to categorization of employees into winners and losers, but does not necessarily enhances overall organization effectiveness or financial performance. Some of the gaps in the outcome can actually be explained in the difference between Work Place Competition and Market Place Competition. 
 

 

The contention is not to let go leveraging the benefits of competition, but to be conscious of its limitations. Create enough avenues for all well meaning employees to win and make it evident that collaboration and partnerships in the overall interest of organization also pays.

Reflect!!!

When did you review Management Processes last?

Mostly, I hear Organization Leaders involved in evaluation of business strategies, competitive positioning, financial plans, operational processes, technological assets and organization structure, but seldom undertaking conscious review of Management Processes. My contention is that well aligned and oiled Management Processes have far greater impact in achieving effectiveness of business strategies and efficiency gains of operational initiatives, then traditionally given attention to.

Three key Management Processes; Information Management process, Decision Making process, and Communication process are essential part of organization machinery and once established tend to have life of their own. Unless their robustness and alignment with overall business strategy and execution plan are ascertained, they have the potential to undermine other efforts of enhancing organization performance.


Technological Innovation and Gen-Y employees orientation demands and make possible complete reconfiguring of these Management Processes from the traditional way these were handled. Let us consider some questions that may help review each of these processes:

Information Management process:

Are we tapping all kind of internal and external sources of information that can help make sense of the complex world? How many of innovative ideas are coming from outside the company (say customers)?

Are we able to derive actionable insights/ foresights out of all the information that we have access to? How much of unstructured data on the web is mined to understand what our customers/ stakeholders liked about Company (products and pronouncements) last week?

Are we ensuring that all those who have to act, use the same set of information and the most recent one? How many customer interlocks across the organization are informed by unified understanding of customer preferences, and interaction history?

Decision Making process:

Are the decisions that are centralized, emerging out of conscious assessment of gains in the form of consistent and effective roll-out or out of power concentration or tradition? When was the debate (experiment) to decentralize some decisions undertaken last?

Are managers consciously selecting the right decision making process (collective or individual) based on context or one style in predominant as part of organization culture? How well understood are the accountability norms related to joint decision making?

Are leaders balancing the intuitive and insight (data backed) based decision making? How often intuitive decisions are betted for experimentation, then waiting for additional data backed evidence?

Communication process:

Are leaders across the organization only telling orders or explaining rationales as well, to facilitate execution? To what extent, leaders are open to questioning existing practices and ready to listen and debate from say new hires or interns?

To what extent, communication networks, formal and informal, are supportive of positive collaboration and partnering across silos? What percent of email traffic for middle managers are with colleagues other than immediate bosses or subordinates?

Are we using new channels of communication that are symbolic of interconnected social age? How strategically are we using twitters, blogs, web 2.0 technologies to connect, convey and correspond effectively and coherently across the stakeholder community?

Review of the Management processes facilitated by above questions will surely throw-up some areas that need to change. Change in Management processes require intervention design, comprising leadership sensitization & coaching, and creating new technological infrastructure besides sustained monitoring, till new processes become institutionalized. Not an easy task, but worth it.

Lets Reflect!!!

You can also visit the adjacent poll to express your opinion and see what others are thinking.

Being Creative by Design

Everyone agrees that we need to be more innovative in our recommendations to clients to create greater impact.  However, despite rightful intent and efforts, there seems to be great variation in the quality of outcomes.  Some practitioners by experience or intellect are able to provide wider perspectives than majority.  So what does the majority do besides blaming education, experience or IQ?

I believe that conscious and rigorous employing of seemingly contradicting perspectives on any context can help us widen the universal set of possibilities leading to potentially better advice.  This is what we reckon as “being creative by design”.

Listed below are some of the perspectives (about objectives, strategy and execution) put forward by gurus that although contrarian to established thinking seems to be true as well in specific contexts.

1.    Stakeholders get motivated differently

• What motivates a professional manager may not motivate the owner of the firm.  Economists have always insisted on goal alignment between owners and professional managers under principal-agent theory. There is considerable debate on whether shareholder wealth maximization or stakeholder value generation should be the key objective functions of an enterprise.
• Further, managers and employees may get motivated differently.  Even in the same group, individuals may stand at different levels on the Missionary- Mercenary Orientation Continuum. 
• Off-course, there is need for an overarching objective that collectively reflects the aspirations of all stakeholders. But, for the message to engage, it should be able to connect to individual level legitimate aspirations as well.

Implications : Do not assume! Ascertain that every stakeholder’s priorities and expendables are well understood and the look towards achievement of Pareto Optimality.

2.     Selective Strategic Views are standalone traps

• Strategy formulation is essentially a creative exercise, an art that is being continuously scientisized through different frameworks, each approach providing a specific view towards strategy formulation.
• Unconscious of single view limitations, consultants often pick specific approach (framework) as favorites and apply it in all situations limiting the options.
• Ansoff matrix provides a sufficient framework for us to explore both the competitive and innovation orientation, provided we do justice to all the quadrants.  Return Driven Strategy framework is another broad encompassing framework.  

 

Implications :  It pays to consciously apply different views of Strategy Formulation to a situation to come up with diverse solution set.

Click here to view the complete article

You may like to further add to this list. 

Right Diagnosis precedes Right Advice (Rapid Organization Diagnosis Aid)

Top Managers in several organizations often run to outdo each other in adapting latest management concepts and introducing new initiatives with a hope that these initiatives will help address performance gaps. These initiatives may fall in the areas of strategy redesign, restructuring, process reengineering or automation. Sometimes these initiatives deliver, and most often, not. And the fault may not exactly be with the initiative design or execution, but with the areas of intervention itself. Disillusioned by outcomes of internal initiatives, clients often look towards Consultants for advice.

With due respect to fellow consultants, they also often move towards providing advice based on inadequate diagnosis, that is more selective and biased towards building case for initiatives that consultants excel in. And organizations are no better off after initial euphoria of implementing Consultants’ recommendations wear off.  All this reiterates the need for having right diagnosis.

There are several management frameworks and models such as BLM, 7s, business excellence models, which provide guidelines on undertaking comprehensive review, encompassing all organizational dimensions and their linkages.  These frameworks require extensive data collection and are often time and resource intensive efforts, which may not be feasible in all cases. 

How about having a rapid diagnostic aide that helps identify problem areas fast- the typical physician way- using a set of questions, developed on most frequently observed organizational infirmities.

Rapid Organization Diagnosis Aid is based on the premise that successful firms are able to manage four key areas well.  These four key areas are:

1.     Establishment of Organization Fundamentals
2.     Alignment of Organization Elements
3.     Appropriateness of Apparatus
4.     Accountability for Performance

Accordingly, the problem identification process focuses on reviewing the state of these four areas within the organization. Based on experience here are a set of 19 questions that will help undertake RAPID and RIGHT diagnosis.  

The reality check would be best achieved by evaluating how effectively the organization is responding to the key questions under each of the four key areas. 

Click here to read the full article and view the complete set of questions

Three Clever Questions: Don't Ignore Anymore

Often in our quest for continued business excellence and chasing new businesses, we tend to ignore asking uncomfortable questions that may spring surprises, we can better do without. With growing complexity, enhanced innovation focus and accellerated pace of change, these questions have gained lot more significance and need serious and systematic management attention, like never before.

1 Is the problem we are solving still a high priority problem for the client? Business depends upon its ability to help clients solve problems in an efficient and cost effective manner. What if the problem itself is no more a problem? Consultants banking on providing information access services to clients in earlier days have lost appeal as information access is no more a problem that clients face today. Video conferences solve the problem of managing face-2-face interaction without the need to travel. Hence business travel service agents banking on better travel services may be focused on solving problem, which may loose its own priority over time. What if the mileage efficiency of petrol engines double itself or oil prices become one-third of its present value? Alternate fuels based vehicles banking primarily on solving travel cost related problems may loose significance.

2 What is the potential appeal of the Opposite Extreme? For every loyal customer set there is a disengaged set, which is located at the other extreme of the continuum on specific service/product characteristics. If you have positioned your products with high acquisition cost and low consumable costs, there will indeed be a consumer set that prefer low acquisition cost and acceptable high running costs. If you have bunched all services and provided single price, some customers may be looking for separate prices for each service consumed. If your soft-drink is black, there are some consumers that prefer their soft-drink to be colorless. Often competition emerges from other extreme and goes unnoticed, till it starts gnawing your market share. Idea is not to advocate serving all set of customers, but to be conscious of the potential customer set that prefers the opposite of “what you offer”. You may choose to ignore them, but then that will be a strategic choice.

3 Are we depending too much on Rationality as a basis of appeal to potential customers? So much has been written about the limitation of humans to make rational decisions and how subconscious choices, operating environment and social context have disproportionately high influence on our decision making. In fact, Dan Ariely (predictably irrational), Steven D. Levitt (Freakonomics), Michael J. Mauboussin (Think Twice) and other authors have not only provided examples of decisions taken by people like us that can not be labeled as rational, but also provide ideas on how to capitalize on this peculiarities associated with “how we buy?”. Marketeers know this through experience, but make sure the R&D folks, design engineers and operational excellence experts also keep this in mind and accommodate “irrationality” in their solution perspective.

Reflect! Share your views and perspectives, as always.

Leaders : Reboot your approach

Hi,

Thanks for reflecting your views on the previous post. Here are some of my reflections. 

I think, the difference lies in the approach towards some of the key leadership functions.

Lets take some examples:

1. Approach to “being accepted”: Leaders can no longer rely on Hierarchy to get acceptability. It is leader’s personal expertise and recognized excellence in an area of business value, which followers believe deserve respect and worthy of providing platform to lead. 
2. Approach to “being heard”: Directive style memos don’t work anymore beyond minimal compliance. Two way dialogue, that is authentic, persuasive, consistent across channels while being open to questioning with leader as facilitator and final integrator of views seems to work. 
3. Approach to “getting things done”: It is no more about detailed instructions about “how” it is to be done, but greater focus on telling “what needs to be done’ and “why it is important?” 
4. Approach to “getting best out of those led”: Traditional means of Motivating them to do what they are not convinced about, wont work. Connect work to their passion and then work relentlessly to avoid organization bureaucracy, and politics act as de-motivating distractions. 
5. Approach to “handling failures”: Instead of being criticized for being careless and unprofessional, leaders are expected to emphasize upon lessons learnt and may celebrate the well intentioned experimentations.

What other approaches need to change?

Lets Reflect!

What enable leaders to sustain relevance in the new world?

Leaders sustain their relevance till the time they continue to sustain dependency of the followers on them. This is achieved by leaders providing something followers’ value and are seen as the most preferred source. Seen this way, leaders’ sustained relevance depends upon their ability to continually understand their followers and provide Value they seek.

Apart from seeking reward, recognition or objective resource allocation (which falls more in Managers’ domain now), followers used to look towards leaders for problem solving. For this, leaders required sufficient technical finesse to design appropriate solution and guts to execute the same. Demonstrable outcomes reinforced their credibility and thus help sustain their leadership. No less demanding task, but a lot simpler as long as problem had knowable dimensions and followers relatively aligned expectations.

Given the complex operating context and growing influence of multiple stakeholders in decision making, these days followers look towards Leaders for Sense Making of the prevailing "chaos with dynamically shifting patterns". Leaders challenge is to define the context, and communicate the relative importance of various trends at play and define action program, in a language that is simple but sufficiently sophisticated (to convey complex set of interdependencies) and boundary-spanning to connect with diverse followers set.

While in earlier world, followers leaders' confidence in proposed action and surety behind the proposal, now they look towards leaders ability to accept tentativeness and risks but still convince that the proposed action is the most suitable and appropriate option. While earlier having contingency plan was a good management practice, now leaders need to convey ability to adapt and allow for mid-course modifications as essential part of their confidence winning proposals.

What additional other traits do you see leaders of the new world need to learn?

Do you see anything yesterdays’ leaders need to UNLEARN to sustain their leadership in the New world?

 Lets reflect!!!

How do you measure your Relevance?

Relevance is defined in terms of pertinent to matter at hand, appropriateness to the users needs and capable of making a difference in decision making. Staying relevant is indeed best assurance for guaranteeing survival. Need for sustaining relevance and threats to relevance are obvious, especially when pointed out. But still we see irrelevance eating out organizations, brands, technologies, products and experts all around. And in most of the cases, although the movement to irrelevance has been gradual, its realization has been sudden and often too late.


Measuring relevance of regular basis and picking signals early may help. So how do you measure relevance rightly, even if not necessarily quantitatively accurately? Financial Performance, present customer satisfaction index or order pipeline may not be right meausres. 

Here are some initial thoughts around measuring relevance as a Consultant:

Type of Engagements: Advance booking of your time beyond present engagement is not sufficient to construe sustained relevance but business. Are you getting engagements with enhanced complexity, seeking greater innovation and creativity and by more demanding customers? Or order book is full by customers seeking similar advice and efficient reliable solution in their quest to catch-up fast.

Type of Competition: Consultant is known by the “Competition” he is is compared with. Often the early indication of loss or shift in uniqueness of position comes from change in the type and number of competitors one has.

Type of Praise: Who is praising you and for what? Most sought after praise comes from competition (in disguised form), and at the same time praise that is easiest to come by but with least business benefit (however most endearing) is from your own team.

What are other measures of Relevance that you believe help?