Book Review: Evolutionary Organizations: Operating System matters most!

The alternate approach to traditional bureaucratic, hierarchy driven, rules bound, centrally controlled organization is purpose driven, collective intelligence empowered, self-managing-teams based organizations. The central theme of this book is that the latter form of organizations, which it refers as Evolutionary Organizations, are more effective in delivering sustained results and better equipped to meet the challenges that are essentially complex in nature.

Several theories from time to time have emerged that espouse the importance of basing organizations working in Theory-Y assumptions, and also recognize the diminishing effectiveness of Fredrerick Taylorism in designing modern day workplace practices.

What makes this book a valuable addition to this ongoing mission to make organizations more purpose-driven, adaptive, transparent, engaging and with healthier workplace, is its structured evaluation of twelve dimensions that form the operating system of the organization. 

The Operating System canvas covers broad aspects like Purpose and Strategy to specifics like Meetings & information sharing within the organization- describing how each of these dimensions needs to be relooked at, supported by Thought Starters and alternate practices derived from Evolutionary Organizations. The key questions at the end of each dimension are intended to help self-diagnose own organization status and opportunity for redesign. The questions, however, could have been lot more provocative and challenging!

Given the pervasive role technology is playing in all aspects of organizations functioning, it would be good to consider technology as another dimension in the OS canvas. Evolutionary Organizations may be leveraging technology to liberate and empower nor to control and monitor workforce as against traditional organizations.

The expected emphasis on managing change well, is reflected in whole section being devoted to change – but does contain interesting additions to mostly programmatic and mechanical traditional approach to managing change using kotter model or its variants: The importance of prioritizing tensions (limiting to 7), proposing alternatives to address tensions, conducting experiments and scaling the successful ones.

Dignan underlines the importance of experiments in learning, which works well provided the purpose of experiments are made explicit and we do not associate the outcome of experiments with the effectiveness or smartness of the leader guiding the experiment, as often seen in traditional organizations. This is where leaders ability to promote enabling culture and provide psychological safety to teams play pivotal role.

Isolated adoption of practices from Evolutionary Organizations to traditional organizations seldom work- the change agenda needs to cover the whole OS canvas. Book is rich in resources, be it references to original works, list of evolutionary organizations and practical ideas using games that comes handy to any evangelist that would like to provoke his organization to take the evolutionary path, starting with relooking at the existing operating system.

Mr DIGNAN has done lot more than enough to stoke disenchantment among readers that our organisations are capable of more! And the NEW BRAVE WORK means progress over perfection and courage over caution.

Book Review: Market creating Innovations- a Must for Nations seeking prosperity, but not ENOUGH ?

Here is the key paradigm authors put forth as Nations' route to prosperity. Innovation directed at non-consuming population would spur socio-economic development, through multiplier effect as its impact span economic activities across several sectors including logistics, infrastructure and financial services. Further the infrastructure, both social and physical that gets created to serve the new set of economic activities is likely to be more sustainable as its upkeep would be better taken care of by the beneficiaries by paying directly for use or indirectly through taxes.

As strong advocate of Innovation and with vast body of work behind him in this field, Clayton along with his co-authors, has brought out role of innovation in spurring the overall development of the country in an emphatic manner, supported by good number of illustrative cases. However, innovation focusing on tapping non-consumption segment, as single dominant factor contributing to difference in prosperity levels between South Korea (who focused on market creating innovations) and Mexico (who focused on efficiency innovations) looks far-fetched.

Besides, not every innovation focused at non-consumption market is successful- take example of Nano, which was positioned at rural market two wheeler riders who cannot afford full-priced traditional car. Similarly, infrastructure directed at efficiency gains are as sustainable as those created to serve new markets or deliver to new customers (pull strategy). In fact most of the flyovers or bypass in cities are paid for by common commuters or funded by governments as it saves them travel time which may be used for any purpose, including using part of saved time for generating economic outcomes. China has traditionally created infrastructure first and then invited economic players than the other-way round!

Most of the examples talk about the entrepreneur who came up with product or service that targeted non-consumption segment, and then how it turned out to be a big success at a scale that created huge social and economic surplus for the society. While entrepreneurs may have their own motivation to grow and distinct approach to meeting with challenges en-route to scale (through multi-directional integration for example), national governments have role to play in cultivating entrepreneurs and minimizing impediments to their growth.

Hands-off approach by government in early stages of market creation may create monopolies or wrongful practices that would cost societies too dear later. At the same-time China hybrid approach of mixing of support and vigilance for the start-ups through often direct stake, is a delicate balance, with mixed outcomes. It is with respect to the role of Government in supporting prosperity process that needs greater clarity.

Book does a great job of providing guidelines on how to identify non-consumption markets and supports this with sample of such opportunities in Appendix that can make any entrepreneur or marketer think of possibilities that are normally not so obvious.

While book remind development practitioners and economists on the importance of supporting more market creating innovations, it would be great read for entrepreneurs and business strategists, struggling to identify opportunities that holds immense potential for growth, impact and prosperity for self, organizations and nations.

Demystifying Digital Transformation- A practitioner’s companion

Digital transformation is inevitable, for organisations who seek to remain relevant in the future. The objective of any digital transformation is to innovatively apply the technology stack to reinvent the organisation and the way in which it will engage with the customer to deliver value to them.

Given that each organisation has a unique DNA with distinctive aspirations, the digital journey need to be individually crafted with clear purpose, technology choices, and implementation specifics. Leaders will be called upon to take well-informed and deliberative decisions that have enormous implications and could very well define the future of the organisation.

I, along with Nishith Sharan, have suggested the necessary framework to assist leaders define their transformation agenda and execution specifics. We present an integrated approach, covering technological, strategic and organisational perspectives, while pointing out the decisions that need to be considered at various milestones during the digital transformation journey.

Demystifying Digital Transformation is an essential handbook for the industry leaders and transformation professionals as they embark on the digital transformation journey.

 The prime motivation to write this book is to bring certain rigor and sanity around this topic of digital transformation, so as to avoid lot of wasted efforts, resources and disappointment within organizations.


I wish this book serves the purpose in its usefulness to readers,

Happy to get the feedback, as always

Are we preparing our Organisations to absorb smarter machines, as integral part of talent pool?

In the Second Machine Age, it’s not so clear whether humans will be complements or machines will largely substitute for humans; we see examples of both…… Erik Brynjolfsson, Schussel Family Professor of Management Science at the Sloan School.

Machines have always been integral instrument available to workforce to deliver work more efficiently and consistently. They performed routine and well-structured tasks, be it manual or cognitive, helping workers boost their outputs.  But with improvement in technologies such as AI, Cognitive computing, Natural Language processing, big data analytics, machines have become lot smarter.  Today some of the activities which were unquestionably human (being complex, non-routine), can also be performed with machines, not only efficiently but also with higher quality outputs. 

There are different projections about the extent to which Smarter Machines (SM) will be introduced in our work delivery model, working alongside or instead of human colleagues.  Carl Frey and Michael Osborne have conducted analysis of 702 occupations to rank their susceptibility to technological advancements linked risk.  According to their estimate, around 47% of total US employment is in high risk category.  

If this is to happen, are our organisations ready to embrace this challenge, which will manifest itself in terms of leadership expectations, performance measure, workforce strength, skill requirements or work related policies and processes?  Have we started thinking about the impact of these smarter machines on our organisation, and what should be our approach to managing it?  Is it time we start asking these questions?

New machines display significantly higher capabilities, when compared to traditional machines on three key dimensions:

SEARCH CAPABILITIES:  While traditional machines were able to search from within structured data sets in prescribed formats, SM are able to search from structured and unstructured data, coming from multiple sources, in different formats, almost in dynamic manner.

SOLVING CAPABILITIES: While traditional machines helped solve structured routine well defined and programmable set of problems, smarter machines are able to increasingly solve non-routine, context sensitive problems, with increasing accuracy with every usage.  SM can identify patterns and trends from large data sets and put forth advice with associated probabilities.      

SERVE CAPABILITIES: Machines can now serve responses in any format, and converse with humans as near humans with natural language as medium of conversation. 

Every other day, we see new examples of SM replacing human work, completely or partially, as enterprises experiment with them.  Some published examples are shared as case in point:

1.       USAA, a financial service company, uses smarter machine to handle its Armed Forces customers’ queries with regard to transitioning to civilian-life.  Machines uses data base of 2000+ questions and 3000+ military training documents as search base to solve customer questions and respond in natural language.  (IBV paper)      

2.       Associated Press is using smarter machine from company Automated Insights to autonomously create Quarterly Corporate Earnings stories, from data coming from Investment Research firm(ZackS). AI algorithm can process large number of financial announcements, press releases and other information and then offer personalised financial advice at large scale and lower cost. 

3.       Computer Assisted Translation technology is being employed to speed up the translation work, as it memorises earlier translations and use for preparing half cooked translated material for human translators to perfect.   

4.       Oncologists at Memorial Sloan-kettering Cancer Centre are using IBM Watson computer to provide chronic care and cancer treatment diagnostics using pattern recognition capabilities, with 600000 medical evidence reports and 1.5 million patient records and trials as referable data set. 

5.       Deep Knowledge Ventures (DKV), a Hong Kong venture capital fund appointed a computer algorithm named Vital  to its board of directors, claiming to be the first company of its kind to give a machine an "equal vote" when it comes to investment decisions. (BBC)

6.       Law firms rely on smart machines to scan thousands of legal briefs and precedents to assist in pre-trail research.

7.       Dr Mark Oleynik is working on creating automated kitchen housed by robotic chef that can create dishes like the professional chef it learns cooking from.  (Economist)

Yes, these examples may take time to go mainstream, but not as much time as earlier technologies have taken. These capabilities are growing exponentially and the costs of such machines are going downwards, fast, really fast!

While IT and Operational departments are busy identifying suitable business use-cases and associated technological solutions for incorporating these SM in the ways of delivering work, HR department needs to be proactively thinking of its implications for the organisation, leadership and workforce management.  Let us look at each of these areas:

Leadership: Leaders working alongside SM, that can throw unbiased data backed probabilistic recommendations, demands greater maturity and acceptance from the leaders. It can be a fight between domain expert taking out of experience and SM sharing advice that is based on pattern recognition from immense data from multiple sources.  Leaders need to be open to reconciling between gut feel and data based alternatives to problem solving. They need to be open to questioning their beliefs as domain experts and to re-examine counter intuitive suggestions coming out of machines. How do we empower leaders to have the strength of conviction to go their way, despite what SM advices? Are leaders going to be made accountable for going against SM advice, in case of things going wrong?  On the other hand, how will you keep domain experts motivated, if in most of the cases they have to go by SM advice.  Finally, leaders need to be smarter themselves in defining and asking right kind of questions to their smarter assistants (ie SM). 

Workforce Management: SM introduction will replace or redefine some jobs and consequent workforce requirements.  Those jobs that are high on creative intelligence, social intelligence or perception and manipulation seems to be least impacted, all others jobs are vulnerable. Tpo begin with, using the available thought-ware and general guidelines, we need to have view on the extent of staff that is working on vulnerable jobs.  It would have implications on the hiring vs contracting decisions, especially with medium term horizon. Also is there a way to reconfigure set of vulnerable jobs to ensure that certain category of revised jobs have greater creative intelligence, social intelligence and perception component? This readjustment effort takes time hence the need to take cognizance of the impending challenges and start thinking now.       

Skill Development:  The scope for skill development will have two clear objectives- enhancing skills among staff to work with SM and enhancing skills among employees to help tide over the transition as their existing jobs get make reconfigured/replaced and they have to look for alternate ways to stay employed and relevant. In the first category fall learnings with regard to natural language processing, database system and administration, and interface design, that would be spearheaded by technical department and supported by HR.  The second category include trainings with regard to critical thinking, evidence based decision-making, social intelligence and change management, where HR has to take lead.    

Use-case participation: SM introduction will most likely take the use-case based pilot approach to implementation.  While pilot may be focussed on validating the value generating potential of the new delivery model (using smarter machine), it is important for HR to also use the pilot to study the change impact analysis of the proposed solution.  For example, in the assisted decision making by manager, how will be the accountability of the wrong decision is tracked and established?  This may require some changes in the policies, as well.

Perception management: Also managing the expectations of the workforce on the efficacy of the new solution needs to be addressed as the SM effective benefits may take some usage to get to its full potential.  Here HR has to play its traditional role of managing naysayers that are quick to dismiss any new disruptive solutions and maintain the positive culture around the need to experiment and be open to new ways of working.    

SM idea shall be hitting our enterprise shore, in some form or other, and we need to be partnering with its carriers/sponsors to ensure organisation is ready to embrace it without much pain,

Do you agree?  Are there some other aspects of SM introduction that organisations should take note off? 

Share your views and comments, as always   

Change Management for Digital Transformation vs ERP implementation: What’s the difference???

Recently, one of my colleagues, a Change Management (CM) professional with experience in driving several ERP transformation programs, has taken up an assignment to help client undertake digital transformation, primarily aimed at internal operations.  He is deliberating on a question, which I think several of change management professional will encounter soon:

 

How is the CM approach going to be different for digital transformation program, compared to that in an ERP implementation project?

Here are a few initial reflections to set the stage and invite views, comments and experience sharing from this group: 

The key characteristics of Digital transformation program vary from the ERP implementation program in certain ways, including the following: (not exhaustive)

1.       Digital transformation program is often conceived in the form of vision that is quite wide, aspirational and all encompassing (customer interface, internal operational processes and operating model) supported by broad road map. The desired states are more often described in terms of value adding scenarios and differentiating services that are made possible by providing additional capabilities (collaborative, analytical, mobile etc) and their creative adoption by the employees. Business cases associated with ERP programs are a lot more definitive and with clear steady state targets.

2.       Digital transformation programs often add to and complement the existing technical capabilities and functionalities available to users to perform their regular work. For example, advent of Enterprise Social Network does not mean discontinuation of email system. Whereas ERP program often aims to automate manual / excel sheet work and to that extent replaces the old ways of working.  To that extent, an employee can live without participating in enterprise social network, but cannot bypass ERP based approvals to conduct daily business.

3.       The nature of risk linked to digital transformation program is largely linked to confidential information sharing which is perceived more severe than in typical ERP implementation program. 

4.       Leaders have no choice but to actively participate and lead by example, in case of digital transformation program. Hence their behavioural change/alignment is a pre-requisite. In case of ERP implementation program, public endorsement of its importance while delegating its actual usage to assistants is possible, but not in case of digital transformation program. After-all leader cannot delegate writing blogs, podcasts, video-casts to others without being exposed!

5.   ERP delivers value from ensuring that process level integration points, which flow across functional boundaries are well managed and aligned with the help of an IT-system. ERP users need to be sensitive of the process interdependencies to do justice to their role.  On the other hand, Digital transformation programs are essentially focused on driving value thorough employees voluntarily and creatively collaborating across boundaries, in an open transparent and relatively tolerant environment, supported by additional data analytical skills.  Understandably, cultural permission plays much greater influence in driving outcome of the digital transformation program.

6.   Employee generational split may also become a relevant segmentation strategy during digital transformation exercise, given different level of natural adoption to digital technologies among different generations.

7.  While significant effort is required in training the users in using ERP systems, the training effort associated with use of digital technologies may not be much and may be in the form of familiarisation modules; as the social technologies are quite intuitive, and users are significantly mature in the use of these tools in their personal life. The barrier to adoption of digital initiative, in that respect is seldom lack of skills on the part of employees.  There would off-course be need for specialised skill pool, say that of data scientists, digital strategists, digital technologists, which in any case would be part of overall capability building program.

What does these differences mean for CM approach and intervention design:

1.      Communicating the case for digital transformation has to be lot more leadership- driven, continuous, and conversational, leveraging all possible channels. Stories, describing creative usage of new capabilities to drive value-adds, emanating from different sources, play a pivotal role in driving adoption.

2.      Leadership Buy-in: Leaders need to convince believe within themselves that its worth it, and what is expected of them is do-able and non-conflicting to their self- image. Leaders have to hear first-hand stories and alternative experiences to appreciate the potential of digital transformation and their own role in supporting this change. Peer level conversation and experience sharing at leadership level is a must and has to be facilitated as part of CM intervention.  Leadership enablement is easier by associating some digital enthusiast to work along for some protracted period.

3.      Policies and practices: Digital enterprises thrive on a certain level of responsible information sharing, open communication, and collaborative learning that need support from enabling policies and practices.  As a change facilitator, it is important to identify and bring forth the policy or practices conflict with digital transformation objectives and help address them.  Often it is more to do with interpretation of the policies than policy itself that is in conflict.

4.      Training and capability building:  Digital transformation linked capability development effort will involve more of familiarising users with the features of digital technologies and varied ways it has been used to create value.  To that extent the learning will be more byte sized, social learning and experience sharing based continual learning, than structured class-room trainings and practice sessions predominantly used during ERP implementation program. Games as learning tool seem to be quite relevant.  Instead of user-manuals or reference sheets, guidelines, best practices and provocative use cases and stories may be more relevant.     

5.      Adoption tracking and support: There is clear method and science behind measuring the adoption levels of ERP system usage, and segments /pockets that reflects low adoption levels can be analysed and system, training or management intervention can be made to address the cause. Concerted efforts made thus, shall help achieved fairly stable usage of the system across the enterprise, which signals reduced need for CM intervention.  In case of digital transformation, the adoption is linked to employee voluntary engagement with the new capabilities and their extracting value out of it.  The usage pattern may vary (tank after peak!) and could be due to variety of reasons.  CM needs to do much more diligence to find real reasons behind these variations and also experiment ways to spur adoption again. Digital transformation in that respect is a journey and CM has to be co-traveller on this route for a much longer distance. 

Success of digital transformation program hinges on employee engagement, supporting culture and leadership participation, and not on management dictates (with  structured capability building interventions), and that is what makes CM work challenging and interesting!

Share your experience and view-points!

 

 

TRAP-PROOF your Technology Enablement Program

IT enablement program, although well intended and management supported, fails to deliver as it falls prey to traps during the journey.  Here are a few “Traps” that spread across six dimensions; System, People, Infrastructure, Data, Execution and Resources (S.P.I.D.E.R) that can play havoc—being cognizant of these upfront help.

SYSTEM:

Trap 1:  New system will automate everything

System in its original or morphed form should cater to all users’ wishes, including complete elimination of paper documents; excel sheets and other manual ways of working. 

Trap 2:  All systems should be able to talk to each other…… seamlessly. 

In the professed new “open, networked, connected world”, there should be no barriers with regard to data flow, access rights and application usage between new and existing legacy systems.

PEOPLE:

Trap 3:  People care for new IT system, as much as IT team does. 
IT enablement once completed will help business gain better control on planning, operations and customer acquisition levers, resulting in real business benefits.  So business should be readily sparing team members for system testing, getting trained and conducting trainings as asked by IT team. 

Trap 4:  People adopt well designed IT systems on their own.

The new system offers multiple benefits and all it expects is people to enter data into system instead of on paper or Excel! On top of that, we have offered training programs, designated super users to help and made management reinforce the benefits of new system.  Human beings are rational beings, at-least in office, all of them, all the time……. fair assumption? 

INFRASTRUCTURE:

Trap 5:  Infrastructure availability is only a cost issue

You can get any infrastructure you need, provided you are willing to pay for.  Issues like existing infrastructure status, network security and risk vulnerabilities, buy vs rent decisions, vendor delivery timelines are too trivial aspects to bother about.   

Trap 6:  New system is modern only if it works on my tablet. 

My personal applications work across channels, so should my office applications.

DATA:

Trap 7:  All type of recordable data should be available in the system. Lets’ have it, just in case!    
It takes hardly any effort to configure another template/KPI in the system.  And business will religiously maintain correct and up-to-date data in the system. 

Trap 8:  Data preparedness can be managed easily

The challenges associated with data preparedness, i.e. collection, validation or migration from existing formats, need no special attention.  

EXECUTION:

Trap 9:  Assigning Accountabilities and Responsibilities will ensure delivery
RACI is more used when things go wrong for finding scapegoats, than for driving effective collaboration.

Trap 10:  Getting stakeholders meetings on calendar is Governance

All stakeholders when invited to the weekly meetings and risks and issues openly sought, should leave no scope for surprises at the last moment.

RESOURCES:

Trap 11:  Two partially competent resources can substitute for one competent one
Is It?

Trap 12:  Resource replacement is BaU (business as usual)

We have robust documentation of changes and requirements.  Moreover everyone is expected to collaborate, jell well with team members and adapt to the operating context, fast.  Isn’t it?

The above list is by all measures illustrative. 

Have you also encountered traps that have potential to derail the program?  Help validate and add to the above list.   

 

Enabling Performance through Answering Five Key Questions

There is increasing sense of disillusionment among the managers about the average performances delivered by their staff despite repeated goading and pleading for better performances. Do it better next time(boss); Sure, I shall try my best(staff) are the games being played with surprising frequency across the working world. But it seldom works!

Often following five questions answered honestly help identify the appropriate intervention that will push the performance up, without heroic magic required from either the worker or the manager.

What additional information, if shared will help? How often you realize that the information used by staff is outdated or incomplete and hence the outcome suboptimal? If besides sharing the technical qualifications required for sourcing candidates, key success factors for being effective in open position are also shared with the recruiter, the outcome will be better and process much faster and efficient.

What additional specific skill, if developed will help? Your expectations for creative solutions are not met, despite best efforts on the part of the staff; helping them learn formal approach to creative thinking may be useful. Often training is seen as the panacea for all under-performances, in reality it seldom works as effectively. Poor skill gap analysis and reliance on generic broad base training are to blame. It requires keen observation to identify exact work component where skill enhancement shall have material impact on performance, followed by specific coaching and deep practice.

What resources/ additional capacity, if provided will help? Often, we discover later in the day that the staff did not have adequate capacity or resources to deliver the performance standards expected. One of the resource, we often tend to ignore is the time availability with the staff, to address to the new requirement, after addressing other competing commitments and daily unavoidable chores. Estimating upfront the resources required and ensuring availability by freeing resources through re-prioritization and re-apportionment helps.

What additional power/ authority, if delegated will help? Here best is to ask staff, what decision making powers if provided will help improve performance, instead of making well meaning guess. Often, staff is equally fair in suggesting ways to control the misuse of power and ensure accountability, when seeking additional powers. Well defined policies and processes limit the scope for wrongful discretionary use of powers and hence inhibition to delegate authority is mostly from within the Manager then real need of the set-up.

What set of incentives, if provided will help? Managers often fault at extremes in response to this requirement- by either providing too much incentive (even for delivering regular performance) or none (where voluntary stretch is warranted and deserves recognition). Before structuring the incentives, it is important to first identify disincentives (conflicting goals) that deters staff put in their best- from head and soul, and resolve the misalignment. If better performances have to become new habit, appeal has to go beyond material incentives to professional pride of delivering high standards bearing their signatures.

Next time before labeling staff as incompetent, non-serious etc etc, examine to what extent have you considered these five questions and made enabling interventions.

Set the staff for success, and they shall not disappoint!

Reflect!!!

Two steps to Effective Decisionning

We all make decisions and often later realize (even if not acknowledge) that the outcomes are not as per expectations. Despite right intent and use of right techniques, the real decision making gets influenced by contextual variables and our embedded thinking patterns. For example, our decisions are sometimes affected by the anticipated difficulty in communicating tough decision to the affected party. We sometimes regret that we took decision too early – buying time would have been better.

Knowing how important effective decisionning is for us, I developed a simple two step process that has significantly improved outcomes for me- and hence will invite you to try as well!

Effective decisionning involves taking two steps in strictly sequential manner:

(1) Making Decision, (2) Communicating Decision.

Making Decision:

It is about making sure we know WHAT is at stake, WHO all are the stakeholders and by WHEN decision has to be taken. Specific efforts have to be made to ensure that these three elements are well considered. Stakes assessment has to include organizational and personnel, financial and social, long and short term. Stakeholders include both the affected and affecting parties. WHEN brings out the need to take decision at right time, otherwise preferred style prevails (some believe in quick decision taking while some by habit never seem to decide!), which may not be in the overall best interests.

Communicating Decision:

Once the decision is taken, avoid rushing to communicate the decision. Often there is time-lag between the futuristic decisions taken and the need for retaining the present arrangement. Right TIMING assumes that impact assessment and contingency readiness has been ascertained, and delaying communicating further will hamper the affected parties’ ability to manage the situation. Buying time to avoid difficult conversation or in the hope things will change on their own, actually make things worse for the affected parties. Prepared TEXT helps ensure that decision is left to minimal misinterpretation and you do not say stuff you regret later. TONE can help convey feelings while staying within the professional environment.

We do tend to cover the above six elements intuitively but doing so consciously and in structured manner not only help in effective decisionning but also help understand the reason why others may not agree with your decision- it is difference in perspective around any of these six elements that may be the real cause behind the disagreement.

Try and share your experiences!

When stuck- encourage employees to confront three honest questions, on their own.

Talent management can be lot more directive and instructive in scenarios where we know what motorized or memorized skills we want our talent to posses and what predefined behaviors we want them to exhibit. Such scenarios assume managers know better! And future scenario will be some combination of historic scenarios. Increasingly both the above assumptions are questionable.

It’s about developing from within, at attitude and values level that seems to be the best chest for the talent in these uncertain and volatile times. As leaders of such talent, how do you enable your team to grow from within? Preaching, selling or telling wont work. Has it ever? Experience sharing may help and provoke them to reflect.

Accordingly, recently I shared with leaders, three questions that often help me gauge how well aligned my internal compass is with objective at hand (and that often predicts my probability of success):

Am I Genuinely Curious to know? If so, there could be no reason for not being able to find out the real issues, expectations, apprehensions, or stakes in the situation? Lack of information sources, limited time availability and inaccessibility to stakeholders are excuses to mask the lack of curiosity.

Am I Authentic in Connecting/ Reaching out? Communication gaps, in the era of multiple channels promising anytime anywhere connectivity, can only be explained as lack of intent to connect. Have I shrugged responsibility by supplying information or reached out to ensure that information is rightly received and understood? Has reaching out effort being backed by values of sharing, learning and caring for the stakeholders?

Am I Passionate enough to Contribute to making change happen? How glued I am with the big picture change that current set of activities, projects, programs intend to achieve? Do I care enough for the cause and its psychological pay-off to me not to bother about credit sharing and value apportionment, but focus on the actual value being created?

Whenever I have seen myself complaining about fidgety clients, unclear expectations, lack of resources, limited time, or team conflicts, at-least one of the above three elements is missing. At the same time, in events when all three elements are present, I am amazed at my own potential to be creative, engaging, relentless, energetic, focused and Impactful.

Reflect on situations where you (or your employees) are stuck, and see if any of the above is missing?

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?